Part 12

_April 8._—In spite of a deluge of rain last night there was a large audience to hear Dickens, and Longfellow came as usual. He read with more vigor than the night before and seemed better.... The time approaches swiftly for our flight to New York. We dread to leave home and would only do it for _him_, besides, the pleasure must be much in the fact of trying to do something rather than in really doing anything, for I fear he will be too ill and utterly fatigued to care much about anything but rest.

_Friday, April 10._—Left home at eight o’clock in the morning, found our dearly beloved friend C. D. already awaiting us, with two roses in his coat and looking as fresh as possible. It was my first ride in America in a compartment car. Mr. Dolby made the fourth in our little party and we had a table and a game of “Nincom” and “Casino” and talked and laughed and whiled away the time pleasantly until we arrived here at the Westminster Hotel in time for dinner at six. I was impressed all day long with the occasional languor which came over C. D. and always with the exquisite delicacy and quickness of his perception, something as fine as the finest woman possesses, which combined itself wondrously with the action of the massive brain and the rapid movement of those strong, strong hands. I felt how deeply we had learned to love him and how hard it would be for us to part.

At dinner he gave us a marvellous description of his life as a reporter. It seems he invented (in a measure) a system of stenography for himself; this is to say he altered Gurney’s system to suit his own needs. He was a very young man, not yet 20, when at seven guineas a week he was engaged as reporter on the “Morning Chronicle,” then a very large and powerful paper. At this period the present Lord Derby, then Mr. Stanley, was beginning his brilliant career, and O’Connell, Shiel, and others were at the height of their powers. Wherever these men spoke a corps of reporters was detailed to follow them and with the utmost expedition forward verbatim reports to the “Chronicle.” Often and often he has gone by post-chaise to Edinburgh, heard a speech or a part of it (having instructions, whatever happened, to leave the place again at a certain hour, the next reporter taking up his work where he must leave it), and has driven all the way back to London, a bag of sovereigns on one side of his body and a bag of slips of paper on the other, writing, writing desperately all the way by the light of a small lamp. At each station a man on horseback would stand ready to seize the sheets already prepared and ride with them to London. Often and often this work would make him deadly sick and he would have to plunge his head out of the window to relieve himself; still the writing went steadily forward on very little slips of paper which he held before him, just resting his body on the edge of the seat and his paper on the front of the window underneath the lamp. As the station was reached, a sudden plunge into the pocket of sovereigns would pay the postboys, another behind him would render up the completed pages, and a third into the pocket on the other side would give him the fresh paper to carry forward the inexorable, unremitting work.

At this period there was a large sheet started in which all the speeches of Parliament were reported verbatim in order to preserve them for future reference—a monstrous plan which fell through after a time. For this paper it was especially desired to have a speech of Mr. Stanley accurately reported upon the condition of Ireland, containing suggestions for the amelioration of the people’s suffering. It was a very long and eloquent speech and took many hours in the delivery. There were eight reporters upon the work, each to work three-quarters of an hour and then to retire to write out his portion and be succeeded by the next. It happened that the roll of reporters was exhausted before the speech came to an end and C. D. was called in to report the last portions, which were very eloquent. This was on Friday, and on Saturday the whole was given to the press and the young reporter ran down to the country for a Sunday’s rest. Sunday morning had scarcely dawned “when my poor father, who was a man of immense energy, surprised me by making his appearance. The speech had come into Mr. Stanley’s hands, who was most anxious to have it correctly given in order to have it largely circulated in Ireland, and he found it all bosh, hardly a word right, except at the beginning and the end. Sending immediately to the office, he had obtained my sheets, at the top of which, according to custom, the name of the reporter was written, and, finding the name of Dickens, had immediately sent in search of me. My father, thinking this would be the making of me, came immediately, and I followed him back to London. I remember perfectly the look of the room and of the two gentlemen in it as I entered—Mr. Stanley and his father. They were extremely courteous, but I could see their evident surprise at the appearance of so young a man. For a moment as we talked I had taken a seat extended to me in the middle of the room. Mr. Stanley told me he wished to go over the whole speech, and if I was ready he would begin. Where would I like to sit? I told him I was very well where I was and we would begin immediately. He tried to induce me to sit elsewhere or more comfortably, but at that time in the House of Commons there was nothing but one’s knees to write upon and I had formed the habit of it. Without further pause then he began, and went on hour after hour to the end, often becoming very much excited, bringing down his hand with violence upon the desk near which he stood and rising at the end into great eloquence.

