He was the spoiled child of his genius and of the large world of his admirers; there was no vanity about him, and no exaggeration of his own abilities, but other people, even artists whom he appreciated, were of merely relative importance to him. He declined to put himself in comparison with any of his contemporaries, though he admitted his deficiencies as compared to the great Venetians, and repeatedly said that if he had been taught to paint in a great school he would have been a better painter, which was, no doubt, the truth; for, as he admitted, he had not yet learned the true method of painting. He refused to exhibit in the annual exhibitions, whether of the Academy or other, not because he feared the comparison with other modern painters, but because he was indifferent to it, though I have heard him say that he would be glad to exhibit his pictures with those of the old masters, as they would teach him something about his own. Like every other really great artist, he had a very just appreciation of the work of other men, and his criticisms were, _me judice_, very sound and broad from the point of view of art; the only painter of any note I ever heard him speak of with strong dislike was Brett, whom he could not tolerate. But he had a higher opinion of his own natural abilities than of his actual achievement,--his self-appreciation was not the conceit of a man who understood only what he himself did, but a full consciousness of what at his best he would be capable of doing and hoped to do before he died. In my opinion he understood himself and his merits justly, but he was to himself the centre of his own system; other stars might be as great, and probably there were many such, but they were remote, and judged in perspective.
He was undoubtedly the most gifted of his generation of artists, not only in England, where art is, if not exotic, at least sporadic, but in Europe, and I consider that if he had been of t.i.tian"s time he would have been one of the greatest of the Venetians. His imaginative force and intensity were extraordinary, and some of the elaborate compositions he drew in pen and ink, for future painting, are as remarkable in invention and dramatic feeling as anything I know in art, and all drawn without a model. The "Hector," the "Hamlet and Ophelia," the "Magdalene at the door of Simon the Pharisee," are designs of unsurpa.s.sed power, eminent in all the great qualities of design, harmony of line, invention, and dramatic intensity. His early work had all the purity and intensity of feeling of the primitive Italians, and the designs alluded to are of a little later period and of his highest imaginative activity. Had he always maintained the elevation of that period he would have done more and better work, but he fell into irregularities of life which wasted his powers and destroyed the precious exaltation of his early art. The sensuous quality of his painting, the harmony of color and the play of it, like the same qualities in his poetry, remained as long as I knew anything of his life, but his drawing and even his intellectual powers fell off through his unsystematic, excessive demands on them, night work and overwork. In his later years his work was nearly always more or less jaded, his eye failing in the perception of forms, as has so often been the case in even the greatest painters in their decay.
No doubt chloral was ultimately one of the agencies of his prostration, though not of his death, but he did not have recourse to it until his power of recuperation from overwork had begun to fail; and, when he had become accustomed to the effect of the chloral, he took it as the means of a form of intoxication, a form well understood by those who have had any experience, personal or by observation, in the use of the drug. The craving for this intoxicant, once it becomes a habit, is, like the use of morphia, invincible, and Rossetti indulged in it to such an extent that he used to take the original prescription to several druggists to obtain a quant.i.ty that one would not have given him. The crisis came long after my close personal relations with him had ceased, and I had become only an occasional correspondent, living in Italy. But to make his decline the consequence of the use of chloral, even when it was finally become habitual, as some do, is absurd. It had been prescribed for him by a competent physician, because some remedy for his malady had become necessary. Even before I had recommended his first experiment with it he had been incapacitated from work by sleeplessness, and was in a very precarious condition of nerves and brain, and, though he recovered at Robertsbridge a comparative health, so that he was enabled to do some of his best work, his return to London, and gradually to his old habits of life and work, ultimately reproduced the old symptoms.
During the earlier days of the return of the malady I was in London again and saw a great deal of him, was witness to his having become subject to illusions, and heard his declarations that he was beset by enemies and that he continually heard them in an adjoining room conspiring to attack him, and he attributed the savage criticism of Buchanan on his volume of poems to his being in the conspiracy to ruin him. The attack of Buchanan had a most disastrous effect on his mind.
It was the first time that Rossetti had experienced the brutalities of criticism, and his sensitiveness was excessive. No rea.s.surance had any effect; he had heard, he declared, the voices of those who had combined to ruin his reputation discussing the measures they were going to take, and it was evident that it had become a mania closely resembling insanity. Buchanan"s criticism had a rancor and breath of personality in it which had no excuse; it was a savage, wanton attack on the poet which he felt not only as poet and artist but as personal; for, to Rossetti, the two were the silver and golden sides of the shield. Though the morbid state was there, I think that the article of Buchanan had more to do with the intensification of the mania of persecution than anything else that occurred. And at that time he had not yet contracted the habit of taking chloral.
