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London Days: A Book of Reminiscences

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Title: London Days: A Book of Reminiscences

Author: Arthur Warren


        
Release date: January 1, 2011 [eBook #34812]
                Most recently updated: January 7, 2021

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LONDON DAYS: A BOOK OF REMINISCENCES ***




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LONDON DAYS

A BOOK OF REMINISCENCES


BY

ARTHUR WARREN




BOSTON

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY

1920




_Copyright, 1920_,

BY ARTHUR WARREN.


_All rights reserved_

Published September, 1920



Norwood Press

Set up and electrotyped by J. S. Cushing Co.

Norwood, Mass., U. S. A.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER                                        PAGE

    I  First Glimpses of London  . . . . . . .    1
   II  London in the Late Seventies  . . . . .    9
  III  A Norman Interlude  . . . . . . . . . .   18
   IV  I Take the Plunge . . . . . . . . . . .   28
    V  Browning and Moscheles  . . . . . . . .   42
   VI  Patti . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   57
  VII  John Stuart Blackie . . . . . . . . . .   79
 VIII  Lord Kelvin . . . . . . . . . . . . . .   96
   IX  Tennyson  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  114
    X  Gladstone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  138
   XI  Whistler  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  157
  XII  Henry Drummond  . . . . . . . . . . . .  170
 XIII  Sir Henry Irving  . . . . . . . . . . .  185
  XIV  Henry M. Stanley  . . . . . . . . . . .  205
   XV  George Meredith . . . . . . . . . . . .  222
  XVI  Parnell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  240
 XVII  "Le Brav' General"  . . . . . . . . . .  260
       Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  275




{1}

LONDON DAYS




CHAPTER I

FIRST GLIMPSES OF LONDON

One day at dusk, in the autumn of 1878, when I was eighteen, I arrived
at the heart of the world.

I was fresh from New England, and had left Boston, my native city,
seventeen days before, embarking at New York on the Anchor liner
_Alsatia_ three days later; disembarking at Tilbury after a turbulent
voyage that lasted two weeks to the hour.  What was left of me passed
from the Fenchurch Street Station into Leadenhall Street, the least of
three passengers in a four-wheeled cab.  Through the cab windows, and
the ghost of fog which simmered over gas lamps, flashed glimpses of the
city, splashes of light on the pavements illuminated windows bound in
brass, cumbrous drays and 'busses, and great grey horses, and
glistening pubs.  The air was heavy with smoke.  I heard the tramp of
thousands and thousands of persons, all homeward bound, and all wearing
top hats.  And, of all names, there at the right on a clothier's sign,
the enamelled legend: "Dombey and Son!"  My head was packed with
Dickens, and in a pocket was a linen-backed map.

{2}

In one way and another, by books and maps and imagination, I was
already on familiar terms with the world-city which I had never seen.
I had read it up, studied it, knew intricate maps of it, and stories of
its traditions.  At a time when the youth of my country and generation
were expected to follow Horace Greeley's advice, "Go West and grow up
with the country" or, as interpreted by the cynics, "Go West and start
a graveyard"--I made a chance to go East across the Atlantic.  And I
went.  So I beheld the Old World.  But I had chances enough, that is, I
made them, to see the New World later.  And I saw it.  History in the
making is interesting,--sometimes, and if you survive.  History already
made and rounded and woven into legend, the scenes among which men have
lived and wrought through centuries, shaping the rich past on which we
build the present, hold a fascination which did not seem to come to me
from regions where man was pioneering.  London was the magnet that
first drew me.  And as the cab turned south from Leadenhall Street and
moved slowly along the noisy streams of traffic, I exclaimed presently,
to the disappointment of my companions who knew the town and were
prepared to point out its places of celebrity:

"London Bridge at last!"

"At last?" said they.  "Why, this is quick work for the time of day.
How many minutes?"

"But I've been eighteen years on the way," said I.

I managed to keep awake and hungry till we got to the Wiltshire Road in
Brixton, where my guides {3} from Fenchurch Street were staying.  The
stagger and strain of the sea voyage had left me stupidly weary, so
that as soon as possible after dinner I went to bed.  Although I stayed
three weeks in that house, all recollection of a dining room has
vanished.  That may be attributed to the zeal of youth and its
indifference to the art of dining, an art acquired speedily enough
later on.  But never in the subsequent years have I been able to revive
a single memory of that Brixton house.  And the only recollection of
the first three weeks in England is that on the first morning, at an
office in the City, I was violently seasick.

Atlantic passengers who begin their voyaging nowadays in luxuriously
fitted vessels of fifty thousand tons, and coddled within an inch of
their lives, lack the remotest notion of the sea travel of forty years
ago.  The _Alsatia_, of the Anchor Line, was one of the largest and
finest ships afloat in 1878.  She had a single smokestack and a single
screw, no covered deck for passengers, no barber shop, no electric
lights, not even an electric bell.  Deck chairs were unknown, but later
you could buy them ashore and store them in the Company's baggage room
against your return.  No meal could be served on deck without the
permission of the captain.  The first mate was a surly ass who
threatened passengers with irons if he caught them infringing some
stupid rule, long since abolished; and although the steamer was fairly
new she belonged to the age when seamen hated fresh air in a hull, and
the smells from her bilges would have asphyxiated an ox.  She was one
{4} tenth the size of the big liners of to-day, five thousand tons
being registered to her credit in the advertisements where she was
described as "a giant."  She was a worthy sea craft, but she hopped,
skipped, and jumped all the way from New York to London, used fourteen
days in getting there, ten being made against head gales and heavy
seas, one of which threw a sailor from the maintop to the deck, killing
him, and sweeping overboard two hundred sheep which we carried on the
foredeck.  Nearly all liners in those days carried sail and were
square-rigged.  Their canvas was stained with soot and smoke, but it
had a steadying effect on the ship when spread to a favouring quarter.
Whether the _Alsatia_ carried sail I never knew for I was ten days
helpless and agonised in my cabin, and for three days more the
mastheads seemed to scrape the scudding clouds with a fore-and-aft
motion that tore your eyes if you looked skyward.  It was only after we
had passed well up Channel, near Dover, that the wind eased and we
could venture on deck without clinging to life lines.

This horror of seasickness was as unexpected as it was distressing,
for, if I had not been brought up on the sea, I had been accustomed to
it long enough, and had sailed an eighteen-foot catboat up and down
Massachusetts Bay, where there is rough water much of the time and
scope for seamanlike work all the time.  Whether on long rollers, or on
choppy water, I had never been troubled by the sea's motion until the
_Alsatia_ tumbled across the Atlantic, and then it was my head that
bore distress, and not my {5} centreboard.  It seemed as if the
fragment of brain still remaining in me broke loose and rattled from
skull to toes, bounding back with a hideous roar and horrid pressure
which found no relief till we got into quiet water.  I vowed never to
go to sea again.  Since then I have made more than fifty voyages on the
North Atlantic alone.

There was a man aboard who had a salty sailor's fondness for a howling
sea, and we became amazing friendly.  And he was amazing fat, so that
he took very short steps.  As I was no thicker than a lath, and
six-feet-an-inch-and-a-half tall, there was contrast enough as he
paddled alongside me.  Creeping from the hated stateroom where ten
nearly foodless and acutely torturing days had been passed in a damp
melancholy, I saw a dozen or fifteen passengers--our full
strength--seated at a long table on the starboard side of the saloon,
listening to Mr. Pickwick reading "Othello."  He was as round as
Pickwick, not quite so cherubic as Phiz's immortal drawing, and minus
the spectacles.  In the tossing night, when we had forgotten that any
portion of the universe was ever still, he was declaiming Othello's
speech to the Senate.

The figure and the fact were incongruous, but the effect of the
declamation was not.  He read all the tragedy, barring a few cuts.  I
supposed him a comic actor with an ambition for tragic parts.  Some
sailors staring through a deck light took him for a "sky pilot" reading
the burial service for their fellow, but thought him over-long about
it.  His name was Henry Murray.  He was a Scotsman {6} retired from the
Chinese trade.  He was also a Free Mason, Past District Grand Master
for China.  He was returning to England with the intention of becoming
a public reader.  He intended even to become an actor of Falstaff and
he had long been a capable amateur.  His father had been a famous actor
in Edinburgh; his brother commanded the Guion liner _Arizona_, and
later, the _Alaska_.

Henry Murray was a good judge of acting.  But his fondness for acting
was fatal to his fortunes and his life.  The first he spent in efforts
to establish himself; the second he wore out in disappointment over the
failure of his plans.  I remember him with genuine affection, because
he was the first to open to me any door in the mighty and mysterious
world of London.

Plans had no place in my baggage, at least no plans requiring space.  I
had practically worked my way to London where I was to join the staff
of an American engineering concern who were introducing an invention.
Though lacking years I had sufficient application, and I had learned
enough of the business to justify my appointment.  That, in fact, had
been my purpose, and I worked hard to achieve it and uphold it.  But I
wanted to write.  And, being in London, why not write about London?  I
knew that Mrs. Glasse's recipe for cooking hare had begun, "First catch
your hare", and so the prescription for my own case ran, "First learn
your London."  Meantime I had my vocation to lean on.  During the
business hours of four years I ran with my vocation, and, out of
business hours, followed my hobby.

{7}

Old Mother London gave me the key to her streets, and diligently I used
it.  Into every old church I wandered, and into every old building that
had given shelter to Fame when she touched a poet, a philosopher, a
painter, a literary man, a tragedian, a soldier, sailor, or a king.
And I knew the burial places of those she cherished, and those she
flouted, or those she flirted with, no less than the living places of
those who still pursued her on any of the grey mornings in which I
rambled.  They became as familiar to me as any 'bus line, and I became
a walking directory to the odd corners where she had preened her
feathers for an hour or for a space of years.  I became saturated with
her legends, and occasionally an arbiter in cases of suspected masonry
whose identity rumour and record had disputed or concealed.  That was
one form of amusement.  The play was another.

I was at home in London from the moment of my arrival at Fenchurch
Street.  It had been a far cry to Fenchurch Street, and when a lad made
it in company with a rotund gentleman of Pickwickian build, the chances
were sure to be amusing.  After trying two or three boarding houses, I
settled in chambers just out of Queen Square in Bloomsbury.  Murray was
in apartments half a mile away, in Marchmont Street.  Marchmont Street
was shabby in those days, whatever it may be now.  On the west side of
it, over a tailor's shop kept by her husband, was the shabby, but clean
and shining house of Mrs. Floyth, a melancholy woman who had been maid
or housekeeper to John Stuart Mill when {8} the manuscript of Carlyle's
"French Revolution" was burned to light the fires!  I have always
wondered if the old lady herself were responsible for that
conflagration.  It might have accounted for her settled melancholy.

My chambers near Queen Square were in a spacious old house which was
panelled and carved from roof to entrance hall.  There soon began to
meet here, once or twice a month, a congenial group, smoking
churchwarden pipes.  It called itself the "Quill Club", talked
politics, the drama, and books, and the members disagreed as heartily
as any human beings could on all the topics of life.

There would have been no interest in listening to another fellow's talk
had you been in agreement with him.  There were but two rules in the
Club: the first that a man should say what he thought; the second--give
his reasons for thinking so.  When a man failed to sustain his opinion
by his reasons he paid for the tobacco.  The Quills, as may be
supposed, were chiefly of a trade, quill drivers.  But they were not
entirely so: one was "by way of being" an artist, another was a
solicitor, a third was inclined to surgery, a fourth made musical
boxes, the fifth was a dentist, and the others pursued literature, at
greater or smaller distances, and incidentally contributed small feed
to the presses in Fleet Street, or elsewhere.  Of a dozen, ten are
dead.  Some made goals, some fell by the way.  But they all enjoyed
life and work, for all were young.  And sometimes they could pay their
bills.




{9}

CHAPTER II

LONDON IN THE LATE SEVENTIES

London was a more livable place in the late seventies than it is now,
or so it seems to me, as it seems to many others who knew the town in
that earlier time.  There were not so many means for getting everywhere
as there are now, and yet we got everywhere,--everywhere, that is, that
we wished to go.  We were not in a hurry then, and there was more
consideration for the old and the lame than there is now.  Now there is
none at all in the streets or under them.  The electric age was
prophesied, but nothing more.  Nobody in England believed in
prophecies.  There were arc lights on Holborn Viaduct and the Thames
Embankment, nowhere else, but the incandescent lamp had not appeared.
There was nothing electrical, in our modern sense, except the
telegraph.  The telephone was unknown.  It is almost unknown to-day, if
London's use of it be compared with New York's.  There was no electric
traction, and the petrol age was nearly a quarter of a century distant.
But for all these drawbacks, as I daresay they may be regarded by the
youth of the present hour, London was the most livable place in the
world, if you loved cities; it had a charm, a fascination all its own.

{10}

That charm is not to be described.  How can it be described, any more
than the charm of a charming woman?  You are conscious of it, you know
that there is nothing like it, you are sorry for those who must live
elsewhere and cannot come under its spell; they have missed that much
out of life.  You experience a certain largeness of heart, and would
like to give everybody a June in London, but reluctantly acknowledge
that every one must take the will for the deed.

But if you attempt to analyse London it will baffle your effort.  It is
at once so splendid and so mean, so spacious and so meagre, so
beautiful and so ugly, so noisy and so quiet, so restless and restful,
that the farther you go the more puzzled you become, unless having
begun by questioning it you end by accepting.  Take it in its own way
and you will see that it is in itself a problem that cannot be solved
by a study of weeks or months; it is a study for a lifetime, for many
lifetimes.  For instance: architecturally it is too often saddening and
mean.

Some one will fly into a rage when he reads the preceding sentence.  He
will ask resentfully if I think Westminster Abbey, the Parliament
Buildings, St. Paul's Cathedral sad, or mean, or shabby.  Of course I
do not.  Their nobility and beauty almost redeem the hundreds of square
miles of common-place and melancholy builders' work that encumbers
London.  Yet how the mean shops press upon St. Paul's and shut it in!
Could anything be uglier than the National Gallery?  Could any
important thoroughfare be more conducive to depression of {11} spirits
than Victoria Street?  It's not the old London that is architecturally
ugly and mean; it is the modern London, and usually the more modern the
greater the affliction to the eye.  Somebody said, I think it was
Schelling, "Architecture is frozen music."  Would not anybody say that
the Methodist mountain in Westminster is frozen pudding?

London in the late seventies was architecturally less saddening than
now, because less that was pretentious and defiant of good taste had
been undertaken.  Its public buildings of later date are the worst in
Europe, excepting those that have arisen in Germany.  Squat, heavy, out
of proportion, lacking in dignity, in beauty, they seem to have been
erected for the purpose of proving that in architecture the modern
Briton will neither imitate nor aspire.  "The finest site in Europe" is
almost the meanest sight.  The marvel is that a capital and a country
having so many fine models of earlier date do not repeat them, improve
upon them, or attempt even a finer taste.  The opportunities have been
unrivalled, but about the achievements the less said the better.  Acres
of slums have been swept away to be superseded by miles of masonry
which serve mainly to prevent an acquaintance with good taste.  What
public "improvement" could be shabbier than Shaftsbury Avenue, meaner
than newer Whitehall, or more commonplace than Kingsway and Aldwych?
What department of a Government could have blocked a vista so
remorselessly as the Admiralty has done, or have betrayed a contempt
for beauty more disheartening than the County {12} Council has shown in
its latest horror at Westminster Bridge?

The majestic beauties of London seem to have developed by accident
rather than by design.  The view down Waterloo Place to the Abbey and
the Victoria Tower and the view eastward from the Serpentine Bridge in
Hyde Park have certainly done so.  The view down the river from
Waterloo Bridge, or Westminster, was never planned; it grew slowly,
being first blessed by every natural advantage that a patient
Providence could bestow.  In its buildings of a private character, its
domestic architecture, London still has much to seek; monotony has been
the rule, but the style has not deteriorated.  In some respects and
localities it has much improved; there is evidence that imagination has
been allowed to exercise itself, that all house owners do not, in these
times, think alike, and are not content with dwellings which, outwardly
at least, seem, class by class, to have been run from one mould.
Individuality begins to express itself as if, at last, some Londoners
were beginning to lose their fear of becoming conspicuous.  An advance
in taste has run concurrently with the decline of the top hat and frock
coat.

But the interiors of English buildings of all kinds, public as well as
private, churches as well as theatres, offices no less than railway
stations, clubs, homes, hotels, all are draughty, as lacking in warmth
as they were when I first knew them.  The exceptions are so few that
they are advertised.  Central heating is still regarded as a fad,
constant hot water is a {13} novelty; there is a superstitious regard
for cold air as pure air, and a fear of warm air as impure.  But the
worst cold is that of dampness, and many houses are never dry.  Mildew
is common in their closets, chill in the bedrooms, and their halls are
rheumatic.  Rheumatism, and its allies lumbago, influenza, pneumonia,
and consumption are the customary ills.  When the Briton is cold
indoors he goes out for a walk and warms his blood.  The theory is that
artificial warmth is unhealthful; the truth is that it is an expense to
which the Briton objects, and that he has not learned how to warm his
house.  The tough survive.  The delicate, the aged, the invalid, or the
sedentary take their chances, and while they live do so with an
unbelievable lack of comfort.  Consequently the English complain of
cold when the American would think the temperature moderate; but the
American uses heat to keep his house dry as well as warm.  He often
overdoes it; he often goes as far in one direction as the Briton in the
other.  But an English house warmed in the American way, not
necessarily to the usual American degree, is always appreciated by the
Briton, although he may be far from understanding the reason of his
content.  London had a charm in the late seventies that it lost when
the Twentieth Century was still young,--the charm of leisure.  The
internal-combustion engine drove leisure from the land.  The old
two-horse 'bus was a leisurely thing.  Even the four-horse express
'busses that plied between the Swan at Clapham to Gracechurch Street,
and similar urban and suburban centres, were leisurely enough, {14}
compared with the electric trains and motor 'busses that now rush the
city man to and fro.  They were not comfortable, those horse-drawn
caravans with their knifeboard roofs and perilous scaling ladders, that
is, they were not comfortable excepting on the box seats to which every
man's ambition soared.  There, sheltered by great leathery aprons, the
lucky passenger braved the weather, beheld the passing world, and
exchanged small talk with the driver who condescended affably to
discourse, with his "regulars", the news of the day.  The smart hansom
disappeared long ago.  Smart as it was it was leisurely compared with
the flashing taxi and motor which have superseded "London's gondola",
as Disraeli called it.  And, Heaven knows, the sulphurous underground
was leisurely beyond words.

Everybody rushes now.  London has no more time to spare than New York
has.  It seems a dream that, when I first entered an English train, the
custom was for the railway guards to call, "Take your time, take your
time!"  But that was their call forty years ago.

Gradually the street cries have lessened in variety, in character, and
in interest.  The simple trades that announced their wares by a snatch
of something that passed for song have disappeared one by one.  Even
the muffin man is vocal no longer, and his bell is silent.  Whatever
may have caused the other merchants of the curb to vanish, the war and
short rations removed the muffin man.  He was almost the last, perhaps
actually the last of the creatures who gave to London streets an
old-world sound or savour.

{15}

When the late seventies were still on the calendar, and for long after,
the silk hat was an unrelenting tyrant, and in the City, among
stockbrokers, it bore a special gloss.  Every male above the age and
status of an office boy or a labouring man wore a silk hat.  Without
that ugly and inconvenient headgear you would not call upon your
solicitor, or appear at your banker's, or negotiate a contract, much
less intrude upon an official person.  The silk hat was a sign of
respectability.  In the House of Commons it seemed a symbol of the
majesty of the British Constitution.  There, to this day, the head must
be covered, as if the members were in a synagogue.  In summer time
straw hats were unknown, excepting for the sex that was gentler then,
and invariably the sex wore furs with its straws.  A man who ventured
in a straw hat incurred the risk of obloquy.  At any rate, he was as
marked and ridiculous an object as Jonas Hanway when, in an earlier
century, he raised an umbrella in Oxford Street.

Temple Bar was standing where Fleet Street joins the Strand; the new
Law Courts which now overlook its site were in process of construction;
the Griffin was undreamed of.  Northumberland Avenue had been opened
but was incomplete.  The modern hotels had yet to be promoted.  The
Grand was the first of these, but its fortunes were thought hazardous.
There was no Metropole, or Victoria, although their walls were going
up.  Rimmel's perfumery warehouse stood where the Savoy is now, and
that sordid adventurer Hobbs (or was it Jabez Balfour?) had not
preempted the site of the Cecil which was {16} then covered with
lodging houses, chambers, and private hotels.  There was no Carlton, no
Ritz, no Waldorf; even the Great Central was not in being, and the only
restaurants of consequence were the Criterion, St. James', Gatti's old
Adelaide Gallery, half its present size, the Cafe Royal, Very's, and
the stuffy predecessor of the present Holborn.

