Marse Henry: An Autobiography (Volume 2)
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Title: Marse Henry: An Autobiography (Volume 2)
Author: Henry Watterson
Release date: July 1, 2005 [eBook #8459]
Most recently updated: February 21, 2015
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/8459
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MARSE HENRY: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (VOLUME 2) ***
Produced by Curtis A. Weyant and the Online Distributed
Proofreading Team
"Marse Henry"
An Autobiography
By
Henry Watterson
Volume II
Illustrated
Contents
Chapter the Thirteenth
Charles Eames and Charles Sumner-Schurzand Lamar--I Go to Congress--A
Heroic Kentuckian--Stephen Foster and His Songs--Music and Theodore
Thomas
Chapter the Fourteenth
Henry Adams and the Adams Family--John Hay and Frank Mason--The Three
_Mousquetaires_ of Culture--Paris--"The Frenchman"--The South of
France
Chapter the Fifteenth
Still the Gay Capital of France--Its Environs--Walewska and De
Morny--Thackeray in Paris--A _Pension_ Adventure
Chapter the Sixteenth
Monte Carlo--The European Shrine of Sport and Fashion--Apocryphal
Gambling Stories--Leopold, King of the Belgians--An Able and
Picturesque Man of Business
Chapter the Seventeenth
A Parisian _Pension_--The Widow of Walewska--Napoleon's
Daughter-in-Law--The Changeless--A Moral and Orderly City
Chapter the Eighteenth
The Grover Cleveland Period--President Arthur and Mr. Blaine--John
Chamberlin--The Decrees of Destiny
Chapter the Nineteenth
Mr. Cleveland in the White House--Mr. Bayard in the Department of
State--Queer Appointments to Office--The One-Party Power--The End of
North and South Sectionalism
Chapter the Twentieth
The Real Grover Cleveland--Two Clevelands Before and After Marriage--A
Correspondence and a Break of Personal Relations
Chapter the Twenty-First
Stephen Foster, the Song-Writer--A Friend Comes to the Rescu
His Originality--"My Old Kentucky Home" and the "Old Folks at
Home"--General Sherman and "Marching Through Georgia"
Chapter the Twenty-Second
Theodore Roosevelt--His Problematic Character--He Offers Me an
Appointment--His _Bonhomie_ and Chivalry--Proud of His Rebel Kin
Chapter the Twenty-Third
The Actor and the Journalist--The Newspaper and the State--Joseph
Jefferson--His Personal and Artistic Career--Modest Character and
Religious Belief
Chapter the Twenty-Fourth
The Writing of Memoirs--Some Characteristics of Carl Shurz--Sam
Bowles--Horace White and the Mugwumps
Chapter the Twenty-Fifth
Every Trade Has Its Tricks--I Play One on William McKinley--Far Away
Party Politics and Political Issues
Chapter the Twenty-Sixth
A Libel on Mr. Cleveland--His Fondness for Cards--Some Poker
Stories--The "Senate Game"--Tom Ochiltree, Senator Allison and General
Schenck
Chapter the Twenty-Seventh
The Profession of Journalism--Newspapers and Editors in
America--Bennett, Greeley and Raymond--Forney and Dana--The Education
of a Journalist
Chapter the Twenty-Eighth
Bullies and Braggarts--Some Kentucky Illustrations--The Old Galt
House--The Throckmortons--A Famous Sugeon--"Old Hell's Delight"
Chapter the Twenty-Ninth
About Political Conventions, State and National--"Old Ben Butler"--His
Appearance as a Trouble-Maker in the Democratic National Convention of
1892--Tarifa and the Tariff--Spain as a Frightful Example
Chapter the Thirtieth
The Makers of the Republic--Lincoln, Jefferson, Clay and Webster--The
Proposed League of Nations--The Wilsonian Incertitude--The "New
Freedom"
Chapter the Thirty-First
The Age of Miracles--A Story of Franklin Pierce--Simon Suggs
Billy Sunday--Jefferson Davis and Aaron Burr--Certain Constitutional
Shortcomings
Chapter the Thirty-Second
A War Episode--I Meet my Fater--I Marry and Make a Home--The Ups and
Downs of Life Lead to a Happy Old Age
Illustrations
Henry Watterson--Fifty Years Ago
Henry Woodfire Grady--One of Mr. Watterson's "Boys"
Mr. Watterson's Library at "Mansfield"
A Corner of "Mansfield"--Home of Mr. Watterson
Henry Watterson (Photograph Taken in Florida)
Henry Watterson. From a painting by Louis Mark in the Manhattan Club, New
York
"MARSE HENRY"
Chapter the Thirteenth
Charles Eames and Charles Sumner-Schurzand Lamar--I Go to Congress--A
Heroic Kentuckian--Stephen Foster and His Songs--Music and Theodore
Thomas
I
Swift's definition of "conversation" did not preside over or direct the
daily intercourse between Charles Sumner, Charles Eames and Robert J.
Walker in the old days in the National Capital. They did not converse. They
discoursed. They talked sententiously in portentous essays and learned
dissertations. I used to think it great, though I nursed no little dislike
of Sumner.
Charles Eames was at the outset of his career a ne'er-do-well New
Englander--a Yankee Jack-of-all-trades--kept at the front by an exceedingly
clever wife. Through the favor she enjoyed at court he received from Pierce
and Buchanan unimportant diplomatic appointments. During their sojourns in
Washington their home was a kind of political and literary headquarters.
Mrs. Eames had established a salon--the first attempt of the kind made
there; and it was altogether a success. Her Sundays evenings were notable,
indeed. Whoever was worth seeing, if in town, might usually be found there.
Charles Sumner led the procession. He was a most imposing person. Both
handsome and distinguished in appearance, he possessed in an eminent degree
the Harvard pragmatism--or, shall I say, affectation?--and seemed never
happy except on exhibition. He had made a profitable political and personal
issue of the Preston Brooks attack. Brooks was an exceeding light weight,
but he did for Sumner more than Sumner could ever have done for himself.
In the Charles Eames days Sumner was exceedingly disagreeable to me. Many
people, indeed, thought him so. Many years later, in the Greeley campaign
of 1872, Schurz brought us together--they had become as very brothers in
the Senate--and I found him the reverse of my boyish ill conceptions.
He was a great old man. He was a delightful old man, every inch a
statesman, much of a scholar, and something of a hero. I grew in time to be
actually fond of him, passed with him entire afternoons and evenings in his
library, mourned sincerely when he died, and went with Schurz to Boston, on
the occasion when that great German-American delivered the memorial address
in honor of the dead Abolitionist.
Of all the public men of that period Carl Schurz most captivated me. When
we first came into personal relations, at the Liberal Convention, which
assembled at Cincinnati and nominated Greeley and Brown as a presidential
ticket, he was just turned forty-three; I, two and thirty. The closest
intimacy followed. Our tastes were much alike. Both of us had been educated
in music. He played the piano with intelligence and feeling--especially
Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, neither of us ever having quite reached
the "high jinks" of Wagner.
To me his oratory was wonderful. He spoke to an audience of five or ten
thousand as he would have talked to a party of three or six. His style was
simple, natural, unstrained; the lucid statement and cogent argument now
and again irradiated by a salient passage of satire or a burst of not too
eloquent rhetoric.
He was quite knocked out by the nomination of Horace Greeley. For a long
time he could not reconcile himself to support the ticket. Horace White and
I addressed ourselves to the task of "fetching him into camp"--there being
in point of fact nowhere else for him to go--though we had to get up what
was called The Fifth Avenue Conference to make a bridge.
Truth to say, Schurz never wholly adjusted himself to political conditions
in the United States. He once said to me in one of the querulous moods that
sometimes overcame him: "If I should live a hundred years my enemies would
still call me a--Dutchman!"
It was Schurz, as I have said, who brought Lamar and me together. The
Mississippian had been a Secession Member of Congress when I was a Unionist
scribe in the reporters' gallery. I was a furious partisan in those
days and disliked the Secessionists intensely. Of them, Lamar was most
aggressive. I later learned that he was very many-sided and accomplished,
the most interesting and lovable of men. He and Schurz "froze together,"
as, brought together by Schurz, he and I "froze together." On one side he
was a sentimentalist and on the other a philosopher, but on all sides a
fighter.
They called him a dreamer. He sprang from a race of chevaliers and
scholars. Oddly enough, albeit in his moods a recluse, he was a man of
the world; a favorite in society; very much at home in European courts,
especially in that of England; the friend of Thackeray, at whose house,
when in London, he made his abode. Lady Ritchie--Anne Thackeray--told me
many amusing stories of his whimsies. He was a man among brainy men and a
lion among clever women.
We had already come to be good friends and constant comrades when the
whirligig of time threw us together for a little while in the lower house
of Congress. One day he beckoned me over to his seat. He was leaning
backward with his hands crossed behind his head.
As I stood in front of him he said: "On the eighth of February, 1858, Mrs.
Gwin, of California, gave a fancy dress ball. Mr. Lamar, of Mississippi,
a member of Congress, was there. Also a glorious young woman--a vision of
beauty and grace--with whom the handsome and distinguished young statesman
danced--danced once, twice, thrice, taking her likewise down to supper.
He went to bed, turned his face to the wall and dreamed of her. That was
twenty years ago. To-day this same Mr. Lamar, after an obscure interregnum,
was with Mrs. Lamar looking over Washington for an apartment. In quest of
cheap lodging they came to a mean house in a mean quarter, where a poor,
wizened, ill-clad woman showed them through the meanly furnished rooms. Of
course they would not suffice.
"As they were coming away the great Mr. Lamar said to the poor landlady,
'Madam, have you lived long in Washington?' She said all her life. 'Madam,'
he continued, 'were you at a fancy dress ball given by Mrs. Senator Gwin
of California, the eighth of February, 1858?' She said she was. 'Do you
remember,' the statesman, soldier and orator continued, 'a young and
handsome Mississippian, a member of Congress, by the name of Lamar?' She
said she didn't."
I rather think that Lamar was the biggest brained of all the men I have met
in Washington. He possessed the courage of his convictions. A doctrinaire,
there was nothing of the typical doctrinaire, or theorist, about him. He
really believed that cotton was king and would compel England to espouse
the cause of the South.
Despite his wealth of experience and travel he was not overmuch of a
raconteur, but he once told me a good story about his friend Thackeray. The
two were driving to a banquet of the Literary Fund, where Dickens was to
preside. "Lamar," said Thackeray, "they say I can't speak. But if I want to
I can speak. I can speak every bit as good as Dickens, and I am going to
show you to-night that I can speak almost as good as you." When the moment
arrived Thackeray said never a word. Returning in the cab, both silent,
Thackeray suddenly broke forth. "Lamar," he exclaimed, "don't you think you
have heard the greatest speech to-night that was never delivered?"
II
Holding office, especially going to Congress, had never entered any wish
or scheme of mine. Office seemed to me ever a badge of bondage. I knew too
much of the national capital to be allured by its evanescent and lightsome
honors. When the opportunity sought me out none of its illusions appealed
to me. But after a long uphill fight for personal and political recognition
in Kentucky an election put a kind of seal upon the victory I had won and
enabled me in a way to triumph over my enemies. I knew that if I accepted
the nomination offered me I would get a big popular vote--as I did--and so,
one full term, and half a term, incident to the death of the sitting member
for the Louisville district being open to me, I took the short term,
refusing the long term.
Though it was midsummer and Congress was about to adjourn I went to
Washington and was sworn in. A friend of mine, Col. Wake Holman, had made
a bet with one of our pals I would be under arrest before I had been
twenty-four hours in town, and won it. It happened in this wise: The night
of the day when I took my seat there was an all-night session. I knew too
well what that meant, and, just from a long tiresome journey, I went to bed
and slept soundly till sunrise. Just as I was up and dressing for a stroll
about the old, familiar, dearly loved quarter of the town there came an
imperative rap upon the door and a voice said: "Get up, colonel, quick!
This is a sergeant at arms. There has been a call of the House and I am
after you. Everybody is drunk, more or less, and they are noisy to have
some fun with you."
It was even as he said. Everybody, more or less, was drunk--especially the
provisional speaker whom Mr. Randall had placed in the chair--and when we
arrived and I was led a prisoner down the center aisle pandemonium broke
loose.
They had all sorts of fun with me, such as it was. It was moved that I
be fined the full amount of my mileage. Then a resolution was offered
suspending my membership and sending me under guard to the old Capitol
prison. Finally two or three of my friends rescued me and business was
allowed to proceed. It was the last day of a very long session and those
who were not drunk were worn out.
When I returned home there was a celebration in honor of the bet Wake
Holman had won at my expense. Wake was the most attractive and lovable of
men, by nature a hero, by profession a "filibuster" and soldier of fortune.
At two and twenty he was a private in Col. Humphrey Marshall's Regiment
of Kentucky Riflemen, which reached the scene of hostilities upon the Rio
Grande in the midsummer of 1846. He had enlisted from Owen county--"Sweet
Owen," as it used to be called--and came of good stock, his father, Col.
Harry Holman, in the days of aboriginal fighting and journalism, a frontier
celebrity. Wake's company, out on a scout, was picked off by the Mexicans,
and the distinction between United States soldiers and Texan rebels not
being yet clearly established, a drumhead court-martial ordered "the
decimation."
This was a decree that one of every ten of the Yankee captives should be
shot. There being a hundred of Marshall's men, one hundred beans--ninety
white and ten black--were put in a hat. Then the company was mustered as on
dress parade. Whoso drew a white bean was to be held prisoner of war; whoso
drew a black bean was to die.
In the early part of the drawing Wake drew a white bean. Toward the close
the turn of a neighbor and comrade from Owen county who had left a wife and
baby at home was called. He and Wake were standing together, Holman brushed
him aside, walked out in his place and drew his bean. It turned out to be a
white one. Twice within the half hour death had looked him in the eye and
found no blinking there.
I have seen quite a deal of hardihood, endurance, suffering, in both women
and men; splendid courage on the field of action; perfect self-possession
in the face of danger; but I rather think that Wake Holman's exploit that
day--next to actually dying for a friend, what can be nobler than being
willing to die for him?--is the bravest thing I know or have ever been told
of mortal man.
Wake Holman went to Cuba in the Lopez Rebellion of 1851, and fought under
Pickett at the Battle of Cardenas. In 1855-56 he was in Nicaragua, with
Walker. He commanded a Kentucky regiment of cavalry on the Union side in
our War of Sections. After the war he lived the life of a hunter and fisher
at his home in Kentucky; a cheery, unambitious, big-brained and big-hearted
cherub, whom it would not do to "projeck" with, albeit with entire safety
you could pick his pocket; the soul of simplicity and amiability.
To have known him was an education in primal manhood. To sit at his
hospitable board, with him at the head of the table, was an inspiration in
the genius of life and the art of living. One of his familiars started the
joke that when Wake drew the second white bean "he got a peep." He took
it kindly; though in my intimacy with him, extending over thirty years, I
never heard him refer to any of his adventures as a soldier.
It was not possible that such a man should provide for his old age. He had
little forecast. He knew not the value of money. He had humor, affection
and courage. I held him in real love and honor. When the Mexican War
Pension Act was passed by Congress I took his papers to General Black, the
Commissioner of Pensions, and related this story.
"I have promised Gen. Cerro Gordo Williams," said General Black, referring
to the then senior United States Senator from Kentucky, "that his name
shall go first on the roll of these Mexican pensioners. But"--and the
General looked beamingly in my face, a bit tearful, and says he: "Wake
Holman's name shall come right after." And there it is.
III
I was very carefully and for those times not ignorantly taught in music.
Schell, his name was, and they called him "Professor." He lived over in
Georgetown, where he had organized a little group of Prussian refugees into
a German club, and from my tenth to my fifteenth year--at first regularly,
and then in a desultory way as I came back to Washington City from my
school in Philadelphia, he hammered Bach and Handel and Mozart--nothing so
modern as Mendelssohn--into my not unwilling nor unreceptive mind, for my
bent was in the beginning to compose dramas, and in the end operas.
Adelina Patti was among my child companions. Once in the national capital,
when I was 12 years old and Adelina 9, we played together at a charity
concert. She had sung "The Last Rose of Summer," and I had played her
brother-in-law's variation upon "Home, Sweet Home." The audience was
enthusiastic. We were called out again and again. Then we came on the stage
together, and the applause increasing I sat down at the keyboard and played
an accompaniment with my own interpolations upon "Old Folks At Home," which
I had taught Adelina, and she sang the words. Then they fairly took the
roof off.
Once during a sojourn in Paris I was thrown with Christine Nilsson. She was
in the heyday of her success at the Theater Lyrique under the patronage of
Madame Miolan-Carvalho. One day I said to her: "The time may come when you
will be giving concerts." She was indignant. "Nevertheless," I continued,
"let me teach you a sure encore." I played her Stephen Foster's immortal
ditty. She was delighted. The sequel was that it served her even a better
turn than it had served Adelina Patti.
I played and transposed for the piano most of the melodies of Foster as
they were published, they being first produced in public by Christy's
Minstrels.
IV
Stephen Foster was the ne'er-do-well of a good Pennsylvania family. A
sister of his had married a brother of James Buchanan. There were two
daughters of this marriage, nieces of the President, and when they were
visiting the White House we had--shall I dare write it?--high jinks with
our nigger-minstrel concerts on the sly.
Will S. Hays, the rival of Foster as a song writer and one of my reporters
on the Courier-Journal, told me this story: "Foster," said he, "was a good
deal of what you might call a barroom loafer. He possessed a sweet tenor
voice before it was spoiled by drink, and was fond of music, though
technically he knew nothing about it. He had a German friend who when
he died left him a musical scrapbook, of all sorts of odds and ends of
original text. There is where Foster got his melodies. When the scrapbook
gave out he gave out."
I took it as merely the spleen of a rival composer. But many years after
in Vienna I heard a concert given over exclusively to the performance of
certain posthumous manuscripts of Schubert. Among the rest were selections
from an unfinished opera--"Rosemonde," I think it was called--in which the
whole rhythm and movements and parts of the score of Old Folks at Home were
the feature.
It was something to have grown up contemporary, as it were, with these
songs. Many of them were written in the old Rowan homestead, just outside
of Bardstown, Ky., where Louis Philippe lived and taught, and for a season
Talleyrand made his abode. The Rowans were notable people. John Rowan,
the elder, head of the house, was a famous lawyer, who divided oratorical
honors with Henry Clay, and like Clay, was a Senator in Congress; his son,
"young John," as he was called, Stephen Foster's pal, went as minister to
Naples, and fought duels, and was as Bob Acres wanted to be, "a devil of a
fellow." He once told me he had been intimate with Thackeray when they were
wild young men in Paris, and that they had both of them known the woman
whom Thackeray had taken for the original of Becky Sharp.
The Foster songs quite captivated my boyhood. I could sing a little, as
well as play, and learned each of them--especially Old Folks at Home and
My Old Kentucky Home--as they appeared. Their contemporary vogue was
tremendous. Nothing has since rivalled the popular impression they made,
except perhaps the Arthur Sullivan melodies.
Among my ambitions to be a great historian, dramatist, soldier and writer
of romance I desired also to be a great musician, especially a great
pianist. The bone-felon did the business for this later. But all my life I
have been able to thumb the keyboard at least for the children to dance,
and it has been a recourse and solace sometimes during intervals of
embittered journalism and unprosperous statesmanship.
V
Theodore Thomas and I used to play duos together. He was a master of the
violin before he took to orchestration. We remained the best of friends to
the end of his days.
On the slightest provocation, or none, we passed entire nights together.
Once after a concert he suddenly exclaimed: "Don't you think Wagner was a
---- fraud?"
A little surprised even by one of his outbreaks, I said: "Wagner may have
written some trick music but I hardly think that he was a fraud."
He reflected a moment. "Well," he continued, "it may not lie in my mouth to
say it--and perhaps I ought not to say it--I know I am most responsible for
the Wagner craze--but I consider him a ---- fraud."
He had just come from a long "classic entertainment," was worn out with
travel and worry, and meant nothing of the sort.
After a very tiresome concert when he was railing at the hard lines of a
peripatetic musician I said: "Come with me and I will give you a soothing
quail and as dry a glass of champagne as you ever had in your life."
The wine was poured out and he took a sip.
"I don't call that dry wine," he crossly said, and took another sip. "My
God," without a pause he continued, "isn't that great?"
Of course he was impulsive, even impetuous. Beneath his seeming cold
exterior and admirable self-control--the discipline of the master
artist--lay the moods and tenses of the musical temperament. He knew little
or nothing outside of music and did not care to learn. I tried to interest
him in politics. It was of no use. First he laughed my suggestions to scorn
and then swore like a trooper. German he was, through and through. It
was well that he passed away before the world war. Pat Gilmore--"Patrick
Sarsfield," we always called him--was a born politician, and if he had not
been a musician he would have been a statesman. I kept the peace between
him and Theodore Thomas by an ingenious system of telling all kinds of kind
things each had said of the other, my "repetitions" being pure inventions
of my own.