“In these later years we never meet without that scene returning vividly to my mind, as I have no doubt it does to his also, but I, of course, have never referred to it, leaving him to do so if he shall ever think fit.

“Shiel was a small man with a queer high voice and spoke very fast. O’Connell had a fine brogue which he cultivated, and a magnificent eye. He had written a speech about this time upon the wrongs of Ireland, and, though he repeated it many, many times during three months when I followed him about the country, I never heard him give it twice the same, nor ever without being himself deeply moved.”[27]

Mr. Dickens’s imitation of Bulwer Lytton is so vivid that I feel as if it were taking a glimpse at the man himself. His deaf manner of speaking he represents exactly. He says he is very brilliant and quick in conversation, and knows everything!! He is a conscientious and unremitting student and worker. “I have been surprised to see how well his books wear. Lately I have reread ‘Pelham’ and I assure you I found it admirable. His speech at the dinner given to me just before leaving was well written, full of good things, but delivered execrably. He lacks a kind of confidence in his own powers which is necessary in a good speaker.”

Speaking of O’Connell, Mr. Dickens said there had been nobody since who could compare with him but John Bright, who is at present the finest speaker in England. Cobden was fond of reasoning, and hardly what would be called a brilliant speaker; but his noble truthfulness and devotion to the cause to which he had pledged himself made him one of the grandest of England’s great men. I asked about Mrs. Cobden. He told me she had been made very comfortable and in a beautiful manner. After her husband’s death, his affairs having become involved by some bad investment he had made, a committee of six gentlemen came together to consider what should be done to commemorate his great and unparalleled devotion to his country. The result was, instead of having a public subscription for Mrs. Cobden with the many unavoidable and disagreeable features of such a step, each of these gentlemen subscribed about £12,000, thus making £70,000, a sufficient sum to make her most comfortable for life....

I have forgotten to say how in those long rides from Edinburgh the mud dashed up and into the opened windows of the post-chaise, nor how they would be obliged to fling it off from their faces and even from the papers on which they wrote. As Dickens told us, he flung the imaginary evil from him as he did the real in the days long gone, and we could see him with the old disgust returned. He said, by the way, that never since those old days when he left the House of Commons as a Reporter had he entered it again. His hatred of the falseness of talk, of bombastic eloquence, he had heard there made it impossible for him ever to go in again to hear anyone.

_Sunday, April 12._—Last night we went to the circus together, C. D., J., and I. It is a pretty building. I was astonished at the knowledge C. D. showed of everything before him. He knew how the horses were stenciled, how tight the wire bridles were, etc. The monkey was, however, the chief attraction. He was rather drunk or tired last night and did not show to good advantage, but he knew how to do all the things quite as well as the men. When the young rope-dancer slipped (he was but an apprentice at the business, without wages, C. D. thought), he tried over and over again to accomplish a certain somersault until he achieved it. “That’s the law of the circus,” said C. D.; “they are never allowed to give up, and it’s a capital rule for everything in life. Doubtless this idea has been handed down from the Greeks or Romans and these people know nothing about where it came from. But it’s well for all of us.” ...

At six o’clock Mr. Dickens and Mr. Dolby came in to dinner. He seemed much revived both in health and spirits, in spite of the weather....

Dickens talked of Frédérick Lemaître; he is upwards of sixty years old now; but he has always lived a wretched life, a low, poor fellow; yet he will surprise the actors continually by the new points he will make. He will come in at rehearsal, go about the stage in an abject wretched manner, with clothes torn and soiled as he has just emerged from his vulgar, vicious haunts, and without giving sign or glimmer of his power. Presently he says to the prompter, who always has a tallow candle burning on his box, “Give me your candle”; then he will blow it out and with the snuff make a cross upon his book. “What are you going to do, Frédérick?” the actors say. “I don’t know yet; you’ll see by and by,” he says, and day after day perhaps will pass, until one night when he will suddenly flash upon them some wonderful point. They, the actors, watching him, try to hold themselves prepared, and if he gives them the least hint will mould their parts to fit his. Sometimes he will ask for a chair. “What will you do with it, Frédérick?” He does not reply, but night after night the chair is placed there until he makes his point. He often comes hungry to the theatre, and the manager must give him a dinner and pay for it before he will go on. Fechter, from whom these particulars come, tells Dickens that there can be nothing more wonderful than his acting in the old scene of the miserable father who kills his own son at the inn. The son, coming in rich and handsome, and seeing this old sot about to be driven from the porch by the servant, tells the man to give him meat and wine. While he eats and drinks, the wretch sees how freely the rich man handles his gold and resolves to kill him. Fechter’s description, with his own knowledge of Lemaître, had so inspired Dickens that he was able to reproduce him again for us.