The first run of "Pinafore" had not ended, the revival of Old Drury's
prosperous days had not begun; "Our Boys" had been running for nearly
five thousand nights at the Vaudeville; Sothern was making his last
appearances in the last season of the unremodelled Haymarket; there was
the Alhambra but no Empire, no Hippodrome, no Coliseum; St. James'
Hall, but no Queen's Hall; the Albert Hall was mostly empty, the
old-style music halls were mostly full; Mr. Pinero was acting small
parts in Irving's company and had not written so much as the scenario
of a one-act play; Henry Arthur Jones had not been heard of; Bernard
Shaw was unknown, Adelaide Neilson was at the height of her brief
career, Forbes Robertson had begun his, and Buckstone's days were
ending.  The era of the Kendals and John Hare at the St. James' was yet
to come, but the happy reign of the Bancrofts, at the old Prince of
Wales', behind the Tottenham Court Road, where the Scala now stands,
had yet to close.

George Meredith was not only "caviare to the general" but "the general"
were a little shocked when they learned that he was still a reader for
a publishing house and a writer when he had the time.  "The general"
found delight in the fiction of Miss {17} Braddon and Mrs. Henry Wood,
and, of course, Ouida, as they would delight now if these ladies were
spinning copy; Kipling was at school, and Barrie dreaming in the north.
We had William Black and Walter Besant and James Rice, but no Society
of Authors, and no literary knights.  If the world is small now it was
very large then, but "sausage and mashed" were cheap at the top of
London Bridge, threepence for a pair of hulking sausages and a liberal
plate of mashed potato, a penny more for a great hunk of bread, and
tu'ppence more for half a tankard of beer.

A certain splendid swagger departed from London Streets when the
regiments quartered in town abandoned their gorgeous uniforms and
dressed less like magnificos and more like fighting men.  They were
fighting men though, they and their successors who held back the
outnumbering German rush from the Channel ports of France in 1914, as
all the world knows, and none know better than the Huns.  But they were
dandies too, those earlier men, and they filled the eye.  Their saucy
scarlet, short-waisted jackets, their jaunty fatigue caps, their tight
trousers with broad red stripes, on shapely legs which seemed
tremendous in length, were at once the admiration of nursemaids and the
envy of small boys, lending, as they did, colour and form to these dun
streets.  Will the glorious colossi who strode thus habited be seen
again this side of Charon's ferry; or will their successors lead the
simple life in khaki and puttees?




{18}

CHAPTER III

A NORMAN INTERLUDE

After a winter in London I went to Paris for a part of the spring,
stopping on the way a day in Rochester (I had the Dickens fever then),
and another day in Canterbury for the Cathedral's sake.  A night boat,
the ancient Wave, or the antediluvian Foam, took me to Calais, and
through some delay on the line there was a wait of hours.  But the
night was fine, and I spent it roaming through and beyond the old town,
getting forty winks afterward in the station, and a breakfast of hot
chocolate and bread at a place facing the harbour where I watched the
fishing boats put out on a convenient tide.  In Paris I knew only one
person, an American friend who was studying art, taking his lessons at
Julian's, and slowly, yet certainly, learning that art was not for him.
He introduced me to a lot of men who knew their way about, and soon I
knew my way about as well as they did, possibly, in some directions, a
little better, for, with one or two exceptions, I cannot remember any
who were gifted with a faculty for anything but good-fellowship and for
spending their allowances from home.  They knew the jargon of the
studios, but as Paris seemed full {19} of men who could paint as well
as they and were threatening to do it, the charming group dissolved in
a year or two, one after another, returning to their homes in various
parts of the world.  Not one that I know of is living now, and nearly
all whom I could trace in later years had gone into trade, and
flourished there.

But my acquaintance with Paris had begun.  It was to be extended in
subsequent years.  What chiefly remains in my recollection concerning
those early days is that for the first time I had the consciousness of
being in a foreign country.  I never had that in England, no, not for a
minute, and no one, then or since, ever tried to make me feel it there.
Of course, part of the difference was due to language, but not all the
difference.  There were subtle differences in France, and some plain,
outstanding ones.  The English are kindly people, hospitable, and, if I
must say so--and I think I must, having lived through three years of
the great war with them, to say nothing of many preceding years--they
are naive.  The Englishman, if he liked you, took you to his home, but
he said that the Frenchman did not.  But he did, I found.  And I found
that the Frenchman, if less kindly, was more polite.  The Frenchman had
either clearer ideas or none at all about other nationalities; the
Englishman--but really, these reflections do not belong in this book,
but in another, if anywhere.  I will not prolong them here, but say
only that I was in Paris fairly often after that first visit and that I
liked it the more the more I knew it.

{20}

But I am forgetting my friend Monsieur Raoul de St. Ange.  I would not
willingly forget my friend St. Ange.  In fact, I could not forget him.
He was a delightful man of fifty or thereabouts, a dear and gracious
person.  I had met him in London where he was giving lessons in French,
and trying to make a French weekly paper pay its way and earn him
something over.  He was of Norman birth, and had lived fairly well in
Paris up to the time of the Commune, when he had been ruined.  He
emigrated to London.  He had a wife and two small sons.  The boys were
about ten and twelve respectively.  This little family lived in a
little house at Shepherd's Bush.  The house was very simple, but it was
as neat as wax.  I used to help St. Ange a little with the English
section of his paper, and in return he gave me lessons in French.

One day he said to me: "I must go to Normandy; a week there.  It will
give me the greatest pleasure if you come."  And so I arranged to meet
him at Amiens on my return from Paris.  He had some family affairs to
settle, something to do with the children, and a bit of property that
had been left in trust for them.  In Normandy we would see some of his
people, a bit of France from the inside not the outside.  I jumped at
the chance.  We met at Amiens, and explored the Cathedral before doing
anything else.  He knew somebody there, or somebody knew of him, and we
were taken all over the wonderful Cathedral, from roof to crypt.  We
were so long at this that we concluded to spend the night in Amiens,
and push on, next morning, by train to {21} a village some thirty miles
or more away, which was one of the objectives of his visit.

The name of that village I have clean forgotten.  It has passed like
many other names that were supposed to be fixed there.  But forgotten
it is, although the place itself is associated with memories of rustic
hospitality more generous than anything that has ever come my way.
Well, we arrived at the village of the forgotten name, and we put up at
the house of the station master, in the station building itself.  There
was no inn.  The station master was somehow, somewhere, within St.
Ange's circle of friends.  He took charge of our kits and showed me to
what I am sure was the best bedroom.  I had a guilty feeling that the
occupants must have turned out for my benefit; but one can only defer
to the custom of the country.

Presently Monsieur Station Master, and Madame Station Master, and
little Station Master _fils_ appeared, each in best bib and tucker, and
led the way across the fields, to a little thatched farmhouse two miles
distant.  The railway contingent evidently were making holiday.  All
the way we walked through fields of grain, in a wide path which came,
by and by, to a little bridge over a chattering stream, and then to a
road, and around a bend in the road to the farmhouse, thatched, moss
and flowers growing in the thatch, and a family growing in the door,
for the doorway was filled with humans of ages from eight to eighty, in
rows and tiers.  As we drew near there was such a display of waving
handkerchiefs and joyous shouts as would have {22} gratified William
the Conqueror himself had he been passing.

St. Ange was smothered in embraces, and I was bidden in, not to the
embraces, but to a seat in the fireside, after salutations all round.
St. Ange had not been in these parts for twenty years.  He was trustee
for some of these younkers, and had now come to be relieved of his
trust, as the younkers were of age in the eyes of the law.  You would
have thought that I was a benefactor, so generous were their
attentions.  Food and wine were pressed upon me.  What the good folk
were saying did not enter my comprehension; the twists of the Norman
tongue were beyond me.  But smiles are translatable in any language and
so are hearty courtesies.  Presently what appeared to be the whole
population of the neighbouring countryside streamed in, and St. Ange
and his American friend had to meet them all.  We met like old friends.
Then St. Ange took me to call upon some old folk in a cottage not far
away.  We must have been a couple of hours calling about.  When we
returned to the first place a dinner was ready for us, and we for it.

The fat of the land was before us.  There was every kind of good thing
that grew in Normandy.  And there was wine of the country, and plenty
of it.  The triumph of the occasion was duck,--duck such as I never ate
before, and have not eaten since, not even in Paris, where they have a
subtle skill in cooking these things.  I could write rhapsodies about
that duck.  When, even nowadays, I am seeking to whet appetite, I think
of the ducks I ate in Norman {23} cottages.  No one has eaten duck who
has not eaten it in Normandy where every housewife seemed to me a
marvel of a cook.  I was in Normandy a week, lunched and dined and
supped in a different house each day--they were chiefly the homes of
cottage folk--and, for abundance and good feeding, I still regard it as
a land of miracle.

How I praised the duck at that first dinner, and extolled Madame's
skill in cookery!  Madame was pleased.  Have I conveyed the impression
that these were wealthy folk?  It was not my intention to do so.  They
were Normandy peasants, which may mean anything or little as far as
well-being goes.  The room in which we ate was the living room,
cooking-washing-eating-room.  I daresay that behind a panel, or a
curtain, there was an alcove with a bed.  Anyhow, there was one in an
adjoining room.  And over the dining table was a loft to which you
mounted by a ladder which was slung against the ceiling, when not
wanted, by rope and pulley.  The dining-room floor was of earth, hard
packed, hard as nails, clean as the proverbial whistle.  Everything
shone with cleanliness--windows, napery, brass, pewter, plates,
kettles--if all the belongings of the room had whistled there would
have been a bellow as if the siren of a big liner had blown.  Such
cleanliness and such cooking I have not found in all the years that
followed in the many English cottages I have known, but I met the
combination three or four times a day for six or seven days, each time
beneath a different roof.

St. Ange and I walked back across the fields by {24} moonlight,
Monsieur, Madame, and Toddlekins Station Master, and two from our
feasting house, accompanying us.  That night I slept like a top.  At
noon what was my surprise and joy to find another duck, duly prepared
and cooked by our hostess of the preceding day, waiting for me on the
station master's table.  It had been brought by one of her small fry
with the lady's compliments.  There was a compliment fit for a prince!
Have I mentioned the wine that graced the basket, and the miraculous
green peas that were to melt in the mouth?  Ah, well, it was long ago,
and it was hospitality.

In that way did Normandy receive us at every halt, whether we called at
farm, or cottage, or chateau.  Was there ever such a country for eating
and drinking, I wondered.  At last we arrived at Rouen.  We had driven
in from the country, and somewhat wearied and dusty with the journey,
we were hurried by a stout and jolly man, a gigantic person who was in
waiting on the road, to a delightful dwelling in the town where three
generations of St. Ange's relatives welcomed us and would have haled us
forthwith to the seats of honour, but that we pleaded for a wash and a
change.

It was twelve o'clock when we gathered at table.  It was four when we
rose.  And when we rose, something else was served in the next room.
And I was told that we must dine at another house, at seven; I think
seven was the hour.  And we were to sup at a third party at eleven!
But I had become accustomed to this splendour of generosity.  St. Ange
had warned me at Amiens that it was inevitable, {25} and could n't be
shirked.  And so, after the first heroic occasion, the memorable affair
of duck at the cottage, I made a great show of eating and drinking, so
that these valiant Norman trenchermen would not think me rude and
neglectful, and speedily I learned how to keep up the appearance of
feasting and of still having a wee-bit appetite at the end.  That was
doing pretty well, I think, for a novice.  And it required some skill
in calculation, for at each table there was everything, and abundance
of everything, that gourmets or gourmands could desire to eat and
drink.  In seven days there were twenty-one such feasts!

When we reached London, on our homeward journey, I called for sausage
and mashed, and a tankard of bitter, by way of return to the simple
life.

But the kindness of it all, the generous hospitality; the opening of
hearts to a stranger who comes with an old friend or relative,--in
forty years I have seen nothing to equal it.  The gentleman who killed
the fatted calf offered but a Barmecide feast in comparison with the
provender of my Norman friends.

A few days after the return from France a telegram came to me from St.
Ange, saying that his boy was seriously ill, and asking me to come at
once.  In the evening I went as quickly as I could to Shepherd's Bush.
The little chap had taken a chill, pneumonia had supervened.  The
doctor was in the house when I arrived.  "Can't live through the
night," he said.  The parents were with the little fellow.  I dozed
below in an armchair, knowing that there was need {26} of sleep if I
were to see these good people through the crest of their trouble.  An
hour after midnight the mother came and said: "It is finished!  Yes,
dead.  I am anxious for _mon mari_.  He will not move, or speak.  He
sits staring--_comme ca_.  Please go to him."

I aroused St. Ange and made him come with me.  All night till dawn I
walked him, through Shepherd's Bush, through Hammersmith, across the
Bridge, across Barnes Common, through Mortlake and Richmond, and back
again, making him talk and tiring him out.  That was the object, to
counter his nervous excitement by physical fatigue and to divert his
mind.  I brought him home at sunrise, limp, exhausted.  He slept for
ten hours.

I had to make him see that the world had not come to a standstill, that
there was no "copy" for his paper, and so on.  I saw his printers, his
publishers, and some other people he knew who turned out "copy."
Between them all they saw him through the worst of his problems.  This
brought me in a practical way into connection with the outer fringes of
Fleet Street and London journalism, and in my odd hours I learned how
"copy" was prepared for the compositors, how proofs were corrected, how
"forms" were made up, and before long was able to assist some of my new
acquaintances when they were pressed for time at these games.

It was natural enough that in following these lines as a joyous amateur
I should drift into journalism.  I never intended to stay in it, I
preferred to write books; but in those days that seemed a mad {27}
thing to do,--to write books and expect to earn money by them.  In
journalism, if one got his "stuff" printed, he got paid, and, if one
knew the ropes, he had n't to wait forever for the payment.  There was
a certain attractiveness about being paid for work one liked to do, and
I liked writing better than anything else.  And I liked the rush and
pressure of journalism as I saw these things manifested in the
experience of my friends.  They had adventures too; I also would have
them.  It seemed possible to know everybody, go everywhere, see
everything, and, if one worked the ropes with skill, he might remain
his own master.  One saw it all through rose-coloured glasses.  How
else should youth see anything?

Even to-day I see St. Ange through the rose-coloured glasses of memory.
It is the only way possible, for except in memory I have not seen him
in all these years since we returned from Normandy and his boy died.
Within a month from the funeral Raoul St. Ange and his wife vanished.
They had returned to France, 't was said, but no one knew.  His pupils
did not know, his printers did not know, his paper was dying.  I
suppose he had n't the heart to face the obsequies.  He merely
vanished.  No inquiry revealed him.  Never a letter, never a wire,
never a trace of any kind in forty years.




{28}

CHAPTER IV

I TAKE THE PLUNGE

I have never been so old as I was during my first three or four years
in London.  It is, or at any rate it used to be, a common delusion of
youth that the mantle of years has descended upon its shoulders.  In my
case the shoulders could have carried a large mantle.  I was tall and
big framed, earning my living in a foreign country, where, by the way,
I felt completely at home; my habits of thought were far beyond those
which custom fixes for the 'teens, and all my associates were older
than myself, most of them much older.  In the work which circumstances
and I laid out, youth was by others supposed to be a disadvantage, so
that it might have been natural had I assumed the merit of a maturity
which I did not possess.  But I was not compelled to assume it.  It was
attributed to me.  Nobody supposed that I was under nineteen.  I was
supposed to be at least half a dozen years older.

My first editor was George Parsons Lathrop, of the _Boston Courier_.
He was a son-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and he achieved the honour
of editing my copy by the alacrity with which he published it for
nothing.  As the suggestion was {29} my own the acceptance of
non-compensated work was entirely fair.  If his paper could stand it, I
could.  I wanted practise, and Lathrop wanted copy.  He was perfectly
willing that I should practise in his columns.  I did n't know him from
Adam, but had written to him enclosing a "London Letter" which
solicited his acceptance on gratuitous terms.  Beneath my generosity
was a design.  Not only did I need practice but I wanted to be known as
the London Correspondent of an American paper, in order to have the
_entree_ at theatres, concerts, political gatherings, and other public
functions.  After sufficient practice with Lathrop, I would endeavour
to sell copy in other quarters.  The plan succeeded.

When the period of gratuitous service had stretched far enough, a
Boston journal of much interest and overwhelming respectability,
deigned graciously to pay five dollars a letter for my London "stuff."
The magnitude of this offer did not shock me, but five dollars meant a
sovereign, and the addition of twenty shillings to one's weekly income
suggested wealth to a young scribbler in London.  Three or four letters
had been despatched when, one evening, an expensive acquaintance who
had rooms above mine, near Queen Square, dropped in at my snug chambers
and spun a yarn.  He had "seen Leighton, you know, President of the
Royal Academy, good sort, dev'lish good fellow.  What do you suppose he
's done now?  Taken up a sculptor in Paris, French of course, poor as I
am, poorer, if it 's possible to be poorer than I am, and has had a
piece of the chap's work sent over here for exhibit at the {30}
Academy.  Sculptor could n't send it.  No money.  Not even a studio.
Devilled for years in other men's studios.  Leighton saw, says fellow
must become known in London.  Got artist chaps to pay expenses of
sending over.  Good fellow, Leighton.  Go see it, you!  Press
Day--Royal Academy--next week.  Forgot French chap's name!"

This brought to my recollection the fact that in Paris, the previous
Easter, when haunting Bohemia with a pack of student friends, I had
heard of a needy sculptor who was doing things of strange power, and
was hard up because he would not work in accepted forms, but persisted
in carving things that nobody wanted.  And who, in those days, would
buy sculpture from an "artist unknown"?  My friends promised that I
should meet the man, but I was called away from Paris before this could
be arranged.

I went to the Royal Academy on Press Day, and saw the specimen of the
"new man's" work.  I was quite alone with it.  One is always sure to be
alone in the Statuary Room of the Royal Academy.  An article came out
of the silence.  It went to my five-dollar editor.  He responded with
this note:


"Sorry we can't pay for any more of your letters.  We printed the last
one, but, really, we don't want articles about unknown sculptors,
especially French ones."


The unknown sculptor, whose name, of course, I gave, was Auguste Rodin!

I subsequently heard that the article was the {31} first about Rodin to
be published in America, and that an artist and fellow townsman of
mine, Henry Bacon, then in Paris, brought it to his attention.  Months
afterward, having followed me half around the world, there arrived by
post a big and battered parcel.  It contained a photograph of the
sculpture I had seen, the bust of Rodin's "St. John Preaching", and the
large mount bore Auguste Rodin's autograph with a grateful message to
me.  I had the trophy framed and hung over the fireplace in my
chambers, and there, whether the fireplace were in England or America,
it has hung ever since.  If I were the first to give Auguste Rodin
public recognition in my country, he was the first anywhere to
acknowledge my stumbling work.

Vocation was pressing its claims more heavily than usual about that
time and there was little opportunity to pursue a project I had formed
for writing a series of articles upon "The London of Disraeli."
Everybody in pendom had written of "Dickens' London", and "Thackeray's
London", and after "Endymion" had made its loudly trumpeted appearance,
it occurred to me that Disraeli had a London which the makers of
articles had not seized upon and which would yield "material" for
interesting copy.  This, if well illustrated, might appeal to some
magazine editor in America and subsequently become a book.  At the same
time I was gathering notes and impressions for a series of papers which
might be called "Odd Corners of London."  For things of this kind
America seemed to promise an especially good market, and I believed
{32} that I could supply it fairly well.  One thing after another
delayed this little plan.  Vocation was taking up more time and at
higher pressure than is compatible with hobby-riding.  It has a habit
of doing so.  Then a visit to America intervened, for the purpose of
spending my twenty-first birthday, and the following five or six
months, at home.  The return to England was followed by a rush of work
in the City, and this by an illness of some weeks' duration.  All the
while the Disraeli subject lay untouched until, one day in 1882, I met
a character in a Disraeli novel, who was much more of a character
outside it.

It was a day of powerful rain.  The Pullman Company were to run their
first train in England over the Brighton line from Victoria Station.
They had invited a regiment of celebrities and a few odd sticks.  Among
the latter I was included by some official of my acquaintance who
thought I might write an article for some overseas paper.  Taking a
place in a smoking car I was solitary for but a minute, when George
Augustus Sala entered hurriedly and plumped himself down beside me,
saying: "What a beastly, blowy, wet morning!"

"The worst since Noah's time," said I.

"If this train gets to Brighton and returns through the flood, it will
be another case not only of pull man, but also of pull devil, pull
baker," said Sala.

"There 's copy for you," said I.

"Oh, are you a journalist?" asked Sala.

"I 'm hoping to be.  It's an aspiration."

"Desperation, more likely," he said.  "Don't do {33} it, young man, not
if there 's a good crossing to sweep in your neighbourhood.  Journalism
is the worst trade in the world."

"Every man says that of his own profession," I replied.

"Profession be hanged!  What do we profess?  We stain paper, and look
as wise as owls, and know a damned sight more than we ever tell.  Most
of us bleat in our folds like sheep; few of us have the chance to go
about the world and see things, and even they work like slaves to
entertain the public while their owners take the profits.  The worst
trade in the world, sir; work harder, know more than any other--about
human nature, anyhow--and get less for it than any other; what we write
is forgotten the day after it's printed, and when we can't grind out
any more, when they 've squeezed our brains dry, we 're thrown on the
dust-heap to be buried by a benevolent association.  Don't go into
journalism unless you own the paper!  That's where the profits are--big
circulation and advertising revenue, politics and peerages!  I 'm too
old for aiming at ownership now; besides, I 'm a writer, not a screw!
Journalism be hanged.  If I 'd been a _chef_ in a millionaire's palace,
or a fashionable hotel, I 'd have done better."