In the diary of Ford Madox Brown, published by William Rossetti, there is an amusing story of Dante"s keeping Brown"s overcoat, and keeping the room needed for other occupants, with the unconscious oblivion of any other convenience than his own, which was quite characteristic of the man, and which was shown on a larger scale at Robertsbridge. He not only took possession of whatever part of the house pleased him best, but, without in the least consulting me, he invited his friends to come and occupy it. As the agreement was that we should pay share and share alike of the expense, and as I invited no one, the burden on me was out of all proportion to our respective means. Rossetti"s income, according to his own statement, was, at that time, 3000 a year, but he was always in debt. He denied himself nothing that struck his fancy, and he had the most costly Oriental porcelain in London, and the most beautiful old furniture to be found, and the most princely disregard of expenditure. I had finally to refuse to continue the life in common. Dante invited Mr. and Mrs. Ford Madox Brown, and then Mr. and Mrs. Morris, and as they were all excellent friends of mine I could make no objection, though ill able to bear my share of the expense of the menage incurred, and finally I broke away, leaving him in possession, with Madame Bodichon"s consent. He was generous to the same degree of extravagance that he was indifferent to the claims of others; he made no more account of giving you a treasured curio than he did of taking it. His was a sublime and childlike egotism which simply ignored obligations until, by chance, they were made legal, at which, when it happened, he protested like a spoiled child.
And he had been so spoiled by all his friends and exercised such a fascination on all around him, that no one rebelled at being treated in his princely way, for it was only with his friends that he used it.
He dominated all who had the least sympathy with him or his genius.
Had Rossetti"s knowledge of the technique of painting, its science, been equal to his feeling for it, he had certainly founded a school of the truest art; but, for schools, the grammar is the first requisite, and Rossetti had himself never been taught what he would have had to teach. His feeling for color was on a par with his power of composition, and it seems to me that since Tintoret no one has equaled him in the combination. Of modern men, I know only Baron Leys and Delacroix who possessed to the same degree the power of spontaneous, harmonious composition, except Turner in landscape; all other modern art has, to my mind, more or less of the _pose plastique_, the air of the _tableau vivant_. His death, at a time when he should have been at the height of his powers, a premature victim of his undisciplined temperament and the irregularities it led him into, coupled with the over-intense mental vivacity, equally undisciplined, is one of the most melancholy incidents in the chaotic artistic movement of our time.
Ford Madox Brown, who was his first master, and is commonly considered to have exercised a great influence on Rossetti, in my opinion had none that was permanent. He was Rossetti"s ant.i.thesis, and in himself as inconsequent as Rossetti was logical. He was severely and uncompromisingly rationalistic; with the conscience of a Puritan he was an absolute skeptic, with a profound contempt for all religious matters, while Rossetti, with all his irregularities, never could escape from his religious feeling, which was the part of his const.i.tution he possessed in common with his sisters. Brown had, of the purely artistic qualities, only the academic; he was neither a colorist nor a great draughtsman; his art was literary, didactic, and, except for occasional dramatic pa.s.sages, unemotional and unpoetic. The predominance of the intellectual powers in him was so great that the purely artistic view of nature was impossible to him; and his artistic education, while curiously erratic and short-sighted in its elementary and technical stage, was intellectually large in academic and literary qualities, and comprehensive. It appears to me that the telling of the story was, in his estimation, the highest office of art, so that, while his drawing was bad in style, his execution sc.r.a.ppy and amateurish and deficient in breadth and subordination, his compositions were often masterly, fine in conception, and harmonious in line, in the pen-and-ink study; but the want of _ensemble_ and the insubordination of the insistent detail generally made his work less imposing when it was on canvas than in the first study. His habit of finishing from corner to corner, without having the whole work broadly laid out before him to guide him in the proper subordination of the details to the general effect, made it impossible for him to make his pictures broad and effective. His most successful pictures were, therefore, the small ones, in which the impossibility of too much insistence on detail proved an advantage.
I shall always regard Brown as a man carried by a youthful enthusiasm for art out of his true occupation, which was history; for his literary and scientific tendencies and his vehement love of truth were the larger part of his mind, and these qualities are of secondary importance in art. He sympathized strongly with the early phase of the pre-Raphaelite movement, which was what he had attempted with less intensity himself; but when Rossetti entered upon his true artistic development, it was only the personal influence of the past that gave the elder painter any power of influencing the younger. It is possible that Rossetti owed something of his manner of painting--a fragmentary method of completion--to the teaching of Brown; if so, he was indebted to his friend for the weakest side of his art. But, for the rest, this system of working is very general amongst English painters, in whom the amateur is persistent--the building the picture up in detail, with minor reference to the ma.s.s of the structure; and this was the weakness of Brown"s art, for what he did was done with such intensity that no after treatment could bring it into complete subordination to the general effect. Theodore Rousseau"s maxim, "If you have not got your picture in the first five lines you will never get it," seems to me the true golden rule of the art of painting, as in all creation. A picture should grow _pari pa.s.su_ in all its parts; otherwise there is no certainty of its keeping together when finished.
