Talked familiarly with kings and queens--Half-witted girl
who giggled all the time--It gnawed me terribly--A Scotch
terrier named Towsey--A sentiment of diplomatic etiquette--
London as a physical entity--Ladies in low-necked dresses--
An elderly man like a garden-spider--Into the bowels of the
earth--The inner luminousness of genius--Isolated and tragic
situation--"Ate ever man such a morsel before!"--The great,
wild, mysterious Borrow--Her skeleton, huddled, dry, and
awful--"Ma'am, you expose yourself!"--Plane, spokeshave,
gouge, and chisel--"I-passed-the-Lightning"--Parallel-O-
grams-A graduate of Antioch--"Continual cursing"--A
catastrophe--"Troubles are a sociable sisterhood"--"In truth
I was very sorry"--He had dreamed wide--awake of these
things--A friend of Emerson and Henry James--Embarked at
Folkestone for France.
We spent our first reunited week at the Castle Hotel, which was founded
on an ancient castle wall, or part of it; traces of it were shown to
guests. The harbor lapped the sea-wall in front; the Isle of Wight,
white-ramparted, gleamed through the haze in the offing. I suppose,
during that week, we were enough employed in telling one another our
histories during our separation; and naturally that of my mother and
sisters filled the larger space. They had brought home words and phrases
in a foreign tongue, which made me feel very ignorant; they had talked
familiarly with kings and queens; they had had exciting experiences in
Madeira; they brought with them photographs and colored prints of people
and places, unlike anything that I had seen. My mother, who was an
unsurpassed narrator of events, gave us wonderful and vivid accounts of
all they had seen and done, which I so completely assimilated that to
this day I could repeat a great deal of them; my father listened with
eyes like stars (as my mother would have said), and with a smile in the
corners of his mouth. It was glorious weather all the time, or so it
seems to have been to me. My sisters and I renewed our acquaintance,
and found one another none the worse. Nobody called on us except a Mrs.
Hume, with whom a stay of a fortnight was projected; she kept a girls'
school, and, this being vacation, she would take us as boarders. We
were starved there, as only a pinching, English, thin-bread-and-butter
housekeeper can starve people; and my sisters and I had for our playmate
a half-witted girl who was staying over the vacation, and who giggled
all the time. Mrs. Hume had aroused my enthusiasm by telling me that
there were endless sea-anemones along the coast; but Providence seemed
hostile to my sea-anemone proclivities; for it turned out that what Mrs.
Hume understood by sea-anemones was a small, white-flowering weed
that grew on the low bluff beside the water. I never told her my
disappointment, imagining that it would distress her; but it gnawed me
terribly, and she did not merit such forbearance.
We would much better have stayed at the hotel, only that they charged us
fourteen dollars a day, which was considered exorbitant in those days.
There were seven of us, including Fanny, the nurse. What an age, when
two dollars a head was exorbitant! What Mrs. Hume charged us I know not,
but it is only just to admit that it must have been a good deal less
than one hundred dollars a week; though, again, it must not be forgotten
that translucent bread-and-butter is not expensive. We were sent there,
I suppose, in order to remind us that this was still the world that we
were living in, after all, and not yet Paradise. We came out from her
sobered and chastened, but cheerful still; and meanwhile we visited
Stonehenge and other local things of beauty or interest. Then Mr.
Bennoch (who, to tell the truth, had introduced Mrs. Hume to us) invited
us to spend a month at his house in Blackheath, while he and his wife
were making a little tour in Germany, and we arrived at this agreeable
refuge during the first half of July. My father records that he was as
happy there as he had ever been since leaving his native land. It was
a pleasant little house, in a semi-countrified spot, and it contained,
besides the usual furniture proper to an English gentleman and his wife
of moderate fortune, a little Scotch terrier named Towsey, who commanded
much of the attention of us children, and one day inadvertently bit my
thumb; and I carry the scar, for remembrance, to this day.
Many well-known persons passed across our stage here; and London,
with all its wonders, was at our doors, the wide expanse of its
smoke-piercing towers visible in our distance. All the while my father
kept the official part of himself at Liverpool, where his consular
duties still claimed his attention; he went and came between Mrs.
