:*'?ip f (^ SOUTHERN BRANCH. -UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LIBRARY, ii-Of ANGELES. CALIF. RANDOM IMEMORIES RANDOM MEMORIES BY ERNEST WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 1922 50977 COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY ALL EUGHTS RBSESVEO Cbe Slibereit)e ^ttsi CAMBRIDGE • MASSACHUSETTS PRINTED IN THE U. S. A. MD PREFACE This is not meant for a serious autobiography. In- deed, those who know me know that I am seldom serious. I have thought that there ought to be some record ■^ of the anecdotes connected with those early friends of V my father's; also some of the bons mots of that period '^^'^ which might otherwise be lost. I have added some experiences as an art student as far back as the six- ties of the last century, and some art criticisms, nec- ^ essarily crude, from their brevity. In addition I have given brief notes of travel in the past. There are so many tragedies and injustices in this world that unless we smile and keep on smiling, we ^ are liable to be overwhelmed by despair. I have there- "^ fore tried to look on life on its comic side, as far as v possible. Any one who has had the misfortune to be the son of an illustrious parent knows how hard it is to be taken seriously by people. He remains, with them, always the son of his father. They generally try to make matters better by reminding him that it is a well-known fact that genius skips one generation. vl PREFACE Then why try to be serious ? There are some solemn-faced people who cannot enjoy a joke, and who take as an Insult to their dig- nity any attempted pleasantry. They are the people of superior minds, the " Holier-than-Thous " who formed the bulk of the Mugwump Party. Later, as the "best thinkers," they opposed the war with Spain on the ground that we should not meddle in other people^s aifairs. Now, strange to say, these " best thinkers " want us to join the League of Nations, because it is our duty to mix in the aifairs of all the world ! They would like America to be like the Irish- man, who, seeing a street fight going on, wanted to know if it was a private fight, or if anybody could come in. The funny part is, that the "best minds" are almost always wrong, while the common peo- ple are almost always right. The " best minds of the period" made fun of Lincoln, while the com- mon people believed in him and trusted him. The same might be said of Roosevelt, the most beloved and popular man of his generation. The "best minds" reviled him while he lived, but take another view now. For these "best minds" this book is not written. They would find it hopelessly frivolous. My only hope is that some congenial spirit may get a few hours' amusement out of it. Let us, then, keep a cheerful PREFACE Vll countenance and do our little mite to uphold the right, as we see the right. Those likewise serve, who do their best To Champion the Right. Each smallest star In space so far Lends something to the night. E. W. L. October^ 19 21 NOTE I WISH especially to thank Mr. William Roscoe Thayer for his kindness in helping to get this little book published; also the editors of the Atlantic Monthly for their courtesy in allowing the republica- tion of the article on "Couture," and Curtis & Cam- eron for permission to reproduce a photograph of one of my paintings. E. W. L. October, 1921 CONTENTS I. Craigie House i II. My Father's Friends 20 III. Education and Other Things 48 IV. War 68 V. Quips and Cranks 81 VI. Art 96 VII. Italian Art 129 VIII. A Walking Tour in the Alps 142 IX. Life at Home and Abroad 158 X. Reminiscences OF Thomas Couture 177 XI. Winter in Siena 204 XII. Egypt 221 XIII. Professional Fortunes 261 ILLUSTRATIONS Henry WadSWORTH Longfellow Photogravure Frontispiece From the portrait painted by Ernest W. Longfellow in 1876 Craigie House 2 From a sketch by Ernest W. Longfellow E. W. L., June, 1861 48 Thomas Gold Appleton 64 Smoker: A Portrait Study (Alexander Longfellow) 116 From a painting by Ernest W. Longfellow Frederic Crowninshield and E. W. L. on Walking- Trip 142 Thomas Couture 188 From an etching by L. Massard Stone Pines 206 From a painting by Ernest W. Longfellow Sketches made on the Nile 238 Ernest W. Longfellow in his Studio 262 RANDOM MEMORIES • CHAPTER I CRAIGIE HOUSE Under date of Sunday, November 23, 1845, may be found the following entry in my father's journal: "This morning, between two and three o'clock, came into the village of Cambridge a little wandering mu- sician, with a remarkable talent for imitating with his mouth the penny trumpet and the wooden dog." And later, under date of December 7, "We drank the baby's health under the title of the Chevalier New- kom on account of his being a newcomer and a great musician in his way." Now I ask, Is it quite fair to be introduced to the world in this way.** Give a dog, even a wooden dog, a bad name and hang him, much more a chevalier of misplaced industry in the way of performing on penny trumpets. However, my excuse for mentioning this unpropitious advent is that it illustrates the vein of gentle humor that was characteristic of my father. He was fond of making harmless puns and small witti- cisms when in the bosom of his family and in inter- course with intimate friends, which those who knew 2 RANDOM MEMORIES him only through his writings might not suspect. Be- sides, even the pipings of a penny trumpet may some- times suggest the theme of a grand symphony, and so these jottings from a rather uncertain and treacherous memory may serve to reconstruct some of those scenes that took place under my father's roof, where many interesting events took place, and many illustrious people came and went. The old Craigie house, as it was called, where I was bom ^s recorded above, and where my father lived almost from the time he was appointed Professor of Belles-Lettres at Harvard till his death in 1882, is so well known as hardly to need a description. It was called the Craigie house after the widow Craigie, who was living in it at the time of my father's advent in Cambridge, and who at first refused to take him as a lodger, thinking him so young that he must be an undergraduate trying to impose on her by calling himself a professor. The house, however, was built by the Vassals in about 1759 at about the same time as the other Vassal houses, one of which, known as the Bachelder house, was nearly opposite. Some- what farther up the street was a house known as the Riedesel house, from having been occupied for a time by the Baron Riedesel and his charming wife, when, with other Hessian officers, they were held prisoners there, after Burgoyne's surrender. On one y 'm w ^ m P w O ffi _Q W O 1— t -:^ ^ u S o fe #- V i CRAIGIE HOUSE 3 of the window-panes of this house was to be seen the name of the Baroness Riedesel, scratched there with her diamond ring while she was a prisoner. The Craigie house originally was probably a square timber house, with bricks between the framing for greater warmth, — I believe the bricks were brought from England, — built in what is now called the Co- lonial style of architecture, with huge, square beams supporting the double-hipped roof, sheathed on the outside with clapboards, and with wooden pilasters at the corners and on either side of the front door. It has always, as long as I can remember, been painted a straw color with white trimmings and green blinds. It was placed high on a double bank well back from the street, with a straight path leading to it, and three pairs of stone steps, giving it a commanding aspect. The balustrade at the top of the first pair of steps was a late addition, added at my suggestion by my father in 1869. To show how false even the memory of great men may be, Mr. Lowell always insisted he remem- bered that balustrade when he was a boy. The house, as originally built, contained four rooms of equal size on each floor. There was a central hall with stairs leading up from either side, and meeting in the middle, only to part to reach the front and back chambers respectively. At this junction was a parti- tion, with door and large window with rounded top 4 RANDOM MEMORIES giving light to the back hall. These stairs were adorned with the beautiful twisted balustrades of the period, and up their creaking treads must have passed many a time the weary step of the Father of his Country in those anxious days of the siege of Boston when the house was occupied by him as his headquarters. The Vassals were Tories and had fled to Nova Scotia at the beginning of hostilities. Hence their house was confiscated and assigned to Washington, as the finest residence in the neighborhood. From the front of the house the view extended to the Brighton meadows and hills beyond, with the Charles, in its windings making the letter "S" alluded to In my father's sonnet to Charles Sumner. It was a tidal river as far as Watertown, and with strong easterly winds or exceptionally high tides, the meadows were entirely flooded, making a beautiful lake, with only the haycocks of marsh grass showing above the wa- ters. In those early days great schooners were wont to pass up and down with their freight of coal or lum- ber, and the scent of the marsh grass was wafted pleasantly to one's nostrils. Later, the river was polluted by the gasworks on its border, and the sail- ing vessels gave place to coal barges towed by fussy tugs. Still, my father always loved that view, and often have I seen him come out on his front steps. CRAIGIE HOUSE 5 bareheaded, merely to gaze at it, either in its noonday- haze or lit up with the splendors of sunset. It was his hope that it would never be obstructed, and it was this wish that led his children to preserve it as best they might, by giving the land opposite the house to the city of Cambridge to be made into a park. The assessors immediately raised the valuations on the adjoining land, on the plea that now we lived on a park. Originally, two stately lines of elms led up on either hand to the front door, but in old Mrs. Craigie's day she would not have them protected from the canker- worms, because, as she used to say, the canker-worms had as good a right to live as the elms. Consequently all but the one on the right of the house eventually died, and the ones set out to replace them never seemed to thrive. My father took great pains with these trees and did all he could to protect them from this Cambridge pest. He insisted on the gardener see- ing to It that the trees were properly protected by tar, and that the tar should be kept fresh, especially on the warm days In winter, when the moths were wont to climb the trees to lay their eggs. He was explaining about this habit of the female to an Irish gardener, when he was met with the astonishing rejoinder, "Sure, your honor, don't ye know that the faymale canker-woram dies before it is boran!" Which would 6 RANDOM MEMORIES seem to be a more effective way of disposing of the worms than by tar. Cambridge, as I first remember It, was little more than a village, with Harvard College as the centre; now it has become a large city. In those old days Harvard Square had a large and beautiful elm in its centre, flanked by the village pump and the hay scales. Herds of cattle and flocks of sheep would pass through on market days on their way to Brighton. An omnibus, known as the "Hourly," used to ply once an hour between Cambridge and Boston and was the only public conveyance. It was a large bus drawn by four horses, and was so accommodating that it would go out of its way to pick up passengers in any part of Cambridge, if duly notified. It was supposed to start, however, from Harvard Square in Cambridge on the hour, and from in front of the old Brattle Street Church in Boston on the half-hour, if I remember right. It was driven by a man named Morse, who in his old age lost his mind and used to sit in front of his fireplace with strings attached to his tea-kettle and think he was still driving his "bus." Some wit, in alluding to him, said, "Mors communis omnibus." It is also related that on one occasion in the winter, he had as a passenger on the box seat with him a student who was slightly intoxicated, and who, on a sudden lurch of the bus, fell off into a snowdrift. )i i CRAIGIE HOUSE 7 When Morse pulled up, the student calmly remarked, " Hello, Morse, upset, have n't you ? " On being as- sured to the contrary, he exclaimed, "Oh, if I had known that, I would n't have jumped off." To collect the fares, a small boy stood on the step at the rear, and one boy, who had acquired a most remarkable pepper-and-salt coat, excited my brother's admira- tion particularly, and nothing would do but he must be allowed to go into Boston and purchase a similar coat. I believe his highest ambition at that time was one day to be allowed to become the bus boy, Boston in those days was also very different from what it is to-day. The old Brattle Street Church still had embedded in its front the round cannon-ball that had been fired from the American lines. The funny old group of buildings still blocked up the centre of Scollay Square, where now the subway stations reign supreme. The beautiful old Hancock house, which should never have been taken down, was still standing. The Back Bay came up to Charles Street at the foot of the Common, with rope-walks stretching out into it. The Milldam was really a mill- dam, and was what is now the lower part of Beacon Street. There were very few houses then on Beacon Street below Charles, and I remember perfectly when all those houses beyond what is now Arlington Street were built, and it was considered very far out. 8 RANDOM MEMORIES What Is now the PubHc Garden and the whole sec- tion beyond was filled in much later, mostly, we used to say, with tin cans and hoopskirts. Fashionable people still lived in Summer and Tremont Streets as well as on Beacon Hill. My grandfather, Mr. Nathan Appleton, lived at 39 Beacon Street, in one of those beautiful old bow-front houses, with purple panes of glass brought from Holland, that were the pride of Bostonians of those days. We always drove in to dine on Saturdays, dinner being then at the fashionable hour of two o'clock. We also always dined there on Thanksgiving Day, which I remember as a great event for us children, as naturally we ate too much and re- pented ruefully afterwards. Christmas was an event of much excitement, as my grandfather always had a Christmas tree, with a large party of all the relations and friends, and many beautiful presents for every- body. Farther up Beacon Street lived Uncle Sam Ap- pleton and his wife, — Aunt Sam as we called her, — a dear old lady, who represented my idea of a French Marquise, with her side curls and her frilled caps. She always wore white gloves, night and day, to keep her hands white, but as nobody ever saw her without her gloves, I never could see what good it did. Their house was even finer than my grandfather's, with a circular central hall, with a fountain in the middle, and, supported by marble columns, a gallery connect- CRAIGIE HOUSE 9 ing the bedrooms running round it. This house was very broad and was afterwards torn down to make room for two modern houses. Those were the days when people spoke of the Ticknors with bated breath, and Mrs. Harrison Gray Otis received on Washington's Birthday sitting in state with her turban on. Everett and Winthrop were the awe-inspiring orators of great occasions. One of the anecdotes of the former is to the effect that on some occasion, either the laying of the corner- stone of Bunker Hill Monument or some subsequent oration on Bunker Hill Day, Mr. Everett, who never neglected any possible point that might be made, carefully sought out an old survivor of the Battle of Bunker Hill, and invited him to sit on the platform -during the oration. He also requested him to rise at a certain passage where he spoke of the few remaining soldiers who had taken part in the action. Much to the old veteran's astonishment, however, when Mr. Everett had come to that part of the address and he had risen according to instruction, Mr. Everett sud- denly turned upon him and in thunder tones ex- claimed, "Sit down! Sit down! It is fitter that we should stand"; whereupon the old man, much per- plexed, sat down, but the point had been made amid great applause. Mr. Winthrop was, as I remember him, rather a 10 RANDOM MEMORIES pompous old gentleman with spectacles, and with the grand manner of the past generation. He had the habit of greeting an acquaintance with a lofty air, his hand raised, which was allowed to descend to grasp that of his friend in rather a condescending manner. On meeting Dr. Holmes one day, the latter, who was a small man, and as quick in his motions as the other was slow, suddenly slid his hand in underneath and said, "Ah! Winthrop, I come the undercut." It is hard to indicate in print the drollery of this without having known and seen the contrast between the two men. It was my grandfather who bought the Craigie house and presented it to the newly wedded couple when my father married my mother, his second daugh- ter, who it may be remembered figured as the heroine of one of my father's prose works — "Hyperion." The oldest daughter married a son of Sir James Mack- intosh, the historian, who was at one time Governor of some of the West Indian islands, but they mostly lived in London. At the time my father and mother took up their abode in the Craigie house there were also living in part of the house Mr. Worcester, the lexicographer, and his wife, whose lease had not expired. They soon moved out, however, and lived in a house that Mr. Worcester built on an adjoining estate. There was a CRAIGIE HOUSE ii pond on the line of separation between the two es- tates, and on that pond we boys sailed boats in summer and skated in winter, and tumbled in and got wet, impartially, summer and winter. Mr. Worcester, as I remember him, was a widower and rather a crusty old gentleman, who was given to complaining to my father of our depredations on his property, not without reason, I am free to confess. A high board fence sep- arated the adjoining lands except at the pond, and on that fence we used to perch, and when Mr. Worces- ter's gardener's back was turned, we would swoop down upon his apples or pears, and, regaining the fence, would make good our escape. Although we had plenty of apples and pears in our own garden, they never tasted so good as those acquired with a sense of danger. In the winter, too, on the ice, I am afraid we made an awful racket, which must have disturbed the worthy Mr. Worcester in his search for unknown words and their meanings to put into his "Dictionary of the English Language"; for he used to issue forth in great wrath and request us to leave his part of the pond, which we proceeded to do with great speed till he had retired, when of course we came back again, as only a very small part of the pond was on our land. The pond has since been filled up, and no longer exists. At that time the Craigie estate was quite large and 12 RANDOM MEMORIES extended up to the Harvard Observatory. Craigie and Buckingham Streets had not been laid out, but were cut through and built upon well within my mem- ory. Sparks Street was a green lane with a gate at the bottom on Brattle Street, which goes to show what a country village Cambridge was then. We had in our house neither gas nor water, and I well remember the excitement of us children when the floors were pulled up to put in the pipes. Mr. Lowell has written such a charming description of Cambridge in the early days that it leaves little for others to say. My father, as I first remember him, was a man somewhat over forty: clean-shaven except for small mutton-chop side whiskers, turning grey; hair rather long, parted in the middle behind, and brought for- ward over the ears in what would now be considered a rather tousled condition, but was the fashion of that time. He had rather a large mouth, but finely cut, a slightly aquiline nose, broad and fine forehead, and beautiful blue eyes. His whole expression was benign and sweet, and did not belie his character, which was the most perfect imaginable. He had a well-set-up figure of middle height, with rather square shoulders, and a jauntiness in his walk and bearing which gave rise to the lines in a college doggerel of the period. With his hat on one whisker, and an air that says, 'Go it, You have here the great American poet.'" CRAIGIE HOUSE 13 In the days when professors and even other men in Boston and Cambridge were rather slovenly in their appearance, he was always very carefully dressed, and indeed was considered rather a dandy, and I believe Mrs. Craigie, when he first came to board with her, thought his gloves of much too light a shade to be worn by a strictly virtuous man. An English govern- ess, however, who was employed to teach my sisters, was so impressed by the beauty of his character that, although a very strict Episcopalian, she declared that, after knowing my father, it was impossible for her ever again to recite the Athanasian Creed, as she could not believe that even though a Unitarian he would be condemned to eternal damnation. My father was very methodical and careful in his ways. He believed in having a place for everything and everything in its place, and kept with the great- est care anything that could be useful. He always carefully folded up and put away, in a drawer de- voted to the purpose, the wrapping paper that came on bundles, and untied, never cut, the string, and put that away in another drawer, thus having them both on hand when needed. The paper that he wrote his manuscripts on was of a certain kind called cartridge paper, and cut to a certain size and kept in large quan- tities ready for use. He wrote most of his manuscripts on this paper 14 RANDOM MEMORIES with pencil (having always several ready sharpened) in a beautifully clear hand, very evenly spaced and with few erasures or corrections. In the early days he wrote standing at a desk by one of the front windows of his study, where he could look out on the Charles in its windings. Later he sat at a round table in the centre of the room. For his correspondence he used at first quill pens which he mended with great care him- self, and afterwards rubber or stub pens. He was very conscientious about answering his large correspond- ence himself, and refused to have a secretary till the last few years of his life, sacrificing a great deal of his valuable time to answering trivial demands upon his kindness. It was always to my father that we went in our childish troubles. He was very skilful in putting on a bandage for a sore throat or doing up a cut finger, keeping at hand little bandages already rolled up for immediate use. He also doctored us with homoeo- pathic remedies for our small ailments, but of course calling in a regular doctor for anything serious. I re- member, however, one occasion when I had a high fever, which the doctor seemed unable to subdue, that my father, who had once been at a German water cure, did me up himself in wet sheets with many blankets over me, till I was in a profuse perspiration and the fever conquered. CRAIGIE HOUSE 15 He was always the most kind and indulgent of parents, and one of the few things I can look back upon with satisfaction in my life is the fact that I never caused him any worry or anxiety on my account, and that till the day of his death we never had the slightest misunderstanding, but were always on the most intimate and affectionate terms. My father and mother had six children in all : my brother Charles, who was born within a year of their marriage and was a year and a half my senior; a sister, who was born two or three years after me, but lived only a short time ; and my three sisters who figure in the "Children's Hour" — ' . "Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, And Edith with golden hair" — the latter of whom came really between the other two. It was while walking up and down with his second daughter, then a baby in his arms, that my father composed and sang to her the well-known lines: "There was a little girl. Who had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead. When she was good, She was very good indeed, But when she was bad she was horrid.** i6 RANDOM MEMORIES Many people think this a Mother-Goose rhyme, but this is the true version and history. It may interest people to know that the "Verses to a Child" were written about my brother Charles, while "The Castle-Builder," published many years later, related to me : "A gentle boy, with soft and silken locks, A dreamy boy, with brown and tender eyes, A castle-builder, with his wooden blocks. And towers that touch imaginary skies." We were all born in the old Craigie house and there passed our childhood, with summers passed mostly at Nahant, where we boarded first at Mrs. Johnson's in the village, next to the general store and post-office, and later lived in the cottage that my father bought on the south side of Nahant. Mrs. Johnson was a typical New England woman, tall and bony, but an excellent cook, and her popovers and sponge cake were renowned. In those early days we kept a carriage and a pair of dapple-grey horses, and always drove down through Maiden and Lynn when we moved to Nahant. That moving, which could not take place till the college term was over, was a great excitement to us children, and I can remember now how delicious the first scent of the seaweed was, as we crossed Lynn beach and got the first breath of the sea. CRAIGIE HOUSE 17 We all loved the life at Nahant, except, I think, my father, who, though he enjoyed the rest after his long winter work in college, missed his books and his delightful study in Cambridge. But it was good for us children, and he was content, although, as he used to say, it was impossible to do any work there as the air seemed to have a somnolent and deadening effect upon his muse. And it was not till the autumn came again that his inspiration returned, but with it, alas, the drudgery of his college work which took up so much of his time. My father had charge in the college of the Depart- ment of Modern Languages, with tutors under him to do a great deal of the direct teaching. His lecture- room was in the right-hand entry of University Hall in what is now, I believe, the Faculty Room. At that time the chapel services were held in the central hall of "University," the students having their seats on the floor of the hall, while the professors and their families had pews in the large gallery at one end, and the choir in the small one at the other. Professors, as well as students, were expected to attend prayers at eight o'clock in the morning, and divine service, morning and afternoon, on Sundays. Fortunately, my father lived just beyond the half-mile limit and so was relieved of the necessity of prayers, but the two services a day on Sunday had to be endured, and 1 8 RANDOM MEMORIES even we children often went in the afternoon as well as the morning; and how very long and sleepy those afternoon services seemed! The college was then strictly Unitarian, but students of other denomina- tions were allowed to attend their own churches under certain restrictions. The old Puritan Sunday still sur- vived in a great measure, and I remember that we were not allowed to read the same books as on week- days, and had special Sunday clothes which were specially uncomfortable, as if to remind us that we must be on our good behavior, and could not play any games or frolic; in consequence of which we looked upon Sunday as a day to be dreaded; and a long and dreary day it was, to young boys full of animal spirits and a desire to work them off. I do not remember that we went to any Sunday school, be- cause I think there was none connected with the col- lege chapel, but our mother gave us religious instruc- tion at home. The presidents of the college were always clergymen, and conducted the services in the chapel themselves. They seemed to me a succession of dull preachers, Presidents Sparks, Walker, and Hill, but perhaps that was only because my young under- standing was not equal to the profundity of their re- marks. President Felton was the first president not a clergyman. Speaking of Puritan Sundays: it was only a few CRAIGIE HOUSE 19 years ago that on one Sunday morning in Boston I heard a boy, returning from church with his father on Commonwealth Avenue, shout to another boy on the other side of the street, whereupon his father re- proved him by saying, "Hush, you forget it is Sun- day" — so the old spirit still lingers. CHAPTER II MY FATHER'S FRIENDS My father's special friends, in the early days, were Charles Sumner, Professor Felton, Professor Agassiz, James Russell Lowell, Professor Charles Eliot Nor- ton, and James T. Fields. Mr. Sumner was, I think, nearer to my father than any one. They seemed to share the same ideals, and had the same hatred of injustice and oppression, and were in entire accord politically until Mr. Sumner's quarrel with General Grant and his support of Greeley, when my father re- mained staunch to the Republican Party, to which he had belonged from its foundation. Sumner was a large and tall man of over six feet, of a genial temperament, but somewhat wanting in humor, and took himself and the causes he advocated very seriously. He was a cultivated man with a wonderful memory, and had been much in England and on the Continent. He almost always wore a frock coat and white waistcoat, with check trousers and white spats, quite in the English statesman's style. He corresponded constantly with my father and always, when he was in Boston, dined with us on Sundays, having a house on Hancock Street and usually walking MY FATIiER'S FRIENDS 21 out for the then midday nieal. He was rather awe- inspiring to us children, and had a way of resting his hand affectionately upon our heads and gradually bearing down as he forgot himself in conversation, till we, who at first did not dare to move, at last gave way under the pressure and collapsed. He also would take one's hand in his and, grinding his thumb into the back of it till we could bear the pain no longer, would then release it with a laugh. I do not think he intentionally made us suffer, it was only his idea of being playful: a rather elephantine one, I must con- fess. He used to tell a story on himself and thought It a great joke, about once, on a Fourth of July, calling up his office boy and delivering to him an impromptu Fourth-of-July oration of what the day meant, and all that, and then giving him a quarter and telling him he could go and pass the day at Mount Auburn (the cemetery in Cambridge). Let us hope the boy spent it in fire-crackers and on Boston Common instead. Mr. Sumner, as I remember him best, had iron-grey hair and side whiskers and a rather long nose which he was fond of pulling. I remember wondering as a boy whether it was so long because of this habit of his, or if he pulled it because it was so long. He had rather small and what might be called pig's eyes, with red rims, but on the whole was a fine-looking man, with an imposing presence. I remember well the terrible com- 22 RANDOM MEMORIES motion made by the attack upon him in the Senate Chamber by Brooks. He was struck from behind as he was seated at his desk, and In his frantic efforts to rise to escape the terrible blows of the cane on the back of his head, tore the desk bodily from Its fasten- ings. It was many years, and after much suffering and searing with white-hot irons on his back, before he recovered his health, and I imagine his nervous system never fully recovered, which may have 'had something to do with the infelicities of his marriage, late in life, to the widow Hooper, afterwards known as Mrs. Mason, she having resumed her maiden name after the divorce. One amusing incident In relation to Mr. Sumner I must not forget. My father had had constructed in his dressing-room a shower bath, let into the wall, with curtains in front. He was one day showing it with pride to Mr. Sumner and explained how by pulling a cord the water descended, whereupon Mr. Sumner stepped into the alcove, and pulled the cord, without thinking, just to see how it worked, and was of course drenched. Alas, for the dignified Sumner! Another story of Sumner that he used to tell against himself related to one of his voyages to Europe. As the guest of honor on board he had a seat on the right hand of the captain at his table. Mr. Sumner had been ill for three days and at last dragged himself up in time for dinner, but was a little late. Those were MY FATHER'S FRIENDS 23 the days when the captain sat at the head of a long table and carved the roast himself. On this occasion the captain called loudly for the steward to know where the beef gravy was. " Please, sir," said the steward, " this gentleman has eaten it, thinking it was the soup." Whereupon Mr. Sumner retiredmore sick than before. Mr. Sumner was very kind to me later, when at the age of seventeen I had the ambition to enter West Point; although he must have known my father's aversion to war or anything connected with it, he had me appointed to the Academy. Unfortunately, when the time came for me to go up for my examination, I was sick in bed and had little courage, and gave in to my father's objections to my entering on a soldier's career. I have always regretted this, as I still believe that I should have made a better soldier than artist. Mr. Sumner's brother George was also a frequent visitor at the house. He was a cultivated man and much travelled. He was also responsible for having the State House painted chocolate color. Another brother, Albert, also came sometimes. He and his wife were lost at sea in a collision of steamships outside New York, and I remember there was a lawsuit about the property as to which was likely to have survived the other. The court finally decided, I believe, that the man, being supposedly the stronger, would naturally survive the longer. 