Bennoch and Bright like young housekeepers--"What did you
marry that woman for?"--"Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures"--
"The worst book anybody ever wrote"--"Most magnificent eye I
ever saw"--A great deal of the feminine in Reade--Fire,
pathos, fun, and dramatic animation--A philosophical library
in itself--Amusing appanage of his own book--Oily and
voluble sanctimoniousness--Self-worship of the os-rotundus
sort--Inflamed rather than abated by years--"Every word of
it true; but--"--Better, or happier, because we had lived--
Appropriated somebody else's adventure--Filtering remarks
through the mind of a third person--A delightful Irishman--
Unparalleled audacity--An unregenerate opinion--The whole
line of Guelphs in it--"Oh, that somebody would invent a new
sin!"--"The Angel in the House"--Very well dressed--
Indomitable figure, aggressively American--Too much of the
elixir of life--A little strangeness between us--Sunshine
will always rest on it.
The central event of 1856 was the return from Lisbon and Madeira of my
mother and sisters. Measuring time, as boys do (very sensibly), not by
the regulated pace of minutes, but by the vast spaces covered by desire,
it appeared to me, for some decades, that they had been absent in those
regions for years--two years at least; and I was astonished and almost
incredulous when dates seemed to prove that the interval had been six or
eight months only. It was long enough.
In the course of the previous spring my father made two or three little
excursions of a few days or a week or so in various directions, commonly
convoyed by Bright or Bennoch, who were most enterprising on his behalf,
feeling much the same sort of ambition to show him all possible of
England and leading English folk that a young housekeeper feels to show
her visiting school-friend her connubial dwelling and its arrangements,
and to take her up in the nursery and exhibit the children. Had my
father improved all his opportunities he would have seen a great deal,
but the consulate would have been administered by the clerks. He took
trips through Scotland and the north of England, and south to London and
the environs; dined at the Milton Club and elsewhere, visited the
Houses of Parliament, spent a day with Martin Farquhar Tupper, author
of Proverbial Philosophy, and still was not remarkably absent from the
dingy little office down by the docks, or from the euchre games in Mrs.
Blodgett's smoking-room. For the most part, I did not accompany him
on these excursions, being occupied in Liverpool with my pursuit of
universal culture; yet not so much occupied as to prevent me from
feeling insolvent while he was away, and rich as Aladdin when he got
back. For his part, he struggled with low spirits caused by anxiety lest
the next mail from Portugal should bring ill news of the beloved invalid
there (instead of the cheerful news which always did come); his real
life was suspended until she should return. Partings between persons
who love each other seem to be absolute loss of being; but that being
revives, with a new spiritual strength, when all partings are over.
Of the people whom he met on these sallies, I saw some, either then or
later: Disraeli, Douglas Jerrold, Charles Reade, Tom Taylor, Bailey,
the author of that once-famous philosophic poem, "Festus"; Samuel Carter
Hall, and a few more. Disraeli, in 1856, had already been chancellor of
the exchequer and leader of the house, and was to hold the same offices
again two years later. He had written all but two of his novels, and had
married the excellent but not outwardly attractive lady who did so
much to sustain him in his career. At a dinner of persons eminent in
political life, about this juncture, Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli were present,
and also Bernal Osborne, a personage more remarkable for cleverness
and aggressiveness, in the things of statesmanship, than for political
loyalty or for a sense of his obligations to his associates. This
gentleman had drunk a good deal of wine at dinner, and had sat next to
Mrs. Disraeli; when the ladies had left the table he burst out, with
that British brutality which often passes for wit, "I say, Disraeli,
what on earth did you marry that woman for?" All talk was hushed by this
astounding query, and everybody looked at the sallow and grim figure
to whom it was addressed. Disraeli for some moments played with his
wineglass, apparently unmoved; then he slowly lifted his extraordinary
black, glittering eyes to those of his questioner. "Partly for a
reason," he said, measuring his words in the silence, "which you will
never be capable of understanding--gratitude!" The answer meant much for
both of them; it was never forgotten, and it extinguished the clever and
aggressive personage. It was ill crossing swords with Disraeli.