_Wednesday, April 15._—[On returning from a reading in “Steinway Hall, than which nothing could be worse for reading or speaking”]: He soon came up after a little soup, when he called for brandy and lemons and made _such_ a burnt brandy punch as has been seldom tasted this side of the “pond.” As the punch blazed his spirits rose and he began to sing an old-fashioned comic song such as in the old days was given between the plays at the theatre. One song led to another until we fell into inextinguishable laughter, for anything more comic than his renderings of the chorus cannot be imagined. Surely there is no living actor who could excel him in these things if he chose to exert his ability. His rendering of “Chrush ke lan ne chouskin!!” or a lingo which sounded like that (the refrain of an old Irish song) was something tremendous. We laughed till I was really afraid he would make himself too hoarse to read the next night. He gave a queer old song full of rhymes, obtained with immense difficulty and circumlocution, to the word “annuity,” which it appeared has been sought by an old woman with great _assiduity_ and granted with immense _incongruity_. The negro minstrels have in great part supplanted these queer old English, Irish, and Scotch ballads, but they are sure to come up again from time to time. We did not separate until 12, and felt the next morning (as he said) as if we had had a regular orgy. They did not forget, Dolby and he, to pay a proper tribute to “Maryland, My Maryland,” and “Dixie” as very stirring ballads.

[After another reading, from which Dickens came home extremely tired]: We ran in at once to talk with him and he soon cheered up. When I first pushed open the door he was a perfect picture of prostration, his head thrown back without support on the couch, the blood suffusing his throat and temples again where he had been very white a few minutes before. This is a physical peculiarity with Dickens which I have never seen before in a man, though women are very subject to that thing. Excitement and exercise of reading will make the blood rush into his hands until they become at times almost black, and his face and head (especially since he has become so fatigued) will turn from red to white and back to red again without his being conscious of it.

_Friday, April 17._—Weather excessively warm, sky often overcast. Last evening Mr. Dickens read again and for the last time “Copperfield” and “Bob Sawyer.” He was much exhausted and said he watched a man who was carried out in a fainting condition to see how they managed it, with the lively interest of one who was about to go through the same scene himself. The heat from the gas around him was intolerable. After the reading we went into his room to have a little soup, “broiled bones,” and a sherry cobbler. His spirits were good in spite of fatigue, the thought of home and the memories of England coming back vividly. We, finally, from talk of English scenery, found ourselves in Stratford. He says there is an inn at Rochester, very old, which he has no doubt Shakespeare haunted. This conviction came forcibly upon him one night as he was walking that way and discovered Charles’s Wain setting over the chimney just as Shakespeare has described. “When you come to Gad’s Hill, please God, I will show you Charles’s Wain setting over the old roof.”

We left him early, hoping he would sleep, but he hardly closed his eyes all night. Whether he was haunted by visions of home, or what the cause was, we cannot discover, but whatever it may be, his strength fails under such unnatural and continual excitement.

_Saturday, April 18._—Mr. Dickens has a badly sprained foot. We like our rooms at his hotel—47 is the number. Last night was “Marigold” and “Gamp” for the last time. He threw in a few touches for our amusement and a great deal of vigor into the whole. Afterward we took supper together, when he told us some remarkable things. Among others he rehearsed a scene described to him years ago by Dr. Eliotson of London of a man about to be hanged. His last hour had approached as the doctor entered the cell of the criminal, who was as justly sentenced as ever a wretch was for having cut off the end of his own illegitimate child. The man was rocking miserably in his chair back and forth in a weak, maudlin condition, while the clergyman in attendance, who had spoken of him as repentant and religious in his frame of mind, was administering the sacrament. The wine stood in a cup at one side until the sacred words were said, when at the proper moment the clergyman gave it to the man, who was still rocking backward and forward, muttering, “What will my poor mother think of this?” Finding the cup in his hands, he looked into it for a moment as if trying to collect himself, and then, putting on his regular old pothouse manner, he said, “Gen’lemen, I drink your health,” and drained the cup in a drunken way. “I think,” said C. D., “it is thirty years since I heard Dr. Eliotson tell me this, but I shall never forget the horror that scene inspired in my mind.” The talk had taken this turn from the fact of a much-dreaded Press dinner which is to come off tonight and which jocosely assumed the idea of a hanging to their minds. C. D. said he had often thought how restricted one’s conversation must become with a man who was to be hanged in half an hour. “You could not say, if it rains, ‘We shall have fine weather tomorrow!’ for what would that be to him? For my part, I think I should confine my remarks to the times of Julius Cæsar and King Alfred!!” He then related a story of a condemned man out of whom no evidence could be elicited. He would not speak. At last he was seated before a fire for a few moments, just before his execution, when a servant entered and smothered what fire there was with a huge hodful of coal. “_In half an hour that will be a good fire_,” he was heard to murmur.

