the Vendome. Mrs. Jack Gardner took him up, which of course made him a
social attraction there. Then he went to Chicago, Philadelphia, and back
to New York.
One day he and I, in company with a prominent citizen of Brooklyn,
visited a famous violin maker in that city who was anxious to meet Mr.
Heron-Allen. We found our way up to his studio or workshop, where he was
hard at work in his shirt sleeves and apron, and before him lay Ed.
Heron-Allen’s book on the violin. As he had not been apprised of Mr.
Heron-Allen’s coming, the visit was a complete surprise; but it was a
very interesting meeting to hear those two experts discussing the
mechanism of the violin, and reminded one of the oft-quoted saying, that
“if you want something you must give something.” Mr. Heron-Allen
discovered we had a great violin maker in America, and the violin maker
claimed he was greatly benefited by the visit from the man whom he
considered possessed the greatest knowledge of the violin of any one of
his years.
Cheirosophy became irksome to Ed. Heron-Allen in a short time, and he
decided to turn his attention to literature. He told me that he was
going to write a novel, that he had found a publisher who was to make an
advance on royalties, and that he was going to try living the life of a
Bohemian litterateur for two years, depending for his living entirely
upon what he could make with his pen. He withdrew from society, took
apartments in some obscure place in New York, and I didn’t see him for
some months. One morning I met him on Fourth Avenue, and he looked
emaciated and hungry. He said he was going to get some breakfast. I
invited him to breakfast with me, but he declined, and said he was
still engaged in his literary labors and depending upon them wholly for
his sustenance. He did keep it up for two years, but came near starving
to death. During that time he put out two books--one “The Kisses of
Fate,” the other I have forgotten.
He afterward called upon me and told me that he was going back to London
to take charge of his father’s business, who was a well-established
barrister in Soho.
The season following I visited him at his office in London. He had some
public position in the law courts, which I visited with him. He was not
clerk of the court, but seemed in charge of the distribution of briefs
and assignment of cases for the judge. He invited me inside the railing
and introduced me to the judge on the bench as Judge Pond of New York,
as coolly as though it were an indisputable fact. The judge welcomed me
on the seat by his side, and was very chatty and agreeable to me. I
managed in some way to mask my identity and to keep up the delusion
until the hour for adjournment, when Mr. Heron-Allen and I walked out,
he thanking the judge for his kindness to his friend. When we got out on
the street he nearly fainted with laughter over the practical joke and
the way it had succeeded.
On my last visit to London, in 1897, my wife and I dined at his house.
He is happily married, owns a big establishment, has a fine profession,
and has had some of the most wonderful experiences of any man I have
ever known. He was a great friend of Sir Richard Burton, who declared to
me that of all the interesting and remarkable characters he had ever
met, Ed. Heron-Allen was the most interesting, and suggested that he
should have been a great soldier and leader of armies. His youthful
appearance would lead one to believe him a mere boy. His manner and
habits are those of a perfect gentleman. Putney, London, was the home of
his boyhood. He was reared in affluence, and in the part of London where
he lived he was known by all classes, rich and poor, as “The Pet of
Putney.”
Patrick Sarsfield Gilmore was the greatest manager of his time, as well
as the greatest military bandmaster. To him is due almost all the credit
of making it possible to produce fine orchestral effects with a military
band. Before his time military bands were simply brass bands, and the
introduction of wood instruments--the oboe, saxaphone, flute, piccolo,
and clarinet--dates from the year of Gilmore’s great Peace Jubilee.
[Illustration]
In 1859, in Salem, Mass., he organized Gilmore’s Band, which he
maintained until his death, Sept. 24, 1892. In Music Hall, Boston,
Gilmore introduced the first band concerts, at popular prices, that were
self-sustaining. For years, in Boston and New England, Gilmore’s Band
headed the great parades.