Douglas Jerrold was at the height of his fame and success in this year;
he died, I think, the year following, at the age of fifty-four. He was
very popular during his later lifetime, but he seems to have just missed
those qualities of the humorist which insure immortality; he is little
more than a name to this generation. He was the son of an actor, and
had himself been on the stage; indeed, he had tried several things,
including a short service as midshipman in his Majesty's navy. He wrote
some two-score plays, and was a contributor to Punch from its outset;
there are several books to his credit; and he edited Lloyd's Weekly
Newspaper, which was first called by his own name. But people who
have read or heard of nothing else of his, have heard of or read "Mrs.
Caudle's Curtain Lectures." Douglas Jerrold, however, is by no means
fully pictured by anything which he wrote; his charm and qualities
came out in personal intercourse. Nor does the mere quotation of his
brightnesses do him justice; you had to hear and see him say them in
order to understand them or him. He was rather a short man, with a short
neck and thick shoulders, much bent, and thick, black hair, turning
gray. His features were striking and pleasing; he had large, clear,
prominent, expressive black eyes, and in these eyes, and in his
whimsical, sensitive mouth, he lived and uttered himself. They took all
the bitterness and sting out of whatever he might say. When he was
about to launch one of his witticisms, he fixed his eyes intently on his
interlocutor, as if to call his attention to the good thing coming, and
to ask his enjoyment of it, quite apart from such application to himself
as it might have. It was impossible to meet this look and to resent
whatever might go with it. Thus a friend of his, who wished to write
telling books but could not quite do it, came to him in haste one day
and exclaimed, aggrievedly, "Look here, Douglas, is this true that was
told me--that you said my last book was the worst I'd ever written?"
Douglas gazed earnestly into the flushed and troubled face, and said,
in his softest tones, "Oh no, my dear fellow, that isn't what I said at
all; what I did say was that it was the worst book anybody ever wrote."
Such a retort, so delivered, could not but placate even an outraged
author.
Of Charles Reade my father saw little, and was not impressed by what he
saw; but Reade, writing of him to my sister Una, five-and-twenty years
after, said, "Your father had the most magnificent eye that I ever
saw in a human head." Reade was just past forty at the time he met my
father, and had just published _It Is Never Too Late to Mend_--the
first of his great series of reform novels. Christie Johnstone and
Peg Woffington were very clever, and written with immense vigor and
keenness, but did not give the measure of the man. I doubt if my father
had as yet read any of them; but later he was very fond of Reade's
writings. Certainly he could not but have been moved by The Cloister and
the Hearth, the greatest and most beautiful of all historical novels. He
saw in him only a tall, athletic, light-haired man with blue eyes. I
was more fortunate. I not only came to know Reade in 1879, but also
knew several persons who knew him intimately and loved and admired him
prodigiously; they were all in one story about him. He was then still
tall and athletic, but his wavy hair and beard were gray; his face was
one of the most sensitive men's faces I ever saw, and his forehead was
straight and fine, full of observation and humor; his eyes were by turns
tender and sparkling. There was a great deal of the feminine in Reade,
together with his robust and aggressive masculinity. The fault of his
head was its lack of depth; there was not much distance from the ear to
the nostril, and the backhead was deficient. It was high above. There
was a discord or incongruity in his nature, which made his life not
what could be called a happy one. He had the impulses of the radical and
reformer, but not the iron or the impassivity which would have enabled
him to endure unmoved the attacks of conservatism and ignorance. He
kicked against the pricks and suffered for it. He was passionate,
impatient, and extreme; but what a lovely, irresistible genius! He was
never a society figure, and withdrew more and more from personal contact
with people; but he kept up to the last the ardor of his attack upon the
abuses of civilization--or what he deemed to be such. He fell into
some errors, but they were as nothing to the good he effected even in
external conditions; and the happiness and benefit he brought to tens of
thousands of readers by the fire, pathos, fun, sweetness, and--dramatic
animation of his stories, and by the nobility and lovableness of many
of the characters drawn in them, are immeasurable, and will touch us and
abide with us again when the welter of the present transition state has
passed. His devotion to the drama injured his style as a novelist, and
also led him to adopt a sort of staccato manner of construction and
statement which sometimes makes us smile. But upon the ground proper to
his genius Reade had no rival. A true and full biography of him, by a
man bold enough and broad enough to write it, would be a stirring book.