Blodgett's and Black-heath. The popularity of the incomparable
boarding-house in Duke Street had continued to increase, and he was
obliged to bestow himself in a small room at the back of the building,
which was reputed to be haunted by the spirit of one of his predecessors
in office, who had not only died in it, but had often experienced there
the terrors of delirium tremens; but the ghost, perhaps from a sentiment
of diplomatic etiquette, never showed itself to my father. Or it may
have been that the real self of him being in Blackheath, what remained
was not sufficient to be conscious of a spiritual presence. He came and
went, like sunlight on a partly cloudy day. I recollect taking a walk
over the Heath at evening with him and the doctor who was attending my
mother; Mr. Bennoch was with us; it must have been just before he
and his wife went to the Continent. After walking some distance (the
gentlemen chatting together, and I gambolling on ahead) we came to the
summit of a low rise, from which we beheld London, flung out, all its
gloomy length, before us; and in all my thoughts of London as a physical
entity the impression then received of it returns to me. It lay vast,
low, and obscure in front of the dull red of the sunset, with dim
lights twinkling dispersedly throughout it, and the dome of St. Paul's
doubtfully defining itself above the level. There is no other general
view of London to be compared with this, seen under those conditions.
Soon after, we came to some ridges and mounds, which, said Bennoch,
marked the place where were buried the heaps of the slain of some great
prehistoric battle--one, at least, which must have taken place while
the Romans yet ruled Britain. It was a noble scene for such an antique
conflict, when man met man, foot to foot and hand to hand, with sword
and spear. My mind was full of King Arthur and his Round-Table knights
of the Pendragonship, and I doubted not that their mightiest fight had
been fought here.
There were many walks in London itself. One day, going west along the
Strand, we found ourselves drawn into the midst of a vast crowd near
Charing Cross; some royal function was in progress. Threading our
way slowly through the press, we saw a troop of horsemen in steel
breastplates, with nodding plumes on their helmets, and drawn swords
carried upright on their thighs--the famous Horse Guards; and farther
on we began to see carriages with highly ornamental coachmen and footmen
passing in dilatory procession; within them were glimpses of ladies in
low-necked dresses, feathers in their hair, and their necks sparkling
with jewels.
At length we turned off towards the north, and by-and-by were entering a
huge building of gray stone, with tall pillars in front of it, which my
father told me was the British Museum. What a place for a boy! Endless
halls of statues; enormous saloons filled with glass-cases of shells;
cases of innumerable birds; acres of butterflies and other insects;
strange objects which I did not understand--magic globes of shining
crystal, enormous masses of iron which were said to have fallen from the
sky; vases and jewels; and finally, at the farther end of a corridor,
a small door, softly opening, disclosed a circular room of stupendous
proportions, domed above, the curving walls filled with myriads of
books. In the centre was a circular arrangement of desks, and in the
midst of these an elderly man, like a garden-spider in his web; but it
was his duty to feed, not devour, the human flies who sat or walked to
and fro with literary meat gathered from all over the world. It was my
first vision of a great library.
Another time we went--all of us, I think--to the Tower of London. I
vibrated with joy at the spectacle of the array of figures in armor, and
picked out, a score of times, the suit I would most gladly choose to put
on. Here were St. George, King Arthur, Sir Scudamour, Sir Lancelot--all
but their living faces and their knightly deeds! Then I found myself
immured in dungeons with walls twenty feet thick, darksome and
low-browed, with tiny windows, and some of them bearing on their stones
strange inscriptions, cut there by captives who were nevermore to issue
thence, save to the block. Here the great Raleigh had been confined;
here, the lovable, rash-tempered Essex; here, the noble Sir Henry Vane,
who had once trod the rocky coast of my own New England. Everywhere
stood on the watch or paced about the Beef-eaters in their brilliant
fifteenth-century motley. I have never since then passed the portals of
the Tower, nor seen again the incomparable gleam of the Koh-i-noor--if
it were, indeed, the Koh-i-noor that I saw, and not a glass model
foisted on my innocence.
Again, I followed my father down many flights of steps, into the bowels
of the earth; but there were lights there, and presently we passed
through a sort of turnstile, and saw lengthening out before us two
endless open tubes, of diameter twice or thrice the height of a man,
with people walking in them, and disappearing in their interminable
perspective. We, too, entered and began to traverse them, and after we
had proceeded about half-way my father told me that the river Thames was
flowing over our heads, with its ships on its surface, and its fishes,
and its bottom of mud and gravel--under all these this illuminated
corridor, with ourselves breathing and seeing and walking therein. Would
we ever again behold the upper world and the sky? The atmosphere was not
pleasant, and I was glad to find myself climbing up another flight of
stairs and emerging on the other side of the river, which we had crossed
on foot, dry-shod.
Of the famous personages of this epoch I did not see much; only I
remember that a woman who seemed taller than common, dressed in a dark
silk gown, and moving with a certain air of composure, as if she knew
she was right, and yet meant to be considerate of others; whose features
were plain, and whose voice had a resonance and modulation unlike other
voices, was spoken of in my hearing as bearing a name which I had heard
often, and which had a glamour for my boyish imagination--Jenny Lind.