Rossetti"s influence, though always partial and never leaving a genuine pupil, was very wide, in the end, it seems to me, much exceeding that of Millais and that of Holman Hunt; but it is a question in which of his two functions--poet or painter--it was most effective. I have heard Swinburne say that but for Rossetti"s early poetry he would never have written verses, but this I think must be taken conditionally. Swinburne has the poetic temperament so decided and so individual, and his musical quality is so exalted, that it was impossible that he should not have shown it at some time; but it is possible that Rossetti furnished the spark that actually kindled the fire. Perhaps Swinburne himself cannot trace the vein to its hidden sources, and confounded the mastery of Rossetti"s temperament and the personal magnetism he exercised on those who came into close relations with him with an intellectual stimulus which, strictly speaking, Rossetti did not exercise. He was too specialized, too exclusively artistic in all his developments, to carry much intellectual weight, and Swinburne was more fully developed in the purely intellectual man; but the warmest friendship existed between them. I often saw Swinburne at Cheyne Walk, and, when they were together, the painter"s was certainly the dominant personality, to which Swinburne"s att.i.tude was that of an affectionate younger brother.
One day Rossetti had invited us all to dinner, and when we went down to the drawing-room there was great exhilaration, Swinburne leading the fun. Morris was, as usual, very serious, and, in discussing some subject of conversation, Swinburne began to chaff and tease him, and finally gave him a vigorous thrust in the stomach, which sent him backwards into a high wardrobe, on the outer corners of which stood Rossetti"s two favorite blue and white hawthorn jars, a pair unrivaled in London, for which he had paid several hundred pounds each. The wardrobe yielded and down came the jars. I caught one, and Morris, I believe, the other, as it was falling on his head. Rossetti was naturally angry, and, for the first and only time in my experience of him, lost control of his temper, bursting out on the culprit with a torrent of abuse which cooled the hilarity of the poet instantly, and reduced him to decorum with the promptness of a wet bath. To hear Swinburne read his own poetry was a treat, and this I enjoyed several times at Rossetti"s; the terrible sonnets on Napoleon III. after Sedan, amongst the readings, being the most memorable and effective.
The influence of Rossetti on Morris and Burne-Jones is unquestionable, and they probably both owed their embarking in an artistic career to the stimulus given by the advent of a purely artistic nature which set a new light in their firmament. The little we have of Morris"s painting shows only that he had the gift, but his own appreciation of his work was too modest to encourage him to face the strain of going through the necessary education, made more difficult by his want of early training, even of the imperfect and incorrect kind against which Rossetti had so successfully had to make his way to a correct conception of his art. On the whole, I consider Morris to have been the largest all-round man of the group, not merely on account of the diversity of his faculties, for he had in his composition a measure, greater or less, of most of the gifts which go to make up the intellectual man and artist, but because he had, in addition to those, a largeness and n.o.bility of nature, a magnanimity and generosity, which rarely enter into the character of the artist; and perhaps the reason why his gifts were not more highly developed was that his estimation of them was so modest. His facility in versification led him to diffuseness in his poems, and the modest estimation in which he held his work, when done, was a discouragement to the _limae labor_ so necessary to perfection. He told me that he had written eight hundred lines of one of his tales in one night, but at the same time he regretted that he could not invent a plot, though the exquisite manner in which he carried out the old plots which have been the common property of poets since poetry existed in the form of tales is honor enough.
But in the feeling for pure decoration, which is the essential element in art, in the universality of his application of it, and the high excellence to which he brought it in each branch to which he devoted himself, I doubt if Morris has had a rival in our day; and I am inclined to think that in the default of an early education in art, such as the great Italian painters received, we lost one of the greatest artists who have ever lived. For with the high degree in which he possessed taste, technical abilities never fully developed in work, and exquisite feeling for color and invention in design, he had the large human mould which would have made his work majestic beyond that of any of his great contemporaries and co-workers. He remained, owing to the late discovery of himself and the poor opinion of his abilities, only a large sketch of what his completed self would have been. He had that full, sensuous vitality which Madox Brown so completely lacked to his great injury, without the excess of it which was so treacherous with Rossetti. Mr. Mackail"s recent life of Morris does great injustice to Rossetti without in any way exalting his friend, for Rossetti always urged Morris to follow his artistic tendencies with the largest and most liberal encouragement and appreciation, and all the stimulus derivable from a most exalted opinion of his native abilities. Rossetti would have set everybody to painting, I think, for, in his opinion, it was the only occupation worth living for, and he was absolutely free from personal jealousy.