Bailey, the amiable mystical poet, whom my father mildly liked, was
another man my glimpses of whom came at a date much later than this.
He was a small, placid, gently beaming little philosopher, with a large
beard and an oval brow, and though he wrote several things besides
"Festus," they never detached themselves in the public mind from the
general theme of that production. Bailey himself seemed finally to have
recognized this, and he spent his later years (he lived to a great age)
in issuing continually fresh editions of his book, with expansions and
later thoughts, until it got to be a sort of philosophical library in
itself. He appeared in society in order to give his admirers opportunity
to offer up their grateful homage, and to settle for them all questions
relative to the meaning of man and of religion. No misgivings troubled
him; his smile was as an unintermittent summer noonday. He was
accompanied by his wife, with whom he seemed to be, as Tennyson
says, "twinned, like horse's ear and eye." She relieved him from the
embarrassing necessity of saying illuminative and eulogistic things
about himself and his great work. The book, upon its first publication,
was really read by appreciable numbers of persons; later, I think,
"Festus Bailey" came to be, to the general mind, an amusing kind of
appanage of his own work, which was now taken as read, but ceased to
have readers. How happy a little imperviousness may make a good man!
Tom Taylor, the dramatist, Punch contributor, and society wit, I
remember only as a pale face and a black beard. His wit had something
of a professional tang. There are many like him in club-land and hanging
about the stage; they catch up and remember all the satirical sayings,
the comicalities, and quips that they hear, and they maintain a sort
of factory for the production of puns. Their repartee explodes like an
American boy's string of toy crackers, and involves, to set it going,
no greater intellectual effort. They are not, in their first state, less
intelligent than the common run of men--rather the contrary; but as
soon as they have gone so far as to acquire a reputation for wit, their
output begins to betray that sad, perfunctory quality which we find in
wound-up music-boxes, and that mechanical rattle makes us forget that
they ever had brains. However, Tom Taylor, with his century of plays and
adaptations--among them "Our American Cousin," which the genius of
an actor, if not its own merit, made memorable--should not be deemed
unworthy of the reputation which, in his time and place, he won. He was
at his best when, stimulated by applause and a good dinner, he portrayed
persons and things with a kind of laughable extravagance, in the mode
introduced by Dickens. Men of his ilk grow more easily in our soil than
in the English, and are much less regarded.
Henry Stevens--"the man of libraries," as my father calls him--was a
New-Englander, born in Vermont; he took betimes to books, came abroad,
and was employed by the British Museum in getting together Americana,
and by various collectors as an agent to procure books, and in these
innocent pursuits his amiable life was passed. He had a pleasing gift of
drollery, which made his companionship acceptable at stag-parties and
in the smoking-room of the clubs, and he had also a fund of special
information on literary subjects which was often of value. I met him
in after-life--twenty-five years after--and age had not altered him,
though, perhaps, custom had somewhat staled his variety. He was of
medium stature, dark haired and bearded. With him was often seen the
egregious Mr. Pecksniff (as Samuel Carter Hall was commonly known to
his acquaintances since the publication of Martin Chuzzlewit ten
years before). Hall was a genuine comedy figure. Such oily and voluble
sanctimoniousness needed no modification to be fitted to appear before
the footlights in satirical drama. He might be called an ingenuous
hypocrite, an artless humbug, a veracious liar, so obviously were
the traits indicated innate and organic in him rather than acquired.