There also rises before me the dark, courteous visage and urbane figure
of Monckton Milnes; but there was something more and better than mere
courtesy and urbanity about him; the inner luminousness, I suppose, of
what was nearly genius, and would have been altogether that but for
the swaddling-clothes of rank and society which hampered it. My father
thought him like Longfellow; but there was an English materialism about
Milnes from which the American poet was free. Henry James told me
long afterwards a comical tale of how, being left to browse in Mimes's
library one afternoon, he strayed into an alcove of pretty and inviting
volumes, in sweet bindings, mellowed by age, and was presently terrified
by the discovery that he was enmeshed in the toils of what bibliophiles
term, I think, "Facetiae"--of which Milnes had a collection unmatched
among private book-owners. Milnes's social method was The Breakfast,
which he employed constantly, and nothing could be more agreeable--in
England; we cannot acclimate it here, because we work in the afternoon.
Of Miss Bacon, of the Bacon-wrote-Shakespeare theory, I saw nothing, but
heard much, for a time, in our family circle; my father seemed to have
little doubt of her insanity, and absolute certainty of the despotic
attitude she adopted towards her supporters, which was far more
intolerable than the rancor which she visited on those who disregarded
her monomaniacal convictions. My mother, out of pure compassion, I
believe, for the isolated and tragic situation in which the poor woman
had placed herself, tried with all her might to read the book and
believe the theory; she would take up the mass of manuscript night after
night, and wade through it with that truly saintlike self-abnegation
which characterized her, occasionally, too, reading out a passage
which struck her. The result was that she could not bring herself to
disbelieve in Shakespeare, but she conceived a higher admiration than
ever of Bacon; and that, too, was characteristic of her.
We made several incursions into the surrounding country. One was to
Newstead, where, from the talkative landlady of the hotel, we heard
endless stories about Byron and his wife; this was before Mrs. Harriet
Beecher Stowe published her well-intended but preposterous volume about
the poet. Then we visited Oxford, and were shown about by the mayor of
the town, and by Mr. S. C. Hall, and were at one moment bathed in the
light emanating from Lady Waldegrave, of which interview my father, in
his private note-book, speaks thus: "Lady Waldegrave appeared; whereupon
Mr. Speirs (the mayor) instantly was transfigured and transformed--like
the English snob he is, worthy man--and looked humbler than he does in
the presence of his Maker, and so respectful and so blest that it was
pleasant to behold him. Nevertheless, she is but a brummagem kind of
countess, after all, being the daughter of Braham, the famous singer,
and married first to an illegitimate son of an Earl Waldegrave--not
to the legitimate son and possessor of the title (who was her first
love)--and after the death of these two to the present old Mr. Harcourt.
She is still in her summer, even if it be waning, a lady of fresh
complexion and light hair, a Jewish nose (to which her descent entitles
her), a kind and generous expression of face, but an officer-like
figure and bearing. There seems to be a peculiarity of manner, a lack
of simplicity, a self-consciousness, which I suspect would not have been
seen in a lady born to the rank which she has attained. But, anyhow, she
was kind to all of us, and complimentary to me, and she showed us
some curious things which had formerly made part of Horace Walpole's
collection at Twickenham--a missal, for instance, splendidly bound and
beset with jewels, but of such value as no setting could increase, for
it was exquisitely illuminated by the own hand of Raphael himself! I
held the precious volume in my grasp, though I fancy (and so does my
wife) that the countess scarcely thought it safe out of her own hands.
In truth, I suppose any virtuoso would steal it if he could; and Lady
Waldegrave has reason to look to the safe-keeping of her treasures, as
she exemplified by telling us a story while exhibiting a little silver
case. This once contained a portion of the heart of Louis XII. (how
the devil it was got I know not), and she was showing it one day to
Strickland, Dean of Westminster, when, to her horror and astonishment,
she saw him open the case and swallow the royal heart! Ate ever man such
a morsel before! It was a symptom of insanity in the dean, and I believe
he is since dead, insane." It was after this interview with the countess
that we visited Old Boston, and when my parents told old Mr. Porter
about the missal his jolly eyes took on a far-away expression, as if he
saw himself in the delightful act of purloining it, "in obedience to a
higher law than that which he broke."