24 RANDOM MEMORIES About 1848 there appeared on the scene a young German poet, Emmanuel Scherb by name; slender, with dark hair worn long like Liszt's. He was a con- stant visitor at the house and was, I imagine, a po- litical refugee. He seemed to be very poor, and no doubt was glad of the economy of constant dinners and teas at our house. He was a cultivated man, however, and my father seemed fond of him, or at least he tolerated him, perhaps out of compassion, as he did so many others. We boys, and also my Uncle Tom Appleton, specially disliked him, and I think it must have been of him that my father once remarked, when some one asked him why he allowed him to come so much to the house, "Who would be kind to him if I were not?" We caught him once surreptitiously rubbing a small round bald spot on the top of his head, that looked surprisingly like a priest's tonsure, and asked him why he did it, and he said that the friction would make the hair grow, whereas we felt convinced it would have quite the contrary eflfect, and were perfectly sure after that that he was a Jesuit in disguise. However, later, as he became more and more down on his luck, I believe he became a Unitarian preacher, and finally in '62 or '63 he was detected in bounty-jumping, or, in other words, of enlisting to get the bounty that was paid for recruits, and then deserting. I believe my father had to pay MY FATHER'S FRIENDS 25 a considerable sum to get him out of that scrape. Shortly afterwards, to the relief of every one, he died in a hospital in Boston. Professor Felton, afterwards president of the col- lege, was a man of large bulk, with a smooth-shaven face and tight-curling black hair, and resembled some of the old Romans, especially as his nose was of the type known by that name. He was a very genial man with a hearty laugh, and came a great deal to the house in the early days, and to Nahant, where he lived in the Gary Cottage, near the Spouting Horn on the north shore. I remember his telling us how one day, when he had stripped for his daily swim and was contemplating the waves, which were unusually high, and had just made up his mind that it was too rough safely to take a swim, a huge wave, larger than its fellows, picked him up from the rock on which he was sitting, as if he had been a baby, and carried him out to sea, when another equally large one brought him back again and deposited him on the same spot, only very much bruised and scratched: he was so fat he was like a cork, and was easily tossed about, and must have been an amusing sight; but it was no joke for him. Professor Agassiz was the most charming man of all my father's friends. He was the embodiment of bonhomie and had the most delightful and contagious 26 RANDOM MEMORIES laugh I ever heard. We saw much of him, both at Cambridge and at Nahant, where he also had a cot- tage, at the foot of the hill on which the Gary Cottage stood. He was like a child in his delight when some new fish or medusa was brought to him by the fisher- men, who all understood that anything unusual that came up on their lines, or that was caught in their nets, was to go direct to him. He had large tanks con- nected with his house, where, in constantly renewed salt water, he had them put, so that he could study them at leisure. He also took the greatest interest in geology and would dance with joy when he found some rock smooth and polished by ice that confirmed his glacial theory, or stray boulders of a diff"erent ma- terial from that of the surrounding rocks, showing that they must have been brought from a distance; and he would treat with the greatest contempt the suggestion that they might have been deposited on the shore by icebergs, which I believe is the theory of some scientists. There are several of these large boulders in Essex County, the Ship Rock in Saugus and the Agassiz Boulder in Manchester being two of the largest and visited by Agassiz with great interest. With all his charm and good nature the mention of Darwin and his theory acted on him like a red rag to a bull, and he would become so excited and furious that it would be well to drop the subject as quickly as pos- MY FATHER'S FRIENDS 27 sible, and then he would calm down with a great burst of laughter at his own rage. He would never allow that Darwin had a leg to stand on, and always argued that if the Creator could make many species develop from one, He could equally and with more reason create all the different species. I do not know whether he ever changed his mind or ever accepted, what all the rest of the scientific world soon came to accept as one of the fundamental principles of creation — • the development of species. He spoke English wonder- fully well, with only a slight foreign accent, and was one of the most delightful lecturers I ever heard, so clear and concise, and with a wonderful talent for drawing in chalk on the blackboard. It was a real treat to see a perfect fish or skeleton develop under his hand with extraordinary sureness and perfect knowledge, without any hesitation or correcting, like a Japanese drawing in its truth to nature, and it seemed a shame that such beautiful drawings were only in chalk and had to be rubbed out again. I re- member his saying once that the first time he lec- tured, he told his audience all he knew in twenty minutes, and had been elaborating ever since. Such was the modesty of one of the most learned of men. To show the extraordinary kindness of the man — once, when I was just beginning my artistic career, he was talking to me of the carelessness of artists in de- 28 RANDOM MEMORIES picting the different species of trees or geological for- mations, and spoke of Calarme, a Swiss artist, in whose pictures, on the contrary, these things were always carefully attended to. Poor dear man, he little under- stood that science and art are widely separated, and that a slavish copying of nature is not art, and that art does not concern itself with fauna and geological periods, but with the impression a particular scene or effect has on the spectator and can be made to have on the imagination of others. However, in this par- ticular case, he very kindly asked me to come over to his place on the north side of Nahant the next morn- ing, and he would give me a lecture on rock forma- tion. So the next morning I appeared at his cottage and he took me out on the shore, and for an hour and a half of his valuable time, he gave me a most delight- ful talk on the geological periods and the formation of different rocks. One of my great regrets in life is that my father would not let me go with Agassiz on his expedition to Brazil and his exploration of the Amazon. Agassiz had offered me the post of artist to the expedition and I had been wild to go, but I was not yet of age, and my father very much opposed it, fearing I could not stand the climate, so I reluctantly gave it up. It was certainly one of the lost chances of my life. That was very characteristic of my father; he always thought MY FATHER'S FRIENDS 29 it wisest not to do a thing. He had none of the adven- turous spirit. "To stay at home is best," he wrote. He hated excess or extremes. He dishked extreme cold or extreme heat, and beHeved in the juste milieu in everything. Not for him, therefore, the extreme heights or depths of the tragic poets. He was not a rushing river, boiHng and tumbling over rocks, but the placid stream flowing through quiet meadows. He hated war, he hated violence in any form, and though nothing roused his indignation like injustice, he was for peaceful measures if possible. None of the abolitionists hated slavery more than he, but he did not believe in violent methods, and thought that in time gradual emancipation could be brought about with proper compensation to the slave-owners. But, unfortunately, the South did be- lieve in violent measures, and by their violence pulled the temple about their ears, and brought about the very catastrophe that they dreaded. "They that take the sword shall perish with the sword." James Russell Lowell was, of course, one of the most frequent visitors to our house, living as he did at Elmwood, only a short distance beyond, and passing daily on his walks to and from the college, when as Professor of Belles-Lettres he succeeded my father in 1857. Mr. Lowell was a handsome man with reddish beard, and hair parted in the middle, which at that 30 RANDOM MEMORIES time was thought very effeminate; I remember an ad- vertisement of the period, in which a man was wanted, which ended with "No one who parts his hair in the middle need apply." Mr. Lowell always seemed to me hard to understand, and it was only after his death, when his letters were published by Charles Eliot Norton, that there seemed to be a clue to the enigma. I think he was a very sensitive and perhaps shy man, and thought he was not appreciated, as appears in his letters, and was jealous of the successes of others. A man genial and charming as host in his own house, he seemed constrained and shy in company; given to saying sharp things and doing occasionally most ex- traordinarily gauche things, for a man of the world. It was only as Minister to England, where he was made much of, and flattered to his heart's content, that he seemed to find himself. In America, before he was appointed as Minister to Spain, he went little into society, and preferred to shut himself up in his own house, where he received a few intimate friends, and where, by his own fireside with his pipe in his mouth, he was the most delightful conversationalist, with many quips and cranks, and much unusual and eru- dite knowledge. I could give several instances of his gaucherie in so- ciety that have been related to me, but will give only one instance that happened to me personally. To be- MY FATHER'S FRIENDS 31 gin with, at the time of my father's death, Mr. Lowell, then in England, was the only one of my father's inti- mate friends who did not write either to my sisters or myself some word of condolence and sympathy. The first time I saw Mr. Lowell after that event was at my youngest sister's wedding some years later, at the Craigie house. I had not seen him since I had been in Madrid, at the time he was Minister there, when he had been most cordial and hospitable. Seeing him standing in the middle of the room talking with Mr. Norton, I went up to him and very cordially took him by the hand and said how glad I was to see him back in America. I then turned to shake hands with Mr. Norton. Mr. Lowell, to my utter astonishment, turned on his heel, and without a word to me walked across the room to Miss Norton, who was standing at some distance, and did not come near me again. I have never been able to understand this incident. I saw Mr. Lowell frequently after that, before his death, but no explanation was ever offered by him or asked for by me, and he always seemed most cordial when I called upon him at his house, which I did several times while he was ill. Charles Eliot Norton was another of my father's friends, although much younger. He came much to the house in the days of the Dante suppers so charm- ingly described by Mr. Howells. A sweet, gentle 32 RANDOM MEMORIES nature, perhaps a little over-refined, but a ripe scholar and a lover of art. My father relied much on his judg- ments in things literary, and especially on his criti- cisms of his translation of Dante. In art, however, he was a Ruskinlte, and did not believe, with the excep- tion of Turner and Burne- Jones, that any art existed since the Renaissance. He once apologized to me for having a charming Corot hanging in his hall, left by some friend for him to care take of. Fancy apologiz- ing for a Corot ! Ralph Waldo Emerson came seldom to my father's house, but I saw him occasionally at the Saturday Club, where my father sometimes took me, and also at lectures given by Mr. Emerson in Boston, where he invariably got his manuscript mixed and would fill in the space with his beaming smile, as if to take his au- dience into his confidence, and say, "You see how it is with philosophers, they can't be expected to do things like other people." That wonderful, benignant smile is the chief thing I remember about him. There is a story told about him and Alcott, a neighbor in Con- cord, which, if not true, is "ben trovato." It seems that Alcott used to visit Emerson In the mornings and Emerson would get off some of his Orphic sayings, and in the afternoon Emerson would visit Alcott, when the latter would repeat some of the things Emer- son had said in the morning. Emerson, quite forget- MY FATHER'S FRIENDS 33 ting that he had said them, would say, "What a remarkable mind Alcott haB.'" A unique character in Cambridge In those days was Sophocles, the Greek Professor. Of small stature, with a great mass of tousled grey hair and beard, out of which gleamed two piercing black eyes, he was sup- posed to live in almost abject poverty, in one room, cooking his own meals, that he might send all his salary to his aged mother in Greece. He used to tell a marvellous tale about his father and the primitive habits of life in Greece. I cannot do justice to the story, but it seems that his father lived somewhere in the country where he was visited one day by some cut-throats who announced that they had come to kill him. His father knew these men and knew that they had come from an enemy of his. So he said to them, "How much does my enemy give you to kill me.**" — and they named a sum, a very small sum in our money. And he said to them, " I will give you so much more" — and he named a sum — "if you will go back and kill my enemy instead of me." And after they had eaten and drunk, they departed to kill his enemy. Then Sophocles would give a most unholy chuckle. An occasional visitor to our house was the "Wicked" Sam Ward, so called to distinguish him from the "Good" Sam Ward, who was a banker and the agent 34 RANDOM MEMORIES of the Barings in America. Sam Ward had been a fellow-student of my father's in Germany, I think at Heidelberg, and always had a warm affection for him, in spite of their being so dissimilar in every way. He was a most charming and agreeable man. He, on several occasions, sold poems for my father to news- papers or publishers at a much higher price than my father would have dared to ask. He was the brother of Julia Ward Howe, and uncle of Marion Crawford, the novelist, and it was owing to his urging that the latter wrote his first book, "Mr. Isaacs," which had such an Immediate success. Mr. Ward, in later years, lived in Washington, and was known as the "King of the Lobby." He gave wonderful dinners, and was supposed thereby to be able to "put over" legisla- tion when his guests were in a mellow mood. A certain Hungarian, Szerdehaly — if that is the right spelling, which probably it is not — at one time came much to the house. He had been an officer in the army and had fought under Kossuth. He was won- derfully well-read on all military matters, and could describe all Napoleon's campaigns and battles in great detail. What his special attraction was, to my father, I do not know, certainly not his recital of battles. Probably his being an exile was enough for my father to be kind to him. Another political exile was Luigi Monti, a Sicilian, MY FATHER'S FRIENDS 35 and a much more sympathetic friend. He taught Italian under my father in college, and we all became very fond of him. He had the Italian faculty of play- ing on the piano, from memory, most of the Italian operas, and was always a welcome guest. He married an American, the sister of Dr. T. W. Parsons, who was an Italian scholar, and who made one of the best translations in verse of Dante's "Inferno." Mr. Monti figured, as the Sicilian, in my father's "Tales of a Wayside Inn," as did also Dr. Parsons, as the poet, and is described there better than I can do it. Through Mr. Sumner he was later made consul to Palermo, but was removed by Grant when he and Sumner quarrelled. The genial publisher James T. Fields and his charming and romantic wife were, of course, frequent visitors at Cambridge. My father, I think, often re- lied on their criticism and suggestion before publish- ing his poems. Mr. Fields was a large man, with a superb curly black beard, and was a great raconteur. His wife was rather small and frail-looking. If he got a crumb lodged in his beard, she would say, "Jamie, dear, there is a gazelle in the garden," which amused his friends and became a household expression in our family. She would also have lapses and a far-away look, and when questioned would say, "Oh, I was in Italy." In her later years she became one of the most 36 RANDOM MEMORIES delightful old ladies I ever met, so cultivated and in- terested in everything, as well as given up to good works. Mr. Fields was once waked in the night, by hear- ing some one moving about below stairs. Fearing burglars, he went to the head of the stairs, and called out in a rather shaky voice, "Who's there.?" "Come down and see," was the response from below, where- upon Mr. Fields very wisely locked himself into his room and from the window called loudly for the police. Mr. and Mrs. Fields had a little box of a house on Charles Street, in the same block with Dr. Holmes, where they dispensed a charming hospitality. They had many interesting souvenirs from celebrated people, and in later years Mrs. Fields held the near- est approach to a salon of anybody in Boston. Mrs. Whitman, Mrs. Pratt, and Mrs. Bell, daughters of Rufus Choate; Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Thaxter, and Miss Jewett were some of the ladies who added lustre to these gatherings. It was through Mr. and Mrs. Fields that all the literary celebrities of the world that came to America were passed on to my father, such as Thackeray, Dickens, Trollope, and many others, not to mention Americans like Bayard Taylor, Bret Harte, Howells, etc. Thackeray I do not remember, but Dickens, on his second visit, came several times to lunch and dine. He MY FATHER'S FRIENDS 37 was very entertaining, with many amusing stories, but somehow not quite a gentleman. He was fond of a red plush waistcoat and a very loud watch-chain. On that second visit he gave readings from his own works which had a great success, and I imagine that Amer- ican dollars made him look more kindly on the coun- try than he did on his first visit. He had as a manager an Englishman named Dolby, a large man, and a walking-match was arranged between him and Mr. Osgood, the publisher, a small man. Every one sup- posed the large Englishman would have an easy vic- tory over his small competitor, especially as English- men are known as such great walkers. However, when the match came off, owing, I fancy, partly to Mr. Dolby's over-confidence and his not taking the trouble to get himself into condition, and Mr. Os- good's doing so, the over-confident and large Dolby soon found himself out of breath and outdistanced on the hills, and Osgood came in an easy winner. Lord Houghton came often to dine on his numer- ous visits to America. He was very genial, but rather eccentric, and had very bad table manners, slobber- ing his food. I afterwards saw him in London, where he came to call on my wife and me. He did nothing but laugh as if he thought that it was a huge joke that he should have returned our call at all; but in spite of the times he had dined at my father's house 50977 38 RANDOM MEMORIES in Cambridge, he did not invite us to his house, nor did his daughters return my wife's call. Different countries, diflferent ways. Speaking of table manners, my uncle, Mr. Mack- intosh, of whom I have already spoken, had an aversion to napkins, and always took his from his plate and threw it into the corner of the room, using the edge of the tablecloth instead. At that time nap- kins were not used much in England, and I remember that up to 1873 the Cunard Company did not furnish any, and we had to carry our own when we went to England. There is a story that one day in England a lady making a visit on some titled person remarked that she understood that the Queen had introduced the custom of having napkins at lunch; and the other remarked that the Queen ought to be very careful how she tampered with the customs of England. . To return to the celebrities: Aubrey de Vere, the Irish poet, I remember coming to dine in a sealskin waistcoat, which must have been very hot, besides showing that he thought the American barbarians did not dress for dinner. Trollope was a very loud-voiced individual, with the true British self-confidence. He boasted that he made a practice of always writing just so many hours a day, whether he felt like it or not : which accounts for much of his long-drawn-out tediousness. MY FATHER'S FRIENDS 39 Of Americans, Bayard Taylor came often. He was a very handsome man of fine carriage, and must have looked superb in the Arab costume which he wore in his travels in the East. He had many thrilling tales to tell of his explorations of unknown lands. Bret Harte, a slight man, with sensitive face, al- though perhaps at home in the wilds of California, had so little sense of locality that I remember I was asked to pilot him back to his lodgings in Boston after his first visit to us. Later he came on to deliver a poem before the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Every one was disappointed at the rather commonplace and not at all appropriate poem he delivered. But it was whispered about privately that the reason was that the poem he had prepared for the occasion was de- stroyed, the night before, by his wife, who was known to be out of her mind, so he had to take whatever he had on hand. Poor man! He, of course, wanted so much to make a good impression before all these Eastern bigwigs in literature. Mr. Howells came to live in Cambridge and was always a welcome visitor. A charming, genial man, with a keen sense of humor and a delightful laugh easily provoked. My father, as well as the rest of us, grew to be very fond of him. Henry James, Sr., and his two celebrated sons also lived a long time in Cambridge. Of the three, Mr. 40 RANDOM MEMORIES James, Sr., was perhaps the most Interesting. He was one of the best talkers I ever heard. Not long before he died, he had his portrait painted by Duveneck, and as Mr. James was an old man and lame, I offered my studio in Cambridge for the sittings. So the two of us painted him at the same time, and he entertained us all the while with the most delightful talk. Profes- sor William James belonged to a dining-club with me in Cambridge and was a most delightful comrade, though I must confess sometimes too profound for my comprehension. His brother Harry, as we called him, was nearer my age, and, like his father, was a charming talker when in the mood, which was not al- ways. In those early days he had not acquired the stutter that he picked up in England, and I remember how eagerly we welcomed his first books. His later manner became so involved that, like the rest of the world, we almost gave up reading him. One had to go through such a struggle with obscure sentences, and hardly any plot, that it was seldom worth the eifort. Why literary people pretended to admire his later style I can't imagine. The best style should be the clearest and simplest. One of the most delightful of men was George Wil- liam Curtis, who came on from New York occasion- ally. He had great charm of manner and a most musi- cal voice, and was a great favorite as a lecturer. Once MY FATHER'S FRIENDS 41 in the fifties we stayed in the same house with him at Newport. He was at that time courting his future wife, Miss Shaw. She was devoted to horses, and, I suppose to ingratiate himself with her, he bought a fast trotter, and used to take her to ride, although I do not think he was at all a horsy man himself. One day she could not go with him, and he took me in- stead, a lad of ten or twelve, and was just as agreeable and nice to me as if he had not been disappointed in his companion, which shows what a sweet disposition he had. I had almost forgotten Dr. Holmes, the dear little man. He was like a sparrow, always chirping so gaily. I remember one memorable lunch at Nahant when were present the Doctor, Mr. Sumner, Professor Agassiz, Mr. Appleton, my father, and myself. How gay the talk was, and how brilliant! It would be hard to find four more wonderful talkers than the first four. I sat next to Dr. Holmes, and when he was not firing off volleys of fire-crackers in response to the sallies of the others, he was plying me with questions as if to see how little I knew. I think it was Dr. Holmes who once related how on one of his lecturing tours, in some small country town, he had struggled hard to get a laugh out of the audience. All his funniest sal- lies fell flat; only an occasional spasmodic twitch or grimace would pass over the face of some one. Much 42 • RANDOM MEMORIES discouraged, he finished his lecture and was about to depart, when one of the selectmen came up to him and thanked him warmly for the lecture, and re- marked that "some of the things you said were so funny that it was all we could do not to laugh." Indeed, to have seen so much of all the talented people who came to our house was a liberal educa- tion in itself, and I have always felt that I never had any education at all in comparison with the learning of those men, and it has rather spoiled me for ordinary society. Of course, besides literary people there were many other celebrities — actors, singers, and artists, as well as public characters like Kossuth and the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, whom I remember coming to pay their respects to my father. Of the actresses, first place should be given Mrs. Kemble, whose won- derful reading of Shakespeare enthralled us when we were young. She was a large woman, with a beau- tiful voice, and a tragic Lady Macbeth manner that inspired many people with awe. There is a story that she was introduced to a timid youth in Europe who, to make conversation, said, " I believe, madam, that you have many fine hotels in America." She glared at him a moment, and then crushed him with the re- mark in her most tragic manner, " I have no hotel in America." She was, however, really a most kindly MY FATHER'S FRIENDS 43 person. We once passed a summer at Nahant in the same boarding-house with her and her daughter, Mrs. Wister. I was then only a boy and one day we had all gone for a picnic to the Ship Rock in Saugus. For some reason, either from the heat of the sun, or from the viands, or both, I had a violent sick headache. Mrs. Kemble took compassion on me and took my head in her lap. Mrs. Wister, whose father, Mr. Butler, was an American, was once in Europe at a table d'hote where a lot of English were making fun of Americans for their pronunciation and queer phrases. When she could stand it no longer, she said in the beautiful English learned from her mother, "We may not speak your language, but we understand it." Tableau ! Of course Sarah Bernhardt came to see my father, and it Is said kissed him, but I cannot vouch for that, though it sounds likely. The two beautiful women Miss Nilsson, the singer, and Miss Neilson, the actress, I remember coming; especially the latter, who was the most lovely Juliet ever seen on the stage, with a beautiful English voice and charming acting. Nilsson the singer I first heard in Paris, where she was singing in 1866 at the Lyric Theatre, now, I believe, the Sarah Bernhardt. She was then singing contralto parts, having a mezzo- soprano voice, Cavallo, the wife of the manager, 44 RANDOM MEMORIES taking the soprano. She was then young and very beautiful and a great favorite, which naturally made Cavallo jealous. Among the musicians I must not forget Ole Bull, the great violinist. He came often to play to my fa- ther, and was like a great child in his simplicity and self-esteem. He told once of his son by his first mar- riage, whom he had not seen for many years, coming to America to find him, and how he went to a concert and, not remembering his father by sight after so long, was not sure it was he till he heard him play, and then he said, "Ah! it is the great Ole Bull.'^ Ole Bull married, in this country, a charming woman, much younger, a Miss Thorp, whose brother married my youngest sister, so that the families were brought much together. He was a most genial and kindly man and figured in the "Tales of a Wayside Inn" as the violinist. I do not know how musical people rank him as a virtuoso, but I fancy he was accused of being too fond of showing off. However, he certainly gave us a great deal of pleasure by his playing, so what is the use of comparisons ? Fechter we all liked very much when he was acting in Boston. Socially also he was delightful, so full of bonhomie and good spirits. He made the most roman- tic of lovers, and we young people were never tired of quoting the many romantic speeches from his plays. MY FATHER'S FRIENDS 45 such as, "Dost like the picture?" and, "Wilt walk?" or, "I am here, Lagardere." Booth came too. Poor, melancholy Booth ! I think he never recovered from his brother's dastardly crime. I remember being in the same hotel with him in New York when he was playing with Salvini. He gave Mrs. Longfellow and me a box one night, and in the scene where Othello throws lago down, Booth was so drunk, or ill, that he lay with his head in the footlights, and could not get up till Salvini came and pulled him up. Poor man! he was hissed, and it was very em- barrassing for me the next day when I had to thank him for the pleasure the performance had given us. Salvini also came to my father's house many times, and my father enjoyed talking Italian with him. He certainly was a remarkable tragic actor, who could carry off a play speaking Italian when the rest of the company were speaking English. My father was very fond of music, being able him- self to play a little on the piano, and having been guilty of playing the flute in his youth, sometimes even playing it occasionally in later years for our benefit. Therefore, he enjoyed the many musicians who came, and who were delighted to play or sing to him. Also he was always receiving seats and boxes for the operas and concerts. I can remember the first operas I heard as a boy. 46 RANDOM MEMORIES with Mario and Grisi, and later, when about sixteen, Patti's first appearance. How charming and beauti- ful she was, and how like a bird she sang! Of course nobody has ever come up to her since, in her particu- lar line. My father's favorite opera was "Don Gio- vanni," and I think it has been mine also, when well given, but it needs an uncommonly strong cast, which is not always obtainable. Many artists and critics passed through our doors : the former mostly in search of a job to paint my father's portrait; but for some reason there was never a really satisfactory picture ever made of him. Lawrence, the English artist, made a very good drawing, done before my father grew a beard, but slightly too fierce in expression. Healy painted him three times, twice in Rome in 1869 — ' once with his daughter Edith, and once stand- ing under the Arch of Titus. What his idea was I do not know. The other portrait he painted I think in 1862, not long after my mother's tragic death, and when my father for the first time had grown a beard. Many sculptors tried their hands at busts: one a negress in Rome; what has become of it I do not know. The best was by Powers in Florence, but still not quite satisfactory. The bust in Westminster Ab- bey, by Brock, an Englishman, from photographs we sent him, although it looks very well in its posi- MY FATHER'S FRIENDS 47 tlon, has too much the look of a prosperous English business man. I remember well William Winter, in later years the dramatic critic, coming to see my father when he was a young man, rather timid and shy. My father would always offer him a cigar, which he was too timid to re- fuse, and which invariably made him sick, so that he would have to retire to the garden. The same thing happened every time he came, much to the amuse- ment of us boys. Among others living in Cambridge was a painter of some note who was also a poet. One day I had been reading some of his poetry, and I said to my father that I thought Mr. C.'s poetry was better than his paintings. My father said, "On the contrary, his paintings are better than his poetry," which, between two expert opinions, seemed to leave very little of the unfortunate gentleman. A little poet named Street came to lunch at Na- hant one day. After lunch my father and he took a walk in the course of which they met a nicely dressed woman, to whom my father, always very polite to his servants, took off his hat. Mr. Street demanded to know who the handsome lady was; my father said, "That is the lady who waited on you at lunch," much to the amusement of both. CPIAPTER III EDUCATION AND OTHER THINGS The two Adamses, Charles and Henry, have each written a book to try to prove that they had no edu- cation. I knew both of them well enough to know that no one else would have dared to make such an assertion. The Adamses have from the time of John Adams loved to be in the opposition, and I venture to say that, with the family trait of one always contra- dicting the other, Henry probably said that Charles had quite as good an education as was good for him, and Charles, after reading "The Education of Henry Adams," would have said it was rubbish, whereas it is an uncommonly edifying book. It is like red pepper; it tickles the palate without giving much nourish- ment, and leads nowhere. I once passed a rainy Sunday at The Glades, a summer colony, where two Adamses, Jack and Charles, sat all the afternoon on the piazza in rock- ing-chairs, and whatever one said the other contra- dicted flatly. Education ought to be a training of the faculties and not the mere cramming of knowledge into a boy, like potatoes into a sack. Education really never ceases from the time we are born until we die, and de- ERNEST W. LONGFELLOW June, iS6i EDUCATION AND OTHER THINGS 49 pends more on teaching one to use his brain, to ac- quire knowledge through experience, and judgment of what facts are useful and what a waste of time. Many people never seem to use their brains or to have any judgment. We learn more from our failures than from our successes, and it is one of the tragedies of life that we can pass on such a small part of our ac- cumulated knowledge. The rising generation seldom thinks much of the wisdom of its elders, or pays much attention to its admonitions, but has to learn from sad experience for itself. It is related of William James that he gave a frog to his first-born, when a baby, to see what would hap- pen. The child naturally put it in its mouth; which delighted the experimental parent, and I am sure convinced the infant that frogs in the uncooked state were not desirable food, and that it had better not try it again. Hence we learn by experience! My education began as the youngest pupil in a dame's school in an old gambrel-roofed house under the shadow of the Washington Elm in Cambridge, where the Congregational Church now stands. There I learned to make my pothooks and hangers, and I suppose learned my three R's. Later I graduated to a boys' school on Kirkland Street, kept by one Am- brose Wellington. I was a good boy, but I can't re- member that I learned much there. I chiefly remem- 50 RANDOM MEMORIES ber the struggle to get over that mile between our house and the school by nine o'clock, especially in winter mornings when sometimes the snowdrifts were waist-deep. When we were about eleven or twelve, my brother and I persuaded my father to let us go to Boston to a school kept by Mr. George Bradford in the old Liberty Block on Washington Street, oppo- site the Boylston Market. Mr. Bradford was a very amiable old gentleman, and I think much too lenient, so that we did not progress very fast. Finally he gave up the school and I was transferred to Mr. Dixwell's school in Boylston Place. There we all had to work hard, as Mr. Dixwell was a stern and sarcastic task- master, and kept the under-teachers up to their work. It was there that I heard a boy translate " cum summa diligentia" into "Caesar came into Gaul on the top of a diligence." Owing to an attack of measles and the ensuing weak eyes, I lost nearly the whole of one winter, and so fell very far behind my class in Latin and Greek. I was not very good at Latin or Greek, and could never see the good of learning long strings of words that were governed by the ablative or of committing to memory a lot of Greek irregular verbs. It is that kind of teaching that does so much to dis- courage boys and to make them hate their studies instead of making them interested, which so easily could be done by the right kind of teaching. EDUCATION AND OTHER THINGS 51 I was always good at mathematics, which for some reason in the human mind never goes with the acquir- ing of languages. So, having been two years in the first class in mathematics and the second or third in Latin and Greek, I took the bull by the horns and persuaded my father to let me go to the Lawrence Scientific School instead of the College. It seems to me that mathematics is the best training for the rea- soning faculties. It induces, indeed demands, clear thinking, and makes inexact statements and sloppy reasoning fatal. It was at this time that I made my futile effort to go to West Point. Philosophical speculation may be excellent gym- nastics for the mind, but I think it largely a waste of time. What we want are concrete facts, and not theo- ries, as to what might, could, or should be. I have always had a horror of theorists. I have seen too many artists and others