Dickens, after all, missed some of the finer shades of the character;
there can be little doubt that Hall was in his own private contemplation
as shining an object of moral perfection as he portrayed himself before
others. His perversity was of the spirit, not of the letter, and thus
escaped his own recognition. His indecency and falsehood were in his
soul, but not in his consciousness; so that he paraded them at the very
moment that he was claiming for himself all that was their opposite.
No one who knew him took him seriously, but admired the ability of his
performance, and so well was he understood that he did little or no
harm beyond the venting of a spite here and there and the boring of his
auditors after the absurdity of him became tedious. Self-worshippers
of the _os-rotundus_ sort are seldom otherwise mischievous. He may be
sufficiently illustrated by two anecdotes.
They both occurred at a dinner where I was a guest, and Bennoch sat at
the head of the table. Hall sat at Bennoch's left hand, and my place was
next to Hall's. The old gentleman--he was at this period panoplied
in the dignity of a full suit of snow-white hair, and that unctuous
solemnity and simpering self-complacency of visage and demeanor which
were inflamed rather than abated by years--began the evening by telling
in sesquipedalian language a long tale of an alleged adventure of his
with my father, which, inasmuch as there was no point to it, need not
be rehearsed here; but I noticed that Bennoch was for some reason hugely
diverted by it, and found difficulty in keeping his hilarity within due
bounds of decorum, Hall's tone being all the while of the most earnest
gravity. Later I took occasion to ask Bennoch the secret of his mirth;
was the tale a fiction? "Not a bit of it," Bennoch replied; "it's every
word of it true; but what tickled me was that it was myself and not Hall
who was in the adventure with your father; but Hall has been telling it
this way for twenty years past, and has long since come to believe that
his lie is the truth." So ended the first lesson.
The second was administered shortly before the company dispersed.
Mr. Hall again got the floor to deliver one of his more formal moral
homilies. "And, my dear friends--my very dear friends," he went
on, resting his finger-ends upon the table, and inclining his body
affectionately towards his auditors, "may I, as an old man--I think the
oldest of any of you here present--conclude by asking your indulgence
for an illustration from the personal experience and custom of one who
may, I think--who at least has ever striven to be, a humble Christian
gentleman--may I, my dear friends, cite this simple example of what I
have been attempting to inculcate from my own personal practice, and
that of my very dear and valued wife, Mrs. Hall? It has for very many
years been our constant habit, before seeking rest at night, to kneel
down together at our bedside, and to implore, together, the Divine
blessing upon the efforts and labors of the foregoing day. And before
offering up that petition to the Throne of Grace, my friends "--here
the orator's voice vibrated a little with emotion--"we have ever been
sedulous to ask each other, and to question our own hearts, as to
whether, during that day, some human fellow-creature had been made
better, or happier, because we had lived. And very seldom has it
happened--very seldom, indeed, my dear friends, has it happened--that
we were unable to say to ourselves, and to each other, that, during
that day, some fellow-creature, if not more than one, had had cause for
thankfulness because we had lived. And now I will beg of you, my dear
friends," added Mr. Hall, producing his large, white pocket-handkerchief
and patting his eyes with it, "to pardon a personal allusion, made in
fulness of heart and brotherly feeling, and if there be found in it
anything calculated to assist any of you towards a right comprehension
of our Christian responsibilities towards our fellow-man, I entreat that
you take it into your hearts and bosoms, and may it be sanctified unto
you. I have done."
This report may be relied upon as substantially accurate, for the
reporter made a note of the apologue and exhortation soon afterwards.