He conceived and carried to a triumphant success the greatest musical
jubilee festival ever known in all the world--the World Peace Jubilee
Festival of 1872, when it did seem that wars were over and all the world
was at peace. The immensity of the scheme was all the product of
Gilmore’s brain. For over a year (1868-69) he found little
encouragement. Business men scoffed at the wild idea and fairly laughed
in his face at his persistence. “Finally,” as he told me himself, “I
found one Boston merchant who was willing to listen to me, and as I
unfolded the possibility and feasibilities of the plan and the great
stimulus it would be to Boston trade, I saw that he caught the idea and
comprehended the situation. This was Mr. Eben Jordan, who then and there
promised me his help. I had no trouble from that time on. Mr. Jordan
raised and supplied the money. I set about the details, secured the
ground, had plans for the great coliseum drawn, contracts awarded, and
the work was progressing rapidly and to the satisfaction of all
interested. The great arches were raised, and the immensity of the
structure attracted much public attention. People came from far and near
to see the monster auditorium that was rising above everything in
Boston. I was about ready to start for Europe to secure musical talent
for the event, when, one morning, I saw headlines in the papers: ‘The
Great Gilmore Coliseum Levelled to the Ground by a Hurricane,’ etc. I
went out to the grounds and there everything lay flat. There was not a
post standing. Those great arches were blown down and all was a hopeless
wreck.
“I did not lose my courage, but called on Mr. Jordan, who listened to me
as attentively as on the first occasion. I assured him that the accident
was surely the most fortunate thing that could possibly have occurred. I
had discovered, during the progress of this auditorium, which I had
planned to seat 20,000, that it was inadequate, as the public attention
which it was attracting warranted the fitting up of a building with
three times that capacity. I was receiving orders from one end of the
country to the other for blocks of seats, thousands of applications from
singers to join the chorus, and there was not a military band leader in
the country but had applied to join the great orchestra. We must have an
auditorium with a capacity of 50,000--nothing less. I got that committee
together, and before I slept that night had new plans matured and ready
to announce the next morning.
“New life was instilled into the great project. The accident had
provided the sure means of success. The whole community was heart and
soul in it. The new coliseum was built. I engaged leaders, got out books
of music to be used for choruses, and within three months singers were
being drilled in all the New England cities.”
In 1871 Mr. Gilmore visited the capitals of Europe and succeeded in
accomplishing what no other man could have brought about. He obtained
from the governments of England, Germany, France, Ireland, Russia, and
Italy, their national bands, all composed of enlisted men, and these
bands were sent at the expense of their respective governments to take
part in the World’s Peace Jubilee Festival.
It was interesting to hear from Mr. Gilmore’s own lips the accounts of
his visits to the capitals and his arguments with the heads of
governments when they tried to show the absurdity of granting leave of
absence to enlisted men to visit our free country. Naturally, they said,
the men would all desert, and quite naturally, too, the Americans would
offer all inducements for them to desert--inducements quite
irresistible, if all reports were true.
Mr. Gilmore replied that he would put them on their honor; that
musicians were above the average of intelligence; they were gentlemen,
and they would never desert. The fact that their sovereigns put trust in
them and granted this privilege, would test their honor and their pride.
He proposed to make a competitive international military band
tournament, and every musician would feel bound to see his band bring
home the prize.
Gilmore succeeded. Those foreign bands were a great feature of the
jubilee, and their respective nations took a patriotic pride in seeing
that nothing was lacking of perfect equipment for the visit.
The greatest opera singer of that time was Mme. Peschka Leutiner, who
was subsidized by and under contract with the German government. Consent
of the German Emperor must be obtained to bring her to America.
Gilmore’s application for this great singer was refused. Nothing
daunted, he secured an audience with Emperor William, and before leaving
had obtained his consent, which meant an imperial order for Germany’s
greatest singer to take the leading part in the World’s Peace Jubilee.
“I never will forget the kindness and courtesy I received from the great
emperor, and the feeling of triumph I had as I left his august
presence,” said Mr. Gilmore afterward.
Many an evening while on tour, over his bottle of champagne after a
concert (it was his custom to take a pint of champagne every night
before going to bed), have I enjoyed Gilmore’s description of his
successful visits to European capitals and the cordial receptions he had
everywhere.
The great Peace Jubilee was the talk of the world to a greater degree
than anything that has since taken place except the World’s Fair in
Chicago.
While the plans for it were in progress, Gilmore was constantly being
told by musical friends that his ensemble was so large as to render
impossible the harmony of 1,000 instruments and 10,000 voices. They
would be necessarily so far apart that the time required for the sound
to travel would produce discord.