Chapter the Fourteenth
Henry Adams and the Adams Family--John Hay and Frank Mason--The Three
_Mousquetaires_ of Culture--Paris--"The Frenchman"--The South of
France
I
I have been of late reading The Education of Henry Adams, and it recalls
many persons and incidents belonging to the period about which I am now
writing. I knew Henry Adams well; first in London, then in Boston and
finally throughout his prolonged residence in Washington City. He was an
Adams; very definitely an Adams, but, though his ghost may revisit the
glimpses of the moon and chide me for saying so, with an English "cut to
his jib."
No three brothers could be more unlike than Charles Francis, John Quincy
and Henry Adams. Brooks Adams I did not know. They represented the fourth
generation of the brainiest pedigree--that is in continuous line--known to
our family history. Henry thought he was a philosopher and tried to be one.
He thought he was a man of the world and wanted to be one. He was, in spite
of himself, a provincial.
Provincialism is not necessarily rustic, even suburban. There is no
provincial quite so provincial as he who has passed his life in great
cities. The Parisian boulevardier taken away from the asphalt, the cockney
a little off Clapham Common and the Strand, is lost. Henry Adams knew
his London and his Paris, his Boston and his Quincy--we must not forget
Quincy--well. But he had been born, and had grown up, between the lids of
history, and for all his learning and travel he never got very far outside
them.
In manner and manners, tone and cast of thought he was
English--delightfully English--though he cultivated the cosmopolite.
His house in the national capital, facing the Executive Mansion across
Lafayette Square--especially during the life of his wife, an adorable
woman, who made up in sweetness and tact for some of the qualities lacking
in her husband--was an intellectual and high-bred center, a rendezvous for
the best ton and the most accepted people. The Adamses may be said to
have succeeded the Eameses as leaders in semi-social, semi-literary and
semi-political society.
There was a trio--I used to call them the Three Musketeers of Culture--John
Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge and Henry Adams. They made an interesting and
inseparable trinity--Caleb Cushing, Robert J. Walker and Charles Sumner not
more so--and it was worth while to let them have the floor and to hear them
talk; Lodge, cool and wary as a politician should be; Hay, helterskelter,
the real man of the world crossed on a Western stock; and Adams, something
of a litératteur, a statesman and a cynic.
John Randolph Tucker, who when he was in Congress often met Henry at
dinners and the like, said to him on the appearance of the early volumes of
his History of the United States: "I am not disappointed, for how could an
Adams be expected to do justice to a Randolph?"
While he was writing this history Adams said to me: "There is an old
villain--next to Andrew Jackson the greatest villain of his time--a
Kentuckian--don't say he was a kinsman of yours!--whose papers, if he
left any, I want to see."
"To whom are you referring?" I asked with mock dignity.
"To John Adair," he answered.
"Well," said I, "John Adair married my grandmother's sister and I can put
you in the way of getting whatever you require."
I have spoken of John Hay as Master of the Revels in the old
Sutherland-Delmonico days. Even earlier than that--in London and Paris--an
intimacy had been established between us. He married in Cleveland, Ohio,
and many years passed before I came up with him again. One day in Whitelaw
Reid's den in the Tribune Building he reappeared, strangely changed--no
longer the rosy-cheeked, buoyant boy--an overserious, prematurely old man.
I was shocked, and when he had gone Reid, observing this, said: "Oh, Hay
will come round all right. He is just now in one of his moods. I picked him
up in Piccadilly the other day and by sheer force brought him over."
When we recall the story of Hay's life--one weird tragedy after another,
from the murder of Lincoln to the murder of McKinley, including the tragic
end of two members of his immediate family--there rises in spite of the
grandeur that pursued him a single exclamation: "The pity of it!"
This is accentuated by Henry Adams' Education. Yet the silent courage with
which Hay met disaster after disaster must increase both the sympathy
and the respect of those who peruse the melancholy pages of that vivid
narrative. Toward the end, meeting him on a public occasion, I said: "You
work too hard--you are not looking well."
"I am dying," said he.
"Yes," I replied in the way of banter, "you are dying of fame and fortune."
But I went no further. He was in no mood for the old verbal horseplay.
He looked wan and wizened. Yet there were still several years before him.
When he came from Mannheim to Paris it was clear that the end was nigh. I
did not see him--he was too ill to see any one--but Frank Mason kept me
advised from day to day, and when, a month or two later, having reached
home, the news came to us that he was dead we were nowise surprised, and
almost consoled by the thought that rest had come at last.
Frank Mason and his wife--"the Masons," they were commonly called, for Mrs.
Mason made a wondrous second to her husband--were from Cleveland, Ohio, she
a daughter of Judge Birchard--Jennie Birchard--he a rising young journalist
caught in the late seventies by the glitter of a foreign appointment. They
ran the gamut of the consular service, beginning with Basel and Marseilles
and ending with Frankfurt, Berlin and Paris. Wherever they were their
house was a very home--a kind of Yankee shrine--of visiting Americans and
militant Americanism.
Years before he was made consul general--in point of fact when he was plain
consul at Marseilles--he ran over to Paris for a lark. One day he said to
me, "A rich old hayseed uncle of mine has come to town. He has money to
burn and he wants to meet you. I have arranged for us to dine with him at
the Anglaise to-night and we are to order the dinner--carte blanche." The
rich old uncle to whom I was presented did not have the appearance of a
hayseed. On the contrary he was a most distinguished-looking old gentleman.
The dinner we ordered was "stunning"--especially the wines. When the bill
was presented our host scanned it carefully, scrutinizing each item and
making his own addition, altogether "like a thoroughbred." Frank and I
watched him not without a bit of anxiety mixed with contrition. When he had
paid the score he said with a smile: "That was rather a steep bill, but we
have had rather a good dinner, and now, if you boys know of as good a dance
hall we'll go there and I'll buy the outfit."
II
First and last I have lived much in the erstwhile gay capital of France. It
was gayest when the Duke de Morny flourished as King of the Bourse. He was
reputed the Emperor's natural half-brother. The breakdown of the Mexican
adventure, which was mostly his, contributed not a little to the final
Napoleonic fall. He died of dissipation and disappointment, and under the
pseudonym of the Duke de Morra, Daudet celebrated him in "The Nabob."
De Morny did not live to see the tumble of the house of cards he had built.
Next after I saw Paris it was a pitiful wreck indeed; the Hotel de Ville
and the Tuileries in flames; the Column gone from the Place Vendôme; but
later the rise of the Third Republic saw the revival of the unquenchable
spirit of the irrepressible French.
Nevertheless I should scarcely be taken for a Parisian. Once, when
wandering aimlessly, as one so often does through the Paris streets, one of
the touts hanging round the Cafe de la Paix to catch the unwary stranger
being a little more importunate than usual, I ordered him to go about his
business.
"This is my business," he impudently answered.
"Get away, I tell you!" I thundered, "I am a Parisian myself!"
He drew a little out of reach of the umbrella I held in my hand, and with
a drawl of supreme and very American contempt, exclaimed, "Well, you don't
look it," and scampered off.
Paris, however, is not all of France. Sometimes I have thought not the
best part of it. There is the south of France, with Avignon, the heart of
Provence, seat of the French papacy six hundred years ago, the metropolis
of Christendom before the Midi was a region--Paris yet a village, and Rome
struggling out of the debris of the ages--with Arles and Nîmes, and, above
all, Tarascon, the home of the immortal Tartarin, for next-door neighbors.
They are all hard by Marseilles. But Avignon ever most caught my fancy, for
there the nights seem peopled with the ghosts of warriors and cardinals,
and there on festal mornings the spirits of Petrarch and his Laura walk
abroad, the ramparts, which bade defiance to Goth and Vandal and Saracen
hordes, now giving shelter to bats and owls, but the atmosphere laden with
legend
_"...tasting of Flora and the country green,
Dance and Provençal song and sun-burnt mirth."_
Something too much of this! Let me not yield to the spell of the
picturesque. To recur to matters of fact and get down to prose and the
times we live in let us halt a moment on this southerly journey and have a
look in upon Lyons, the industrial capital of France, which is directly on
the way.
The idiosyncrasy of Lyons is silk. There are two schools of introduction in
the art of silk weaving, one of them free to any lad in the city, the other
requiring a trifle of matriculation. The first of these witnesses the whole
process of fabrication from the reeling of threads to the finishing of
dress goods, and the loom painting of pictures. It is most interesting of
course, the painstaking its most obvious feature, the individual weaver
living with his family upon a wage representing the cost of the barest
necessities of life. Again, and ever and ever again, the inequalities of
fortune! Where will it end?
The world has tried revolution and it has tried anarchy. Always the
survival of the strong, nicknamed by Spencer and his ilk the "fittest." Ten
thousand heads were chopped off during the Terror in France to make room
for whom? Not for the many, but the few; though it must be allowed that in
some ways the conditions were improved.
Yet here after a hundred years, here in Lyons, faithful, intelligent men
struggle for sixty, for forty cents a day, with never a hope beyond! What
is to be done about it? Suppose the wealth of the universe were divided per
capita, how long would it remain out of the clutches of the Napoleons of
finance, only a percentage of whom find ultimately their Waterloo, little
to the profit of the poor who spin and delve, who fight and die, in the
Grand Army of the Wretched!
III
We read a deal that is amusing about the southerly Frenchman. He is indeed
_sui generis_. Some five and twenty years ago there appeared in
Louisville a dapper gentleman, who declared himself a Marseillais, and who
subsequently came to be known variously as The Major and The Frenchman. I
shall not mention him otherwise in this veracious chronicle, but, looking
through the city directory of Marseilles I found an entire page devoted to
his name, though all the entries may not have been members of his family.
There is no doubt that he was a Marseillais.
Wandering through the streets of the old city, now in a café of La
Cannebière and now along a quay of the Old Port, his ghost has often
crossed my path and dogged my footsteps, though he has lain in his grave
this many a day. I grew to know him very well, to be first amused by him,
then to be interested, and in the end to entertain an affection for him.
The Major was a delightful composite of Tartarin of Tarascon and the
Brigadier Gerard, with a dash of the Count of Monte Cristo; for when he was
flush--which by some odd coincidence happened exactly four times a year--he
was as liberal a spendthrift as one could wish to meet anywhere between the
little principality of Monaco and the headwaters of the Nile; transparent
as a child; idiosyncratic to a degree.
I understand Marseilles better and it has always seemed nearer to me since
he was born there and lived there when a boy, and, I much fear me, was
driven away, the scapegrace of excellent and wealthy people; not, I feel
sure, for any offense that touched the essential parts of his manhood. A
gentler, a more upright and harmless creature I never knew in all my life.
I very well recall when he first arrived in the Kentucky metropolis. His
attire and raiment were faultless. He wore a rose in his coat, he carried
a delicate cane, and a most beautiful woman hung upon his arm. She was his
wife. It was a circumstance connected with this lady which led to the after
intimacy between him and me. She fell dangerously ill. I had casually met
her husband as an all-round man-about-town, and by this token, seeking
sympathy on lines of least resistance, he came to me with his sorrow.
I have never seen grief more real and fervid. He swore, on his knees and
with tears in his eyes, that if she recovered, if God would give her back
to him, he would never again touch a card; for gambling was his passion,
and even among amateurs he would have been accounted the softest of soft
things. His prayer was answered, she did recover, and he proceeded to
fulfill his vow.
But what was he to do? He had been taught, or at least he had learned,
to do nothing, not even to play poker! I suggested that as running a
restaurant was a French prerogative and that as he knew less about cooking
than about anything else--we had had a contest or two over the mysteries of
a pair of chafing dishes--and as there was not a really good eating place
in Louisville, he should set up a restaurant. It was said rather in jest
than in earnest; but I was prepared to lend him the money. The next thing I
knew, and without asking for a dollar, he had opened The Brunswick.
In those days I saw the Courier-Journal to press, turning night into day,
and during a dozen years I took my twelve o'clock supper there. It was thus
and from these beginnings that the casual acquaintance between us ripened
into intimacy, and that I gradually came into a knowledge of the reserves
behind The Major's buoyant optimism and occasional gasconnade.
He ate and drank sparingly; but he was not proof against the seduction
of good company, and he had plenty of it, from William Preston to Joseph
Jefferson, with such side lights as Stoddard Johnston, Boyd Winchester,
Isaac Caldwell and Proctor Knott, of the Home Guard--very nearly all the
celebrities of the day among the outsiders--myself the humble witness
and chronicler. He secured an excellent chef, and of course we lived
exceedingly well.
The Major's most obvious peculiarity was that he knew everything and had
been everywhere. If pirates were mentioned he flowered out at once into an
adventure upon the sea; if bandits, on the land. If it was Wall Street
he had a reminiscence and a scheme; if gambling, a hard-luck story and
a system. There was no quarter of the globe of which he had not been an
inhabitant.
Once the timbered riches of Africa being mentioned, at once the Major gave
us a most graphic account of how "the old house"--for thus he designated
some commercial establishment, which either had no existence or which he
had some reason for not more particularly indicating--had sent him in
charge of a rosewood saw mill on the Ganges, and, after many ups and downs,
of how the floods had come and swept the plant away; and Rudolph Fink, who
was of the party, immediately said, "I can attest the truth of The Major's
story, because my brother Albert and I were in charge of some fishing camps
at the mouth of the Ganges at the exact date of the floods, and we caught
many of those rosewood logs in our nets as they floated out to sea."
Augustine's Terrapin came to be for a while the rage in Philadelphia, and
even got as far as New York and Washington, and straightway, The Major
declared he could and would make Augustine and his terrapin look "like a
monkey." He proposed to give a dinner.
There were great preparations and expectancy. None of us ate much at
luncheon that day. At the appointed hour, we assembled at The Brunswick. I
will dismiss the decorations and the preludes except to say that they were
Parisian. After a while in full regalia The Major appeared, a train of
servants following with a silver tureen. The lid was lifted.
"_Voilà!_" says he.
The vision disclosed to our startled eyes was an ocean that looked like
bean soup flecked by a few strands of black crape!
The explosion duly arrived from the assembled gourmets, I, myself, I am
sorry to say, leading the rebellion.
"I put seeks terrapin in zat soup!" exclaimed The Frenchman, quite losing
his usual good English in his excitement.
We reproached him. We denounced him. He was driven from the field. But he
bore us no malice. Ten days later he invited us again, and this time Sam
Ward himself could have found no fault with the terrapin.
Next afternoon, when I knew The Major was asleep, I slipped back into the
kitchen and said to Louis Garnier, the chef: "Is there any of that terrapin
left over from last night?"
All unconscious of his treason Louis took me into the pantry and
triumphantly showed me three jars bearing the Augustine label and the
Philadelphia express tags!
On another occasion a friend of The Major's, passing The Brunswick and
observing some diamond-back shells in the window said, "Major, have you any
real live terrapins?"
[Illustration: Henry Woodfin Grady One of Mr. Watterson's "Boys".]
"Live!" cried The Frenchman. "Only this morning I open the ice box and they
were all dancing the cancan."
"Major," persisted the friend, "I'll go you a bottle of Veuve Cliquot, you
cannot show me an actual living terrapin."
"What do you take me for--confidence man?" The Major retorted. "How you
expect an old sport like me to bet upon a certainty?"
"Never mind your ethics. The wager is drink, not money. In any event we
shall have the wine."
"Oh, well," says The Frenchman, with a shrug and a droll grimace, "if you
insist on paying for a bottle of wine come with me."
He took a lighted candle, and together they went back to the ice box. It
was literally filled with diamond backs, and my friend thought he was gone
for sure.
"Là!" says The Major with triumph, rummaging among the mass of shells with
his cane as he held the candle aloft.
"But," says my friend, ready to surrender, yet taking a last chance, "you
told me they were dancing the cancan!"
The Major picked up a terrapin and turned it over in his hand. Quite numb
and frozen, the animal within made no sign. Then he stirred the shells
about in the box with his cane. Still not a show of life. Of a sudden he
stopped, reflected a moment, then looked at his watch.
"Ah," he murmured. "I quite forget. The terrapin, they are asleep. It is
ten-thirty, and the terrapin he regularly go to sleep at ten o'clock by
the watch every night." And without another word he reached for the Veuve
Cliquot!
For all his volubility in matters of romance and sentiment The Major was
exceeding reticent about his immediate self and his own affairs. His
legends referred to the distant of time and place. A certain dignity could
not be denied him, and, on occasion, a proper reserve; he rarely mentioned
his business--though he worked like a slave, and could not have been making
much or any profit--so that there rose the query how he contrived to make
both ends meet. Little by little I came into the knowledge that there was
a money supply from somewhere; finally, it matters not how, that he had an
annuity of forty thousand francs, paid in quarterly installments of ten
thousand francs each.
Occasionally he mentioned "the Old House," and in relating the famous
Sophonisba episode late at night, and only in the very fastnesses of
the wine cellar, as it were, at the most lachrymose passage he spoke of
"l'Oncle Célestin," with the deepest feeling.
"Did you ever hear The Frenchman tell that story about Sophonisba?" Doctor
Stoic, whom on account of his affectation of insensibility we were wont to
call Old Adamant, once asked me. "Well, sir, the other night he told it to
me, and he was drunk, and he cried, sir; and I was drunk, and I cried too!"
I had known The Frenchman now ten or a dozen years. That he came
from Marseilles, that he had served on the Confederate side in the
Trans-Mississippi, that he possessed an annuity, that he must have been
well-born and reared, that he was simple, yet canny, and in his money
dealings scrupulously honest--was all I could be sure of. What had he done
to be ashamed about or wish to conceal? In what was he a black sheep, for
that he had been one seemed certain? Had the beautiful woman, his wife--a
tireless church and charity worker, who lived the life of a recluse and a
saint--had she reclaimed him from his former self? I knew that she had
been the immediate occasion of his turning over a new leaf. But before her
time what had he been, what had he done?
Late one night, when the rain was falling and the streets were empty, I
entered The Brunswick. It was empty too. In the farthest corner of the
little dining room The Major, his face buried in his hands, laid upon the
table in front of him, sat silently weeping. He did not observe my entrance
and I seated myself on the opposite side of the table. Presently he looked
up, and seeing me, without a word passed me a letter which, all blistered
with tears, had brought him to this distressful state. It was a formal
French burial summons, with its long list of family names--his among the
rest--the envelope, addressed in a lady's hand--his sister's, the wife of
a nobleman in high military command--the postmark "Lyon." Uncle Celestin
was dead.
Thereafter The Frenchman told me much which I may not recall and must not
repeat; for, included in that funeral list were some of the best names in
France, Uncle Célestin himself not the least of them.
At last he died, and as mysteriously as he had come his body was taken
away, nobody knew when, nobody where, and with it went the beautiful woman,
his wife, of whom from that day to this I have never heard a word.
Chapter the Fifteenth
Still the Gay Capital of France--Its Environs--Walewska and De
Morny--Thackeray in Paris--A _Pension_ Adventure
I
Each of the generations thinks itself commonplace. Familiarity breeds
equally indifference and contempt. Yet no age of the world has witnessed so
much of the drama of life--of the romantic and picturesque--as the age
we live in. The years betwixt Agincourt and Waterloo were not more
delightfully tragic than the years between Serajevo and Senlis.
The gay capital of France remains the center of the stage and retains the
interest of the onlooking universe. All roads lead to Paris as all roads
led to Rome. In Dickens' day "a tale of two cities" could only mean London
and Paris then, and ever so unalike. To be brought to date the title would
have now to read "three," or even "four," cities, New York and Chicago
putting in their claims for mundane recognition.
I have been not only something of a traveller, but a diligent student
of history and a voracious novel reader, and, once-in-a-while, I get my
history and my fiction mixed. This has been especially the case when the
hum-drum of the Boulevards has driven me from the fascinations of the Beau
Quartier into the by-ways of the Marais and the fastnesses of what was once
the Latin Quarter. More than fifty years of intimacy have enabled me to
learn many things not commonly known, among them that Paris is the most
orderly and moral city in the world, except when, on rare and brief
occasions, it has been stirred to its depths.
I have crossed the ocean many times--have lived, not sojourned, on the
banks of the Seine, and, as I shall never see the other side again--do
not want to see it in its time of sorrow and garb of mourning--I may be
forgiven a retrospective pause in this egotistic chronicle. Or, shall I not
say, a word or two of affectionate retrogression, though perchance it leads
me after the manner of Silas Wegg to drop into poetry and take a turn with
a few ghosts into certain of their haunts, when you, dear sir, or madame,
or miss, as the case may be, and I were living that "other life," whereof
we remember so little that we cannot recall who we were, or what name we
went by, howbeit now-and-then we get a glimpse in dreams, or a "hunch" from
the world of spirits, or spirts-and-water, which makes us fancy we might
have been Julius Caesar, or Cleopatra--as maybe we were!--or at least Joan
of Arc, or Jean Valjean!
