He had a peculiar, and, I think, a groundless terror of the public of
the United States of America, from which country he derived the larger
moiety of his income. In spite of our remonstrances, he subscribed to
the New York _Nation_ to the very end, and he insisted, in spite of
fact, reason, and my earnest entreaties (having regard to the future
unification of the English-speaking race), in figuring that
continental empire as a vain, garrulous, and prosperous female of
uncertain age, and still more uncertain temper, with unfounded
pretensions to intellectuality and an ideal of refinement of the most
negative description, entirely on the strength of that one sample. One
might as well judge England by the _Spectator_. My protests seemed
only to intensify his zest in his personification of Columbia as the
Aunt Errant of Christendom, as a wild, sentimental, and advanced
maiden lady of inconceivable courage and enterprise, whom everything
might offend and nothing cow. "I know," he used to say, "something
will be said or done and she'll have hysterics; the temptation to
smuggle something through Miss Bathwick's back is getting almost too
much for me. I _could_, you know. Or some one will come along with
something a little harder and purer and emptier and more emphatically
handsome than I can hope to do. I shall lose her one of these days....
How can I hope to keep for ever that proud and fickle heart?"
And then I remember he suddenly went off at a tangent to sketch out a
great novel he was to call "Aunt Columbia." "No," he said, "they would
suspect that--'Aunt Dove.'" She was to be a lady of great,
unpremeditated wealth, living on a vast estate near a rather crowded
and troublesome village. Everything she did and said affected the
village enormously. She took the people's children into her
employment; they lived on her surplus vegetables. She was to have a
particularly troublesome and dishonest household of servants and a
spoiled nephew called Teddy. And whenever she felt dull or energetic
she drove down into the village and lectured and blamed the
villagers--for being overcrowded, for being quarrelsome, for being
poor and numerous, for not, in fact, being spinster ladies of enormous
good fortune.... That was only the beginning of one of those vast
schemes of his that have left no trace now in all the collection.
His fear of shocking America was, I think, unfounded; at any rate, he
succeeded in the necessary suppressions every time, and until the day
of his death it was rare for the American press-cuttings that were
removed in basketfuls almost daily with the other debris of his
breakfast-table to speak of him in anything but quasi-amorous tones.
He died for them the most spiritual as well as the most intellectual
of men; "not simply intellectual, but lovable." They spoke of his
pensive eyes, though, indeed, when he was not glaring at a camera they
were as pensive as champagne, and when the robust pathos bumped
against the unavoidable humour as they were swept along the narrow
torrent of his story they said with all the pleasure of an apt
quotation that indeed in his wonderful heart laughter mingled with
tears.