Of Burne-Jones I saw little in those days. He was still working out his artistic problem, and came now and then to the studio of Rossetti, who had the highest opinion of his abilities. And, taking art in its special function, that of the decorator, there can hardly be a dispute as to his rank amongst the greatest of romantic designers of the centuries following that of Giotto. His fertility of invention was very great; and, considering that his studies began at a period which for most artists would have been too late for the acquisition of technical excellence of a high degree, his attainment in that direction was most remarkable. Entirely original, if that quality could be predicated of any artist, he certainly was not, and he borrowed of his predecessors to an immense extent, not slavishly but adaptingly, and what he borrowed he proved a good right to, for he used it with a high intelligence and to admirable effect. It seems to me that though he added little or nothing to the resources of art, as Rossetti undoubtedly did, he employed the precedents of past art, and especially of the Italian renaissance, to better effect than any other artist of our epoch; and, in borrowing as he did, he only followed the example of most of the great old masters, who used material of any kind found in their predecessors" works, in perfectly good conscience.
His industry was prodigious, and his devotion to art supreme.
CHAPTER XXV
RETURN TO JOURNALISM
Miss Spartali and I were married in the Spring of 1871, and in justice to her I came to the hazardous decision to make my home in England, and there to devote myself to general literature and correspondence with America. As my financial condition at that moment, thanks to the various contributions to it, was better than it had ever been before, I had the courage needed to face the great change in my life. I brought with me from Lowell a letter to Leslie Stephen, whose friendship has ever since been one of the pleasantest things in my English life. Mrs. Stephen, the elder daughter of Thackeray, was to us an angel of goodness, and never since has the grateful recognition of her loving hospitality in thought and deed diminished in my mind. Our debt to her was a debt of the heart, and those are never paid. Her sister, later Mrs. Ritchie, added much to the obligations of our early life in London, and still remains our friend. Mr. Stephen gave me an introduction to the "Pall Mall Gazette," then under the charge of Greenwood, and I contributed in incidental ways to its columns; and with contributions to "Scribner"s" and other magazines it seemed that we might forgather, and we decided to bring the children out.
An article on the Cretan insurrection, printed while I was still in the island, had led the way to an acquaintance with Froude, in whose magazine it appeared, and I had been put on the staff of the "Daily News," which had printed a contribution on the Greek question as a leading article; so that, on the whole, the venture did not seem too rash for a man who never looked far ahead for good fortune. My friendship with Froude lasted as long as he lived. He was a warm and sincere friend, always ready with word or deed to help one who needed it, and one of the men for whom I retain the warmest feeling of all I knew at this epoch of my life. In New York I had made an arrangement with Dr. Holland to hold the literary agency for "The Century" (then "Scribner"s") for England, and on returning to London we took a small furnished house at Notting Hill Way, where our daughter Effie was born. In the following spring we moved out to Clapham Common, to be near the parents of my wife, and in the comparative quiet of that then delightful neighborhood we gave our experiment full scope. The life as a literary life was ideal, but as a practical thing it failed. Here I had the pleasure of extending hospitality to Emerson on his way to Egypt, and Lowell on the way to Madrid. To make the acquaintance of Lowell we had Professor and Mrs. Max Muller to meet him at dinner, and Tom Taylor was of the company, he living as a near neighbor.
But Russie"s condition was a shadow over my life, growing deeper every day. Though he had been discharged from Boston as incurable, we put him under the care of one of the best of English surgeons, and one of the kindest-hearted men I have ever known, the late Mr. John Marshall, one of the warm and constant friends I had made through my relations with Rossetti, of whom Marshall was a strong admirer. Though his charges were modified to fit our estate, they aggregated, with all his moderation, to a sum which I could ill support; but to save, or even prolong Russie"s life, I would have made any sacrifice. He was then not far from nine, and, though crippled by his disease, with his once beautiful face haggard with pain and no longer recognizable by those who had known him in his infancy, he was to me still the same,--a dear and loving child, the companion of my fortunes at their worst; and his devotion to me was the chief thing of his life. I had carried him in my arms at every change of vehicle in all the journeys from Athens to Boston and from Boston to London again, and to him I was all the world; to me he was like a nursling to its mother, the first thought of every day, an ever-present care, and his long struggle with death was an inseparable sadness in my existence. I remarked to Lowell one day that I feared he would die, and Lowell replied, "I should be afraid he would not die." The seeming cruelty of the expression struck me like a sentence of death, and momentarily chilled my feeling towards Lowell; but the incident made me understand some things in life as I could not have otherwise understood them, enabling me to take a larger view of our individual sorrows. There is no doubt that to Russie"s sufferings and death I owe a large part of my experience of the spiritual life, and especially a comprehension of the secret of the mother"s heart, so rarely understood by one of the other s.e.x.
