It happened once in Boston, in the year 1861 or 1862, that I was at a
dinner of the Atlantic Club, such as was held every Saturday, when the
question was raised as to whether any man had ever written a complete and
candid autobiography. Emerson, who was seated by me at the right,
suggested the "Confessions" of Rousseau. I objected that it was full of
untruths, and that for plain candour it was surpassed by the "Life of
Casanova." Of this work (regarding which Carlyle has said, "Whosoever
has looked therein, let him wash his hands and be unclean until even")
neither Emerson nor Lowell, nor Palfrey nor Agassiz, nor any of the
others present seemed to have any knowledge, until Dr. Holmes, who was
more adventurous, admitted he knew somewhat thereof. Now, as I had read
it thrice through, I knew it pretty well. I reflected on this, but came
to the conclusion that perhaps the great reason why the world has so few
and frank autobiographies is really because the world exacts too much. It
is no more necessary to describe everything cynically than it is to set
forth all our petty diseases in detail. There are many influences which,
independent of passion or shame, do far more to form character.
Acting from this reflection, I wrote this book with no intention that it
should be published; I had, indeed, some idea that a certain friend might
use it after my death as a source whence to form a Life. Therefore I
wrote, as fully and honestly as I could, _everything_ which I could
remember which had made me what I am. It occurred to me as a leading
motive that a century or two hence the true inner life of _any_ man who
had actually lived from the time when railroads, steamboats, telegraphs,
gas, percussion-caps, fulminating matches, the opera and omnibuses,
evolution and socialism were quite unknown to his world, into the modern
age, would be of some value. So I described my childhood or youth
exactly as I recalled, or as I felt it. Such a book requires very
merciful allowance from humane reviewers.
It seemed to me, also, that though I have not lived familiarly among the
princes, potentates, and powers of the earth, yet as I have met or _seen_
or corresponded with about five hundred of the three thousand set down in
"Men of the Time," and been kindly classed among them, it was worth while
to mention my meetings with many of them. Had the humblest scribbler of
the age of Elizabeth so much as mentioned that he had ever exchanged a
word with, or even looked at, any of the great writers of his time, his
record would now be read with avidity. I have really never in my life
run after such men, or sought to make their acquaintance with a view of
extending my list; all that I can tell of them, as my book will show, has
been the result of chance. But what I have written will be of some
interest, I think--at least "in the dim and remote future."
I had laid the manuscript by, till I had time to quite forget what I had
written, when I unexpectedly received a proposal to write my memoirs. I
then read over my work, and determined "to let it go," as it was. It
seemed to me that, with all its faults, it fulfilled the requisition of
Montaigne in being _ung livre de bonne foye_. So it has gone forth into
print. _Jacta est alea_.
The story of what is to me by far the most interesting period of my life
remains to be written. This embraces an account of my labour for many
years in introducing Industrial Art as a branch of education in schools,
my life in England and on the Continent for more than twenty years, my
travels in Russia and Egypt, my researches among Gypsies and Algonkin
Indians, my part in Oriental and Folklore and other Congresses, my
discovery of the Shelta or Ogham tongue in Great Britain, and the long
and very strangely adventurous discoveries, continued for five years,
among _witches_ in Italy, which resulted in the discovery that all the
names of the old Etruscan gods are still remembered by the peasantry of
the Toscana Romagna, and that ceremonies and invocations are still
addressed to them. All this, however, is still too near to be written
about. But it may perhaps some day form a second series of reminiscences
if the present volumes meet with public favour.
As some of my readers (and assuredly a great many of the American) will
find these volumes wanting in personal adventure and lively variety of
experiences, and perhaps dull as regards "incidents," I would remind them
that it is, after all, only the life of a mere literary man and quiet,
humble scholar, and that such existences are seldom very dramatic.