wrecked on the reefs of theory. My uncle, Mr. Appleton, once expressed it very well in telling of how he was asked by his professor in college to explain the theory of the billiard ball. He said, "Confound him! I could n't explain that, but I could give him seventy-five out of a hundred at bil- liards and beat him." I had the good fortune, or perhaps the misfortune, to have two remarkable scholars in my class, Edward Pickering, afterwards head of the Harvard Observa- 52 RANDOM MEMORIES tory in Cambridge, and John Trowbridge, later Pro- fessor of Physics at Harvard. They set such a high standard that it was difficult for the rest of us to keep up. Pickering, not being satisfied with the usual les- sons set by the teacher, used to ask for difficult prob- lems besides. The result was that I got my degree only by the skin of my teeth. Fortunately for me I had given much time to the study of military engi- neering, which was not in the course, and handed in, as my thesis on graduation, an elaborate drawing of a semi-permanent field fortification, which much pleased General Eustis, then at the head of the school. This shows, I think, that if I had been allowed to carry out my ambition of going to West Point, I should have made a success of it. I may add that in my second year at the school I had the off"er, among others, of being made a second lieutenant in an en- gineer regiment then being formed by the Govern- ment, but again my father objected, as I was not of age, and as my brother was in the cavalry at the front, he thought one son risking his life was enough. When I graduated, in the summer of 1865, the war was over, and, owing to the many engineers return- ing to civil life, I thought the chance of getting em- ployment as an engineer was small, so, although I had my degree of S.B., I gave up the idea of devoting EDUCATION AND OTHER THINGS 53 my life to engineering, and decided to take up the study of art instead. So ended my education at school. My education by experience began at the tender age of four and a half, when my father and mother and we two boys made a journey to Washington in the spring of 1850. Such a journey then was much more of an affair than it Is now, and of course to children It was a mo- mentous experience. Even though I was only four and a half, I can remember now that we drove over to Brighton and took the cars there instead of at Boston, I suppose to save driving Into town. I distinctly re- member a high flight of steps that had to be descended to reach the track. We had to pass the first night at Springfield. When we reached New York the follow- ing day, the train was drawn Into the city by horses as far as what Is now Madison Square Garden, which was then the site of the station, and. Indeed, remained so until 1870, I believe. We put up at the old Astor House and my father gave me a picture of the hotel with our windows marked In red. I cannot remember much about our journey through Philadelphia and Baltimore, or our arrival in Washington. We put up at a hotel with a veranda running around the upper story as well as one below. I think It was called the National Hotel. Henry Clay was staying In the same house, and 54 RANDOM MEMORIES my father saw much of him, but I do not remember him; I remember only that somebody gave my brother and myself tack-hammers, with which we amused ourselves by hammering tacks into the floor of the verandas. How trivial things stick in the memory when much more important things vanish! However,! distinctly remember being taken to see President Tay- lor and his shaking hands with me, tot that I was. There is nothing unusual in the life of most boys. Like others, I played marbles in the spring, — why marbles are played by boys only in the spring I don't know, — bathed and boated in the summer, played baseball, football, and hockey in the autumn, and skated and played hockey on the ice on Fresh Pond or smaller ponds in the winter. I found it difficult to learn to swim, I remember, because when I was quite young my nurse used to carry me out in her arms and duck me bodily, which was a cruel thing to do, and gave me a horror of hav- ing my head under water. The result was that, in learning to swim, as soon as my head went under, as it was sure to do, I struggled to stand up. Finally I was so disgusted with myself that I boldly launched myself from a rock, where I knew the water was over my head, and swam to another rock at some distance because I had to, or drown: after that I had no trouble. EDUCATION AND OTHER THINGS 55 When I was quite young I came very near drown- ing in Charles River. There was a place where the boys all bathed, a la Cupid, where there was a shelv- ing beach and a few rocks. I had waded in till the water was up to my waist or a little more, when sud- denly the current, which was quite strong, took me off my feet and I was rapidly drifting downstream with my legs kicking in space as it were. I could not swim and the other boys did not notice anything. I did not call out, but realized that I was going under and wondered what would happen next. What hap- pened was that my feet struck a rock and, pushed by the current, I stood up, with the water up to my chin, and was able to make a spring into more shallow water. It all happened in a moment, but it was cer- tainly a lucky escape. I excelled at football and skat- ing, and was a very fast runner, the fastest in Dix- well's School when I was there, and I could dodge on the ice, like a terrier, when we played hockey. I was also fond of rowing and had much practice at Nahant, where I won a number of races from boys of my own age or older. While at the Scientific School we formed a six-oar crew, in which I some- times pulled stroke, but more often bow. I was not heavy enough, however, — weighing only one hun- dred and twenty pounds, — for entering races, in which the crew later distinguished itself. I have al- 56 RANDOM MEMORIES ways kept up rowing, and have rowed a great deal on the ItaHan lakes and sometimes on the Thames, in England. When tennis was introduced into America about 1880, I was thirty-five; rather late to learn a new game. I became, however, quite expert for my age, and won the championship of our tennis club in Cam- bridge, in the singles, doubles, and mixed doubles. At a tournament at the St. George's Cricket Club of Staten Island, where there were many good players, I was beaten only by the winner of the tournament, so that although I do not claim to have been a crack, I was no duffer. I even had the honor of having had a man tell me he used to come out to Cambridge from Boston to see me play. I played often at Nahant, with Mr. Sears, who was national champion for seven years, and although he could give me fifteen and beat me easily, it was good practice. In the summer of 1852, we deserted Nahant, and went to Newport, where we stayed at the Cliff House. Mr. Appleton, who was with us, and who had been a great football player in his youth, performed the re- markable feat of kicking a football over the hotel, much to our boyish delight and admiration. I re- member there was a remarkable character at New- port called Count Gurowski, a Russian with only one eye, who was supposed to be a Russian spy. He came EDUCATION AND OTHER THINGS 57 often to the hotel, and I am sure, if not a spy, was a Russian agent of some sort. I remember his turning up in Washington during the Civil War, and coming to see my father, when we were there to hunt for my brother when he was wounded. He said he had been much annoyed by a dog in a neighboring yard that barked at night. But he said he had stopped all that; he had thrown him some poisoned meat, and that was the end of the dog. Pleasant for the owner of the dog! There was quite an interesting group of people in the Cliff House that summer, among others Julia Ward Howe. We have a daguerreotype in which she figures, also my father in a marvellous tall hat, and a man by the name of Costa, I think, who had had an extraordinary adventure. He had been on a steamer on the Hudson which was burned, with great loss of life. Being a good swimmer, he rescued a number of people, and then, being exhausted, sat down on a trunk that had been washed ashore. To his aston- ishment he found it was his own trunk that some one had thrown overboard, and he was therefore able to change and put on dry clothes. Our life at Nahant in the summer was a very simple one. The house that my father bought was known as the Wetmore Cottage; it was rather a cheap affair, and poorly furnished. My uncle, Mr. Apple- ton, owned a share in it, and formed part of our 58 RANDOM MEMORIES household, much to our deHght. He Hved in a semi- detached L, where he had his own suite of rooms, and where he spent much of his time painting, mostly on rounded pebbles for paper-weights, which was quite a fad with him As I have said, the house was on the southern side of Nahant, on a triangular plot close to the water, and therefore on hot days got the refreshing southwest wind directly from the ocean. It had a piazza run- ning entirely round it, and on the back piazza over- looking the bay my father passed a great deal of his time. The house has since been burned. We kept rowboats just below, and my uncle had a sloop yacht called the Alice after my eldest sister. He was very fond of yachting, but knew nothing about sailing a boat himself. Sometimes he would take the helm, but the skipper would surreptitiously do the steering. I have even known Mr. Appleton to stand looking over the stem thinking he was directing the boat, when fortunately another hand was doing it. We enjoyed many sails on the Alice, and also cruised as far east as Mount Desert, along the beauti- ful Maine coast and among its many lovely islands. Many days we were held up by fog, but with a merry party what did that matter.^ On one of these cruises, when we had gone on shore at the Isles of Shoals to pass the evening dancing at the hotel, we came near EDUCATION AND OTHER THINGS 59 having a serious accident. When we came to the shore at the nearest point to where our yacht was anchored, which, as there was no good anchorage near the hotel, was at some distance, we found the wind had risen and there was quite a sea on. We had difficulty in making the man on the yacht hear our hail, as the wind was directly on shore. Finally the skipper came, but as it was very dark and the waves high, he could not come very near to the rocks, and we had to make a flying leap into the boat, as best we could. As there were five of us besides the man, it was a rather heavy load for the small boat, and as each one leaped into the boat he let in some water, so that as we started off we had quite a lot washing about our feet. As we went on, the waves broke more and more over the side, and in spite of our bailing, it soon became evi- dent that we should be swamped before long. It was not a pleasant prospect; in that dark night and choppy sea, the chances of being able to swim to safety were slight. I am proud to say that whatever we felt, not one of us showed the slightest sign of fear, but we all sat perfectly still, except for bailing the boat. We shouted to the yacht in vain; as we had the only small boat, those on board could have done nothing, even if they had heard us. Fortunately some fisher- men in a boat not far off heard our cries and came to our rescue, just as we were about to sink. As they 6o RANDOM MEMORIES came alongside and pulled us aboard, our boat was awash, and in another minute we should have had to swim for it. We were wet to our waists as it was. The Shoals was a charming resort in those days with Mrs. Thaxter as presiding genius. She had been born on the island and had never, I believe, been to the mainland, or seen a horse even, till she married Mr. Thaxter when she was sixteen. She was a very bright woman and wrote poems of great beauty, especially about her beloved island and the sea. She loved music, and surrounded herself with musicians and artists, and the evenings passed in her cottage, with its wild garden, were a great treat. Alas! those days are no more. Mrs. Thaxter has passed away, and the hotel over which her father and then her brothers presided was burned, not to be rebuilt. In 1866, my brother, Captain Clark (a neighbor), and Harry Stanfield, with a crew of three sailors, crossed the Atlantic in the Alice. This was a very daring adventure to take in a sloop of only twenty- eight or thirty tons, about the size of Columbus's smallest ship, but they arrived safely after a quick run of eighteen days. I have always thought that it was a much more remarkable feat for Columbus to get back than to go out, as going he had the trade winds with him. My brother afterwards crossed EDUCATION AND OTHER THINGS 6i twice in a yacht with James Gordon Bennett, with whom he often went yachting. Mr. Appleton was very fond of chowder, so we had it every day at Nahant. And such chowder I have never tasted since. As we all had splendid appetites from sea bathing and being in the open air all day, we never tired of it. Nahant was dubbed "Cold Roast Boston" be- cause it was the favorite summer resort of the elite of that city. It is said to have been purchased from the Indians for a suit of clothes, though why Indians were foolish enough to want the white man's ugly habili- ments it is hard to see; it would have been more natural for them to sell their birthright for a mess of pottage. Nahant was probably originally an island that the waves and tides had turned into a peninsula by form- ing the long strip of sand connecting it with the main- land. The favorite way of reaching it was by steam- boat from Boston, but people also could take a train to Lynn and drive across the long beach in a kind of open omnibus called, in local parlance, a barge. Mr. Appleton once invited Mrs. Church, the wife of the artist, to come to Nahant, and told her she would find a barge at Lynn to bring her across. She naturally thought Nahant must be an island, and when she reached Lynn looked about in vain for some sort of 62 RANDOM MEMORIES boat; having, I suppose, visions of a gorgeous craft, something Hke Cleopatra's barge, with silken sails, etc. It was a great come-down to be shown the lowly omnibus and told that that was the barge. In the early days of which I am writing there was a fine large hotel there, kept by Paran Stevens, whose widow, afterwards, thanks to her large fortune, be- came a leader in London society, and whose daughter married Lord Paget. The hotel occupied large grounds at the eastern end of Nahant and was very fashionable at one time, and became so overcrowded one year that Mr. Stevens added a large L. The very next year, for no apparent reason, the current changed, and each year fewer and fewer people came, until finally the hotel was closed. A few years later it was set on fire by somebody, and burned to the ground. We boys had always hoped to have the courage to set it on fire and see it blaze, and I remember the regret I felt that some one else had had that joy, and that we had left Nahant the day before it happened. The estate was afterwards bought by Mr. Lodge, the father of Sen- ator Lodge, and the Senator has his house on the beau- tiful grounds that formerly belonged to the hotel. One day another boy and I had lost our ball over the fence of a triangular piece of ground that seemed to belong to nobody, not far from the entrance to these grounds. As I climbed over the fence to get the EDUCATION AND OTHER THINGS 63 ball, one of the pickets came away in my hands; after that as we walked along we occasionally pulled at the pickets to see if any others were rotten, meaning no harm. Suddenly descended upon us a man in a furious rage and struck at me with a heavy cane. It was Mr. Lodge, who owned the land without our knowing it. I put up my arm to ward off the blow, and my left arm became helpless. I thought he had broken it. He then turned on the other boy, but fortunately a neighbor who had seen the occurrence rushed out of his house and saved us from further chastisement. Every one was very indignant that Mr. Lodge should have so far lost his temper as to treat young boys in such a brutal manner. I had to carry my arm in a sling for a week or more; perhaps I carried It so a little longer than necessary to excite sympathy. What wonder! My brother vowed vengeance on Mr. Lodge, and one night carried ofT the revolving stile that pre- vented Mr. Lodge's cows from wandering from his place. He hid the stile under his bed for some days, and then took it out to sea in his boat, and cast it overboard. Mr. Lodge was naturally very angry at having his cows let out, and as they wandered over to Lynn, it was some days before he got them back. He issued a reward for the miscreant who had stolen the stile and let them escape; but my brother was never found out. 64 RANDOM MEMORIES Not far from us, at Nahant, lived a family of seven boys, with whom we had much to do. Their father, Mr, Curtis, called his house "The House of the Seven Gabbles." His oldest son, Mr. Dan Curtis, enjoyed the distinction of being one of the two most noted wits in Boston at that time, his rival being Mr. Appleton. Many of their sayings have become classic, and the sayings of one are often attributed to the other. It was Mr. Curtis, not Mr. Appleton, who called Na- hant "Cold Roast Boston," and it was he who one cold winter day came into the Studio Building on Tremont Street and said he wished some one would tether a shorn lamb on the corner of Winter Street, a peculiarly exposed and windy corner. I have had the temerity to add that they could have found plenty of shorn lambs on State Street, not far away. Mr. Dan Curtis had the poor taste once to pull the nose of a gentleman on the train, and the misfor- tune to select a lawyer for the experiment. The result was that he was fined in court for assault and bat- tery, and, being a pugnacious individual, he "refused to pay the fine, so had to spend a time in jail. After he got out, he and his wife, who was English, were so dis- gusted with a town that interfered with the liberty to pull noses, that they shook the dust of Boston from their feet, and went to live in Venice, where there was no dust. THOMAS GOLD APPLETON About 1880 EDUCATION AND OTHER THINGS 65 At the time they were living there, Don Carlos, the pretender to the throne of Spain, was living on the opposite side of the Grand Canal. On one very hot summer day, Mr. Curtis and some friends were going down the canal in their gondola and espied Don Car- los and friends sitting on their balcony, evidently very hot. Mr. Curtis immediately said, "Look at Don Carlos and his friends conspiring at every pore." Once at the opera there was a party of Russians in a near-by box; one of the ladies wore a very decoUetee dress, and Mr. Curtis was asked if he knew who she was. He said that she must be the Princess Chimezoff, nee Orloif . Mr. Appleton's most quoted bon mot was that "all good Americans when they die go to Paris." Mr. Appleton, however, said so many good things that it is impossible to quote many things that would give any idea of the brilliance of his conversation. I have known him to be more amusing at breakfast, with only some children as audience, than when he had more important listeners. He simply could not help being original and funny; not like some humorists who have to have an appreciative audience. Mark Twain, for instance, when I have met him, seemed to have the air that something was expected of him, and that he must play up and be funny to order. Miss Hale in her life of Mr. Appleton has quoted some of his say- ^ RANDOM MEMORIES ings, but failed to convey any idea of his ready wit. There was in Boston at one time a very plain spin- ster of uncertain age, by the name of Joy. Mr. Apple- ton used to say of her, "A thing of beauty is a joy forever." He was once at a wedding reception where no wine was served; when he asked the waiter for some champagne, and was told there was none, he re- marked, "Ah! got ahead of our Saviour, have they?" — referring, of course, to the marriage of Cana. Some one once asked him if he knew who the lady was that was driving with Mr. Hearn ; he said he sup- posed it was "his'n." When one of us children had lost a tooth he would say, " Sharper than a serpent's fang, it is, to have a toothless child." Also he was fond of saying, "Man wants but little here below, but wants that little Longfellow." Mr. Appleton belonged to a club of artists and ama- teurs, in Boston, called the Allston Club, which had a short and struggling existence. After it had been going on for ten years, one of its members proposed that they have their portraits painted in a group. "Yes," said Mr. Appleton, "Boors carousing, after Teniers," which killed the project. Shortly after that they were persuaded by another member to purchase a large picture by Courbet, called the "Quarry," which caused the club to go into bankruptcy. This picture is now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. EDUCATION AND OTHER THINGS 67 The Reverend Dr. Huntington, then a Unitarian, was at one time preacher at Harvard College, and induced all the college people to subscribe to a chime of bells for the chapel. While the bells were being made in Europe, Dr. Huntington went over to the Episcopal Church, and when the bells were finished, he took the bells, which had been ordered in his name, with him, and the chimes were set up in Christ Church, Cambridge, instead of in the College Chapel. Mr. Appleton thereupon remarked that the bells would say, "Turn again, Huntington, Bishop of Boston." As a matter of fact he did become the Bishop of West- em New York. For a number of years, while we were at Nahant, my grandfather Appleton had a cottage on Ocean Street, Lynn. One day my brother, on one of his wild expeditions, got himself upset from a dory on the beach below the cottage, and was fitted out with dry clothes and an old pair of slippers, and sent home. When the clothes and slippers were returned, there was found pinned to the bundle the following lines in my father's well-known handwriting : "Slippers tha4; perchance another, Sailing o'er the Bay of Lynn, Some forlorn and shipwrecked brother, Seeing, may purloin agin!" CHAPTER IV WAR An event of importance in our life was the panic of 1857, when everybody felt poor and had to economize. We had to give up horses, which we had always had, and our butler; and I distinctly remember how we children were admonished not to take any more on our plates than we could eat, even at my grandfather's and Aunt Sam's in Boston, whom we had always sup- posed to be very rich. In the years before 1861 there was much talk pro and con about slavery and whether the South would secede, in which my brother and I were old enough to take an interest. All my boy friends, pretty nearly, were of Whig families and opposed to the election of Lincoln, and said dreadful things about the rail- splitter and Charles Sumner and the abolitionists, so that we had violent debates and discussions. In the spring of 1861, when the storm burst, and the rebels fired on Sumter, the sentiment changed, however. I remember well the excitement of the first troops going off in Governor Andrew's famous brown overcoats and their being fired upon in Baltimore, and how many of the older boys we knew well enlisted, WAR 69 and all the drilling on the Common. I was, alas, too young to go, but we were all filled with the desire, and finally my brother, in the autumn a year later, ran away when he was only eighteen, and enlisted in a Massachusetts battery. Later, through the offices of Major Curtis, of the First Massachusetts Cavalry, who was engaged to our aunt, he was given b}'' Gov- ernor Andrew a commission in that regiment as second lieutenant. It was in the summer of 1861 that my mother died, from burns from a match setting fire to her light dress while she was sealing some packages for my sisters. I was staying at Nahant at the time, but had been up to Cambridge to lunch that day, and, as I was stepping on the horse-car to go into town to take the boat to Nahant, my mother drove by in a carriage and waved her hand to me. That was the last I saw of her alive. She met with the accident that afternoon and the next morning was dead. This was my first great grief, and my first acquaintance with death, that great mystery. My father was badly burned while trying to save her, and I remember his lying in bed and holding up his poor bandaged hands and murmuring, "Oh, why could I not save her?" It was a terrible blow to him, from which he never recovered, as he recorded in his poem "The Cross of Snow." ^ ^ See Life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, by Samuel Longfellow. The poem was never published in the collected editions, as being too mtimate. 70 RANDOM MEMORIES In June, 1862, we made up a party to visit Niagara, I think principally to divert my father. There were, besides my father, my aunt. Miss Appleton, and two friends of hers, Miss Beebe and Miss Shattuck, my brother Charles, and myself. As the girls were several years older than we boys, they made a good deal of us, and we had a very merry time. We stopped at Utica to visit Trenton Falls, which at that time had to be done by stage-coach. My father, knowing nothing about the politics of the Albany papers, had bought an Albany "Argus"; as we stopped at a way station to change horses, he gave it to one of the loafers sit- ting about. The man received it rather grudgingly and said, "Hum! Democrats abroad! " which amused us very much, as the feeling against the Democrats, who were mostly opposed to the war, was very strong with us, Trenton Falls was then not so much visited, and was not so overrun by wedding couples as I found it on a later visit, when it was quite embarrassing as at every turn you came on couples embracing. Its amber water, foaming and tumbling between its high wooded cliffs, is very beautiful. From there we went to Niagara, where we slept with the thunder of the falls in our ears, and especially enjoyed the rapids above the falls, where you could get close to the rushing water. We returned to Bos- WAR 71 ton by way of Toronto, the rapids of the St. Law- rence, and Montreal. I think the trip did my father good, and the merriment of us young people must have cheered him up and distracted his mind from his great loss. As was natural, my father was much upset by my brother's running away and becoming a soldier so young. And I know he had the never-ceasing anxiety that he might be killed or wounded that all parents suffered at that time. Every morning he opened the paper with fear and trembling, fearing that he might see his name in those terrible lists after great battles that seemed to be always going against the North. Finally he got word that he had camp fever and would be invalided North, and as he passed most of the summer of 1863 with us at Nahant, he escaped the action of Aldie, in which his regiment was severely handled, and the subsequent Battle of Gettysburg. Shortly after he rejoined his regiment, he was the officer of the day, at, I think, Culpeper Court-House, when he found the lady of the house, in the yard in which his men were stationed, was engaged in asking them questions and trying to learn the disposition of the Northern forces, evidently to send word through the lines to the rebels. My brother politely asked the lady, who turned out to be the wife of Governor Wise of Virginia, to stop asking the men 72 RANDOM MEMORIES questions and retire into the house. She indignantly refused, so my brother told her that if she did not re- tire he would have his men carry her bodily into the house. She was then furious, and demanded his name, and when she found on further inquiry that he was the son of the poet, she said, as she finally flounced into the house, that she would never read any more of his father's poems as long as she lived. In the Mine Run Campaign, shortly after, my brother was badly wounded through both lungs. He was out in the thick woods of the wilderness near Good Hope Church trying to connect the skirmish line that had been broken. His men were dismounted and acting as skirmishers, and he himself was carry- ing a gun, when he saw two men in grey. As he took aim at one, another farther to the left fired at him and the ball passed under his shoulder-blades and through both lungs as his arms were thrown forward in the act of firing. They shouted that they had got him, so he plunged through the thick undergrowth with the rebels after him, and then dodged sideways to a road, where some of his men fortunately saw him fall, and brought him in and put him in the pulpit of the church. Some newspaper-man saw him there, covered with blood, and telegraphed my father that his son was dangerously wounded in the face. We received the telegram while at lunch, and my WAR 73 father and I immediately started for Washington by the Fall River boat. There were no staterooms nor even berths to be had, so we had to sit up in arm- chairs all night in the saloon. When we reached Washington, we could get no news of my brother or of his whereabouts. Dr. Knapp, of the Sanitary Com- mission, did his best to help. At the War Ofhce a supercilious clerk said, in an airy manner, that there had been no battle, that there were only a little over a thousand killed and wounded in the advance. We were told, however, that there was a train of wounded expected at Alexandria the next day, and that he might be in that. So we journeyed down the river to that point, but he was not there. After two days of anxiety we were told he was probably in a train that was expected that evening at the station on the Wash- ington side of the Long Bridge. Sowewent there and waited and waited at a little tumble-down station with a telegraph clicking away, and I thought, if there were important messages going through, how easy for any of the loafers or spies sitting round to read them off. Finally after a two hours' wait a train of freight cars came in, crammed with wounded, lying or sitting on the straw-covered floors. Pretty hard going for wounded men, officers as well as privates ; not even a day coach. As the poor wrecks were lifted out, we finally came upon my brother. A more forlorn, be- 74 RANDOM MEMORIES draggled, and wretched being It would be hard to imagine. His wound had not been dressed for three days, and before reaching the train he had been bumped and banged over bad roads for two days in an ambulance, with hardly anything to eat or drink. How those men lived through it, it is hard to see; some did not. After we had got him to the hotel and given him a bath, and had a doctor dress his wound and put him to bed, he became quite cheerful. He said that the one thing he thought of when he was wounded was the sense of relief that he no longer had any responsi- bility about his men. Owing to the shortage of offi- cers, he, a second lieutenant, only nineteen, had been in charge of his company, and the responsibility weighed heavily upon him. His wound was so severe that although he eventually recovered his health, he was not able to go back into the service before the war was over. A curious thing in regard to his efforts to enlist when he ran away from home was that he tried first to enlist in the regular army, but they would not take him because he had lost the thumb on his left hand, from a bursting shotgun when he was twelve, and they said he would not be able to hold a gun. After the war he became a crack shot at clay-pigeon shooting, showing how absurd their objection was. He became WAR 75 a noted yachtsman and traveller and died when only forty-eight. I have always felt that his death was really hastened by his wound, so that in a sense he died for his country. I must confess that my brother and I had very little in common. He was a good horseman, while I never could feel at home on a horse, but I owned and drove horses for a number of years. He owned several yachts and sailed them himself with skill. I, too, owned a small yacht for over fifteen years, of which I was skipper, but I never acquired the love of yacht- ing he had. He also, as I have said, was a good shot, while I disliked shooting. I was told that when I went up the Nile I must take a gun, as there was plenty of game. I went out only once and after shooting a number of birds, I was so disgusted with myself, and the birds were so much more beautiful hopping and flying about, that I have never shot a bird since. Why people want to destroy God's creatures for what they call sport passes my understanding. But tastes differ, and the Englishman is supposed to say, "What a beautiful morning ! Let's kill something." Which re- minds me of a story that Mr. Lowell used to tell. One beautiful moonlight night he met the local butcher somewhere in the small hours, wandering in Harvard Square. Mr. Lowell inquired what he was doing there, to which he replied that it was such a beautiful night 76 RANDOM MEMORIES for slaughtering that he could not stay in bed. Mr. Appleton used to say, "Pigs wha hae wi' Wallace bled," Wallace being the name of the butcher. To return to the war, from which I seem to have wandered to other kinds of slaughtering: the most thrilling sight of the war was the march down State Street in Boston of its first colored regiment, with Colonel Shaw at their head and all singing "John Brown's Body." Saint-Gaudens has well represented in his Shaw Memorial the contrast between the aris- tocratic features and carriage of this noble New Eng- land type and his faithful and humble followers. In the middle of the war. General Fremont took a cottage near us at Nahant, and we saw a good deal of Mrs. Fremont and their daughter. There was also a Pole, whose name I have forgotten, who had been on Fremont's staff. He had with him a horse that he had ridden in the war in Missouri. This horse had a bad scar on his rump. Mr. Appleton asked the Pole how he got such a scar, and he said he got it at Springfield, whereupon Mr. Appleton said they were very careless on the railroads. Poor man! his one claim to glory had been in the Battle of Springfield, Missouri. Sic transit gloria mnndi! As boys we had been in the habit of bathing on the property taken by the Fremonts, but at some dis- tance from the house. My brother was at home on WAR 77 sick-leave while recovering from camp fever, and he and another young man went in bathing from the old spot, with nothing on, as had been our custom. In spite of our friendliness with the Fremonts, Mrs. Fremont had them arrested for bathing without clothes. When the trial came on, my brother's counsel asked her how she knew it was my brother who was bathing, as it was impossible from the house to recog- nize any one at that distance. She had to confess, blushing, that she used an opera-glass! After that, of course, she lost her case. When my brother went to the war, he left behind his Scotch terrier, called Trap, who was then getting old and rheumatic. He attached himself to my father and followed him everywhere, and spent most of his time in my father's study sleeping on a closed register, where just enough heat came through to make him comfortable. My father used often to take a nap in the afternoon in his armchair in front of the fire. As the gods nod, so do poets sometimes snore. When this happened, it seemed to disturb the dog in his slumbers, and he would get up and paw at my father's knee till he waked him up, and then would lay him- self down again with a sigh of contentment to con- tinue his own sleep undisturbed. There was some- thing so human about this that my father never resented it. 78 RANDOM MEMORIES As can be imagined, with my love of military affairs I was tremendously interested in the war, and fol- lowed all the campaigns with great faithfulness. I could give detailed