The man who, of all writing men, was nearest to my heart in those years,
and long after, was George Borrow, whose book, Lavengro, I had already
begun to read. The publication of this work had made him famous, though
he had written two or three volumes before that, and was at this
very time bringing out its sequel, Romany Rye. But Borrow was never a
hanger-on of British society, and we never saw him. One day, however,
Mr. Martineau turned up, and, the conversation chancing to turn on
Borrow, he said that he and George had been school-mates, and that the
latter's gypsy proclivities had given him a singular influence over
other boys. Finally, he had persuaded half a dozen of them to run away
from the school and lead a life of freedom and adventure on the roads
and lanes of England. To this part of Mr. Martineau's tale I lent an
eager and sympathetic ear; but the narrator was lowered in my estimation
by the confession that he himself had not been a member of Borrow's
party. He went on to say that the fugitives had been pursued and
captured and brought back to bondage; and upon Borrow's admitting that
he had been the instigator of the adventure, he was sentenced to be
flogged, and that it was on the back of this very Martineau that he
had been "horsed" to undergo the punishment! Imagine the great, wild,
mysterious Borrow mounted upon the ascetic and precise cleric that
was to be, and the pedagogue laying on! My father asked concerning the
accuracy of some of Borrow's statements in his books, to which Martineau
replied that he could not be entirely depended on; not that he meant to
mislead or misrepresent, but his imagination, or some eccentricity in
his mental equipment, caused him occasionally to depart from literal
fact. Very possibly; but Borrow's imagination brought him much nearer to
essential truth than adherence to what they supposed to be literal facts
could bring most men.
One of the most interesting expeditions of this epoch--though I cannot
fix the exact date--was to an old English country-seat, built in the
time of Henry VIII., or earlier, and added to from age to age since
then, until now it presented an irregularity and incongruousness of
plan which rendered it an interminable maze of delight to us children
wandering through it. We were taken in charge by the children of the
family, of whom there were no fewer than fourteen, all boys, with only
twelve years between the eldest and the youngest (some of them being
twins). Hide-and-seek at once suggested itself as the proper game for
the circumstances, but no set game was needed; the house itself was
Hide-and-seek House; you could not go twenty feet without getting lost,
and the walls of many of the rooms had sliding panels, and passages
through the thickness of them, and even staircases, so that when one
of us went into a room there was no predicting where he would come out.
Finally they brought us to a black, oaken door with a great, black
lock on it, and bolts at the top and bottom; it was near the end of a
corridor, in the oldest wing of the building. The door, in addition to
its native massiveness, was studded with great nails, and there were
bands of iron or steel crossing it horizontally. When we proposed
to enter, our friends informed us that this door had been closed one
hundred and eighty years before and had never been opened since then,
and that it had shut in a young woman who, for some reason, had become
very objectionable or dangerous to other persons concerned. The windows
of the room, they added, had been walled up at the same time; so there
this unhappy creature slowly starved to death in pitch darkness. There,
doubtless, within a few feet of where we stood, lay her skeleton,
huddled, dry, and awful in the garments she wore in life. Sometimes,
too, by listening long at the key-hole, you could hear a faint sound,
like a human groan; but it was probably merely the sigh of the draught
through the aperture. This story so horrified me and froze my young
blood that the fancies of Mrs. Radcliffe and Edgar Allan Poe seemed like
frivolous chatter beside it.
About the middle of September the Bennochs returned from the Continent,
and we made ready to transfer ourselves to the lodgings in Southport
which had been prepared for us. Bennoch, who was soon to meet with the
crucial calamity of his career, was in abounding spirits, and he told my
father an anecdote of our friend Grace Greenwood, which is recorded in
one of the private note-books. "Grace, Bennoch says," he writes, "was
invited to a private reading of Shakespeare by Charles Kemble, and she
thought it behooved her to manifest her good taste and depth of feeling
by going into hysterics and finally fainting away upon the floor.
Hereupon Charles Kemble looked up from his book and addressed himself to
her sternly and severely. 'Ma'am,' said he, 'this won't do! Ma'am, you
disturb the company! Ma'am, you expose yourself!'"
This last hit had the desired effect, for poor Grace probably thought
that her drapery had not adjusted itself as it ought, and that perhaps
she was really exposing more of her charms than were good to be imparted
to a mixed company. So she came to herself in a hurry, and, after a few
flutterings, subsided into a decorous listener. Bennoch says he had this
story from an eye-witness, and that he fully believes it; and I think it
not impossible that, betwixt downright humbug and a morbid exaggeration
of her own emotions, Grace may have been betrayed into this awful fix. I
wonder how she survived it!