Mrs. Hall, like her husband, was of Irish birth, and an agreeable
and clever woman. They were both born in 1800, and died, she in her
eighty-second, he in his ninetieth year. He remained the same Hall to
the very end of his long chapter, and really, if no one was the better
because he had lived, I don't know that any one was the worse, in the
long run, either; and there have been Pecksniffs of whom as much could
hardly be affirmed. There is, however, an anecdote of Hall which my
father tells, and seems to have credited; if it be true, it would appear
that once at least in his life he could hardly have implored the Throne
of Grace for a blessing on the deeds of the day. "He told me," writes my
father, "(laughing at the folly of the affair, but, nevertheless, fully
appreciating his own chivalry) how he and Charles Lever, about ten years
since, had been on the point of fighting a duel. The quarrel was made
up, however, and they parted good friends, Lever returning to Ireland,
whence Mr. Hall's challenge had summoned him." I suspect good Mr. Hall
must have once more appropriated somebody else's adventure; it was not
in the heat of youth that the bloody-minded and unchristian episode is
supposed to have occurred, but when Mr. Hall was in his forty-seventh
year.
Durham, the sculptor, was a lifelong friend of Bennoch's, and was often
in my father's company, and he manifested a friendly feeling towards my
father's son long afterwards. He was a man of medium height, compactly
built, with slightly curling hair, and a sympathetic, abstracted
expression of countenance. He was at this time making a bust of Queen
Victoria, and he told us that it was contrary to court etiquette for her
Majesty, during these sittings, to address herself directly to him,
or, of course, for him directly to address her; they must communicate
through the medium of the lady-in-waiting. The Queen, however, said
Durham, sometimes broke through this rule, and so did the sculptor,
the democracy of art, it would seem, enabling them to surmount the
obligation to filter through the mind of a third person all such remarks
as they might wish to make to each other. Durham also said that when
the bust was nearly finished the Queen proposed that a considerable
thickness of the clay should be removed from the model, which was done.
The bust, as an ideal work, was thereby much improved, but the likeness
to her Majesty was correspondingly diminished. Years afterwards I
was talking with W. G. Wills, the painter and dramatist, a delightful
Irishman of the most incorrigibly republican and bohemian type. He had,
a little while before, been giving lessons in painting to the Princess
Louise, who married the Marquis of Lorne, and who was, herself,
exceptionally emancipated for a royal personage. One day, said Wills
(telling the story quite innocently), the Princess was prevented from
coming as usual to his studio, and he received a message from Windsor
Castle, where the Princess and the Queen were staying, from the Queen's
secretary, commanding his presence there to give the Princess her
lesson, and to spend the night. This would be regarded by the ordinary
British subject not only as an order to be instantly and unhesitatingly
obeyed, but as a high honor and distinction. "But the fact is," said
Wills, with his easy smile, "I'd promised to be at my friend
Corkran's reception that evening, and, of course, I couldn't think of
disappointing him; there was no time to write, so I just sent a telegram
to the castle saying I was engaged." Probably English society history
does not contain a parallel to this piece of audacity, and one would
have liked to see the face of the private secretary of her Majesty
when he opened the telegram. But Wills could not be made to recognize
anything singular in the affair.
Commenting in one of his private note-books, at this time, upon the
subject of modern sculpture in general, my father utters one of his
unregenerate opinions. "It seems to me," he says, "time to leave off
sculpturing men and women naked; such statues mean nothing, and might as
well bear one name as another; they belong to the same category as the
ideal portraits in books of beauty or in the windows of print-shops.
The art does not naturally belong to this age, and the exercise of it,
I think, had better be confined to manufacture of marble fireplaces."
As we shall see, he modified this radical view before he left Italy; but
there is some ground of truth in it, nevertheless.