But my unfailing facility for getting into hot water was not to find an exception in London. As agent for "Scribner"s" I had to secure contributions from English authors, not so easy then as now. Amongst other items I was instructed to secure a story from a certain author, and I contracted with her for the proof sheets of her next novel, about to be published in England in the--Magazine, the price to be paid for the advance proofs being 500, if I remember rightly. There was then no international copyright with America, but a courtesy right between publishers, with a general understanding amongst the trade that the works of an author once published by a house should be considered as belonging by prescription to it. On the announcement by "Scribner"s" of the coming publication of this author"s novel, the firm who had published her prior works announced that they would not respect the agreement with the author, but would pirate the story.
As the result of the quarrel, "Scribner"s" resigned the story to its rival on payment to the lady of the sum agreed on. But now appeared an utterly unsuspected state of things: the--Magazine had already sold the proof sheets of the story to a third American house, and an expose of the situation showed that English publishers had been in the practice of selling the advance proofs of their most popular works of fiction to the American houses, and recouping the half of the price paid the authors.
On the heels of this discovery by the public, there happened one of the periodical outbreaks of English journalism against the "American"
system of literary piracy, and simultaneously the visit of a committee of the American publishers deputed by the government of the United States to study out an arrangement for a treaty of international copyright on the basis of equality of right and privileges in both countries of the authors of both countries, but with no recognition of publishers" rights or privileges. The English government, taking advice from a committee of authors and publishers, in which the interest of the publishers was dominant, declined the offer of the American form of treaty, insisting on the protection of publishers"
rights, and the negotiations fell through, with great increase of the outcry in the English press. Being in communication with Mr. William H. Appleton, the head of the American committee, and in possession of the facts of the case as regarded the courtesy right, I wrote to the English papers, putting the American view of the matter, and the facts, dwelling on the hitherto unknown point that the depredations on the authors" interests were committed by the English publisher, who sold to the American the wares the latter was accused of stealing, whereas the fact was that he bought and paid equally for the right of publication, while the English publisher continued to reprint American books without the least regard for a.n.a.logous transatlantic rights.
The consequences to me were variously disastrous. In the first place I was deluged with applications from authors of still unestablished transatlantic reputation to secure for them offers from "Scribner"s"
for the advance sheets of their books. In the second I was treated to a torrent of abuse as "the friend of piracy" ("Daily News" leading article), and for some days not a single London paper would print a word of reply or explanation from me. The "Echo" was the first to do me the justice of printing a defense, and it was followed by the "Times," which printed my letter and one from Mr. Appleton; but of the authors who, having a transatlantic reputation, had profited by the "courtesy right," only Mr. Trollope came forward to sustain me with the statement that he had received more from the Harpers--his American publishers--than from his English publishers. The author whose novel had been the occasion of the original trouble, grateful for what I had done in her case, declared that the English authors ought to make me a testimonial (or perhaps it was a monument she suggested), but from no other source did I receive a word of thanks. And the third consequence was that the "Pall Mall Gazette" dropped me "like a hot potato." As my monthly cheques had reached the sum of ten pounds, and were slowly increasing, the inroad on my income arising from my crusade against publishing abuses was a serious item in my outlook.
As misfortunes never come alone, this was followed by my supersession, as literary agent of "Scribner"s," by Mr. Gosse, who had been making a visit to New York. It was in curious coincidence with these disasters that I addressed (with a letter of introduction from Madame Bodichon, who always was the kindest of friends to me) a distinguished lady member of the staff of an evening paper, with a request to help me to get work on it, and was told distinctly that she did not favor the entry of foreigners on the staff, as English writers had too much compet.i.tion amongst themselves, and "the crumbs from the table" should be reserved for them, so that while I had opened the door for English writers in my native land, to the disadvantage of myself and my compatriots, I was to be excluded from the English market as a foreigner. My old friend the editor of the "Daily News," had, during my absence in America, been appointed to the "Gazette," and the new Pharaoh "knew not Joseph." And so we decided to throw up the sponge and go back to America, though even there the new influx of English compet.i.tors (for which I was in part responsible) had made our chance less brilliant. My father-in-law offered us, if we withdrew from our decision, to settle 400 a year on my wife. With this aid we felt that we might carry through; and to her the change from English life, surrounded by old friends and an artistic atmosphere, to the strange and comparatively cruder surroundings of America, was to be avoided at any possible price, and I had no right to hesitate.
