1874
SHERMAN ON CUBA--VISIT ITALY--GARIBALDI’S WONDERFUL RECEPTION
AT ROME--THE ARTIST FREEMAN--FIRST AMERICAN PAINTER TO LIVE
IN ROME--ROME IN 1840--SEE VICTOR EMMANUEL--JOAQUIN MILLER--
HIS CONVERSATION AND APPEARANCE--NEW SWISS CONSTITUTION--
MORE LETTERS FROM GENERAL SHERMAN--TOO MANY COMMANDERS IN
WASHINGTON FOR HIM--WILL GO TO ST. LOUIS--HIS VIEWS OF WAR
HISTORIES.
A hint once that if I preferred to be in the Army instead of the
Consular service the matter could be arranged, led me to think of one
of the Paymasterships then being created by Congress. The General wrote
me as to these plans. His letter has value only because of the prophecy
as to Cuba.
“WASHINGTON, D. C., Nov. 28, 1873.
“DEAR BYERS:--I was very glad to get your letter of November 12th
this morning, as it reminds me of a duty neglected to write you,
renewing my thanks to you for your extreme kindness to Minnie.
She arrived home about the 1st of November perfectly well, and
she has been quietly at home ever since. The winter season is
about to begin, and she must do her share in society. We begin
to-night by a large reception at Mr. Fish’s, and I suppose must
keep it up through the winter. I suppose that Mr. Rublee will
remain where he is, and the Department regarding you as fixed,
will not voluntarily promote you to a larger Consulate.
“As to the Army, things are somewhat confused. There is a law
forbidding any appointments or promotions in the staff corps and
Departments, including the Paymasters. Of these there are for
duty about forty-seven, and I understand the Paymaster-General,
Alvord, says he must have fifty-three to do the necessary work.
And in his annual report to be submitted to Congress next Monday
he will ask for that number, and I believe the Secretary of War
and the President both approve, but for these six places there
are more than a hundred conspicuous applicants. Yet I will
submit your letter, or so much of it as refers to that subject,
to General Belknap, who knows you and whose recommendation will
be conclusive. Of course I, too, will endorse. But don’t build
any castles on this, for I know what a rush there will be on the
first symptom of Congress opening the subject. Everybody here is
on the qui vive for Cuba, but I don’t get excited, for I believe
the diplomatists will settle it, but sooner or later Cuba will
cause trouble in that quarter. I will give your message to Mrs.
Sherman, to Lizzie, Minnie, etc., and will always be glad to hear
such good news of the baby and Mrs. Byers. Give them my best
love, and believe me,
“Truly, etc.,
W. T. SHERMAN.”
_March, 1874._--Went to Italy for a month, via the Mont Ceni. I was
surprised at the beauty of the river boulevard in Pisa, for travelers
rarely mention it. To my mind, it is finer than the Lung Arno of
Florence. Besides, it is something to see a big bridge made wholly of
marble.
The one man of all men in Italy I hoped to see, was Garibaldi, the
Ulysses of the modern world.
He was not to be seen; but I tried to console myself by looking over to
his little island of Caprera, near the Sardinian coast. Dumas’ Life of
Garibaldi set my mind on fire with the story of this man. My inn-keeper
at Naples, too, had been with the patriot in all his campaigns.
Listening to him talk was as entertaining as reading Homer.
[Illustration: Garibaldi.--_Page 96._]
[Illustration: King Victor Emmanuel.--_Page 96._]
The scene, when Garibaldi came to Rome from the solitude of his little
island, to enter parliament the next year, was worthy the brush of
a great artist. The Italy that he had made, and presented to Victor
Emmanuel, had seemed to have forgotten the old man of Caprera. He
was feeble and poor and rheumatic. Suddenly all Italy, _his_ Italy,
remembered him. The King sent a gilded chariot drawn by six white
horses, to take him through the streets of Rome. As the old cripple,
wearing his Garibaldi mantle, limped into the Parliament house, every
member rose to do him honor. I would rather have been Garibaldi in Rome
that day, than to have been Cæsar, riding along the same streets, with
slaves and subjugated peoples in his train.
_March 5._--Looked at numbers of the historic Roman palaces. The one
that affected me most was the dingy and neglected old building in the
Ghetto, where the Cenci lived. This immense and half-empty pile, in an
obscure part of Rome, would attract nobody, save for the story of a
beautiful girl, immortalized by the pencil of Guido Reni. All the time
I was within the building, my mind was on a scene in a prison, where
this same girl hung in torments before her cruel tormentors, crying to
be let down, and she “would tell it all”--the killing of her own father.
And then came that morning before daylight, the morning of her
execution. Herself and an artist are in a cell. A little candle burns,
the executioners wait outside the door, and Guido Reni, to make her
picture striking, drapes a sheet about her head and shoulders, while
all the time she is waiting there for death. Saddest tale of Rome!