At Southport we remained from the middle of September to the following
July, 1857. In addition to my aquarium, I was deeply involved in the
ship-building industry, and, the more efficiently to carry out my
designs, was apprenticed to a carpenter, an elderly, shirt-sleeved,
gray-bearded man, who under a stern aspect concealed a warm and
companionable heart. There were boys at the beach who had little models
of cutters and yachts, and I conceived the project of making a sail-boat
for myself. My father seems to have thought that some practical
acquaintance with the use of carpenter's tools would do me no harm--by
adding a knowledge of a handicraft to my other culture--so he arranged
with Mr. Chubbuck that I should attend his work-shop for instruction.
Mr. Chubbuck, accordingly, gave me thorough lessons in the mysteries
of the plane, the spokeshave, the gouge, and the chisel, and finally
presented me with a block of white pine eighteen inches long and
nine wide, and I set to work on my sloop. He oversaw my labors, but
conscientiously abstained from taking a hand in them himself; the
model gradually took shape, and there began to appear a bluff-bowed,
broad-beamed craft, a good deal resembling the French fishing-boats
which I afterwards saw off the harbors of Calais and Havre. The outside
form being done, I entered upon the delightful and exciting work of
hollowing it out with the gouge, narrowly avoiding, more than once,
piercing through from the hold into the outer world. But the little ship
became more buoyant every day, and finally stood ready for her
deck. This I prepared by planing down a bit of plank to the proper
thickness--or thinness--and carefully fitted it into its place, with
companionways fore and aft, covered with hatches made to slide in
grooves. Next, with chisel, spoke-shave, and sand-paper, I prepared
the mast and fitted a top-mast to it, and secured it in its place with
shrouds and stays of fine, waxed fishing-line. The boom and gaff
were then put in place, and Fanny Wrigley (who had aforetime made my
pasteboard armor and helmet) now made me a main-sail, top-sail, and jib
out of the most delicate linen, beautifully hemmed, and a tiny American
flag to hoist to the peak. It only remained to paint her; I was provided
with three delectable cans of oil-paint, and I gave her a bright-green
under-body, a black upper-body, and white port-holes with a narrow red
line running underneath them. Thus decorated, and with her sails
set, she was a splendid object, and the boys with bought models were
depressed with envy, especially when I called their attention to the
stars and stripes. This boat-building mania of mine had originated while
we were at Mrs. Blodgett's, where the captain of one of the clippers
gave me a beautiful model of his own ship, fully rigged, and perfect
in every detail; only it would not sail, being solid. Concerning
his clipper, by-the-way, I once overheard a bit of dialogue in Mrs.
Blodgett's smoking-room between my captain and another. "Do you mean to
say," demanded the latter, "that you passed the Lightning?" To which
my captain replied, in measured and impressive tones,
"I-passed-the-Lightning!" The Lightning, it may be remarked, was at that
time considered the queen of the Atlantic passage; she had made the trip
between Boston and Liverpool in ten days. But my captain had once shown
her his heels, nevertheless. I wanted to christen my sloop The Sea
Eagle, but my father laughed so much at this name that I gave it up;
he suggested The Chub, The Mud-Pout, and other ignoble titles, which I
indignantly rejected, and what her name finally was I have forgotten.
She afforded me immense happiness.
At Southport we had a queer little governess, Miss Brown, who came to us
highly recommended both as to her personal character and for ability to
instruct us in arithmetic and geometry, geography, English composition,
and the rudiments of French. She was barely five feet in height, and as
thin and dry as an insect; and although her personal character came up
to any eulogium that could be pronounced upon it, her ignorance of the
"branches" specified was, if possible, greater than our own. She was
particularly perplexed by geometry; she aroused our hilarity by always
calling a parallelogram a parallel-O-gram, with a strong emphasis on
the penultimate syllable; and she spent several days repeating over to
herself, with a mystified countenance, the famous words, "The square
of the hypothenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two legs."
What were legs of a triangle, and how, if there were any, could they be
square? She never solved this enigma; and although we liked little Miss
Brown very much, she speedily lost all shadow of control over us; we
treated her as a sort of inferior sister, and would never be serious.
"English governess" became for us a synonym for an amiable little
nonentity who knew nothing; and I was surprised to learn, later, from
the early works of Miss Rhoda Broughton, that they could be beautiful
and intelligent. Miss Brown did not outlast our residence in Southport.
From Southport we removed to Manchester, and thence, after exhausting
the exposition, to Leamington, where we spent September and October of
1857. We expected to proceed direct from Leamington to France and Italy,
but we were destined to be delayed in London till January of 1858.