The great Exhibition of Vienna, in 1873, found the New York "Tribune"
unprovided in time for its correspondence, and the European manager, my friend G.W. Smalley, proposed to me to go out for the paper. There were three months still to the opening, but the preparation of the groundwork of a continuous correspondence, on an occasion to which the American public attached much importance, was a matter of gravity, and the time was not too long. The editor had neglected the matter, owing to considerations which deluded him, and I was just in time to forestall the worst effects of a scandal which made its noise in its day. The chief commissioner, General Van Buren, had had a.s.sociated with him, through influences which need not be cited, several under-commissioners who were Jews, formerly of Vienna, and of course obnoxious to the society, official and polite, of the Austrian capital, and who were exercising a most unfortunate influence on the prospects of the American exhibitors. In addition to this, they had entered into a system of trading in concessions for their personal advantage, the compet.i.tion being very keen, especially in the department of American drinks, and their dealings with the compet.i.tors had excited great indignation in certain quarters. One of the disappointed applicants, whose concession had been unjustly annulled in favor of a higher bidder, came to me for advice. I at once inst.i.tuted a rigorous though secret inquiry, and collected a body of evidence of corrupt practices, which I laid before the American minister, Mr. Jay, with a demand that it should be communicated to the government. Mr. Jay at first declined to take cognizance of the matter, and accused me of doing what I did with political partisan bias, Van Buren being a prominent politician. I a.s.sured him that I did not even know to which party Van Buren belonged; but, what probably moved him more was my a.s.surance that the affair was not going to be whitewashed, that if it was not corrected quietly I was determined to make a public exposure, and that whoever tried to whitewash it would need a whitewashing himself, whereupon he decided to take, under oath, the evidence I had laid before him and send it to Washington, which he did.
The result was a cable dismissal of the entire commission and the nomination in their places of several American gentlemen who had come to Vienna to witness the opening of the Exhibition, amongst whom were two of my warmest personal friends. They immediately offered me the official position of secretary to the commission, which I declined.
Having enlisted on the "Tribune," and considering myself held "for the war," I could not desert, though the inducement was very strong, for I should not only have been better paid than by the "Tribune," but should have been practically director of the Exhibition, so far as the American department was concerned. The exposure of the old commission which I sent the "Tribune" was printed reluctantly, for Van Buren was a personal friend of the editor-in-chief; but as I had taken the pains to make the substance of it common property so far as the other correspondents were concerned, it could not be suppressed.
For the opening ceremony there was great rivalry amongst the leading papers of New York, and the "Herald" made very expensive arrangements to cable a full account; and, beside its European manager, John Russell Young, and its telegraphic manager, Mr. Sauer, it had Edmund Yates and a well-known European lady novelist to make up the report.
The "Tribune" sent to my a.s.sistance an old friend, Bayard Taylor, and one of the staff from New York, E.V. Smalley. The "Herald" was prepared for practically unlimited expenditure on the occasion; the "Tribune" simply ordered me to telegraph 6000 words to Smalley at London, leaving the question of cabling open. Young thought me a rival to be held in poor account, and was careless. All the "Herald" staff took their places in the Exhibition building for the ceremony of opening by the Emperor, which was no doubt spectacular; but, as the doors were to be closed until the ceremony was over, and the Emperor rose to make the tour of the Exhibition, no one could get at the telegraph till all was complete. I stayed outside and sacrificed the spectacle. I had found who was to be the telegraph inspector for the day, and I went to him with an offer to hire a wire for the day. This was impossible, he said, as there was to be but one wire for all the foreign press. I put my case to him as that of a beginner in the service, to whom a success was of great importance for the future, and asked to be allowed to declare 6000 words to follow continuously; but this too, he said, was against the regulations. But I secured his sympathy, and he finally promised me that if I got first on the wire, and my message came without interruption, one section being laid before the operator before the other was finished, they should go on without interruption, as one message; but, if one minute lapsed and another message came in the interval, I must take my turn with the others.
As Taylor was an old hand, and wrote a most legible script, and style _currente calamo_, I told him to write what he could as the ceremony went on, and, the moment the doors were opened, to consign what he had written to a messenger whom I had hired for the day,--an American clerk of one of the exhibitors under some little obligation to me, a sharp Yankee, for whose use I had hired a cab, with the fastest horse I could find, to run back and forth between the Exhibition and the telegraph. Taylor was then to finish his account of the opening ceremonies and bring it or send it by the messenger to me at the telegraph office, the messenger waiting or returning for the first installment of Smalley"s account of the imperial inspection, which he was to follow closely. After this he was to continue to write the incidents of the opening; and when the whole approximated to the 6000 words needed, he was to come himself to the telegraph. I, meanwhile, went into the streets and devoted myself to picking up incidents of the procession, the deportment of the population, and the weather; and when I supposed that the opening of the doors was about to take place I went to the telegraph office and deposited 1200 words. Long before these could be sent, Taylor"s first installment came, and then Taylor himself with the second. Young, seeing my staff always present, and thinking me asleep, took his time.
When Taylor"s second part had been deposited and paid for, I saw coming down the street in a furiously driven carriage Mr. Sauer, with the first part of his message. I slipped out at a back door and was not seen, and Sauer returned for the continuation of his telegram.