descriptions of all operations, and of battles, even to the names of the generals on both sides, and the number of troops engaged ! At first I was a great believer in General McClellan, as were most of the people in the East and all the Army of the Potomac, and even swallowed the excuse of the change of base in the Peninsula ; but I lost faith in him after the Battle of Antietam, when Lee was at his mercy if he had only used the large reserve force that had not been engaged, and when he might have bagged the whole outfit if he had attacked the second day instead of doing nothing and allowing Lee to re- cross the Potomac unmolested. I was in Washington in 1863 when Grant was bogged before Vicksburg, and it seemed impossible that he could get on. Great pressure was brought on Lincoln to have him removed. I was often in Mr. Sumner's rooms and heard many stories there of Grant's drunkenness and incapacity. All the politi- cians were against him, and the enmity between him and Sumner must have begun then. It was at that time that Lincoln made his celebrated remark, when he was urged to remove him on account of his drink- ing, that he wished he knew what brand of whiskey WAR 79 Grant used so that he could send It to some of his other generals. Washington in war-time was a terrible place. Pennsylvania Avenue at that time was hardly any- thing but shanties between the Capitol and the Treasury Building. It was unpaved and a sea of mud. I remember seeing an army wagon stalled and de- serted in the middle of the avenue. The city swarmed with officers on leave and camp-followers and polit- ical hangers-on. How anything was accomplished in such a chaos is hard to see. Halleck, the Chief of Staff, was incompetent. Gen- eral after general was tried in command of the Army of the Potomac, only to prove unequal to the task. Fortunately Stanton, at the War Office, was a man of iron, and when Grant came East and took supreme command things began to move, and the end was ob- viously only a question of time. Numbers and re- sources were bound to tell, and the terrible war came to an end. As my father used to say, autobiographies are what biographies ought to be, but often they unconsciously betray their writers. There were three autobiogra- phies written after the war — by Grant, Sherman, and McClellan — that contained this self-revelation in a notable degree. Every one agrees that Grant's "Personal Memoirs" was a remarkable book from 8o RANDOM MEMORIES its clearness, simplicity, and unexpected literary quality. It raised him even higher in public esteem than before. Sherman's book was disappointing, and I think left the impression that he was not quite the great general that we had thought him, and that he was not the superior of Grant, as he himself seemed to think, although he always loyally carried out Grant's orders. His doubting of the wisdom of Grant's campaign in the rear of VIcksburg, which turned out one of the most perfectly conducted and masterly strokes of the war, is a case in point. McClellan tried in his book to vindicate himself, and succeeded only In making his incapacity and in- decision more apparent. He was undoubtedly a great organizer, but had temperamental limitations that prevented his success as a general. He was an en- gineer officer to begin with and always seemed anxious to exercise his training. He started a regular siege be- fore Yorktown when there were few forces to oppose him, and when he could easily have taken that place if he had attacked ; he always waited to see what the other fellow was going to do, instead of imposing his own initiative on the enemy. He also always mag- nified the size of the opposing forces and was perpet- ually calling for reenforcements. CHAPTER V QUIPS AND CRANKS Every person of prominence has queer experiences with cranks and otherwise unintentionally humorous persons. My father was no exception, and indeed suffered more than others, because of his kindness of heart. Fortunately, he had a sense of humor, and could see the funny side of things, which enabled him to bear up under many boring experiences. Some of these happenings it is worth recording, if only to add to the gaiety of nations. There was a man at Newport who, after being in- troduced to my father, said, in the most impressive manner, "Oh! Mr. Longfellow, I have long wished to meet you, as I am one of the few people who appre- ciate your 'Evangeline.' " My father was once walking down to Harvard Square when he was stopped by an Irishman. "And is this Mr. Longfellow?" he inquired. "And are you the poet.?" Being assured that he was, he proceeded to say, "I am happy to meet you, sorr. I have a brother in the Port [Cambridgeport] who is also a poet, and a drunkard." There was also the gushing poetess who had 82 RANDOM MEMORIES brought a manuscript poem for my father's approval, and, I suppose wishing to ingratiate herself with the poet, exclaimed with clasped hands and eyes rolled up, "Evangeline, sir, is a very superior article, a very superior article." A rustic individual was once calling with his bride, and by way of entertaining them my father was show- ing them the things of interest on his study table, among others Coleridge's inkstand that had been given my father by an English admirer. My father had said that perhaps the "Ancient Mariner" had been written from this very inkstand. Coleridge evi- dently conveyed but a vague idea to the man, who burst out with, "'The Old Oaken Bucket,' now, who done that?" My father once received a letter from a student in a Western college stating that there was to be a prize given for the best poem written by one of the stu- dents, and he was sure if my father would write it for him, he would win the prize. He added in a post- script, "Please send bill." A gigantic Russian called Bakunin, of some emi- nence as a writer and with a voice like a megaphone, arrived once to see my father. He came about noon, and stayed so long that my father invited him to lunch, whereupon he bellowed, "Yiss, and I will dine with you too," and he did, and did not leave till eleven QUIPS AND CRANKS 83 o'clock at night. Bakunin, it seems, was a violent anarchist, although I am sure my father never sus- pected it. We did not trouble about such things in this country In those days. I believe he is considered to have been the parent of the present Bolshevik movement. Mr. Fields, the publisher, gave Bakunin a dinner to meet the literary celebrities of Boston. Those were the happy days when you could have genuine canvas- back ducks. When that course arrived, Bakunin took one mouthful of the delicious morsel, and then called the waiter to him. "Wat iss dass.?" "Canvas- back duck, sir." "Mor^.''" bellowed the Russian, and proceeded to gobble what was on his plate. My three sisters were painted as the three Graces by Buchanan Read, the poet-artist, who wrote and painted "Sheridan's Ride." But the artist was em- barrassed by the six arms, and in order to get rid of one, he painted my youngest sister with one arm be- hind her back. Not being very skilful, it looked as if she had lost an arm, so the story got about that she was born with only one arm. Mr. Lowell was once riding in the Cambridge horse-car when he heard a woman, as they were passing my father's house, re- lating the story in a loud voice, for the benefit of the whole car. This was too much for Mr. Lowell, so he said to the woman, "Excuse me, madam, but I know 84 RANDOM MEMORIES the Longfellow family very well, and I can assure you that the young lady has both her arms." "Excuse me, sir," said the woman, not to be put down, "but I have it on the best authority." To show how stories of this sort travel, and grow as they travel, I was once asked by a lady in Eng- land if it was true that one of my sisters had no arms, and as she had a great talent for poetry wrote beau- tifully with her feet! This is a fact, though incredi- ble. Nor did she mean poetical feet either. There was one day a crazy woman who arrived at my father's house with all her baggage, and an- nounced that she was married to my father and had come to stay. Mr. Greene, an old and palsied friend of my father's, who was staying in the house at the time, went out into the hall to remonstrate with her and persuade her to go away. She demanded his name, and what right he had to interfere. When he said his name was Greene, she turned on him with "Get away, you old green snake," and the old man fled. Finally, I believe, the police had to be called in to get rid of her. This same George Washington Greene, a grandson of General Greene, of the Revolution, had been a friend of my father's youth, in Italy. In his old age he became very feeble, and when he visited us my father had practically to undress him and put him to QUIPS AND CRANKS 85 bed. One night he came into my father's room in the middle of the night, and, waking him up, announced that he smelled smoke, so the two old gentlemen took candles and went poking about the house to find the fire. Wherever they went, Mr. Greene smelled smoke, but my father could not. At last my father turned on Mr. Greene and said, "George, you have been smok- ing to-night after dinner, and you are not used to smoking, and what you smell is the smoke in your moustache." After a hearty laugh the two old men retired to bed again. Colonel Harper, of Kentucky, had a celebrated race-horse named "Longfellow." When the Colonel was asked why he named him after the poet Long- fellow, he said, "Poet nothing; I called him 'Long- fellow' because he had such a long body." This much amused my father. Tales and jokes have to be very apropos, not to seem flat as champagne when the sparkle is gone. "Brev- ity is the soul of wit." A joke or a story should be spontaneous and should not be too long in the tell- ing, lest it become tedious. The best story-teller I ever heard was Whistler; he always managed to end his story in an unexpected manner. I knew a man once who collected stories and jokes in a little book, and when he was going out to dinner he got up a few, and tried to lead the conversation round so he 86 RANDOM MEMORIES could work them in. Anything more ghastly I can't imagine. I once knew a man named by his friends "Conver- sation" Clark. Whatever topic was started he would say, "Oh, that reminds me"; or, " Speaking of"; and oif he would go, and there was no way of stopping him till he became entirely exhausted by his own volubility. I did once get the better of him, however; I happened to meet him at the Riffel Inn at Zermatt, where I was stopping for sketching purposes. After he had nearly talked us to death at lunch, I invited him to go with us up the hills to the Riffel Lake, where I was finishing a sketch. It was a rather stiff climb, and in that high air one got easily out of breath. I was in good train- ing, having been doing a good deal of climbing, and he was not. We started off gaily enough, he talking as fast as ever, but pretty soon he began to pant, and had to stop talking, being quite out of breath. "Funny," he said, "I never had to stop talking be- fore." I noticed after that he fought shy of us, and we were not sorry when he soon departed for more congenial climes. Speaking of ready wit, my uncle, the Reverend Samuel Longfellow, was once at a dinner given by Mr. Longworth at Cincinnati, and in response to a toast from Mr. Longworth, replied, "Worth makes the man, and want of it the fellow." QUIPS AND CRANKS 87 Sometimes I have been guilty of saying things my- self that perhaps I may be permitted to put down. I was once, shortly after the earthquake in San Fran- cisco, asked by an Englishman who was going to America, and had letters to people in Philadelphia, if they had earthquakes in that city. I responded that I had never heard of any, but I knew they had Quak- ers. I think to this day he is puzzling over that reply. Once some one was remarking on the habit of some wives to find trivial fault with their husbands. I said, "Yes, women look at a man through a magnifying glass before marriage, and through a microscope after." Speaking of marriage, I once said that the holy state of matrimony was so holey that there were plenty of loopholes of escape. A lady in England was speaking about some man who had just been knighted, who had made his for- tune through wholesale dealings in fish, and wondered why there was such a difference between him and a fishmonger. I said it must be the difference of scale. Once on the Nile, when there was an unusual collec- tion of natives on the bank waiting for the ferry, a lady on the boat asked me what the crowd meant. I said it must be a bank holiday. She said that she did not suppose they would have a bank in such a small village. I assured her that on the contrary there were two banks, one on each side of the river. 88 RANDOM MEMORIES The first day of May in Europe, like our Labor Day, is given up to parades and celebrations by the Social- ists. One spring in Paris it was rumored that the Royalists were going to use the common people and Socialists to stir up a revolt, and cause, if possible, a revolution, when the Royalists hoped to come into power. People were so alarmed that they laid in pro- visions and canned goods, in case of a state of siege, and the Government filled Paris with troops con- cealed in cellars and unfinished buildings, and warned the people to keep off the streets on May i st, and not to gather in groups. As a result the streets were quite deserted in the morning and cavalry patrolled every- where. As nothing happened, in the afternoon the populace, Parisian-like, came out to see why nothing had happened. In fact the whole plot was a fiasco. A few days later my cousin came to call on us, and brought my wife a bunch of lilies-of-the-valley. He apologized for their being so small, and I said, "Yes, since the first of May, the lilies of France had been very small." I don't think he knew what I meant, but a lady, long a resident of Paris, who happened to be present, thought it very clever, and repeated it to all her friends ; of course not including her French friends, because in French, fleur-de-lis, the symbol of the Royal- ists, and lily-of-the-valley have quite a different name, and do not come under the same head of lily as with us. QUIPS AND CRANKS 89 One day in Rome, Signor BonI, the archaeologist, was discoursing on a recent excavation in the Forum in which he had dug down farther than had ever been done before, and discovered some remarkable pot- tery. I remarked that I supposed if he had gone still farther, he would have come to China. I am afraid he thought this remark flippant. On another occasion I had been having a conver- sation with an Englishman across the table at a table (Thote. After a little he said, " I should not have thought you were an American. You don't talk through your nose"; meaning, I have no doubt, to be very complimentary. "That is singular," I said. "I was not sure you were an Englishman because you do not drop your A's." He became huffy, thinking I was pulling his leg, as he would have expressed it. During my father's life an educated Englishwoman, the wife of a dean, who certainly ought to have known better, asked me where my father was then. I said he was in America. She wanted to know what he was doing there. I told her that he lived there. "But he was born in England," she declared, and I had hard work to convince her that I knew where my father was born. Another Englishwoman declared that it was a pity that we had no literature in America. I said we had some authors, and ran over a list of a dozen, begin- 90 RANDOM MEMORIES ningwith Cooper and ending with Howells and James. "But", she said, "we claim all those as English." Of course I said, "If you claim all our principal authors, then we have no literature."" Per contra, speaking of Howells and James, I be- lieve that in one of Gilbert and Sullivan's operas, where somebody sings of " a Howell and James young man," most Americans think they are alluding to those authors, instead of the clerks in the emporium of that name. I was once staying in the house of a very nice Eng- lishman, with people who I suppose might be called the fast set. Among the party was a rector of about thirty-five who was of the sporty-parson sort. He played cricket for his county, and was also a crack tennis player. After dinner one night, as the gentle- men were crossing the hall to join the ladies in the drawing-room, he suddenly came up to me and slapped my face, saying, " I wanted to say that I had slapped the face of the son of the poet Longfellow." Then he bolted to the protection of the ladies. Now that is a kind of joke that I do not appreciate, espe- cially coming from a parson who is protected by his cloth, so I could not take it out of him later. He prob- ably was a little drunk, if that makes it any better. None of the other men seemed to think it was out of the way, but I confidently expected an apology from QUIPS AND CRANKS 91 my host. As none came I told him I was very sorry but I had to leave for London the following morning. This rector was the rector to Lord Salisbury at his place near by, and was evidently a gentleman except in his manners. At a lunch at Lord Playfair's in London a gentle- man, an entire stranger to me, leaned across the table and said to me, "Your Senators all get their places by bribery, do they not?" Now, that was a nice thing to say to a stranger! I replied that I knew several Sen- ators, and I thought they would compare favorably with members of the upper house of any other country. I might have added that, as Labouchere once declared to me, it was quite a common thing in England, if a man made a large enough contribution to the party funds, for him to be made a peer or at least be knighted. However, we must take people as we find them, and not measure every one with one foot-rule as the English are prone to do. There is one curious thing about Englishmen, and that is that, while the young men are apt to be bump- tious and self-satisfied, when they pass fifty and have seen something of the world, no more charming people exist than Englishmen. As to women, English, Amer- ican, or others, it is safest not to make comparisons. Each nation naturally thinks its own women the most beautiful and charming. 92 RANDOM MEMORIES Another curious experience In London I must men- tion. I was called on there once by an entire stranger, an M.P., who wished me to lunch with him. I believe he said he got my address from Lord Houghton. I had no desire to lunch with him, and pointed out to him that I had with me my wife and a cousin, and that I did not wish to desert them. He quite ignored them, however, when I Introduced them, and made not the faintest sign of including them In the invitation, so I thought It must be a man's lunch. As he was persist- ent and would not take no for an answer, I finally accepted. At the appointed time I arrived at his house, a large mansion in one of London's fashionable squares. There was a large gathering assembled of ladies and gentlemen, I should think about twenty. He introduced me to his wife, but to nobody else, which, of course, is the English custom, but rather trying to strangers, as evidently all the others were very much at home. I was rather angry, because in such a large company it seemed to me rude not to have included my wife, at least, in the invitation, es- pecially as when we went down to lunch I was left with a young man to follow on behind, as there were two ladles short. I found a place as best I could, without any attention whatever from my host or hostess, nor did I have a word with them till I took my leave. I have never to this day understood that QUIPS AND CRANKS 93 man's persistence in having me to lunch, or his utter neglect of a stranger after he got him there. I sup- posed when he asked me, he wanted to boast of hav- ing the son of the poet to lunch, but as he introduced me to nobody, that did not seem the reason. I, of course, left a card at the house ; but I have never seen the man again and don't even remember his name. I mention the incident only as an example of the curious manners of an English M.P. and a man of wealth. After my father's death an Englishman wrote for some London paper a detailed account of an ascent of Vesuvius by moonlight accompanied by my father. There was not a bit of truth in it. I was at Naples with my father at the date mentioned and know that he did not go up the mountain, much less by moonlight. A short time ago I saw in an English newspaper that the "village smithy" was in a certain English village that was named; as a matter of fact, as every- body knows, it was on Brattle Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts. I do not wish it thought from these many allusions to the English that I dislike them; on the contrary, I have many friends there, but I am not mentioning here the many pleasant memories, but only the queer things that sometimes happen. There is one trait that I especially like in the English — their simplicity and straightforwardness, often amounting to naivete. 94 RANDOM MEMORIES I once met an Englishman on a steamer In the Med- iterranean who was much taken with a charming American girl on board. He confided to me how de- lightful it was to be able to get acquainted so easily. He said that in England if you saw much of a girl, so as to get to know her, her father or brother were sure to want to know what your intentions were, when as a matter of fact you had n't any except to get to know her. He added with a sigh in the most naive manner, "I married my cousin because I knew her." Another time I sat next an English woman for sev- eral days at the table d'hote in Venice. She seemed im- pressed by the fact that I was the son of the poet, for when she was going awa}^ she made me a curtsy and said that the pleasantest remembrance of her trip abroad would be having met me. A curious thing happened to me once at Windsor. I had gone down with a party to pass the afternoon on the river. After lunch at the hotel, it came on to rain; as I was putting on my overcoat in the hall, I leaned my umbrella up against a sofa behind me; when I turned round to take it, It was gone. I had seen a nice-looking gentleman in the hall near me, and I asked the porter if he could have taken it by mis- take. He said he knew the gentleman well, as he lived in the neighborhood, and he would ask him when he came in again. So I left my address in London with QUIPS AND CRANKS 95 the porter with a good tip and asked him to send me the umbrella if it was brought back. I was quite con- vinced in my own mind that the umbrella had not been taken by accident because one certainly knows one's own umbrella by the feel. Several days later the umbrella was returned to me with the handle bro- ken, and done up inside so that it could not have been broken in transit. I think the gentleman might at least have had it mended for me after stealing it. CHAPTER VI ART When one has lived over seventy years, one has nec- essarily seen many changes in the fashions in art. It is a far cry from the Diisseldorf school, or Pre- Raphaelitism, to the Post-Impressionists or Cubists, not to mention Futurism. In the fifties, when I first became conscious of paintings, the so-called Hudson River school was in the ascendant in America. I take it it was an out- growth of Diisseldorf. Although we had some good pictures in our house, notably a head of a Venetian Senator by Tintoretto, a very fine work, and a large picture of two children, supposed to be the children of Sir William Pepperell, attributed to Copley, but which I now think may have been painted by Sir William Beechey, besides two good Stuarts, I do not think they made much impression on my childish mind. I, of course, drew pictures, as all children do, but it was not till a summer at Newport, when I was ten or eleven, and we were living in the same house with Kensett, the artist, that I really became inter- ested in painting. I remember I used to watch him ART 97 paint, and when he lent me some of his paints and brushes I painted my first picture in oils, I think of a sailboat in a rough sea, on a piece of tobacco-box. My uncle, Mr. Appleton, was an amateur painter of some talent, who might have become a real artist if he had been willing to devote himself to art and had not been too indolent to take lessons and work hard. He had many friends among the artists, especially Kensett and Church, he of the "Heart of the Andes" and Niagara fame. In this way I became familiar with the work of the North River school, which now seems very thin and over-elaborated. Kensett was a charming man, and had as an artist a delightful touch; but his pictures lack what artists call quality. Church was well known for his large and ambitious compositions in something of the classical style, with a great deal of detail in the foreground and rainbows and that sort of thing in the sky, which appealed to the uneducated. Cropsey was devoted to autumn foliage of the most brilliant description, which you might say was a trifle gaudy. Mclntyre was perhaps one of the best of the school, with his quiet brown autumn scenes. While the work of this school was well studied and composed, it was worked out with almost too much 98 RANDOM MEMORIES detail and painstaking care, and, I regret to say, owing to its thin quality, came perilously near to the chromo. Then followed in the fifties the devotees of Ruskin and Pre-Raphaelitism. Mr. Norton was one of these; and through him and Mr. Lowell there appeared in Cambridge a Mr. Stillman. He devoted days to paint- ing the moss on a tree-trunk or on a stone. He wished to paint my father's portrait sitting under a giant oak at Waverley, some four miles away. So my poor father had to journey day after day, to be set down under this oak, when any tree-trunk in our own garden would have done as well, once the picture was started. There is such a thing as carrying realism too far. The followers of Ruskin seem to have had no sense of proportion ; a pebble seemed to them as important as a whole mountain-side. One of them named Freeman spent years on the Nile painting temples with the most meticulous care, even using an opera-glass to read and record the hieroglyphics which a photo- graph would do much better, and he boasted that archaeologists would be able thereby to read the in- scriptions in his pictures — and this in the name of art! Ruskin, with his charm of style, probably did more to injure English art in the last century than even the philistine puritanism of the Victorian era. No wonder he and Whistler came to blows. ART 99 A little later Blerstadt was covering acres of canvas in an endeavor to convey the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains. His pictures of the undoubted Diissel- dorf school have a certain spaciousness, and have an added interest as a record of an era that has passed away, with their Indians and the wildness of the mountains in those days. He was followed by Hill, who did much the same thing, only perhaps in a broader style, and with not so much detail. In the late fifties or early sixties pictures of the Bar- bison school began to trickle into America. William Hunt came back from studying with Couture and Millet, and brought pictures with him. I have always thought the best things Hunt ever did wxre under the influence of Couture; like his hurdy-gurdy boy, and the girl at the fountain; also his powerful portrait of Chief Justice Shaw. The influence of Millet seemed to have a weakening influence on his art, and also led him into that ever-hot color which at one time af- flicted him. His own style developed later, and was marked by a more loose handling, but a carelessness of drawing. In his boys bathing, so much admired, the poise of the boy standing on the other's shoulder is admirable, but why was it necessary to sacrifice the drawing of the latter's arm.^ So in his decorations for the Capitol at Albany, the drawing of the figures was as bad as could be. Perhaps it is fortunate for his loo RANDOM MEMORIES fame, now that so much more expert draughtsman- ship is expected in decoration, that the paintings were destroyed by damp. Hunt's fame was almost entirely local and was due to his many portraits of Boston people, and to his having a class of lady pupils. No surer road to ac- quiring fame exists than to have a class of admiring females, exclaiming at every stroke of the brush, and carrying your praises abroad. Mr. Hunt's talent did not seem to be appreciated by his fellow-townsmen at first, as it deserved. I re- member an exhibition he had that seemed on the point of failure, when one of his friends had the in- genious idea of writing an article for the "Transcript" abusing his work; the next evening an article by the same man praising it extravagantly appeared; in this way a discussion was started that raged in all the papers for a week, and all the world flocked to the ex- hibition to see for itself; so the show became a great success. Few people seem to have the critical faculty or are judges of pictures, and fewer still know anything about drawing; most follow like sheep where they are led. Another artist who had studied in Paris returned about this time, W. Allan Gay. He had been a pupil of Troyon, but painted only landscapes — -charming views of the Cohasset shore for the most part. He was ART loi a great friend of Mr. Appleton's, who bought several of his pictures. Mr. Appleton did not think he was sufficiently encouraged, and one day, meeting one of the richest men of Boston, who was also by way of be- ing a philanthropist, told him that he ought to encour- age the fine arts, that he ought to buy some of Mr. Gay's pictures. A few days later, meeting him again, he asked him if he had done so; whereupon the gen- tleman said, No, he had not done so because he had made inquiries, and he had found that Mr. Gay was not in impecunious circumstances. Comment is need- less ! However, a few years later, the same gentleman gave me an order for two pictures, so I suppose he had either seen a light, or else he considered me such a poor artist, in one way or the other, that I needed help. The pictures of the Barbison school that these art- ists brought home, and others that began to appear in the dealers' galleries, inspired me with such enthu- siasm for the French school that I determined to go to Paris to study when I had finished my studies at the Lawrence Scientific School, as I have before men- tioned. (I may mention here that Mr. Appleton gave an order to Millet for a picture to cost two hundred dollars, I think; but Millet was so long finishing the picture that Mr. Appleton countermanded the order. This picture was the celebrated Angelus, which was afterwards sold for ^100,000.) Accordingly, accom- I02 RANDOM MEMORIES panled by my uncle, the Reverend Samuel Longfel- low, as bear leader, and to keep me out of mischief, I suppose, I sailed in October of 1865 for the great adventure. And it was a great adventure, for I was not yet quite twenty; I had never taken any lessons in drawing or painting, except such as one has at school, which practically amounted to nothing; I had never drawn from the life, and not even from casts. There were no good art schools in Boston then that I could have gone to; but I had a natural gift for drawing and a correct eye. The first three days at sea I was deadly seasick and very homesick. The Cunarders of those days were not very comfortable. The saloon was aft, with the cabins grouped around it, or down below; we had one of the latter, and there was little ventilation and the smells on board were awful. There was no way to keep warm except to stand next the smokestack on deck. There was no protection on the upper deck, there were no chairs, and we had to sit on rugs on the deck. There was n't even a smoking-room, but an enclosed space over the main hatch, called the "fid- dle," where the few gentlemen who smoked gathered, and told the usual smoking-room yarns. After the first few days, however, I enjoyed the voyage. There was a young man not much older than myself, with his wife, and a lady friend travelling with them. He ART 103 also had thoughts of studying art, but later gave it up to become an actor and playwright of considerable reputation. We saw a good deal of them later in Paris. My uncle and I stopped a few days in London to visit the galleries and sights and see some of my un- cle's friends. One of our interesting experiences was being taken by Moncure Conway to see Carlyle. He received us in a dingy old grey dressing-gown and sat humped up in front of the fire, and railed at almost everything, especially America, where he had never been and never wished to go. He was a fine, vigorous old Scotchman, and not at all the rather sick-looking individual painted by Whistler. The pictures at the National Gallery interested me very much, especially the Sir Joshuas and the Rom- neys, also the Turners. I had heard much about, but had never seen any of Turner's paintings, only the drawings of the "Liber Studiorum," which I had always admired, and of course engravings. I confess his later manner was rather too imaginative for my taste. It is said that a lady once said to Turner that she had never seen any sunsets like the ones he painted, to which he replied, "Don't you wish you might.?" London in late October Is not a very cheerful place, and all the people we met had sympathized with the I04 RANDOM MEMORIES South, and were vexed at having put their money on the wrong horse. One gentleman, who had in- vested largely in Confederate bonds, declared roundly that it was an outrage that the North would not pay him for them. So after a week we crossed to Havre. I shall never forget my first landing in a country where everybody spoke a strange language; even the children seemed wonderfully clever to speak French so well ! I found what little French I thought I knew went nowhere, and I could not understand a word that was said. Fortunately my uncle spoke French of a sort. At Rouen I had my first view of a Gothic cathedral, and it remains an ever vivid memory. It was toward dusk as we entered into the gloom of Saint-Ouen lighted only by the jewelled windows, far up where the columns seemed lost in a grey mist. How solemn and inspiring! It has always seemed to me that the Gothic is the only style for places of worship. It seems to express the yearnings and aspirations of the human soul reaching up to the Infinite. Arrived in Paris, the first question was where to es- tablish ourselves for the winter. My uncle thought the large hotels much too expensive, so we started out apartment-hunting. My uncle had an obsession for having a view, which is not always easy in a city. I have known him, if only passing a night in a place, to ART los chase all over a hotel to get a room with a view, even if we arrived after dark and were leaving early the next morning; much to my disgust when I was tired with a long journey and wished only to get to bed. Finally he hit upon some rooms on the outside shell, as it were, of the Chatelet Theatre. It was an unfortunate choice, I think, because, although we looked out on the river, with all its bridges, and the Conciergerie directly opposite, certainly a beautiful view, it proved to be very damp and cold from the river for a winter sojourn. The river fogs were often so thick we could not see the street below, much less the beautiful view we had done so much to obtain. However, it was cheap, which was something. We had a small salon with a tiny bedroom on each side; the usual parquet floor, which creaked whenever you stepped on it; a few small rugs that slid away from under you; a ridiculous little square hole called a fire- place, which we soon found, no matter how extrava- gant we were with our basket of wood, was quite inadequate