Here is another bit of art criticism. He has been giving a detailed
description of the sitting-room in one of our lodgings, and of the
objects contained in it, evidently as a part of his general practice to
record the minor facts of English life, to serve as a background for the
English romance he hoped to write afterwards. "On the mantle-piece," he
writes, "are two little glass vases, and over it a looking-glass (not
flattering to the beholder), and above hangs a colored view of some lake
or seashore, and on each side a cheap colored print of Prince Albert
and one of Queen Victoria. And, really, I have seen no picture, bust,
or statue of her Majesty which I feel to be so good a likeness as this
cheap print. You see the whole line of Guelphs in it--fair, blue-eyed,
shallow-brained, commonplace, yet with a simple kind of heartiness and
truth that make one somewhat good-natured towards them."
"I must see Dickens before I leave England," he wrote, commenting upon
the various tales he heard of him from henchmen and critics; but he
never did see him, nor Thackeray either, whom he perhaps wished still
more to meet. Thackeray visited America while we were abroad; and when
Dickens came to Boston to read, my father was dead. Nor did he see
Bulwer, an apostrophe by whom he quotes: "Oh, that somebody would invent
a new sin, that I might go in for it!" Tennyson he saw, but did not
speak with him. He sat at table, on one occasion, with Macaulay,
and remarked upon the superiority over his portraits of his actual
appearance. He made the acquaintance, which ripened into friendship,
in Italy, of Robert Browning and his wife, and of Coventry Patmore, the
author of "The Angel in the House," a poem which he greatly liked. But,
upon the whole, he came in contact with the higher class of literary
men in England less than with others, whom he was less likely to find
sympathetic.
One afternoon, when I had accompanied him to the consulate, there
entered a tall, active man, very well dressed, with black, thick-curling
hair and keen, blue eyes. He seemed under thirty years of age, but had
the self-confident manner of a man of the world, and a great
briskness of demeanor and speech. He sat down and began to tell of his
experiences; he had been all over the world, and knew everything about
the world's affairs, even the secrets of courts and the coming movements
of international politics. He was a striking, handsome, indomitable
figure, and aggressively American. When he went away, he left with my
father a book which he had written, with an engraved portrait of
the author for frontispiece. This volume, faded and shelf-worn, but
apparently unread, bound in the execrable taste of a generation and a
half ago, I recently found among my father's volumes. It bore on the
title-page the dashing signature of George Francis Train. Train saw
things in the large--in their cosmic relations; from us he was going
forth to make a fortune compared with which that of Monte Cristo would
be a trifle. He did make fortunes, I believe; but there seems to have
been in his blood a little too much of the elixir of life--more than he
could thoroughly digest. His development was arrested, or was continued
on lines which carried him away from practical contact with that world
which he believed he held in the hollow of his hand. My father suspected
his soundness; but in 1856 there seemed to be no height to which he
might not rise. The spiritual steam-engine in him, however, somehow got
uncoupled from the mass of the machinery of human affairs, and has
been plying in vacua, so to say, ever since. On the 9th of June came
a telegram from Southampton; my mother and sisters had arrived from
Madeira. My father and I left Liverpool the next day, feeling that our
troubles were over. In the afternoon we alighted at the little seaport
and took a cab to the Castle Hotel, close to the water. My father, with
a face full of light, sprang up-stairs to the room in which my mother
awaited him; I found myself with my sisters and Fannie Wrigley, the
faithful nurse and companion who had accompanied them on their travels.
How tall and mature Una was! What a big girl baby Rose had become! There
was a little strangeness between us, but great good-will; we felt that
there were a great many explanations to be made. In a few minutes I was
called up-stairs to my mother. At the first glance she seemed smaller
than formerly; her face appeared a little different from my memory of
it; I was overcome by an odd shyness. She smiled and held out her arms;
then I saw my beloved mother, and a great passion of affection poured
through me and swept me to her. I was whole again, and indescribably
happy.
There was never such another heavenly room as that parlor in the Castle
Hotel; never another hotel so delightful, or another town to be compared
with Southampton. I was united to all I loved there, and in my thoughts
sunshine will always rest on it.