Possibly.  At any rate he would have been the prince of _chefs_ as he
was "the prince of journalists", or was it the king the public called
him?  He was supposed to earn fabulous sums with his pen.  If he earned
them he spent them, for he left nothing when he had "gone west."  He
was an artist in {34} cookery, had a knowing taste in wines; he had
been everywhere, seen everything, knew everybody, and on the shortest
possible notice could write an article upon anything or nothing.  He
had a flaming face, small, glittering eyes, a build and frontage not
unlike that of Pierpont Morgan of later fame, and a reputation for wit
and story-telling.  He had also a reputation for geniality.  He was as
genial as a thunderstorm.  His rumblings and clatters might pass quite
harmless, or sear you with a flash.  His familiar signature was "G.A.S."

"I see you don't believe it," said he, "but you will.  Don't say I did
n't warn you."

"Thanks," said I.

"Not in the least," said he.  "Go to your doom!  What's your paper?"

I said I had written for two or three papers at home, in America, and I
told him the story of the editor who did n't want Rodin.  He laughed
until his white waistcoat nearly burst its buttons.  "I had an editor
once," said he, "who didn't know the date of the Battle of Waterloo but
was certain that Nelson had saved the day.  Journalism a 'profession',
eh?  And editors are the High Board of Examiners.  But don't mind me.
I 'm like this on wet mornings."

Just then a wet prelate in a shaggy coat shook himself at the door, as
if he were a huge dog that had soaked in the rain.  His prelacy was
revealed by the purple at his throat.

"Monsignor Capel," exclaimed Sala.  "How are you?  And did you come in
a boat?"

{35}

"The voyage from Kensington was rough," said the prelate, "but this
seems a snug harbour."

"Make fast to moorings here, and to-morrow the envious will say that
G.A.S. is travelling Rome-wards with you on an American train."

"Undreamed-of felicity," said the prelate.  "But I think we shall not
go far toward Rome to-day.  This train has no 'through connection', as
they say in America.  This is my first experience in an American train,
but not, of course, your first, Mr. Sala.  Possibly your first, sir,"
he said, turning to me, as he took a seat beside Sala.

"Oh, no, I 'm an American," said I.

"Then I am doubly fortunate," said the Monsignor.  "Because I am going
to America and you can tell me how to get about, if you will be so
good."  This was a pleasant way to break the ice, and as the train
filled, presently we had a pleasant company and were speedily at
Brighton, where the Pullman people entertained their trainload at
luncheon.  On the return journey Monsignor Capel sat opposite me at a
table built for two, and talked about America.  That is to say, he
asked questions and I answered them, as we smoked the Pullman cigars.
As we parted at Victoria, he invited me to dine at his house, making an
appointment for the following week.

He was not only a clever man and "striking", as they say, in
appearance, but he had great charm, and being a Jesuit of brilliant and
varied accomplishments, could adapt himself easily to any company.  As
a preacher he was eloquent; as a man of the world he was brilliant and
fascinating; as an {36} ecclesiastic distinguished and influential; as
a maker of titled, wealthy, and in the worldly sense "important"
converts to Rome he was famous, but as the administrator of a college
or university he proved a failure.  He was a prominent figure in London
life; he was the Monsignor Catesby of "Lothair", as Manning was the
Cardinal Grandison.  If his fortunes had begun to ebb at the time I
knew him, the glamour of his successes was still about him.

Disraeli had described Catesby as "a fascinating man who talked upon
all subjects except high mass, and knew everything that took place at
Court without being present there himself.  He led the conversation to
the majestic theme, and while he seemed to be busied in breaking an egg
with delicate precision, and hardly listening to the frank expression
of opinions which he carelessly encouraged, obtained a not insufficient
share of Lothair's views and impressions of human beings and affairs in
general."

I dined with Monsignor Capel on several occasions at Scarsdale Lodge,
in Wright's Lane, Kensington.  Scarsdale Lodge has for many years known
a succession of celebrated tenants, of whom Dundreary Sothern was one.
Sothern had also lived at Cedar Villa, next door, and Capel had
succeeded him there.  Now, and for many years, Scarsdale Lodge has been
the town home of H. Hughes-Stanton, R.A., whom I have known from almost
the beginning of things.  Up to the year preceding the Pullman
excursion Monsignor Capel had lived in Cedar Villa.  Sothern had made
that place famous for breakfasts and suppers and practical jokes.  {37}
Capel's breakfasts had been quite as famous without the practical
jokes.  Capel had transformed Sothern's billiard room into a chapel.
The dining room in which the actor had "exposed" the "feats" of the
Davenport brothers, and where the lights of Bohemia had twinkled, had,
under the prelate's tenancy, been noted for its hospitality to pilgrims
from the polite world who were on the way to Rome.  But the line was
not drawn at hungry hearts.  Palates that were used to dainty feasts
were tickled there, and brilliant table talk of politics and art, of
literature and science and society had rippled there.  Capel's
hospitality was wide; his guests were, as likely as not,
non-conformists--if they dared to come--Anglicans who dared
anything--and political men of all shades of opinion, especially
anti-Gladstonian opinion.  But disciples of the G.O.M. were welcome if
they were good talkers.  They might be converted to other politics; at
any rate they would hear them.

Monsignor Capel at home was in purple-edged cassock, with purple
buttons and broad purple sash.  If in his shaggy overcoat he had
suggested bulk, in his cassock and biretta he was a dignified, even an
imposing figure.  He received me in his study at the twilight hour.
The fire-glow played over the room, while the papal chamberlain
submitted to the processes of an interview.  But "submitted" is
scarcely the right word; it is merely the word that custom applies to
the extraction of copy from a willing subject.  He had invited the
interviewer and did not pretend that the interview {38} was torture.
We sat by the fire and spun.  The room was on the ground floor of the
house and in the rear, overlooking the garden.  His writing desk was in
a bay window, and above it a crucifix was suspended.  Near it, on the
left wall, hung a large photograph of Pope Pius IX and his household.
The Monsignor himself was not inconspicuous in this.  About the room
were a dozen or more photographs of celebrities.  Among these was a
photograph of Gladstone.  "I keep that here as a penance," said Capel,
to whom the name of the "Grand Old Man" was anathema.

Capel alluded to himself as a "lamb" in politics, but his allusion to
politicians opposed to his way of thinking were anything but lamblike
that early evening.  He had published a pamphlet called "Great Britain
and Rome, or Ought the Queen to Hold Diplomatic Relations with the
Sovereign Pontiff?"  Of course he held that she ought, and he said so
to the immense disapproval of the majority of his fellow countrymen.
He had also produced a pamphlet on the Irish Question which, then as
now, could be counted on for enraging and puzzling half the population.
The solution proposed by him, was, I believe, more Roman Catholicism,
but why and how to get more of what was already in excess one did not
see then, and sees now even less than before.

But Capel's star was dimming.  His Catholic college, or university, or
whatever it was, had failed for lack of support and faults of
administration, and the financial troubles were soon to drive him to
the {39} bankruptcy court, if they had not already done so.  And His
Eminence Cardinal Manning had thrown his influence against the
captivating Monsignor.  The Cardinal had his reasons, and, I suppose,
they were good reasons.  At any rate, like Shylock's, they were
sufficient.  When the Cardinal was against a man in his flock, that
man's chances for preferment, and even for holding his own, were not
worth discussing.  Capel went to America in 1883.  He sailed on the
_Arizona_ whose captain was the brother of my friend, Henry Murray.
The Monsignor made a meteoric flash over the American continent.  I saw
him there.  And then the continent swallowed him.  He died in
California, if not unknown then practically forgotten.

The sequel to my visit at Scarsdale Lodge was an article, and the
article was sent, on chance, to the _Boston Herald_, then the leading
newspaper in New England and of almost metropolitan importance.  I did
not know any one connected with the paper, not even the editor's name.
But the article was printed, although I did not know that until some
months later, at the end of 1882, when I turned up in Boston, at the
_Herald_ office, and asked for the editor, sending him my card with a
message of inquiry about the article which I had posted to him from
London some months earlier.

I intended to ask him for a job, for I had decided to settle awhile in
Boston and turn my London experiences to account if the opportunity
could be made.

A boy came to the room where I had waited on the anxious seat for an
unhappy quarter of an hour.

{40}

"Mr. Holmes will see you," he said.  "Come this way."

Holmes was the man's name, was it!  Yes, John H.  I had learned that
much, and I followed the boy to an inner office.  A dark-haired,
slender, agreeable-mannered man, who looked rather like the Whitelaw
Reid of that time, rose from his desk.  As he did so I said:

"Mr. Holmes, I believe."

"Yes," said he, "and you are the writer of that article?" naming it.

"Yes," said I.

He held out his hand, and smiled.  We shook hands, and I tried to look
as if it were my daily occupation to be welcomed by the editors of
powerful journals.  Naturally, I did n't feel that way, and was
nervously wondering what to say next.  That anxiety vanished as the
editor asked:

"Are you at liberty to do any more work of that kind, or of any special
kind, for us?"

"Yes," said I, concealing, I hoped, my eagerness and delight.

"Then I will take as much as you are willing to write," said he, "and
pay you ten dollars a column, and when you go anywhere for us, your
expense bill."

This seemed a fair beginning, particularly as I had not been compelled
to ask for it, as I had expected to do.  When I closed the door behind
me and descended the stairs, I felt an elation of spirit that was
natural enough in a young chap who was more than five months short of
his twenty-third birthday.

{41}

And so, with the beginning of 1883, I took the plunge into journalism.
There followed five more or less adventurous years which carried me
from one end of the country to the other and across the Atlantic and
back again.  Then in 1888, I was appointed London correspondent of the
same paper, a position which I held for nine years until called
elsewhere.  It is with memories and impressions of the London Days of
that time, and of some of their celebrated personages, that the
following pages are concerned.




{42}

CHAPTER V

BROWNING AND MOSCHELES

You will look in vain now for the old brown-brick bungalow that stood,
for the most part concealed by trees and shrubs, within the railings of
the park-like enclosure halfway down Sloane Street, on the left-hand
side, as you go from Knightsbridge.  It stood there till the end of the
eighties.  If you walked there in the days of my early acquaintance
with it, or glided through Sloane Street in a hansom, the chances were
that the bungalow would still escape your glance, sheltered as it was
by foliage.  But from the top of any 'bus you could make it out
readily, and you would wonder, as most 'bus fares did, what lucky or
eccentric fellow lived within the very plain walls and had all that
Cadogan enclosure as a back garden.  Probably your neighbour on the
'bus top would tell you, 'bus neighbours being at all times well
stocked with misinformation, that the favoured dwelling was the home of
the gardener of the enclosure.  But it was not.  It was the home of my
delightful friend, Felix Moscheles, and there you could find Robert
Browning almost any Sunday afternoon when he was in London.

{43}

Felix Stone Moscheles was the son of Ignaz Moscheles, composer and
pianist, whose intimate friendship with Mendelssohn is revealed in the
latter's published correspondence.  Felix was born in London February
8, 1833, at Number 3 Chester Place, Regent's Park, and Mendelssohn
acted as his godfather at the christening in St. Pancras Church.  Felix
died at Tunbridge Wells, December 22, 1917.  He was as kind a man as
ever lived.  He was an artist by profession, fond of music and
musicians, as you might expect him to be; he spoke several languages
fluently and with equal charm--English, French, German, Esperanto, and
I know not what else--and he was passionately attached to movements for
world peace.  We know that nothing made for the peace of the world down
to mid-1914; that while Germany had been deceiving it, the world had
lulled itself to sleep with "drowsy syrups" and ecstatic daydreams.  I
think the awakening killed my dear old friend.  That is not surprising.
He was over eighty-one when the war broke out, and almost eighty-five
when he died.  Down to 1913, when I saw him last, I used to say that he
was the youngest man of my acquaintance.  He had the optimism of youth,
its buoyant spirit, its gallant outlook.

When I first knew Moscheles he was only fifty-five or fifty-six, and he
was passing cakes to the ladies, while his wife poured tea, and a
stoutish man in a grey checked suit, and with grey moustache and
chin-beard, was talking something which seemed like philosophy, and was
certainly not {44} poetry, to a mixed group in a cosy corner.  It was
one of the happy points about Moscheles' Sunday afternoons that if you
cared to continue talking with another caller and the other caller
cared to continue to listen, or to talk with you, you were not routed
up to exchange commonplaces about the weather with somebody else who
needed to be assured that it rained, or that the sun was shining.  You
could flit from group to group, and find a place where you fitted, and
the host or hostess would contrive, if you were unknown, to make you
known to some one without interrupting some one else's story, so that
no one was left adorning the wall.

The stoutish, grey man in the grey checked suit was Robert Browning
whose afternoon-tea manner was quite simple, as unaffected as that of a
bank-chairman contemplating dividends or deposits.  He was not in the
least a posing poet.  He had been a great friend of Moscheles for a
long time, and the latter spoke of him as "my literary godfather."
Moscheles, at this time, was preparing for publication "Felix
Mendelssohn's letters to Ignaz and Charlotte Moscheles."  I had
something to do with persuading him to write "In Bohemia with George Du
Maurier."  I had been looking in his studio through a mass of autograph
letters and sketches relating to his years in Paris as an art student,
the "Trilby" years, and, as Du Maurier's book and the play adapted from
it were the rage of the time, Felix was encouraged to write around the
letters he had, and Du Maurier's early sketches, and about the
characters in the romance of the hour, and to {45} send some of the
chapters to the _Century Magazine_, and afterward to produce the whole
as a book.

Moscheles was brought up among celebrities, and was surrounded by the
famous all his life.  Mendelssohn, Joachim, Malibran, Lablache were, in
his boyhood, family friends.  He attracted distinguished persons as
long as he lived.  When he was thirteen the family moved from London to
Leipzig, at Mendelssohn's instigation.  Mendelssohn was eager that his
friend, Moscheles' father, should become a professor in the
Conservatoire which he was founding at Leipzig.  And so the move was
made, Ignaz Moscheles relinquishing his London career and its worldly
advantages in order to live near his friend.  Felix, who at ten had
begun his education at King's College, London, had, at thirteen, to
find it in Germany.  But not for long; when he was seventeen,
determined to become an artist, he began studying drawing and painting
in Paris, at the Atelier Gleyre.  Having seen something of the troubles
of Germany in 1848, he was now to see the troubles of France which led
to and followed the flight of Louis Philippe, and attended the _coup
d'etat_.

It was during the Atelier Gleyre period that he met George du Maurier
and had the amusing experiences he described afterwards in the book to
which I have alluded.  From Paris he went to Antwerp, where he studied
under Van Lorino at De Keyser's Academy, and where he had as fellow
students Laurens Alma-Tadema, Maris, and Heyermans.  I don't know when
he returned to London {46} to settle down, but when he did so he began
a career that was to be rich in friendships, helpful to all, and
productive in portraiture.

As a portrait painter he was at his best, I think.  As long ago as
1862, in his studio at Cadogan Gardens, he painted a portrait of
Mazzini which, after Mazzini's death, he offered to present to Italy.
But official Italy at that time was not desiring portraits of Mazzini
and the offer was declined.  Now, after the painter's death, the
portrait goes to a museum at Milan.  In 1882, Moscheles visited
America, accompanying his friends Henry Irving and Ellen Terry on their
first journey over the Atlantic.  He painted Grover Cleveland, during
the week when Cleveland was first elected to the Presidency, and talked
with him of the subjects which absorbed the artist,--International
Arbitration and Universal Peace.  His portrait of Browning went to the
Armour Institute, Chicago.  Other portraits of his which were quite
remarkable, which linger in the memory, were of his mother, Charlotte
Moscheles, Rubinstein, H. M. Stanley, Gounod, Sarasate, Tom Mann,
Israels, Stepniak, George Jacob Holyoake (at the age of eighty); he
made beautiful water colours of Venice, of Spain, of Sicily, of Cairo,
of Tunis, of Algerian subjects; and later was quite fascinated by his
scheme of painting a series of "Pictures with a Purpose."

But the "Pictures with a Purpose" did not, I think, attract persons
less purposeful than the painter.  They were socialistic pictures,
reforming, philanthropic, propagandist, as if the painter were {47}
preaching by paint and canvas.  I think his oral preaching was
preferred.

I have mentioned the old brown-brick bungalow where Moscheles lived in
Cadogan Gardens, where I first knew him, and first saw Robert Browning.
Moscheles had lived there for I know not how many years, but when his
lease expired, in the early nineties, the bungalow expired too.  The
march of "improvement" was coming down Sloane Street, and the bungalow
was doomed.  It disappeared from the gaze of surrounding and jealous
neighbours who might have keys to the gardens but could not live in
those pleasant demesnes.  In the Elm Park Road, near the borders of
Chelsea and Fulham, Moscheles found a house with an unusually large
garden.  He transformed the house and built a studio which he connected
with it, and there one went to so many melodious evenings and artistic
afternoons that through the years of recollection I seem to behold him
hospitably dispensing tea and bread and butter, attended by swarms of
musicians who were, or were to become, famous; by poets and painters
who had found, or still were seeking, celebrity; by dreamers who were
going to free Russia; or zealous gentlemen, like Baron d'Estournelles
de Constant, who were not only labouring for the Hague Conferences but
for the Parliament of Man.

It was there that Mark Hambourg first played when he came to London.  I
remember the occasion well enough, but not the music, for I cannot
forget that phenomenally ugly youngster.  He was then {48} only a boy.
But the music rippled and thundered from his fingers, while that
amazing head with its torrential hair cast shivering shadows over the
magical keyboard.  The unprepossessing youth was then unknown.  He
became known soon enough and he ran quickly to the fame that waits upon
pianists of remarkable gifts.

Moscheles was a citizen of the world, which he regarded as his native
country, so it was natural enough that he should take a lively interest
in Esperanto in the days when people thought it a fad, and he became,
as he remained, President of the London Esperanto Club.  He was
constantly corresponding with congenial folk in remote countries with
the object of spreading the merits of Esperanto as an auxiliary
language for international intercourse.  "Even now," he said a
generation ago, "I can go anywhere with it, and by its aid find
somebody who will make me feel at home."  He was a tireless
propagandist.  I would venture to say that he loved "propaganding" more
than art.  At any rate he could seldom avoid diluting his painting with
propaganda in the contented Victorian era when little wars were fought
every six months and trouble looked for between whiles.  How easy it
seemed in those days, when most of us were credulous, to achieve
Liberty by lecturing!

Partly through his zeal for Esperanto and partly through his passion
for a "Free Russia", he was particularly keen to meet Stepniak.  I had
known the latter for some years, having as long ago as 1885 or 1886
written an article about him for the _New {49} York Tribune_.  The
meeting with Moscheles was brought about one night at a "Smoke Talk" in
my home in Cheyne Walk, and from that moment the two men became fast
friends, remaining so until Stepniak's tragic death.  Whether Stepniak
had or had not killed an official in Russia I don't know, and I do not
care much.  If he had killed him I dare say the man deserved it, for,
of all the plundering and oppressive gangs of officialdom, the Russians
of that era had about the worst; they robbed like desperados and they
ruled their land with lies, torture, and corruption.  In a country
capable of producing the "Revolution" of 1917 and the later Bolshevism,
anything was possible in the mid-eighties,--anything except the shadow
of freedom.  The tall dark Russian with the thin beard and the thin
squeaky voice was a striking contrast to Moscheles, who was grey, and
rather short than tall, and whose quiet geniality was the bloom on a
trustful, generous character that invited confidence.  Stepniak used to
say that he never became quite accustomed to the liberty of English
life.  The opposite character of Russian habits had bitten too deeply
into him.  I remember that when he first came to London he would look
around furtively when in the street, and if we stopped at a corner to
talk he would ask: "Will the police allow this?  In Russia they would
not after dark."  If he had lived to see London during the Great War he
might have felt much more at home.

No one was ever bored at the Moscheles' afternoons.  How could one be
bored when host and {50} hostess gave no thought to themselves but all
their thought to their guests?  Even the Swami I met there did not
depress my spirits as many Swamis have done.  I forget his name.  I
have met regiments of them in one country and another.  Mostly they
blazed, not with humility but importance.  He, I say, had a worldly
air, as if he were an Anglican bishop.  He had also a sense of humour
which was not entirely subdued as he listened to an American lady
expounding the doctrine of "Votes for Women."  "Madame," said he, "may
I ask a question?"

The lady looked assent.

"Your husband: does he share these views?"

"Not yet," she replied.

"Ah," said the Swami.  And there were gusts of laughter.

"I may add," said the lady, "that I am not yet married."

Then the laughter came in shrieks, and the Swami smiled.  But this, of
course, was a generation before the suffragettes were brandishing
hatchets like the Redmen, and burning churches and slashing paintings
like the Huns.