When Smalley"s first dispatch had been put on, I saw Sauer coming again with his second. Then I sat tight and saw that the message had been written in columns of words on large paper, so that the counting should be rapid. It made a huge packet, and he deposited it with evident satisfaction and turned to go out, when he saw Archibald Forbes, who was writing his telegram to the "Daily News" at the table in the office, and turned to speak to him. When leaving him he caught sight of me in the corner, and started as if he had been hit by a bullet, then made as if he had not seen me and was going out, but reconsidered and came to speak to me. "Well, what have you done?"
he said. I replied that I had put about 5000 words on, and was only waiting for the odds and ends from Smalley. He flushed with surprise and vexation, and began to curse the telegraph officials "who never kept their engagements," and went off in a towering rage. My 6000 words went on before a single word of the message to the "Herald"
could go.
Mr. Young had ordered for that evening a magnificent dinner for his staff, to which mine was invited to celebrate his unquestioned feat.
While waiting for the dinner to come on, he took me apart and asked confidentially what we had really done. I told him, and he asked if we cabled, to which I replied that as to that I knew nothing, that I had wired G.W. Smalley in London, but what he had done I could not say.
"Well," said he, "if you have cabled you have beaten us, and if you have not cabled you may have beaten us," and then he went on to say that if I would drop the "Tribune" and come over to the "Herald" he would give me a good post and good pay. "No," I replied, "I have taken service with the "Tribune" for the campaign, and I cannot desert them." (My recompense was a curt dismissal from the "Tribune" as soon as the urgent work of the reporting of the opening was done.) Mr.
Whitelaw Reid"s nerve had failed him when it came to the question of the expense of cabling, and the 6000 words had gone by steamer from Queenstown. I had given the "Tribune" the best beat it had ever had except the Sedan report, if the editor had had the courage to profit by it. The "Herald" received 150 words of its report in time for the press the next morning, and had to make up its page of dispatches from matter sent by post in advance and by expansion of the 150 words received. Edmund Yates, in his autobiography, tells a story of the affair which is in every important detail untrue, and he probably knew nothing of it except what Young had admitted, and that was certainly very little, for Young was a very reticent man, and not likely to tell his defeat even to his staff.
Bennett was too fickle and whimsical an employer to suit me, and I had no disposition to expose myself to his whims. With Young I was always on the best terms, and he was disposed to employ me when a momentary service was required, but I had had one experience with his chief, which was sufficient. He had offered me the London agency of the "Herald" at a time when any constant occupation would have been acceptable, and we had come to terms, when suddenly he was taken with the notion that Edmund Yates, in addition to the service to the paper, would be of use to him in social ways, and he dropped me and appointed Yates, to drop him a little later, paying him a year"s salary to break the contract.
One bit of work I did for the "Herald" which I remember with much pleasure. It was the reporting of Beaconsfield"s Aylesbury speech, not a stenographic report, for that they had from the English press, but a letter on the occasion as a demonstration. I went to Aylesbury, and, as Beaconsfield was to speak twice,--once at the farmers" ordinary and then at the a.s.sembly rooms,--I dined at the ordinary; and as all the places in the a.s.sembly rooms had been taken before the dinner was over, I had to employ some a.s.surance to hear the princ.i.p.al speech. As soon as the company rose from the table, I pushed through to where Beaconsfield was standing, and, presenting my card as correspondent of the New York "Herald," asked him to be kind enough to put me in the way of hearing him, explaining why I had lost my chance through remaining to hear him at the dinner. He turned to one of the young men who were with him, remarking that my card would take me anywhere, and said, "See that Mr. Stillman has a place near me," and to me, "Keep close to me," which I did, and took a seat on the edge of the platform, at his feet; and I certainly never heard a more effective speech. The lordly, triumphant manner with which he bantered Gladstone for his dealings in the Straits of Malacca, the demonstrative confidence with which he took victory for granted, and the magnetism of his personal bearing, made an impression on me quite unique in my experience of men. Gracious is the only word which I can apply to his manner to those around him, and it had a fascination over them which I could perfectly understand, and I could easily comprehend that he should have a surrounding of devotees. The serene, absolute self-confidence he evidently felt was of a nature to inspire a corresponding confidence in his followers. It was an interesting display of the power of a magnetic nature, and gave me a higher idea of the man than all his writings had given or could give. For his intellectual powers and their printed results I never had a high opinion, but his was one of the most interesting and remarkable personalities I ever encountered.
As Russie continued to hold his own against his terrible disease, Mr.
