Besides those few pitiful successes, I had nothing but defeats in the
sort of literature which I supposed was to be my calling, and the defeats
threw me upon prose; for some sort of literary thing, if not one, then
another, I must do if I lived; and I began to write those studies of
Venetian life which afterwards became a book, and which I contributed as
letters to the ‘Boston Advertiser’, after vainly offering them to more
aesthetic periodicals. However, I do not imagine that it was a very
smiling time for any literary endeavorer at home in the life-and-death
civil war then waging. Some few young men arose who made themselves
heard amid the din of arms even as far as Venice, but most of these were
hushed long ago. I fancy Theodore Winthrop, who began to speak, as it
were, from his soldier’s grave, so soon did his death follow the earliest
recognition by the public, and so many were his posthumous works, was
chief of these; but there were others whom the present readers must make
greater effort to remember. Forceythe Willson, who wrote The Old
Sergeant, became known for the rare quality of his poetry; and now and
then there came a poem from Aldrich, or Stedman, or Stoddard. The great
new series of the ‘Biglow Papers’ gathered volume with the force they had
from the beginning. The Autocrat was often in the pages of the Atlantic,
where one often found Whittier and Emerson, with many a fresh name now
faded. In Washington the Piatts were writing some of the most beautiful
verse of the war, and Brownell was sounding his battle lyrics like so
many trumpet blasts. The fiction which followed the war was yet all to
come. Whatever was done in any kind had some hint of the war in it,
inevitably; though in the very heart of it Longfellow was setting about
his great version of Dante peacefully, prayerfully, as he has told in the
noble sonnets which register the mood of his undertaking.
At Venice, if I was beyond the range of literary recognition I was in
direct relations with one of our greatest literary men, who was again of
that literary Boston which mainly represented American literature to me.
The official chief of the consul at Venice was the United States Minister
at Vienna, and in my time this minister was John Lothrop Motley, the
historian. He was removed, later, by that Johnson administration which
followed Lincoln’s so forgottenly that I name it with a sense of
something almost prehistoric. Among its worst errors was the attempted
discredit of a man who had given lustre to our name by his work, and who
was an ardent patriot as well as accomplished scholar. He visited Venice
during my first year, which was the darkest period of the civil war, and
I remember with what instant security, not to say severity, he rebuked my
scarcely whispered misgivings of the end, when I ventured to ask him what
he thought it would be. Austria had never recognized the Secessionists
as belligerents, and in the complications with France and England there
was little for our minister but to share the home indignation at the
sympathy of those powers with the South. In Motley this was heightened
by that feeling of astonishment, of wounded faith, which all Americans
with English friendships experienced in those days, and which he, whose
English friendships were many, experienced in peculiar degree.
I drifted about with him in his gondola, and refreshed myself, long
a-hungered for such talk, with his talk of literary life in London.
Through some acquaintance I had made in Venice I was able to be of use to
him in getting documents copied for him in the Venetian Archives,
especially the Relations of the Venetian Ambassadors at different courts
during the period and events he was studying. All such papers passed
through my hands in transmission to the historian, though now I do not
quite know why they need have done so; but perhaps he was willing to give
me the pleasure of being a partner, however humble, in the enterprise. My
recollection of him is of courtesy to a far younger man unqualified by
patronage, and of a presence of singular dignity and grace. He was one
of the handsomest men I ever saw, with beautiful eyes, a fine blond beard
of modish cut, and a sensitive nose, straight and fine. He was
altogether a figure of worldly splendor; and I had reason to know that he
did not let the credit of our nation suffer at the most aristocratic
court in Europe for want of a fit diplomatic costume, when some of our
ministers were trying to make their office do its full effect upon all
occasions in “the dress of an American gentleman.” The morning after his
arrival Mr. Motley came to me with a handful of newspapers which,
according to the Austrian custom at that day, had been opened in the
Venetian post-office. He wished me to protest against this on his behalf
as an infringement of his diplomatic extra-territoriality, and I proposed
to go at once to the director of the post: I had myself suffered in the
same way, and though I knew that a mere consul was helpless, I was
willing to see the double-headed eagle trodden under foot by a Minister
Plenipotentiary. Mr. Motley said that he would go with me, and we put
off in his gondola to the post-office. The director received us with the
utmost deference. He admitted the irregularity which the minister
complained of, and declared that he had no choice but to open every
foreign newspaper, to whomsoever addressed. He suggested, however, that
if the minister made his appeal to the Lieutenant-Governor of Venice,
Count Toggenburg would no doubt instantly order the exemption of his
newspapers from the general rule.
Mr. Motley said he would give himself the pleasure of calling upon the
Lieutenant-Governor, and “How fortunate,” he added, when we were got back
into the gondola, “that I should have happened to bring my court dress
with me!” I did not see the encounter of the high contending powers, but
I know that it ended in a complete victory for our minister.
I had no further active relations of an official kind with Mr. Motley,
except in the case of a naturalized American citizen, whose property was
slowly but surely wasting away in the keeping of the Venetian courts. An
order had at last been given for the surrender of the remnant to the
owner; but the Lombardo-Venetian authorities insisted that this should be
done through the United States Minister at Vienna, and Mr. Motley held as
firmly that it must be done through the United States Consul at Venice. I
could only report to him from time to time the unyielding attitude of the
Civil Tribunal, and at last he consented, as he wrote, “to act
officiously, not officially, in the matter,” and the hapless claimant got
what was left of his estate.
I had a glimpse of the historian afterwards in Boston, but it was only
for a moment, just before his appointment to England, where he was made
to suffer for Sumner in his quarrel with Grant. That injustice crowned
the injuries his country had done a most faithful patriot and
high-spirited gentleman, whose fame as an historian once filled the ear
of the English-speaking world. His books seemed to have been written in
a spirit already no longer modern; and I did not find the greatest of
them so moving as I expected when I came to it with all the ardor of my
admiration for the historian. William the Silent seemed to me, by his
worshipper’s own showing, scarcely level with the popular movement which
he did not so much direct as follow; but it is a good deal for a prince
to be able even to follow his people; and it cannot be said that Motley
does not fully recognize the greatness of the Dutch people, though he may
see the Prince of Orange too large. The study of their character made at
least a theoretical democrat of a scholar whose instincts were not
perhaps democratic, and his sympathy with that brave little republic
between the dikes strengthened him in his fealty to the great
commonwealth between the oceans. I believe that so far as he was of any
political tradition, he was of the old Boston Whig tradition; but when I
met him at Venice he was in the glow of a generous pride in our war as a
war against slavery. He spoke of the negroes and their simple-hearted,
single-minded devotion to the Union cause in terms that an original
abolitionist might have used, at a time when original abolitionists were
not so many as they have since become.
For the rest, I fancy it was very well for us to be represented at Vienna
in those days by an ideal democrat who was also a real swell, and who was
not likely to discredit us socially when we so much needed to be well
thought of in every way.
At a court where the family of Count Schmerling, the Prime Minister,
could not be received for want of the requisite descents, it was well to
have a minister who would not commit the mistake of inviting the First
Society to meet the Second Society, as a former Envoy Extraordinary had
done, with the effect of finding himself left entirely to the Second
Society during the rest of his stay in Vienna.