“I told them to wait and see,” said Gilmore, “and when I stood before
that orchestra and that vast chorus, on my twenty-foot elevated stand,
with my ten-foot baton in my hand, and began the opening overture with
one grand harmony over the great coliseum, my triumph was complete.
Major Pond, I would not have exchanged places with the greatest monarch
living.” What a triumph!
THE WORLD’S PEACE JUBILEE IN BOSTON IN 1872.
P. S. GILMORE, Director.
Chorus: 10,000. Orchestra: 1,000.
Orchestra leaders: Carl Zarrhan, Johann Strauss, and Dr.
Tourjie.
Pianist: Dr. Von Buelow.
Soloists: Mme. Peschka Leutiner, Mme. Rudersdorff, and Miss
Adelaide Phillips.
National bands: English, German, French, Italian, Russian,
Irish, and American (the Marine Band, of
Washington, D. C.).
In 1873 Mr. Gilmore went to New York with his band, which became the
Twenty-second Regiment Band of that city. He remained its leader up to
the time of his death and made annual concert tours all over the
country. It was my privilege to conduct several of these tours; in fact,
I was his sole agent for booking his concerts until I was outbid by Mr.
Blakely, who toured the band the four last years they were on the road.
Gilmore’s Band, always one hundred strong, was at the head of all great
public parades. Its appearance along the line of march was the signal
for great outbursts of applause. Gilmore conceived the greatest and most
popular schemes for hitting the music-loving as well as the patriotic
masses. He was not a business man in the sense of loving to acquire
money. In fact, he cared very little for money, but much for the fame of
his band. He was a hard worker, and never left a rehearsal until
everything was right. His musicians loved him and everybody respected
him.
Once he and I were walking together down Broadway and were speaking of
Parnell, who was then in New York and booked to speak in the Academy of
Music in Brooklyn that evening. Mr. Beecher was to speak there also.
Gilmore said to me:
“Major, do you know Mr. Beecher real well; I mean well enough to ask a
favor? I want to get a seat on the stage to-night to hear him and
Parnell, and it’s too late to think of securing a ticket.”
“Do I _know_ him?” I said.
Just then I saw Mr. Beecher coming up Broadway toward us. Our eyes met,
but each pretended not to see the other, and we came together co-chunk!
We squared off at each other, and so stood a few seconds, to the
surprise of passers-by. Then came Mr. Beecher’s laugh of recognition,
and I said:
“Mr. Beecher, to my surprise, _this man_, P. S. Gilmore, says he never
met you and asks if I know you well enough to introduce him to you.”
“Well,” said Mr. Beecher, “I know Mr. Gilmore, but it’s quite evident
that a man of his fair reputation and fame doesn’t know the company he
is in.”
Mr. Beecher invited Mr. Gilmore to “come over early with Pond and take
dinner, and if I get into the Academy you will.” So we were there at the
great Parnell meeting, and Mr. Gilmore heard Mr. Beecher at his best,
for that meeting is on record as an event in Mr. Beecher’s life.
I went home with Mr. Beecher, and he and I sat in his dining-room for
some time over a light supper, I listening to his conversation on the
topic of the evening just past. I left him at about eleven o’clock for
my home at the Everett House, New York. Mr. Gilmore then resided in New
York, at 61 West 12th Street. On my way home it occurred to me that
possibly Mr. Gilmore had not yet finished his bottle of champagne, and
so I rang his bell. It was just twelve o’clock. The colored boy opened
the door and I asked if Mr. Gilmore were still up. He said, “Yes.” I
walked back to the dining room, and there he stood, telling Mrs. Gilmore
about his experiences of the evening. He turned to me, saying:
“Major, I’m glad you came in. I am telling Mrs. Gilmore that this
evening has been the greatest of my life; that Mr. Beecher’s speech
to-night should be carved in letters of gold and placed in every
schoolroom throughout the entire land.”
Mr. Gilmore and I were fast friends up to the time of his death. He had
many eccentricities, some of which retarded his success. He was the man
and the only man who should have had the direction of the musical
features at the Chicago Exposition. He was ignored, and the whole affair
turned out a diabolical failure, as everybody at all versed in the
management of musical affairs knew and felt at that time. It broke Mr.