Next morning I called at the American Legation. Mr. W----, the
secretary, affected the utmost ignorance and indifference as to who I
was, or whether my card would finally reach Mr. Marsh, our Minister.
I asked him to hand the card back to me, and walked over to the
Rospigliosi palace, where Mr. Marsh promptly received me, and in the
kindest manner. I was in the presence of a statesman and a scholar--not
a snob.
Mr. Marsh had followed the Italian court all about Italy--to Turin,
Florence, Rome. He stood high in the estimation of the Italian court
and foreign diplomats. His genius and scholarship were now casting
luster on the American name.
“Don’t tell anybody at home what a palace I live in,” he said to me,
jocosely. “They will think me an aristocrat over there, whereas I am
the plainest of republicans. Here in Rome a palace is just as cheap as
anything. Everybody lives in a palace here.”
In another part of the palace, I saw Guido’s great picture of Aurora.
I noticed the mark of the French cannon ball that went through it when
Garibaldi was defending Rome.
Bought a copy of Guido’s Cenci, and then went and looked at the Angelo
bridge, where they cut off the head of Beatrice.
I went often to Mr. Freeman’s studio. He was the first American painter
to live in Rome. He was, too, the first U.S. Consul to Italy, and he it
was who protected Margaret Fuller, on a time, from the danger of a mob.
It was at the time the French forced their way into Rome. He planted
the Stars and Stripes on her balcony, and the mob fell back. That was
in 1849.
Freeman painted a picture for me that has inspired a poem by J.
Buchanan Read. It was “The Princess.” The model was a blonde, with hair
like gold. Freeman corrected my notion that there were no blondes in
Italy. There are many, just as there were in the time of the earlier
masters. Yellow was Titian’s favorite color.
Freeman told me much of Rome, as it was when he first went there, in
1840. He lived there under three popes, Gregory, Pius IX and Leo XIII.
Rome was entirely different from to-day. The houses had open entrances,
or, where there were doors, they swung outward to the street, like
American barn doors. There were almost no sidewalks, and the few seen
were only wide enough for one person. The streets were dimly lighted by
occasional oil lamps, great distances apart. Of course, assassination
in such streets was of common occurrence. The water spouts of the
houses were so projected as to empty themselves in cataracts on the
heads of passers-by.
The pavements were made of cobble stones, that had to be covered with
straw or earth when the Pope went abroad in his grandeur.
The city was full of foreign artists, along in the fifties, as now.
Among them were Crawford and Greenough, Story and _West_, whom Byron
called “_Europe’s worst painter and poor England’s best_.”
The fact is, West was a Pennsylvania Quaker, though he became King
George’s court artist, and at last got buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
I went often to the Vatican, not to see the palace itself, for that
impressed me not at all, or only as a great and miscellaneous pile,
but to see a certain picture there. The artist who made it was but
thirty-seven years old when he died. Yet, it has been said that in the
“Transfiguration” one sees “the last perfection of art.” This picture
seems to be one of those things that no one ever thinks to try to
emulate. Like the Iliad and Paradise Lost, nothing of their kind came
before them, and nothing is looked for to follow them.
One morning I was drinking my coffee in a little den in the Via
Condotti. A very singular-looking man came in and sat down at the
little table next to mine. Hearing me speak English with a friend, he
addressed me. “You are the Consul at Zurich, are you not? You were
pointed out to me the other day in the street. I am Joaquin Miller of
California. Let us get acquainted.” I moved my chair and coffee over
to his table. I was greatly gratified at meeting a poet who seemed to
me to have some of the genius of Byron. His “Songs of the Sierras”
have the ring of the master. Last summer I read them in Switzerland.
Their freshness, their flavor of the prairie and the mountain, their
passionate utterance, took me by storm. What the English said of him,
in their extravagant joy at “discovering” a live genius in the wilds of
the United States, did not affect me, it was the stirring passion of
the verse itself. The buffalo, the Indian scout, the burning prairie,
the people of the desert, the women with bronzed arms and palpitating
hearts, the men in sombreros, with brave lives, and love worth the
dying for--that was what he was writing about, and they were all alive
before me.
Sitting here at the little white marble table of an Italian café, he
seemed all out of place. There was nothing in the surroundings of which
this half-wild looking poet-scout of the prairies was a part. His
yellow locks, flashing blue eyes, stormy face, athletic form, careless
dress, and broad-brimmed hat on the floor by his feet, all told of
another kind of life.
Much of his talk was cynical in the extreme. He was ridiculing
everything, everybody, even himself, and he looked about him as if
constantly thinking to grab his hat, bound for the door, and rush over
the Tiber with a yell. He hated restraint of any kind whatever--dress,
custom, language.
Miller was now writing in some little attic in Rome, but none of his
friends knew where. He would not tell them; he wanted to be alone.