II
Let me repeat that upon no spot of earth has the fable we call existence
had so rare a setting and rung up its curtain upon such a succession of
performances; has so concentrated human attention upon mundane affairs; has
called such a muster roll of stage favorites; has contributed to romance so
many heroes and heroines, to history so many signal episodes and personal
exploits, to philosophy so much to kindle the craving for vital knowledge,
to stir sympathy and to awaken reflection.
Greece and Rome seem but myths of an Age of Fable. They live for us as
pictures live, as statues live. What was it I was saying about statues--that
they all look alike to me? There are too many of them. They bring the
ancients down to us in marble and bronze, not in flesh and blood. We do not
really laugh with Terence and Horace, nor weep with Æschylus and Homer. The
very nomenclature has a ticket air like tags on a collection of curios in
an auction room, droning the dull iteration of a catalogue. There is as
little to awaken and inspire in the system of religion and ethics of the
pagan world they lived in as in the eyes of the stone effigies that stare
blankly upon us in the British Museum, the Uffizi and the Louvre.
We walk the streets of the Eternal City with wonderment, not with pity, the
human side quite lost in the archaic. What is Cæsar to us, or we to Cæsar?
Jove's thunder no longer terrifies, and we look elsewhere than the Medici
Venus for the lights o' love.
Not so with Paris. There the unbroken line of five hundred
years--semi-modern years, marking a longer period than we commonly ascribe
to Athens or Rome--beginning with the exit of this our own world from the
dark ages into the partial light of the middle ages, and continuing thence
through the struggle of man toward achievement--tells us a tale more
consecutive and thrilling, more varied and instructive, than may be found
in all the pages of all the chroniclers and poets of the civilizations
which vibrated between the Bosphorus and the Tiber, to yield at last to
triumphant Barbarism swooping down from Tyrol crag and Alpine height, from
the fastnesses of the Rhine and the Rhone, to swallow luxury and culture.
Refinement had done its perfect work. It had emasculated man and unsexed
woman and brought her to the front as a political force, even as it is
trying to do now.
The Paris of Balzac and Dumas, of De Musset and Hugo--even of
Thackeray--could still be seen when I first went there. Though our age is
as full of all that makes for the future of poetry and romance, it does not
contemporaneously lend itself to sentimental abstraction. Yet it is hard to
separate fact and fiction here; to decide between the true and the
false; to pluck from the haze with which time has enveloped them, and to
distinguish the puppets of actual flesh and blood who lived and moved and
had their being, and the phantoms of imagination called into life and
given each its local habitation and its name by the poet's pen working its
immemorial spell upon the reader's credulity.
To me D'Artagnan is rather more vital than Richelieu. Hugo's imps
and Balzac's bullies dance down the stage and shut from the view the
tax-collectors and the court favorites. The mousquetaires crowd the field
marshals off the scene. There is something real in Quasimodo, in Cæsar de
Birotteau, in Robert Macaire, something mythical in Mazarin, in the Regent
and in Jean Lass. Even here, in faraway Kentucky, I can shut my eyes and
see the Lady of Dreams as plainly as if she were coming out of the Bristol
or the Ritz to step into her automobile, while the Grande Mademoiselle is
merely a cloud of clothes and words that for me mean nothing at all.
I once passed a week, day by day, roaming through the Musee Carnavalet.
Madame de Sevigne had an apartment and held her salon there for nearly
twenty years. Hard by is the house where the Marquise de Brinvilliers--a
gentle, blue-eyed thing they tell us--a poor, insane creature she must have
been--disseminated poison and death, and, just across and beyond the Place
des Vosges, the Hotel de Sens, whither Queen Margot took her doll-rags and
did her spriting after she and Henri Quatre had agreed no longer to slide
down the same cellar door. There is in the Museum a death-mask, colored and
exceeding life-like, taken the day after Ravaillac delivered the finishing
knife-thrust in the Rue de Ferronnerie, which represents the Bèarnais as
anything but a tamer of hearts. He was a fighter, however, from Wayback,
and I dare say Dumas' narrative is quite as authentic as any.
One can scarce wonder that men like Hugo and Balzac chose this quarter
of the town to live in--and Rachael, too!--it having given such frequent
shelter to so many of their fantastic creations, having been the real abode
of a train of gallants and bravos, of saints and harlots from the days of
Diane de Poitiers to the days of Pompadour and du Barry, and of statesmen
and prelates likewise from Sully to Necker, from Colbert to Turgot.
III
I speak of the Marais as I might speak of Madison Square, or Hyde Park--as
a well-known local section--yet how few Americans who have gone to Paris
have ever heard of it. It is in the eastern division of the town. One finds
it a curious circumstance that so many if not most of the great cities
somehow started with the rising, gradually to migrate toward the setting
sun.
When I first wandered about Paris there was little west of the Arch of
Stars except groves and meadows. Neuilly and Passy were distant villages.
Auteuil was a safe retreat for lovers and debtors, with comic opera villas
nestled in high-walled gardens. To Auteuil Armand Duval and his Camille
hied away for their short-lived idyl. In those days there was a lovely lane
called Marguerite Gautier, with a dovecote pointed out as the very "rustic
dwelling" so pathetically sung in Verdi's tuneful score and tenderly
described in the original Dumas text. The Boulevard Montmorenci long ago
plowed the shrines of romance out of the knowledge of the living, and a
part of the Longchamps racecourse occupies the spot whither impecunious
poets and adventure-seeking wives repaired to escape the insistence of
cruel bailiffs and the spies of suspicious and monotonous husbands.
Tempus fugit! I used to read Thackeray's Paris Sketches with a kind of awe.
The Thirties and the Forties, reincarnated and inspired by his glowing
spirit, seemed clad in translucent garments, like the figures in the
Nibelungenlied, weird, remote, glorified. I once lived in the street "for
which no rhyme our language yields," next door to a pastry shop
that claimed to have furnished the mise en scène for the "Ballad of
Bouillabaisse," and I often followed the trail of Louis Dominic Cartouche
"down that lonely and crooked byway that, setting forth from a palace yard,
led finally to the rear gate of a den of thieves." Ah, well-a-day! I have
known my Paris now twice as long as Thackeray knew his Paris, and my Paris
has been as interesting as his Paris, for it includes the Empire, the Siege
and the Republic.
I knew and sat for months at table with Comtesse Walewska, widow of the
bastard son of Napoleon Bonaparte. The Duke de Morny was rather a person in
his way and Gambetta was no slouch, as Titmarsh would himself agree. I knew
them both. The Mexican scheme, which was going to make every Frenchman
rich, was even more picturesque and tragical than the Mississippi bubble.
There were lively times round about the last of the Sixties and the early
Seventies. The Terror lasted longer, but it was not much more lurid than
the Commune; the Hotel de Ville and the Tuileries in flames, the column
gone from the Place Vendôme, when I got there just after the siege. The
regions of the beautiful Opera House and of the venerable Notre Dame they
told me had been but yesterday running streams of blood. At the corner of
the Rue de la Paix and the Rue Dannou (they called it then the Rue St.
Augustine) thirty men, women, and boys were one forenoon stood against
the wall and shot, volley upon volley, to death. In the Sacristy of the
Cathedral over against the Morgue and the Hotel Dieu, they exhibit the
gore-stained vestments of three archbishops of Paris murdered within as
many decades.
IV
Thackeray came to Paris when a very young man. He was for painting
pictures, not for writing books, and he retained his artistic yearnings if
not ambitions long after he had become a great and famous man of letters.
It was in Paris that he married his wife, and in Paris that the melancholy
finale came to pass; one of the most heartbreaking chapters in literary
history.
His little girls lived here with their grandparents. The elder of them
relates how she was once taken up some flights of stairs by the Countess X
to the apartment of a frail young man to whom the Countess was carrying a
basket of fruit; and how the frail young man insisted, against the protest
of the Countess, upon sitting at the piano and playing; and of how they
came out again, the eyes of the Countess streaming with tears, and of her
saying, as they drove away, "Never, never forget, my child, as long as
you live, that you have heard Chopin play." It was in one of the lubberly
houses of the Place Vendôme that the poet of the keyboard died a few days
later. Just around the corner, in the Rue du Mont Thabor, died Alfred de
Musset. A brass plate marks the house.
May I not here transcribe that verse of the famous "Ballad of
Bouillabaisse," which I have never been able to recite, or read aloud, and
part of which I may at length take to myself:
_"Ah me, how quick the days are flitting!
I mind me of a time that's gone,
When here I'd sit, as now I'm sitting
In this same place--but not alone--
A fair young form was nestled near me,
A dear, dear face looked fondly up,
And sweetly spoke and smiled to hear me,
There's no one now to share my cup."_
The writer of these lines a cynic! Nonsense. When will the world learn to
discriminate?
V
It is impossible to speak of Paris without giving a foremost place in the
memorial retrospect to the Bois de Boulogne, the Parisian's Coney Island.
I recall that I passed the final Sunday of my last Parisian sojourn just
before the outbreak of the World War with a beloved family party in the
joyous old Common. There is none like it in the world, uniting the urban
to the rural with such surpassing grace as perpetually to convey a double
sensation of pleasure; primal in its simplicity, superb in its setting; in
the variety and brilliancy of the life which, upon sunny afternoons, takes
possession of it and makes it a cross between a parade and a paradise.
There was a time when, rather far away for foot travel, the Bois might
be considered a driving park for the rich. It fairly blazed with the
ostentatious splendor of the Second Empire; the shoddy Duke with his shady
retinue, in gilded coach-and-four; the world-famous courtesan, bedizened
with costly jewels and quite as well known as the Empress; the favorites
of the Tuileries, the Comédie Française, the Opera, the Jardin Mabille,
forming an unceasing and dazzling line of many-sided frivolity from the
Port de Ville to the Port St. Cloud, circling round La Bagatelle and
ranging about the Cafe Cascade, a human tiara of diamonds, a moving bouquet
of laces and rubies, of silks and satins and emeralds and sapphires. Those
were the days when the Due de Morny, half if not full brother of the
Emperor, ruled as king of the Bourse, and Cora Pearl, a clever and not at
all good-looking Irish girl gone wrong, reigned as Queen of the Demimonde.
All this went by the board years ago. Everywhere, more or less, electricity
has obliterated distinctions of rank and wealth. It has circumvented lovers
and annihilated romance. The Republic ousted the bogus nobility. The
subways and the tram cars connect the Bois de Boulogne and the Bois de
Vincennes so closely that the poorest may make himself at home in either or
both.
The automobile, too, oddly enough, is proving a very leveller. The crowd
recognizes nobody amid the hurly-burly of coupes, pony-carts, and taxicabs,
each trying to pass the other. The conglomeration of personalities effaces
the identity alike of the statesman and the artist, the savant and the
cyprian. No six-inch rules hedge the shade of the trees and limit the glory
of the grass. The _ouvrier_ can bring his brood and his basket and
have his picnic where he pleases. The pastry cook and his chére amie,
the coiffeur and his grisette can spoon by the lake-side as long as the
moonlight lasts, and longer if they list, with never a gendarme to say them
nay, or a rude voice out of the depths hoarsely to declaim, "allez!" The
Bois de Boulogne is literally and absolutely a playground, the playground
of the people, and this last Sunday of mine, not fewer than half a million
of Parisians were making it their own.
Half of these encircled the Longchamps racecourse. The other half were
shared by the boats upon the lagoons and the bosky dells under the summer
sky and the cafés and the restaurants with which the Bois abounds. Our
party, having exhausted the humors of the drive, repaired to Pré Catalan.
Aside from the "two old brides" who are always in evidence on such
occasions, there was a veritable "young couple," exceedingly pretty to look
at, and delightfully in love! That sort of thing is not so uncommon in
Paris as cynics affect to think.
If it be true, as the witty Frenchman observes, that "gambling is the
recreation of gentlemen and the passion of fools," it is equally true that
love is a game where every player wins if he sticks to it and is loyal to
it. Just as credit is the foundation of business is love both the asset
and the trade-mark of happiness. To see it is to believe it, and--though a
little cash in hand is needful to both--where either is wanting, look out
for sheriffs and scandals.
Pré Catalan, once a pasture for cows with a pretty kiosk for the sale
of milk, has latterly had a tea-room big enough to seat a thousand, not
counting the groves which I have seen grow up about it thickly dotted with
booths and tables, where some thousands more may regale themselves. That
Sunday it was never so glowing with animation and color. As it makes one
happy to see others happy it makes one adore his own land to witness that
which makes other lands great.
I have not loved Paris as a Parisian, but as an American; perhaps it is a
stretch of words to say I love Paris at all. I used to love to go there and
to behold the majesty of France. I have always liked to mark the startling
contrasts of light and shade. I have always known what all the world now
knows, that beneath the gayety of the French there burns a patriotic
and consuming fire, a high sense of public honor; a fine spirit of
self-sacrifice along with the sometimes too aggressive spirit of freedom.
In 1873 I saw them two blocks long and three files deep upon the Rue St.
Honore press up to the Bank of France, old women and old men with their
little all tied in handkerchiefs and stockings to take up the tribute
required by Bismarck to rid the soil of the detested German. They did it.
Alone they did it--the French people--the hard-working, frugal, loyal
commonalty of France--without asking the loan of a sou from the world
outside.
VI
Writing of that last Sunday in the Bois de Boulogne, I find by recurring
to the record that I said: "There is a deal more of good than bad in every
Nation. I take off my hat to the French. But, I have had my fling and I am
quite ready to go home. Even amid the gayety and the glare, the splendor of
color and light, the Hungarian band wafting to the greenery and the stars
the strains of the delicious waltz, La Veuve Joyeuse her very self--yea,
many of her--tapping the time at many adjacent tables, the song that fills
my heart is 'Hame, Hame, Hame!--Hame to my ain countree.' Yet, to come
again, d'ye mind? I should be loath to say good-by forever to the Bois
de Boulogne. I want to come back to Paris. I always want to come back to
Paris. One needs not to make an apology or give a reason.
"We turn rather sadly away from Pré Catalan and the Café Cascade. We
glide adown the flower-bordered path and out from the clusters of Chinese
lanterns, and leave the twinkling groves to their music and merry-making.
Yonder behind us, like a sentinel, rises Mont Valerien. Before us glimmer
the lamps of uncountable coaches, as our own, veering toward the city,
the moon just topping the tower of St. Jacques de la Boucherie and
silver-plating the bronze figures upon the Arch of Stars.
"We enter the Port Maillot. We turn into the Avenue du Bois. Presently we
shall sweep with the rest through the Champs Èlysées and on to the ocean of
the infinite, the heart of the mystery we call Life, nowhere so condensed,
so palpable, so appealing. Roll the screen away! The shades of Clovis and
Genevieve may be seen hand-in-hand with the shades of Martel and Pepin,
taking the round of the ghost-walk between St. Denis and St. Germain, now
le Balafré and again Navarre, now the assassins of the Ligue and now the
assassins of the Terror, to keep them company. Nor yet quite all on murder
bent, some on pleasure; the Knights and Ladies of the Cloth of Gold and the
hosts of the Renaissance: Cyrano de Bergerac and François Villon leading
the ragamuffin procession; the jades of the Fronde, Longueville, Chevreuse
and fair-haired Anne of Austria; and Ninon, too, and Manon; and the
never-to-be-forgotten Four, 'one for all and all for one;' Cagliostro and
Monte Cristo; on the side, Rabelais taking notes and laughing under his
cowl. Catherine de Medici and Robespierre slinking away, poor, guilty
things, into the pale twilight of the Dawn!
"Names! Names! Only names? I am not just so sure about that. In any event,
what a roll call! We are such stuff as dreams are made of, and our little
life is rounded by a sleep; the selfsame sleep which these, our living dead
men and women in steel armor and gauzy muslins, in silken hose and sock and
buskin, epaulettes and top boots, brocades and buff facings, have endured
so long and know so well!
"If I should die in Paris I should expect them--or some of them--to meet me
at the barriers and to say, 'Behold, the wickedness that was done in the
world, the cruelty and the wrong, dwelt in the body, not in the soul of
man, which freed from its foul incasement, purified and made eternal by the
hand of death, shall see both the glory and the hand of God!'"
It was not to be. I shall not die in Paris. I shall never come again.
Neither shall I make apology for this long quotation by myself from myself,
for am I not inditing an autobiography, so called?
Chapter the Sixteenth
Monte Carlo--The European Shrine of Sport and Fashion--Apocryphal
Gambling Stories--Leopold, King of the Belgians--An Able and
Picturesque Man of Business
I
Having disported ourselves in and about Paris, next in order comes a
journey to the South of France--that is to the Riviera--by geography the
main circle of the Mediterranean Sea, by proclamation Cannes, Nice, and
Mentone, by actual fact and count, Monte Carlo--even the swells adopting a
certain hypocrisy as due to virtue.
Whilst Monte Carlo is chiefly, I might say exclusively, identified in the
general mind with gambling, and was indeed at the outset but a gambling
resort, it long ago outgrew the limits of the Casino, becoming a Mecca
of the world of fashion as well as the world of sport. Half the ruling
sovereigns of Europe and all the leaders of European swelldom, the more
prosperous of the demi-mondaines and no end of the merely rich of every
land, congregate there and thereabouts. At the top of the season the show
of opulence and impudence is bewildering.
The little principality of Monaco is hardly bigger than the Cabbage Patch
of the renowned Mrs. Wiggs. It is, however, more happily situate. Nestled
under the heights of La Condamine and Tête de Chien and looking across
a sheltered bay upon the wide and blue Mediterranean, it has better
protection against the winds of the North than Nice, or Cannes, or Mentone.
It is an appanage--in point of fact the only estate--remaining to the once
powerful Grimaldi family.
In the early days of land-piracy Old Man Grimaldi held his own with Old Man
Hohenzollern and Old Man Hapsburg. The Savoys and the Bourbons were kith
and kin. But in the long run of Freebooting the Grimaldis did not keep
up with the procession. How they retained even this remnant of inherited
brigandage and self-appointed royalty, I do not know. They are here under
leave of the Powers and the especial protection, strange to say, of the
French Republic.
Something over fifty years ago, being hard-up for cash, the Grimaldi of the
period fell under the wiles of an ingenious Alsatian gambler, Guerlac by
name, who foresaw that Baden-Baden and Hombourg were approaching their
finish and that the sports must look elsewhere for their living, the idle
rich for their sport. This tiny "enclave" in French territory presented
many advantages over the German Dukedoms. It was an independent sovereignty
issuing its own coins and postage stamps. It was in proud possession of
a half-dozen policemen which it called its "army." It was paradisaic in
beauty and climate. Its "ruler" was as poor as Job's turkey, but by no
means as proud as Lucifer.
The bargain was struck. The gambler smote the rock of Monte Carlo as with a
wand of enchantment and a stream of plenty burst forth. The mountain-side
responded to the touch. It chortled in its glee and blossomed as the rose.
II
The region known as the Riviera comprises, as I have said, the whole
land-circle of the Mediterranean Sea. But, as generally written and
understood, it stands for the shoreline between Marseilles and Genoa. The
two cities are connected by the Corniche Road, built by the First Napoleon,
who learned the need of it when he made his Italian campaign, and the
modern railway, the distance 260 miles, two-thirds of the way through
France, the residue through Italy, and all of it surpassing fine.
The climate is very like that of Southern Florida. But as in Florida they
have the "Nor'westers" and the "Nor'easters," on the Riviera they have the
"mistral." In Europe there is no perfect winter weather north of Spain, as
in the United States none north of Cuba.
I have often thought that Havana might be made a dangerous rival of Monte
Carlo under the one-man power, exercising its despotism with benignant
intelligence and spending its income honestly upon the development of both
the city and the island. The motley populace would probably be none the
worse for it. The Government could upon a liberal tariff collect not less
than thirty-five millions of annual revenue. Twenty-five of these millions
would suffice for its own support. Ten millions a year laid out upon
harbors, roadways and internal improvements in general would within ten
years make the Queen of the Antilles the garden spot and playground of
Christendom. They would build a Casino to outshine even the architectural
miracles of Charles Garnier. Then would Havana put Cairo out of business
and give the Prince of Monaco a run for his money.
With the opening of every Monte Carlo season the newspapers used to tell of
the colossal winnings of purely imaginary players. Sometimes the favored
child of chance was a Russian, sometimes an Englishman, sometimes an
American. He was usually a myth, of course. As Mrs. Prig observed to Mrs.
Camp, "there never was no sich person."