Gilmore’s heart to see so great an opportunity lost, and I believe that
was one of the causes that hastened his death.
He left one of the finest musical libraries ever collected. I do not
know who has it now. He had no successor. We have Sousa and his
incomparable band, that is up to date and in keeping with the
requirements of the time, but the two great leaders are not alike.
Gilmore, often seen plodding in the mud through the streets of Boston at
the head of a score of musicians, then conceiving and carrying to
successful termination the greatest musical jubilee ever known, and
making Puritan Boston bow the knee to him, Irishman and Catholic though
he was.
Sousa, an enlisted musician in the Marine Band at Washington, becoming
its leader, then, through Mr. Gilmore’s former manager, starred with a
band of his own, and rising year after year, through the popularity of
his own compositions and charming personnel as a conductor, to the
highest place as a musician, bandmaster, and composer--not like Gilmore,
but like what he is, and no one else can be--Sousa.
Elbert Hubbard, editor of _The Philistine_, founder and owner of the
Roycroft Shop in East Aurora, New York, is the most recent and unique
development in the lecture field.
[Illustration]
I wish that I were able to write of Mr. Hubbard as I should like, but as
I cannot, I shall say nothing. He says it himself. I have read so many
nice things of him in _The Philistine_, a few of them reprints from
other papers, that I think the entire eulogistic field is exhausted. I
am one of the subscribers who pay for those puffs that he prints about
himself.
Notwithstanding all that, he is doing a mighty good work, and he is also
letting the public into the secret about himself for a consideration.
Not long ago he wrote me: “If I get down to business here and cut off
all distractions, I can make a name equal to John Ruskin’s or Thomas
Carlyle’s. _I can do it_, but I must keep out of sight in order to
succeed. To merely talk is not to succeed, and the public is only a
devil that takes a man to the top of the mountain and then casts him on
the stones beneath. So make no more lecture engagements for me.” And so
the lecture-going public will never know what it has lost.
Good luck to you, Elbert! A high ambition is the chief spur to success.
Mr. Hubbard has received great praise for many of his “Little Journeys
to the Homes of Famous People,” and many of them are truly delightful;
but, of course, visiting so many of these, he has been obliged to travel
in all sorts of weather and at all seasons of the year. He must have
visited the home of Robert Burns just at the breaking up of a hard
winter or the opening up of spring, else his tracks could never have
thrown up so much mud.
The proportionate success of Hubbard to some of the other men of the
platform may be inferred from _The Philistine_ for April, 1900, where he
says:
“The week before I was in Des Moines, Dean Stubbs exploited an audience
in the same church. Stubbs had one hundred people; I had a thousand,
with just $500 in the box office, that’s all. About an hour after the
lecture the chairman of the committee snipped a clove, and declared that
Stubbs wasn’t in it with me--a proposition I did not argue.”
In a later number of _The Philistine_ Mr. Hubbard went on to say:
“I see that Dean Stubbs of Ely is out with a letter in the _Pall Mall
Gazette_, denying that he ever said that Major Pond was the original
David Harum. In this letter the Dean takes occasion to say his regard
for the Major is very great, and further, that he fully endorses Hall
Caine’s project of placing in Westminster Abbey a memorial tablet to
Major Pond. The leading literary men of England and several American
authors also have made contributions for the purpose mentioned. All
those who contribute will have their names on the tablet, too, and
beneath will be these words, ‘It is he that hath made us and not we
ourselves.’”
I was so elated to hear that the Dean had made nice mention of me, that
I wrote to him, asking him to send me a copy of the _Pall Mall_, and
here is his reply:
“Of course I did not write a letter to the _Pall Mall_ at all--on that
or any other subject. I have not written a line about my American
impressions in any English papers since my return, nor do I intend to do
so.”
With this letter from the Dean of Ely, how am I to realize my blasted
hopes of being immortalized in Westminster Abbey?
I travelled with Mr. Hubbard on a little starring tour last spring
(March, 1900). Everywhere we went he had something nice to say to the
porters, to the baggagemen, the hackmen, the street-car conductors, and
the waiters in the hotels. He seemed incapable of hurting any one’s
feelings. Everybody was in love with him. His is a remarkable
personality. But when he gets set down by himself with that caustic pen
of his, the words of Scripture seem to take possession of him, and “Whom
he loveth he chasteneth.”