But I have alluded to Browning, and have done so because whenever I
think of Moscheles, I always think of him in association with Browning.
Their friendship was very intimate, and that is one fact which shows
the kind of man Moscheles was.  After that glimpse and
how-d'ye-do-good-bye at the old brown-brick bungalow which the Earl of
Cadogan was so glad to destroy when the chance arrived to do so, it had
been arranged by Moscheles and the {51} poet that we should meet again
with another friend of the three at a little lunch of four.  But fate,
or, to be precise, politics, which may be another name for fate,
decided otherwise, and I had to go far afield to chronicle the results.
Never again did that little company come together unless it were at
Browning's open grave, on the midday of the dying year.  The reaper
Death had mown quickly.

When the scene shifted to Westminster Abbey, I waited at the cloister
doors till I could pass to a seat in the Poets' Corner.  While waiting
at the door, I heard from the pressing throng behind me the voice of an
Irish writer whom I had known and had lost from sight five years
before.  While looking for the familiar face that belonged to the
delicious brogue, there came the sound of a great key turning an
ancient lock, and then the door swung open.  "Come," said another
friend, and we went in, getting separated before we had gone far, but
taking seats near the draped grave.

Browning's son was chief mourner.  The poet had died in his son's home,
the Palazzo Rezzonico, in Venice.  And now, this day at Westminster was
the last day of 1889.  The great bell of the Abbey began tolling; its
deep notes floated down from its tower as they sought lodgment in the
hearts of the assembling throng, and with every stroke some face
appeared that all England, or the world, knew well.  After thirty years
I can recall many of the faces that the grey light of the dull day,
softened by the colouring of the Abbey windows, fell upon.  There were
tiers of people.  Even the openings in {52} the triforium revealed
them, and by the great western doors they were packed, though they
could catch but glimpses of the chancel, and most of them not that.
Huxley's was the first face I saw.  I had first seen it in the same
place, almost on the same spot, years before, at Darwin's funeral.  Max
Muller and George Meredith were near him now.  One thought that England
sent her celebrated living men that day to meet the famous multitudes
whose bodies have been laid away beneath the Abbey pavement for
centuries upon centuries.  There were Lord Wolseley and the Lord Chief
Justice, Lord (then Professor) Bryce, Frederic Harrison, Holman Hunt,
Henry Irving, Sidney Colvin, Whistler and Poynter and Alma-Tadema and
Sir John Lubbock (afterwards Lord Avebury).

London was covered with a thickening fog.  You could scarcely see the
Abbey from Dean's Yard.  Within the Abbey the arches aloft dissolved in
mist, a mist of copper and pale gold where the light glanced through
rose windows.  Slipping into one's memory came Mrs. Browning's lines:

  "--view the city perish in the mist
  Like Pharaoh's armaments in the deep Red Sea,
  The chariots, horsemen, footmen, all the host
  Sucked down and choked to silence."


Candles from the choir places, and long-chained lamps, sent their soft,
yellow gleams eerily through the veil which seemed to hang above us.
And as the high noon drew near my glances fell upon the historians
Kinglake, Lecky, and Froude.  Would {53} any one of the three ever
write of this scene in England's history, I wondered?  Bret Harte,
Burne-Jones, George du Maurier, Leslie Stephen, William Black,
Bancroft, and John Hare, and the publishers Blackwood, Macmillan,
Murray, and Spottiswoode, ambassadors and ministers, the heads of
universities, of learned societies, were shown to their places, singly
or in groups, or took positions where they could find them, standing
against the monuments.  And when no more people could find space, the
Abbey clock struck twelve, and the great west doors swung open, and
down the long central aisle came the funeral train.  Then arose the
choral music which for one hundred and seventy years has risen at every
burial within the Abbey, the burial office composed and played by Croft
and Purcell when they were organists at Westminster.

Sir Frederick Bridge is playing it now, as Robert Browning, all there
is of him on earth, is carried on his bier through the dense throng, to
pause a while at the foot of the chancel steps beneath the central
lantern.  Choir and clergy precede him.  On either side of him walk
Hallam Tennyson, Doctor Butler (of Trinity College, Cambridge), Sir
James Fitzjames Stephen, Sir Theodore Martin, Archdean Farrar,
Professor Masson, Professor Jowett (master of Balliol), Sir Frederick
Leighton, Sir James Paget, Sir George Grove, George Murray Smith
(Browning's publisher), and Professor Knight (of the University of St.
Andrews).  Then as the service proceeds (the Archbishop of Canterbury
is here, Dean Vaughan, and others eminent in the {54} Church) the
choristers sing a "Meditation" which Sir Frederick Bridge has composed
to Mrs. Browning's poem:

  "What would we give to our beloved?
  The hero's heart to be unmoved,
    The poet's star-tuned harp to sweep,
  The patriot's voice to teach and rouse,
  The monarch's crown to light the brows?
    'He giveth His beloved sleep.'

  "O earth, so full of dreary noises!
  O men, with wailing in your voices!
    O delved gold, the wailers heap!
  O strife, O curse that o'er it fall!
  God strikes a silence through you all,
    And 'giveth His beloved sleep.'

  "His dews drop mutely on the hill,
  His cloud above it saileth still,
    Though on its slopes men sow and reap,
  More softly than the dew is shed,
  Or cloud is floated overhead,
    'He giveth His beloved sleep.'"


The organ and the choir paused; all sounds died away.  God struck a
silence through us all.  It fell upon a throng that faced the world's
loss as if suddenly confronted by the flight of the soul for whose
absence all mourned.  And just then there fell a shaft of sunlight,
golden, magical, touching the bier, and then it faded slowly away.  To
many, very many among the silent company, the loss by this death was a
personal one; to all it had more than a touch of that.  It must be so
when a great poet dies.  What I remember as vividly as all else {55}
was the great number of young faces in the Abbey, as if the rising
generation did reverence to him who had passed.

By and by the last hymn had been sung, the Dean had pronounced the
benediction, and Bridge, at the great organ, made the old Abbey thrill
to its inmost stones with the vibrating tones of the Dead March from
"Saul."  Now the coffin had been lowered into its grave at the foot of
Chaucer's tomb.  Before us and at each hand were monuments, tablets,
inlaid stones, marking the burial places of Spenser, Dryden, Gay, of
Butler and Casaubon, Ben Jonson, Addison and Cowley, Prior, Macaulay
and Grote; of Handel, Campbell, Sheridan, and Garrick.  I stood on the
grave of Dickens.  And the throng passed slowly, reverently gazing into
the dark grave where Browning's body had been laid as the old year was
dying.  Pealing through nave and transepts and the chapels of Kings,
above the altar and the tombs of soldiers, sailors, statesmen--the
brood who had made England and sung of her--the rumbling and trumpeting
of the Dead March.  Might not Shakespeare and Milton, Doctor Johnson,
and Goldsmith and Gray have come to the Poets' Corner that day at noon
to join the company, and to greet, from their own memorials, this other
man who had helped to make England?  It seemed quite probable as we
passed from that real world into the world of fog, and the closing door
of the Poets' Corner shut in behind us the now tremulous notes of the
organ.

How often have I heard Sir Frederick stir the {56} slumbering majesty,
beauty, and solemnity that lie within the Abbey organ, stir them to
living wonder on occasions like this?  More times than I can easily
recall.  In capitals and churches and cathedrals, in many parts of the
world, that March from "Saul" has awakened memories within me.  My
earliest memory of music concerns itself with a military band, marching
slowly, slowly down a hill, troops following with reversed arms, a gun
carriage carrying something that was not a gun, covered with a flag;
horses whose riders moved very slowly; coaches that young eyes saw as
beyond number; and then a hole-in-the-ground.  Men carried something on
their shoulders from the gun carriage and lowered it into the hole;
other men fired guns at the sky.  A hawk flew full circle in the blue.
And some one said, "My boy, take a last look where your father lies."
Then the Dead March rolled and moaned again, and fixed itself on one of
the pins of memory.

The solemn notes always bring back those moments, as a vision in which
a small boy made his first acquaintance with Death.  But they have
never seemed to humble and exalt, moan and triumph and sob and
victoriously march to the rhythm of the winds, so charged with majesty,
as when Sir Frederick touched the heart of his instrument at the Abbey.
The occasion, the place drenched with memories, the simple ceremony,
the music's magic, and the mystery of it all make of this tribute to
Death one of the rich experiences of living.




{57}

CHAPTER VI

PATTI

One broiling afternoon--it was in August, 1893--a Great Western train
from London left me at a wee-bit station on the top of a Welsh
mountain.  The station was called "Penwylt."  It overlooked the Swansea
Valley, and stood about halfway between Brecon and the sea.  When a
traveller alighted at Penwylt there was no need to ask why he did so.
He could have but one destination, and that was Craig-y-Nos Castle, the
home of Madame Patti.  She was then Madame Patti-Nicolini; she
afterward became the Baroness Cederstroem.  I shall use here the name by
which, for sixty years, she has been known to an adoring world.  A
carriage from the castle was awaiting me, and quickly it bore me down
the steep road to the valley, a sudden turn showing the Patti palace
there on the banks of the Tawe.  The Castle was two miles distant and a
thousand feet below the railway.  An American flag was flying on the
tower.  It flew there through the week of my visit, for was I not an
ambassador from the American Public to the Queen of Song?

Mr. Gladstone once told Madame Patti that he would like to make her
Queen of Wales.  But she {58} was that already, and more.  She was
Queen of Hearts the world over, and every soul with an ear was her
liege.  And, literally, in Wales Patti was very like a queen.  She
lived in a palace; people came to her from the ends of the earth; she
was attended with "love, honour, troops of friends"; and whenever she
went beyond her own immediate gardens the country folk gathered by the
roadside, dropping curtseys and throwing kisses to her bonny majesty.

Her greeting of me was characteristic of this most famous and fortunate
of women, this unspoiled favourite of our whirling planet.  A group of
her friends stood merrily chatting in the hall, and, as I approached, a
dainty little woman with big brown eyes came running out from the
centre of the company, stretched forth her hands, spoke a hearty
welcome, and accompanied it with the inimitable smile which had made
slaves of emperors.  She had the figure and vivacity of a girl.  She
was fifty that year, but, there in broad daylight, looked fifteen or
twenty years younger.  This is not an illusion of gallantry, but a
statement of fact.

There was a kind of family party at Craig-y-Nos.  Stiffness and
dullness, and the usual country-house talk about horses and guns, golf
and fishing, did not prevail there.  _La Diva's_ guests were intimate
friends, and chiefly a company of English girls who were passing the
summer with her.  In the evening, when all assembled in the
drawing-room before going in to dinner, I found that we represented
five nationalities,--Italian, Spanish, French, English, {59} and
American.  While we awaited the appearance of our hostess, the
gathering seemed like a polyglot congress.

As the chimes in the tower struck the hour of eight, a fairy vision
appeared at the drawing-room door,--Patti, royally gowned and jewelled.
The defects of the masculine intellect leave me incapable of describing
the costume of that radiant little woman.  It belonged to one of her
operatic characters, I forget which one.  But my forgetfulness does n't
matter.  The sight brought us to our feet, bowing as if we had been a
company of court gallants in the "spacious days of great Elizabeth",
and we added the modern tribute of applause, which our queen
acknowledged with a silvery laugh.  I remember only that the gown was
white and of some silky stuff, and that about _La Diva's_ neck were
loops of pearls, and that above her fluffy chestnut hair were
glittering jewels.  With women it may be different, but mere man cannot
give a list of Patti's adornments on any occasion; he can know only
that they became her, and that he saw only her happy face.  Before our
murmurs had ceased, Patti, who had not entered the room, but had merely
stood in the portal, turned, taking the arm of the guest who was to sit
at her right, and away we marched in her train, as if she were truly
the queen, through the corridors to the conservatory, where dinner was
served.

It was my privilege at the Castle table to sit at Madame Patti's left.
At her right was one whose friendship with her dated from the instant
of her {60} first European triumph.  Heavens!--How many years ago?  But
it was a quarter of a century less than it now is at the time of which
I am writing.  The delight of those luncheons and dinners at
Craig-y-Nos is unforgettable.  There was a notion abroad that these
meals were held "in state"; but they were not.  There was merely the
ordinary dinner custom of an English mansion.  The menu, though, was
stately enough, for the art of cookery was practised at Craig-y-Nos by
a master who had earned the right to prepare dinners for Patti.  The
dining room was seldom used in summer for, handsome though that
apartment is, Patti, and her guests, too, for that matter, preferred to
be served in the great glass room which was formerly the conservatory
and was still called so.  There we sat, as far as outlook goes, out of
doors; in whatever direction we gazed we looked up or down the Swansea
Valley, across to the mountains, and along the tumbling course of the
river Tawe.  I was risking some neglect of my dinner, for I sat gazing
at the wood-covered cliffs of Craig-y-Nos (Rock-of-the-Night) opposite,
and listening to the ceaseless prattle of the mountain stream.  Patti,
noticing my admiration of the view, said, "You see what a dreadful
place it is in which I bury myself."

"'Bury' yourself!  On the contrary, here you are at the summit of
Paradise, and you have discovered the fountain of perpetual youth.  A
'dreadful place', indeed!  It's the nearest thing to fairy-land."

"But one of your countrymen says that I 'hide {61} far from the world
among the ugly Welsh hills.'  He writes it in an American journal of
fabulous circulation, and I suppose people believe the tale."

Patti laughed at the thought of a too credulous public, and then she
added:

"Really, they write the oddest things about my home, as if it were
either the scene of Jack-the-Giant-Killer's exploits on the top of the
Beanstalk, or a prison in a desolate land."

After visiting Patti at Craig-y-Nos I wondered no more why this
enchanting woman sang "Home, Sweet Home" so that she fascinated
millions.  Her own home was far from being "humble", but it was before
all things, a home.  And she had earned it.  There is not anywhere a
lovelier spot, nor was there elsewhere a place so remote and at the
same time so complete in every resource of civilization.

Dinner passed merrily.  Merrily is exactly the word to describe it.  Up
and down the table good stories flew, sometimes faster than one could
catch them.  Nobody liked a good joke better than Patti, and when she
heard one that particularly pleased her she would interpret it to some
guest who had not sufficiently mastered the language in which it was
told.  It was all sheer comedy, and after watching it, and hearing _La
Diva_ speak in a variety of tongues, I asked:

"I wonder if you have what people call a native tongue, or whether all
of them came to you as a gift of the gods."

"Oh, I don't know so many languages," she {62} replied, "only--let's
see--English, German, Italian, Spanish, and Russian."

"And which do you speak best, or like best?"

"I really don't know.  To me there is no difference, as far as
readiness goes, and I suppose 'the readiness is all.'"

"Not quite all.  But what is your favourite, if you have a favourite
among them?"

"Oh, Italian!  Listen!"

And then she recited an Italian poem.  Next to hearing Patti sing, the
sweetest sound was her Italian speech.  Presently she said:

"Speaking of languages, Mr. Gladstone paid me a pretty compliment a
little while ago--nearly three years ago.  I will show you his letter
to-morrow, if you care to see it."

Patti forgot nothing.  The next day she brought me Mr. Gladstone's
letter.  The Grand Old Man had been among her auditors at Edinburgh,
and after the performance he went on the stage to thank her for the
pleasure she had given him.  He complained a little of a cold which had
been troubling him, and Patti begged him to try some lozenges which she
found useful.  That night she sent him a little box of them.  The old
statesman acknowledged the gift with this letter:


6, Rothesay Terrace,
  Edinburgh.
    October 22, 1890.

Dear Madame Patti:

I do not know how to thank you enough for your charming gift.  I am
afraid, however, that the use {63} of your lozenges will not make me
your rival.  _Voce quastata di ottante' anni non si ricupera_.

It was a rare treat to hear from your Italian lips last night the songs
of my own tongue, rendered with a delicacy of modulation and a fineness
of utterance such as no native ever in my hearing had reached or even
approached.  Believe me,

Faithfully yours,
  W. E. GLADSTONE.


This letter, naturally enough, gave conversation a reminiscent turn.
After some talk of great folk she had known, I asked Madame Patti what
had been the proudest experience in her career.

"For a great and unexpected honour most gracefully tendered," said she,
"I have known nothing that has touched me more deeply than a compliment
paid by the Prince of Wales (afterwards King Edward VII) and a
distinguished company, at a dinner given to the Duke of York and the
Princess May (the present King and Queen), a little while before their
wedding.  The dinner was given by Mr. Alfred Rothschild, one of my
oldest and best friends.  There were many royalties present and more
dukes and duchesses than I can easily remember.  During the ceremonies
the Prince of Wales arose, and to my astonishment, proposed the health
of his 'old and valued friend, Madame Patti.'  He made _such_ a pretty
speech, and in the course of it said that he had first seen and heard
me in Philadelphia in 1860, when I sang in 'Martha', and that since
then his own attendance at what he was good enough to call my
'victories in the realm of song' had been among his pleasantest {64}
recollections.  He recalled the fact that on one of the occasions, when
the Princess and himself had invited me to Marlborough House, his wife
had held up little Prince George, in whose honour we were this night
assembled, and bade him kiss me, so that in after life he might say
that he had 'kissed the famous Madame Patti.'  And then, do you know,
that whole company of royalty, nobility, and men of genius rose and
cheered me and drank my health.  Don't you think that any little woman
would be proud, and ought to be proud, of a spontaneous tribute like
that?"

It is difficult, when repeating in this way such snatches of biography,
to suggest the modest tone and manner of the person whose words may be
recorded.  It is particularly difficult in the case of Madame Patti,
who was absolutely unspoiled by praise.  Autobiography such as hers
must read a little fanciful to most folk; it is so far removed from the
common experiences of us all and even from the extraordinary
experiences of the renowned persons we hear about usually.  But there
was not a patch of vanity in Patti's sunny nature.  Her life had been a
long, unbroken record of success,--success to a degree attained by no
other woman.  No one else has won and held such homage; no one else had
been so wondrously endowed with beauty and genius and sweet simplicity
of nature,--a nature unmarred by flattery, by applause, by wealth, by
the possession and exercise of power.  Patti at fifty was like a girl
in her ways, in her thoughts, her spirit, in her disinterestedness, in
her enjoyments.  {65} Time had dimmed none of her charms, it had not
lessened then her superb gifts.  She said to me one day:

"They tell me I am getting to be an old woman, but I don't believe it.
I don't feel old.  I feel young.  I am the youngest person of my
acquaintance."

That was true enough, as they knew who saw Patti from day to day.  She
had all the enthusiasm and none of the affectations of a young girl.
When she spoke of herself it was with most delicious frankness and lack
of self-consciousness.  She was perfectly natural.

She promised to show me the programme of that Philadelphia performance
before the Prince of Wales so long ago, and the next day she put it
before me.  It was a satin programme with gilt fringe, and it was
topped by the Prince of Wales's feathers.  At that Philadelphia
performance Patti made her first appearance before royalty.  In the
next year she made her London debut at Covent Garden, as Amina in "La
Somnambula."  The next morning Europe rang with the fame of the new
prima donna from America.

"I tried to show them that the young lady from America was entitled to
a hearing," said she, as we looked over the old programmes.

"And has 'the young lady from America' kept her national spirit, or has
she become so much a citizen of the world that no corner of it has any
greater claim than another upon her affections?"

"I love the Italian language, the American people, {66} the English
country, and my Welsh home," she said.

"Good!  The national preferences, if you can be said to own any, have
reason on their side.  Your parents were Italian, you were born in
Spain, you made your first professional appearance in America, you
first won international fame in England, and among these Welsh hills
you have planted a paradise."

"How nice of you!  That evening at Mr. Alfred Rothschild's, the Prince
of Wales asked me why I do not stay in London during 'the season', and
take some part in its endless social pleasures.  'Because, your Royal
Highness,' I replied, 'I have a lovely home in Wales, and whenever I
come away from it I leave my heart there.'  'After all,' said the
prince, 'why should you stay in London when the whole world is only too
glad to make pilgrimages to Craig-y-Nos?'  Was n't that nice of him?"

I despair of conveying any impression of the _naivete_ with which the
last five words were uttered.  The tone expressed the most innocent
pleasure in the world.  When Patti spoke in that way she seemed to be
wondering why people should say and do so many pleasant things on her
account.  There was an air of childish surprise in her look and voice.

I said: "All good republicans have a passion for royalty.  I find that
an article about a King, or a Queen, or a Prince is in greater demand
in the United States than anywhere else in the world.  So tell me
something more about the Prince and Princess of Wales.  I promise, as a
zealous democrat, that {67} no one on the far side of the Atlantic will
skip a word.  Have the Prince and Princess visited Craig-y-Nos?"

"No.  But they were coming here a couple of years ago.  See--here is
the Prince's letter fixing the date.  But it was followed by the death
of the Duke of Clarence, their eldest son, and then for many months
they lived in quiet and mourning, only appearing in their usual way
just before the wedding of the Duke of York (King George V).  They sent
me an invitation to the wedding festivities.  But alas!  I could not
go.  I had just finished my season and was lying painfully ill with
rheumatism.  You heard of that?  For weeks I suffered acutely.  It's an
old complaint.  I have had it at intervals ever since I was a child.
But about that royal wedding.  When the Prince and Princess of Wales
learned that I was too ill to accept their gracious invitation,
they--well, what do you suppose they did next?"