III
Charles Garnier, the Parisian architect, came and built the Casino, next to
the Library of Congress at Washington and the Grand Opera House at Paris
the most beautiful building in the world, with incomparable gardens and
commanding esplanades to set it off and display it. Around it palatial
hotels and private mansions and villas sprang into existence. Within it a
gold-making wheel of fortune fabricated the wherewithal. Old Man Grimaldi
in his wildest dreams of land-piracy--even Old Man Hohenzollern, or Old Man
Hapsburg--never conceived the like.
There is no poverty, no want, no taxes--not any sign of dilapidation or
squalor anywhere in the principality of Monaco. Yet the "people," so
called, have been known to lapse into a state of discontent. They sometimes
"yearned for freedom." Too well fed and cared for, too rid of dirt and
debt, too flourishing, they "riz." Prosperity grew monotonous. They even
had the nerve to demand a "Constitution."
The reigning Prince was what Yellowplush would call "a scientific gent."
His son and heir, however, had not his head in the clouds, being in point
of fact of the earth earthly, and, of consequence, more popular than his
father. He came down from the Castle on the hill to the marketplace in the
town and says he: "What do you galoots want, anyhow?"
First, their "rights." Then a change in the commander-in-chief of the army,
which had grown from six to sixteen. Finally, a Board of Aldermen and a
Common Council.
"Is that all?" says his Royal Highness. They said it was. "Then," says he,
"take it, mes enfants, and bless you!"
So, all went well again. The toy sovereignty began to rattle around in its
own conceit, the "people" regarded themselves, and wished to be regarded,
as a chartered Democracy. The little gim-crack economic system experienced
the joys of reform. A "New Nationalism" was established in the brewery down
by the railway station and a reciprocity treaty was negotiated between the
Casino and Vanity Fair, witnessing the introduction of two roulette tables
and an extra brazier for cigar stumps.
But the Prince of Monaco stood on one point. He would have no Committee on
Credentials. He told me once that he had heard of Tom Reed and Champ Clark
and Uncle Joe Cannon, but that he preferred Uncle Joe. He would, and he
did, name his own committees both in the Board of Aldermen and the Common
Council. Thus, for the time being, "insurgency" was quelled. And once more
serenely sat the Castle on the hill hard by the Cathedral. Calmly again
flowed the waters in the harbor. More and more the autos honked outside the
Casino. Within "the little ball ever goes merrily round," and according to
the croupiers and the society reporters "the gentleman wins and the poor
gambler loses!"
IV
To illustrate, I recall when on a certain season the lucky sport of print
and fancy was an Englishman. In one of those farragos of stupidity and
inaccuracy which are syndicated and sent from abroad to America, I found
the following piece with the stuff and nonsense habitually worked off on
the American press as "foreign correspondence":
"Now and then the newspapers report authentic instances of large sums
having been won at the gaming tables at Monte Carlo. One of the most
fortunate players at Monte Carlo for a long time past has been a Mr.
Darnbrough, an Englishman, whose remarkable run of luck had furnished the
morsels of gossip in the capitals of Continental Europe recently.
"If reports are true, he left the place with the snug sum of more than
1,000,000 francs to the good as the result of a month's play. But this, I
hear, did not represent all of Mr. Darnbrough's winnings. The story goes
that on the opening day of his play he staked 24,000 francs, winning all
along the line. Emboldened by his success, he continued playing, winning
again and again with marvelous luck. At one period, it is said, his credit
balance amounted to no less than 1,850,000 francs; but from that moment
Dame Fortune ceased to smile upon him. He lost steadily from 200,000 to
300,000 francs a day, until, recognizing that luck had turned against him,
he had sufficient strength of will to turn his back on the tables and
strike for home with the very substantial winnings that still remained.
"On another occasion a well-known London stock broker walked off with
little short of £40,000. This remarkable performance occasioned no small
amount of excitement in the gambling rooms, as such an unusual incident
does invariably.
"Bent on making a 'plunge,' he went from one table to another, placing the
maximum stake on the same number. Strange to relate, at each table the same
number won, and it was his number. Recognizing that this perhaps might be
his lucky day, the player wended his way to the trente-et-quarante room
and put the maximum on three of the tables there. To his amazement, he
discovered that there also he had been so fortunate as to select the
winning number.
"The head croupier confided to a friend of the writer who happened to be
present that that day had been the worst in the history of the Monaco bank
for years. He it was also who mentioned the amount won by the fortunate
Londoner, as given above."
It is prudent of the space-writers to ascribe such "information" as this
to "the head croupier," because it is precisely the like that such an
authority would give out. People upon the spot know that nothing of the
kind happened, and that no person of that name had appeared upon the scene.
The story on the face of it bears to the knowing its own refutation, being
absurd in every detail. As if conscious of this, the author proceeds to
quality it in the following:
"It is a well-known fact that one of the most successful players at the
Monte Carlo tables was Wells, who as the once popular music-hall song put
it, 'broke the bank' there. He was at the zenith of his fame, about twenty
years ago, when his escapades--and winnings--were talked about widely and
envied in European sporting circles and among the demi-monde.
"In ten days, it was said, he made upward of £35,000 clear winnings at
the tables after starting with the modest capital of £400. It must not be
forgotten, however, that at his trial later Wells denied this, stating
that all he had made was £7,000 at four consecutive sittings. He made the
statement that, even so, he had been a loser in the end.
"The reader may take his choice of the two statements, but among
frequenters of the rooms at Monte Carlo it is generally considered
impossible to amass large winnings without risking large stakes. Even then
the chances are 1,000 to 1 in favor of the bank. Yet occasionally there
are winnings running into four or five figures, and to human beings the
possibility of chance constitutes an irresistible fascination.
"Only a few years ago a young American was credited with having risen from
the tables $75,000 richer than when first he had sat down. It was his first
visit to Monte Carlo and he had not come with any system to break the bank
or with any 'get-rich-quick' idea. For the novelty of the thing he risked
about $4,000, and lost it all in one fell swoop without turning a hair.
Then he 'plunged' with double that amount, but the best part of that, too,
went the same way. Nothing daunted, he next ventured $10,000. This time
fickle fortune favored him. He played on with growing confidence and when
his winnings amounted to the respectable sum of $75,000 he had the good
sense to quit and to leave the place despite the temptation to continue."
V
The "man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo," and gave occasion for the
song, was not named "Wells" and he was not an Englishman. He was an
American. I knew him well and soon after the event had from his own lips
the whole story.
He came to Monte Carlo with a good deal of money won at draw-poker in a
club at Paris and went away richer by some 100,000 francs (about $20,000)
than he came.
The catch-line of the song is misleading. There is no such thing as
"breaking the bank at Monte Carlo." This particular player won so fast upon
two or three "spins" that the table at which he played had to suspend until
it could be replenished by another "bank," perhaps ten minutes in point of
time. There used to be some twenty tables. Just how one man could play at
more than one of them at one time a "foreign correspondent," but only
a "foreign correspondent," might explain to the satisfaction of the
horse-marines.
I very much doubt whether any player ever won more than 100,000 francs at a
single sitting. To do even that he must plunge like a ship in a hurricane.
There is, of course, a saving limit set by the Casino Company upon the
play. It is to the interest of the Casino to cultivate the idea, and the
letter writers are willing tools. Not only at Monte Carlo, but everywhere,
in dearth of news, gambling stories come cheap and easy. And the cheaper
the story the bigger the play. "The Jedge raised him two thousand dollars.
The Colonel raised him back ten thousand more. Both of 'em stood pat. The
Jedge bet him a hundred thousand. The Colonel called. 'What you got?' says
he. 'Ace high,' says the Jedge; 'what you got?' 'Pair o' deuces,' says the
Colonel."
Assuredly the "play" in the Casino is entirely fair. It could hardly be
otherwise with such crowds of players at the tables, often covering the
whole "layout." But there is no such thing as "honest gambling." The
"house" must have "the best of it." A famous American gambler, when I had
referred to one of his guild, lately deceased, as "an honest gambler," said
to me: "What do you mean by 'an honest gambler'?"
"A gambler who will not take unfair advantage!" I answered.
"Well," said he, "the gambler must have his advantage, because gambling is
his livelihood. He must fit himself for its profitable pursuit by learning
all the tricks of trade like other artists and artificers. With him it is
win or starve."
Among the variegate crowds that thronged the highways and byways of Monte
Carlo in those days there was no single figure more observed and striking
than that of Leopold the Second, King of the Belgians. He had a bungalow
overlooking the sea where he lived three months of the year like a country
gentleman. Although I have made it a rule to avoid courts and courtiers,
an event brought me into acquaintance with this best abused man in Europe,
enabling me to form my own estimate of his very interesting personality.
He was not at all what his enemies represented him to be, a sot, a gambler
and a roué. In appearance a benignant burgomaster, tall and stalwart; in
manner and voice very gentle, he should be described as first of all a man
of business. His weakness was rather for money than women. Speaking of
the most famous of the Parisian dancers with whom his name had been
scandalously associated, he told me that he had never met her but once in
his life, and that after the newspaper gossips had been busy for years with
their alleged love affair. "I kissed her hand," he related, "and bade her
adieu, saying, 'Ah, ma'mselle, you and I have indeed reason to congratulate
ourselves.'"
It was the Congo business that lay at the bottom of the abuse of Leopold.
Henry Stanley had put him up to this. It turned out a gold mine, and then
two streams of defamation were let loose; one from the covetous commercial
standpoint and the other from the humanitarian. Between them, seeking to
drive him out, they depicted him as a monster of cruelty and depravity.
A King must be an anchorite to escape calumny, and Leopold was not an
anchorite. I asked him why I never saw him in the Casino. "Play," he
answered, "does not interest me. Besides, I do not enjoy being talked
about. Nor do I think the game they play there quite fair."
"In what way do you consider it unfair, your Majesty?" I asked.
"In the zero," he replied. "At the Brussels Casino I do not allow them to
have a zero. Come and see me and I will show you a perfectly equal chance
for your money, to win or lose."
Years after I was in Brussels. Leopold had gone to his account and his
nephew, Albert, had come to the throne. There was not a roulette table in
the Casino, but there was one conveniently adjacent thereto, managed by a
clique of New York gamblers, which had both a single "and a double O,"
and, as appeared when the municipality made a descent upon the place, was
ingeniously wired to throw the ball wherever the presiding coupier wanted
it to go.
I do not believe, however, that Leopold was a party to this, or could have
had any knowledge of it. He was a skillful, not a dishonest, business man,
who showed his foresight when he listened to Stanley and took him under his
wing. If the Congo had turned out worthless nobody would ever have heard of
the delinquencies of the King of the Belgians.
Chapter the Seventeenth
A Parisian _Pension_--The Widow of Walewska--Napoleon's
Daughter-in-Law--The Changeless--A Moral and Orderly City
I
I have said that I knew the widow of Walewska, the natural son of Napoleon
Bonaparte by the Polish countess he picked up in Warsaw, who followed him
to Paris; and thereby hangs a tale which may not be without interest.
In each of our many sojourns in Paris my wife and I had taken an apartment,
living the while in the restaurants, at first the cheaper, like the Café de
Progress and the Duval places; then the Boeuf à la Mode, the Café Voisin
and the Café Anglais, with Champoux's, in the Place de la Bourse, for a
regular luncheon resort.
At length, the children something more than half grown, I said: "We have
never tried a Paris _pension_."
So with a half dozen recommended addresses we set out on a house hunt. We
had not gone far when our search was rewarded by a veritable find. This
was on the Avenue de Courcelles, not far from the Pare Monceau; newly
furnished; reasonable charges; the lady manager a beautiful well-mannered
woman, half Scotch and half French.
We moved in. When dinner was called the boarders assembled in the very
elegant drawing-room. Madame presented us to Baron ----. Then followed
introductions to Madame la Duchesse and Madame la Princesse and Madame la
Comtesse. Then the folding doors opened and dinner was announced.
The baron sat at the center of the table. The meal consisted of eight or
ten courses, served as if at a private house, and of surpassing quality.
During the three months that we remained there was no evidence of a
boarding house. It appeared an aristocratic family into which we had been
hospitably admitted. The baron was a delightful person. Madame la Duchesse
was the mother of Madame la Princesse, and both were charming. The
Comtesse, the Napoleonic widow, was at first a little formal, but she came
round after we had got acquainted, and, when we took our departure, it was
like leaving a veritable domestic circle.
Years after we had the sequel. The baron, a poor young nobleman, had come
into a little money. He thought to make it breed. He had an equally poor
Scotch cousin, who undertook to play hostess. Both the Duchess and the
Countess were his kinswomen. How could such a ménage last?
He lost his all. What became of our fellow-lodgers I never learned, but the
venture coming to naught, the last I heard of the beautiful high-bred
lady manager, she was serving as a stewardess on an ocean liner. Nothing,
however, could exceed the luxury, the felicity and the good company
of those memorable three months _chez l'Avenue de Courcelles, Pare
Monceau_.
We never tried a _pension_ again. We chose a delightful hotel in the
Rue de Castiglione off the Rue de Rivoli, and remained there as fixtures
until we were reckoned the oldest inhabitants. But we never deserted the
dear old Boeuf à la Mode, which we lived to see one of the most flourishing
and popular places in Paris.
II
In the old days there was a little hotel on the Rue Dannou, midway between
the Rue de la Paix and what later along became the Avenue de l'Opéra,
called the Hôtel d'Orient. It was conducted by a certain Madame Hougenin,
whose family had held the lease for more than a hundred years, and was
typical of what the comfort-seeking visitor, somewhat initiate, might find
before the modern tourist onrush overflowed all bounds and effaced the
ancient landmarks--or should I say townmarks?--making a resort instead of a
home of the gay French capital. The d'Orient was delightfully comfortable
and fabulously cheap.
The wayfarer entered a darksome passage that led to an inner court. There
were on the four sides of this seven or eight stories pierced by many
windows. There was never a lift, or what we Americans call an elevator. If
you wanted to go up you walked up; and after dark your single illuminant
was candlelight. The service could hardly be recommended, but cleanliness
herself could find no fault with the beds and bedding; nor any queer people
about; changeless; as still and stationary as a nook in the Rockies.
A young girl might dwell there year in and year out in perfect safety--many
young girls did so--madame a kind of duenna. The food--for it was a
_pension_--was all a gourmet could desire. And the wine!
I was lunching with an old Parisian friend.
"What do you think of this vintage?" says he.
"Very good," I answered. "Come and dine with me to-morrow and I will give
you the mate to it."
"What--at the d'Orient?"
"Yes, at the d'Orient."
"Preposterous!"
Nevertheless, he came. When the wine was poured out he took a sip.
"By ----!" he exclaimed. "That is good, isn't it? I wonder where they got
it? And how?"
During the week after we had it every day. Then no more. The headwaiter,
with many apologies, explained that he had found those few bottles in a
forgotten bin, where they had lain for years, and he begged a thousand
pardons of monsieur, but we had drunk them all--_rien du plus_--no
more. I might add that precisely the same thing happened to me at the Hôtel
Continental. Indeed, it is not uncommon with the French caravansaries
to keep a little extra good wine in stock for those who can distinguish
between an _ordinaire_ and a _supérieur_, and are willing to pay
the price.
III
"See Naples and die," say the Italians. "See Paris and live," say the
French. Old friends, who have been over and back, have been of late telling
me that Paris, having woefully suffered, is nowise the Paris it was, and
as the provisional offspring of four years of desolating war I can well
believe them. But a year or two of peace, and the city will rise again,
as after the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, which laid upon it a
sufficiently blighting hand. In spite of fickle fortune and its many ups
and downs it is, and will ever remain, "Paris, the Changeless."
I never saw the town so much itself as just before the beginning of the
world war. I took my departure in the early summer of that fateful year and
left all things booming--not a sign or trace that there had ever been aught
but boundless happiness and prosperity. It is hard, the saying has it,
to keep a squirrel on the ground, and surely Paris is the squirrel among
cities. The season just ended had been, everybody declared, uncommonly
successful from the standpoints alike of the hotels and cafés, the shop
folk and their patrons, not to mention the purely pleasure-seeking throng.
People seemed loaded with money and giddy to spend it.
The headwaiter at Voisin's told me this: "Mr. Barnes, of New York, ordered
a dinner, carte blanche, for twelve.
"'Now,' says he, 'garçon, have everything bang up, and here's seventy-five
francs for a starter.'
"The dinner was bang up. Everybody hilarious. Mr. Barnes immensely pleased.
When he came to pay his bill, which was a corker, he made no objection.
"'Garçon,' says he, 'if I ask you a question will you tell me the truth?'
"'_Oui, monsieur; certainement._'
"Well, how much was the largest tip you ever received?"
"Seventy-five francs, monsieur."
"'Very well; here are 100 francs.'
"Then, after a pause for the waiter to digest his joy and express a proper
sense of gratitude and wonder, Mr. Barnes came to time with: 'Do you
remember who was the idiot that paid you the seventy-five francs?'
"'Oh, yes, monsieur. It was you.'"
IV
It has occurred to me that of late years--I mean the years immediately
before 1914--Paris has been rather more bent upon adapting itself to human
and moral as well as scientific progress. There has certainly been less
debauchery visible to the naked eye. I was assured that the patronage had
so fallen away from the Moulin Rouge that they were planning to turn it
into a decent theater. Nor during my sojourn did anybody in my hearing so
much as mention the Dead Rat. I doubt whether it is still in existence.
The last time I was in Maxim's--quite a dozen years ago now--a young woman
sat next to me whose story could be read in her face. She was a pretty
thing not five and twenty, still blooming, with iron-gray hair. It had
turned in a night, I was told. She had recently come from Baltimore and
knew no more what she was doing or whither she was drifting than a baby.
The old, old story: a comfortable home and a good husband; even a child or
two; a scoundrel, a scandal, an elopement, and the inevitable desertion.
Left without a dollar in the streets of Paris. She was under convoy of a
noted procuress.
"A duke or the morgue," she whimpered, "in six months."
Three months sufficed. They dragged all that remained of her out of the
Seine, and then the whole of the pitiful disgrace and tragedy came out.
V
If ever I indite a volume to be entitled Adventures in Paris it will
contain not a line to feed any prurient fancy, but will embrace the record
of many little journeys between the Coiffeur and the Marché des Fleurs,
with maybe an excursion among the cemeteries and the restaurants.
Each city is as one makes it for himself. Paris has contributed greatly to
my appreciation, and perhaps my knowledge, of history and literature and
art and life. I have seen it in all its aspects; under the empire, when the
Due de Morny was king of the Bourse and Mexico was to make every Frenchman
rich; after the commune and the siege, when the Hôtel de Ville was in
ruins, the palace of the Tuileries still aflame, the column gone from the
Place Vendôme, and everything a blight and waste; and I have marked it rise
from its ashes, grandly, proudly, and like a queen come to her own again,
resume its primacy as the only complete metropolis in all the universe.
There is no denying it. No city can approach Paris in structural unity and
regality, in things brilliant and beautiful, in buoyancy, variety, charm
and creature comfort. Drunkenness, of the kind familiar to London and New
York, is invisible to Paris. The brandy and absinthe habit has been greatly
exaggerated. In truth, everywhere in Europe the use of intoxicants is on
the decline. They are, for the first time in France, stimulated partly
by the alarming adulteration of French wines, rigorously applying and
enforcing the pure-food laws.
As a consequence, there is a palpable and decided improvement of the
vintage of the Garonne and the Champagne country. One may get a good glass
of wine now without impoverishing himself. As men drink wine, and as the
wine is pure, they fall away from stronger drink. I have always considered,
with Jefferson, the brewery in America an excellent temperance society.
That which works otherwise is the dive which too often the brewery fathers.
They are drinking more beer in France--even making a fairly good beer. And
then--
But gracious, this is getting upon things controversial, and if there is
anything in this world that I do hybominate, it is controversy!
Few of the wondrous changes which the Age of Miracles has wrought in my day
and generation exceeded those of ocean travel. The modern liner is but a
moving palace. Between the ports of the Old World and the ports of the
new the transit is so uneventful as to grow monotonous. There are no more
adventures on the high seas. The ocean is a thoroughfare, the crossing a
ferry. My experience forty years ago upon one of the ancient tubs which
have been supplanted by these liners would make queer reading to the
latter-day tourist, taking, let us say, any one of the steamers of any one
of the leading transatlantic companies. The difference in the appointments
of the William Penn of 1865 and the star boats of 1914 is indescribable.
It seems a fairy tale to think of a palm garden where the ladies dress for
dinner, a Hungarian band which plays for them whilst they dine, and a sky
parlor where they go after dinner for their coffee and what not; a tea-room
for the five-o'clockers; and except in excessive weather scarcely any
motion at all. It is this palm garden which most appeals to a certain lady
of my very intimate acquaintance who had made many crossings and never gone
to her meals--sick from shore to shore--until the gods ordained for her a
watery, winery, flowery paradise--where the billows ceased from troubling
and a woman could appear at her best. Since then she has sailed many times,
lodged à la Waldorf-Astoria to eat her victuals and sip her wine with
perfect contentment. Coming ashore from our last crossing a friend found
her in the Red Room of that hostel just as she had been sitting the evening
before on shipboard.