Mr. Dickens has now read 76 times. It seems like a dream.

_Sunday, April 19._—Last night the great New York Press dinner came off. It was a close squeeze with Mr. Dickens to get there at all. He had been taken lame the night before, his foot becoming badly swollen and painful. In spite of a skilful physician he grew worse and worse every hour, and when the time for the dinner arrived he was unable to bear anything upon his foot. So long as he was above ground, however, it was a necessity he should go, and an hour and a half after the time appointed, with his foot sewed up in black silk, he made his way to Delmonico’s. Poor man! Nothing could be more unfortunate, but he bore this difficult part off in a stately and composed manner as if it were a sign of the garter he were doffing for the first time instead of a badge of ill health. The worst of it is that the papers will telegraph news of his illness to England. This seems to disturb him more than anything else. Ah! What a mystery these ties of love are—such pain, such ineffable happiness—the only happiness. After his return he repeated to me from memory every word of his speech without dropping one. He never thinks of such a thing as writing his speeches, but simply turns it over in his mind and “balances the sentences,” when he is all right. He produced an immense effect on the Press of New York, tremendous applause responding to every sentence. Curtis’s speech was very beautiful. “I think him the very best speaker I ever heard,” said C. D. “I am sure he would produce a great effect in England from the sympathetic quality he possesses.” I have seldom seen a finer exercise of energy of will than Mr. Dickens’s attendance on this dinner. It brought its own reward, too, for he returned with his foot feeling better. He made a rum punch in his room, where we sat until one o’clock. After repeating his speech, he gave us an imitation of old Rogers as he would repeat a quatrain:—

“The French have sense in what they do Which we are quite without, For what in Paris they call _goût_ In England we call _gout_.”

Mr. Dolby sat at dinner near a poor bohemian of great keenness of mind, Henry Clapp, by name, who said some things worthy of Rivarol or any other wittiest Frenchman we might choose to select. Speaking of Horace Greeley (the chairman at the dinner), he said: “He was a self-made man and worshipped his creator.” Of Dr. O——, a vain and popular clergyman, that “he was continually looking for a vacancy in the Trinity.” Of Mr. Dickens, that “nothing gave him so high an idea of Mr. Dickens’s genius as the fact that he created Uriah Heep without seeing a certain Mr. Young (who sat near them), and Wilkins Micawber without being acquainted with himself (Henry Clapp).” Of Henry T—— that “he aimed at nothing and always hit the mark precisely.”

This speech of Mr. Dickens will make a fine effect, a reactionary effect, in the country. The enthusiasm for him knew no bounds. Charles Norton spoke for New England. I had a visit from him this morning as well as from Mr. Osgood, Dolby, etc. C. D. lunched at the Jockey Club with Dr. Barker and Donald Mitchell and returned to dine with us. He talked of actors, artists, and the clergy—church and religion—but was evidently suffering more or less all the time with his foot, yet kept up a good heart until nine o’clock, when he retired to the privacy of his own room. He feels bitterly the wrong under which English dissenters have labored for years in being obliged not only to support their own church interests in which they _do_ believe, but also the abuses of the English Church against which their whole lives are a continual protest. He spoke of the beauty of the landscape through which we had both been walking and driving under a grey sky, with the eager spring looking out among leafless branches and dancing in the red and yellow sap. He said it had always been a fancy of his to write a story, keeping the whole thing in the same landscape, but picturing its constantly varying effects upon men and things and chiefly, of course, upon the minds of men. He asked me if I had ever read Crabbe’s “Lover’s Ride.” We became indignant over a tax of five per cent which had just been laid upon the entire proceeds of his Readings, telegraphed to Washington, and found that it was unjust and had been taken off.

_Monday, April 20._—Attended a meeting of a new “institution” just on foot, first called “Sorosis” and afterwards “Woman’s League” for the benefit and mutual support of women. It was the first official meeting, but it proved so unofficial that I was entertained, and amused as well, and was able on my return to make Mr. Dickens laugh until he declared if anything could make him feel better for the evening that account of the Woman’s League would.