to increase the temperature of the rooms when those terrible fogs arrived ; and no sun could be depended upon. As a matter of fact, the sun is a rare sight in a Paris winter. I have known a whole month pass without its once putting in an appearance; this is the more strange as it is often clear at night. The concierge, who did our rooms and brought us io6 RANDOM MEMORIES our morning coffee and petit paiuy lived with his wife in a little cubby-hole halfway up the first flight of stairs. Where they did their cooking I never found out. I hardly ever saw the wife, except when I caught a glimpse of a white cap when asking for the cordon to let us out, or groping our way in late at night, after the theatre, perhaps. We took our luncheons and dinners out at near-by restaurants, mostly at the ex- travagant price of two or two and a half francs for the dinner, and less for lunch. It was a primitive and simple life, but very delightful to look back upon. Seldom did we go to any of the expensive restaurants or penetrate to the Champs Elysees quarter. Fortunately for me, my uncle was very enthusiastic about music and art, and as he had been abroad be- fore was invaluable as a cicerone. We took season tickets for the Pasdeloup concerts at the Cirque d'Hiver, but unfortunately, being late in getting them, could get seats only behind the orchestra in too close proximity to the kettle-drums to get the best ef- fect. However, with my uncle as guide, I was able to get acquainted with all the best music, and have al- ways been glad that my taste was cultivated so early, so that music has always been a great pleasure to me. Of course, we spent many hours at the Louvre studying the old masters, and here again I owe a great deal to my uncle for his guidance and knowl- ART 107 edge in art; also at the Luxembourg, where the pic- tures of the modern French school were shown in the large gallery at the eastern end of the palace, not, as now, in the Orangerie. However, the great question was. How was I to begin my studies? I had not the least idea; neither had my uncle. I did not think of entering the Beaux-Arts, because I did not think I knew enough, and I spoke so little French. There were no Juliens then, and I knew no one to advise me. Finally through a Boston artist, who was passing through Paris, I got an introduction to a Mr. May, an American artist living in Paris. He was very kind, and not only advised me to enter the atelier of Ernest Hebert, but took me there himself and intro- duced me to the massier or painter at the head of the atelier; also, as the etiquette required, to call on Hebert at his own studio. There was nothing commercial, like Julien's differ- ent ateliers, about the atelier Hebert. It was more like a club. You paid so much to enter and so much a week for hire of models, rent, and so forth. Hebert came twice a week to criticise without any pay, giv- ing his services for the love of art, and that was his only connection with the atelier. The atelier was in the rue de Leval, just round the corner from the rue Pigalle, in the Montmartre quarter. I was very anxious to get to work, and the very io8 RANDOM MEMORIES next day after being taken there, having in the mean- time ordered an easel, a portfolio, and a dozen sheets of charcoal paper, as well as sticks of charcoal and some paper stumps, such as I had seen most of the students using, I presented myself at an early hour. The atelier consisted of a large room with almost the entire side toward the north given up to a large window, the panes of which, I should judge, had not been washed since the flood. Opposite the door there was a raised platform for the model, beside which was a stove, and the whole place reeked with the smell of paint, turpentine, and tobacco smoke. Of course, being in France, there was no ventilation, and for the sake of the model the temperature had to be in the neighborhood of seventy degrees. When I arrived, the place was crowded, and as a late comer I had to take what place I could find to set up my easel. It was one of the rules of the atelier that on Monday mornings those coming first had first choice as to places. Some preferred to squat close to the model on low stools, others farther back sitting down, while those at the rear had to stand up to see well. About a third painted in oils, but the greater number, not so advanced, were contented to make charcoal drawings. There was always more or less of a hubbub going on, some singing snatches of popular songs, in which ART 109 occasionally almost the whole room would join, others whistling, others talking, and others grunting when things did not go right with their drawing. As I entered, the noise ceased for a moment — Ah! nouveau!' — and then it began again. I found my easel and portfolio in a corner where it had been left when sent from the color shop, and as quietly as possible began my work. The model that morning happened to be a woman, and I must confess that to my Puritan mind, and rev- erencing woman as I had been taught to do, it seemed to me a dreadful desecration to put this poor naked girl up for all those ribald youths to stare at. You must remember that I had never drawn from the nude before; but I soon learned, what few people under- stand, that artists regard their models, at least when they are drawing or painting from them, as so much furniture. The question of sex does not come in. At the end of the hour the model was given a rest of five minutes, when cigarettes were lighted and general conversation broke out. I understood not a word of what was going on, but I suddenly found that all eyes were turned on me, and every one calling out some- thing for my benefit. I had awful visions of the haz- ings that I had heard about, as the racket grew louder and louder. There was not another American or Eng- lishman in the place, but fortunately a very nice- no RANDOM MEMORIES looking Frenchman that sat near me explained In fairly good English that, as a newcomer, I was ex- pected to give all hands a treat. So I told him I should be delighted, and if he would send out for what they wanted, I would be pleased to pay for it. He ex- plained the situation to the others, and the hubbub ceased, and I became popular at once at the expense of a few francs. Ernest Hebert, the artist, who came twice a week to criticise the work, was well known for his picture in the Luxembourg called "Malaria," a picture charm- ing in color and sentiment, and quite the best thing he ever did. His later pictures had an unpleasant greenish hue. He was a little dark man with melan- choly expression, and he was not an inspiring teacher. The highest praise that he ever gave was a " Pas mal. " He took more interest naturally in the more ad- vanced men, who were painting in oils, and rarely took the trouble to pay much attention to the rest of us, usually only glancing at our work, and either giving a grunt of indifference to inferior work, or, as I have said, a ^^ Pas maV* for anything that was really good. Of course, he paid little attention to me, and I doubt if he remembered ever to have seen me before. Only on one occasion, after I had been there some time, and had made, as I thought, a more than usually good and careful drawing, he sat down in front of ART III my work and, taking a piece of charcoal, without saying a word, made two strokes across my drawing, quite ruining it. I was very angry at the time, but what he meant was that I had not put enough action into the figure. I thought this unjust, because the model had a difficult pose and had slumped toward the end of the hour. Of course, I had begun the drawing as the model had first taken the pose, and could not very well alter it as the model slumped more and more. However, I now see, what I did not understand at the time, that just as an actor has to exaggerate a little in order to get his effect across the footlights, so an artist must exaggerate slightly to convey his idea. The best drawing is not, therefore, the most accurate, but style in drawing means deviating from photographic exactness. This has been a hard lesson for me to learn, as my tendency has always been to too much accuracy, owing, I suppose, to my training as an engineer. As Cantine once said to me, I did not let myself go; or, as he expressed it, if I would only get drunk, I would do much better. The rule of the atelier was that we had male models for three weeks of the month, and a female model for the other week. At the beginning of the week, a vote would be taken as to the pose, and the pose once selected was the same for the whole week. Most of the students made only one drawing or painting 112 RANDOM IVIEMORIES in the week, but as I am naturally a rapid worker, I often made two. I did not care to make such a care- ful drawing as most of the men, but thought I should get more practice and knowledge of the figure by changing my position and making two drawings. Every one did just as he liked, in his method of work, though most made smudgy drawings in char- coal, using a paper stump or lingers. I was pleased to find that, although new to this method of work, my drawings were better than some. There were some men of over thirty, who had been coming to the atelier for years, who could never learn to draw, but still kept at it, apparently pleased with their work. As to the men who painted, some had already "arrived," as the expression is; that is, had exhibited at the Salon, but came back to keep their hands in, in work from the life. There seemed to be absolutely no system taught, but each one followed his own sweet will. There was one I remember who never used any brushes, but put the paint on with his fingers, and then stirred it round, making an awful mess, and covering himself with paint in the process. He was the dirtiest painter I ever saw. Some of the best studies in oils were hung up on the walls, as an example, and there were among them some superb work done by former students. I had little to do with the other students, as I spoke ART 113 so little French, and picked it up very slowly. I have no talent for languages, and it is impossible for me to learn any. It is odd, because my father was an excel- lent linguist, and spoke four languages perfectly be- sides his own, and could turn from speaking one to another with perfect ease. I have often heard for- eigners remark with surprise how well he spoke their language. I must say all these Frenchmen, but few of whom were gentlemen, treated me very well. There was no hazing, or chaffing, and if there were unkind things said, I did not know enough to comprehend them. Considering I was the only man in the place that was not a Frenchman, I think this remarkable. I believe, however, there was one Swede, but he spoke French. Sometimes I would go out to lunch with some of the men, and they were always very jolly and kind. We usually went to some cremerie or establishment Duval, where we got a bowl of milk and some bread for a few sous. If any one expects an account of wild doings in the Latin Quarter, he will be disappointed, as I saw nothing of these things. Indeed, I doubt if they ex- ist, except in the imagination of men who like to look knowing when the Quarter is mentioned, and want it to be thought they were devils of fellows in their youth. 114 RANDOM MEMORIES I don't wish to be thought a prude; but I may have been surrounded with sirens without knowing it. I had come out for work, not frivoHty, and I generally find that one sees only what one is looking for. I don't even know whether there were Moulins Rouges or Bals Boulliers in those days. The Jardin Mabille was then in its glory, but I went there only once, at the solicitation of a friend. It was a beautiful place with its many lights and shrubberies, just off the Champs Elysees, but the rather plain hired ladies, who kicked off gentlemen's tall hats and displayed as much lin- gerie as possible, soon palled upon me. I have to confess that I have never enjoyed the pleasures that please most men, and indeed have not cared for men's society very much. Clubs bore me, and worst of all are the large, men's dinners with speeches. I get on very well with other artists or liter- ary and musical people, but the general run of men are tiresome. They want to talk only about their own affairs; if they are golfers, about the wonderful strokes they have made; if automobilists, about where they have been, and the merits of their particular car. I enjoy women's society immensely as a relaxation, but only that of bright women of one's own class; not that of aggressive women, or of those who wish to be thought learned. I cannot imagine finding amusement with brainless chorus girls or the usual demi-mondaines. ART 115 But to return to our "muttons." It may seem strange, but I cannot remember whether we began work at eight or nine o'clock in the morning, but I think the latter, although I often on dark winter mornings had to dress and have breakfast by candle- light. It was quite a distance from the place du Chate- let to the rue de Leval, a good half-hour's rapid walk, and not much less by omnibus. There was an omnibus that went from the Chatelet to the place Pigalle that I took on rainy mornings, but I generally preferred to walk if the mornings were at all fine. That early-morn- ing walk was delightful; it led through the Halle Centrale with the market carts just coming in, and all the old women in their white caps bustling about, and the trig-looking bonnes doing their marketing; then on by Saint-Eustace, where we often went Sunday afternoons to hear the beautiful music, up the long narrow Boulevard Poissonniere. This was the real old Paris. There were the rag-pickers about, with their long hooks, searching the gutters and rubbish-heaps for stray treasures. The shrill cries, almost a chant, of the vendors with their little pushcarts filled the street, and the freshness of the morning air made the heart glad. Then across the Boulevard Poissonniere, and by the little church of Notre Dame de Lorette, which used to be considered the centre of the soubrette quarter, 1 16 RANDOM MEMORIES I believe; but at that early hour there were no houris about. Still on, breasting the hill that leads to Montmartre, and by the rue Pigalle to the atelier. Such was my morning walk, and how delightful to look back upon and recall the familiar smells and sounds! What a time is youth! Not content with working in the morning, some of us hired models to come in the afternoons; at other times I went to the Louvre and drew from the statues or copied some of the pictures. My favorite painters were Titian and Rembrandt. I made several copies from each. Toward the beginning of the year, Mr. Mac and his wife returned from their travels, and settled down not far from us on the Boulevard Saint-Michel, just across the river; after that we saw a good deal of them, and Mr. M. and I took a studio together, where I worked some of the time. He was a very versatile person; full of enthusiasm for all sorts of things, but wanting in stability, I thought. He would not go to an atelier to learn to draw, but wanted to paint right off. He had had some instruction from Page, the artist, who at one time had quite a vogue. Page, though a good draughtsman, had theories. He thought he had discovered the secret of the Venetian coloring, and indulged in glaze after glaze on his pictures to get that rich amber tone. Unfortunately, so many oil glazes smoker: a portrait study (Alexander Longfellow) ART 117 In time turned black, and all his portraits have been ruined. Mr. M. had these theories from him, and tried to convince me of their soundness, but after one or two experiments I gave It up, and ever since have fought shy of theories in art. Mrs. M. confided to me that they had not really come abroad to study art, when I suggested that her husband did not seem very keen about his studies, but to consume the time while they got a divorce. It seems that they had taken a room for a year at In- dianapolis, then the centre for divorces, and had left a trunk there, to comply with the legal requirements, while they travelled in Europe. The funny part of the situation was that the lady who was travelling with them was the lady whom Mr. M. was to marry after the divorce was obtained. She was Mrs. M.'s most intimate friend, but because Mrs. M. loved her hus- band and also her friend so much, she wished them to be happy, and, therefore, she was to retire and leave them to be married and live happy ever after. Cer- tainly a remarkable situation, brought about In a great measure, I believe, by a book called, I think, "Coun- terparts," which was then very popular, and which advocated letting " affinities " take It Into their own hands and go off together. Mr. M. did afterwards marry the other lady, and his first wife, I believe, also married again. 1 1 8 RANDOM MEMORIES In the middle of the winter, another American turned up at the ateUer Hebert. Henry Marker had been an artist for " Harper's Weekly " during the Civil War, and had then gone to Munich to study. When he came to Paris, therefore, he had already acquired a good deal of the technique of painting. He made ex- cellent studies in oils, mostly of the head, and had great facility. He afterwards had much success with Brittany subjects and was a well-known exhibitor at the Salon, receiving, I believe, several medals. It was a relief to have some one to talk to in my own tongue. He was a pleasant fellow, and then un- married ; years afterwards I met him with an invalid son on a Mediterranean steamer, and we recalled with pleasure our former comradeship. I cannot pretend that the life at the atelier was very agreeable to a sensitive and fastidious person, and I also found the gloomy weather of the Paris winter very trying and depressing, so that I welcomed my uncle's suggestion that we should go to Italy in March, and study the old masters there. Of course, it would have been better to have stuck it out longer at the atelier, but the prospect of sunshine in Italy was too tempting. Accordingly, we departed in the middle of March by train to Nice, and then after a few days drove by carriage along the Cornice Road to Genoa. There was ART 119 no railroad then, and what an enchanting three days that was! Alfred Tennyson's poem of "The Daisy" gives a far better description of that drive than I can, and is worth recalling. From Genoa, after studying the Van Dycks, we took diligence to Spezzia, where again we could take the train for Pisa. The railroad from Pisa to Rome then extended only a little beyond Leghorn, where we had to get into a diligence for a long night ride. What a night that was ! We could not get a seat in the coupe and were jammed into the interior with a lot of Italians who smelled of garlic. They told us it was quite likely we should be held up by brigands, as the route we were obliged to travel was infested with them, and they had fearful tales to tell of other diligences being stopped, and the passengers robbed, if not car- ried off for ransom. I remember several of the women proceeded to hide their jewelry in their stockings and inside their corsets, quite regardless of exposure of legs and bosoms. Fortunately, the oil lamp gave little light. I shall never forget how my legs and back ached from our cramped position, and that dreadful twitch- ing of the former which comes when you are sleepy and can't sleep. Suddenly in the middle of the night, just as I had begun to doze off, the diligence stopped, and we all felt 120 RANDOM MEMORIES sure our hour had come, and the brigands had arrived. The guard informed us that the gentlemen must all get out, so we expected to be stood up against a wall and have our pockets emptied. It proved, however, to be nothing worse than a bad and muddy road, in which the diligence was stuck, on the slope of a rather steep hill. So we all put our shoulders to the wheels, and managed to get the ponderous vehicle to the top. Nothing further happened till we reached Civlta Vecchia, where we took the train for Rome. The first glimpse of the dome of Saint Peter's must send a thrill through any one not hardened by much travel. Rome in those days was a medieval city. The Pope still drove in state through the streets, while all the people fell on their knees in the mud as he passed. Cardinals were as thick as blackberries, and In their scarlet robes gave a welcome bit of color as they walked in the villas or on the Pinclo. The streets were ill-paved and ill-lighted, and it was not con- sidered safe to walk alone at night in any but the most frequented thoroughfares. The Coliseum was still draped in Its mantle of moss and hanging vines, before the hand of archaeologists had scraped and repaired Its crumbling walls, In what they call preservation — Heaven save the mark! The Forum was a resting-place for those magnificent white oxen attached to the red-wheeled carts of the ART 121 Campagna, not as now a perfect rabbit warren, with so many holes dug in it that it no longer resembles a Forum — ^all to make a Roman holiday for the anti- quaries! There were no new streets and brand-new apartments, but crumbling walls, ruins, and decay, much more picturesque and interesting than at present. William Story, the sculptor, was then at the zenith of his fame, and was turning out his stiff, classical statues of Cleopatra, Medea, etc., much to his own satisfaction and that of the English public, who were his chief patrons. Mr. Story was a most charming man, but as a sculptor perhaps the less said the better. The best thing he ever did was the memorial to his wife, in the English cemetery in Rome. Henry James was asked by the Story family to write a life of Mr. Story, but when it was done it was so much more about Mr. James than Mr. Story that I believe the family were not at all pleased. I remember the Story boys — who afterward became famous as artist and sculptor — home on vacation in their Eton jackets. Mrs. Story was very fond of English society, especially when titled, and received in state on the top floor of the Palazzo Barberini. Tilton, another American, was a painter of some suc- cess in Rome at that time. He was a Portland boy and had been helped by my father when beginning his 122 RANDOM MEMORIES career. He was, therefore, very friendly. He was tre- mendously conceited and people made much fun of him on that account. He used to say, "How remarkable it is that the names of most great painters begin with T! — Titian, Tintoretto, Turner " ; and then he would pause and everybody was expected to add "Tilton." He was a follower, so he thought, of Turner — a long way behind — and used to boast that only his pictures and Turner's looked equally well upside down. We had lodgings near the Hotel d'Angleterre, and I was much shocked when we were going away, and had asked the proprietor to have our luggage taken down, to have him calmly put the trunks on his wife's head to take downstairs, while he sauntered down with his hands in his pockets — having previously put his hands into mine pretty deeply. Of course we spent much time at the Vatican and other galleries, and I learned a great deal from study- ing the pictures and sculptures. I was not like an American sculptress who was asked, after being two years in Rome, if she did not get much inspiration from the magnificent statues at the Vatican. She replied that she had never been there, because she did not wish to lose her originality. We stayed in Rome over Easter to see the cere- monies at Saint Peter's, which were very impressive, ART 123 especially when the Pope came out on the balcony to bless the people. It was a wonderful sight to see that whole vast piazza filled with kneeling people to re- ceive the benediction of that sweet-faced old man in white, far above them. Since 1870 that sight has never been seen again. It seems hard to believe now that Italy was then divided up into separate states and that we had to get our passports back from the police, who had taken possession of them on our arrival, and have them viseed for Naples. This is not a chronicle of travel, but merely a hasty sketch of my early experiences. Therefore I shall not say much about our stay in Naples, nor have I attempted to expatiate on the wonders of Rome. We did the usual things at Naples and we explored Pompeii, which I must say impresses one wonderfully on a first visit, and I think was perhaps more in- teresting when there was not so much uncovered, and when the imagination had full play as to what still remained a mystery in the life of this dead city. After all it is not so much what one sees in their desolate and rather monotonous streets of ruined houses, but in the picture that is conjured up by the imagination. We also visited Herculaneum, that mysterious city entombed, clasped in the embrace of the deadly lava. What a pity the Italian Government, dog-in-the- 124 RANDOM MEMORIES manger-like, will not permit others to explore these hidden treasures when they are unable to do so them- selves. We went, of course, to Capri, that enchanted isle, and to Sorrento and Amalfi. From Salerno, as there was no railroad then, we went to Paestum by car- riage. The district between Salerno and Paestum was much frequented by bandits at that time, so the Government insisted on our having an escort of cav- alry. The year before, an Englishman had been captured and a large ransom demanded; as the ran- som was not forthcoming with sufficient promptness, they cut off one of his ears and sent it to the family in England, and followed it with the other ear to hurry up matters. Three or four years later, in Rome, I saw a man at a reception that had something pe- culiar about his appearance. He had no ears, and that was the very man, so I know the story was true. You can't imagine how queer he looked ! As the ex- pense of a carriage with mounted escort was consid- erable, we combined with two Englishmen for the trip. No brigands appeared, though we saw plenty of villainous-looking peasants working in the fields, that no doubt could have turned themselves into brigands at a moment's notice if there had been no escort. Paestum was much more desolate in those days than it is to-day, and therefore much more impres- ART 125 sive. There was no railroad station or other build- ings, and the land had not been drained. Nothing but those solemn ruins in a wet and deserted plain. It was said to be death to pass the night there owing to malaria, and I can well believe it. Of course, while at Naples I climbed Vesuvius with some acquaintances, and a wonderful sight it was looking down into that devils' cauldron of the crater, with steam and poisonous vapors rising all around us. It was then that I heard for the first time of the Italian who, showing Vesuvius to an American, said, "There! you have n't anything like that in America.'* "Pooh! if we turned Niagara on that it would put it out in a minute," said the American. This story has been brought down to date by putting it into the mouth of Mr. McAdoo on his visit to Naples during the World War. In the spring of 1 866, war was threatening in Europe, so we did not linger in Rome on our return, but started for Florence by way of Perugia almost immediately. We could go only as far as Foligno by rail, as no rail- road was finished then through to Florence. At Fo- ligno we were transferred to a diligence, and when we arrived at the steep hill leading to Perugia, they at- tached two magnificent milk-white oxen to pull us up the hill. Perugia still belonged, I think, to the Papal States ; at all events, the fortress that stood where the 126 RANDOM MEMORIES parade ground is now was still there, and the only hotel was outside the gates. It was in this hotel only a few years before that the Papal soldiers, when they retook the town, nearly murdered Mr. Edward Per- kins and his wife, of Boston. The landlord told us how he had hidden them in a closet, when his hotel was ransacked and several people killed. It must have been a frightful experience. We enjoyed the Peruginos and Raphaels and the quaint streets of this truly medieval city. None of the old cities of Italy has kept its character better than Perugia, and I always enjoy revisiting it, which I have done many times. I suppose we drove to Assisi, but I can't remember now, I have been there so often since. On reaching Florence, we devoted ourselves to the pictures and churches, but although we were in a hurry to get to Venice before the war broke out, we had time to study the many galleries and works of art pretty thoroughly. What a lovely city it is, with its wonderful setting in the beautiful valley of the Arno! After the gloom of Rome, amongst its crumbling ruins, how cheerful and bright it seems ! One is never tired of standing on the Ponte Vecchio and looking at the rushing river, or wandering among the treasures of the Uffizi or Pitti, or dreaming away a sunny afternoon in the beautiful Boboli Gardens or the Caschini. ART 127 At last we tore ourselves away, and went to Bologna — more pictures; and then on to Ravenna to see the mosaics and Dante's tomb, and wandered in the Pineta, which had not then been destroyed by fire. Finally we reached Venice, then in Austrian hands. Austrian soldiers were everywhere. Austrian bands played in the Piazza, but to empty space; no Italian would think of being seen there listening to the music; only the pigeons flew about, and were indifferent to the oppressors. We had the galleries and churches almost to ourselves, as there were few or no tourists. The beautiful palaces looked down on empty canals, and there was a general air of expectancy like the hush before a thunder-storm. We were warned that the frontiers of Venice might be closed any day, and no foreigners allowed to depart, so we did our sight-seeing as rapidly as possible. I shall never forget, however, my first impression of those glowing canvases, and the Venetian school has ever since been my favorite. We were fortunate in seeing the wonderful picture of " Saint Peter Martyr," by Titian, which was destroyed by fire the following year, and of which only a memory now remains. We left Venice just in time, for the following day nobody was given permission to leave. A fellow- countryman of ours who attempted to get away, and had hired a boat to cross the Po from Mantua, was 128 RANDOM MEMORIES fired upon by Austrian sentries, although war had not actually begun. Fortunately, he got safely across. We then went to Como, which was full of Gari- baldians in their red shirts, and we had the good for- tune to see Garibaldi himself. We took the steamer up the lake next day, meaning to stay at Bellaggio, but at the wharf at Cadenabbia we were hailed by friends from home, and induced to get off there. Cadenabbia has ever since been our favorite spot on the lake, and it was owing to this chance that my father went there in 1868 and gave the world his well-known poem of Cadenabbia beginning — "No sound of wheels or hoof-beat breaks The silence of the summer day." In those days there was no way of getting to Cade- nabbia save by boat or walking. Alas, now, even the noisy automobile disturbs the quiet of the summer's day, but the lake remains as lovely as ever. One day, when we had made an expedition to the head of the lake, my uncle, who had separated from the rest of the party, was poking about the little town and talking to the peasants, as was his wont, when he was suddenly arrested as an Austrian spy. He certainly had a German look with his reddish beard. He was marched off to the guard-house, where for- tunately he was able to produce his letter of credit on Barings and to prove that he was an American. CHAPTER VII ITALIAN ART While we rest on the shores of this most beautiful of lakes, an epitome of all that is most charming in Italy, — color, atmosphere, picturesque villages, and lofty mountains, — it is a good opportunity to cast an eye backward on the art treasures of this wonderful country that I had seen for the first time. I had now had a chance to study with some care the paintings and sculpture of Its many galleries and churches. I had become familiar with the different schools and the characteristics of the different artists. It is a great trial to any one who has become famil- iar with certain pictures that one has In one's mind as indicating the style of an artist, to have some of these later commentators, like Berenson, come along, and attribute them to somebody else; especially if you cannot agree with his method of attribution. Artists do not always work from the same models, and make noses or ears always alike; also different artists some- times use the same model. I do not think any one who has not painted himself can be so good a judge of the technique of a picture or so surely detect the manner- isms of an artist as one who has. 130 RANDOM MEMORIES There is no subject about which so much rubbish has been written as art. Literary people sit themselves down before a picture and let their imaginations run wild. They see all sorts of things in the picture that I am sure the artist never thought of. It is like the commentators of Shakespeare, who twist and turn the text, or find an imaginary cipher — like the Baconians. Just as some people seem to think that poetry, if easy to understand, cannot be poetry, so others find dark and hidden mysteries in pictures; we have even come to Cubists, with their unintelligible jumble of parallelograms, which may be "a nude descending the stairs," or anything else you like. Great is the power of unbridled imagination! At least, however, let us remain within the limits of nature. Let art be sane, and not follow the evil imaginations of degenerate minds. I believe it is said that man cannot imagine any- thing that he has not seen. Dragons and such other wild beasts are only combinations of things seen. Look at the grotesques of Leonardo da Vinci ; they are only features of man or beast in unusual combination. So as a rule I think pictures direct from nature are more satisfactory in the long run than imaginary land- scapes. I prefer, myself, Corot's pictures from nature to his more imaginary works. I know this is not the generally received opinion. I do not, however, think ITALIAN ART 131 the human mind can conceive of trees or clouds or hills more beautiful than nature has given them to us. The classical landscapes of Claude or Turner may be full of light, of beautiful composition, of fantastic ruins, but after all they leave you cold, compared to the real thing; they are but translations or arrange- ments, and do not give us as much pleasure as a nearer transcript and more intimate view from nature would do. In studying the Greek and Roman statuary in Rome and Naples, one cannot help noticing how close to nature they are. Some of the busts in marble or bronze might be of living people, so real are they. The Greek statues are, of course, idealized. It does not seem possible that such beautiful forms ever existed ; they certainly do not now, except in very exceptional circumstances. Only once in a model have I seen those beautiful pointed breasts that you find in the old statues of women and that have ever been the ideal for artists. It is the same for the feet and hands; we have to copy the feet of the old statues because in these days we never see feet that have not been ruined by shoes, or knocked out of shape by hard usage. Of course, the Greeks had one advantage in treat- ing the human form; they were much more familiar with the nude in everyday life, and could watch the play of the muscles in sunshine or shade, while we 132 RANDOM MEMORIES can study It only in the studio from indifferent models and in an artificial light. Some artists have tried posing models, mostly female, en plein air, but I think the result is seldom satisfactory. The nude out of doors is too