"Seems hardly any motion at all," she said, looking about her and fancying
herself still at sea, as well she might.
Chapter the Eighteenth
The Grover Cleveland Period--President Arthur and Mr. Blaine--John
Chamberlin--The Decrees of Destiny
I
What may be called the Grover Cleveland period of American politics began
with the election of that extraordinary person--another man of destiny--to
the governorship of New York. Nominated, as it were, by chance, he carried
the State by an unprecedented majority. That was not because of his
popularity, but that an incredible number of Republican voters refused
to support their party ticket and stayed away from the polls. The
Blaine-Conkling feud, inflamed by the murder of Garfield, had rent the
party of Lincoln and Grant asunder. Arthur, a Conkling leader, had
succeeded to the presidency.
If any human agency could have sealed the breach he might have done it. No
man, however, can achieve the impossible. The case was hopeless.
Arthur was a man of surpassing sweetness and grace. As handsome as Pierce,
as affable as McKinley, he was a more experienced and dextrous politician
than either. He had been put on the ticket with Garfield to placate
Conkling. All sorts of stories to his discredit were told during the
ensuing campaign. The Democrats made him out a tricky and typical "New York
politician." In point of fact he was a many-sided, accomplished man who
had a taking way of adjusting all conditions and adapting himself to all
companies.
With a sister as charming and tactful as he for head of his domestic
fabric, the White House bloomed again. He possessed the knack of
surrounding himself with all sorts of agreeable people. Frederick
Frelinghuysen was Secretary of State and Robert Lincoln, continued from the
Garfield Cabinet, Secretary of War. Then there were three irresistibles:
Walter Gresham, Frank Hatton and "Ben" Brewster. His home
contingent--"Clint" Wheeler, "Steve" French, and "Jake" Hess--pictured as
"ward heelers"--were, in reality, efficient and all-around, companionable
men, capable and loyal.
I was sent by the Associated Press to Washington on a fool's errand--that
is, to get an act of Congress extending copyright to the news of the
association--and, remaining the entire session, my business to meet the
official great and to make myself acceptable, I came into a certain
intimacy with the Administration circle, having long had friendly relations
with the President. In all my life I have never passed so delightful and
useless a winter.
Very early in the action I found that my mission involved a serious and
vexed question--nothing less than the creation of a new property--and I
proceeded warily. Through my uncle, Stanley Matthews, I interested the
members of the Supreme Court. The Attorney General, a great lawyer and
an old Philadelphia friend, was at my call and elbow. The Joint Library
Committee of Congress, to which the measure must go, was with me. Yet
somehow the scheme lagged.
I could not account for this. One evening at a dinner Mr. Blaine
enlightened me. We sat together at table and suddenly he turned and said:
"How are you getting on with your bill?" And my reply being rather halting,
he continued, "You won't get a vote in either House," and he proceeded
very humorously to improvise the average member's argument against it as
a dangerous power, a perquisite to the great newspapers and an imposition
upon the little ones. To my mind this was something more than the
post-prandial levity it was meant to be.
Not long after a learned but dissolute old lawyer said to me, "You need no
act of Congress to protect your news service. There are at least two, and I
think four or five, English rulings that cover the case. Let me show them
to you." He did so and I went no further with the business, quite agreeing
with Mr. Blaine, and nothing further came of it. To a recent date the
Associated Press has relied on these decisions under the common law of
England. Curiously enough, quite a number of newspapers in whose actual
service I was engaged, opened fire upon me and roundly abused me.
II
There appeared upon the scene in Washington toward the middle of the
seventies one of those problematical characters the fiction-mongers delight
in. This was John Chamberlin. During two decades "Chamberlin's," half
clubhouse and half chophouse, was all a rendezvous.
"John" had been a gambler; first an underling and then a partner of the
famous Morrissy-McGrath racing combination at Saratoga and Long Branch.
There was a time when he was literally rolling in wealth. Then he went
broke--dead broke. Black Friday began it and the panic of '73 finished
it. He came over to Washington and his friends got him the restaurant
privileges of the House of Representatives. With this for a starting point,
he was able to take the Fernando Wood residence, in the heart of the
fashionable quarter, to add to it presently the adjoining dwelling of
Governor Swann, of Maryland, and next to that, finally, the Blaine
mansion, making a suite, as it were, elegant yet cozy. "Welcker's," erst a
fashionable resort, and long the best eating-place in town, had been ruined
by a scandal, and "Chamberlin's" succeeded it, having the field to itself,
though, mindful of the "scandal" which had made its opportunity, ladies
were barred.
There was a famous cook--Emeline Simmons--a mulatto woman, who was equally
at home in French dishes and Maryland-Virginia kitchen mysteries--a very
wonder with canvasback and terrapin--who later refused a great money offer
to he chef at the White House--whom John was able to secure. Nothing could
surpass--could equal--her preparations. The charges, like the victuals,
were sky-high and tip-top. The service was handled by three "colored
gentlemen," as distinguished in manners as in appearance, who were known
far and wide by name and who dominated all about them, including John and
his patrons.
No such place ever existed before, or will ever exist again. It was the
personality of John Chamberlin, pervasive yet invisible, exhaling a silent,
welcoming radiance. General Grant once said to me, "During my eight years
in the White House, John Chamberlin once in a while--once in a great
while--came over. He did not ask for anything. He just told me what to do,
and I did it." I mentioned this to President Arthur. "Well," he laughingly
said, "that has been my experience with John Chamberlin. It never crosses
my mind to say him 'nay.' Often I have turned this over in my thought
to reach the conclusion that being a man of sound judgment and worldly
knowledge, he has fully considered the case--his case and my case--leaving
me no reasonable objection to interpose."
John obtained an act of Congress authorizing him to build a hotel on the
Government reservation at Fortress Monroe, and another of the Virginia
Legislature confirming this for the State. Then he came to me. It was at
the moment when I was flourishing as "a Wall Street magnate." He said: "I
want to sell this franchise to some man, or company, rich enough to carry
it through. All I expect is a nest egg for Emily and the girls"--he had
married the beautiful Emily Thorn, widow of George Jordan, the actor, and
there were two daughters--"you are hand-and-glove with the millionaires.
Won't you manage it for me?" Like Grant and Arthur, I never thought of
refusing. Upon the understanding that I was to receive no commission, I
agreed, first ascertaining that it was really a most valuable franchise.
I began with the Willards, in whose hotel I had grown up. They were rich
and going out of business. Then I laid it before Hitchcock and Darling, of
the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. They, rich like the Willards, were
also retiring. Then a bright thought occurred to me. I went to the Prince
Imperial of Standard Oil. "Mr. Flagler," I said, "you have hotels at St.
Augustine and you have hotels at Palm Beach. Here is a halfway point
between New York and Florida," and more of the same sort. "My dear friend,"
he answered, "every man has the right to make a fool of himself once in his
life. This I have already done. Never again for me. I have put up my
last dollar south of the Potomac." Then I went to the King of the
transcontinental railways. "Mr. Huntington," I said, "you own a road
extending from St. Louis to Newport News, having a terminal in a cornfield
just out of Hampton Roads. Here is a franchise which gives you a
magnificent site at Hampton Roads itself. Why not?" He gazed upon me with
a blank stare--such I fancy as he usually turned upon his suppliants--and
slowly replied: "I would not spend another dollar in Virginia if the Lord
commanded me. In the event that some supernatural power should take the
Chesapeake & Ohio Railway by the nape of the neck and the seat of the
breeches and pitch it out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean it would be
doing me a favor."
So I returned John his franchise marked "nothing doing." Afterward he put
it in the hands of a very near friend, a great capitalist, who had no
better luck with it. Finally, here and there, literally by piecemeal, he
got together money enough to build and furnish the Hotel Chamberlin, had a
notable opening with half of Congress there to see, and gently laid himself
down and died, leaving little other than friends and debts.
III
Macaulay tells us that the dinner-table is a wondrous peacemaker, miracle
worker, social solvent; and many were the quarrels composed and the plans
perfected under the Chamberlin roof. It became a kind of Congressional
Exchange with a close White House connection. If those old walls, which by
the way are still standing, could speak, what tales they might tell, what
testimonies refute, what new lights throw into the vacant corners and dark
places of history!
Coming away from Chamberlin's with Mr. Blaine for an after-dinner stroll
during the winter of 1883-4, referring to the approaching National
Republican Convention, he said: "I do not want the nomination. In my
opinion there is but one nominee the Republicans can elect this year and
that is General Sherman. I have written him to tell him so and urge it upon
him. In default of him the time of you people has come." He subsequently
showed me this letter and General Sherman's reply. My recollection is that
the General declared that he would not take the presidency if it were
offered him, earnestly invoking Mr. Elaine to support his brother, John
Sherman.
This would seem clear refutation that Mr. Blaine was party to his own
nomination that year. It assuredly reveals keen political instinct and
foresight. The capital prize in the national lottery was not for him.
I did not meet him until two years later, when he gave me a minute account
of what had happened immediately thereafter; the swing around the circle;
Belshazzar's feast, as a fatal New York banquet was called; the far-famed
Burchard incident. "I did not hear the words, 'Rum, Romanism and
Rebellion,'" he told me, "else, as you must know, I would have fittingly
disposed of them."
I said: "Mr. Blaine, you may as well give it up. The doom of Webster,
Clay, and Douglas is upon you. If you are nominated again, with an assured
election, you will die before the day of election. If you survive the day
and are elected, you'll die before the 4th of March." He smiled grimly and
replied: "It really looks that way."
My own opinion has always been that if the Republicans had nominated
Mr. Arthur in 1884 they would have elected him. The New York vote would
scarcely have been so close. In the count of the vote the Arthur end of
it would have had some advantage--certainly no disadvantage. Cleveland's
nearly 200,000 majority had dwindled to the claim of a beggarly few
hundred, and it was charged that votes which belonged to Butler, who ran as
an independent labor candidate, were actually counted for Cleveland.
When it was over an old Republican friend of mine said: "Now we are even.
History will attest that we stole it once and you stole it once. Turn about
may be fair play; but, all the same, neither of us likes it."
So Grover Cleveland, unheard of outside of Buffalo two years before, was to
be President of the United States. The night preceding his nomination for
the governorship of New York, General Slocum seemed in the State convention
sure of that nomination. Had he received it he would have carried the State
as Cleveland did, and Slocum, not Cleveland, would have been the Chief
Magistrate. It cost Providence a supreme effort to pull Cleveand through.
But in his case, as in many another, Providence "got there" in fulfilment
of a decree of Destiny.
Chapter the Nineteenth
Mr. Cleveland in the White House--Mr. Bayard in the Department of
State--Queer Appointments to Office--The One-Party Power--The End of
North and South Sectionalism
I
The futility of political as well as of other human reckoning was set
forth by the result of the presidential election of 1884. With a kind
of prescience, as I have related, Mr. Blaine had foreseen it. He was
a sagacious as well as a lovable and brilliant man. He looked back
affectionately upon the days he had passed in Kentucky, when a poor
school-teacher, and was especially cordial to the Kentuckians. In the House
he and Beck were sworn friends, and they continued their friendship when
both of them had reached the Senate.
I inherited Mr. Blaine's desk in the Ways and Means Committee room. In one
of the drawers of this he had left a parcel of forgotten papers, which
I returned to him. He made a joke of the secrets they covered and the
fortunate circumstance that they had fallen into the hands of a friend and
not of an enemy.
No man of his time could hold a candle to Mr. Blaine in what we call
magnetism--that is, in manly charm, supported by facility and brain power.
Clay and Douglas had set the standard of party leadership before his time.
He made a good third to them. I never knew Mr. Clay, but with Judge Douglas
I was well acquainted, and the difference between him and Mr. Blaine in
leadership might be called negligible.
Both were intellectually aggressive and individually amiable. They at least
seemed to love their fellow men. Each had been tried by many adventures.
Each had gone, as it were, "through the flint mill." Born to good
conditions--Mr. Blaine sprang from aristocratic forebears--each knew by
early albeit brief experience the seamy side of life; as each, like Clay,
nursed a consuming passion for the presidency. Neither had been made for
a subaltern, and they chafed under the subaltern yoke to which fate had
condemned them.
II
In Grover Cleveland a total stranger had arrived at the front of affairs.
The Democrats, after a rule of more than half a century, had been out of
power twenty-four years. They could scarce realize at first that they were
again in power. The new chieftain proved more of an unknown quantity than
had been suspected. William Dorsheimer, a life-long crony, had brought the
two of us together before Cleveland's election to the governorship of the
Empire State as one of a group of attractive Buffalo men, most of whom
might be said to have been cronies of mine, Buffalo being a delightful
halfway stop-over in my frequent migrations between Kentucky and the
Eastern seaboard. As in the end we came to a parting of the ways I want to
write of Mr. Cleveland as a historian and not as a critic.
He said to Mr. Carlisle after one of our occasional tiffs: "Henry will
never like me until God makes me over again." The next time we met,
referring to this, I said: "Mr. President, I like you very much--very much
indeed--but sometimes I don't like some of your ways."
There were in point of fact two Clevelands--before marriage and after
marriage--the intermediate Cleveland rather unequal and indeterminate.
Assuredly no one of his predecessors had entered the White House so wholly
ignorant of public men and national affairs. Stories used to be told
assigning to Zachary Taylor this equivocal distinction. But General Taylor
had grown up in the army and advanced in the military service to a chief
command, was more or less familiar with the party leaders of his time,
and was by heredity a gentleman. The same was measurably true of Grant.
Cleveland confessed himself to have had no social training, and he
literally knew nobody.
Five or six weeks after his inauguration I went to Washington to ask a
diplomatic appointment for my friend, Boyd Winchester. Ill health had cut
short a promising career in Congress, but Mr. Winchester was now well on to
recovery, and there seemed no reason why he should not and did not stand in
the line of preferment. My experience may be worth recording because it is
illustrative.
In my quest I had not thought of going beyond Mr. Bayard, the new Secretary
of State. I did go to him, but the matter seemed to make no headway. There
appeared a hitch somewhere. It had not crossed my mind that it might be
the President himself. What did the President know or care about foreign
appointments?
He said to me on a Saturday when I was introducing a party of Kentucky
friends: "Come up to-morrow for luncheon. Come early, for Rose"--his
sister, for the time being mistress of the White House--"will be at church
and we can have an old-fashioned talk-it-out."
The next day we passed the forenoon together. He was full of homely and
often whimsical talk. He told me he had not yet realized what had happened
to him.
"Sometimes," he said, "I wake at night and rub my eyes and wonder if it is
not all a dream."
He asked an infinite number of questions about this, that and the other
Democratic politician. He was having trouble with the Kentucky Congressmen.
He had appointed a most unlikely scion of a well-known family to a foreign
mission, and another young Kentuckian, the son of a New York magnate, to a
leading consul generalship, without consultation with any one. He asked me
about these. In a way one of them was one of my boys, and I was glad to see
him get what he wanted, though he aspired to nothing so high. He was indeed
all sorts of a boy, and his elevation to such a post was so grotesque that
the nomination, like that of his mate, was rejected by the Senate. I
gave the President a serio-comic but kindly account, at which he laughed
heartily, and ended by my asking how he had chanced to make two such
appointments.
"Hewitt came over here," he answered, "and then Dorsheimer. The father is
the only Democrat we have in that great corporation. As to the other, he
struck me as a likely fellow. It seemed good politics to gratify them and
their friends."
I suggested that such backing was far afield and not very safe to go by,
when suddenly he said: "I have been told over and over again by you and by
others that you will not take office. Too much of a lady, I suppose! What
are you hanging round Washington for anyhow? What do you want?"
Here was my opportunity to speak of Winchester, and I did so.
When I had finished he said: "What are you doing about Winchester?"
"Relying on the Secretary of State, who served in Congress with him and
knows him well."
Then he asked: "What do you want for Winchester?"
I answered: "Belgium or Switzerland."
He said: "I promised Switzerland for a friend of Corning's. He brought
him over here yesterday and he is an out-and-out Republican who voted for
Blaine, and I shall not appoint him. If you want the place for Winchester,
Winchester it is."
Next day, much to Mr. Bayard's surprise, the commission was made out.
Mr. Cleveland had a way of sudden fancies to new and sometimes queer
people. Many of his appointments were eccentric and fell like bombshells
upon the Senate, taking the appointee's home people completely by surprise.
The recommendation of influential politicians seemed to have little if any
weight with him.
There came to Washington from Richmond a gentleman by the name of Keiley,
backed by the Virginia delegation for a minor consulship. The President at
once fell in love with him.
[Illustration: Mr. Watterson's Library at "Mansfield"]
"Consul be damned," he said. "He is worth more than that," and named him
Ambassador to Vienna.
It turned out that Mrs. Keiley was a Jewess and would not be received at
court. Then he named him Ambassador to Italy, when it appeared that Keiley
was an intense Roman Catholic, who had made at least one ultramontane
speech, and would be _persona non grata_ at the Quirinal. Then
Cleveland dropped him. Meanwhile poor Keiley had closed out bag and baggage
at Richmond and was at his wit's end. After much ado the President was
brought to a realizing sense and a place was found for Keiley as consul
general and diplomatic agent at Cairo, whither he repaired. At the end
of the four years he came to Paris and one day, crossing the Place de la
Concorde, he was run over by a truck and killed. He deserved a longer
career and a better fate, for he was a man of real capacity.
III
Taken to task by thick and thin Democratic partisans for my criticism of
the only two Democratic Presidents we have had since the War of Sections,
Cleveland and Wilson, I have answered by asserting the right and duty of
the journalist to talk out in meeting, flatly repudiating the claims as
well as the obligations of the organ grinder they had sought to put upon
me, and closing with the knife grinder's retort--
_Things have come to a hell of a pass
When a man can't wallop his own jackass_.
In the case of Mr. Cleveland the break had come over the tariff issue.
Reading me his first message to Congress the day before he sent it in, he
had said: "I know nothing about the tariff, and I thought I had best leave
it where you and Morrison had put it in the platform."
We had indeed had a time in the Platform Committee of the Chicago
convention of 1884. After an unbroken session of fifty hours a straddle
was all that the committee could be brought to agree upon. The leading
recalcitrant had been General Butler, who was there to make trouble and who
later along bolted the ticket and ran as an independent candidate.
One aim of the Democrats was to get away from the bloody shirt as an issue.
Yet, as the sequel proved, it was long after Cleveland's day before the
bloody shirt was laid finally to rest. It required a patriot and a hero
like William McKinley to do this. When he signed the commissions of Joseph
Wheeler and Fitzhugh Lee, Confederate generals and graduates of the West
Point Military Academy, to be generals in the Army of the United States,
he made official announcement that the War of Sections was over and gave
complete amnesty to the people and the soldiers of the South.
Yet the bloody shirt lingered long as a troublemaker, and was invoked by
both parties.
IV
That chance gathering of heedless persons, stirred by the bombast of
self-exploiting orators eager for notoriety or display--loose mobs of
local nondescripts led by pension sharks so aptly described by the gallant
General Bragg, of Wisconsin, as coffee coolers and camp followers--should
tear their passion to tatters with the thought that Virginia, exercising an
indisputable right and violating no reasonable sensibility, should elect
to send memorials of Washington and Lee for the Hall of Statues in the
nation's Capitol, came in the accustomed way of bloody-shirt agitation. It
merely proved how easily men are led when taken in droves and stirred by
partyism. Such men either bore no part in the fighting when fighting was
the order of the time, or else they were too ignorant and therefore too
unpatriotic to comprehend the meaning of the intervening years and the
glory these had brought with the expanse of national progress and prowess.
In spite of their lack of representative character it was not easy to
repress impatience at ebullitions of misguided zeal so ignoble; and of
course it was not possible to dissuade or placate them.
All the while never a people more eager to get together than the people of
the United States after the War of Sections, as never a people so averse to
getting into that war. A very small group of extremists and doctrinaires
had in the beginning made a War of Sections possible. Enough of these
survived in the days of Cleveland and McKinley to keep sectionalism alive.
It was mainly sectional clamor out for partisan advantage. But it made
the presidential campaigns lurid in certain quarters. There was no end of
objurgation, though it would seem that even the most embittered Northerner
and ultra Republican who could couple the names of Robert E. Lee and
Benedict Arnold, as was often done in campaign lingo, would not hesitate,
if his passions were roused or if he fancied he saw in it some profit to
himself or his party, to liken George Washington to Judas Iscariot.
The placing of Lee's statue in the Capitol at Washington made the occasion
for this.