"Something kind and graceful."

"They sent me two large portraits of themselves, bearing their
autographs and fitted into great gilt frames.  You shall see the
portraits after dinner.  They have the places of honour at Craig-y-Nos."

We had reached the coffee stage of dinner, and the cigars were being
passed.  The ladies did not withdraw, according to the mediaeval (and
shall I say popular?) habit, but the company remained unbroken, and
while the gentlemen smoked, the ladies kept them in conversation.
Nowadays you would say they all smoked.  Presently, some one {68}
proposed Patti's health, and we all stood, singing, "For She 's a Jolly
Good Fellow."

That put the ball of merriment in motion again.  One of the young
ladies, a goddaughter of the hostess, carolled a stanza from a popular
ditty.  At first I thought it audacious that any one should sing in the
presence of _La Diva_.  It seemed sacrilege.  But in another instant we
were all at it, piping the chorus, and Patti leading off.  The fun of
the thing was infectious.  The song finished, we ventured another, and
Patti joined us in the refrains of a medley of music-hall airs,
beginning with London's latest mania, "Daisy Bell, or a Bicycle Built
for Two", and winding up with Chevalier's "Old Kent Road" and the
"Coster's Serenade", Coborn's "Man That Broke the Bank at Monte Carlo",
and somebody else's "Daddy Would n't Buy me a Bow-Wow."

Patti turned with an arch look.  "You will think our behaviour
abominable."

"No, I don't.  I think it jolly.  Besides, it's not everybody who has
heard you sing comic songs."

Her answer was a peal of laughter, and then she sat there, singing very
softly a stanza of "My Old Kentucky Home", and as we finished the
chorus she lifted a clear, sweet note, which thrilled us through and
through and stirred us to excited applause.

"What have I done?"  Patti put the question with a puzzled air.

The reply came from the adjoining library: "High E."  One of our number
had run to the piano.

{69}

Then I recalled what Sir Morell Mackenzie had told me a little while
before he died.  We were chatting in that famous room of his in Harley
Street, and we happened to mention Madame Patti.  "She has the most
wonderful throat I have ever seen," said Sir Morell.  "It is the only
one I have ever seen with the vocal cords in absolutely perfect
condition after many years of use.  They are not strained, or warped or
roughened, but as I tell you, they are perfect.  There is no reason why
they should not remain so ten years longer, and with care and health
twenty years longer."

Remembering this, I asked Patti if she had taken extraordinary care of
her voice.

"I have never tired it," said she; "I never sing when I am tired, and
that means I am never tired when I sing.  And I have never strained for
high notes.  I have heard that the first question asked of new
vocalists nowadays is 'How high can you sing?'  But I have always
thought that the least important matter in singing.  One should sing
only what one can sing with perfect ease."

"But in eating and drinking?  According to all accounts, you are the
most abstemious person in the world."

"No, indeed!  I avoid very hot and very cold dishes, otherwise I eat
and drink whatever I like.  My care is chiefly to avoid taking cold and
to avoid indigestion.  But these are the ordinary precautions of one
who knows that health is the key to happiness."

"And practising?  Have you rigid rules for that?  One hears of
astounding exercise and self-denial."

{70}

"Brilliant achievements in fiction.  For practising I run a few scales
twenty minutes a day.  After a long professional tour I let my voice
rest for a month and do not practise at all during that time."

During my visit to Craig-y-Nos we usually spent our evenings in the
billiard rooms.  There were two, an English room and a French one.  In
the French room there was a large orchestrion which had been built in
Geneva for Madame Patti.  It was operated by electricity and was said
to be the finest instrument of its kind.  Our hostess would start it of
an evening, and the ingenious contrivance would "discourse most
eloquent music" from a repertoire of one hundred and sixteen pieces,
including arias from grand operas, military marches and simple ballads.
Music, of course, is the fascinator that Patti cannot resist.  The
simplest melody stirs her to song.  In the far corner from the
orchestrion she would sit in a big easy-chair, and hum the air that
rolled from the organ pipes, keeping time with her dainty feet, or
moving her head as the air grew livelier.  Or she would send forth some
lark-like trill, or urge the young people to a dance, or a chorus, and
when every one was tuned to the full pitch of melody and merriment, she
would join in the fun as heartily as the rest.  I used to sit and watch
her play the castanets, or hear her snatch an air or two from "Martha",
"Lucia", or "Traviata."

One night the younger fry were chanting negro melodies, and Patti came
into the room, warbling as if possessed by an ecstasy.  "I love those
darky songs," said she, and straightway she sang to us, {71} with that
inimitable clarity and tenderness which were hers alone, "Way Down upon
the Suwanee River", "Massa's in the Col', Col' Ground", and after that
"Home, Sweet Home", while all of us listeners felt more than we cared
to show.

Guests at Craig-y-Nos were the most fortunate of mortals.  If the guest
were a man, a valet was told off to attend him; if the guest were a
lady, a maid was placed at her service.  Breakfast was served in one's
room at any hour one chose.  Patti never came down before high noon.
She rose at half-past eight, but remained until twelve in her
apartments, going through her correspondence with her secretary and
practising a little music.  At half-past twelve luncheon was served in
the glass pavilion.  After that hour a guest was free to follow his own
devices until dinner time.  He might go shooting, fishing, riding,
walking, or he might stroll about the lovely demesne, and see what
manner of heavenly nook nature and Patti had made for themselves among
the hills of Wales.  Patti's castle is in every sense a palatial
dwelling.  She saw it fifteen years before I did, fell in love with it,
purchased it, and subsequently expended great sums in enlarging it.
The castellated mansion, with the theatre at one end and the pavilion
and winter garden at the other, has a frontage of fully a thousand feet
along the terraced banks of the Tawe.  But the place has been so often
described that it is unnecessary to repeat that oft-told story, or to
give details of the gasworks, the electric-lighting station, the ice
plant and cold-storage rooms, the steam {72} laundry, the French and
English kitchens, the stables, the carriage houses, the fifty servants,
or of the watchfulness, care, devotion, which surrounded the melodious
mistress of this miniature kingdom.  Those matters are a part of the
folklore of England and America.

But I must say something of Patti's little theatre.  It was her special
and particular delight.  She got more pleasure from it than from any
other of the many possessions at Craig-y-Nos.  It was a gem of a
theatre, well proportioned and exquisitely decorated.  Not only could
the sloping floor be quickly raised, so that the auditorium might
become a ballroom, but the appurtenances of the stage were elaborate
and complete.  For this statement I had the authority of the stage
manager of the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden.  This expert was
supervising certain alterations at the Patti theatre while I was at
Craig-y-Nos, and he told me that the house then contained every
accessory for the production of forty operas!

Patti sang occasionally at concerts in her theatre.  All her life she
treasured her voice for the public; she had never exhausted it by
devising an excess of entertainment for her personal friends.  And so
most of the performances in the little theatre were pantomimic.
Although Patti seemed to me always to be humming and singing while I
was at the Castle, yet there was nothing of the "performing" order in
what she did.  She merely went singing softly about the house, or
joining in our choruses, like a happy child.

{73}

One morning, while a dozen of us were sitting in the shade of the
terrace, the ladies with their fancy work, the men with their papers,
books, and cigars, we heard, from an open window above, a burst of
song, full-throated like a bird's.  It was for all the world like the
song of a skylark, of glorious ecstasy, as if the bird were mounting in
the air, the merrier as it soared the higher, until it poured from an
invisible height a shower of joyous melody.  No one amongst us stirred,
or made a sound.  _La Diva_ thought us far away up the valley, where we
had planned an excursion, but we had postponed the project to a cooler
day.  We remained silent, listening.  Our unseen entertainer seemed to
be flitting about her boudoir, singing as she flitted, snatching a bar
or two from this opera and that, revelling in the fragment of a ballad,
or trilling a few notes like our friend the lark.  Presently she
ceased, and we were about to move, when she began to sing "Comin' Thro'
the Rye."  She was alone in her room, but she was singing as gloriously
as if to an audience of ten thousand in the Albert Hall.  The
unsuspected group of listeners on the terrace slipped then from their
own control, and took to vigorous applause and cries of "_brava,
brava_."

"Oh, oh, oh!" cried the birdlike voice above.

We looked up, and saw Patti leaning out at the casement.

"Oh," said she, "I couldn't help it, really I could n't.  I 'm so
happy!"

At luncheon she proposed an entertainment in the theatre for the
evening of the following day.  {74} We were to have "Camille" in
pantomime.  The preparations moved swiftly.  Among the guests were
several capable amateur actors.  The performance began a little after
ten.  Some musicians were brought from Swansea.  A dozen gentlefolk
hastily summoned from the valley, those among the guests who were not
enrolled for the pantomime, and a gallery full of cottagers and
servants made up the audience.  We had "an opera" in five acts of
pantomime, with orchestra, and all together it was fun.  Of course,
Patti carried off the honours.  There was supper after the play, and
the sunlight crept into the Swansea Valley within two hours after we
had risen from table.

I said to Patti after the pantomime, "You don't seem to believe that
change of occupation is the best possible rest.  You seem to work as
hard at rehearsing and acting in your little theatre as if you were 'on
tour.'"

"Not quite!  Besides, it is n't work, it's play," replied the
miraculous little woman.  "I love the theatre.  And, then, there is
always something to learn about acting.  I find these pantomime
performances useful as well as amusing."

Every afternoon about three o'clock Patti and her guests went for a
drive, a small procession of landaus and brakes rattling along the
smooth country roads.  You could see at once that this was Pattiland.
The cottagers came to their doors and saluted her Melodious Majesty,
and the children of the countryside ran out and threw kisses.

"Oh! the dears," exclaimed the kind-hearted {75} Queen, as we were
driving toward the village of Ystradgynlais (they call it something
like "Ist-rag-dun-las"), one afternoon.  "I would like to build another
castle and put all those mites into it, and let them live there with
music and flowers!"  And I believe she would have given orders for such
a castle straightway, had there been a builder in sight.

On the way home Patti promised me "a surprise" for the evening.  I
wondered what it might be, and when the non-appearance of the ladies
kept the gentlemen waiting in the drawing-room at dinner time, I was
the more puzzled.  The men, to pass the time, inspected the "trophies"
of the prima donna.  It would be impossible to enumerate them because
Craig-y-Nos Castle was another South Kensington Museum in respect to
the treasures it held.  Every shelf, table, and cabinet was packed with
gifts which Patti had received from all parts of the earth, from
monarchs and millionaires, princes and peasants, old friends and
strangers.  There was Marie Antoinette's watch, to begin with, and
there were portraits of the Prince and Princess of Wales, to end with.
There was a remarkable collection of portraits of royal personages,
presented to Patti by the distinguished originals on the occasion of
her marriage to M. Nicolini.  Photographs of the Grand Old Man of
Politics and the Grand Old Man of Music rested side by side on a little
table presented by some potentate.  Gladstone's likeness bore his
autograph and the inscription, "_Con tanti e tanti Complimenti_";
Verdi's, his autograph and a fervent tribute written at Milan.  There
were crowns and {76} wreaths and rare china; there were paintings and
plate, and I know not what, wherever one looked.

If one were to make Patti a gift, and he had a King's ransom to
purchase it, he would find it difficult to give her anything that would
be a novelty, or that would be unique in her eyes.  She had everything.
For my part, I would pluck a rose from her garden, or gather a nosegay
from a hedgerow, and it would please her as much as if it were a
diadem.  She valued the thought that prompted the giving, rather than
the gift itself.  She never forgot even the smallest act of kindness
that was done for her sake.  And she was always doing kindnesses for
others.  I have heard from the Welsh folk many tales of her generosity.
And to her friends she was the most open-handed of women.

There was one dark, drizzly day during the visit to Craig-y-Nos.  It
mattered little to the men.  The wet did not interfere with their
amusements.  But every lady wore some precious jewel that Patti had
given her that morning,--a ring, a brooch, a bracelet, as the case
might be.  For the generous creature thought her fair friends would be
disappointed because they could not get out of doors.  How could she
know that every one in the Castle welcomed the rain because it meant a
few hours more with Patti?

The "surprise" she had spoken of was soon apparent.  The ladies came
trooping into the drawing-room wearing the gowns and jewels of Patti's
operatic roles.  Patti herself came last, in "Leonora's" white and
jewels.  What a dinner-party we {77} had that night,--we men, in the
prim black and white of evening dress, sitting there with "Leonora" and
"Desdemona" and "Marguerite" and "Rachel" and "Lucia" and "Carmen" and
"Dinorah", and I know not how many more!  Nobody but Patti would have
thought of such merry masquerading, or, having thought of it, would or
could have gone to the trouble of providing it.

Of course, we talked of her favourite characters in opera, and then of
singers she had known.  She said it would give her real pleasure to
hear Mario and Grisi again, or, coming to later days, Scalchi and Annie
Louise Carey.  The latter, being an American and a friend, I was glad
to hear this appreciation of her from the Queen of Song.  "Carey and
Scalchi were the two greatest contraltos I have known; and I have sung
with both of them.  I remember Annie Louise Carey as a superb artist
and a sweet and noble woman."

I said "Hear, hear," in the parliamentary manner, and then Patti added:

"Now we will go to the theatre again.  There is to be another
entertainment."  It was, of all unexpected things, a lantern show.
Patti's arrangement for that was, like everything else at Craig-y-Nos,
from her piano to her pet parrot, the only one of its kind.  It was
capable of giving, with all sorts of "mechanical effects", a two hours'
entertainment every night for two months without repeating a scene.
Patti invited me to sit beside her and watch the dissolving views.  It
seemed to me that it would be like this to sit beside Queen Victoria
{78} during a "State performance" at Windsor, only not half so much
fun!  Here was Patti Imperatrice, dressed like a queen, wearing a crown
of diamonds, and attended by her retinue of brilliantly attired women
and attentive gentlemen of the court.  And it was so like her to cause
the entertainment to end with a series of American views and to sing
for me "Home, Sweet Home", as we looked out on New York harbour from a
steamship inward bound.

The next morning I started from Craig-y-Nos for America.  As the
dogcart was tugged slowly up the mountain side, the Stars and Stripes
saluted me from the Castle tower, waving farewell as I withdrew from my
peep at Paradise.




{79}

CHAPTER VII

JOHN STUART BLACKIE

The wind was from the east, the Scotch "mist" from everywhere, but
Professor Blackie had a sunny heart that made one forget the raw
weather.  I thought the sun was shining and the skies blue when I went
to lunch at Number 9 Douglas Crescent, Edinburgh, one November day in
the early nineties.

Almost any day in half a century you might have seen Professor Blackie
striding through Edinburgh as strong as an athlete, hearty as a young
hunter.  One morning I encountered him as he was beating eastward
against half a gale, his cape flying, his cloud of white hair tossing
against his big-brimmed, soft black hat, his cheeks rosy with the
winter wind, and his kind eyes dancing with the delight he felt in
exercise.  He was eighty-five!

I told him of reading somewhere that he loved to play the peripatetic
philosopher.  How he laughed!  "Do they say that of me?  Ho, ho, ho!"
And then he trolled a "Hi-ti-rumty-tum", snatching an air, as his habit
was, from a half-forgotten song, and ending with an exclamatory line of
Greek.  He looked like a prophet apostrophising the gods.

"And they say I speak 'a confusion of tongues.' {80} Don't mind that,"
said he.  "Greek, Latin, Gaelic, German, English--all are one to me.  I
borrow the words that come readiest for the thought.  But Greek is the
great language."  And he strode down the hill.

He was the most picturesque figure then living in Edinburgh, and many
thought him the greatest man in the Scotland of those times.  He was
the "Grand Old Man" of that northern kingdom, and in vitality and
spirits and capacity for work he was at eighty-five the youngest man I
knew.  He was packed with wisdom and overflowing with music and
merriment.  If he had not been so musical and so merry you might have
called him Scotland incarnate.  Doubtless he was that, with the music
and merriment added.  As for character, even Scotland never produced a
nobler one, nor set it in a more imposing figure, or in a grander head.
Scholar, poet, philosopher, teacher, learner, political writer, lover
of the classics, strenuous believer in modern progress, he was sure
that the world was never better than in his day, the Victorian day, and
that it was growing better steadily.  They were all optimists then.
Lord Salisbury, when prime minister, added that they were all
socialists.  Professor Blackie drew the line at that.  Perhaps
Salisbury was quoting Harcourt.

Visiting in Glasgow, I received one morning a note from him inviting me
to lunch at his house in Edinburgh.  On the lower, left-hand corner of
the envelope he had written a line of Greek, as his custom was.  This
time it was an adjuration: {81} "Speak the truth in love."  But who
could speak of him in other words than those of love?  In his note he
had written "Come and talk."  But he did all the talking.  What an
inspiring flood it was!

No sooner was I in his hall than I heard, to my disappointment, the
sound of what seemed lively conversation from an adjoining room.  I had
hoped to find him alone.  The prospect of a luncheon party dampened my
ardour.  But when the maid conducted me to the presence, there sat the
Scottish sage alone, declaiming a Gaelic poem.  At least he told me it
was Gaelic!

"Laugh," cried he, "laugh.  'T will do ye good.  Ah, y' are one o' the
laughin' men!  I like them.  Try a man; will he no' laugh, or smile,
don't tie to him.  There 's too much gloom in the world."

What a picture he was in that hour.  Yes, and hours after, when I left
him.  The tall old man with strong, smooth-shaven face, like one of the
traditional gods of his favourite lore, but in no other respect
resembling a mythological being.  His head was crowned, not with
laurel, but with a wide-brimmed Panama or leghorn hat, beneath which
streamed his long white hair.  And his body was lost in the embraces of
a blue dressing-gown which came to his heels; and around his waist were
yards of red silk sash, the ends of which trailed behind him.

"Punctual," said he.  "You are sharp to the minute.  Came by the eleven
train, eh?  An hour and five minutes on the rail.  Wonderful how we
live now!  Glasgow to Edinburgh and return, {82} ninety-six miles for
seven shillings and sixpence, first class.  The quickest travelling in
the world, and the cheapest.  That's one thing the auld Greeks could
na' do.  Fol-de-rol-de-rol-de-ri.  Progress, progress; I believe in it.
I 'm a marching man.  There's nae such thing as standin' still; you go
forward, or you fall back.  Will ye ring the bell?  I thank ye!
Bachelor's hall the day.  My wife is in the country, but we will try to
be comfortable."

While we ate Professor Blackie talked, burst into snatches of melody,
rippled in Greek, or thundered in German, or gave the dear twist of
Scotland to his words, or, when he thought there had been enough of
that, drew from the "well of English, pure and undefiled."  And all the
time he wore his hat!

"You won't mind, I know," he said.  "Eighty-five and no glasses to my
eyes.  There 's protection in the shade of a hat's brim.  Eighty-five
and no glasses!  The only proof I 'm eighty-five is the almanac.  There
's no proof in my body.  I 'm as young as ever there."  And then he
turned the Greek tap so that Aristotle larded the lunch.

He had been in love with Greek for more than sixty years; he taught it
for thirty or forty years; he knew it as well as he knew English; he
read modern Greek newspapers; he had the best Greek library in the
kingdom; I daresay he dreamed in Greek.  I said: "You talk as if, in
spirit, you were more a Greek than a Scotsman."

"Not that"--he half sang the words--"Oh, {83} bonny Scotland for me.  A
man should stick to the land where God put him!"

He drew the knife along the breast of a chicken.  "My wife won't let me
carve when she 's at home," he said.  He looked threateningly at a
joint.  "Never mind, never mind," said he, and then in a chant, "hey
nonny, hi nonny."  Pause.  Then "Come off, old boy," and a wing and a
leg clattered to the platter.  "The nearer the bone the sweeter the
meat," said he.  "But statesmen have carved empires more easily."

"Mr. Gladstone, for example," said I, referring to the Home Rule Bill.

"Ho, there; but he has n't performed the amputation!"

"You don't agree with your old friend about that policy?"

"No, nor about Greek.  But we are friends still.  As for discussion, we
began that when we first met.  How many tens of years ago was that?  We
have been discussing ever since.  Yes, forty years!  We met at Dean
Ramsey's house.  Gladstone was a splendid man to disagree with even
then."

As Professor Blackie talked of his friends, the names of nearly all his
contemporaries in England, Scotland, and Germany came hurrying forth.
But he would n't tell anecdotes about them for two reasons; first, he
never remembered good stories; second, "I don't live in the past," he
said.  He was not a good talker, if good talk means keeping up your end
in conversation.  He kept up more than his end.  He was always ready
for a monologue.  {84} He did n't converse, he exploded.  His
utterances were volcanic.  There would come an eruption of short
sentences blazing with philosophy; then a kindly glow over it all, and
the discharge would subside quickly with a gentle rumty-tum, or a
snatch from some old Scotch ballad.  We had been talking of education.
Suddenly the table shook under a smiting hand, and these words were
shot at me:

"Teaching!  We are teaching our young men everything except this: to
teach themselves, and to look the Lord Jesus Christ in the face!  You
are doing it in America, too.  You are as bad as we are in Britain."
And then immediately, and with a seraph's smile, "May I pass you a
wing?"