It was in Leamington that we were joined by Ada Shepard. She was a
graduate of Antioch, a men-and-women's college in Ohio, renowned in its
day, when all manner of improvements in the human race were anticipated
from educating the sexes together. Miss Shepard had got a very
thorough education there, so that she knew as much as a professor,
including--what would be of especial service to us--a knowledge of most
of the modern European languages. What seemed, no doubt, of even more
importance to her was her betrothal to her classmate, Henry Clay Badger;
they were to be married on her return to America. Meanwhile, as a matter
of mutual convenience (which rapidly became mutual pleasure), she was
to act as governess of us children and accompany our travels. Ada (as my
father and mother presently called her) was then about twenty-two years
old; she had injured her constitution--never robust--by addiction to
learning, and had incidentally imbibed from the atmosphere of Antioch
all the women's-rights fads and other advanced opinions of the day.
These, however, affected mainly the region of her intellect; in her
nature she was a simple, affectionate, straightforward American maiden,
with the little weaknesses and foibles appertaining to that estate;
and it was curious to observe the frequent conflicts between these
spontaneous characteristics and her determination to live up to her
acquired views. But she was fresh-hearted and happy then, full of
interest in the wonders and beauties of the Old World; she wrote,
weekly, long, criss-crossed letters, in a running hand, home to
"Clay," the king of men; and periodically received, with an illuminated
countenance, thick letters with an American foreign postage-stamp on
them, which she would shut herself into her chamber to devour in secret.
She was a little over the medium height, with a blue-eyed face, not
beautiful, but gentle and expressive, and wearing her flaxen hair in
long curls on each side of her pale cheeks. She entered upon her duties
as governess with energy and good-will, and we soon found that an
American governess was a very different thing from an English one
(barring the Rhoda Broughton sort). Her special aim at present was to
bring us forward in the French and Italian languages. We had already,
in Manchester, made some acquaintance with the books of the celebrated
Ollendorff; and my father, who knew Latin well, had taught me something
of Latin grammar, which aided me in my Italian studies. I liked Latin,
particularly as he taught it to me, and it probably amused him, though
it must also often have tried his patience to teach me. I had a certain
aptitude for the spirit of the language, but was much too prone to leap
at conclusions in my translations. I did not like to look out words
in the lexicon, and the result was sometimes queer. Thus, there was
a sentence in some Latin author describing the manner in which the
Scythians were wont to perform their journeys; relays of fresh horses
would be provided at fixed intervals, and thus they were enabled to
traverse immense distances at full speed. The words used were, I think,
as follows: "Itaque conficiunt iter continuo cursu." When I translated
these, "So they came to the end of their journey with continual
cursing," I was astonished to see my father burst into inextinguishable
laughter, falling back in his chair and throwing up his feet in the
ebullience of his mirth. I heard a good deal of that "continual cursing"
for some years after, and I believe the incident prompted me to pay
stricter attention to the dictionary than I might otherwise have done.
However, what with Ollendorff and Miss Shepard, we regarded ourselves,
by the time we were ready to set out for the Continent, as being in fair
condition to ask about trains and to order dinner. My mother, indeed,
had from her youth spoken French and Spanish fluently, but not Italian;
my father, though he read these languages easily enough, never attained
any proficiency in talking them. After he had wound up his consular
affairs, about the first week in October, we left Leamington and took
the train for a few days in London, stopping at lodgings in Great
Russell Street, close to the British Museum.
We were first delayed by friendly concern for the catastrophe which at
this moment befell Mr. Bennoch. He was a wholesale silk merchant, but
his literary and social tendencies had probably led him to trust too
much to the judgment and ability of his partners; at all events, on his
return from Germany he had found the affairs of his establishment much
involved, and he was now gazetted a bankrupt. In the England of those
days bankruptcy was no joke, still less the avenue to fortune which it
is sometimes thought to be in other countries; and a man who had built
up his business during twenty years by conscientious and honorable work,
and who was sensitively proud of his commercial honor, was for a time
almost overwhelmed by the disaster. My father felt the most tender
sympathy and grief for him, and we were additionally depressed by a
report, circumstantially detailed (but which proved to be unfounded),
that Mrs. Bennoch had died in childbirth--they had never had children.
"Troubles," commented my father "(as I myself have experienced, and
many others before me), are a sociable sisterhood; they love to
come hand-in-hand, or sometimes, even, to come side by side, with
long-looked-for and hoped-for good-fortune." He was doubtless thinking
of that dark and bright period when his mother lay dying in his house in
Salem and The Scarlet Letter was waiting to be born.
A few days later he went by appointment to Bennoch's office in Wood
Street, Cheapside, and I will quote the account of that interview for
the light it casts on the characters of the two friends:
"When I inquired for Bennoch, in the warehouse where two or three clerks
seemed to be taking account of stock, a boy asked me to write my name on
a slip of paper, and took it into his peculiar office. Then appeared Mr.
