Chapter 15

Bailey, the amiable mystical poet, whom my father mildly liked, was another man my glimpses of whom came at a date much later than this. He was a small, placid, gently beaming little philosopher, with a large beard and an oval brow, and though he wrote several things besides "Festus," they never detached themselves in the public mind from the general theme of that production. Bailey himself seemed finally to have recognized this, and he spent his later years (he lived to a great age) in issuing continually fresh editions of his book, with expansions and later thoughts, until it got to be a sort of philosophical library in itself. He appeared in society in order to give his admirers opportunity to offer up their grateful homage, and to settle for them all questions relative to the meaning of man and of religion. No misgivings troubled him; his smile was as an unintermittent summer noonday. He was accompanied by his wife, with whom he seemed to be, as Tennyson says, "twinned, like horse's ear and eye." She relieved him from the embarrassing necessity of saying illuminative and eulogistic things about himself and his great work. The book, upon its first publication, was really read by appreciable numbers of persons; later, I think, "Festus Bailey" came to be, to the general mind, an amusing kind of appanage of his own work, which was now taken as read, but ceased to have readers. How happy a little imperviousness may make a good man!

Tom Taylor, the dramatist, Punch contributor, and society wit, I remember only as a pale face and a black beard. His wit had something of a professional tang. There are many like him in club-land and hanging about the stage; they catch up and remember all the satirical sayings, the comicalities, and quips that they hear, and they maintain a sort of factory for the production of puns. Their repartee explodes like an American boy's string of toy crackers, and involves, to set it going, no greater intellectual effort. They are not, in their first state, less intelligent than the common run of men--rather the contrary; but as soon as they have gone so far as to acquire a reputation for wit, their output begins to betray that sad, perfunctory quality which we find in wound-up music-boxes, and that mechanical rattle makes us forget that they ever had brains. However, Tom Taylor, with his century of plays and adaptations--among them "Our American Cousin," which the genius of an actor, if not its own merit, made memorable--should not be deemed unworthy of the reputation which, in his time and place, he won. He was at his best when, stimulated by applause and a good dinner, he portrayed persons and things with a kind of laughable extravagance, in the mode introduced by Dickens. Men of his ilk grow more easily in our soil than in the English, and are much less regarded.

Henry Stevens--"the man of libraries," as my father calls him--was a New-Englander, born in Vermont; he took betimes to books, came abroad, and was employed by the British Museum in getting together Americana, and by various collectors as an agent to procure books, and in these innocent pursuits his amiable life was passed. He had a pleasing gift of drollery, which made his companionship acceptable at stag-parties and in the smoking-room of the clubs, and he had also a fund of special information on literary subjects which was often of value. I met him in after-life--twenty-five years after--and age had not altered him, though, perhaps, custom had somewhat staled his variety. He was of medium stature, dark haired and bearded. With him was often seen the egregious Mr. Pecksniff (as Samuel Carter Hall was commonly known to his acquaintances since the publication of Martin Chuzzlewit ten years before). Hall was a genuine comedy figure. Such oily and voluble sanctimoniousness needed no modification to be fitted to appear before the footlights in satirical drama. He might be called an ingenuous hypocrite, an artless humbug, a veracious liar, so obviously were the traits indicated innate and organic in him rather than acquired. Dickens, after all, missed some of the finer shades of the character; there can be little doubt that Hall was in his own private contemplation as shining an object of moral perfection as he portrayed himself before others. His perversity was of the spirit, not of the letter, and thus escaped his own recognition. His indecency and falsehood were in his soul, but not in his consciousness; so that he paraded them at the very moment that he was claiming for himself all that was their opposite. No one who knew him took him seriously, but admired the ability of his performance, and so well was he understood that he did little or no harm beyond the venting of a spite here and there and the boring of his auditors after the absurdity of him became tedious. Self-worshippers of the _os-rotundus_ sort are seldom otherwise mischievous. He may be sufficiently illustrated by two anecdotes.

They both occurred at a dinner where I was a guest, and Bennoch sat at the head of the table. Hall sat at Bennoch's left hand, and my place was next to Hall's. The old gentleman--he was at this period panoplied in the dignity of a full suit of snow-white hair, and that unctuous solemnity and simpering self-complacency of visage and demeanor which were inflamed rather than abated by years--began the evening by telling in sesquipedalian language a long tale of an alleged adventure of his with my father, which, inasmuch as there was no point to it, need not be rehearsed here; but I noticed that Bennoch was for some reason hugely diverted by it, and found difficulty in keeping his hilarity within due bounds of decorum, Hall's tone being all the while of the most earnest gravity. Later I took occasion to ask Bennoch the secret of his mirth; was the tale a fiction? "Not a bit of it," Bennoch replied; "it's every word of it true; but what tickled me was that it was myself and not Hall who was in the adventure with your father; but Hall has been telling it this way for twenty years past, and has long since come to believe that his lie is the truth." So ended the first lesson.