He quoted from one of his books, a recent one: "Of all the chances that
can befall a young man at his first start in the race of life, the
greatest unquestionably is to be brought into contact, and, if
possible, to enter into familiar relations with a truly great man.  For
this is to know what manhood means, and a manly life, not by grave
precept, or wise proverb, or ideal picture; but to see the ideal in
complete equipment and compact in reality before you, as undeniably and
as efficiently as the sun that sheds light from the sky, or the
mountain that sheds waters into the glen."

Strong influences were about Blackie's life in his youth, and he
became, in his turn, a great influence in other lives.  He was the son
of a Scotch banker, and was born in Glasgow.  He had his first
schooling in Aberdeen, and he entered college at twelve and the
University of Edinburgh at fifteen.  At {85} the latter place he
studied under John Wilson ("Christopher North").  At Aberdeen he had
the best Latin instruction of his time.  There they were famous
Latinists.  At the University of Edinburgh it was mainly religion with
him, and the Bible his favourite reading.  At twenty he went to
Germany, the Germany that is dead.  His strong grave face would light
up when he spoke of the men he had known there.

"Niebuhr was the biggest man Germany has produced, but Bunsen was the
greatest all round.  Bunsen looked like Goethe.  I told him so, and
found that others thought so.  But Bunsen had a sweeter mouth than
Goethe.  My father's teaching, the nature that God gave me, and
Bunsen's influence, have been the shaping forces of my life.

"I returned to Scotland, was called to the bar at twenty-five, and ran
away from it at thirty.  I was not meant for a lawyer.  Aberdeen
University made me its Professor of Latin Literature, and I kept at
that till 1852, when Edinburgh appointed me Professor of Greek.  I was
thirty years at that time.  A few years ago I retired.  There is the
story of my life."

No.  Only the story of the shell of his life.  It said nothing of what
he had done.

"Done!" exclaimed the old man.  "If you live to be as old as John
Blackie, you 'll find it less important to know what a man has done
than to know what he is.  Done?  I 've taught Greek, written a little,
preached a good deal!"

But many men teach Greek, and everybody writes {86} nowadays, and the
globe is a vast pulpit from which all who are not dumb try to preach,
while only the deaf long to listen.  John Stuart Blackie's achievements
are not to be measured by phrases.  He was one of the strong teachers
of men.  Many men now celebrated have told me that they studied under
him and learned little Greek but more wisdom than an entire faculty
could teach them, or any number of books.  "The art of the teacher is
to teach the student to teach himself", the old man was fond of saying.

Blackie was a marching man, you will remember.  For years he marched
across Scotland, and up and down, lecturing the people.  If Scotland
had a hall in which he did not lecture on Burns, on Goethe, on Scottish
Song, Education, Government--to his list of themes there was no end--it
must have been built since his death.  No wonder they called him a
"peripatetic philosopher."

He said to me: "I think I can do more good by speaking to people than
by writing to them.  I have written thirty or forty volumes, if you
count the little ones, but I don't know how to write books to please
the public."

"How can that be?" I asked.  "A bookseller told me that your
'Self-Culture' has already run to thirty editions."

"Oh, that was not written for the public, but for my students; and the
public happened to like it."

"A distinction without much difference then."  And I thought of his
"Essays on Social Subjects", "Four Phases of Morals", "Homer and the
Iliad", {87} and the book "On Beauty"; of his "Songs of Religion and
Life", "The Language and Literature of the Scottish Highlands", "Musa
Burschicosa", "Songs and Legends of Ancient Greece", "Scottish Song",
"Poetical Tracts", and so on.  The public had seemed to like them.  And
the public of Edinburgh must have found some attraction in his novel
"Altavona", for, he said, "They made a great row over it here, thought
they had identified one of the characters, and went buzzing about over
their discovery.  But I 'm not a novelist.  I was trying to effect
reform in the Scottish Land Laws.  I believe in Home Rule for
Scotland," he added.

"Why not, then, for Ireland?"  This was putting one's head into the
lion's mouth.  But he purred gently: "I don't know Ireland!  I've been
there only once!"  That was a fair hit at Gladstone.  "Scotland I do
know!"  The last words came like a blast from the mountains.

Once on a time Professor Blackie printed a list of one hundred and
twelve Scottish songs, and he declared that every Scotsman should know
them all.  I suppose it was patriotism even more than a love of
learning that impelled him to raise L10,000 by four years' labour, and
endow with it, at Edinburgh, a Professorship of Celtic Literature.

He lived on an edge of Edinburgh, and his house overflowed with books
and pictures.  It commanded a northerly outlook, and the country rolled
up almost to the windows.  "Look there," said he, pointing to the big
window of the dining room, "the sun's out, and you can see the Fife
Hills.  I see them about {88} three times a month when our mists lift.
The Forth Bridge is yonder"--pointing.  "Wonderful thing that Forth
Bridge.  You whiz through towards Perth in five minutes!"

Above the fireplace was a large portrait of himself, painted years
before by James Archer, of the Royal Scottish Academy.  It represented
its subject gazing, with head uncovered, at a mountainous landscape.
"That's the poetic Blackie," said the original, "the Blackie who loves
to roam hills and glens.  Yon is Blackie militant," pointing to a
severer portrait on the opposite wall.  "A very different person, as
you see.  A painter can show only one aspect of a character in a single
portrait, and the public, seeing but one portrait, will see but one
side of the character.  That's why there are several Blackies on these
walls.  Come and see my friends as they hang."

He led the way to the entrance hall whose walls were hung with
paintings, engravings, photographs, old prints.  A bust of "Christopher
North" occupied a pedestal at the foot of the stairs.  "And there's
Nolly," sang the Professor, pointing to an oil likeness of Cromwell.
We would take a step or two, and then pause to look at a portrait,
while my energetic host threw out an explanatory phrase whimsically
abbreviating the names of the men he liked best.  "Tom," said he, "Tom
Carlyle, a tyrannical genius who did a lot of good in a hard way.
Bobbie," and he stopped before a portrait of Burns, "Bobbie was a
ploughman, but the artist here made him a dandy, and he never was
that." {89} We must have stopped twenty times on the first flight of
stairs, and at each pause the old man would shoot a remark.  At the
drawing-room door he paused again, exclaiming: "Aristotle, Shakespeare,
Goethe, and the Apostle Paul--these are my heroes!"

The drawing-room was a national, or rather an international portrait
gallery in little.  We began with a line of faces at one end of which
was Goethe, at the other end Bunsen.  There were portraits everywhere,
on the walls, in the chairs, on the tables; some of them rested on the
floor.  Sir Henry Irving as Becket had a chair.  Blackie stopped in
front of him.  "That's a man who has done a great work," said he.  "The
people require amusement, and Irving has amused them nobly.  Ah, you
see Mary Anderson over there.  A marvellous sweet woman.  Scott's next
to her on that wall, now.  Ah, no, I never saw him.  I wish I had known
him.  'Green grow the rushes, O!'  Here are some preachers--Chalmers,
John Knox, Guthrie, Norman Macleod, Cardinal Manning.  Ye 'll think it
a queer assortment, maybe, John Knox and Manning.  Well, the five o'
them were men, man, men!"

"Dear, dear, who has done this thing?" he cried, as if startled.  We
stood before an easel which held a portrait of himself.  An engraving
of Gladstone stood beneath, on the floor.  "Wrong!  It's the wrong
order," said he.  "We must change it.  Down goes Blackie; up goes
Gladdy.  He belongs above me."  He suited the action to the word and
shifted the portraits.

{90}

Presently we marched up another flight of stairs to his study, which
consisted of three connecting rooms lined with books.  "This is where I
live," he said.  "Seven thousand volumes hereabout.  See the Greek
here, here, everywhere.  Man, man, Greek is the only living bridge
between the present and the past!"

Then, snatching up a handful of newspapers from Athens, he continued,
"Some folks call Greek a dead language.  Poor souls!  They don't know
any better.  These things should interest you.  They are fresh from
Athens; not a week old."  And then he read aloud from them, a bit of
politics, an advertisement, lines from the bargain counter, as if to
show that one touch of shopping makes the whole world kin.  "But no
heroes, man, no heroes!  There's no Aristotle now, no Shakespeare, no
Goethe, no Apostle Paul!"

We sat awhile in the study, and Blackie "surveyed mankind from China to
Peru" in lightning flashes.  He always left one panting behind,
breathless, trying to keep pace with his rushing thoughts.  He had done
that sort of thing all his teaching life, and that was why men said
they learned but little Greek from him, but absorbed streams of wisdom.
They would say that when teaching, he never stuck to his text.  The
best you could do was quietly to watch and listen, remember and apply.
After all, that was what he wanted men to do--to learn to teach
themselves.

There are men, very distinguished men, who are much more easily
described than John Stuart Blackie.  {91} What he said of the portrait
painter is equally true of the portrait writer.  I might borrow his own
phrase and say that there was the preacher, there was the teacher, the
patriot, the man of merry soul; and there was the Blackie of odd
moments who was all these in one, as I saw him, with straw hat, blue
dressing-robe, and trailing red sash.  If I picture him as I saw him
then, going about the house in his queer gear and genially nicknaming
great folk in the intervals of snatches of song, you are not to think
of him as merely an eccentric and entertaining old gentleman.  He was
very much at his ease, and he made me feel happily so.  He was natural
man without a pose, without an affectation.  He never posed.  He did
not care what others thought or said about him, what he cared for was
what they thought and said about his subject, whatever that might
be--country, or religion, or song--and it all led to manliness.  "Be a
man!  Be God's man!"  That was the burden of his teaching, preaching,
writing, scholarship, philosophy, religion.  He wrought great things
for the manhood of Scotland.

I remember his coming to Glasgow one night while I visited there.  He
lectured for some society of young men.  His theme was Love.  When he
had finished, a minister jumped up and shouted this invitation:

"Put that into a sermon, sir, and come and preach it to us next
Sabbath.  A guinea and a bed!"

"What?" roared Blackie.  "D'ye think I'd preach the Gospel for money?
I 'll preach it for nothing if ye 'll come and listen!"

{92}

Sometimes they said he was a droll person who went about Scotland
cracking jokes.  And I have heard them say that he "played too much to
the gallery."  But the men who said those things liked their sermons
delivered by long-faced folk, and wanted their lectures peppered with
piety.  They had their suspicions of laughter.  Blackie bubbled over
with good spirits.  Others might make the public sigh and weep; he knew
that it is better to make them laugh; that if you make them "feel good"
they will like you well enough to listen to what you have to say and
think about it.  As for "playing to the gallery" one has only to recall
Blackie's life-long admonitions to Democracy in order to see the error
of that assumption.

The best word-picture of John Stuart Blackie was unknown to the public
at the time of which I write.  It was unknown even to Blackie himself
at that time.  It was written by one of his pupils, Robert W. Barbour,
a brilliant and scholarly man.  His "Letters, Poems, and Pensees"
appeared subsequently in a volume edited by Professor Drummond, a
memorial volume circulated privately.  It was with Professor Drummond's
permission that I published, years ago, an extract from one of
Barbour's letters.  Barbour, when it was written, was in charge of a
school somewhere in the Highlands.  One day his old master, Blackie,
came up from Edinburgh for a blow of the mountain air and a visit to
Barbour, who thus described the occasion:

"Then follow minutes of Elysium, were life only the Academy, and the
world made for students and {93} Professors!  I hear Professor Blackie
talk of foreign travel, of the pictures it gives to hang forever in
one's after-study; and as the brave old snowy head falls back against
the claret of the sofa, he brings me out, one by one, the
pictures--Rome, Florence, Milan, Gottingen--latest hung therein.

"After dinner the Professor and I have an hour and a half's stroll to
the school, while I drink in the delightful desultoriness of his talk,
and try to stop just when he does--which is not always easy; for you
cannot tell why this crystus should seize his fancy, or that
'potentilla' interrupt his thought.  But it only breaks to flower forth
again more beautiful, as he talks first of Italy, its grace we lack so
in Scotland, its lack of sternness we could so well supply; its few
great hearts alive and active, its multitudes asleep and slow; then of
its new literature; then the political parties; then what poets should
do now, not to be so sundered from their time as Browning (who walked
these roads), nor so bound to the mere accident of rhyme.  Let poets
write short, sympathetic lives of men; let them write history, not
stories.

"And so we come to the school where the Professor has half an hour of
cross-questioning the best scholar, to the advantage of the whole
school; and such happy definitions, and such funny 'pokes' with the
mind and the walking-stick, and such instructive similes and amusing
information.  They are rather annoyed when I tell them how great a man
my master is.  Then they sing to him in good Scotch to his heart's
desire....

{94}

"At last he rises, and asking them something in a Gaelic too good, or
bad, or both (or rather book-born), to be understanded of them, he
breaks into a beautiful Gaelic lament, while the whole little audience
stands open-mouthed, eyed, and eared, and hardly recovers to whisper
'Good-bye, sir', ere he and I are out into the air again.

"I apologise for having given him such little work for so long, and he
hums out something in German, which he breaks half sternly to say:
'There are four things a man must love--children, flowers, woman,' and,
must I say it? 'wine.'  He went on to tell me how hateful and horrible
a nature Napoleon's always had seemed to him.  Napoleon said: 'I love
nothing, I love not woman, I love not dice, I love not wine, I love not
politics.'

"Then the hill came, and with the hill our thoughts could not help
climbing.  Was I licensed?  No, not ordained yet, of course.  Would I
preach the splendid possibilities in man, to sink to the beasts which
perish, or to rise to heaven itself?  He did not deny that the heart
was deceitful and desperately wicked, but should we not call on men to
realise for what they were made....  No man understands others, he
said, who does not leave himself more behind, and go and sit by others,
wherever they may be.

"He could not say what Greek one should read who had few books and less
time.  'No, read only where the heart runs; read nothing except that
about which you are passionate...' So I got no lists of authors or
works.  'Read where you are {95} thinking; don't read where you are not
feeling.'  This and much more on war, churches, architecture, youth and
new opinions in theology, and materialism (he had read some of the
latter; he could n't for the life of him remember it) and philosophy.

"He talked," continues Barbour, "and I treasured up.  But most on the
three tongues, and what was work for poets.  Then came afternoon tea
and raillery between him and my mother.  Then they packed into the pony
phaeton--my professor a perfect picture, his broad leghorn bright with
a flower, scarlet of seedum, fringed by golden yew, and the ladies a
good background."

So you see, it was the same John Stuart Blackie years and years before.
"Do stay to tea, man!" he urged, when I said I must be going, that
there would be just time to catch such-and-such a train for Glasgow
where an appointment was to be kept.

"Ah, then punctuality's the word.  Be late and be nothing."  He came
down to the front door with me, his leghorn flapping, his sash-ends
trailing on the stairs.  There were volcanic salutations to portraits
which we had missed when going up.  I said good-bye to the Grand Old
Man of Scotland.

"Good-bye," said he, "and dinna forget--Aristotle, Shakespeare, Goethe,
and the Apostle Paul--my heroes!"

In the gathering dusk I descended the steps, as he stood in the open
doorway, singing, and gazing towards the Corstorphine Hill.




{96}

CHAPTER VIII

LORD KELVIN

He sat on the lower stair, near the front door of his house, making
difficult calculations and strange diagrams in a little book bound in
green morocco.  It would be five minutes before the carriage started,
and he recollected that fact just as he reached the door and had put on
his overcoat.  Another man, almost any other, would have idled while
the five minutes passed, and most men, especially busy men, would have
fussed nervously at having to wait when they were ready.  But Lord
Kelvin, being the busiest of men, never wasted time by fussing, and
never lost it in idling.  Having five minutes he would solve a problem,
so he pulled the memorandum book from his coat pocket, where he always
carried it, and sat on the stair and worked.

He was seventy then, but his spirits were as young as those of the
youngest of his students.  They say that a man is as old as his
arteries.  The saying might have originated with him, if it ever
occurred to him that he had arteries.  But I am not sure that the
customary anatomy was not, in his case, reinforced by an ingenious
system of electrical conductors through which a mysterious energy was
driven by {97} his dynamic mind.  Like all great teachers he was ever
learning.  But it would be difficult to say when he began to learn, for
he was only ten years old when he entered the university!  And he was
thoroughly equipped for entering upon his student work even at that
age.  At twenty-two he was appointed Professor of Natural Philosophy,
and he held that professorship for the rest of his life!

Lord Kelvin was the greatest master of natural science in the
nineteenth century.  The twentieth century has not, thus far, produced
his superior.  He was born in 1824, he died in 1908.  It was my
privilege to know him during the last fifteen years of his life.  A
kinder man, one more considerate of the abysmal ignorance of the fellow
creatures with whom he came into contact, could not be imagined.  He
was a plain Scotsman without a pose, without even a Scottish pose, and
it would be difficult, maybe impossible, to find a better embodiment of
life than that.  Scottish he was, though born in Ireland.  And his fame
was associated with that of Glasgow University which had the honour of
receiving him into student life and which received the greater honour
of his distinguished services for a period almost as long as the
psalmist allots to the life of a man.

When he was eighty-three he outlined, as, probably, he had often
outlined before, the plan of a boy's education.  "By the age of
twelve," said he, "a boy should have learned to write his own language
with accuracy and some elegance; he should have a reading knowledge of
French, should be able to {98} translate Latin and easy Greek authors,
and should have some acquaintance with German.  Having learned the
meaning of words, a boy should study Logic.  I never found that the
small amount of Greek I learned was a hindrance to my acquiring some
knowledge of Natural Philosophy."  Some knowledge of it!  There,
indeed, was modesty.  For who had more knowledge of natural philosophy,
or so much, as Lord Kelvin?

Is it necessary to say that he was not born to baronies?  Surely, that
much all readers may be presumed to know, some wiseacre will remark.
But if one were painting a portrait instead of writing it, nothing
would be more futile than to omit the subject's nose on the presumption
that the public knew he had one.  William Thomson, who became Lord
Kelvin, was born in Belfast, the younger of two brothers.  The elder
brother was James, and he became famous as a professor of engineering.
He died, however, some fifteen years before his brother.  James was
named for his father, and that James, the father, was born on a farm
near Ballynahinch, County Down.  His Scotch ancestors had planted
themselves in Ireland in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
That farmer's boy had a huge hunger for knowledge.  When he was eleven
or twelve years old he taught himself, having no teacher to aid him,
the principles of the sundial, so that he could make dials for any
latitude.  Also, from books which he contrived to get, he learned the
elements of mathematics.  By and by he began teaching in a little
school.  He taught in the summers, and in {99} the winters he studied
at Glasgow University, continuing to do so for five years, and then he
was appointed a teacher in the Royal Academic Institute of Belfast.
When his son William had reached the age of eight, the scholarly parent
was appointed to the Professorship of Mathematics at Glasgow
University, a position he held for twenty years.  His scientific
attainments were high, and his classical scholarship was distinguished.
He educated his sons himself, until each was ten, and then sent each to
the university.  Lord Kelvin said to me once, when we were talking of
those early days: "I had a great father."

The Kelvin is a little stream that winds through the grounds of Glasgow
University.  When Queen Victoria bestowed a peerage upon Sir William
Thomson (she had knighted him many years before that) he chose for his
title the name of the little stream by whose side he had spent his
fruitful and illustrious life.  His had been a life of labour, but it
had been congenial labour.  He had contributed vastly to the sum of
human knowledge; he had invented useful things, to the amazement of
pedantic men who think that science should remain with scientific
persons and never be applied to the wants of the world; at least, not
applied by the scientific discoverer of the principles or things.  But
with all his theories he was a practical man, and he prospered.  That
day when he sat on the stair for five minutes, and concentrated the
training of sixty years upon the page of a notebook, we went to White's.

{100}

Once upon a time there was a White, a James White, who, in Glasgow,
made instruments of precision which found their way all over the world.
And so he became the maker of various things that Sir William Thomson,
afterward Lord Kelvin, had invented.  When White died, or retired, or
possibly before that, Kelvin acquired his business and establishment
and continued the manufacture of instruments of precision, the
establishment being conducted under White's name, as before, and as
possibly it may be to this day.  Anyhow, we went to White's, where Lord
Kelvin took me into his laboratory and showed me, among other things,
his "Siphon Recorder" which was very interesting, albeit very puzzling
to the non-technical mind.  I asked him what it did.  The technical
descriptions I had read were rather baffling.  His answer was: "The
electric current in an under-sea cable, say an Atlantic cable, is very
weak and weary.  This reaches out from the shore, and helps it along,
and writes down what it says."  It was for this invention that he was
knighted in 1866.  He had connected the hemispheres.

He was one of the courageous and hopeful band that laid and worked the
first Atlantic cables.  Submarine telegraphy had been first employed in
1850 when a line was laid across the English Channel between Dover and
Calais.  But the scientific camps were divided in opinion about the
practicability of working across thousands of miles of ocean-bed.  One
faction declared it "beyond the resources of human skill."  Robert
Stephenson said the project could end only in failure.  Of course, the
{101} moneyed men were timid.  Most of them were more than timid; they
were scared.  Faraday had found that the transmission of signals by
submarine cable, on a line from Harwich to Holland, was not
instantaneous.  "The line leaked," said the financial men, "and most of
the electricity that was pumped into it spilled into the sea.  This
does not occur on land lines," they said; "we will not invest."