Riggs, the junior partner, looking haggard and anxious, poor man. He is
somewhat low of stature, and slightly deformed, and I fancied that he
felt the disgrace and trouble more on that account. But he greeted me
in a friendly way, though rather awkwardly, and asked me to sit down a
little while in his own apartment, where he left me. I sat a good while,
reading an old number of Blackwood's Magazine, a pile of which I found
on the desk, together with some well-worn ledgers and papers, that
looked as if they had been pulled out of drawers and pigeon-holes and
dusty corners, and were not there in the regular course of business.
By-and-by Mr. Riggs reappeared, and, telling me that I must lunch with
them, conducted me up-stairs, and through entries and passages where I
had been more than once before, but could not have found my way again
through those extensive premises; and everywhere the packages of silk
were piled up and ranged on shelves, in paper boxes, and otherwise--a
rich stock, but which had brought ruin with it. At last we came to that
pleasant drawing-room, hung with a picture or two, where I remember
enjoying the hospitality of the firm, with their clerks all at the
table, and thinking that this was a genuine scene of the old life
of London City, when the master used to feed his 'prentices at a
patriarchal board. After all, the room still looked cheerful enough; and
there was a good fire, and the table was laid for four. In two or three
minutes Bennoch came in--not with that broad, warm, lustrous presence
that used to gladden me in our past encounters--not with all that
presence, at least--though still he was not less than a very genial
man, partially be-dimmed. He looked paler, it seemed to me, thinner,
and rather smaller, but nevertheless he smiled at greeting me, more
brightly, I suspect, than I smiled back at him, for in truth I was very
sorry. Mr. Twentyman, the middle partner, now came in, and appeared as
much or more depressed than his fellows in misfortune, and to bear it
with a greater degree of English incommunicativeness and reserve. But
he, too, met me hospitably, and I and these three poor ruined men sat
down to dinner--a good dinner enough, by-the-bye, and such as ruined men
need not be ashamed to eat, since they must needs eat something. It was
roast beef, and a boiled apple-pudding, and--which I was glad to see, my
heart being heavy--a decanter of sherry and another of port, remnants
of a stock which, I suppose, will not be replenished. They ate pretty
fairly, but scarcely like Englishmen, and drank a reasonable quantity,
but not as if their hearts were in it, or as if the liquor went to their
hearts and gladdened them. I gathered from them a strong idea of what
commercial failure means to English merchants--utter ruin, present and
prospective, and obliterating all the successful past; how little chance
they have of ever getting up again; how they feel that they must plod
heavily onward under a burden of disgrace--poor men and hopeless men
and men forever ashamed. I doubt whether any future prosperity (which
is unlikely enough to come to them) could ever compensate them for this
misfortune, or make them, to their own consciousness, the men they were.
They will be like a woman who has once lost her chastity: no after-life
of virtue will take out the stain. It is not so in America, nor ought it
to be so here; but they said themselves they would never again have put
unreserved confidence in a man who had been bankrupt, and they could
not but apply the same severe rule to their own case. I was touched by
nothing more than by their sorrowful patience, without any fierceness
against Providence or against mankind, or disposition to find fault with
anything but their own imprudence; and there was a simple dignity, too,
in their not assuming the aspect of stoicism. I could really have shed
tears for them, to see how like men and Christians they let the tears
come to their own eyes. This is the true way to do; a man ought not to
be too proud to let his eyes be moistened in the presence of God and
of a friend. They talked of some little annoyances, half laughingly.
Bennoch has been dunned for his gas-bill at Blackheath (only a pound or
two) and has paid it. Mr. Twentyman seems to have received an insulting
message from some creditor. Mr. Riggs spoke of wanting a little money
to pay for some boots. It was very sad, indeed, to see these men of
uncommon energy and ability, all now so helpless, and, from managing
great enterprises, involving vast expenditures, reduced almost to reckon
the silver in their pockets. Bennoch and I sat by the fireside a little
while after his partners had left the room, and then he told me that he
blamed himself, as holding the principal position in the firm, for not
having exercised a stronger controlling influence over their operations.