I like the atmosphere of East Aurora and frequently visit the Roycroft
Shop. It is an object lesson in industry, frugality, and nice manners. A
common friend, writing from St. Louis, expresses a wonder that a man who
naturally elicits so much adulation does not become conceited!
Hubbard had the largest money audience of any “one-man show” in New York
last winter, and the readers of _The Philistine_ have been told all
about it. That was his first New York audience.
When the Dean of Ely gave a course of five lectures in the Lyceum
Theatre, New York, the first one was not very largely attended. The
second audience was larger; the third larger still; and at the fifth,
the capacity of the house was reached. This information I give here, as
my friend Hubbard has never been furnished with box-office statements of
that business. Yet, of the two, from a business standpoint, I would
prefer the Roycroft man for a series of one-night stands over the
country in cities where he has _never_ before appeared--and there are
many such towns left.
Mr. Hubbard’s love of water and cleanliness is remarkable. Not satisfied
with his daily morning baths, he wants them all through the day. As soon
as he arrives at a hotel he must have his bath, and before starting out
sight-seeing he wants another. Then on his return for luncheon he will
take out his watch, and if there happens to be fifteen minutes to spare,
he says, “Just time for a bath before luncheon,” and off he goes for his
tub.
At the Roycroft Shop he has had a number of bathrooms built for the
convenience of the employees. At first there was but one, and when Mr.
Hubbard announced that any one could be excused from work, at any time,
long enough to take a bath, the capacity of this one room was soon
reached and the employees were found waiting in line for their turn. So
this permission had to be withdrawn until additional bathrooms could be
added. The supply of bathrooms is now adequate and appreciated, as well
as remunerative, for it adds vigor and energy to the workers, and
increases their earning capacity.
In a sequestered bend of the brook, a few hundred yards from the back
door of the Roycroft Shop, is the Roycroft swimming hole, which reminds
the passer-by of a frog pond on a spring day, for the male Roycrofters,
old and young, can be seen and heard jumping into the water for the time
being, until the curious visitor has passed beyond the range of view.
“Cleanliness is godliness,” says Hubbard. “This is part of our system of
education.”
Mr. Hubbard is without question the most amphibious man I ever knew--a
sort of human sea lion--and I must say that when I saw him plunging
around in the swimming hole at East Aurora, I was struck with the
resemblance of his eyes to the beautiful, large, mild, liquid eyes of
the California sea lion.
AUTHOR READERS
[Illustration:
_COPYRIGHT, 1891, BY F. GUTEKUNST, PINX._
EDWIN ARNOLD]
Sir Edwin Arnold is only one of many notable people with whom I have
enjoyed relations of a kindly and personal character, but the enduring
friendship with which he has honored me has been one of the pleasantest
features of my whole life.
Now that his public activity, in a personal sense, has ceased, one may
measure his notable career by the large pathway it has blazed. He has
had always the honors usually attendant upon an English literary career.
Educated at two of the endowed schools, which in England are called
“public,” and of a legal family, he won a scholarship to University
College, Oxford, where he graduated in 1854, taking in 1852 the
Newdigate prize for an English poem. He was a second master in King
Edward VI. School at Birmingham, but was soon appointed Principal of the
Government Sanscrit College at Roona, in the Bombay Presidency, and was
also made a Fellow of the Bombay University. He remained until 1861,
serving also as an editorial correspondent of English papers, when he
returned to London as chief of the editorial staff of the London
_Telegraph_, a position that he still holds (1900).
It is certainly true, and I have had many evidences of it, that Sir
Edwin Arnold has been and still is a political writer, a power to be
counted with in British affairs. To him, perhaps, as political writer
and Asiatic scholar and poet, is far more due the beginnings of present
British Imperialism as a political condition than to either Chamberlain,
as statesman, or Kipling, as singer of the “Greater Englanders.” The
leading articles of the _Telegraph_ have been a unique feature of that
powerful journal, as much for the wide knowledge shown of imperial
affairs as for the peculiarly rich and refulgent literary merit they
display. English editorials, though keen and incisive in logic, are
usually colorless as to rhetoric and illustration. Arnold’s leaders have
been and continue the reverse of that.