William Thomson discovered and formulated "the law which governs the
retardation of electrical signals in submarine lines."  Whitehouse
found that with a line 1125 miles long, a signal required a second and
a half for transmission.  Thomson's law showed that on a line long
enough to connect Ireland with Newfoundland the transmission of a
signal would require six seconds.  This meant a dismally limited
service.  Only a few words could be cabled in an hour.  The croakers
were pleased.  The men whose habit it is to say "I told you so" were
joyous.  The financiers would use their capital for other purposes.
But Cyrus Field of New York found the money, and William Thomson found
the way to utilize his own law to make success out of what had seemed
to others to be defeat.  He invented the "Siphon Recorder."  Then the
cable was laid under the Atlantic, and on August 17, 1858, Thomson's
instruments sent and received this message:

"Europe and America are united by telegraph.  Glory to God in the
highest, and on earth peace and goodwill toward men."

Two weeks later the cable broke.  The world jeered and lost faith,
according to its habit.  Some {102} called the cable undertaking "a
swindle", some "a hoax", some a silly toy.  These were thoughtful
critics.  Eight years passed, eight years of effort to make and
submerge a cable that would endure.  In 1866 the difficulties were
overcome.  The world congratulated itself and the men who had worked
the "miracle."  Lord Kelvin told me the story as if it had been a
little affair of the day before.  "There has been so much to think of
since then," said he, "and there is so much more to be done!
Harnessing Niagara is one thing."  The men who plan things and do them
were already planning for that, and as in the cable project, they
called in Lord Kelvin to help.

"How far can we transmit electricity for power and lighting purposes?"
they asked.

"Three hundred miles," said he.

They laid their plans for a much shorter distance, within a hundred
miles, and they thought that Kelvin was dreaming.  Years later, when
power and lighting current had been successfully conveyed over much
greater distances than Kelvin had suggested, an acquaintance of mine
asked him: "Why did n't you tell us that electric power can be
conducted over these greater distances?  I thought three hundred miles
was the limit."

"The limit is not known," replied Lord Kelvin.  "In the case you refer
to, I answered a specific question regarding a specific plan undertaken
for commercial purposes.  The limit was improved by time and
circumstance, not by Nature.  Ten years ago we could not build the
machinery that is built {103} to-day, nor, on a great scale, employ the
conductors that are used to-day.  My suggestion concerned the means
then known, not the means that might be developed in a decade."

"Well, I lost a chance," said the would-be investor, who was also a
Scot.

"So, I imagine, did the capitalists of Archimedes' day.  You will
remember that they failed to provide him with a fulcrum," said Lord
Kelvin dryly.

Lord Kelvin, when a young man, became permanently lame as the result of
a skating accident, but his lameness did not retard his physical
activity.  Sir William Ramsay, the celebrated chemist who had been a
pupil of Kelvin, said that it "lent emphasis to his amusing class
demonstration of 'uniform velocity' when he, Kelvin, marched back and
forth behind his lecture-bench with as even a movement as his lameness
would permit; and the class generally burst into enthusiastic applause
when he altered his pace, and introduced them to the meaning of the
word 'acceleration.'"

Ramsay's opinion was that Kelvin "was not what would be called a good
lecturer; he was too discursive."  Ramsay doubted whether any man "with
a brain so much above the ordinary, so much more rapid in action than
the average, can be a first-rate teacher....  But Kelvin never allowed
the interest of his students to flag.  His aptness in illustration and
his vigour of language prevented that.  Lecturing one day on 'Couples',
he explained how forces must be applied to constitute a Couple and
illustrated the direction of the forces by turning around the {104}
gas-bracket.  This led to a discussion on the miserable quality of
Glasgow coal-gas and how it might be improved.  Following again the
main idea, he caught hold of the door and swung it to and fro; but
again his mind diverged to the difference in the structure of English
and Scottish doors.  We never forgot what a 'Couple' was--but the idea
might have been conveyed more succinctly."  Yes, and ten to one the
receivers of it would have forgotten what a "Couple" was!

I heard Kelvin address the Royal Society in London while he was
president of that body.  He had invited me to come, and I was curious
enough to see the most distinguished scientific body in the world
learning something from the world's most distinguished mathematician,
electrician, and natural philosopher.  The hall in Burlington House was
filled.  Had an earthquake swallowed the hall then, the world would
have been deprived instantaneously of dozens of men who were doing its
thinking for it.  The subject of the discourse was not thrilling, nor
could the lecturer have been accused of an attempt to pander to
popularity.  The subject was "The Homogeneous Division of Space."
There shot through the hour's talk a stream of descriptive phrases such
as "tetrakaidekahedronal cells", "parallelepipedal partitionings",
"enantiomorphs ", and their progeny.

The genial old gentleman on the platform would rest his weight upon his
hands on the table, or the lecture-desk, and lean forward towards his
audience, and tell some puzzling facts about nature's puzzles, {105}
pouring streams of numbers and their multiplications and divisions into
their ears while they floundered in the mathematical deluge.  He would
see that he had them puzzled, that his mind was working too fast for
them; he must have surmised it from the expressions on their faces, for
while he announced theories, discoveries, and drew conclusions, they,
with all their knowledge and experience, would look as blank or
bewildered as schoolboys, and he would step back from the table and,
with a winning smile, remark, "It's this way", or "After all, it's
simpler than it seems", or "I think it would be demonstrated so", and
turning swiftly on one heel would face the blackboard and draw upon it
in strokes that were like flashes, a diagram which made it all so clear
that his hearers chuckled, or laughed outright; then swiftly he would
turn again and face them with that winning smile which seemed to mean,
"See how simple it is!"  Then they would applaud him, which is very
difficult for the Royal Society to do.

Lord Kelvin's was the first house in the world to be lighted by
electricity throughout.  He utilized the current in every nook and
corner, in attics and cellars, in cupboards, closets and wardrobes,
long before anybody else had attempted to do so.  This was when
everybody else thought electric lighting a luxury, but his purpose was
to prove it a necessity.  That was his way.  Whenever he acquired new
knowledge he applied it forthwith to the betterment of the human lot.
He thought that science for the sake of science, or scientists, was as
stupid a formula as "art for art's sake."  Cheese for cheese's sake
{106} would be quite as useful to mankind.  Of what use was knowledge
if it were not applied to the needs of man?

He was a yachtsman, but not for sporting purposes, or faddishness, or
luxurious idleness.  He loved the sea, and his yacht, a schooner named
_Lalla Rookh_, enabled him to wrest from the sea some of its secrets.
For twenty years he went sailing every summer, living aboard weeks at a
time.  He held the certificate of a master navigator.  It was on board
the _Lalla Rookh_ that he invented his famous apparatus for taking
soundings and his no less famous compass.  These things became
necessities for navigators.

The first pair of telephonic instruments that Alexander Graham Bell
brought to Europe were presented by him to Lord Kelvin, who immediately
put them to use by connecting his house with that of his brother-in-law
and assistant, Doctor J. T. Bottomley.  The first electrically lighted
house in the world was the first in the old world to be connected by
telephone for purposes professional, social, personal, and domestic.
For how could Kelvin, who was always peering into the future, be afraid
of new things?  He peered into the past, too, for you remember how he
startled the orthodox mind by his calculations regarding the age of the
earth.

Lord Salisbury, just before he became Prime Minister for the last time
(his long term of 1895-1902) was Chancellor of the University of Oxford
and at the same time President of the British Association for the
Advancement of Science.  At Oxford, {107} in a memorable year, and in
behalf of the University of which he was chancellor, he welcomed the
association of which he was president, and he reminded his learned
listeners that Lord Kelvin, whom he alluded to as "the greatest living
master of natural science amongst us", was the first to point out that
the amount of time required by the advocates of the Darwinian theory
for the working out of the process of evolution which they had imagined
"could not be conceded without assuming the existence of a totally
different set of natural laws from those with which we are acquainted."
Hot things cool.  The once seething earth has cooled and is cooling.
So many million years ago it must have been hotter than now by
calculable degrees.  "But if at any time it was hotter at the surface
by fifty degrees Fahrenheit than it is now, life would then have been
impossible on this planet."

Lord Kelvin assured us that organic life on earth cannot have existed
more than a hundred million years ago.  So if you believed in
Archbishop Ussher's chronology, and niggardly dealt out to the earth an
age of only six thousand years, or went so far as Professor Tait with
his ten million, you had, by Kelvin's figuring, a tremendous margin to
fill up somehow.  Of course the orthodox jumped and squealed.  But the
geologists and biologists stamped and yelled.  Some of them wanted more
than Kelvin's stingy allowance; they wanted not one hundred million
years, but hundreds of millions.  And there was a pretty ferment in the
camps!

Sir William Ramsay I have quoted on Kelvin's {108} illustration, in the
class room, of the term "acceleration."  Kelvin maintained speed when
he had got it up.  Remember that he was lame, and consider his energy.
He would dart at an object that stood a few feet from him, on his
lecture-bench, use it for whatever demonstration was required, and then
dart at another, or at the blackboard, or at the pointer, as if he were
a busy bee extracting honey from the flowers.  There was certainty
about everything he did; no hesitation, no floundering, no hemming and
hawing for a word, or the next act.  His lameness merely lent emphasis
to the fact that he was walking; it did not prevent his swiftness of
movement.  Across the grounds of the university I toiled after him like
"panting time."  He gave the impression of readiness for a race, and
might challenge you at any minute.  His gown was always streaming
behind him, his mortar-board cap in imminent danger of blowing off in
the breeze stirred by his advance.  Well, he had raced the world many
years and had always won.

Some great men are so impressed by their own greatness that their
manner becomes ponderous and vast as if they lived in a belief that
they cast shadows on the sun.  Not so Lord Kelvin, who never seemed to
think that great men thought him a greater than themselves.  His manner
was simple, gentle, courteous, and direct.  He was easy to talk with,
and yet he had no small talk.  But it was not easy to answer his
questions.  There was never such a man as he for asking questions
unless it were the Chinese Viceroy, Li Hung Chang.  Whatever your
profession, {109} trade, interests in life, he would put questions that
went to the roots of your matter and revealed on his part a greater
knowledge of the problems involved than you dreamed existed.  By
tireless questioning he learned.  But where Li Hung Chang turned the
results of his questioning to his own benefit, Kelvin applied them to
the good of the world.  Yet when, in 1896, they celebrated the fiftieth
anniversary of his professorship at Glasgow he was, I take it, the most
surprised man in all the galaxy of the famous.  The dear old gentleman
with the domed head, the white hair, and generous white beard seemed to
be asking himself, "What next?  Why all this fuss and feathers?"  But
he was apparently genuinely pleased, too, for all the tributes bespoke
honest admiration of achievement and character.  Fifty-one learned
societies, twelve colleges, and twenty-eight universities were
represented.  They were of all countries.  That day the world, and all
that was therein, lifted its hat to Lord Kelvin.

I may slip in here a quotation from Emerson.  "In Newton," said
Emerson, "science was as easy as breathing; he used the same wit to
weigh the moon that he used to buckle his shoes; and all his life was
simple, wise, and majestic.  So it was in Archimedes--always self-same,
like the sky.  In Linnaeus, in Franklin, the like sweetness and
equality--no stilts, no tiptoe; and their results are wholesome and
memorable to all men."

What Lord Kelvin had done, and was still to do, could not be described
by any writing of less than encyclopaedic scope, and a knowledge as
wide and {110} deep as his own.  Helmholtz may be quoted, as he has
been quoted by many who attempted the larger task from a scientific
standpoint.  Helmholtz was his intimate friend.  Helmholtz said: "He is
an eminent mathematician, but the gift to translate real facts into
mathematical equations, and vice versa, is, by far, more rare than to
find a solution of a given mathematical problem, and in this direction
he is most eminent and original."

Kelvin's first published paper was a defence of the mathematician,
Fourier.  His second was on "The Uniform Motion of Heat in Homogeneous
Solid Bodies, and Its Connection With The Mathematical Theory of
Electricity."  I think he was eighteen then.  He was certainly showing
the bent of his mind.  Fifty or sixty years later he said, in a
presidential address to the Royal Society: "Tribulation, not
undisturbed progress, gives life and soul, and leads to success where
success can be reached."  I do not know what his tribulations were, but
they may have been the tribulations of defeat.  He may have faced many
defeats, but he won more successes.  And the world was more concerned
with scientific discoveries during his career than it had been in the
time of Count Rumford and Humphry Davy, whose work in disproving that
heat is a material body had been forgotten because nobody seemed to
think it more important than curious.  Sometime in the eighteen-forties
James Prescott Joule ascertained the dynamical equivalent of heat, and
settled the fact that heat is a mode of motion.  Kelvin may be said to
have leaped to the side of his friend.

{111}

Lord Kelvin was the first to appreciate the importance of Joule's
discovery, and it was not long before he placed the whole subject of
thermodynamics on a scientific basis.  He put his conclusions into
these easily understandable words: "During any transformation of energy
of one form into energy of another form, there is always a certain
amount of energy rendered unavailable for further useful application.
No known process in nature is exactly reversible: that is to say, there
is no known process by which we can convert a given amount of energy of
one form into energy of another form, and then, reversing the process,
reconvert the energy of the second form thus obtained into the original
quantity of energy of the first form.  In fact, during any
transformation of energy from one form into another, there is always a
certain portion of energy changed into heat in the process of
conversion, and the heat thus produced becomes dissipated and diffused
by radiation and conduction.  Consequently there is a tendency in
nature for all the energy in the universe, of whatever kind it be,
gradually to assume the form of heat, and having done so to become
equally diffused.  Now, were all the energy of the universe converted
into uniformly diffused heat, it would cease to be available for
producing mechanical effort, since, for that purpose, we must have a
hot source and a cooler condenser.  This gradual degradation of energy
is perpetually going on, and, sooner or later, unless there be some
restorative power of which we have, at present, no knowledge whatever,
the present state of things must come to an end."

{112}

He revealed the Electrodynamics of Qualities of Metals; the size of
atoms, the horse-power of the sun; he determined the rigidity of the
earth, the laws of the tides, made far-reaching discoveries in
electricity, in vortex motion; it might be said of him that he took the
universe for his field.

But in a chapter like this one is tempted to dwell too long on high
achievements.  What attracted one more than the achievements was the
man, the kindly, sympathetic man who loved truth not celebrity, and
work more than its rewards.  He was ever the same, whether one met him
in Glasgow, London, at sea, or in America, the same simple,
straightforward, kindly character.  He retained his mental activity to
the end.  He died at eighty-four, and seemed only to be departing on
another journey in quest of truth and friendship.

On one of the afternoons when I sat with him in his study, within the
precincts of the university, he said, "Patience, great patience is the
need of this generation.  It asks results before it earns them.  Man is
too wasteful of the resources he finds in the earth.  The most of our
coal is lost in smoke; the most of our heat is dissipated in the air.
We need patience not less than courage in dealing with our problems."
The study was lined with engravings and photographs.  Darwin and Joule
and Faraday looked down from the walls, and there were pictures of the
cable-laying ships, the _Hooper_, and the _Great Eastern_.  There were
trophies of travel,--from specimens of sea-bottom along the African
coast, to quite personal mementos of his lectures at {113} Johns
Hopkins University and other places in America.

A typical day of Lord Kelvin's was, in outline, this: After breakfast
he would, at nine, face his class in the university and lecture for an
hour.  I heard him in such an hour lecture on "Kepler's Laws."  He
lectured to his class three days a week.  After the lecture he would go
to White's where he was perfecting an electric metre.  After White's he
would return to the university and lecture until one o'clock, say, on
the "Higher Mathematics."  Then home to lunch.  After lunch consulting
work on the lighting of a town by electricity.  After that an hour in
Lady Kelvin's drawing-room, taking tea with friends.  Then work in the
study over the laws governing the formation of crystals.  Then dinner.
Then calculations in the study, or writing a paper for one of the
numerous societies of which he was a working member.  In the intervals,
with his secretary's aid, he would attend to his correspondence.  And,
if waiting for his secretary, out of a coat pocket would come the
little green book, and into it would go notes, calculations, or
diagrams, perhaps all three.  That little green book would come out
whenever he had a minute to spare, in his dressing-room, or on the
stairs, or in a train, or a cab, wherever he happened to be, and the
thought flashed.  I often wondered what his thoughts were on the
conservation of personal energy.




{114}

CHAPTER IX

TENNYSON

Freshwater is an overgrown village which sprawls about the western end
of the lovely Isle of Wight.  The meanness of much of its masonry is
compensated by its remarkably wholesome air.  Man has done his best to
spoil Freshwater, but he has not wholly succeeded--yet.  Give him time,
and more radicalism, and he will make it one of the ugly spots of
earth.  I made its acquaintance in the early spring of 1882, and
subsequently have visited it many times.

When I first made acquaintance with Freshwater, there was no railway
within eleven miles, Newport being the terminus of the island lines
which were as drolly inconvenient as they are now.  The fiddling,
amateurish railway, which has come in since then, has not only robbed
Freshwater of its seclusion but has saddled parts of the rolling
country with shabby streets of mean houses worthy of a Montana mining
town.  Towards the downs and the sea much of the old charm remains.
About Farringford it is undisturbed.  And it was at Farringford, that
lovely estate, that Tennyson lived.

I had quarters in a house that faced the sea.  And these quarters were
mine whenever, in the {115} thirty-six years since that delightful May,
I returned to Freshwater.  They are mine no longer.  The house has
become an hotel.  Now, in the thirty-eighth year of my Freshwatering, I
have lodgment elsewhere.  The house that sheltered me so long is
scarcely a quarter of a mile from Tennyson's Lane, and many of the
poet's friends have stayed in it, and friends of Watts, for that great
artist also lived in Freshwater, first at a house which is now called
Dimbola, and subsequently at "The Briary", a charming home built by the
Prinseps and facing Tennyson's "noble Down."  In the rooms to which I
have so often retreated, and where I so often watched the blue Channel
dancing in the sunshine, there are, or were, many mementos of past
days.  Some of them were photographs, and, as any one who knows the
Freshwater legends may guess, they were taken by Mrs. Cameron, the
first of the artist photographers, and, in her day, the celebrator of
all the celebrated who came to Freshwater to visit the poet.

Mrs. Cameron lived at Dimbola which is at the southeastern corner of
the Farringford estate.  "She were a concentric lady who wore velvet
gowns a-trailin' in the dusty roads," as one old-timer described her to
me.  Her photography was not professional but amateur, and her skill in
it was quite remarkable.  So was her persistence.  She would not permit
a possible "subject" to escape without "taking" him or her.  She was
quite intimate with the Tennysons, and always called the poet by his
Christian name.  One day, while there was a smallpox scare about, she
rushed to Farringford, {116} with a stranger in tow, and finding
Tennyson within, she opened the door of the room where he was sitting,
and bidding the stranger follow, cried, "Alfred, I 've brought a doctor
to vaccinate you.  You must be vaccinated!"

Tennyson, horrified, fled to an adjoining room and bolted the door
after him.

"Alfred, Alfred," Mrs. Cameron called, "I've brought a doctor.  You
must be vaccinated; you really must!"

There was no reply.

"Oh, Alfred, you 're a coward!  Come and be vaccinated!"

She won.

When Garibaldi visited Tennyson, he planted a tree in the Farringford
grounds.  And Mrs. Cameron planted herself before him, and begged him
to come and be photographed.  Rather eccentric, as my old-timer had
tried to convey, she had that morning hastened to Farringford without
hat, or gloves, and with her sleeves rolled up, just as she came from
her "dark room", and her hands were stained with photographic
chemicals.  Garibaldi seems to have taken her for a beggar and was
turning away, when she knelt before him and implored him to let her
photograph him.

Again she won.  She always won in such contests.

Mrs. Cameron's day was before the days of dry plates and films.  The
accumulation of negatives that she left when, with her husband, she
returned to Ceylon, where they had formerly lived for many years,
passed into the possession of a son.  I do not {117} know what has been
their subsequent fate; but if uninjured they would be very interesting
now, and a collection of prints from them would have a value all its
own.  She made a number, I daresay many photographs of Tennyson and the
members of his family; and when Longfellow came to Farringford, the
good lady triumphantly proclaimed him a captive.

She was a kind-hearted, good-natured soul, but when she wanted to carry
a point she could be as imperious and decisive as any one that ever
lived in the Isle.  The neighbourhood children she would persuade by
"sweeties", or, failing these, by main force, to "come and be
photographed" in this character or that, and there were maid servants
with classic faces and ploughmen with fine heads who posed for her as
characters in plays and poems, in costumes which she would improvise.
Mrs. Cameron was a generous, interesting, impulsive woman.  Much of
Freshwater legend gathers about her, and her camera, and her diligence
in amateur theatricals.