realistic; you wish the lady would put on her clothes. The great difference between Greek art and that of to-day is that they are never too realistic, and that is the true secret why their art is never disagreeable. They treat the human body in a broad and simple way, and do not go too much into detail or dwell on the defects of the model, but always have In mind that beauty should be the one aim in art. At the present moment there is a great vogue for Rodin. I am taking my Hfe in my hands by criticising him in any way ; but contrast his " The Age of Bronze " with, say, "the man with the strigil," in the Vatican. The back of Rodin's man is all cut up with muscles, and he stands so Insecurely on his feet that he looks as if he would topple over; the abdomen Is also over- elaborated. The proud boast of the admirers of Rodin is that when this figure was first exhibited, people thought It must have been done from a cast of a living man. Perhaps it was; but that is not art. Contrast that with the beautiful broad muscles of the back of the Greek statue, which stands so lightly on its feet, it seems ready to move. Compare Rodin's "Thinker" ITALIAN ART 133 ^- great clumsy brute, who is all animal and had never a thought above feeding, and looks as if he were con- templating murder — with Michael Angelo's " II Pen- seroso" in Florence. We can admire a torso without arms or legs of some old Greek statue, because that is all that is left to us, alas; but deliberately to make such a mutilated ob- ject is an affectation, if not an impertinence. Rodin once actually exhibited at the Salon a pair of legs walking off without any body. It seems to me that of our American sculptors French has more of the Greek than any other. Saint- Gaudens is more akin to the Renaissance sculptors, or the modern French school, in his work. MacMon- nies treats his subjects too much as if they were paintings. To return to the sculpture of Italy; I suppose it is an accepted fact that most of it is Roman reproduc- tion of Greek work; or, as in the bronzes in the Museum at Naples, done by Greek artists transported to Italy. As in translations, so in reproductions, something is lost — the personal final touch given by the artist him- self. We must go to Greece, then, for the more per- fect work, and, alas, how little is left there uninjured ! Compared with Greek work in its perfect grace, how clumsy and awkward Michael Angelo's "David" appears! yet it is full of power. I much prefer his 134 RANDOM MEMORIES "Moses" or the Medici tombs; his "Pieta" shows a more graceful side of his art, and is beautiful. There are many, especially in these days, who pre- fer strength to any other quality; the more strong and brutal a thing is, the better they like it. They no longer care for beauty or for any of the finer qualities in a work of art. It seems to me this is a primitive and savage taste; they, like the savage, like raw and violent coloring and brutal and unrefined modelling. Refinement of line and delicate shades of color have given place to careless drawing, supposed to represent freedom, and paintiness, instead of beauty of surface. The impressionists, in the search for what they call play of color, have substituted opaque paint for the beautiful transparent shades that come from thin films of color lightly laid on. The result is a chalky effect which is added to by their endeavor to force the key up, to get an effect of light. Monet, the great exponent of light, used great blobs of paint to catch the light, but I am convinced that in a few years they will also catch the dirt, and in the end the pictures will lose their brilliancy. In fact I think already many of them have done so. This is one of the things art- ists have to contend against; color settles down a tone or two when it dries or gets old; it gathers tone, but never is so brilliant as after the first painting. Shad- ows of the earlier schools, especially the Munich, and ITALIAN ART 135 some of the Barbison painters, they prefer to see colors in shadow which do not exist. They start off with an assumption of purple shadows in near-by objects which they do not see, and then, to prevent the pic- ture being too cold in color, they have to put in a lot of orange to counteract it, which also they do not see- So the whole thing is false. But people are told to applaud, and they do applaud. Alfred Stevens, the Belgian painter, who is claimed by the impressionists, although he is anything but an impressionist, said that it was a curious fact that all the impressionists had the same impression. However, we have wandered a long way from the art of Italy that I was talking about. Of course, in these hasty sketches, which must seem necessarily crude, I cannot go very deeply into the subject, but can only skim the surface. Italian art from Giotto or Cimabue to Tiepolo covers a wide range. It may be divided roughly into three groups — the so-called primitives, the draughtsmen, and the colorists. The primitives, deficient in drawing and often stiff and awkward in the poses of their figures, were im- bued with a genuine religious fervor that seems to add to, rather than to detract from, the charm of many of their pictures. Our moderns are sadly mis- taken who seem to think that by intentionally bad drawing they are going to recapture this feeling, when 136 RANDOM MEMORIES it is all an affectation and they have no genuine feel- ing in the matter. You cannot be naive and primitive to order, because it is not the stiff and incorrect drawing, but the utter sincerity that counts. The Tuscan and Umbrian schools were deficient in beautiful color, but relied upon drawing and design for their effect. Raphael's pictures are many of them very black in color, although the composition and drawing cannot be surpassed. His earlier pictures under the influence of Perugino were clear in coloring, but when he came under the influence of Michael Angelo, in his endeavor to reinstate the vigor of the latter, he seems to have lost his eye for color. Michael Angelo, in his grandiose if sometimes over-exaggerated draw- ing, seemed to care little for color. Of course the "Last Judgment" is so discolored by smoke that it is im- possible to judge its original state. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, however, is fairly well preserved. In both these men, the design and drawing have pre- occupied them, and also perhaps they have felt that much color was out of place in decorative work. Of course, work in fresco — that is, painting on fresh plaster — does not lend itself to brilliant effects, but rather to subdued tints. It is a curious fact that while you would expect the southern artists to revel in color, it is the artists from northern Italy who have the more beautiful coloring; ITALIAN ART 137 undoubtedly the Venetian painters must have been influenced by the relation of Venice to the Orient, and perhaps they had some secret varnish or glaze ac- quired from there that gave their pictures that mar- vellous amber glow. We are so much accustomed to dwell on the color of the Venetians that we are in- clined to overlook the perfection of their composition and drawing. Tintoretto drew with all the vigor of Michael Angelo, and the drawing of Titian is so per- fect that you take it for granted. The vigorous draw- ing of the "Peter Martyr" could not be surpassed, nor could that of the "Entombment," in the Louvre, and many others of his canvases. Titian seems to me to combine more perfections in his pictures than any other artist. Even the bits of landscape intro- duced as background and the superb setting of the tragedy of the "Peter Martyr" are equalled by few landscape painters. Giorgione had equal color with Titian, but so few pictures attributed to him are authentic that it is hard to form an estimate of his standing. Even the beautiful picture of "The Concert," so called, in the Pitti, has now been taken away from him and given to some one else. Paul Veronese, Bonifazio, and Paris Bordone are only a little behind the other three already mentioned, but, as Browning writes, " the little more, and how 138 RANDOM MEMORIES much It is! " How true this is of many things besides pictures! How many men fall just short of the high- est achievement! "The little more, and how much it is!" It makes often just the difference between suc- cess and failure. It is the distinction between genius and talent. Of course there are many other artists worthy of mention, and much more could be said if we were writ- ing a thesis on Italian art. There are two things worth noticing, however. One is the thorough training all these men had in their profession, owing to the ap- prentice system. They were taught their art from the bottom up, even to grinding their masters' colors, and then helping them in painting their pictures, especially in the draperies or backgrounds. You do not find in any of these men any show of technique for tech- nique's sake; everything is carefully designed, care- fully drawn, and conscientiously painted without any effort to show off. It is quite natural that artists should be interested in the way a picture is painted; but I think we of late years lay too much stress on clever technique. Cleverness, like other superficial qualities, attracts one at first, but one soon gets tired of it. Pictures that depend merely on clever handling do not wear well. We admire them immensely at first, but soon hardly look at them. Solid qualities always tell in the long run. ITALIAN ART 139 Another thing in these old masters is their abiUty to fill the space on their canvases agreeably, and com- bine any number of figures in their compositions with- out too much confusion of arms or legs. Any one who has tried, knows how hard it is to dispose of many limbs so that they will compose well. All this comes in time to be governed in a sense by convention as in the parallel diagonal lines of composition that the Venetians were so fond of. There has been a great hue and cry of late years against conventionality, but people do not realize that conventions are merely the result of many experiments that have failed. On the whole those things remain that turn out to be the most satisfactory in the long run. It is well to try experiments within limits; but such vagaries as Cubism and Vorticism can lead to nothing but absurdities. Nobody can claim that there is any beauty in them. Beauty should be the first law of art; anything else is degrading to it. Some uninformed people point to Japanese art as a departure from our conventions of art. So it is in a measure, because the Japanese do not consider perspective; but their art is governed by their own most rigid conventions, as any one who has studied the matter knows. All this craze for originality leads to nothing but eccentricity. Men are praised because their paintings are unlike anything in heaven or earth. The mere fact that they I40 RANDOM MEMORIES do things unlike any one else proclaims them as gen- iuses, quite regardless of whether their drawing is bad or their color disagreeable. The dealers are in a great measure responsible for this; they buy up canvases by unknown artists, at small prices, and then, by proclaiming that the art- ist who cannot draw or does not know how to paint is a great genius, sell the pictures at absurd prices to the confiding public. Taste in pictures changes from year to year, and by clever manipulation the dealers are able to create a taste, and thereby manufacture a market. Also if they are loaded up with a number of paintings by a particular artist, they see to it that the prices of that artist are kept up at the auction sales. All this is very disgusting to a lover of art; the only consolation being that in the long run things adjust themselves, and bad art eventually gets put away in the attic or cellar, and the good artist comes into his own — but alas! only too often when not in this world and unable to profit by his final justification. All these reflections were not, of course, made at that time of the past that I have been dealing with. I was then too young and my study of art too recent for me to have formed any definite conclusions from what I had seen in Italy; but it was a good foundation to build upon, and I have always contended that the study of the old masters is essential if an artist is to ITALIAN ART 141 amount to anything. It is the fashion nowadays to despise the old masters; but just as in literature it is essential to have read the classics, so in art we must study those who have gone before, if we are to learn the great principles of art, and not flounder around in a sea of eccentricities. CHAPTER VIII A WALKING TOUR IN THE ALPS After a delightful stay of some time at Cadenabbia, my uncle and I departed for Geneva by way of Milan, Turin, and the Mont Cenis. The Mont Cenis Tunnel had not then been completed, and we were taken over the mountain on some kind of improvised cog railroad, the first of its kind, I believe, to be con- structed. I had agreed to meet a friend of my own age at Geneva on July 4th for a walking and climbing tour in Switzerland. This friend, Mr. Frederic Crownln- shield, had been a great athlete at Harvard and the stroke of the "varsity" crew; afterward he became an artist like myself, and it is possible that my example may have influenced him. At that time, however, I do not think he had any idea of such a thing. We started our tour by going part-way to Cham- onix by diligence and then walking the last part when it became interesting. I remember how we rejoiced, as we walked up through the pine woods, at the deli- cious scent of the pines, which reminded us of home, the freshness of the mountain air, and the cool rush- ing river tumbling down by the side of the road; then FREDERIC CROWNINSHIELD AND E. W. L. ON WALKING-TRIP A WALKING TOUR IN THE ALPS 143 that first glimpse of snowclad mountain-tops seen through the trees, and finally that wonderful valley of Chamonix surrounded with towering peaks, and above all the great mass of Mont Blanc. I will not weary the reader with descriptions of all that we did and saw. To begin with, we had to get into training after our long stay in cities, so we did the usual excursions to limber up our muscles. Our most ambitious excursion was to the "Jardin" far up on the Mer-de-Glace — a fatiguing, but not dan- gerous trip. It was our first experience of glacier- climbing, and most interesting, and the crossing of crevasses and climbing among seracs was sometimes exciting. We had the ambition, when we got into con- dition, of making the ascent of Mont Blanc, but found the expense of guides and porters beyond our slender means, and I think it as well we did not attempt it, with our slight experience. The valley of Chamonix is, I think, rather disap- pointing from a pictorial point of view. It is too nar- row and the sides too steep to get a good view of the mountains on either side. The top of Mont Blanc can scarcely be seen or its height judged. Not till you view it from the opposite side of the valley, from the Brevant, does its true majesty appear. That was our first stiff climb, and we were rather proud of it. I have been there since and do not think now that it 144 RANDOM MEMORIES was much to be proud of; but we were young and It was our first real mountain. We had sent our heavy luggage from Geneva to Vevey, and I carried only a satchel over my shoulder, containing toilet articles, a pair of slippers, a change of underclothes, and extra socks; no overcoat or umbrella, only an alpenstock. Mr. Crowninshield had a knapsack with much the same contents. So equipped, we went one afternoon from Chamonix to Armentieres to pass the night, and the next day walked to Martigny by way of the Tete-Noire, arriv- ing in time for lunch. Mr. Crowninshield, who was always for pushing on, was not contented with this, but insisted on get- ting for the night to Chambery, up a little valley off the Rhone valley at the foot of the Dent du Midi, which he had designs upon for the following morning. It was rather too long a trip, and we reached Cham- bery quite exhausted. However, after a night's rest, we were off for the mountain at an early hour, none the worse. It Is rather a stiff climb, and we ran Into a snowstorm at the top, so we got no view, but we did it In record time, which seemed the main thing with my friend. Unfortunately, Mr. C. sprained his ankle coming down, so we had to go to Vevey, where his mother and other friends were, till he got well enough to start off again. It was not a bad sprain, so A WALKING TOUR IN THE ALPS 14S in a week we took a carriage with my uncle, who had joined us again, and drove up the Rhone valley to Visp. It was a very hot and dusty drive and unin- teresting, and we did well not to walk it. From Visp by starting early we were able to walk up to Zermatt in one day. There was no railroad then, and only a bridle-path. Most people went on mules, but it was a rather precarious path in those days and several accidents occurred. I shall never forget that first view of the Matterhom, peeping over the shoul- der of the mountain ; how it cheered our flagging spir- its and gave new vigor to our tired limbs. There is no mountain that affects the imagination like the Mat- terhorn; it is so grand standing up alone to defy the elements, and so many lives have been lost in scaling its frowning precipices. Only the year before, in 1865, I think, had it first been conquered by Whymper and his party, and had taken its revenge in the loss on the way down of most of them. It has now been made much easier of ascent by ropes and irons in places; but still it exacts its toll of lives occasionally. We looked at it longingly, but had no notion of attempt- ing so dangerous an experiment. Indeed, I think just then it would have been difficult to get guides who would go, as after the terrible accident of the year before they seemed to have a superstitious dread of it. 146 RANDOM MEMORIES From Zermatt we climbed up to the RifFel Inn, in- tending to stay there several days and make excur- sions from there, having secured two reliable guides for that purpose. We did not count going up to the Corner Grat as any sort of excursion, but enjoyed that wonderful view all the same. You seem there to be right in the heart of the mountains, and it would be hard to find any view in Switzerland to equal it that can be reached so easily. Our first real excursion was to the Cima di Jazzi, a rather long walk over the Corner Clacier to a moun- tain where you can look down into Italy, thousands of feet below, and where if you are not careful you might fall equally far, if you went too near the edge, where the snow forms a cornice at the top of the precipice on the Italian side. This was a sort of breather. The next morning we started before sunrise to make the ascent of Monte Rosa. I confess to disliking very much to be called in the dark at three in the morning, when your courage is at the lowest, and you say to yourself what a fool you are to have agreed to any such idiotic performance. You shiver in your thin clothes in the cold dining-room, where you are served with a hunk of tough bread and bad coffee by candlelight, and you don't care whether school keeps or not. You stumble up the first slopes, by the uncertain light of A WALKING TOUR IN THE ALPS 147 a lantern held by the guide, who seems to be in an unnecessary hurry. You feel so tired, and your feet so heavy from the climb of the day before, that it Is folly to think you can ever hold out to get up any sort of a mountain, much less one of fifteen thousand feet or more. Then suddenly — "Oh, grand and glorious feeling" — you see the guide put down the lantern, and you see the daylight gradually spread, and one peak after another touched with rose; and then over the brow of the rise ahead suddenly pops the sun, and all your woes are forgotten, your legs seem to regain strength, and you feel like shouting aloud in your joy, only you want all your breath to keep up with the guide who is stalking ahead. The reason for starting so early is to get on the snow or the glacier before the rays of the sun begin to melt it. The sun is surprisingly hot in the rarefied atmos- phere of those heights, and it is necessary to wear goggles to protect the eyes from the glare of the snow, w'hich, as you climb, is brought nearer to the eyes than in ordinary winter walks over snowfields. On this particular morning we had quite a climb up to the shoulder overlooking the Corner Glacier and then down to the glacier itself; so far it was the same route we had followed in going to the Cima di Jazzi. We now were roped before crossing the glacier, which, though quite level and easy to travel, has treacherous 148 RANDOM MEMORIES crevasses filled with snow, where by an incautious step one might fall through. Climbers are roped so that if one or two should fall into a crevasse, the others can pull them out. First goes the principal guide, who shows the way and cuts steps in the steep slopes or pinnacles of ice on the glaciers; these steps are not very deep, just enough to give you toe-hold, as step- cutting is very fatiguing work; then at the distance of about fifteen feet comes the second man, attached to the first by the rope and holding it by his left hand, so as to be ready to give a pull if necessary; then at the same distance behind comes usually the second guide; and so on according to the size of the party. It will be seen by this that if any one falls, the others are in- stantly ready to pull him up. It is obvious that it is very dangerous for a party of less than three to climb because one man is usually not strong enough un- aided to pull another out of a crevasse. After crossing the glacier, we stopped for a little at the rocks at the foot of Monte Rosa for some re- freshment, and then began the toilsome ascent over snowfields toward the summit. It was a beautiful clear morning and our spirits were high, but already, to one with an observant eye, could be seen little feathers of cloud collecting on the two peaks of Monte Rosa and on the summit of the Lyskamm. Probably the guides knew from these signs that a south wind A WALKING TOUR IN THE ALPS 149 was blowing up there, and that we should never reach the top of the mountain, but they did not wish to lose their fee for making the ascent, which they could hardly claim if we turned back thus early. More and more the clouds gathered, and when we were still an hour from the summit it became evident that it was useless to go on, as it was beginning to snow and the view was obscured, so reluctantly we turned back and raced for our lives down the moun- tain, as the snow soon became so thick that we could see only a few yards ahead, and without a clever guide we should have easily lost our way, and probably have perished as so many others have done in similar circumstances. The snow had obliterated our tracks coming up, and we plunged in places nearly up to our waists in the softened snow. Still we raced on; at one point Mr. Crowninshield disappeared up to his arm- pits in a crevasse, but was jerked out, as you would jerk a fish from the water, with hardly a pause. At last we got below the storm and safely back to the hotel, where we went to bed while our clothes were being dried. The next morning it was very cold and the ground around the hotel was covered with snow, so we de- cided to descend to Zermatt and, as the weather seemed so bad, to go the next day down the valley to Visp. That night, however, it cleared off, and we were I50 RANDOM MEMORIES waked at an early hour by the guide, who said it would be a good day to ascend the Breithorn, which we had hoped to do, but had given up. People going up the Breithorn usually sleep at the Theodule hut, to save the long climb up from Zermatt; but as we had not done so, we had to take that tedious climb first, and were glad when we reached the hut to rest a moment, and refresh ourselves with some mulled wine that the woman there made for us. Some Germans had slept at the hut, and on that account we were glad we had not, as it might have been crowded and unpleasant. The Germans had already started when we got there, but were going slowly and we passed them be- fore long, as my companion was always anxious to see how quickly we could do a thing and was bent on making a record every time; which seemed to me un- necessary, but I was not to be outdone. We got to the top long before the Germans and sat on the rounded summit enjoying that wonderful view. The day was perfect and very clear after the storm, and we were surrounded by those towering peaks clothed in fresh-fallen snow, dazzling in its bright- ness — Monte Rosa, the Lyskamm, the Moins, and close at hand the Matterhorn raising its great bulk into the blue heavens. A little farther oif were the Dent Blanche, the beautiful Weisshom, and other peaks, and far down at the end of the valley rose the A WALKING TOUR IN THE ALPS 151 Bernese Oberland, with the Jungfrau Hfting Itself above the rest. Then far to the south we could just see Mont Blanc slightly yellow in the haze. We sat there a long time entranced; till the Germans' arrival drove us away. Two very happy but tired young men reached Zermatt again in the afternoon and felt they had made up for the disappointment of Monte Rosa. The next day we went down the valley to Visp, and on following days to the Rhone Glacier, doing the Eggeshorn on the way. My father has described the Rhone Glacier as "a gauntlet of ice, which centuries ago. Winter, the King of these mountains, threw down In defiance to the Sun." In those days it did resem- ble a giant's glove, lying with the palm down, and reaching almost down to where the hotel stood. The cold breath of the giant seemed to fill the valley and freeze one's bones. It was about the coldest place in Switzerland. Now the giant hand has been with- drawn and gradually the sun, which took up the chal- lenge, has conquered ; and like other glaciers in Swit- zerland it has shrunk to half its size, and has become a withered hand impotent to do evil. The next morning bright and early we scaled the heights to the Grimsel Pass, and, passing the Hospice, above its gloomy lake, wended our way down the beautiful Hash Thai, stopping for lunch at the Han- degg Falls, where two falls join, reminding one some- 152 RANDOM MEMORIES what of when French waiters pour your cafe-au-lait from two pots at once, making a delicious foam in your cup. We reached Meiringen late in the after- noon, making a very long day, but when you are young you recuperate quickly, and by the next morning we started quite fresh for Interlaken over the Great Scheidegg, by way of Grindelwald. It is a good thirty miles, with a stiff climb up to the Scheidegg, but we were in splendid condition by that time and came into Interlaken at a rattling pace. We were two rather disreputable-looking youngsters and hardly thought the lordly porter at the Victoria would admit us, but they are used to that sort of thing in Switzerland and very grateful did we find a good bed and bath after our long tramp. The next day we joined Mr. Crowninshield's mother at a pension near by, where my uncle also came. My uncle and I took much pleasure in hunting up the places in Interlaken mentioned in "Hyperion": the Hotel des Alpes where the Ashburtons were stopping, the cloister where Paul Flemming had his quarters, and the ruined castle of Unspunnen where heunsuccessfullyplied his suit to Mary Ashburton. As a is well known,the heroine of "Hyperion," the romance written by my father before his second marriage, was supposed to be his future wife, and he may have writ- ten the book hoping thereby to forward his courtship. I A WALKING TOUR IN THE ALPS 153 The beauty of Switzerland is in its lovely lakes and charming valleys, but above all, in the contrast be- tween the luxuriousness of its vegetation and the wonderful snow mountains lifting their white purity into the blue sky. The Yosemite is grander and its vegetation wilder than the valley of Lauterbrunnen; but it does not have the beautiful Jungf rau, the Monch, and the Eiger rising up above its towering cliffs ; if it had it would be the most wonderful place in the world. It is always the snow mountains of Switzerland that give the added touch to all its loveliness, and stim- ulate the imagination. As you approach by way of Berne, there in the distance is that mysterious line of silver crests, and you instantly feel that you must get nearer to them. At Thun, across the beautiful lake with its translucent green water, they rise still nearer; and at Interlaken it seems as if the mountains had been kept by some gigantic hand to form a frame- work for the Jungfrau, so perfectly is it placed in the picture. Interlaken, with its surrounding lakes, val- leys, and snow mountains, is certainly the beauty spot of Switzerland. We lingered there several weeks, staying at Miirren above Lauterbrunnen a long time. There it seems as if you could almost touch the opposite mountams across the narrow valley. There is no place where the afterglow on those snowclad heights can be seen to 154 RANDOM MEMORIES better advantage: that wonderful pink glow that comes after the sun has set, and that gradually fades till a grey hue, as of death, overspreads their glowing foreheads and leaves them cold and lifeless. We climbed the Schilthom, Mr. Crowninshield and I ; we crossed the Wengemalp ; we went up the Faul- hom, but got no view; we visited glaciers; in short, we did almost all the things we ought to do, and, being young, we had a glorious time. We wound up by walking to Lucerne, where we parted. So came to an end our walking tour. My uncle and I took carriage up to Andermatt and then, by the Vorder Rhein and the Spliigen, descended into Italy again, only to leave it by Stelvio Pass ; or rather we tried to cross the pass, but at the top we found Italian and Austrian sentinels pacing to and fro within a few feet of each other. The war was over; but the peace had not yet been signed, so they would not let us pass. A very polite Italian officer told us, if we would go back a little way, there was a path leading into a comer of Switzerland and from there we could cross into the Tyrol without any trouble. This seemed an ingenious way of whipping the devil around the stump, so with the help of a man to carry our luggage, we got into Austria in that way. We arrived at \Ieran without further difficulty and found the grape cure in full swing. It was amusing to A WALKING TOUR IN THE ALPS 155 see the amount of grapes those fat Germans would tuck away. What the cure is for, I have forgotten, or if it still goes on there. From ]Meran we drove by way of Landeck to Inns- bruck and Munich and so to Salzburg and the Salz- kammergut and then to Vienna. The war that was won by Germany in one battle was now over and peace signed, and Vienna was as gay and apparently as unconcerned as if she had not been terribly humiliated. Italy, which had never been able to stand up against the Austrians unassisted, had been handed Venezia by Germany for her rather inglorious participation in the war. I was somewhat disappointed in the galleries in Vienna; there were few pictures of the first class, it seemed to me. We then went to Prague, that picturesque city with its beautiful bridge, and so on to Dresden, where we revelled in that wonderful gallery, certainly one of the finest in Europe. The Sistine Madonna in its room to itself cannot but impress one profoundly. As a rule I do not care much for Raphael's Madonnas; they seem to me too sweet and sentimental; but the Sistine Madonna is different; there is a mysterious look in her eyes as if she were looking into the future and saw what was before the rather farouche infant in her arms. 156 RANDOM MEMORIES While at Dresden we saw one day a wonderful sight; that was the Grenadiers of the German Guard, in their silver helmets with the golden eagle on top and their shining breastplates, crossing the bridge on their return from the war. Some of their breastplates bore the marks of conflict and they certainly made a magnificent picture. We then went to Holland to study the Dutch school, and the wonderful Rembrandts confirmed the admiration for that painter which I had formed in Paris. The smaller Dutch masters of the genre school never interested me very much, with the exception of Vermeer, and the much-vaunted Paul Potter's bull not at all. It seems to me a sign of a small mind, to find delight in the depicting of flies on a cow's back. My uncle was now going back to America, and I had to make up my mind whether I should accom- pany him. It had been my intention to stay abroad another year or perhaps two, either in Rome or in Paris, to continue my studies, as I felt that I needed a great deal more work in the technique of my profes- sion and that I had hardly begun to paint at all. It was a great mistake on my part that I did not do so, but I was rather homesick at the idea of being de- serted by my travelling companion. My father was writing for me to come home, and most potent of all A WALKING TOUR IN THE ALPS 157 was the desire to see again a certain person of the opposite sex. So, very foolishly, I gave way to my weakness, and after a short stay in Paris we sailed from Brest in a French steamer for home some time in October. So ended, much too soon, my study of art abroad. Judge not thy friend, until thou standest in his place." CHAPTER IX LIFE AT HOME AND ABROAD Perhaps it was fitting that I returned in time for my twenty-first birthday, but as I was not a prodigal, no fatted calf was slaughtered for my benefit. I don't care much for veal anyway. There are two kinds of people in this world, those that are naturally saving and those that are prodigal. The latter have much the best of it, for not only do they enjoy the things they have spent their money for, but they usually end by spending the other fellow's money also. It used to be considered a virtue to work hard and save money for one's children so that they might be better off if possible. Now to exercise thrift and save money is held to be a crime, for as soon as you have money in the bank you become that hated thing, a capitalist, with every man's hand against you. They have reversed the Biblical saying, "He that hath, to him shall be given," and now say that what little he hath shall be taken away from him. Instead of being allowed to leave his hard-earned savings to his wife and children, the State steps in and claims a generous share, on the ground apparently that those who are LIFE AT HOME AND ABROAD 159 incompetent or too lazy to work should be supported by the Industrious. When our forefathers came to this country, they found it a wilderness ; by the sweat of their brows, and at the risk of their lives in many cases, they reclaimed the land, and it is right that their descendants should enjoy the fruits thereof. Now come a horde of for- eigners who have not been able to make a living in their own country, and say calmly that the land be- longs to them equally and it should be divided up amongst them. Was ever anything so preposterous? There is some excuse abroad, where land has been monopolized by the few, and given in olden times in large tracts to some favorite of a king, or divided up by a conquerer among his followers; but in this coun- try, where every man has worked for what he owns, or at least his ancestors have, the socialists, so it seems to me, have not a leg to stand on. There should be no ground for socialism in this country. Almost every millionaire that you can think of began as a poor boy. If every lazy or incompetent man had had their brains, he might have done the same. In a country where a boot-black or a newsboy may become a multimil- lionaire, there is no excuse to talk about the oppres- sion of labor by capital. Our legislators