The second was administered shortly before the company dispersed. Mr. Hall again got the floor to deliver one of his more formal moral homilies. "And, my dear friends--my very dear friends," he went on, resting his finger-ends upon the table, and inclining his body affectionately towards his auditors, "may I, as an old man--I think the oldest of any of you here present--conclude by asking your indulgence for an illustration from the personal experience and custom of one who may, I think--who at least has ever striven to be, a humble Christian gentleman--may I, my dear friends, cite this simple example of what I have been attempting to inculcate from my own personal practice, and that of my very dear and valued wife, Mrs. Hall? It has for very many years been our constant habit, before seeking rest at night, to kneel down together at our bedside, and to implore, together, the Divine blessing upon the efforts and labors of the foregoing day. And before offering up that petition to the Throne of Grace, my friends "--here the orator's voice vibrated a little with emotion--"we have ever been sedulous to ask each other, and to question our own hearts, as to whether, during that day, some human fellow-creature had been made better, or happier, because we had lived. And very seldom has it happened--very seldom, indeed, my dear friends, has it happened--that we were unable to say to ourselves, and to each other, that, during that day, some fellow-creature, if not more than one, had had cause for thankfulness because we had lived. And now I will beg of you, my dear friends," added Mr. Hall, producing his large, white pocket-handkerchief and patting his eyes with it, "to pardon a personal allusion, made in fulness of heart and brotherly feeling, and if there be found in it anything calculated to assist any of you towards a right comprehension of our Christian responsibilities towards our fellow-man, I entreat that you take it into your hearts and bosoms, and may it be sanctified unto you. I have done."

This report may be relied upon as substantially accurate, for the reporter made a note of the apologue and exhortation soon afterwards. Mrs. Hall, like her husband, was of Irish birth, and an agreeable and clever woman. They were both born in 1800, and died, she in her eighty-second, he in his ninetieth year. He remained the same Hall to the very end of his long chapter, and really, if no one was the better because he had lived, I don't know that any one was the worse, in the long run, either; and there have been Pecksniffs of whom as much could hardly be affirmed. There is, however, an anecdote of Hall which my father tells, and seems to have credited; if it be true, it would appear that once at least in his life he could hardly have implored the Throne of Grace for a blessing on the deeds of the day. "He told me," writes my father, "(laughing at the folly of the affair, but, nevertheless, fully appreciating his own chivalry) how he and Charles Lever, about ten years since, had been on the point of fighting a duel. The quarrel was made up, however, and they parted good friends, Lever returning to Ireland, whence Mr. Hall's challenge had summoned him." I suspect good Mr. Hall must have once more appropriated somebody else's adventure; it was not in the heat of youth that the bloody-minded and unchristian episode is supposed to have occurred, but when Mr. Hall was in his forty-seventh year.

Durham, the sculptor, was a lifelong friend of Bennoch's, and was often in my father's company, and he manifested a friendly feeling towards my father's son long afterwards. He was a man of medium height, compactly built, with slightly curling hair, and a sympathetic, abstracted expression of countenance. He was at this time making a bust of Queen Victoria, and he told us that it was contrary to court etiquette for her Majesty, during these sittings, to address herself directly to him, or, of course, for him directly to address her; they must communicate through the medium of the lady-in-waiting. The Queen, however, said Durham, sometimes broke through this rule, and so did the sculptor, the democracy of art, it would seem, enabling them to surmount the obligation to filter through the mind of a third person all such remarks as they might wish to make to each other. Durham also said that when the bust was nearly finished the Queen proposed that a considerable thickness of the clay should be removed from the model, which was done. The bust, as an ideal work, was thereby much improved, but the likeness to her Majesty was correspondingly diminished. Years afterwards I was talking with W. G. Wills, the painter and dramatist, a delightful Irishman of the most incorrigibly republican and bohemian type. He had, a little while before, been giving lessons in painting to the Princess Louise, who married the Marquis of Lorne, and who was, herself, exceptionally emancipated for a royal personage. One day, said Wills (telling the story quite innocently), the Princess was prevented from coming as usual to his studio, and he received a message from Windsor Castle, where the Princess and the Queen were staying, from the Queen's secretary, commanding his presence there to give the Princess her lesson, and to spend the night. This would be regarded by the ordinary British subject not only as an order to be instantly and unhesitatingly obeyed, but as a high honor and distinction. "But the fact is," said Wills, with his easy smile, "I'd promised to be at my friend Corkran's reception that evening, and, of course, I couldn't think of disappointing him; there was no time to write, so I just sent a telegram to the castle saying I was engaged." Probably English society history does not contain a parallel to this piece of audacity, and one would have liked to see the face of the private secretary of her Majesty when he opened the telegram. But Wills could not be made to recognize anything singular in the affair.