A boy brought us the morning journal, and we talked of newspapers. I
asked him what English and American papers he read. He smiled, and
answered ironically: “When I want _seriousness_, I read the London
_Punch_, and for _truth_, I take the New York _Herald_.”
There was no talk that morning with him about poetry, but he was jocose
and cynical.
He asked me what I was doing. I told him I was getting ready to try my
hand at a drama. “Don’t do it--all damned nonsense!” he cried. “Dramas
worth anything are not wanted, and if you write in blank verse, as you
say you propose, not one actor in five hundred knows how to recite the
lines. It must be _mighty plain prose_ for these wind sawyers.”
Just then a tall, fine looking young man came and sat down by our
table. Mr. Miller nudged me, and whispered, “Bingen on the Rhine.”
“That is young Norton, son of the woman who wrote ‘Bingen on the
Rhine.’” I looked at him with interest; but he was English, and I was a
stranger, so conversation at that particular table suddenly stopped.
It was on this visit to Rome that I often saw Victor Emmanuel, Italy’s
first King. Every Sunday afternoon he drove on the Pincian Hill. The
extreme Catholics of Rome, the Pope’s party, paid him little or no
attention, and scarcely greeted him when he passed; but all the rest
of Rome and all Italy nearly worshiped the “Re Galantuomo.” He was a
stout, dark looking man, with black eyes and a mustache like a horse’s
mane. He was fifty-six years old then, and had been twelve years King
of Sardinia, and sixteen years King of Italy.
At this time our Minister, Mr. Marsh, arranged to have a friend and
myself presented to Pope Pius IX, but a sudden attack of Roman fever
deprived me of the pleasure.
Two men have existed in my life-time whom I should have given much
to know,--Mr. Gladstone and Abraham Lincoln. Once I was a bearer of
dispatches to Mr. Lincoln, but illness led me to hurry away, after
giving the trust to General Grant. It has been the regret of my life
that I missed grasping the hand of, possibly, the greatest man that
ever lived.
BACK IN SWITZERLAND. Great excitement on this May Day, 1874, for on the
19th of last month, by a popular vote, the people changed the Swiss
Constitution. Instead of twenty-two little cantons, doing just as they
pleased, they will now have a centralized republic, more like the
United States.
Some interesting features of the new Swiss system are these: The
President is chosen for but a year, and can not succeed himself in
office. No military surrender is allowed. The post and telegraph and
telephone belong to the government, which also controls all railroads
and owns some. Schools are free and compulsory. Salt and gunpowder
are government monopolies, and factories are under national control
or regulation. Abuse of the freedom of the press may be punished by
the general council. Supreme Court Judges are elected, but from the
legislative body. National laws must be submitted to popular vote if
demanded by 30,000 people. The President must be chosen by the Assembly
from among its own members. Members of the Cabinet have seats and votes
in the Assembly.
_August 18, 1874._--Had a long letter some time since from General
Sherman. He says: “Don’t rely too much on my influence here in
Washington. Privately, we feel here that President Grant has somewhat
gone back on his old friends, in trying to make alliances with new
ones. Besides, I am compelled to endorse a good many on their war
record, and would not like to be found to choose among them.” He also
says that this fall he will probably move to St. Louis. “There are too
many commanding officers here in Washington.”
On the 7th he writes interestingly about the histories of the war.
“WASHINGTON, D. C., August 7, 1874.
“DEAR BYERS:--I was glad to receive your letter of the 19th of
July, and, with you, think the Centennial of Philadelphia will
prove a lamentable failure. Congress will not probably adopt it
as a national affair, and it will degenerate into a mere state or
city affair.
“Economy is now the cry here, and it may be that it is forced on
us by the vast cost of the Civil War, which was bridged over by
paper money, that now calls for interest and principal. As in
former years, the first blow falls on the Army and Navy, that are
treated as mere pensioners, and every cent is begrudged.
“No one who was an actor in the Grand Drama of the Civil War,
seems willing to risk its history. I have endeavored to interest
Members of Congress in the preliminary steps of preparing and
printing in convenient form the official dispatches, but find
great opposition, lest the task should fall on some prejudiced
person who would in the preparation and compilation favor
McClellan or Grant or some one party.
“All histories thus far, of which Draper’s is the best, are based
for facts on the newspaper reports, which were necessarily hasty
and imperfect. Till the official reports are accessible, it would
be unsafe for any one to attempt a narration of events beyond his
personal vision, and no single person saw a tenth part of the
whole. I have some notes of my own part in manuscript, and copies
of all my reports and letters, but am unwilling to have them
printed lest it should involve me in personal controversies.
“Minnie will be married Oct. 1st, and we will all remove to St.
Louis soon thereafter.
“All send you and Mrs. Byers the assurance of their affection.
Believe me always your friend,
“W. T. SHERMAN.”