All know how tired the patrician gets of perpetual country life; and in
that one respect I was a patrician. I had seen the things most worth
seeing in the leading towns of Europe in my early days; and had a longing
to witness how forty or fifty millions of people got on in the new
country of Canada and the United States. I had a fancy to see Quebec.
I had a grandfather who was on the staff of General Wolfe, and who saw
him die. I had a great-grandfather, also a British officer, father of
the above, one David Gordon, of Park, who was on duty at Halifax and
there met his death and burial. Not that I would cross the waves on
these accounts; I simply wanted change, so sought it in New-idea-land,
U.S. I went to Philadelphia, thence to Columbus and Galena; from Galena
round about, crossing the Mississippi on foot over its admirable
winter pavement when boats change places with sledges. Then I went to
Boston, thence to Quebec; from Quebec to New York, not to mention all
the stoppages at intervening places; from New York, after not a few
circumgyrations, I found my way back to London again.
I saw a large portion of the New World; it proved to be exactly what
a hundred people had described already, and I do not care to add my
account, only to make up a hundred and one American nights entertainments.
My ghost of travel not being yet laid, I took to the waves again and
sojourned for a while at Jersey, where I had relatives and friends.
At length I settled down in Grosvenor Street, Park Lane; when I was
invited to take charge of the Earl of Ripon’s health at his villa on
Putney Heath. After a lapse of time, I took a small house in Spring
Gardens; later on, I built myself a villa on three acres of park land
at Roehampton; then, still later on, I lived for some years at Parson’s
Green, Fulham; and after some more movements, in separate years, now to
Florence, now to German-Saxony, now to Venice and Rome, which last visit
was eighteen years ago, I am settled, perhaps for good, in St. John’s
Wood, where I am within an easy distance of Highgate Cemetery; so I hope
a one-horse coach will end my journeys.
On looking for the moss I have gathered I find its quantity very small.
At my leisure I hope to fill up the gaps left between the skeleton
outlines of my map of life—what remains to be said, extending over the
nett balance of my years, of which I seem to have more to say than can
reasonably be expected of a man past his eighty-third birthday. But I
have been asked to write a memoir, first by one, then by another; by
one who has long been, and who continues to be, the greatest master of
heart-finding fiction in our time. One comes to me and asks how I get on
with it. One reads a portion and calls it interesting; so, in a way, I am
urged on with my task.
At Boston I dined with Mr. and Mrs. Lawrence; he formerly filled the
United States Embassy at our Court. He was gentleman enough to have been
an English duke. He had nothing to say about the old country that was not
good and admiring, and told me many anecdotes of his own country people
while in London.
Remarking on the strict etiquette observed by us, in never addressing
a man you are not introduced to, he observed that he sat opposite to
another every morning at breakfast in the Athenæum Club, for two years,
without their exchanging a word, when, one day a carriage called to
take him to a country house, and he found his silent companion already
seated in it. In this way they became known to each other and entered
into conversation. To give effect to his own story, a countryman of
his own, he said, came to England and travelled all over it without
introductions, and calling on him he said that he had not been able to
speak to any one for months, and being one day on the chain pier at
Brighton, he could bear it no longer, and observed to a gentleman there:
“It’s a fine day, sir!”
But Mr. Lawrence, instead of condoling with him in his trials, replied:
“I wonder at your impudence!”
Mrs. Lawrence did not appear to have been at all Anglicized; she
rather looked for perfection in the English undergoing the process of
Americanization. Sir Charles Lyell had been a good republican when in
the new country, she said, and had greatly improved through his visits,
but not so fully as she should have liked; and this she emphasized in
good Yankee brogue. I was acquainted with Sir Charles; it was on his
introduction that I came to know the Lawrence family; and I never saw a
sign in him of such improvement. I was among his friends in Boston; on
his introductions I saw Mr. Prescott, but he did not impress me.
My experience of Americans is that they are less advanced in the art of
humbug, and therefore more earnest and sincere than the British. They,
therefore, perform the duties of friendship with great thoroughness.
An interesting feature of immorality has often struck me: it consists in
the never-failing breach of promise made in all the apparent sincerity
felt by men who do not fail to keep their word. Such men—I could give
the names of many for recognition—are very peculiarly framed. They are
contented with the thanks one feels on a kindly proposition being made
by them while they are with you; not caring to gather the gratitude
attendant on the completion of a promise. I know men who play this
skeleton part every day of their lives, and I class them with swindlers.
As one advances in life one gets to know the sowers of this harvest
of tares, and to separate them from those of the wheat crops, without
fouling one’s barn with the results of their labour; the effect of it
being merely amusing at last. What cruelty it can inflict is practised
on children and young people. They are born with implicit confidence: to
them it acts educationally. It affords them a most thorough teaching of
mistrust, which, more than any other branch of education, makes a bad
citizen.