English readers, who are more familiar with such men or literature, will
be less exacting. What I have narrated is nowhere heightened in colour,
retouched in drawing, or made the utmost of for effect, and I might have
gone much further as regards my experiences in politics with the
_Continental Magazine_, and during my connection with Colonel Forney, or
life in the West, and have taken the whole, not more from my memory than
from the testimony of others. But if this work be, as Germans say, at
first too subjective, and devoted too much to mere mental development by
aid of books, the "balance" to come of my life will be found to differ
materially from it, though it is indeed nowhere in any passage exciting.
This present work treats of my infancy in Philadelphia, with some note of
the quaint and beautiful old Quaker city as it then was, and many of its
inhabitants who still remembered Colonial times and Washington's
Republican Court; reminiscences of boyhood in New England; my
revolutionary grandfathers and other relatives, and such men as the last
survivor of the Boston Tea-party (I also saw the last signer of the
Declaration of Independence); an account of my early reading; my college
life at Princeton; three years in Europe passed at the Universities of
Heidelberg, Munich, and Paris, in what was emphatically the prime of
their quaint student-days; an account of my barricade experiences of the
French Revolution of Forty-Eight, of which I missed no chief scene; my
subsequent life in America as lawyer, man of letters, and journalist; my
experiences in connection with the Civil War, and my work in the
advancement of the signing the Emancipation by Abraham Lincoln;
recollections of the Oil Region when the oil mania was at its height; a
winter on the frontier in the debatable land (which was indeed not devoid
of strange life, though I say it); my subsequent connection for three
years with Colonel John Forney, during which Grant's election was
certainly carried by him, and in which, as he declared, I "had been his
right-hand man;" my writing of sundry books, such as the "Breitmann
Ballads," and my subsequent life in Europe to the year 1870.
I can enumerate in my memory distinctly half-a-dozen little-known men
whom I have known, and could with time recall far many more, compared to
whose lives my uneventful and calm career has been as that of the mole
before the eagle's. Yet not one of their lives will ever be written,
which is certainly a pity. The practice of writing real autobiographies
is rapidly ceasing in this our age, when it is bad form to be egoistic or
to talk about one's self, and we are almost shocked in revising those
chronicled in the _Causeries de Lundi_ of Sainte-Beuve. Nowadays we have
good gossipy reminiscences of _other_ people, in which the writer remains
as unseen as the operator of a Punch exhibition in his _schwassel_ box,
while he displays his puppets. I find no fault with this--_a chacun sa
maniere_. But it is very natural under such influences that men whose
own lives are full of and inspired with their _own_ deeds will not write
them on the model of Benvenuto Cellini. One of the greatest generals of
modern times, Lord Napier of Magdala, told me that he believed I was the
only person to whom he had ever fully narrated his experiences of the
siege of Lucknow. He seemed to be surprised at having so forgotten
himself. In ancient Viking days the hero made his debut in every society
with a "_Me voici_, _mes enfants_! Listen if you want to be astonished!"
and proceeded to tell how he had smashed the heads of kings, and mashed
the hearts of maidens, and done great deeds all round. It was bad
form--and yet we should never have known much about Regner Lodbrog but
for such a canticle. If I, in this work, have not quite effaced myself,
as good taste demands, let it be remembered that if I had, at the time of
writing, distinctly felt that it would be printed as put down, there
would, most certainly, have been much less of "me" visible, and the dead-
levelled work would have escaped much possible shot of censure. It was a
little in a spirit of defiant reaction that I resolved to let it be
published as it is, and risk the chances. As Uncle Toby declared that,
after all, a mother must in some kind of a way be a relation to her own
child, so it still appears to me that to write an autobiography the
author must say _something_ about himself; but it is a great and very
popular _tour de force_ to quite avoid doing this, and all art of late
years has run to merely skilfully overcoming difficulties and avoiding
interesting _motives_ or subjects. It may be, therefore, that in days to
come, my book will be regarded with some interest, as a curious relic of
a barbarous age, and written in a style long passed away--
"When they sat with ghosts on a stormy shore,
And spoke in a tongue which men speak no more;
Living in wild and wondrous ways,
In the ancient giant and goblin days."