The two other men had recently gone into speculations, of the extent of
which he had not been fully aware, and he found the liabilities of
the firm very much greater than he had expected. He said this without
bitterness, and said it not to the world, but only to a friend. I am
exceedingly sorry for him; it is such a changed life that he must
lead hereafter, and with none of the objects before him which he might
heretofore have hoped to grasp. No doubt he was ambitious of civic, and
even of broader public distinction; and not unreasonably so, having the
gift of ready and impressive speech, and a behavior among men that
wins them, and a tact in the management of affairs, and many-sided
and never-tiring activity. To be a member of Parliament--to be lord
mayor--whatever an eminent merchant of the world's metropolis may
be--beyond question he had dreamed wide-awake of these things. And now
fate itself could hardly accomplish them, if ever so favorably inclined.
He has to begin life over again, as he began it twenty-five years ago,
only under infinite disadvantages, and with so much of his working-day
gone forever.
"At parting, I spoke of his going to America; but he appeared to think
that there would be little hope for him there. Indeed, I should be loath
to see him transplanted thither myself, away from the warm, cheerful,
juicy English life into our drier and less genial sphere; he is a good
guest among us, but might not do well to live with us."
Bennoch was never lord mayor or member of Parliament; I do not know
that he cared to be either; but he lived to repay all his creditors with
interest, and to become once more a man in easy circumstances, honored
and trusted as well as loved by all who knew him, and active and happy
in all good works to the end of his days. There could be no keeping down
such a man, even in England; and when I knew him, in after years, he was
the Bennoch of yore, grown mellow and wise.
We were now ready for the Continent, when symptoms of some malady began
to manifest themselves among the younger persons of the family, which
presently culminated in an attack of the measles. It was six weeks
before we were in condition to take the road again. Meanwhile we were
professionally attended by Dr. J. J. Garth Wilkinson, a homoeopathist, a
friend of Emerson and of Henry James the elder, a student of Swedenborg,
and, at this particular juncture, interested in spiritualism. In a
biography of my father and mother, which I published in 1884, I alluded
to this latter circumstance, and some time afterwards I received from
his wife a letter which I take this opportunity to print:
"4 FINCHLEY ROAD, N. W., June 19, 1885.
"DEAR SIR,--May I beg of you in any future edition of the Life of your
father to leave out your passage upon my husband and spiritualism? He
is utterly opposed to it now. On Mr. Home's first appearance in England
very remarkable things did occur; but from the first I was a most
decided opponent, and by my firmness I have kept all I know and love
from having anything to do with it for at least thirty-five years. You
may imagine, therefore, I feel hurt at seeing so spiritually minded
a man as my husband really is to be mixed up with so evil a thing as
spiritism. You will pardon a faithful wife her just appreciation of
his character. One other author took the liberty of using his name in a
similar way, and I wrote to him also. Believe me,
"Yours faithfully,
"E. A. WILKINSON."
The good doctor and his wife are now, I believe, both of them in the
world where good spirits go, and no doubt they have long ere this found
out all about the rights and wrongs of spiritism and other matters, but
there is no doubt that at the time of my father's acquaintance with him
the doctor was a very earnest supporter of the cult. He was a man of
mark and of brains and of most lovable personal quality; he wrote books
well worth deep study; Emerson speaks of "the long Atlantic roll" of
their style. Henry James named his third son after him--the gentle and
brave "Wilkie" James, who was my school-mate at Sanborn's school in
Concord after our return to America, and who was wounded in the fight at
Fort Fisher while leading his negro soldiers to the assault. But for the
present, Dr. Wilkinson, so far as we children knew him, was a delightful
and impressive physician, who helped us through our measles in masterly
style, under all the disadvantages of a foggy London winter.
On the 5th of January, 1858--we were ready to start the next
day--Bennoch came to take tea with us and bid us farewell. "He keeps up
a manly front," writes my father, "and an aspect of cheerfulness, though
it is easy to see that he is a very different man from the joyous one
whom I knew a few months since; and whatever may be his future
fortune, he will never get all the sunshine back again. There is a
more determinate shadow on him now, I think, than immediately after his
misfortunes; the old, equable truth weighs down upon him, and makes him
sensible that the good days of his life have probably all been enjoyed,
and that the rest is likely to be endurance, not enjoyment. His temper
is still sweet and warm, yet, I half fancy, not wholly unacidulated by
his troubles--but now I have written it, I decide that it is not so,
and blame myself for surmising it. But it seems most unnatural that
so buoyant and expansive a character should have fallen into the
helplessness of commercial misfortune; it is most grievous to hear his
manly and cheerful allusions to it, and even his jokes upon it; as,
for example, when we suggested how pleasant it would be to have him
accompany us to Paris, and he jestingly spoke of the personal restraint
under which he now lived. On his departure, Julian and I walked a good
way down Oxford Street and Holborn with him, and I took leave of him
with the truest wishes for his welfare."
The next day we embarked at Folkestone for France, and our new life
began.