Some evils in life are unavoidable, but the training that comes from
behind the falsehood habitually worn by an amateur friend is not one of
these.
These moral ornaments of the social system have a game of their own
to play; they know no other, and they play it with all the _finesse_
exercised over a game of whist.
This recalls Mr. Stillman to my mind, almost the only one of Rossetti’s
set whom in this sense I can refer to with unmixed pleasure—Stillman, an
American gentleman of high culture, and his faultless lady, a Greek by
birth! He is now the _Times_ correspondent in Rome. I have met him and
lost sight of him often, and when I meet him after an interval of years,
he is always the same kind, attentive friend, though we have no interests
in common beyond each other.
It having been made known at Boston that I had certain scientific
tendencies, I was invited to deliver a lecture there. It was not the
season for such a purpose, but the influence of the Lawrences sufficed
to get an audience together of about fifteen hundred. I gave a choice of
some subjects, as “The Correlation of Forces, Physical and Vital,” “The
Cyclical Phenomena of the Universe,” and “Sleep, Dreams, Somnambulism,
Sleep-talking, and the Mesmeric State.” The last subject was selected,
and the lecture was received with great politeness by an attentive
audience.
I had intercourse with several leading medical gentlemen at Boston,
and was treated by them with much hospitality. They have a method of
maintaining hospitals peculiarly their own, much of the money being
subscribed out of their own pockets—all for the good of their science.
Dr. Warren was at that time the most noted physician in Boston. He gave
me some brochures of his writing, one alluding to the reflex actions of
the great sympathetic nerve. I found it very suggestive. He had taken the
trouble to collect all that had been written on the sea-serpent, and to
sift the statements of travellers by sea, with a resulting belief in its
individuality.
It was at New York that I made the valued and intimate acquaintance of
Mr. Bancroft, the historian, and his lady, a truly noble pair. Mr.
Bancroft was a man of universal knowledge. This he showed conspicuously
in a lecture, the title of which I have forgotten, but not the contents.
Its purpose was to show the rapid and far-reaching advance that science
had made up to that day.
I met again at New York that gifted artist, Mr. Lawrence, whom I had
known in England. He preceded Richmond, and was his equal in drawing
likenesses in chalks—works which are much prized—among them those of
Thackeray, Tennyson, and other celebrities.
I visited Quebec, and at Lord Elgin’s, the governor-general’s, had the
pleasure of meeting the present Lord Albemarle, then a youth. At the
same party I became acquainted with Mr. Lawrence Oliphant, who, later,
becoming a writer, I may as well depict the impression he made on me.
He was a little man, his manner very gentle and sympathetic, with such
amiability of countenance as to leave little room for intellectual
expression, though no doubt his abilities fell little short of his good
intentions.
I must mention the kindness shown me at New York by the eminent house of
Middleton and Co., whose friendship in financial matters I have availed
myself of to this day. The family belong to the West Indian islands and
are British.
I pass over my explorations in the south and west; they were the same as
other people’s, now well known to book-life; but I do not forget that
I once walked across the Mississippi, a mile wide, on the ice, from
Wisconsin into Minnesota. There is another thing ever to be remembered:
while at Philadelphia I was treated with a dish of _terrapine_, a small
sort of turtle, surpassing the gigantic species in flavour to such a
degree as to wholly eclipse its merits. Why is it not imported? The very
taste of it would raise the feeblest palate from the dead!
It is nearly forty years since I saw the United States: I have had plenty
of time to think over what I thought of them then. The enthusiastic
admirers of America are men who, being a little eminent before going,
receive an ovation on their arrival. These men adore the worthy
republicans, write about them, mention their names in print in the order
in which they bestowed their attentions on them. If these men who, being
a little eminent, went to ever-glorious France and received an ovation,
which they don’t, their enthusiasm would alike tingle at the roots of
their hair.
The Americans are nearly as good as older states, perhaps better than
some. As three hundred years of civilization is, say, to six hundred, in
that proportion they are as good as Europeans.
But the greatness of America has to come. Time will be when America,
perhaps with Australian lands, will be arbiter of the civilized world—if
it likes.
With some exceptions, if we take any one of the United States, it will be
found to be monotonous; there is as much variety in an English county as
in any one of these.
I compare the United States to a book: it is a new and cheap edition of
England in one volume; price, one almighty dollar.
Altogether, there is no difference of moment between the best English and
the best Americans, or the worst English and worst Americans.
Lawrence and Bancroft would have made good dukes!
I remember dining with a great merchant at Philadelphia, who told me that
after receiving a classical education at the University of Dublin, he
emigrated and became a clerk in an American house, and that after a time
he saw his way to establish a business for himself, and had realized a
large fortune. He told me this that he might add the singular assurance
that he never once, in his almost lifelong residence in America, had an
opportunity of showing how good his education had been, or of using a
single Latin word.