Marshall thought that the operation of resecting the leg at the hip might save his life, and though such a maimed existence as his would then be was but a doubtful boon, the boy eagerly caught at the chance of life; and, to recruit strength for the operation, I decided to take him, by Marshall"s advice, to America, and give him a summer in the woods, camping out. I took him to the Maine woods instead of my old haunts of the Adirondacks, because the rail served to the verge of the wilderness, and we had, on Moosehead Lake, the resource of a good hotel to take refuge in if matters went ill. They did go ill, and I found that life was too low in him to give the woodland air and the influence of the pine-trees power to help him. Hope left me, and we turned homeward again, sailing from Boston direct to London. It was in late December, and we had a terrific voyage, and one of the hairbreadth escapes of which I have had so many. In the height of the gale Russie and I were standing in the companion-way, watching the storm, for the boy loved the sea dearly and enjoyed the heaviest weather, when the captain called to me to say that we were not safe there and had better go below. Only a few minutes later an exceptionally heavy sea broke over the deck, took five boats out of the davits or crushed them, carried away in splinters the companion-way in which we had been standing, and swept the decks, the chief officer being saved only by being lashed to the railing of the bridge, and the fall of the ma.s.s of water on the deck breaking several of the deck beams. We had to lie to for the rest of the gale. We landed at Gravesend just before Christmas, Russie being in much worse condition than when we left England. Up to that time I had clung to hope, for to lose the boy was like tearing my soul in two. Mr.
Marshall no longer held out a hope, but said if he had known the strength of the boy"s const.i.tution he would have operated when he first saw him, which was what Russie then begged for and had always looked forward to. Through five years he had resisted the pain of that most painful disease, hoping always, always reading, almost always cheerful.
Our lease expiring, I decided to leave London, and Mr. Spartali offered us a cottage on one of his estates in the Isle of Wight, where the children, Russie especially, might have sweet English air. Marie being engaged in finishing her pictures for the spring exhibition, I went down alone with the children, stopping at an inn at Sandown till the furniture was in the cottage. While so waiting Russie was taken with the first convulsion peculiar to his malady, and then I realized that Death had come, and, unwilling to face him in the semi-publicity of an inn, I took the boy in my arms to the railway, and from the station nearest to the cottage bore him thither.
I tried to prepare him for the impending death, by showing him that it was the end of pain, but his horror of it was inextinguishable, and he cried in agony, "Oh, no, no! Papa, I wish to live as long as you do;"
and, though his faculties were fortunately failing, he beckoned me to lay my head by his on the pallet I had prepared for him on the floor, and offered me a last feeble caress and showed his pleasure in having me by him. He had loved me above all things on earth, even more than his loving mother, and to be with me had always been his dearest delight, and now we met Death alone, he and I, and I could only remember David"s cry, "Absalom, my son!" I watched the fading life, the diminishing breath in the midnight silence of the solitary house, and almost desired Death to hasten, for the final struggle had begun, and the suspense was torture to me. And when the last long breath was drawn, and the limp, deserted body was all that was left to me of my thirteen years of pa.s.sionate devotion, my pride and hope, and the nursing care of so many years, I walked out into the midnight and left my boy to Death. The long tension was over, and I could give way to tears.
It was only a child"s death, a common thing, almost as common as family existence, but it gave a new color to my life, establishing forever a sympathy with the common grief, and a community of sorrow with all bereft fathers and mothers, in the premature dissipation of the hopes of their future, and the lapse of a dear companionship into the eternal void. This is the human brotherhood of sorrow, sacred, enn.o.bling, sanctifying where it abides, the deepest lesson of the school of life. My feet have wandered far, and my thoughts still further from the places and beliefs of my childhood; but whatever and wherever I may be, this grief at times catches me and holds me in a pause of dumb tears, and every similar bereavement I witness renews the sympathetic grief. I have never been able to find a consolation for that loss, for it carried with it the future and its best dreams.
When his mother died, I thought that any death were easier to bear than the sudden and terrible tragedy of that; but in the devastated youth and the lingering pain of Russie"s leaving, I found that
"not all the preaching since Adam Has made Death other than Death."
We buried him quietly in the churchyard at Arreton, the kind rector not asking for a baptismal certificate, for he knew that I was not a churchman, and Russie had never been baptized. In these things we follow prejudices. Mine were Baptist; his mother was an advanced Unitarian, and had been born in the Brook Farm community, of which her father was a member, so that we had no sympathy with paedobaptism, while the terrible effect of my own religious education forbade me to enc.u.mber the boy"s mind with religious dogmas, and from the beginning I had forbidden any one in the house to teach him the name of G.o.d until he was old enough to understand what "G.o.d" meant; but one day during his illness I found him, when he should have been sleeping, weeping bitterly, and to my inquiry as to the cause of his trouble, he replied, "Do you think, Papa, that, if I went to sleep saying my prayers, G.o.d would be satisfied if I finished them after I woke?" That terrible hereditary conscience could not be laid, and perhaps the boy was fortunate in his early death.
CHAPTER XXVI