In my island study there hung for many years the two best photographs
of Tennyson that I ever saw.  They were taken by Mrs. Cameron.  The
first was, I believe, taken about 1870, or '72.  It represents the poet
seated, and holding with both hands a book half opened in his lap.  He
wears a black morning coat, closely buttoned, cut in the fashion of the
time.  Instead of the big rolling collar usually shown in his
portraits, here is the stiff "dickey" of Piccadilly; the cuffs, too,
are in the mode, and over the coat a {118} monocle hangs.  It is quite
out of the style of other Tennyson portraits with which I am reasonably
familiar, but on that account it has a special interest of its own.
The second photograph, to which I have alluded, is not only thoroughly
characteristic but has achieved some fame as "The Dirty Monk", and is
thus autographed by its original:

  "_I prefer 'The Dirty Monk'
      to the others of me.
            A. Tennyson.
    Except one by Mayall._"


When I returned to Freshwater for three or four months in 1913, after
several years' absence, I looked, as usual, for this precious pair.
But they had gone, and no one could tell, or would tell, when or where.
Some souvenir hunter must have loved them too well.

There are, or were, some Morland prints, too.  George Morland lived and
painted in Freshwater, in a bit cottage that stood in front of the site
of this house, but which disappeared nearly a century ago.  Mrs.
Cameron, could she revisit the glimpses of the moon, would find her
quiet old village developed into a sprawling, country town.  It had
five hundred inhabitants when Tennyson first came to it in a sailboat
from the mainland, in 1852, or 1853; it has between five and ten
thousand now, west of the Yar.  The number shifts with the summer
visitors, and the military cannot be counted, for they come and go in a
variable stream.  Ever since the war began, the fit and the wounded,
the trained and the {119} untrained have passed through in large
numbers, or have stayed for longer or shorter terms.  A war town has
grown up on a border of the old town.  Golden Hill is now an expanse of
barrack huts and not of yellow gorse.

Mrs. Cameron believed in getting things done, not in talking about
them.  She transformed the coal shed at Dimbola into a dark room for
developing her negatives; and the poultry house became a studio.  When
her husband, a recluse who had n't so much as seen the beach for a
dozen years, wanted a lawn, she had turf dug by night and laid in the
garden.  Calling her husband to the window next morning, she pointed to
the expanse of new-laid turf and said, "There 's your lawn!" as if any
one would deny her power to work miracles.

Farringford, of course, is enclosed by hedges and trees, literally
surrounded by them.  The house itself is still further protected from
the gaze of the outer world by an inner circle of trees and shrubbery.
The estate is bisected by the lovely lane which has been described in
every account ever written of Tennyson, and photographed a thousand
times.  It, in turn, has a hedgerow on each side and is over-arched by
elms.  It is really an approach to the farm which is attached to the
home acres, and through it, for walking purposes, the public has a
right-of-way.  At the crest of the rising ground is a little green
door, set in the high-banked hedge which guards the home lawns, and by
this green door the poet would pass to the down along another lane
which runs at right angles to the one associated with his {120} name
and immediately opposite the green door.  A few feet beyond this, a
rustic bridge overhead spans Tennyson's Lane, and by this bridge the
poet could cross into a woodland without having to enter the Lane,
where his privacy might be disturbed, and so walk to Maiden's Croft,
where a little green summerhouse stands under the trees and where he
often wrote and meditated.  From this summerhouse he had the best view
of the beautiful and noble down.  From the windows of Farringford there
are exquisite views of seascape and landscape, with lush fields in the
foreground,--a view, on sunny days, of quite un-English colour.  In the
distance St. Catherine's Point and above it the white crown of the
Landslip, and above that the dark shape of St. Boniface Down, lifting
its head eight hundred feet toward the clouds; in the middle distance a
tumble of green hills, and to the right the sea dappled with shafts of
light and colour ever changing,--mauves and blues and greens, splashed
with browns and reds, shifting and playing there under the sun.  It
might be Italian sea and Italian landscape.  And Tennyson called it his
"bit of Italy."  You can see it just as he saw it, if you pause at an
iron gate on your left, near the top of the rise in the Lane, and you
will have in the foreground a group of Italian-like trees beyond which
Stag Rock and Arched Rock stand with their feet in the tiny bay.  It is
of all bits of English land and water one of the most memorable for
form and colour,--this little Italy.  And it drew Tennyson to
Farringford and held him there.

{121}

Tennyson was not seen much in the village, but he often walked to the
bay.  Here is my first glimpse of him: a tall man looking like a
cloaked brigand; his head was swallowed by a great hat, soft and black,
and he was pointing with a stick.

"Making yourself at home here, aren't you?" he was understood to say in
something between a rumble and growl.

An artist friend of mine was seated on a sketching stool at the iron
gate, making a study of the "bit of Italy."  Before the stool was an
easel, a palette, and a box of water colours.  Tennyson, who was
near-sighted, saw at first only the seated figure on the camp stool,
leaning back against the open gate and gazing at the unique view.

"Very much at home," continued the poet.

The right-of-way was for walking only, not for sitting in chairs and
encumbering the earth with easels and general impedimenta of the fine
arts.  My friend, who was a stranger in the land, had probably not
thought of this, and, having a sudden consciousness of intrusion,
whispered to me, around the hedge:

"Tennyson!  O Lord!"

The great man drew nearer, and then, taking in the situation, said:

"Ah, painting!  Brothers in art.  Good morning!"

This was perhaps tender treatment as compared with what we had heard a
pair of strangers might have expected.  But my friend, although
flurried because Jove had passed, remained at work.  I forget, though,
whether the sketch was ever completed.  {122} I was curious enough,
however, to pass on, by a detour, in the hope of seeing Jove on his
homeward stroll.  But he had vanished, and there were no thunderings,
near or far.

Mrs. Cameron and her household, after years at enlivening and
photographing Freshwater, returned to Ceylon.  The departure was an
occasion for a liberal distribution of photographs among the
inhabitants of the West Wight; and where there was a souvenir to be
given or a tip to be left, mounted portraits of celebrities, or of
models dressed as characters in fiction or poetry, were handed out.
Thus it happened that many of the pleasant lodging-houses in the
vicinity became galleries of Cameron art.

"Ideal" Ward had built a country mansion within a mile of Farringford.
It was called Weston Manor.  The eminent Catholic scholar and writer
was, of course, a friend of Tennyson.  And the two would dispute, of
course, about religion, or, rather, about theology, without the
slightest effect upon each other's opinions.  The house is still in the
possession of the Ward family, but is not occupied by them.  For some
years the private chaplain at Weston Manor was Father Peter
Haythornthwaite, a most agreeable and hard-working man.  Father Peter,
as they called him in the island, was also a friend of Tennyson and
frequently a companion of his walks.  He told me an amusing story
connected with his first dinner at Farringford.  Tennyson had an Irish
maid, Mary by name.  The family were very fond of her; her devotion to
them was equalled only by her zeal in serving them, which she would
{123} sometimes do in a domineering, if loyal manner, to which the poet
bowed submissively.  Tennyson disliked formality and stiffness, and was
uncomfortable in a dress suit and starched shirt.  Dressing for dinner
he avoided whenever he could.  Mary had laid out his most ceremonious
clothes.

"Put them away," said he.  "I 'll not wear them!"

Mary insisted.

"Now, I see," said Tennyson.  "I am to wear them for that priest, eh?"

"Plaze, sir!"

"Will he come in his altar robes and stole?"

"The saints forbid!" said she.

"If they forbid him, why should they compel me?" he asked.

"It 's I, yer Honour, that tell ye, for the sake of the house!  And he
's a man of God."

"I could n't resist that, could I?" the poet asked of Father Peter.
"And so," said he, "I dressed."

At the table one evening, Tennyson, being in a humorous mood, composed
rhyming epitaphs upon every name that occurred to him.

"What would you say of me?" asked Father Peter.

Instantly this couplet rolled from the lips of the host:

  "Here lies P. Haythornthwaite,
  Human by nature, Roman by fate."


A letter of Mrs. Cameron's came under my observation one day, and I was
permitted to make a note from it.  "Tennyson," she wrote, "was very
violent with the girls on the subject of the rage for {124} autographs.
He said he believed every crime and every vice in the world was
connected with the passion for autographs and anecdotes and records;
that the desiring of anecdotes and acquaintance with the lives of great
men was treating them like pigs to be ripped open for the public; and
that he knew he himself should be ripped open like a pig; that he
thanked God Almighty with his whole heart and soul that he knew
nothing, and would know nothing, of Jane Austen; and that there were no
letters preserved, either of Shakespeare's, or of Jane Austen's; and
that they had not been ripped open like pigs.  Then he said that the
post for two days had brought him no letters, and that he thought there
was a sort of syncope in the world as to him and his fame."

That last touch is delicious.  Tennyson did not like to be ignored.  He
was proud, and justly proud, of his fame.  Sir Edwin Arnold said:
"Tennyson had a noble vanity, a proud pleasure in the very notoriety
which brought strangers peeping and stealing about his gates."  Perhaps
so, but it was a case of "It needs be that offences come, but woe be to
him through whom the offence cometh."  He hated to have tributes thrust
upon him; he hated intrusions upon his privacy, and had suffered too
much from that sort of thing at Farringford when summer visitors
overran Freshwater.  He liked to be recognised along the country roads;
he liked to have people lift their hats to him; he liked to know that
his work meant something to the passer by.  But he shunned the merely
curious stranger.

{125}

And so it was natural enough that he should have built a summer home on
the mainland, Aldworth, where there was no summer resort and no plague
of the curious.  His friend, James Knowles, of the _Nineteenth
Century_, designed the house, and there Tennyson passed many happy
summers and autumns.  And there, on a moonlit night in the autumn of
1892, he died.  Whether he loved Farringford more, or Aldworth more, I
do not know.  But probably he was as much attached to one as to the
other, for each had its special associations.

The Tennysonian cloak, the Tennysonian hat, the rolling collar, and the
touzled beard and hair were not unique.  There lived at one time in
Freshwater a brother of the poet.  He resembled the poet and dressed
like him.  At the same time there was another resident of the place who
not only resembled Lord Tennyson but "got himself up" in close
imitation of his dress and manner.  He was a warm admirer of Tennyson,
and was immensely flattered to be mistaken for him by strangers.  Small
boys of the neighbourhood learned speedily to extract penny tips from
this adoring person by pretending to mistake him for their celebrated
townsman.  On the whole it was rather a good thing to have three
figures in the place, any one of which might be looked upon or followed
by the summer visitor as the famous poet.  It might be puzzling if the
stranger met two or three Tennysons in a mile, but two of them could
easily divert attention from the third, who was skilled in avoiding
strangers.

There was an aged man who had been a gardener {126} at Farringford and
was living on a little pension from that quarter.  One morning he heard
that the Poet Laureate had died.  Meeting Father Peter in the road he
expressed his grief that "his pore ludship have passed away."  Then,
with much concern for the succession, he asked:

"D'ye think likely Mr. Hallam will follow his father's business?"

Father Peter thought it quite unlikely.

"Ah," said the pensioner, much relieved.  "I think nowt on 't, nowt!"

I have seen Farringford described as "a beautifully wooded gentleman's
park."  It must, at least, be acknowledged that if the gentleman were
not beautifully wooded, he lived there, and that he lived a beautiful
and serene life, a noble life, adding greatly to the fame of England,
and no less to the human lot.  Forty of his eighty-three years were
Farringford years.  Never was poet more happily placed than in this
earthly paradise.  Every circumstance of loyalty and love, of
understanding and devotion, surrounded him here and at Aldworth.  And
never had genius a more devoted aid than Tennyson had in his son
Hallam, the present Lord Tennyson, shield and buckler to his father and
to his gentle mother, the dear lady who seemed like a spirit held on
earth only by the devotion of husband and son.  A family life richer
and more tender one does not know among all the lives that one has
seen, or ever heard of.  To write more about it now would be impious.

Shortly after Tennyson had been buried in Westminster {127} Abbey, on
an October day in 1892, a committee of his neighbours in Freshwater was
formed for the purpose of erecting some memorial in the rural region
where half his life had been passed.  The memorial was meant to be a
local and neighbourly undertaking, and it was thought, naturally
enough, that it might be carried out in the form of a monument, tablet,
or window, in the village church.  But a more fitting idea was adopted.

There stood on the summit of the High Down, "Tennyson's Down" as it is
more generally known, a great beacon of heavy, blackened timber
surmounted by a cresset, in which, on old nights, long ago, fire had
blazed when alarms were signalled from hill to hill along the coast.
This beacon had been taken over by the Lighthouse Board and had served
through decades as a mark for navigation for the endless processions of
ships passing up and down the English Channel and through the Solent by
the Needles.  Six or seven hundred feet above the sea, and near the
edge of a long white cliff, it was easily seen by navigators bound
inward or outward.  For forty years Tennyson had made it a point of
call in his almost daily walks.  The committee believed that in the
place of the old wooden structure a granite shaft could be erected,
serving at once as a memorial to Tennyson and a beacon to seamen.

The Reverend Doctor Merriman, Rector of Freshwater, Colonel Crozier,
Doctor Hollis, and others, invited me to join the committee, and I did
so, suggesting that Americans would wish to share in {128} erecting the
proposed memorial, but that it would be scarcely possible for them to
participate were the object undertaken purely as a village or
neighbourhood tribute.  The broader suggestion was adopted.  A Celtic
cross in Cornish granite was designed by Mr. J. L. Pearson, of the
Royal Academy, and the Brethren of Trinity House (the Lighthouse Board)
consented to preserve it in perpetuity if the committee would provide
for its erection.  I communicated with my old friend, Mrs. James T.
Fields of Boston, the widow of Tennyson's American publisher, and she
brought together an American committee for the purpose of cooperating
with the one in Freshwater.  Doctor Oliver Wendell Holmes became her
first associate and the first American subscriber.  The daughters of
Longfellow and Lowell were members of the American committee, and so
were Mrs. Agassiz, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Margaret Deland, Miss
Sarah Orne Jewett, Professor Charles Eliot Norton, Mr. Thomas Bailey
Aldrich, Mr. H. O. Houghton, Mr. George H. Mifflin, and others.
Several American newspapers courteously drew attention to the proposed
memorial, and Mr. George W. Smalley made an appeal through the New York
Tribune, as I did through other papers.  Subscriptions were purposely
confined to small amounts so that the humblest lover of Tennyson could
contribute his mite.  I remember that among the first to come were
twenty-five cents "from a bricklayer", and "a dollar from a proof
reader."

The cross was erected and now, a quarter of a century later, it shows
scarcely a sign of weather, {129} though it fronts the sun, and the
storms beat upon it, seven hundred feet above the sea.  It bears this
inscription:

     IN MEMORY
     OF ALFRED
   LORD TENNYSON
   THIS CROSS IS
  RAISED A BEACON
   TO SAILORS BY
   THE PEOPLE OF
   FRESHWATER AND
   OTHER FRIENDS
    IN ENGLAND
    AND AMERICA


Cliff-erosion causes the precipitous brink to creep slowly toward the
cross.  By or before the middle of the present century it may become
necessary to remove the Beacon Cross some yards to the north.

It was, I think, on the day of Tennyson's burial that the following
letter appeared in the _Times_, over the signature P.L.I.


"Perhaps the following anecdotes may be of interest, related as they
were in a paper read privately by the late James T. Fields, in 1872,
during my stay in Boston.

"Mr. Fields said that while staying with the poet at Farringford,
Tennyson said at midnight, 'Fields, let 's take a walk!'  It was a dark
and wild night, the sea breaking at the foot of the cliffs.  Knowing
the dangers of the place and his near-sightedness, I feared for his
safety; however, he trudged on through the thick grass with his stick,
I also using the one he had lent me on setting out.

{130}

"Presently he dropped on hands and knees in the grass.  Alarmed I
asked, 'What is the matter?'  He answered in a strong, Lincolnshire
accent, 'Violets, man, violets!  Get thee down and have a smell; it
will make thee sleep the better!'  He had detected them by his acute
sense of smell, aided by his strong love of nature.  I dropped down,
and the sense of the ridiculous struck me forcibly,--in such a position
at midnight lying in the thick grass.  He joined in my laughter, and we
started for home.

"He was egotistical to an extreme, but it was superb, and deeply
impressed one.  An old lady once, sitting next to Tennyson while some
of his poems were being read, exclaimed, 'Oh! how exquisite!'  'I
should say it was,' replied the poet.  At another time he said no one
could read 'Maud' but himself.  'Fields, come and see me, and I will
give you "Maud" so that you will never forget it.'  This was perfectly
true.  I felt I could have listened to him forever, and would go any
distance to hear it as he gave it."


There was much more to the same purpose.  But Mr. Fields, like several
others who have written about Tennyson, may have over-emphasised the
poet's "egotism."  Tennyson was an absolutely honest man.  He said what
he thought.  If another said that his work was "exquisite" or "superb",
or this, or that, he would not affect a self-depreciation which he did
not feel.  That would have been dishonest.  If the work were fine, he
knew it and said so.  If it were over-praised, he said that too.  He
was not imposed upon by flattery, and he hated that and detected it
easily enough.  The "violet" incident above has been quoted frequently.
It is quoted here because Mr. Fields was mistaken about {131} "the
thick grass."  That does not grow on the down.  Besides the furze
bushes, there is only close-cropped turf.  If he walked through "thick
grass" it may have been on the way to and from the down, perhaps, by
the way of Maiden's Croft.  And on the down the poet would have been in
no peril through his short-sightedness.  He was a countryman, and knew
every inch of the way.  A countryman can tell by the slope of the
ground, by "the lie of the land" under his feet, whether or not the
down is leading him astray.  If he is sure-footed, far sight will not
help him much in the dark.  But Fields, although a kindly soul, was a
publisher, and he might easily have felt "ridiculous" when kneeling at
the feet of a poet.

A diligent antiquary lived at Freshwater in Tennyson's time.  He lived
in Easton Cottage, nearly opposite the road-end of Tennyson's Lane.
His name was Robert Walker, and he was well advanced in age.  When I
knew him, in the nineties, he was very deaf, so that talking with him
was tiresome.  But he had interesting talk to give, even if he received
none in return.  He had been a dealer in antiques, I forget where, but
I remember that he told me he had made and lost two fortunes, and was
sheltering his last years under the shreds of the second.  He told me,
too, that he had been offered the curatorship of a well-known museum,
but had declined, preferring retirement in Freshwater.  I have a vague
recollection of being shown the correspondence.  But, at any rate, the
old man promised to confer new fame on Freshwater by proving that it
{132} had very ancient fame, indeed, as a harbourage and stage in the
overland route to the tin mines of Cornwall in the time of the
Phoenicians!

His argument was something like this: In the obscure past there were
Phoenicians.  So much we grant.  They conducted with the world at
large, or with as much of it as was then known, a trade in tin.  Strabo
tells us so.  Whence came their tin?  From Cornwall.  And how did they
get to Cornwall?  By the Isle of Wight, which seems a roundabout way,
but was not so.  The "ships" of the Phoenicians "were little more than
open boats, partly decked, and liable to be swamped by the dash of the
waves over their sides and prows.  They were propelled by rowers,
numbering from thirty to fifty; if wind served they stepped a single
mast and hoisted a single sail."  They avoided the heavy seas of the
Bay of Biscay, and came by the rivers of France.  Up from the
Mediterranean they would proceed by the Rhone to where Lyons is now.
There they would leave their vessels.  From there overland to the
Seine, where they had another fleet awaiting them.  Then down the Seine
to where Havre, or Barfleur, or Cherbourg stand now, and thence across
the Channel to the Isle of Wight, the nearest front of barbarian
England.

Freshwater was then an island.  It is almost an island now.  The little
tidal river, Yar, rises within a few yards of the Channel and flows
north, to the Solent.  In those days there was probably no beach at
Freshwater Bay; the present beach was formed after modern man had
constructed a causeway {133} there.  In those days the waters of the
Channel flowed into the Yar, making a shallow estuary sufficient for an
anchorage, where the Phoenician craft could lie while their adventurous
crews were following the Cornish trail, a feat easily performed,
because, in those days, the Isle of Wight was doubtless joined to the
mainland at Hurst Castle.  If it were not it should have been, in order
to add interest to the story.

About the beginning of the eighteen-nineties workmen were widening and
lowering the road which skirts Farringford and the Briary, and gives an
entrance to the rear of Weston Manor.  They dug so closely into a
Weston hedge that, in going below the subsoil of it, they discovered
the remains of ancient structures containing pottery, ash, charcoal,
lime, enamelled bricks, and so on.  Walker declared the remains were
Phoenician, and the site that of a crematorium and a pottery.  He cited
evidence which I have not space to record.  Being an antiquary he
turned on other antiquaries.  He wrote a pamphlet.  The Antiquary
magazine took up the case and cited similar discoveries, undoubtedly
Phoenician, in South Devon.  Warm arguments for and against the
Phoenician theory were thrown back and forth.  And Freshwater laughed.
It was sure, and is sure still, that the anti-Phoenicians had the best
of it, and Neighbour Walker the worst of it.  A neighbour would have
the worst of it, of course.  But Walker persuaded the Ward of the time
(Granville) to preserve the discoveries and to erect above them two
protecting domes of concrete.  {134} Walker, I think, had the best of
it, for if he could not p

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