It is true that long before Confederate officers had sat in both Houses of
Congress and in Republican and Democratic cabinets and upon the bench of
the Supreme Court, and had served as ambassadors and envoys extraordinary
in foreign lands. But McKinley's doing was the crowning stroke of union and
peace.
There had been a weary and varied interim. Sectionalism proved a sturdy
plant. It died hard. We may waive the reconstruction period as ancient
history. There followed it intense party spirit. Yet, in spite of
extremists and malignants on both sides of the line, the South rallied
equally with the North to the nation's drumbeat after the Maine went down
in the harbor of Havana. It fought as bravely and as loyally at Santiago
and Manila. Finally, by the vote of the North, there came into the Chief
Magistracy one who gloried in the circumstance that on the maternal side
he came of fighting Southern stock; who, amid universal applause, declared
that no Southerner could be prouder than he of Robert E. Lee and Stonewall
Jackson, apotheosizing an uncle, his mother's brother, who had stood at the
head of the Confederate naval establishment in Europe and had fitted out
the Confederate cruisers, as the noblest and purest man he had ever known,
a composite of Colonel Newcome and Henry Esmond.
Meanwhile the process of oblivion had gone on. The graven effigy of
Jefferson Davis at length appeared upon the silver service of an American
battleship. This told the Mississippi's guests, wherever and whenever they
might meet round her hospitable board, of national unification and peace,
giving the lie to sectional malignancy. In the most famous and conspicuous
of the national cemeteries now stands the monument of a Confederate general
not only placed there by consent of the Government, but dedicated with
fitting ceremonies supervised by the Department of War, which sent as its
official representative the son of Grant, himself an army officer of rank
and distinction.
The world has looked on, incredulous and amazed, whilst our country has
risen to each successive act in the drama of reconciliation with increasing
enthusiasm.
I have been all my life a Constitutional Nationalist; first the nation and
then the state. The episode of the Confederacy seems already far away. It
was an interlude, even as matters stood in the Sixties and Seventies, and
now he who would thwart the unification of the country on the lines of
oblivion, of mutual and reciprocal forgiveness, throws himself across the
highway of his country's future, and is a traitor equally to the essential
principles of free government and the spirit of the age.
If sectionalism be not dead it should have no place in popular
consideration. The country seems happily at last one with itself. The
South, like the East and the West, has come to be the merest geographic
expression. Each of its states is in the Union, precisely like the states
of the East and the West, all in one and one in all. Interchanges of every
sort exist.
These exchanges underlie and interlace our social, domestic and business
fabric. That the arrangement and relation after half a century of strife
thus established should continue through all time is the hope and prayer
of every thoughtful, patriotic American. There is no greater dissonance
to that sentiment in the South than in the North. To what end, therefore,
except ignominious recrimination and ruinous dissension, could a revival of
old sectional and partisan passions--if it were possible--be expected to
reach?
V
Humor has played no small part in our politics. It was Col. Mulberry
Sellers, Mark Twain's hero, who gave currency to the conceit and enunciated
the principle of "the old flag and an appropriation." He did not claim the
formula as his own, however. He got it, he said, of Senator Dillworthy, his
patriotic file leader and ideal of Christian statesmanship.
The original of Senator Dillworthy was recognized the country over as
Senator Pomeroy, of Kansas, "Old Pom," as he had come to be called, whose
oleaginous piety and noisy patriotism, adjusting themselves with equal
facility to the purloining of subsidies and the roasting of rebels, to
prayer and land grants, had impressed themselves upon the Satirist of
the Gilded Age as upon his immediate colleagues in Congress. He was a
ruffle-shirted Pharisee, who affected the airs of a bishop, and resembled
Cruikshank's pictures of Pecksniff.
There have not been many "Old Poms" in our public life; or, for that matter
Aaron Burrs either, and but one Benedict Arnold. That the chosen people of
God did not dwell amid the twilight of the ages and in far-away Judea, but
were reserved to a later time, and a region then undiscovered of men, and
that the American republic was ordained of God to illustrate upon the
theater of the New World the possibilities of free government in contrast
with the failures and tyrannies and corruptions of the Old, I do truly
believe. That is the first article in my confession of faith. And the
second is like unto it, that Washington was raised up by God to create it,
and that Lincoln was raised up by God to save it; else why the militia
colonel of Virginia and the rail splitter of Illinois, for no reason that
was obvious at the time, before all other men? God moves in a mysterious
way his wonders to perform. The star of the sublime destiny that hung over
the manager of our blessed Savior hung over the cradle of our blessed
Union.
Thus far it has weathered each historic danger which has gone before to
mark the decline and fall of nations; the struggle for existence; the
foreign invasion; the internecine strife; the disputed succession;
religious bigotry and racial conflict. One other peril confronts
it--the demoralization of wealth and luxury; too great prosperity; the
concentration and the abuse of power. Shall we survive the lures with which
the spirit of evil, playing upon our self-love, seeks to trip our wayward
footsteps, purse-pride and party spirit, mistaken zeal and perverted
religion, fanaticism seeking to abridge liberty and liberty running to
license, greed masquerading as a patriot and ambition making a commodity of
glory--or under the process of a divine evolution shall we be able to mount
and ride the waves which swallowed the tribes of Israel, which engulfed the
phalanxes of Greece and the legions of Rome, and which still beat the sides
and sweep the decks of Europe?
The one-party power we have escaped; the one-man power we have escaped. The
stars in their courses fight for us; the virtue and intelligence of the
people are still watchful and alert. Truth is mightier than ever, and
justice, mounting guard even in the Hall of Statues, walks everywhere the
battlements of freedom!
Chapter the Twentieth
The Real Grover Cleveland--Two Clevelands Before and After Marriage--A
Correspondence and a Break of Personal Relations
I
There were, as I have said, two Grover Clevelands--before and after
marriage--and, it might be added, between his defeat in 1888 and his
election in 1892. He was so sure of his election in 1888 that he could not
be induced to see the danger of the situation in his own State of New York,
where David Bennett Hill, who had succeeded him in the governorship, was a
candidate for reelection, and whom he personally detested, had become the
ruling party force. He lost the State, and with it the election, while Hill
won, and thereby arose an ugly faction fight.
I did not believe as the quadrennial period approached in 1892 that Mr.
Cleveland could be elected. I still think he owed his election, and
Harrison his defeat, to the Homestead riots of the midsummer, which
transferred the labor vote bodily from the Republicans to the Democrats.
Mainly on account of this belief I opposed his nomination that year.
In the Kentucky State Convention I made my opposition resonant, if not
effective. "I understand," I said in an address to the assembled delegates,
"that you are all for Grover Cleveland?"
There came an affirmative roar.
"Well," I continued, "I am not, and if you send me to the National
Convention I will not vote for his nomination, if his be the only name
presented, because I firmly believe that his nomination will mean the
marching through a slaughter-house to an open grave, and I refuse to be
party to such a folly."
The answer of the convention was my appointment by acclamation, but it was
many a day before I heard the last of my unlucky figure of speech.
Notwithstanding this splendid indorsement, I went to the National
Convention feeling very like the traditional "poor boy at a frolic." All
seemed to me lost save honor and conviction. I had become the embodiment
of my own epigram, "a tariff for revenue only." Mr. Cleveland, in the
beginning very much taken by it, had grown first lukewarm and then
frightened. His "Free Trade" message of 1887 had been regarded by the party
as an answering voice. But I knew better.
In the national platform, over the protest of Whitney, his organizer, and
Vilas, his spokesman, I had forced him to stand on that gospel. He flew
into a rage and threatened to modify, if not to repudiate, the plank in his
letter of acceptance. We were still on friendly terms and, upon reaching
home, I wrote him the following letter. It reads like ancient history,
but, as the quarrel which followed cut a certain figure in the political
chronicle of the time, the correspondence may not be historically out of
date, or biographically uninteresting:
II
MR. WATTERSON TO MR. CLEVELAND
Courier-Journal Office, Louisville, July 9, 1892.--My Dear Mr. President:
I inclose you two editorial articles from the Courier-Journal, and, that
their spirit and purpose may not be misunderstood by you, I wish to add a
word or two of a kind directly and entirely personal.
To a man of your robust understanding and strong will, opposition and
criticism are apt to be taken as more or less unfriendly; and, as you are
at present advised, I can hardly expect that any words of mine will be
received by you with sentiments either of confidence or favor.
I was admonished by a certain distrust, if not disdain, visited upon the
honest challenge I ventured to offer your Civil Service policy, when you
were actually in office, that you did not differ from some other great men
I have known in an unwillingness, or at least an inability, to accept,
without resentment, the question of your infallibility. Nevertheless, I was
then, as I am now, your friend, and not your enemy, animated by the
single purpose to serve the country, through you, as, wanting your great
opportunities, I could not serve it through myself.
During the four years when you were President, I asked you but for one
thing that lay near my heart. You granted that handsomely; and, if you
had given me all you had to give beside, you could not have laid me under
greater obligation. It is a gratification to me to know, and it ought to be
some warrant both of my intelligence and fidelity for you to remember that
that matter resulted in credit to the Administration and benefit to the
public service.
But to the point; I had at St. Louis in 1888 and at Chicago, the present
year, to oppose what was represented as your judgment and desire in the
adoption of a tariff plank in our national platform; successfully in both
cases. The inclosed articles set forth the reasons forcing upon me a
different conclusion from yours, in terms that may appear to you bluntly
specific, but I hope not personally offensive; certainly not by intention,
for, whilst I would not suppress the truth to please you or any man, I
have a decent regard for the sensibilities and the rights of all men,
particularly of men so eminent as to be beyond the reach of anything except
insolence and injustice. Assuredly in your case, I am incapable of even so
much as the covert thought of either, entertaining for you absolute respect
and regard. But, my dear Mr. President, I do not think that you appreciate
the overwhelming force of the revenue reform issue, which has made you its
idol.
[Illustration: A Corner of "Mansfield"--Home of Henry Watterson]
If you will allow me to say so, in perfect frankness and without intending
to be rude or unkind, the gentlemen immediately about you, gentlemen upon
whom you rely for material aid and energetic party management, are not, as
to the Tariff, Democrats at all; and have little conception of the place in
the popular mind and heart held by the Revenue Reform idea, or, indeed of
any idea, except that of organization and money.
Of the need of these latter, no man has a more realizing sense, or larger
information and experience, than I have. But they are merely the brakes and
wheels of the engine, to which principles and inspirations are, and must
always be, the elements of life and motion. It is to entreat you therefore,
in your coming letter and address, not to underestimate the tremendous
driving power of this Tariff issue, and to beg you, not even to seem to
qualify it, or to abridge its terms in a mistaken attempt to seem to be
conservative.
You cannot escape your great message of 1887 if you would. I know it by
heart, and I think that I perfectly apprehend its scope and tenor. Take it
as your guiding star. Stand upon it. Reiterate it. Emphasize it, amplify
it, but do not subtract a thought, do not erase a word. For every vote
which a bold front may lose you in the East you will gain two votes in the
West. In the East, particularly in New York, enemies lurk in your very
cupboard, and strike at you from behind your chair at table. There is more
than a fighting chance for Illinois, Iowa, and Minnesota, and next to
a certainty in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Indiana, if you put yourself
personally at the head of the column which is moving in your name,
supposing it to be another name for reduced taxes and freer exchanges.
Discouraged as I was by the condition of things in New York and Indiana
prior to the Chicago Convention, depressed and almost hopeless by your
nomination, I can see daylight, if you will relax your grip somewhat upon
the East and throw yourself confidently upon the West.
I write warmly because I feel warmly. If you again occupy the White House,
and it is my most constant and earnest prayer that you may, be sure that
you will not be troubled by me. I cannot hope that my motives in opposing
your nomination, consistent as you know them to have been, or that my
conduct during the post-convention discussion and canvass, free as I know
it to have been of ill-feeling, or distemper, has escaped misrepresentation
and misconception. I could not, without the loss of my self-respect,
approach you on any private matter whatever; though it may not be amiss
for me to say to you, that three weeks before the meeting of the National
Convention, I wrote to Mr. Gorman and Mr. Brice urging the withdrawal of
any opposition, and declaring that I would be a party to no movement to
work the two-thirds rule to defeat the will of the majority.
This is all I have to say, Mr. President, and you can believe it or not, as
you please; though you ought to know that I would write you nothing except
in sincere conviction, nor speak to you, or of you, except in a candid and
kindly spirit. Trusting that this will find you hale, hearty, and happy, I
am, dear sir, your fellow democrat and most faithful friend,
HENRY WATTERSON.
The Honorable Grover Cleveland.
III
MR. CLEVELAND TO MR. WATTERSON
By return mail I received this answer:
Gray Gables, Buzzards Bay, Mass., July 15, 1892.
MY DEAR MR. WATTERSON:
I have received your letter and the clippings you inclosed.
I am not sure that I understand perfectly all that they mean. One thing
they demonstrate beyond any doubt, to-wit: that you have not--I think I may
say--the slightest conception of my disposition. It may be that I know
as little about yours. I am surprised by the last paragraph of The
Courier-Journal article of July 8 and amazed to read the statements
contained in your letter, that you know the message of 1887 by heart. It
is a matter of very small importance, but I hope you will allow me to say,
that in all the platform smashing you ever did, you never injured nor
inspired me that I have ever seen or heard of, except that of 1888. I
except that, so I may be exactly correct when I write, "seen or heard
of,"--for I use the words literally.
I would like very much to present some views to you relating to the tariff
position, but I am afraid to do so.
I will, however, venture to say this: If we are defeated this year, I
predict a Democratic wandering in the dark wilds of discouragement for
twenty-five years. I do not purpose to be at all responsible for such a
result. I hope all others upon whom rests the least responsibility will
fully appreciate it.
The world will move on when both of us are dead. While we stay, and
especially while we are in any way concerned in political affairs and while
we are members of the same political brotherhood, let us both resolve to be
just and modest and amiable. Yours very sincerely,
GROVER CLEVELAND.
Hon. Henry Watterson, Louisville, Ky.
IV
MR. WATTERSON TO MR. CLEVELAND
I said in answer:
Louisville, July 22, 1892.--My Dear Sir: I do not see how you could
misunderstand the spirit in which I wrote, or be offended by my plain
words. They were addressed as from one friend to another, as from one
Democrat to another. If you entertain the idea that this is a false view
of our relative positions, and that your eminence lifts you above both
comradeship and counsels, I have nothing to say except to regret that, in
underestimating your breadth of character I exposed myself too contumely.
You do, indeed, ride a wave of fortune and favor. You are quite beyond
the reach of insult, real or fancied. You could well afford to be more
tolerant.
In answer to the ignorance of my service to the Democratic party, which you
are at such pains to indicate--and, particularly, with reference to the
sectional issue and the issue of tariff reform--I might, if I wanted to be
unamiable, suggest to you a more attentive perusal of the proceedings of
the three national conventions which nominated you for President.
But I purpose nothing of the sort. In the last five national conventions my
efforts were decisive in framing the platform of the party. In each of them
I closed the debate, moved the previous question and was sustained by the
convention. In all of them, except the last, I was a maker, not a smasher.
Touching what happened at Chicago, the present year, I had a right, in
common with good Democrats, to be anxious; and out of that sense of anxiety
alone I wrote you. I am sorry that my temerity was deemed by you intrusive
and, entering a respectful protest against a ban which I cannot believe to
be deserved by me, and assuring you that I shall not again trouble you in
that way, I am, your obedient servant,
HENRY WATTERSON.
The Hon. Grover Cleveland.
V
This ended my personal relations with Mr. Cleveland. Thereafter we did not
speak as we passed by. He was a hard man to get on with. Overcredulous,
though by no means excessive, in his likes, very tenacious in his dislikes,
suspicious withal, he grew during his second term in the White House,
exceedingly "high and mighty," suggesting somewhat the "stuffed prophet,"
of Mr. Dana's relentless lambasting and verifying my insistence that he
posed rather as an idol to be worshiped, than a leader to be trusted and
loved. He was in truth a strong man, who, sufficiently mindful of his
limitations in the beginning, grew by unexampled and continued success
overconfident and overconscious in his own conceit. He had a real desire to
serve the country. But he was apt to think that he alone could effectively
serve it. In one of our spats I remember saying to him, "You seem, Mr.
President, to think you are the only pebble on the beach--the one honest
and brave man in the party--hut let me assure you of my own knowledge that
there are others." His answer was, "Oh, you go to ----!"
He split his party wide open. The ostensible cause was the money issue.
But, underlying this, there was a deal of personal embitterment. Had he
been a man of foresight--or even of ordinary discernment--he might have
held it together and with it behind him have carried the gold standard.
I had contended for a sound currency from the outset of the fiscal
contention, fighting first the green-back craze and then the free silver
craze against an overwhelming majority in the West and South, nowhere more
radically relentless than in Kentucky. Both movements had their origin on
economic fallacies and found their backing in dishonest purpose to escape
honest indebtedness.
Through Mr. Cleveland the party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Tilden was
converted from a Democrat into a Populist, falling into the arms of Mr.
Bryan, whose domination proved as baleful in one way as Mr. Cleveland's had
been in another, the final result shipwreck, with the extinguishment of all
but the label.
Mr. Bryan was a young man of notable gifts of speech and boundless
self-assertion. When he found himself well in the saddle he began to rule
despotically and to ride furiously. A party leader more short-sighted could
hardly be imagined. None of his judgments came true. As a consequence the
Republicans for a long time had everything their own way, and, save for
the Taft-Roosevelt quarrel, might have held their power indefinitely. All
history tells us that the personal equation must be reckoned with in
public life. Assuredly it cuts no mean figure in human affairs. And, when
politicians fall out--well--the other side comes in.
Chapter the Twenty-First
Stephen Foster, the Song-Writer--A Friend Comes to the Rescu
His Originality--"My Old Kentucky Home" and the "Old Folks at
Home"--General Sherman and "Marching Through Georgia"
I have received many letters touching what I said a little while ago of
Stephen Collins Foster, the song writer. In that matter I had, and could
have had, no unkindly thought or purpose. The story of the musical
scrapbook rested not with me, but as I stated, upon the averment of Will S.
Hays, a rival song writer. But that the melody of Old Folks at Home may be
found in Schubert's posthumous Rosemonde admits not of contradiction for
there it is, and this would seem to be in some sort corroborative evidence
of the truth of Hays' story.
Among these letters comes one from Young E. Allison which is entitled to
serious consideration. Mr. Allison is a gentleman of the first order of
character and culture, an editor and a musician, and what he writes cannot
fail to carry with it very great weight. I need make no apology for quoting
him at length.
"I have long been collecting material about Foster from his birth to his
death," says Mr. Allison, "and aside from his weak and fatal love of drink,
which developed after he was twenty-five, and had married, his life was one
continuous devotion to the study of music, of painting, of poetry and of
languages; in point of fact, of all the arts that appeal to one who feels
within him the stir of the creative. He was, quite singularly enough, a
fine mathematician, which undoubtedly aided him in the study of music as a
science, to which time and balance play such an important part. In fact, I
believe it was the mathematical devil in his brain that came to hold him
within such bare and primitive forms of composition and so, to some extent,
to delimit the wider development of his genius.
"Now as to Foster's drinking habits, however unfortunate they proved to him
they did not affect the quality of his art as he bequeathed it to us.
No one cares to recall the unhappy fortunes of Burns, De Musset, Chopin
or--even in our own time--of O. Henry, and others who might be named. In
none of their productions does the hectic fever of over-stimulation show
itself. No purer, gentler or simpler aspirations were ever expressed in the
varying forms of music and verse than flowed from Foster's pen, even as
penetrating benevolence came from the pen of O. Henry, embittered and
solitary as his life had been. Indeed when we come to regard what the
drinkers of history have done for the world in spite of the artificial
stimulus they craved, we may say with Lincoln as Lincoln said of Grant,
'Send the other generals some of the same brand.'
"Foster was an aristocrat of aristocrats, both by birth and gifts. He
inherited the blood of Richard Steele and of the Kemble family, noted in
English letters and dramatic annals. To these artistic strains he
added undoubtedly the musical temperament of an Italian grandmother or
great-grand-mother. He was a cousin of John Rowan, the distinguished
Kentucky lawyer and senator. Of Foster's family, his father, his brothers,
his sisters were all notable as patriots, as pioneers in engineering, in
commerce and in society. One of his brothers designed and built the early
Pennsylvania Railroad system and died executive vice-president of that
great corporation. Thus he was born to the arts and to social distinction.
But, like many men of the creative temperament, he was born a solitary,
destined to live in a land of dreams. The singular beauty and grace of his
person and countenance, the charm of his voice, manner and conversation,
were for the most part familiar to the limited circle of his immediate
family and friends. To others he was reticent, with a certain hauteur of
timidity, avoiding society and public appearances to the day of his death.