are so weak, and so anxious for votes, that they truckle to the lowest elements. All i6o RANDOM MEMORIES these inheritance and income taxes are just so much discouragement to thrift. Why should any one save, if it is to be taken away from him? Hence this riot of extravagance. During the Civil War our merchant marine was destroyed, with the gleeful assistance of England. It is true she had to pay a matter of fifteen millions for the privilege; but what was that, in spite of the row they made about it, in comparison to getting rid of a dangerous rival f After the war capital was earning so much in other enterprises that it did not pay to put it into reviving shipping, unless with a liberal sub- sidy from the Government; this the legislators from the South and West refused to give. The South had been built up after the war with Eastern capital, and although the West had been developed by subsidies in the form of land grants to the railroads, which had been built with Eastern money, the Congressmen from these regions held up their hands in horror at the word subsidy for the Eastern shipping interests. The short-sightedness of this policy became apparent when the World War came and we had no ships. The farmers and planters were perfectly indifferent as to who carried their produce abroad as long as it was done cheaply; but when the war came, they set up a howl because, owing to their own folly, there were no ships to carry their goods. LIFE AT HOME AND ABROAD i6i For some reason I have been unable to fathom, legislators have a peculiar weakness for farmers. Al- though the unparalleled prosperity of the West re- sulted from the capital lent by the East or from its development, in the way of railroads and liberal loans, the Western farmers have had a constant desire to re- pudiate these debts. This manifested itself first in the greenback craze, then in the silver craze under the leadership of Bryan, whereby they hoped to have to pay only forty cents on the dollar, but afterwards in their unrelenting attacks on the railroads to which they really owed their existence. For years before the World War we have seen Congress and State legislators passing laws starving the railroads. The farmers and shippers seem to think that their produce ought to be carried for nothing, forgetting that cap- ital will not be invested without some return. All this seems self-evident, but books like the "Octopus" helped to inflame their minds, and an orgy of muck- raking was carried on in the press and magazines, the result being that when we needed transportation the most, when the war came, we found many of the railroads in receivers' hands, and the others handicapped by poor equipment, owing to want of funds. The Government then took over the rail- roads, as we know, and proceeded to do exactly what it had forbidden them to do before, that is, 1 62 RANDOM MEMORIES to consolidate competing lines. The New York, New Haven & Hartford had been hounded to death be- cause its directors had wished to bring all New Eng- land into one system, and now the Government found they had to do just that one thing. What fools we mortals be! All this seems to have little connection with what I have been writing about; but in the autumn of 1866 I came of age and received my portion of my mother's fortune, and therefore became a capitalist in a small way. The money that came to my mother had been earned by hard work by my grandfather, who came to Boston a poor boy, and it seems to me only just that it should be passed on to his descendants. A capitalist is not a wicked person; he does not lock up his gains, but, like a bank, he lends it to different enterprises to pay wages of workers, or to buy the things that others make, thereby supporting people who otherwise would starve for want of a market. When will the laboring people learn that they cannot get on without capital f Some employers undoubtedly do treat their workers unjustly, also some workers equally make unjust demands, which the business cannot grant and pay any return. The trouble is that labor, while demanding its share of the profits, is not willing to bear its share of the losses. Instead of put- ting its shoulder to the wheel and helping, labor is too LIFE AT HOME AND ABROAD 163 apt to put a drag on, by demanding shorter hours and less production, and at the same time more pay. How can any business be carried on under those circum- stances? It seems impossible to get it into the heads of the workers that the capital that makes their work possible cannot be had without some return to the capitalist. Enough of this — perhaps too much ! In the autumn of 1866, 1 took a studio in the Studio Building on Tre- mont Street. There I had as neighbors Appleton Brown, the charming landscape painter, a pupil of Lambinet; Porter, the portrait-painter; Innes, and others. Innes, whose pictures now bring such huge prices, could hardly sell his productions, but a man named Williams, who brought home some quite un- important figure subjects from Rome, sold his like hot cakes; such is the want of knowledge or taste on the part of the public. It will be noticed that I had had very little real In- struction In drawing, and none at all in painting. I therefore set myself to learn to paint with such hints as I could get from other artists. I had many hours of discouragement and despair, when paint or brushes would not behave themselves and frightful daubs re- sulted. I tried to get Mr. Hunt to help me, but he declined to interest himself in my work, and Indeed never even i64 RANDOM MEMORIES came to my studio all the time I painted In Boston, except once when he came to my door to ask the ad- dress of another artist. Gradually I began to master my materials, and If by some happy chance a picture turned out well, I was encouraged. That Is an artist's life, between ex- hilaration at success and despair at failure, and never quite satisfied. It is so hard to judge of one's own work. I went much into society in that winter, and was one of the good dancers at a time when dancing reached a perfection In Boston that It never has since. The grace and smoothness of the waltz evolved at that time has never been equalled elsewhere; the fee- ble imitation known as the "Boston" was carried far and wide, but seldom came up to the original. The present one-step, or walk, or wiggle. Is the negation of all grace or beauty. In the spring I became engaged to be married, and in the summer I devoted myself to landscape painting without any more instruction than a close study of nature could afford. In that summer I had my first order for a painting, from John Taylor Johnston, who had at that time one of the finest collections In New York. I felt much honored, but I knew, of course, that it was out of the kindness of his heart and to en- courage a young painter, rather than through any LIFE AT HOME AND ABROAD 165 merit in the painting, which was of the willow road at Nahant and poor enough. Of course, at that time, like all beginners, I sacri- ficed all the members of my family in the way of por- traits or attempted portraits, generally failures; for one's relations have to take the place of the proverbial dog on which things are tried. I worked hard all the following winter, and in May I was married, and, with my father, my two sisters, two aunts, and two uncles, we sailed for Europe in June, 1868. Such a large party found it hard always to find accommodations, so that my wife and I often went off on little jaunts by ourselves. I remember at the Peacock Inn at Rowsley our party so completely filled the little place that nobody else could get in, much to the disgust of some English people, who loudly proclaimed their contempt for American tour- ists. My father received much attention and hospitality in different parts of England and often went with my two sisters to visit, where the rest of us were naturally not expected. He received degrees from both Cam- bridge and Oxford; at the latter, however, in the year following, when he advanced in the red robe pre- scribed, to receive his degree of LL.D., the under- graduates, who are no respecters of persons, called out, "Three cheers for the red man of the West." i66 RANDOM MEMORIES Queen Victoria sent for my father, and he went with Lady Stanley, the wife of Dean Stanley, to the Palace. They waited in a hall till the Queen came in ; my father was presented and they had a pleasant chat, then the Queen withdrew. It was not like some of the weird tales imaginative writers have conjured up. When we were in the Isle of Wight, we all went to see Tennyson. Some of us lunched with him, his wife, and his two boys. I do not remember quite who were of the party; but I do remember that my oldest sister, while the older people were apparently occupied In talking to Tennyson, took the opportunity of looking up a verse In a volume of my father's poems, rather ostentatiously displayed on a side table. There had been some discussion In the party as to Its exact word- ing. My father could not remember any better than the rest of us, and strange to say nobody had a copy of my father's poems with him. While my sister was looking up the passage, suddenly a gruif voice behind her said, "Don't you have enough of that at home.?" — and there stood Tennyson towering over her. He had probably put the volume there, and therefore knew what she was looking at. My poor sister was overcome with mortification, thinking Tennyson so absorbed that he could not have noticed what she was about. I also remember that Tennyson was very LIFE AT HOME AND ABROAD 167 rough to his boys at lunch for some fancied misde- meanor, and Mrs. Tennyson had that subdued air that comes of living with a bear. After lunch he took us to the flat roof of his house to see the view; while there he saw in a distant field a woman and a child running; I think myself they were running to avoid a cow in the field, but Tennyson would have it that they were running to get a glimpse of him, and dragged us down off the roof. He was quite morbid on the subject of sight-seers. Later he took us all out on the downs to the Needles. There is a narrow neck only about three feet wide and perhaps ten feet long that you can go out on, and look down upon the restless sea surging about the pointed rocks called the Needles. It was the only place where I ever felt dizzy, owing to the movement of the water below; I have been on the edge of preci-- pices In Switzerland and walked on the narrow walls of Egyptian temples, but never again have I felt what I felt then. I can appreciate how people get dizzy on only moderate heights, and others who can- not look down from a height without wishing to jump; but none of these things ever affected me. Tennyson also read to us from his poem of "Maud " in a curious sing-song voice that perhaps emphasized the rhythm, but was rather nasal and disagreeable. My father went there to dine, I think, and alto- N. i68 RANDOM MEMORIES gether I fancy Tennyson was uncommonly affable for him; it seemed to be part of his pose to be rather for- ward to strangers and went with his Spanish cloak and black slouch hat. The whole party stayed at the Hotel Langham, which was then new, while in London. Bierstadt, the artist, had one of the salons as his studio, and gave a large dinner to my father, asking many celebrities whom he did not even know. It was a great advertisement for him. My wife and I did not stay long at the Langham, but took lodging in Half Moon Street, where we could be by ourselves and enjoy a little domestic privacy. In so doing, however, we missed seeing many interesting people who came to see my father. There was one M.P. who used to come to see him at one in the morn- ing, having sent word from the House that he was coming so that my poor father had to sit up to receive him. My father at home always went to bed at ten, and it was hard for him to get used to the late Eng- lish hours. I don't suppose the M.P. thought it was anything unusual to call upon a person at that early — or late — -hour. My father and sisters went to Gad's Hill for a week-end with Dickens, and enjoyed their visit very much. After several weeks in London, my wife and I \ LIFE AT HOME AND ABROAD 169 crossed to France by way of Havre so as to enjoy the cathedral at Rouen, and to see friends in Paris. Then we went to Brussels and Antwerp, and through Hol- land, joining the rest of the party at Cologne, and all going up the Rhine together to Switzerland. There we spent the rest of the summer, returning to Paris in September. I took the opportunity while in Paris to go for a month for work in my old atelier in the rue de Leval, which was now under Bonnar. When I appeared, some of the men demanded that I be treated as a new man and pay an entrance fee, but to my surprise the massier declared that he remembered me perfectly and that I was an ancien and should pay nothing. I thought this very nice of him, as I could not remem- ber him at all, and it did not seem to me that there were any of the old crowd. There were several Ameri- cans there then, but I am not sure of their names now. I did not attempt to do anything but draw, as I did not feel expert enough in painting the figure be- fore all these cleverer men. I also while in Paris did some copying in the Louvre, and during our journey- ing I had made a good many water-color sketches, so that I had not been neglectful of my art. In November the whole party went to the Riviera and stayed for some weeks at Mentone, where I made many water-colors in company with my friend Mr. I70 RANDOM MEMORIES Crownlnshield, who was there with his wife, mother, and baby. We all took that lovely drive to Genoa, which was not then partially spoiled by the many railroad tunnels. When at Genoa we read in the paper of a wonderful eruption of Vesuvius that was taking place, so my wife and I and Mr. Appleton took a steamer directly down to Naples to see it. Alas, when we got there it was over. We all settled down in Rome, in the same house with the Frank Lees, of Boston, on the Capo le Case, where we had plenty of sun, an important considera- tion in Rome, where fire-wood is dear. There we passed a very happy winter, enjoying to the full all the ceremonials and services for Christmas, as also much gaiety among the English and American colony. One amusing incident occurred to my father and Mr. Appleton on one of these occasions. They were bidden to a reception at Mr. Hazeltine's. As they ascended the grand staircase of the place where he lived, they saw a number of people going into a door, and took it for granted it was Mr. Hazeltine's apart- ment, and so they entered with other guests. After leaving their coats and hats, they were ushered into a grand salon where a strange lady advanced to receive them. Perceiving strangers, she said in a very haughty and disagreeable manner, "I think you have made a mistake"; to which Mr. Appleton replied LIFE AT HOME AND ABROAD 171 with meaning, "We evidently have." Whereupon they withdrew and proceeded to the floor above, where Mr. Hazeltine lived. After they had gone, a gentleman who was there said to the irate hostess, "Do you know who that was you turned away.^* That was the poet Longfellow." Whereupon the lady threw up her hands in despair, and said, "Oh, dear! and I have been trying to meet him all winter." Which shows that it is as well to be polite since you may en- tertain angels unawares. I took a small studio for the winter opposite the side door of the Capuchin Monastery, where every day the poor used to stand to receive their daily dole. It was quite interesting to watch them, and I made a small sketch of the doorway and the beggars grouped about. There were always plenty of models in their pic- turesque costumes to be had, and I made quite a suc- cess with a quaint little fellow playing bowls, which is such a favorite game in Italy. A Mr. Lorlmer Gra- ham liked the picture so much that he got me to paint his little boy in the same Italian costume, sitting on some steps. I also had an order from Mr. Brimmer, of Boston, for a water-color of the Tritone Fountain, so that I felt fairly launched as a professional artist. I think that was about the last year of the Carni- val, and we took a balcony on the Corso for the three 172 RANDOM MEMORIES days It lasted. It was very gay and noisy, but I could not see much fun in throwing confetti made of lime in other people's faces, so that they had to wear masks to protect their eyes. Also the flowers which were thrown soon degenerated into bunches of sticks, cov- ered with mud from falling into the street. The horse-race also seemed to me poor sport. The horses were without riders and were goaded on by having thorns put under their harness, and by the shouts and blows of the bystanders. They were miserable speci- mens of horseflesh, anyway, and one poor brute fell in front of our balcony and was beaten and pummelled till he staggered up and on. There was a grand masked ball at the opera house to close the festivities and we had a box to look on. Two American girls that we knew went rather too far in their flirtation with an Italian prince, and I had to go down and rescue them just as they, as a lark, were going off for a ride with him. They did not know Ital- ian princes and I dread to think what might have happened to them. Liszt was in Rome that winter living in a convent at the side of the Forum. My father was taken to see him by Mr. Healy, the artist, who was a Catholic. They arrived at dusk, and Liszt opened the door him- self and stood at the head of the stairs, with a lighted candle held above his head. He made such a wonder- LIFE AT HOME AND ABROAD 173 ful picture with his tall figure and black soutane, that my father got Mr. Healy to paint a picture of him, which we have in the Craigie house. A few days later a number of us, at Liszt's invitation, went to hear him play. As he sat at the piano with his iron- grey hair brushed back and a rapt expression on his face, he was a striking object. His wonderful long fingers seemed to be able to produce any effect he wished with slight effort. I do not remember what he played, but I think it was mostly improvisation, and wonderful tones he produced, now low, now crashing chords, and again noble harmonies. He seemed very proud of his piano, which was a Chickering grand that had been presented to him. Suddenly he ended with a bang and, turning to the ladies, said, "Now, I will play something for the ladies," as if he thought they could not appreciate his magnificent perform- ance. He then played something trivial, which was not after all a great compliment to them. Besides the picture of Liszt, Healy painted, as I have mentioned before, a life-size portrait of my father and my sister Edith, and a small picture with them both standing beneath the Arch of Titus. When the rest of the party left Rome for Florence, my wife and I stayed behind in order to help Mr. Crowninshield get away, who with his family had also been passing the winter in Rome; he had been very 174 RANDOM MEMORIES sick with Roman fever. He was so weak that when we got him on the train he cried Hke a baby from ex- haustion. It was a rather disastrous delay, because when we reached Florence I myself was taken with the same fever, and was sick there for a month. Finally, in spite of the English doctor's wishes, we, with the whole party, went to Venice and later to Cadenab- bla, where I finally got back my strength. After another trip through Switzerland and Ger- many with some members of my wife's family, we re- turned to America late in the fall of 1869. I then took a studio in Boston and set about build- ing a house nearly opposite my father's, my wife and I in the meantime staying with him. I worked at my profession steadily until 1876, with the exception of a few months' absence in the summer of 1872, when I made a sketching trip to Switzerland, the Italian lakes, and the Tyrol. I painted some portraits, but mostly figure pieces and landscapes. In the winter of 1876 I felt the need of more in- struction in the figure and determined to go abroad and study with Couture, whose work I greatly ad- mired. Before going I had an exhibition and sale of over a hundred pictures I had painted In the preced- ing years. The sale was very successful and I reali2ied nearly eight thousand dollars. LIFE AT HOME AND ABROAD 175 I had painted a large picture of Priscilla and John Alden walking on the beach against a sunset sky, which was much praised, but was not admitted to the Centennial Exhibition at Philadelphia of that year, because, as I was aware, the figures were not as good as they should have been. However, at the instance of some friends it was sent on to Philadelphia and hung In the Massachusetts Building, where many people saw it. One artist of eminence later told me that he used to go often to look at It, and it in- spired him to become an artist himself, so the pic- ture was not painted In vain. But a realization of the weakness of the figure-painting in it Induced me to go again abroad to try and do better. I after- wards destroyed the picture, I was so dissatisfied with It. A picture of mine of an old mill at Manchester, Massachusetts, was, however, accepted for the Ex- hibition and hung on the line, so I was in a measure consoled. This picture also I destroyed, I now think foolishly. It seemed to me on my return from Europe too dark. In that spring, before leaving for Europe, I painted a portrait of my father which the family think the best portrait of him ever taken. It now stands on an easel in his study. I am not very pleased with It myself, and think the one I painted on a commis- 176 RANDOM MEMORIES sion for Bowdoin College after studying with Couture better. After spending some time at the Exhibition In Philadelphia, my wife and I and a cousin sailed for France to devote myself to work with Couture. CHAPTER X REMINISCENCES OF THOMAS COUTURE It was a beautiful day in the middle of July, 1876, when we glided out of the Gare du Nord, in Paris, on our way to see Thomas Couture, at the little village where for many years he passed the summer months in the seclusion of the country. We descended, after about half an hour's ride, at the little station of Villiers-le-Bel, which seemed stranded in the open fields, as no village was in sight. We began to fear that we too were stranded, and had perhaps been left at the wrong station. However, fol- lowing the few people who, like ourselves, had been spilled, as it were, by the now fast-vanishing train, we passed through the station, and found, drawn up in the shade, an old dusty omnibus, with two sturdy Normandy horses attached. We were assured by a worthy in a blouse, and with a very thick and almost unintelligible patois, that this would conduct us to our destination, the village of Villiers-le-Bel itself, and that he would have the honor to drive us. With a great cracking of the whip we were soon off at a good pace, over a well-macadamized road which led straight out into the country, and the little station 178 RANDOM MEMORIES was left deserted and quiet till the arrival of the next train. Before us stretched the broad, dusty road, and on either hand, with no fence between, were spread the fields of fast-ripening grain, waving and rippling in the breeze; the great red poppies blazed in the sun, and the whole air was musical with the larks soaring far up in the blue sky. How strange it all seemed, and yet how familiar! At every step one was reminded of pictures by Lambinet and Rousseau, Troyon and Daubigny, but Lambinet more than the others; for he it is who has made this part of France peculiarly his own, as Rousseau the Forest of Fontainebleau aTid Daubigny the river Oise. When, at one point, we passed some peasants at their noonday meal under the shadow of their cart, which was tipped up with its shafts in the air, while the good horse, with harness off, browsed hard by, "Ah," I involuntarily thought, "what a perfect Millet!" So it is that the familiarity bom of books and pictures gives an added charm to travel. Aside from this, the landscape in Normandy has a special grace of its own. The gently flowing lines of the hills, and the wide stretch of level plain, without fence or bound to break the view, the little hamlets scattered here and there, and the groups of graceful trees, which from the custom of trimming the lower THOMAS COUTURE 179 branches for firewood lift themselves against the soft skies with peculiar character in their silhouettes, all lend themselves ready-made to the artist's hand. In the atmosphere full of moisture from the English Channel, the distance melts away in a soft haze, and there is never that knock-down aspect of things, near or remote, with which we are so familiar in New Eng- land. After a twenty minutes' drive across the level plain, we reached the outskirts of the village, nestled among its trees at the foot, and running up the slope, of the hill of Ecouen. As we rattled up its little nar- row paved street, amid a salvo from the driver's whip, which echoed and reechoed from the grey houses on either hand like a very successful Fourth- of-July celebration, loungers came out from doors, and fresh faces, framed in white caps, peeped at us from upper windows, to give and receive voluble sal- lies from our blue-bloused driver, who was evidently in high favor with his townsfolk. At length we reached the little square in the middle of the village and drew up in front of the Bureau de Poste. Here we alighted and looked about us. On one side of the square rose the little Gothic church, with its spire terminating in a ridge. The in- side, unhappily, has been spoiled by a thick coat of whitewash, but the outside is quite picturesque, and, i8o RANDOM MEMORIES dominating as it does the little hamlet, is an attractive object from many points in the surrounding country, and has often figured in pictures by French and Amer- ican artists. With the assistance of an old gentleman with a wheelbarrow, on which were deposited our few impedimenta, we set out for the inn, along one of the streets leading from the square. The streets of Vil- liers, as in other French country towns, are all paved with large square blocks of stone; the houses abut directly on the street, and the sidewalk, where there is any, is also paved, and so narrow that in places it is quite lost, where some obtrusive house elbows its way out of the general line. The gutter is often in the middle of the street and answers for a drain as well. Being open to the air, gases have no chance to accumulate; and although you are sometimes greeted by unpleasant odors, no fevers are the result. The inn proved to be also a pastry cook's. The landlord was the cook, and was rarely seen out of his well-ordered kitchen, while his wife sat all day in the shop, with her knitting, and demanding exorbitant prices for the very sweet but generally flavorless con- fitures in which the French delight. No well-regulated French household ever makes its own puddings or pies, but sends for them to the patisserie, which there- fore exercises an important function. In the meantime the hotel part of the establish- THOMAS COUTURE i8i ment was expected to run itself, with such help as it could get from the much-put-upon man-of-all-work, who did everything, from making the beds to wash- ing out the courtyard. The natural result was that between overwork and Madame's temper, which was none of the best, the poor gar^on generally left at the end of his first month, to be succeeded by another un- fortunate. He in turn would be summoned from his bed-making by the shrill voice of Madame in the courtyard below, to attend to some newly arrived guest, only to be scolded back again because his rooms were not done. We entered the inn through the large green doors of the paved courtyard, and after paying our aged conductor waited patiently for the clanging of the great bell, which he had set ringing, to subside. We decided to postpone the inspection of rooms for the more pressing demands of hunger; and so expressed ourselves to the for once smiling landlady. At her suggestion, a table was spread for us in what was called by the somewhat misleading name of bosquet, a sort of arbor running along one side of the courtyard, and composed of straggling vines on espaliers, and sickly creepers running up the high wall that enclosed the court on that side. The other three sides were oc- cupied by the house, under which, in one part, was the stable. We felt that now we were indeed in Bo- 1 82 RANDOM MEMORIES hernia, and our al fresco repast was none the less en- joyable from the fact that the beefsteak was tough and the vin ordinaire very ordinaire. Omelettes and bread are always good in France, and we found no exception here, while later we learned that our landlord had a very good vintage of Beaune, if we chose to pay for it. Our meal was shared by a cat and a dog, the former, however, only in imagination, as she dared not de- scend from her vantage-ground on the high wall. The dog was a large setter in the hobble-de-hoy stage of puppyhood, and had been christened "Stop" by an Italian artist at the hotel, with, I fear, rather vague ideas of English : something as the Japanese supposed '■ Come here" to be the English for dog, because their masters used that phrase in calling to them. Stop, this particular dog certainly never did, but went tumbling over everything; getting between the waiter's legs, and causing no end of mischief, but all in such a good-natured way that the vituperations with which he was greeted usually ended in caresses. After lunch, while the ladies installed themselves in such rooms as we were able to make up our minds to accept, I determined to take the bull by the horns and pay my visit to Couture, to get his consent to give me some instruction. I had often heard him described as a man with a very bad temper and brusque manners, THOMAS COUTURE 183 and I feared my imperfect command of the French language might lead me to say something to rouse his ire, as what may be quite polite in one language is very often rude in another. Besides, he had for many years refused to take pupils, properly so called, and had only recently made exception in favor of some American ladies. Whether he would take a male into his harem seemed quite doubtful, and indeed he re- fused, while I was there, to take some Frenchmen as pupils, though after my advent admitting other Amer- icans and an Italian. It was therefore with trembling that I sought the abode of the great man. I was directed to a neighbor- ing street, where in a long, high wall, overhung by beautiful old trees, I found the large gate of his cha- teau as it was called. Beside this gate was a smaller one, with a grating in it about six inches square. I pulled the iron bell-rod that hung on one side, and immediately, as if both bell and dog had been at- tached to the same cord, there ensued a great jangling and barking. Inside I heard the clack, clack, of wooden shoes coming across a paved court; the slide behind the little grating was pushed back, and an old woman in a Bretonne cap peered out at me. The dog, meanwhile, having been partially suppressed, kept up a muttered protest. "Dear me," I said to myself, "this is indeed a Blue Beard's castle"; and the dog, 1 84 RANDOM MEMORIES who was still invisible, assumed to my imagination gigantic proportions. In response to my inquiry if M. Couture was at home, — my outward appearance being, I suppose, satisfactory, — I was greeted with a smiling ^'' Entrez, monsieur y"* and the drawing back of bolts and opening of the little gate. Somewhat reas- sured by the smiles of the old lady, and finding that the dog, although of evil countenance, was not so very large, I entered, and followed the Bretonne cap and wooden shoes across the court, that had once been laid out with some care, with flower-beds, and a foun- tain in the middle, but was now all in disorder, with a general tangle of weeds and grasses growing up be- tween the paving-stones. Bringing up the rear came the dog, a sort of mongrel mastiff, sniffing unpleas- antly near to my trouser-legs. Had I but known, as I very soon learned, that both dog and master were the most good-natured of creatures, instead of the bug- bears my imagination had painted them, I should not have felt so like a man going to his execution. Al- though I still marched on, my French, if not my cour- age, basely deserted me, and left me to stumble through the ensuing interv^iew as best I could, and then taunted me when safely back at the hotel with what I might have said, but did not. The Chateau Couture, more properly a maison de campagne, was a long, two-storied stuccoed building, without much THOMAS COUTURE 185 architectural pretence, like many another country- house in the suburbs of Paris. It rested so low on the ground that one step carried you into its front door, or through its long French windows. I was ushered into a room on the left of the entrance, used, I after- wards learned, as the dining-room; catching on the way, through the door opposite, a glimpse of the kitchen, with its large, old-fashioned fireplace and bright array of copper saucepans, evidently the pride of the Bretonne cap. Knowing that mine host had a weakness for Americans as more liberal patrons of art than his own countrymen had proved to be, to him at least, I took care to impress on the good dame that it was an American who wished to see monsieur. It was an even chance whether the disappointment of finding that I was not a rich American amateur would not counterbalance the supposed advantage of my nationality; but I hoped for an amiable recep- tion before he found that out. Nor was I mistaken. Clack, clack, went the wooden shoes up the stone stairs, and clack, clack, they soon returned, to say that monsieur would im- mediately descend. The dog, all the while, had followed close at my heels, and stood guard to see that I did not run off with the family spoons. He had a bloodshot look in his eyes that boded no good to any such attempt, and 1 86 RANDOM IVlEMORIES fearing he might mistake my Western freedom for re- pubHcan Hcense, I sat as still as I could on the edge of mv chair. Presently, clack, clack, clack, another pair of wooden shoes came down the stairs, and there entered a short, stout man, in a broad-brimmed Panama hat, dressed in a crumpled suit of grey linen, and with black sabots on his feet. I rose as he entered, and the dog, after several violent blows with his tail against the table-leg that happened to be in the way of this customary salutation, laid himself down in the sun with a great flop and sigh of relief that his duties as policeman were over for the present. Couture — for it was he — extended to me a soft, pulpy, but small and white hand, and welcomed me .with much empressement. "Always charmed to see Americans. Had many American amateurs, who had bought his pictures," etc. Ah, I said to myself, I feared as much ! How shall I ever dare to undeceive him.^ Seeing my evident embarrassment in trjang to tj.- press myself intelligibly, with great tact he suggested that we should go for a walk in the park, as he called it. He rightly divined that a stroll round the grounds would be less formal than sitting up on chairs, and that I should be more at my ease in the open air. This eye to the main chance and extreme sensitiveness to THO^/IAS COUTURE 187 the feelings and motives of others, as well as to any supposed slight upon himself, I found to be among his strongest characteristics. His sharp little eyes read with wonderful insight the characters of his pupils; and although he under- stood not a word of English, we were often startled to find how quick he was to interpret some passing re- mark from one to another, v/hen we thought ourselves safe behind our foreign tongue, and his abrupt ^^ Com- ment?