Commenting in one of his private note-books, at this time, upon the subject of modern sculpture in general, my father utters one of his unregenerate opinions. "It seems to me," he says, "time to leave off sculpturing men and women naked; such statues mean nothing, and might as well bear one name as another; they belong to the same category as the ideal portraits in books of beauty or in the windows of print-shops. The art does not naturally belong to this age, and the exercise of it, I think, had better be confined to manufacture of marble fireplaces." As we shall see, he modified this radical view before he left Italy; but there is some ground of truth in it, nevertheless.

Here is another bit of art criticism. He has been giving a detailed description of the sitting-room in one of our lodgings, and of the objects contained in it, evidently as a part of his general practice to record the minor facts of English life, to serve as a background for the English romance he hoped to write afterwards. "On the mantle-piece," he writes, "are two little glass vases, and over it a looking-glass (not flattering to the beholder), and above hangs a colored view of some lake or seashore, and on each side a cheap colored print of Prince Albert and one of Queen Victoria. And, really, I have seen no picture, bust, or statue of her Majesty which I feel to be so good a likeness as this cheap print. You see the whole line of Guelphs in it--fair, blue-eyed, shallow-brained, commonplace, yet with a simple kind of heartiness and truth that make one somewhat good-natured towards them."

"I must see Dickens before I leave England," he wrote, commenting upon the various tales he heard of him from henchmen and critics; but he never did see him, nor Thackeray either, whom he perhaps wished still more to meet. Thackeray visited America while we were abroad; and when Dickens came to Boston to read, my father was dead. Nor did he see Bulwer, an apostrophe by whom he quotes: "Oh, that somebody would invent a new sin, that I might go in for it!" Tennyson he saw, but did not speak with him. He sat at table, on one occasion, with Macaulay, and remarked upon the superiority over his portraits of his actual appearance. He made the acquaintance, which ripened into friendship, in Italy, of Robert Browning and his wife, and of Coventry Patmore, the author of "The Angel in the House," a poem which he greatly liked. But, upon the whole, he came in contact with the higher class of literary men in England less than with others, whom he was less likely to find sympathetic.

One afternoon, when I had accompanied him to the consulate, there entered a tall, active man, very well dressed, with black, thick-curling hair and keen, blue eyes. He seemed under thirty years of age, but had the self-confident manner of a man of the world, and a great briskness of demeanor and speech. He sat down and began to tell of his experiences; he had been all over the world, and knew everything about the world's affairs, even the secrets of courts and the coming movements of international politics. He was a striking, handsome, indomitable figure, and aggressively American. When he went away, he left with my father a book which he had written, with an engraved portrait of the author for frontispiece. This volume, faded and shelf-worn, but apparently unread, bound in the execrable taste of a generation and a half ago, I recently found among my father's volumes. It bore on the title-page the dashing signature of George Francis Train. Train saw things in the large--in their cosmic relations; from us he was going forth to make a fortune compared with which that of Monte Cristo would be a trifle. He did make fortunes, I believe; but there seems to have been in his blood a little too much of the elixir of life--more than he could thoroughly digest. His development was arrested, or was continued on lines which carried him away from practical contact with that world which he believed he held in the hollow of his hand. My father suspected his soundness; but in 1856 there seemed to be no height to which he might not rise. The spiritual steam-engine in him, however, somehow got uncoupled from the mass of the machinery of human affairs, and has been plying in vacua, so to say, ever since. On the 9th of June came a telegram from Southampton; my mother and sisters had arrived from Madeira. My father and I left Liverpool the next day, feeling that our troubles were over. In the afternoon we alighted at the little seaport and took a cab to the Castle Hotel, close to the water. My father, with a face full of light, sprang up-stairs to the room in which my mother awaited him; I found myself with my sisters and Fannie Wrigley, the faithful nurse and companion who had accompanied them on their travels. How tall and mature Una was! What a big girl baby Rose had become! There was a little strangeness between us, but great good-will; we felt that there were a great many explanations to be made. In a few minutes I was called up-stairs to my mother. At the first glance she seemed smaller than formerly; her face appeared a little different from my memory of it; I was overcome by an odd shyness. She smiled and held out her arms; then I saw my beloved mother, and a great passion of affection poured through me and swept me to her. I was whole again, and indescribably happy.

There was never such another heavenly room as that parlor in the Castle Hotel; never another hotel so delightful, or another town to be compared with Southampton. I was united to all I loved there, and in my thoughts sunshine will always rest on it.

XII

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.