"Now those are the facts about Foster. They certainly do not describe the
'ne'er-do-well of a good family' who hung round barrooms, colored-minstrel
haunts and theater entrances. I can find only one incident to show that
Foster ever went to hear his own songs sung in public. He was essentially a
solitary, who, while keenly observant of and entering sympathizingly into
the facts of life, held himself aloof from immediate contact with its
crowded stream. He was solitary from sensitivity, not from bitterness or
indifference. He made a large fortune for his day with his songs and was a
popular idol.
"Let us come now to the gravamen of my complaint. You charge on the
authority of mere gossip from the late Will S. Hays, that Foster did not
compose his own music, but that he had obtained a collection of unpublished
manuscripts by an unnamed old 'German musician and thus dishonestly,
by pilfering and suppression' palmed off upon the public themes and
compositions which he could not himself have originated. Something like
this has been said about every composer and writer, big and little, whose
personality and habits did not impress his immediate neighbors as implying
the possession of genius. The world usually expects direct inheritance and
a theatric impressiveness of genius in its next-door neighbor before it
accepts the proof of his works alone. For that reason Napoleon's paternity
in Corsica was ascribed to General Maboeuf, and Henry Clay's in early
Kentucky to Patrick Henry. That legend of the 'poor, unknown German
musician' who composed in poverty and secrecy the deathless songs that
have obsessed the world of music lovers, has been told of numberless young
composers on their way to fame, but died out in the blaze of their later
work. I have no doubt they told it of Foster, as they did also of Hays.
And Colonel Hays doubtless repeated it to you as the intimate gossip about
Foster.
"I have an article written by Colonel Hays and published in and cut from
The Courier-Journal some twelve years after the composer's death, in which
he sketches the life and work of Stephen Collins Foster. In that article he
lays especial stress upon the surprising originality of the Foster themes
and of their musical setting. He praises their distinct American or rather
native inspiration and flavor, and describes from his own knowledge of
Foster how they were 'written from his heart.' No mention or suggestion in
it of any German or other origin for any of those melodies that the world
then and now cherishes as American in costume, but universal in appeal.
While you may have heard something in Schubert's compositions that
suggested something in Foster's most famous song, still I venture to say it
was only a suggestion, such as often arises from the works of composers of
the same general type. Schubert and Foster were both young sentimentalists
and dreamers who must have had similar dreams that found expression in
their similar progressions.
"The German musicians from whom Foster got inspiration to work were
Beethoven, Glück, Weber, Mozart. He was a student of all of them and of the
Italian school also, as some of his songs show. Foster's first and only
music teacher--except in the 'do-re-mi' exercises in his schoolboy
life--testifies that Foster's musical apprehension was so quick, his
intuitive grasp of its science so complete that after a short time there
was nothing he could teach him of the theory of composition; that his
pupil went straight to the masters and got illustration and discipline for
himself.
"This was to be expected of a precocious genius who had written a concerted
piece for flutes at thirteen, who was trying his wings on love songs at
sixteen, and before he was twenty-one had composed several of the most
famous of his American melodies, among them Oh Susannah, Old Dog Tray and
Old Uncle Ned. As in other things he taught himself music, but he studied
it ardently at the shrines of the masters. He became a master of the art of
song writing. If anybody cares to hunt up the piano scores that Verdi made
of songs from his operas in the days of Foster he will find that the great
Italian composer's settings were quite as thin as Foster's and exhibited
not much greater art. It was the fault of the times on the piano, not of
the composers. It was not till long afterward that the color capacities
of the piano were developed. As Foster was no pianist, but rather a pure
melodist, he could not be expected to surpass his times in the management
of the piano, the only 'orchestra' he had. It will not do to regard Foster
as a crude musician. His own scores reveal him as the most artful of
'artless' composers.
"It is not even presumption to speak of him in the same breath with Verdi.
The breadth and poignancy of Foster's melodies entitle them to the highest
critical respect, as they have received worldwide appreciation from great
musicians and plain music lovers. Wherever he has gone he has reached the
popular heart. Here in the United States he has quickened the pulse beats
of four generations. But this master creator of a country's only native
songs has invariably here at home been apologized for as a sort of
'cornfield musician,' a mere banjo strummer, a hanger-on at barrooms where
minstrel quartets rendered his songs and sent the hat round. The reflection
will react upon his country; it will not detract from the real Foster when
the constructive critic appears to write his brief and unfortunate life. I
am not contending that he was a genius of the highest rank, although he had
the distinction that great genius nearly always achieves, of creating a
school that produced many imitators and established a place apart for
itself in the world's estimation. In ballad writing he did for the United
States what Watteau did for painting in France. As Watteau found a Flemish
school in France and left a French school stamped forever, so Foster found
the United States a home for imitations of English, Irish, German and
Italian songs, and left a native ballad form and melodic strain forever
impressed upon it as pure American.
"He was like Watteau in more than that. Watteau took the elegancies and
fripperies of the corrupt French court and fixed them in art immortal, as
if the moment had been arrested and held in actual motion. Foster took
the curious and melancholy spectacle of African slavery at its height,
superimposed by the most elegant and picturesque social manners this
country has known, at the moment the institution was at its zenith. He
saw the glamor, the humor, the tragedy, the contrasts, the emotional
depths--that lay unplumbed beneath it all. He fixed it there for all time,
for all hearts and minds everywhere. His songs are not only the pictorial
canvas of that time, they are the emotional history of the times. It was
done by a boy who was not prophet enough to foresee the end, or philosopher
enough to demonstrate the conditions, but who was born with the intuition
to feel it all and set it forth deeply and truly from every aspect.
"While Foster wrote many comic songs there is ever in them something of
the melancholy undercurrent that has been detected under the laces and
arabesques of Chopin's nominally frivolous dances. Foster's ballad form was
extremely attenuated, but the melodic content filled it so completely that
it seems to strain at the bounds and must be repeated and repeated to
furnish full gratification to the ear. His form when compared with
the modern ballad's amplitude seems like a Tanagra figurine beside a
Michelangelo statue--but the figurine is as fine in its scope as the statue
is in the greater.
"I hope you will think Foster over and revise him 'upward.'"
All of us need to be admonished to speak no evil of the dead. I am trying
in Looking Backward to square the adjuration with the truth. Perhaps I
should speak only of that which is known directly to myself. It costs me
nothing to accept this statement of Mr. Allison and to incorporate it as an
essential part of the record as far as it relates to the most famous and in
his day the most beloved of American song writers.
Once at a Grand Army encampment General Sherman and I were seated together
on the platform when the band began to play Marching Through Georgia, when
the general said rather impatiently: "I wish I had a dollar for every time
I have had to listen to that blasted tune."
And I answered: "Well, there is another tune about which I might say the
same thing," meaning My Old Kentucky Home.
Neither of us was quite sincere. Both were unconsciously pleased to hear
the familiar strains. At an open-air fiesta in Barcelona some American
friends who made their home there put the bandmaster up to breaking forth
with the dear old melody as I came down the aisle, and I was mightily
pleased. Again at a concert in Lucerne, the band, playing a potpourri of
Swiss songs, interpolated Kentucky's national anthem and the group of us
stood up and sang the chorus.
I do not wonder that men march joyously to battle and death to drum and
fife squeaking and rattling The Girl I Left Behind Me. It may be a long
way to Tipperary, but it is longer to the end of the tether that binds the
heart of man to the cradle songs of his nativity. With the cradle songs of
America the name of Stephen Collins Foster "is immortal bound," and I would
no more dishonor his memory than that of Robert Burns or the author of The
Star-Spangled Banner.
Chapter the Twenty-Second
Theodore Roosevelt--His Problematic Character--He Offers Me an
Appointment--His _Bonhomie_ and Chivalry--Proud of His Rebel Kin
I
It is not an easy nor yet a wholly congenial task to write--truthfully,
intelligently and frankly to write--about Theodore Roosevelt. He belonged
to the category of problematical characters. A born aristocrat, he at no
time took the trouble to pose as a special friend of the people; a born
leader, he led with a rough unsparing hand. He was the soul of controversy.
To one who knew him from his childhood as I did, always loving him and
rarely agreeing with him, it was plain to see how his most obvious faults
commended him to the multitude and made for a popularity that never quite
deserted him.
As poorly as I rate the reign of majorities I prefer it to the one-man
power, either elective or dynastic. The scheme of a third term in the
presidency for General Grant seemed to me a conspiracy though with many of
its leaders I was on terms of affectionate intimacy. I fought and helped
to kill in 1896 the unborn scheme to give Mr. Cleveland a third term.
Inevitably as the movement for the retention of Theodore Roosevelt beyond
the time already fixed began to show itself in 1907, my pen was primed
against it and I wrote variously and voluminously.
There appeared in one of the periodicals for January, 1908, a sketch of
mine which but for a statement issued concurrently from the White House
would have attracted more attention than it did. In this I related how at
Washington just before the War of Sections I had a musical pal--the niece
of a Southern senator--who had studied in Paris, been a protégée of the
Empress Eugénie and become an out-and-out imperialist. Louis Napoleon was
her ideal statesman. She not only hated the North but accepted as gospel
truth all the misleading theories of the South: that cotton was king; that
slavery was a divine institution; that in any enterprise one Southern man
was a match for six Northern men.
On these points we had many contentions. When the break came she went
South with her family. The last I saw of her was crossing Long Bridge in a
lumbering family carriage waving a tiny Confederate flag.
Forty-five years intervened. I had heard of her from time to time wandering
aimlessly over Europe, but had not met her until the preceding winter in a
famous Southern homestead. There she led me into a rose garden, and seated
beneath its clustered greeneries she said with an air of triumph, "Now you
see, my dear old friend, that I was right and you were wrong all the time."
Startled, and altogether forgetful, I asked in what way.
"Why," she answered, "at last the South is coming to its own."
Still out of rapport with her thought I said something about the
obliteration of sectionalism and the arrival of political freedom and
general prosperity. She would none of this.
[Illustration: Henry Watterson (Photograph taken in Florida)]
"I mean," she abruptly interposed, "that the son of Martha Bullock has come
to his own and he will rescue us from the mudsills of the North."
She spoke as if our former discussions had been but yesterday. Then I gave
her the right of way, interjecting a query now and then to give emphasis to
her theme, while she unfolded the plan which seemed to her so simple and
easy; God's own will; the national destiny, first a third term, and then
life tenure à la Louis Napoleone for Theodore Roosevelt, the son of Martha
Bullock, the nephew of our great admiral, who was to redress all the wrongs
of the South and bring the Yankees to their just deserts at last.
"If," I ended my sketch, "out of the mouths of babes and sucklings, why not
out of the brain of this crazed old woman of the South?"
Early in the following April I came from my winter home in Florida to the
national capital, and the next day was called by the President to the White
House.
"The first thing I want to ask," said he, "is whether that old woman was a
real person or a figment of your imagination?"
"She was a figment of my imagination," I answered, "but you put her out of
business with a single punch. Why didn't you hold back your statement a
bit? If you had done so there was room for lots of sport ahead."
He was in no mood for joking. "Henry Watterson," he said, "I want to talk
to you seriously about this third-term business. I will not deny that I
have thought of the thing--thought of it a great deal." Then he proceeded
to relate from his point of view the state of the country and the immediate
situation. He spoke without reserve of his relations to the nearest
associated public men, of what were and what were not his personal and
party obligations, his attitude toward the political questions of the
moment, and ended by saying, "What do you make of all this?"
"Mr. President," I replied, "you know that I am your friend, and as your
friend I tell you that if you go out of here the fourth of next March
placing your friend Taft in your place you will make a good third to
Washington and Lincoln; but if you allow these wild fellows willy-nilly
to induce you, in spite of your declaration, to accept the nomination,
substantially for a third term, all issues will be merged in that issue,
and in my judgment you will not carry a state in the Union."
As if much impressed and with a show of feeling he said: "It may be so. At
any rate I will not do it. If the convention nominates me I will promptly
send my declination. If it nominates me and adjourns I will call it
together again and it will have to name somebody else."
As an illustration of the implacability which pursued him I may mention
that among many leading Republicans to whom I related the incident most
of them discredited his sincerity, one of them--a man of national
importance--expressing the opinion that all along he was artfully playing
for the nomination. This I do not believe. Perhaps he was never quite fixed
in his mind. The presidency is a wondrous lure. Once out of the White
House--what else and what----?
II
Upon his return from one of his several foreign journeys a party of some
hundred or more of his immediate personal friends gave him a private dinner
at a famous uptown restaurant. I was placed next him at table. It goes
without saying that we had all sorts of a good time--he Cæsar and I
Brutus--the prevailing joke the entente between the two.
"I think," he began his very happy speech, "that I am the bravest man
that ever lived, for here I have been sitting three hours by the side of
Brutus--have repeatedly seen him clutch his knife--without the blink of an
eye or the turn of a feature."
To which in response when my turn came I said: "You gentlemen seem to be
surprised that there should be so perfect an understanding between our
guest and myself. But there is nothing new or strange in that. It goes
back, indeed, to his cradle and has never been disturbed throughout the
intervening years of political discussion--sometimes acrimonious. At the
top of the acclivity of his amazing career--in the very plenitude of his
eminence and power--let me tell you that he offered me one of the most
honorable and distinguished appointments within his gift."
"Tell them about that, Marse Henry," said he.
"With your permission, Mr. President, I will," I said, and continued: "The
centenary of the West Point Military Academy was approaching. I was at
dinner with my family at a hotel in Washington when General Corbin joined
us. 'Will you,' he abruptly interjected, 'accept the chairmanship of the
board of visitors to the academy this coming June?'
"'What do you want of me?' I asked.
"'It is the academy's centenary, which we propose to celebrate, and we want
an orator.'
"'General Corbin,' said I, 'you are coming at me in a most enticing way.
I know all about West Point. Here at Washington I grew up with it. I have
been fighting legislative battles for the Army all my life. That you
Yankees should come to a ragged old rebel like me for such a service is a
distinction indeed, and I feel immensely honored. But which page of the
court calendar made you a plural? Whom do you mean by "we"?'
"'Why,' he replied in serio-comic vein, 'the President, the Secretary of
War and Me, myself.'
"I promised him to think it over and give him an answer. Next day I
received a letter from the President, making the formal official tender and
expressing the hope that I would not decline it. Yet how could I accept it
with the work ahead of me? It was certain that if I became a part of the
presidential junket and passed a week in the delightful company promised
me, I would be unfit for the loyal duty I owed my belongings and my party,
and so reluctantly--more reluctantly than I can tell you--I declined,
obliging them to send for Gen. Horace Porter and bring him over from across
the ocean, where he was ably serving as Ambassador to France. I need
not add how well that gifted and versatile gentleman discharged the
distinguished and pleasing duty."
III
The last time I met Theodore Roosevelt was but a little while before his
death. A small party of us, Editor Moore, of Pittsburgh, and Mr. Riggs,
of the New York Central, at his invitation had a jolly midday breakfast,
extending far into the afternoon. I never knew him happier or heartier.
His jocund spirit rarely failed him. He enjoyed life and wasted no time on
trivial worries, hit-or-miss, the keynote to his thought.
The Dutch blood of Holland and the cavalier blood of England mingled in
his veins in fair proportion. He was especially proud of the uncle, his
mother's brother, the Southern admiral, head of the Confederate naval
organization in Europe, who had fitted out the rebel cruisers and sent them
to sea. And well he might be, for a nobler American never lived. At the
close of the War of Sections Admiral Bullock had in his possession some
half million dollars of Confederate money. Instead of appropriating this to
his own use, as without remark or hindrance he might have done, he turned
it over to the Government of the United States, and died a poor man.
The inconsistencies and quarrels in which Theodore Roosevelt was now and
again involved were largely temperamental. His mind was of that order which
is prone to believe what it wants to believe. He did not take much time to
think. He leaped at conclusions, and from his premise his conclusion was
usually sound. His tastes were domestic, his pastime, when not at his
books, field sports.
He was not what might be called convivial, though fond of good
company--very little wine affecting him--so that a certain self-control
became second nature to him.
To be sure, he had no conscientious or doctrinal scruples about a third
term. He had found the White House a congenial abode, had accepted the
literal theory that his election in 1908 would not imply a third but a
second term, and he wanted to remain. In point of fact I have an impression
that, barring Jackson and Polk, most of those who have got there were loath
to give it up. We know that Grant was, and I am sure that Cleveland was. We
owe a great debt to Washington, because if a third why not a fourth term?
And then life tenure after the manner of the Caesars and Cromwells of
history, and especially the Latin-Americans--Bolivar, Rosas and Diaz?
Away back in 1873, after a dinner, Mr. Blaine took me into his den and told
me that it was no longer a surmise but a fact that the group about General
Grant, who had just been reflected by an overwhelming majority, was
maneuvering for a third term. To me this was startling, incredible.
Returning to my hotel I saw a light still burning in the room of Senator
Morton, of Indiana, and rapping at the door I was bidden to enter.
Without mentioning how it had reached me, I put the proposition to him.
"Certainly," he said, "it is true."
The next day, in a letter to the Courier-Journal, I reduced what I had
heard to writing. Reading this over it seemed so sensational that I added a
closing paragraph, meant to qualify what I had written and to imply that I
had not gone quite daft.
"These things," I wrote, "may sound queer to the ear of the country. They
may have visited me in my dreams; they may, indeed, have come to me betwixt
the sherry and the champagne, but nevertheless I do aver that they are
buzzing about here in the minds of many very serious and not unimportant
persons."
Never was a well-intentioned scribe so berated and ridiculed as I, never a
simple news gatherer so discredited. Democratic and Republican newspapers
vied with one another which could say crossest things and laugh loudest.
One sentence especially caught the newspaper risibilities of the time, and
it was many a year before the phrase "between the sherry and the champagne"
ceased to pursue me. That any patriotic American, twice elevated to the
presidency, could want a third term, could have the hardihood to seek one
was inconceivable. My letter was an insult to General Grant and proof of my
own lack of intelligence and restraint. They lammed me, laughed at me, good
and strong. On each successive occasion of recurrence I have encountered
the same criticism.
Chapter the Twenty-Third
The Actor and the Journalist--The Newspaper and the State--Joseph
Jefferson--His Personal and Artistic Career--Modest Character and
Religious Belief
I
The journalist and the player have some things in common. Each turns night
into day. I have known rather intimately all the eminent English-speaking
actors of my time from Henry Irving and Charles Wyndham to Edwin Booth and
Joseph Jefferson, from Charlotte Cushman to Helena Modjeska. No people are
quite so interesting as stage people.
During nearly fifty years my life and the life of Joseph Jefferson ran
close upon parallel lines. He was eleven years my senior; but after
the desultory acquaintance of a man and a boy we came together under
circumstances which obliterated the disparity of age and established
between us a lasting bond of affection. His wife, Margaret, had died, and
he was passing through Washington with the little brood of children she had
left him.
It made the saddest spectacle I had ever seen. As I recall it after more
than sixty years, the scene of silent grief, of unutterable helplessness,
has still a haunting power over me, the oldest lad not eight years of age,
the youngest a girl baby in arms, the young father aghast before the sudden
tragedy which had come upon him. There must have been something in my
sympathy which drew him toward me, for on his return a few months later
he sought me out and we fell into the easy intercourse of established
relations.
I was recovering from an illness, and every day he would come and read by
my bedside. I had not then lost the action of one of my hands, putting an
end to a course of musical study I had hoped to develop into a career. He
was infinitely fond of music and sufficiently familiar with the old masters
to understand and enjoy them. He was an artist through and through,
possessing a sweet nor yet an uncultivated voice--a blend between a low
tenor and a high baritone--I was almost about to write a "contralto," it
was so soft and liquid. Its tones in speech retained to the last their
charm. Who that heard them shall ever forget them?
Early in 1861 my friend Jefferson came to me and said: "There is going to
be a war of the sections. I am not a warrior. I am neither a Northerner
nor a Southerner. I cannot bring myself to engage in bloodshed, or to take
sides. I have near and dear ones North and South. I am going away and I
shall stay away until the storm blows over. It may seem to you unpatriotic,
and it is, I know, unheroic. I am not a hero; I am, I hope, an artist. My
world is the world of art, and I must be true to that; it is my patriotism,
my religion. I can do no manner of good here, and I am going away."
II
At that moment statesmen were hopefully estimating the chances of a
peaceful adjustment and solution of the sectional controversy. With the
prophet instinct of the artist he knew better. Though at no time taking an
active interest in politics or giving expression to party bias of any kind,
his personal associations led him into a familiar knowledge of the trend of
political opinion and the portent of public affairs, and I can truly say
that during the fifty years that passed thereafter I never discussed any
topic of current interest or moment with him that he did not throw upon
it the side lights of a luminous understanding, and at the same time an
impartial and intelligent judgment.