Once in my younger time, one of the most beautiful and intellectual women
whom I ever knew, Madame Anita de Barrera--(Daniel Webster said she was
beautiful enough to redeem a whole generation of blue-stockings from the
charge of ugliness)--once made a great and pathetic fuss to me about a
_grey hair_ which had appeared among her black tresses. "And what
difference," I said, "can one white hair make to any friend?" "Well,"
she replied, "I thought if I could not awaken any other feeling, I might
at least inspire in you veneration for old age." So with this work of
mine, if it please in naught else, it may still gratify some who love to
trace the footsteps of the past, and listen to what is told by one who
lived long "before the war."
Now for a last word--which involves the only point of any importance to
me personally in this preface--I would say that there will be certain
readers who will perhaps think that I have exaggerated my life-work, or
blown my own trumpet too loudly. To these I declare in plain honesty,
that I believe there have been or are in the United States _thousands_ of
men who have _far_ surpassed me, especially as regards services to the
country during the Civil War. There were leaders in war and diplomacy,
editors and soldiers who sacrificed their lives, to whose names I can
only bow in reverence and humility. But as it was said of the great
unknown who passed away--the _fortes ante Agamemnon_--"they had no poet,
and they died." These most deserving ones have not written their lives
or set themselves forth, "and so they pass into oblivion"--and I regret
it with all my soul. But this is no reason why those who did something,
albeit in lesser degree, should not chronicle their experiences exactly
as they appear to them, and it is not in human nature to require a man to
depreciate that to which he honestly devoted all his energies. Perhaps
it never yet entered into the heart of man to conceive how much has
really been done by everybody.
And I do most earnestly and solemnly protest, as if it were my last word
in life, that I have said nothing whatever as regards my political work
and its results which was not seriously said at the time by many far
greater men than I, so that I believe I have not the least exaggerated in
any trifle, even unconsciously. Thus I can never forget the deep and
touching sympathy which Henry W. Longfellow expressed to me regarding my
efforts to advance Emancipation, and how, when some one present observed
that perhaps I would irritate the Non-Abolition Union men, the poet
declared emphatically, "But it is a great idea" or "a noble work." And
Lowell, Emerson, and George W. Curtis, Bayard Taylor, and many more,
spoke to the same effect. And what they said of me I may repeat for the
sake of History and of Truth.
The present work describes more than forty years of life in America, and
it is therefore the American reader who will be chiefly interested in it.
I should perhaps have mentioned what I reserved for special comment in
the future: that during more than ten years' residence in Europe I had
_one thing steadily in view all the time_, at which I worked hard, which
was to qualify myself to return to America and there introduce to the
public schools of Philadelphia the Industrial or Minor Arts as a branch
of education, in which I eventually succeeded, devoting to the work there
four years, applying myself so assiduously as to neglect both society and
amusements, and not obtaining, nor seeking for, pay or profit thereby in
any way, directly or indirectly. And if I have, as I have read, since
then "expatriated" myself, my whole absence has not been much longer than
was that of Washington Irving, and I trust to be able to prove that I
have "left my country for my country's good"--albeit in a somewhat better
sense than that which was implied by the poet.
And I may here incidentally mention, with all due modesty, that since the
foregoing paragraph came to me "in revise," I received from Count Angelo
di Grubernatis a letter, beginning with the remark that, in consequence
of my _gentile ed insistence premura_, or "amiable persistence, begun
four-years ago," he has at length carried out my idea and suggestion of
establishing a great Italian Folklore Society, of which I am to rank as
among the first twelve members. This is the fourth institution of the
kind which I have been first, or among the first, to found in Europe, and
it has in every case been noted, not without surprise, that I was an
American. Such associations, being wide-reaching and cosmopolitan, may
be indeed considered by every man of culture as patriotic, and I hope at
some future day that I shall still further prove that, as regards my
native country, I have only changed my sky but not my heart, and laboured
for American interests as earnestly as ever.