His mind was both reflective and radiating. His humor though perennial was
subdued; his wit keen and spontaneous, never acrid or wounding. His speech
abounded with unconscious epigram. He had his beliefs and stood by them;
but he was never aggressive. Cleaner speech never fell from the lips of
man. I never heard him use a profanity. We once agreed between ourselves to
draw a line across the salacious stories so much in vogue during our day;
the wit must exceed the dirt; where the dirt exceeded the wit we would none
of it.
He was a singularly self-respecting man; genuinely a modest man. The
actor is supposed to be so familiar with the pubic as to be proof against
surprises. Before his audience he must be master of himself, holding the
situation and his art by the firmest grip. He must simulate, not experience
emotion, the effect referable to the seeming, never to the actuality
involving the realization.
Mr. Jefferson held to this doctrine and applied it rigorously. On a certain
occasion he was playing Caleb Plummer. In the scene between the old
toy-maker and his blind daughter, when the father discovers the dreadful
result of his dissimulation--an awkward hitch; and, the climax quite
thwarted, the curtain came down. I was standing at the wings.
"Did you see that?" he said as he brushed by me, going to his
dressing-room.
"No," said I, following him. "What was it?"
He turned, his eyes still wet and his voice choked. "I broke down," said
he; "completely broke down. I turned away from the audience to recover
myself. But I failed and had the curtain rung."
The scene had been spoiled because the actor had been overcome by a sudden
flood of real feeling, whereas he was to render by his art the feeling of
a fictitious character and so to communicate this to his audience. Caleb's
cue was tears, but not Jefferson's.
On another occasion I saw his self-possession tried in a different way. We
were dining with a gentleman who had overpartaken of his own hospitality.
Mr. Murat Halstead was of the company. There was also a German of
distinction, whose knowledge of English was limited. The Rip Van Winkle
craze was at its height. After sufficiently impressing the German with the
rare opportunity he was having in meeting a man so famous as Mr. Jefferson,
our host, encouraged by Mr. Halstead, and I am afraid not discouraged by
me, began to urge Mr. Jefferson to give us, as he said, "a touch of his
mettle," and failing to draw the great comedian out he undertook himself to
give a few descriptive passages from the drama which was carrying the
town by storm. Poor Jefferson! He sat like an awkward boy, helpless and
blushing, the German wholly unconscious of the fun or even comprehending
just what was happening--Halstead and I maliciously, mercilessly enjoying
it.
III
I never heard Mr. Jefferson make a recitation or, except in the singing of
a song before his voice began to break, make himself a part of any private
entertainment other than that of a spectator and guest.
He shrank from personal displays of every sort. Even in his younger days he
rarely "gagged," or interpolated, upon the stage. Yet he did not lack for
a ready wit. One time during the final act of Rip Van Winkle, a young
countryman in the gallery was so carried away that he quite lost his
bearings and seemed to be about to climb over the outer railing. The
audience, spellbound by the actor, nevertheless saw the rustic, and its
attention was being divided between the two when Jefferson reached that
point in the action of the piece where Rip is amazed by the docility of his
wife under the ill usage of her second husband. He took in the situation at
a glance.
Casting his eye directly upon the youth in the gallery, he uttered the
lines as if addressing them directly to him, "Well, I would never have
believed it if I had not seen it."
The poor fellow, startled, drew back from his perilous position, and the
audience broke into a storm of applause.
Joseph Jefferson was a Swedenborgian in his religious belief. At one
time too extreme a belief in spiritualism threatened to cloud his sound,
wholesome understanding. As he grew older and happier and passed out
from the shadow of his early tragedy he fell away from the more sinister
influence the supernatural had attained over his imagination. One time in
Washington I had him to breakfast to meet the Chief Justice and Mr. Justice
Matthews and Mr. Carlisle, the newly-elected Speaker of the House. It was a
rainy Sunday, and it was in my mind to warn him that our company was made
up of hard-headed lawyers not apt to be impressed by fairy tales and
ghost stories, and to suggest that he cut the spiritualism in case the
conversation fell, as was likely, into the speculative. I forgot, or
something hindered, and, sure enough, the question of second sight and mind
reading came up, and I said to myself: "Lord, now we'll have it." But it
was my kinsman, Stanley Matthews, who led off with a clairvoyant experience
in his law practice. I began to be reassured. Mr. Carlisle followed with a
most mathematical account of some hobgoblins he had encountered in his
law practice. Finally the Chief Justice, Mr. Waite, related a series of
incidents so fantastic and incredible, yet detailed with the precision and
lucidity of a master of plain statement, as fairly to stagger the most
believing ghostseer. Then I said to myself again: "Let her go, Joe, no
matter what you tell now you will fall below the standard set by these
professional perfecters of pure reason, and are safe to do your best, or
your worst." I think he held his own, however.
IV
Joseph Jefferson came to his artistic spurs slowly but surely, being nearly
thirty years of age when he got his chance, and therefore wholly equal to
it and prepared for it.
William E. Burton stood and had stood for twenty-five years the recognized,
the reigning king of comedy in America. He was a master of his craft as
well as a leader in society and letters. To look at him when he came
upon the stage was to laugh; yet he commanded tears almost as readily as
laughter. In New York City particularly he ruled the roost, and could and
did do that which had cost another his place. He began to take too many
liberties with the public favor and, truth to say, was beginning to be both
coarse and careless. People were growing restive under ministrations which
were at times little less than impositions upon their forbearance. They
wanted something if possible as strong, but more refined, and in the person
of the leading comedy man of Laura Keene's company, a young actor by the
name of Jefferson, they got it.
Both Mr. Sothern and Mr. Jefferson have told the story of Tom Taylor's
extravaganza, "Our American Cousin," in which the one as Dundreary, the
other as Asa Trenchard, rose to almost instant popularity and fame. I shall
not repeat it except to say that Jefferson's Asa Trenchard was unlike any
other the English or American stage has known. He played the raw Yankee
boy, not in low comedy at all, but made him innocent and ignorant as a
well-born Green Mountain lad might be, never a bumpkin; and in the scene
when Asa tells his sweetheart the bear story and whilst pretending to light
his cigar burns the will, he left not a dry eye in the house.
New York had never witnessed, never divined anything in pathos and humor
so exquisite. Burton and his friends struggled for a season, but Jefferson
completely knocked them out. Even had Burton lived, and had there been no
diverting war of sections to drown all else, Jefferson would have come to
his growth and taken his place as the first serio-comic actor of his time.
Rip Van Winkle was an evolution. Jefferson's half-brother, Charles Burke,
had put together a sketchy melodrama in two acts and had played in it, was
playing in it when he died. After his Trenchard, Jefferson turned himself
loose in all sorts of parts, from Diggory to Mazeppa, a famous burlesque,
which he did to a turn, imitating the mock heroics of the feminine horse
marines, so popular in the equestrian drama of the period, Adah Isaacs
Menken, the beautiful and ill-fated, at their head. Then he produced
a version of Nicholas Nickleby, in which his Newman Noggs took a more
ambitious flight. These, however, were but the avant-couriers of the
immortal Rip.
Charles Burke's piece held close to the lines of Irving's legend. When the
vagabond returns from the mountains after the twenty years' sleep Gretchen
is dead. The apex is reached when the old man, sitting dazed at a table in
front of the tavern in the village of Falling Water, asks after Derrick Van
Beekman and Nick Vedder and other of his cronies. At last, half twinkle of
humor and half glimmer of dread, he gets himself to the point of asking
after Dame Van Winkle, and is told that she has been dead these ten years.
Then like a flash came that wonderful Jeffersonian change of facial
expression, and as the white head drops upon the arms stretched before him
on the table he says: "Well, she led me a hard life, a hard life, but she
was the wife of my bosom, she was _meine frau!_"
I did not see the revised, or rather the newly-created and written, Rip
Van Winkle until Mr. Jefferson brought it to America and was playing it at
Niblo's Garden in New York. Between himself and Dion Boucicault a drama
carrying all the possibilities, all the lights and shadows of his genius
had been constructed. In the first act he sang a drinking song to a wing
accompaniment delightfully, adding much to the tone and color of the
situation. The exact reversal of the Lear suggestion in the last act was an
inspiration, his own and not Boucicault's. The weird scene in the mountains
fell in admirably with a certain weird note in the Jefferson genius, and
supplied the needed element of variety.
I always thought it a good acting play under any circumstances, but, in
his hands, matchless. He thought himself that the piece, as a piece, and
regardless of his own acting, deserved better of the critics than they were
always willing to give it. Assuredly, no drama that ever was written, as he
played it, ever took such a hold upon the public. He rendered it to three
generations, and to a rising, not a falling, popularity, drawing to the
very last undiminished audiences.
Because of this unexampled run he was sometimes described by unthinking
people as a one-part actor. Nothing could be farther from the truth. He
possessed uncommon versatility. That after twenty years of the new Rip Van
Winkle, when he was past fifty years of age, he could come back to such
parts as Caleb Plummer and Acres is proof of this. He need not have done so
at all. Carrying a pension roll of dependents aggregating fifteen or twenty
thousand a year for more than a quarter of a century, Rip would still have
sufficed his requirements. It was his love for his art that took him to The
Cricket and The Rivals, and at no inconsiderable cost to himself.
I have heard ill-natured persons, some of them envious actors, say that he
did nothing for the stage.
He certainly did not make many contributions to its upholstery. He was in
no position to emulate Sir Henry Irving in forcing and directing the public
taste. But he did in America quite as much as Sir Charles Wyndham and
Sir Henry Irving in England to elevate the personality, the social and
intellectual standing of the actor and the stage, effecting in a lifetime a
revolution in the attitude of the people and the clergy of both countries
to the theater and all things in it. This was surely enough for one man in
any craft or country.
He was always a good stage speaker. Late in life he began to speak
elsewhere, and finally to lecture. His success pleased him immensely. The
night of the Sunday afternoon charity for the Newsboys' Home in Louisville,
when the promise of a talk from him had filled the house to overflowing,
he was like a boy who had come off from a college occasion with all the
honors. Indeed, the degrees of Harvard and Yale, which had reached him both
unexpectedly and unsolicited, gave him a pleasure quite apart from the
vanity they might have gratified in another; he regarded them, and justly,
as the recognition at once of his profession and of his personal character.
I never knew a man whose moral sensibilities were more acute. He loved the
respectable. He detested the unclean. He was just as attractive off the
stage as upon it, because he was as unaffected and real in his personality
as he was sincere and conscientious in his public representations, his
lovely nature showing through his art in spite of him. His purpose was to
fill the scene and forget himself.
V
The English newspapers accompanied the tidings of Mr. Jefferson's death
with rather sparing estimates of his eminence and his genius, though his
success in London, where he was well known, had been unequivocal. Indeed,
himself, alone with Edwin Booth and Mary Anderson, may be said to complete
the list of those Americans who have attained any real recognition in the
British metropolis. The Times spoke of him as "an able if not a great
actor." If Joseph Jefferson was not a great actor I should like some
competent person to tell me what actor of our time could be so described.
Two or three of the journals of Paris referred to him as "the American
Coquelin." It had been apter to describe Coquelin as the French Jefferson.
I never saw Frederic Lemaître. But, him apart, I have seen all the
eccentric comedians, the character actors of the last fifty years, and, in
spell power, in precision and deftness of touch, in acute, penetrating,
all-embracing and all-embodying intelligence and grasp, I should place
Joseph Jefferson easily at their head.
Shakespeare was his Bible. The stage had been his cradle. He continued all
his days a student. In him met the meditative and the observing faculties.
In his love of fishing, his love of painting, his love of music we see the
brooding, contemplative spirit joined to the alert in mental force and
foresight when he addressed himself to the activities and the objectives
of the theater. He was a thorough stage manager, skillful, patient and
upright. His company was his family. He was not gentler with the children
and grandchildren he ultimately drew about him than he had been with the
young men and young women who had preceded them in his employment and
instruction.
He was nowise ashamed of his calling. On the contrary, he was proud of it.
His mother had lived and died an actress. He preferred that his progeny
should follow in the footsteps of their forebears even as he had done.
It is beside the purpose to inquire, as was often done, what might have
happened had he undertaken the highest flights of tragedy; one might as
well discuss the relation of a Dickens to a Shakespeare. Sir Henry
Irving and Sir Charles Wyndham in England, M. Coquelin in France, his
contemporaries--each had his _métier_. They were perfect in their art
and unalike in their art. No comparison between them can be justly drawn.
I was witness to the rise of all three of them, and have followed them
in their greatest parts throughout their most brilliant and eminent and
successful careers, and can say of each as of Mr. Jefferson:
_More than King can no man be--Whether he
rule in Cyprus or in Dreams._
There shall be Kings of Thule after kings are gone. The actor dies and
leaves no copy; his deeds are writ in water, only his name survives upon
tradition's tongue, and yet, from Betterton and Garrick to Irving, from
Macklin and Quin to Wyndham and Jefferson, how few!
Chapter the Twenty-Fourth
The Writing of Memoirs--Some Characteristics of Carl Shurz--Sam
Bowles--Horace White and the Mugwumps
I
Talleyrand was so impressed by the world-compelling character of the
memoirs he had prepared for posterity that he fixed an interdict of more
than fifty years upon the date set for their publication, and when at
last the bulky tomes made their appearance, they excited no especial
interest--certainly created no sensation--and lie for the most part dusty
upon the shelves of the libraries that contain them. For a different
reason, Henry Ward Beecher put a time limit upon the volume, or volumes,
which will tell us, among other things, all about one of the greatest
scandals of modern times; and yet how few people now recall it or care
anything about the dramatis personæ and the actual facts! Metternich, next
after Napoleon and Talleyrand, was an important figure in a stirring epoch.
He, too, indicted an autobiography, which is equally neglected among the
books that are sometimes quoted and extolled, but rarely read. Rousseau,
the half insane, and Barras, the wholly vicious, have twenty readers where
Talleyrand and Metternich have one.
From this point of view, the writing of memoirs, excepting those of the
trivial French School or gossiping letters and diaries of the Pepys-Walpole
variety, would seem an unprofitable task for a great man's undertaking.
Boswell certainly did for Johnson what the thunderous old doctor could not
have done for himself. Nevertheless, from the days of Cæsar to the days
of Sherman and Lee, the captains of military and senatorial and literary
industry have regaled themselves, if they have not edified the public, by
the narration of their own stories; and, I dare say, to the end of time,
interest in one's self, and the mortal desire to linger yet a little longer
on the scene--now and again, as in the case of General Grant, the assurance
of honorable remuneration making needful provision for others--will move
those who have cut some figure in the world to follow the wandering Celt in
the wistful hope--
_Around my fire an evening group to draw,
And tell of all I felt and all I saw._
Something like this occurs to me upon a reperusal of the unfinished memoirs
of my old and dear friend, Carl Schurz. Assuredly few men had better
warrant for writing about themselves or a livelier tale to tell than the
famous German-American, who died leaving that tale unfinished. No man in
life was more misunderstood and maligned. There was nothing either erratic
or conceited about Schurz, nor was he more pragmatic than is common to
the possessor of positive opinions along with the power to make their
expression effectual.
The actual facts of his public life do not anywhere show that his politics
shifted with his own interests. On the contrary, he was singularly
regardless of his interests where his convictions interposed. Though an
alien, and always an alien, he possessed none of the shifty traits of the
soldier of fortune. Never in his career did he crook the pregnant hinges of
the knee before any worldly throne of grace or flatter any mob that place
might follow fawning. His great talents had only to lend themselves to
party uses to get their full requital. He refused them equally to Grant in
the White House and the multitude in Missouri, going his own gait, which
could be called erratic only by the conventional, to whom regularity is
everything and individuality nothing.
Schurz was first of all and above all an orator. His achievements on the
platform and in the Senate were undeniable. He was unsurpassed in debate.
He had no need to exploit himself. The single chapter in his life on which
light was desirable was the military episode. The cruel and false saying,
"I fight mit Sigel und runs mit Schurz," obviously the offspring of
malignity, did mislead many people, reënforced by the knowledge that Schurz
was not an educated soldier. How thoroughly he disposes of this calumny his
memoirs attest. Fuller, more convincing vindication could not be asked of
any man; albeit by those familiar with the man himself it could not be
doubted that he had both courage and aptitude for military employment.
II
A philosopher and an artist, he was drawn by circumstance into the vortex
of affairs. Except for the stirring events of 1848, he might have lived
and died a professor at Bonn or Heidelberg. If he had pursued his musical
studies at Leipsic he must have become a master of the piano keyboard. As
it was, he played Schumann and Chopin creditably. The rescue of Kinkel,
the flight from the fatherland, the mild Bohemianizing in Paris and London
awakened within him the spirit of action rather than of adventure.
There was nothing of the Dalgetty about him; too reflective and too
accomplished. His early marriage attests a domestic trend, from which he
never departed; though an idealist in his public aspirations and aims he
was a sentimentalist in his home life and affections. Genial in temperament
and disposition, his personal habit was moderation itself.
He was a German. Never did a man live so long in a foreign country and take
on so few of its thoughts and ways. He threw himself into the anti-slavery
movement upon the crest of the wave; the flowing sea carried him quickly
from one distinction to another; the ebb tide, which found him in the
Senate of the United States, revealed to his startled senses the creeping,
crawling things beneath the surface; partyism rampant, tyrannous and
corrupt; a self-willed soldier in the White House; a Blaine, a Butler and a
Garfield leading the Representatives, a Cameron and a Conkling leading the
Senate; single-minded disinterestedness, pure unadulterated conviction,
nowhere.
Jobs and jobbing flourished on every side. An impossible scheme of
reconstruction was trailing its slow, putrescent length along. The revenue
service was thick with thieves, the committees of Congress were packed with
mercenaries. Money-making in high places had become the order of the day.
Was it for this that oceans of patriotism, of treasure and of blood had
been poured out? Was it for this that he had fought with tongue and pen and
sword?
There was Sumner--the great Sumner--who had quarreled with Grant and Fish,
to keep him company and urge him on. There was the Tribune, the puissant
Tribune--two of them, one in New York and the other in Chicago--to give
him countenance. There was need of liberalizing and loosening things in
Missouri, for which he sat in the Senate--they could not go on forever half
the best elements in the State disfranchised.
Thus the Liberal Movement of 1872.
Schurz went to Cincinnati elate with hope. He was an idealist--not quite
yet a philosopher. He had his friends about him. Sam Bowles--the first
newspaper politician of his day, with none of the handicaps carried by
Raymond and Forney--a man keen of insight and foresight, fertile of
resources, and not afraid--stood foremost among them. Next came Horace
White. Doric in his simplicity like a marble shaft, and to the outer eye
as cold as marble, but below a man of feeling, conviction and tenacity, a
working journalist and a doughty doctrinaire. A little group of such men
formed itself about Schurz--then only forty-three years old--to what end?
Why, Greeley, Horace Greeley, the bellwether of abolitionism, the king bee
of protectionism, the man of fads and isms and the famous "old white hat."
To some of us it was laughable. To Schurz it was tragical. A bridge had to
be constructed for him to pass--for retrace his steps he could not--and,
as it were, blindfolded, he had to be backed upon this like a mule aboard
a train of cars. I sometimes wonder what might have happened if Schurz had
then and there resigned his seat in the Senate, got his brood together and
returned to Germany. I dare say he would have been welcomed by Bismarck.
Certainly there was no lodgment for him thenceforward in American politics.
The exigencies of 1876-77 made him a provisional place in the Hayes
Administration; but, precisely as the Democrats of Missouri could put such
a man to no use, the Republicans at large could find no use for him. He
seemed a bull in a china shop to the political organization he honored with
a preference wholly intellectual, and having no stomach for either extreme,
he became a Mugwump.
III
He was a German. He was an artist. By nature a doctrinaire, he had become
a philosopher. He could never wholly adjust himself to his environment.
He lectured Lincoln, and Lincoln, perceiving his earnest truthfulness and
genuine qualities, forgave him his impertinence, nor ceased to regard him
with the enduring affection one might have for an ardent, aspiring and
lovable boy. He was repellant to Grant, who could not and perhaps did
not desire to understand him.... To him the Southerners were always the
red-faced, swashbuckling slave-drivers he had fancied and pictured them in
the days of his abolition oratory. More and more he lived in a rut of his
own fancies, wise in books and counsels, gentle in his relations with the
few who enjoyed his confidence; to the last a most captivating personality.
Though fastidious, Schurz was not intolerant. Yet he was hard to
convince--tenacious of his opinions--courteous but insistent in debate. He
was a German; a German Herr Doktor of Music, of Letters and of Common Law.
During an intimacy of more than thirty years we scarcely ever wholly agreed
about any public matter; differing about even the civil service and the
tariff. But I admired him hugely and loved him heartily.
I had once a rather amusing encounter with him. There was a dinner at
Delmo
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