^'' would speedily bring us back to our good manners. Leading the way into the next room, Couture called my attention to some writing in charcoal on one of the panels of the white wainscoting that reached to the ceiling. At the time of the siege of Paris he had written here an appeal to the Prussians to spare his house and pictures, as the home of an artist well known in Europe, and some of whose paintings graced the walls of the galleries of Berlin. I wish I could remem- ber the exact words, they were so naive in their ego- tism, of which his having preser\'ed them to this day was another touch. This room, which was the principal salon, must have been nearly thirty feet long, and reached from side to side of the house, with long French windows on either hand, through one of which we passed to a terrace overlooking the park. The grounds had once 1 88 RANDOM MEMORIES been laid out with much skill, but Couture's dislike to spending money had allowed them to become over- grown and out of repair. A broad vista of fine trees led down to where the paved chaussee from Paris to Ecouen terminated the estate. By skilful planting, and the substitution of an iron paling for the high wall that elsewhere bordered the road, this was quite overlooked, and the eye was led on over smiling fields to the hills of Montmorency, four miles away. Thus the name of "park" did not seem altogether undeserved, although there could not have been over six acres in the whole place. As we wandered about among the trees and shrub- beries, I found little need of talking; my companion, it seemed, liked nothing better than to hold forth. With his arm drawn through mine, a favorite habit of his when walking with any one, he stumped along in his wooden shoes, and was the picture of good nature and bonhomie. A short and thick man, as I have said, with a great shock of iron-grey hair protruding from under his old straw hat; small but very bright eyes, set in a rather heavy and puffy face, of a pale and sal- low hue; nose large, with open and very sensitive nos- trils; clean-shaved, save for a heavy, drooping grey mustache, which concealed a large, sensuous mouth; finally, a receding chin, almost lost in a thick neck, suggestive of apoplexy, — not a handsome man, cer- THOMAS COUTURE THOMAS COUTURE 189 tainly. At the same time, despite his small stature, he gave you a sense of power that was unmistakable; there was a flash in his eyes that revealed the sacred fire, and you felt that he was no common man, as his outward aspect might lead you at first to imagine. He was ungraceful, but with a certain old-fashioned courtesy, especially with ladies, that made up for the want of polish that could hardly be expected from his origin. He often made fun of his awkwardness, and told amusing stories of going to receptions at the Tuileries in the days when he was in high favor with Napoleon ; of putting his feet through great ladies' trains, and committing other gaucheries, to the disgust of the more accomplished courtiers. I found him anything but the bear he had been de- picted, and, with the exception of extreme sensitive- ness to any imagined slight, the most good-natured of men ; very fond of telling stories, and quite willing to laugh at himself, but unwilling to be laughed at; very sure that he was the greatest painter living, and that all others were mere daubers, and very sore at the ill-treatment he fancied he had received at the hands of the French Government and artists ; in a word, a childlike nature within a rough exterior, but very lov- able. Driven into voluntary exile by the jealousy of other artists and intrigues in high places, for ten years I90 RANDOM MEMORIES he did not touch a brush. Living on the reputation made in his younger days, he could not consent to enter the arena a second time, and notwithstanding his love of money he was content to remain idle, un- less spurred on to do something by the importunity of buyers seeking him out. I never succeeded in get- ting at the rights of the case in his quarrel with the world. The ill-treatment, the slights cast upon him by other artists, and his breaking with the Government when in the midst of large commissions, because, as he alleged, he would not give a present to the Min- ister of Fine Arts for procuring him these orders, may have been in great part due to his oversensitive im- agination. To crown all, he rashly wrote a book. "Oh, that mine enemy had written a book!" All the art- world of Paris set up a howl, and its echoes still linger in the ateliers on either bank of the Seine. He retired to nurse his wrongs at Villiers-le-Bel, and so entirely did he become a thing of the past that most lovers of art, if they thought about him at all, thought of him as dead, and wondered why his great painting of "Les Romains de la Decadence" was not removed to the Louvre, as is the custom with works owned by the State after the artist has been dead ten years. What had the poor man done.'' He had written a slight sketch of his life, given an account of his method of THOMAS COUTURE 191 painting, and dared to criticise, but perhaps without sufficient prudence, the works of other painters. If he had had more worldly wisdom he would have held his tongue. The methode Couture has been a byword in the ate- liers of Paris ever since. Not that It was not a good- enough system in its way and as employed by him; but yet it was a difficult method to copy, especially when learned only from his book, and like a written constitution, the too exact formulation of ideas gave a chance for cavillers to find fault. To many, to paint by rule, and not by inspiration, seemed absurd. His system was either misunderstood or misapplied, and certainly has never been successfully held to by any of his pupils. Pupils of other men have been allowed to follow in the footsteps of their masters without dis- credit, but those of Couture have been pursued relent- lessly as long as any trace of the master's method has remained. Why this should be I cannot say. Why bitumen used by Couture is any more sinful than when used by others I do not know, but so it is. His great aim was freshness and purity of color, which he sought to get by mixing or stirring the colors together as little as possible, and by placing on the canvas the exact tint as nearly as he could hit it, and not disturbing it afterwards. Rather than disturb it, he preferred either 192 RANDOM MEMORIES to remove an unlucky touch with the palette knife and bread, or leave it till dry, and then repaint it. His great maxim was to make haste slowly. He used to say, "Give three minutes to looking at a thing, and one to painting it." "Make up your mind exactly what ought to be done, and then do it with rapidity and decision, as if it were the easiest thing in the world." "If a thing does not come right at first, do not fuss over it, but go to something else ; and, if necessary, come back to it later, when you will often find that it is not so bad, or at least is so unimportant in the general result as to be hardly worth doing over," — all of which maxims are most difficult to beginners. The great trouble with the mkhode Couture was that, like the battle-axe of Cceur de Lion, only the master could wield it. To get additional brilliancy, he liked to employ very long brushes that took up a great quantity of paint. This he applied in a single decisive touch with a peculiar movement of the hand, which none of us were ever able to imitate, and which left the paint all bristling and sparkling, like grass with the morning dew fresh upon it. He con- tended that when put on in this way and varnished, it would remain fresh forever, whereas the painting over and over resulted only in deadening the paint and turning it dark in time. Nevertheless, he was al- THOMAS COUTURE 193 ways ready, if a thing did not please him, either to scrape it out, or, when dry, to glaze it down and re- paint it, but always trying as far as possible to retain the brilliant qualities of a first painting. By this process of glazing and repainting he was able, contrary to the generally received opinion, to obtain, when he chose, the most minute finish. Many of his smaller pictures will bear witness to this, and it was only in his larger canvases that he left things in what might seem an incomplete state. He did not invariably work in the same way; but his usual method was to put in the shadows with a very little bitumen and light red mixed with a drying medium, then load the lights, and by the time the shadows had become a little sticky from drying, drag the proper colors into them, which gave a more trans- parent quality than painting them in more solidly would have done. In his drawing he insisted on style: every line should express character, and every line he ever drew was full of it. His careful study of the antique had made him an idealist; he could not be a servile copy- ist. With a few telling strokes he would express the whole essence of an object distilled through the alem- bic of his imagination. He was one of the last of the classical school, and had no sympathy with the grow- ing realism of the age, nor it with him. 194 RANDOM MEMORIES Alas for the man who is bom too late, or who out- lives his proper period ! He who is ahead of his time may come to be revered as a prophet, but he who is behind has no one so poor to do him reverence. The whirligig of time alone may bring him adequate rec- ognition. Among modern painters, Couture is pre- eminent for nobleness of conception and design; but in cleverness of technique he has been much surpassed. His faults were a certain dryness in execution, from the roughness of his paint, and a want of unity in his larger compositions, arising in part from his habit of studying each figure separately, and in part from a lack of feeling for the just relation of values. His fondness for subjects of a satirical nature worked him harm. It is a doubtful point how far art should be used as a moral agent, except as it elevates the mind. The satirist has his place, but it is not the highest place, and the noblest art is degraded if used to point a moral too openly. In such pictures as "The Realist" (a student seated upon the bust of the Venus of Milo, engaged in drawing a pig's head), "The Love of Gold," "The Courtesan," and similar subjects, he squandered the talent that ought to have been devoted to higher aims. It was, I think, a per- version of the intellectual quality in art. In "Les Romains de la Decadence," his best-known picture, and the one which made his reputation, we have, THOMAS COUTURE 195 however, a lesson of the debauchery of luxury and vice which is very powerfully told. The utter weari- ness and satiety of over-indulgence is admirably indi- cated in the attitudes and expression of the figures. The fair cease to charm and the wine to cheer, and the moral is not too obtrusively drawn in the despair of the poet on the one hand, and the scorn of the philosophers on the other. As a portrait-painter he was not very successful. He idealized the likeness out of his sitters, and left only what he thought they ought to be. We prefer ourselves as our looking-glass shows us, and not as others see us, in spite of the old saying. Before parting with Couture, on that first visit, I secured his consent to my becoming a pupil. He seemed much less averse to my project than I had an- ticipated, but confessed that he had intended never to take another scholar, although willing to criticise works brought to him by artists. He had broken his resolution because an American girl had come to him and said, "/^ ^^^^ prendre des lemons y'^ instead of "/^ desire,''^ which so amused him with its maidenly imperiousness that he yielded. Having once given way (and, I suspect, seeing a chance for a little money, though he did not mention that), he thought he would try a few pupils for one summer. I was to return the next morning with my paints and such sketches as 196 RANDOM MEMORIES I had with me, that he might see how proficient I was. I shall never forget that morning. It was very hot. After a repetition of the formalities of the day before at the gate, only with broader smiles on the part of the good dame, and this time with appropriate recog- nition on that of the dog that I was henceforth a priv- ileged person, I was shown up to the room used for a studio. Couture, with the inevitable straw hat, received me warmly, and after rummaging about among a lot of old canvases, at which I longed to get a better look, produced a superb study of a man nude to the waist, which he had made years ago for the picture "L'Amour de I'Or." This he set me to copy. To put me a little at my ease, he took up a book and pretended to read, but I felt all the time that he was looking with those sharp little eyes at every stroke I made. Although the perspiration started at every pore, there was nothing for it but to go on. Oh, how hot it was! The flies buzzed on the window-panes, or lit on my nose; there was no other sound save an occa- sional grunt from my tormentor, whether of approval or disgust I could not tell. After a painful struggle, my task was finished. I felt that I had done myself scant justice; but perhaps it was just as well, as the im- provement thereafter would be all the more marked, and that would please the teacher. With a "Not so THOMAS COUTURE 197 bad," he informed me that "we should soon change all that," and that the next day I could regularly begin. As other pupils arrived soon after, he arranged a class, which met at his house during the first week of every month. He would either give us something of his own to copy, or, painting himself from a model in the morn- ing, make us do the same in the afternoon. In this way we learned how he attacked a subject, and his method of treating it; also gathered many useful hints from his criticism of our own and others' sketches. The rest of the month we worked by ourselves from models, or sketched in the fields, carrying the results to him for correction. He liked to have us come to his house on Sunday afternoons, when he held a sort of levee, seated under the trees in the park. Barbedienne, the celebrated dealer in bronzes, who was his most intimate friend, often came from Paris to pass his Sunday, and other artists from the neighboring Ecouen, a great centre for genre painters, were frequent visitors on those pleasant afternoons. Surrounded by his family, with a clean white linen suit on, his best Panama on his head, and the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole, he poured forth by the hour together a stream of racy anecdotes and amusing conceits. The family consisted of his wife and two daughters and the dog Didi, a very important member. When 198 RANDOM MEMORIES the Prussians were approaching Paris, the Couture family fled, Hke so many others ; leaving the writing on the wall that I have before mentioned, to mollify the conquerors. But alas, on reaching Paris Didi the cherished was missing! He had been left behind, and the Prussians would surely get him. So, in face of the whole advancing host. Couture sallied forth to rescue the dog. He passed the French lines, and advanced into the now deserted country; he reached Villlers-le-Bel in safety, to find it silent and almost uninhabited, but he found the dog. As yet no Prussians were In sight, and he was about to return, when suddenly, over the hill from Ecouen, two Uhlans appeared; they came to a halt; then two more appeared from another direction; then, silently, stealthily, like the coming-in of the tide, from all sides, by every alley and street, came the spiked helmets. The village was surrounded and occupied, and Couture a prisoner. The officers, how- ever, were very kind and polite, and allowed him to return to his family In Paris in triumph, with the dog. History does not relate how Didi escaped being eaten during the siege, but he would have been a tough morsel, and that fact probably saved him. Couture's youngest daughter, Jeanne, was his fa- vorite. She was at that time a very sweet girl of about sixteen, and acted as her father's rapin, that Is, helper In the studio. She kept his palette beautifully clean, THOMAS COUTURE 199 washed his brushes, and always had a fresh rag or paint-tube ready to his hand in time of need. She spoke a Httie EngHsh, which she had learned at school, but was very shy of her accomplishment. Painting a little herself, she took a great interest in the work going on, and with her dark olive skin and the bright ribbon in her hair was always a charming picture, be- side her rugged old father. We passed two summers at Villiers-le-Bel, working in the manner described; the class varying from two to nearly a dozen, mostly of the fair sex. One day in the second summer there came near being an end to the whole thing through our touching the master on his sensitive spot. We had been having a model whom we all disliked, except Couture, who found in her beauties lost on our duller perceptions. I suppose we regarded her from too realistic a standpoint. Her good points were all rudimentary, and it needed the master to add what nature had denied her. He used to say that he preferred a thin to a stout model, because you could study the structure, and could add as much as you liked ; whereas in the other case, the flesh hid every- thing from view, and you did not know how much to take off. Be that as it may, in this case we got very tired of her and her want of beauty, and without any special concert it so happened that one fine morning all the class stayed away, save one faithful mortal. I 200 RANDOM MEMORIES had taken the day to go up to Paris on necessary busi- ness, and the others had similarly found something else to do. Of course the faithful one reported that there was a rod in pickle for us. The next morning we went to Couture's prepared for an outburst, and sure enough it came. When we assembled in the room used for a studio. Couture had not yet come down, and he kept us wait- ing some time, which was an ominous sign. Presently we heard his wooden shoes stumping along through the room leading to ours. He entered with great cere- mony, making a low bow to us all, and not with his usual jovial salutation. He was carefully dressed in his best, freshly shaved (a rather rare occurrence, by the way), with his hat in his hand instead of on his head, and the ribbon of the Legion of Honor in his buttonhole, — altogether en grande tenue. Addressing me as the oldest pupil, he made an oration on the dis- respect of our conduct, when he gave us lessons only as a great favor, and wound up by saying that this rebellion had very much wounded his feelings, and that he should give us no more instruction. Feeling that I was called upon to speak for the others, I ex- pressed my extreme regret at what had happened; explained that no disrespect was intended, that I had been obliged to go to town on business, and that it was a mere accident that the others stayed away at THOMAS COUTURE 201 the same time. Remembering that the French are more easily influenced by an epigram than a sound reason, I wound up by saying that what he had thought a revolution was nothing at most but an emeute^ and should not be regarded seriously. This had the desired effect: the clouds cleared away, he burst out laughing, and we all set to work, and I never knew him more good-natured than he was for the rest of the day. And so the lessons went on. The last time I saw Couture was in Paris, in the autumn of 1878. We were about leaving for Egypt, and invited him and his daughter Jeanne to come and lunch with us at our hotel in the Latin Quarter. He was in a ver)^ hilarious mood, and, like a schoolboy out for a holiday, bent on enjoying himself. After our repast we proposed that we should all go to the Exposition and look at the pictures; thinking his criticism would be both instructive and amusing. But no; he said he was tired of the Exposition; he was a provincial up from the country, and preferred to flaner in the streets of the great city. So off we set; Couture in front with my wife on his arm, and I be- hind with mademoiselle. We must have made a queer group, and I am afraid the good people at home would have been much scandalized at our behavior. Couture acted out to the letter the part of countryman; insisting on looking 202 RANDOM MEMORIES in all the shop windows, as if he had never before been in Paris; caUing loudly to Jeanne to come and admire some object; rushing wildly across the street, to his own and my wife's imminent peril, his hat usu- ally flying off in the passage, which we behind were obliged to rescue from under the feet of the horses or wheels of passing cabs. Even in Paris, where people are used to eccentric behavior, such actions and actors attracted a good deal of notice, and I was glad to get him into Goupil's on pretence of showing him one of his own pictures which I had seen there several days before. The young man who conducted us to the gallery upstairs seemed at first inclined to treat with much coldness such an unpromising set of visitors, and with reluctance pro- duced the head I asked for. No sooner was it placed on the easel than Couture burst out in derisive laugh- ter, abused it roundly, and, although it was an un- doubted Couture, saw fit to ridicule the whole thing. The showman was naturally much incensed, and pro- ceeded to point out to us the excellences of the paint- ing; but Couture would not listen to him, and con- tinued to call it all sorts of names, saying that they used to make omelettes on it, and kicked it about generally in the atelier. The man now looked puz- zled, as if he were dealing with a madman; suddenly a gleam of intelligence shot across his face, as he be- THOMAS COUTURE 203 gan to realize that this eccentric must be Couture himself. Never was there a greater change: he ran- sacked the whole shop for pictures that would in- terest us, and finally bowed us out with all the obse- quiousness he could muster. It was now time for Couture and his daughter to leave us, to take the train for Viliiers-le-Bel, and the flourish of the large Panama hat from a cab window was the last I ever saw of my worthy master. CHAPTER XI WINTER IN SIENA After two summers spent at Villlers-le-Bel with Cou- ture, a winter with friends in a villa outside of Siena, one in Paris, and another in Egypt followed by a spring in Spain, in all which time I made many sketches and finished pictures, we returned to America in August of 1879. If variety is the spice of life, the two winters, one in Siena, and one in Egypt certainly presented contrast enough. After my first summer with Couture, and a sketch- ing tour through Normandy, we went by way of the Riviera down into Italy to Siena, where we shared a villa with an artist friend and his family. This villa was a rather unpretentious, square-looking building, without any architectural features. The lower floor was given up to storerooms. On the piano nohile, or second floor as we should call it, were the dining- room and salons and my friend's studio and sleeping- quarters. My wife and I had a bedroom on the north- eastern corner of the floor above, with a view over the hills to Siena ; also a large room with north light that I used as a studio. Siena has a climate in winter that is not unlike that WINTER IN SIENA 205 of New England, only not so cold; it is much dryer than Rome, with cold, frosty mornings and more snow and ice. There was no way of heating the villa ex- cept with one or two stoves and scaldini, and I must say it was pretty cold. I had chilblains for the first time since I was a child, and had to sleep and dress in an unheated room. Besides, in Italy those oiled and polished floors of cement, slippery as glass, keep your feet perfectly frozen. I remember Mark Twain, who had a villa outside of Florence, called the large cen- tral hall, with its slippery floor, his skating-rink. The villa was surrounded with fields, with olive trees and vines. There was a fattore, or farmer, who had charge of the farm and looked after the crops and the people, men and women, who worked in the fields, and was responsible to the owner of the villa, not to us. The male cook did the marketing and settled his ac- counts every evening with my friend, often with much wrangling. My wife and I paid our share of the ex- penses, and were glad to be free of any of the troubles of housekeeping. The villa was about three miles outside the north gate of Siena, and by walking three quarters of a mile to the main road one could get a public conveyance to the centre of the city. One could also have a carriage sent out if necessary. The country around Siena is a beautiful hilly country 2o6 RANDOM MEMORIES with olive groves and cypresses, and those villas and small towns perched on the top of hills so char- acteristic of Tuscany. The olive trees, in that part of the country, are cut off at the top, I suppose to in- crease their bearing qualities. Their silvery almost smoke-like color, with the dark green of the umbrella pines and cypresses, make a beautiful contrast to the reddish soil, which has given its name to burnt and raw siena. The olive trees are planted in rows, and be- tween them grow the wheat and the vines; thus three crops mature side by side. We went often at first to do the sights of Siena, but the narrow streets where the sun rarely penetrates are very cold and draughty in winter. There are no sidewalks, and everybody walks in the middle of the street, as is the custom in Italy, with the risk of being run over; but nobody ever is. I suppose this custom arose from its being safer in the middle of the street in the days when you might be stabbed in the back if you were too near the wall. In the afternoons the nobility of Siena drive round and round the public garden, as they do the Pincio at Rome. However poor they may be, if they can possibly afford a carriage they must put in an appear- ance with a man in livery on the box. They are mostly very poor, and while they will sit at home in the morn- ings, in their cold palaces, shivering over a scaldino, in WINTER IN SIENA 207 the afternoon they promenade or drive where the world can see them; even, as sometimes happens, two families will own a carriage between them, hiring the horses and having their own livery on the coachman and appearing on alternate days; everything to keep up appearances, which deceive nobody. Such shabby liveries and worn-out horses and carriages it would be hard to match. Siena is as medieval In all respects as It was three hundred years ago, and is therefore one of the most interesting cities in Italy. Its gloomy streets and for- bidding palaces, built more for defence than comfort, with iron rings to which horses can be hitched and sconces in which torches can be placed, still remain; and also its beautiful striped cathedral of black-and- white marble, and above all its wonderful tower, one of the most beautiful in Italy, that dominates the semicircular piazza in which the market Is held and where, on certain days, horse-races take place. Even the art of Siena is of the most medieval kind. Its primitives are almost more primitive than elsewhere. Sodoma, its greatest painter, alone seems Imbued with a more modern spirit. Some people like this stiff and curiously awkward school, but I confess It does not appeal to me. I love the silhouettes of old towns on the hilltops of Tuscany, and never tired of the view of Siena from 2o8 RANDOM MEMORIES our windows, especially in the early mornings when its blue outline so distinguished floated in the rosy mist of dawn. One morning, being very energetic, I arose at five, and walked a mile or more to make a sketch of the town in the morning light with a better foreground than could be had from my window. I found charming models among the peasant girls, with their picturesque, flapping, wide-brimmed leghorn hats; also a dear little maid who stood bashfully at a doorway. I got the parish priest to sit for me, and through him a Capuchin monk. I had asked for one of the brothers; but to my surprise the head of the mon- astery came himself, and seemed much interested. I re- member he took a hand-glass and compared himself in the glass with the portrait, as if he did not really know how he looked; and perhaps they do not have any- thing so frivolous as a looking-glass. I also painted a portrait of my friend's wife and little boy, besides working up some of the sketches I had made on the Riviera. Altogether I had a very busy winter. I found at the villa a rather interesting situation. My friend had been there over two years, and was en- gaged on a large and important picture: that is. Im- portant to him, as he expected to make his reputation by it, and in the meantime was living on his principal, because he felt sure that he would make his fortune when the picture was done, and more than make up WINTER IN SIENA 209 what he was spending while the picture was in the making. Certainly a gamble. In order that this great work should last to the end of time, he had spent much time experimenting with colors, to see which were the most permanent in all conditions of light and weather, even exposing them on the outside of the villa walls. I, who am of a scep- tical disposition, could not help asking myself what was the good of all this, if the picture should turn out a failure; then, instead of wishing it to last forever, you would not care if it perished. However, my friend was very confident of his own powers, and had determined to shut himself away from outside influence in this villa for three years, so as to produce a very original and unique work. Sometimes this system works, but as a rule it is better for an artist to associate constantly with other artists and compare their work with his own. If an artist is sur- rounded only by his own work, it gets to seem to him very good, as he has nothing else by which to judge it. Of course, in the two years my friend had been work- ing on his picture, he had made many studies and ex- periments, and I had expected to find the picture nearly done. It was two or three weeks, however, before he would let us see it. It was surrounded with much mystery, and I could see that he was very sen- sitive to criticism, and dreaded to show it to us. How- 210 RANDOM MEMORIES ever, after much persuasion and with a great deal of ceremony, we were finally permitted to enter the sacred precincts of the studio. The picture, about six feet by eight, was as yet only In outline, yet there were but three figures in It, life- size; two women and a child. It was a beautiful out- line, however, and had some of the qualities of the old masters. Whether the influence of the pictures In Si- ena had anything to do with it, I cannot say; but the drawing was stiff and naive, quite in the style of the primitives; there was also a landscape background that reminded one of the backgrounds of early Italian art. My friend had evidently spent much time over the drawing, and I could imagine that he had sat before it many hours In contemplation, before he could make up his mind to begin putting on the color. I know well that feeling; you have to wait till you are in the right mood to begin work that may spoil what you have already attained. It is so hard to hold on to the first conception of your picture; paint is a stubborn medium to work in, and will not always obey your will. Sometimes when the gods are kind, a picture seems almost to paint itself, but more often there are three stages in a painting : when you first lay it in, and you think everything promises well; then from some per- WINTER IN SIENA ' 211 verslty you spoil it; and the rest of the time you spend in trying to get it back to your first conception. The result is, you are never satisfied, and are apt to make bad worse by puttering over it. So I could well under- stand my friend's reluctance to begin painting, and perhaps spoiling his beautiful outline. However, stimulated, it may be, by the amount of work that I was accomplishing, he soon started in to put on the color. He seldom let us see the picture after that, and he had not got very far with it when we left, about the beginning of March. A year later, the picture was finished, and with the help of a friend at court, and much influence brought to bear on the jury, it was admitted to the Salon and well hung. When I first saw it in the Salon of that year, I was horribly disappointed. All the charm of the outline had vanished. The color was too hot and the handHng heavy. If my friend had carried out the picture in the delicate colors of the primitives, he might have retained some of its naive quality; as it was, the picture was a total failure, and I felt keenly for my friend, who had staked so much on Its success. He came up to Paris with his whole family to en- joy his supposed triumph, and I engaged rooms for them In a small hotel in the Latin Quarter. I also met them at the station, but I could not find it In my heart to say anything about his picture, although I saw he 212 RANDOM MEMORIES was dying to know what I thought of it. I was told afterward that he complained of my unsympathetic attitude, and I suppose thought I was jealous. But what could I do .? I could not praise it, and I could not tell him how bad it was. The next day he set off with his mother to see his picture in the Salon and came home a crushed and disillusioned man. When he saw his picture sur- rounded by the works of others, he realized his failure, and never went near it again. It is bad enough to have your picture rejected at the Salon; but worse to have it accepted and then turn out a failure. One of my cousins, an architect, was once talking with the wife of a doctor, who was lamenting that her hus- band had just lost an important patient by death, when my cousin said, "When your husband makes a failure, it is buried out of sight; but when I make one, I have to look at it the rest of my days." So it is not always the artist who has his work rejected or badly hung that is the worse off, for his failure is not seen by the public. I once heard a story of an artist at an exhibition who spent his time hovering about his picture to hear what people would say about it. Alas, nobody paid the least attention to it for a long time ; at last an old gentleman planted himself in front of it and gazed at it for a long time. Just as the artist was approaching WINTER IN SIENA 213 to hear it praised, the old gentleman, with a snap of his fingers, and a contemptuous "Poof," walked disgustedly away. When you think of those three years my friend had spent on that picture, and the high hopes he had of making a reputation for himself through that one magnum opus, it was a tragedy. My friend, however, was not the kind to be easily discouraged, and al- though he had the picture on which he had spent so many hours destroyed, he girded up his loins and later became a successful artist. I was once telling this story at a dinner party in Paris, when Henry James, who was present, asked if he could not have it to work up into one of his tales. I said no, because it would be too obvious who the art- ist was, and, as he was then alive, it might hurt his feelings. Now that he has passed away, I see no harm in telling it, as an example of the disappointments and trials of artists. I am sorry now that Henry James could not have made it into one of his wonderful psy- chological studies, as he would so beautifully have done, and made so much more of a story of it than I, who am not a story-teller. The following winter we spent in Paris, where, after searching in vain for a suitable furnished apartment, we took a large studio with small unfurnished rooms in the house of Francois, the landscape-painter, on the 214 RANDOM MEMORIES Boulevard du Montparnasse. We bought a small amount of furniture and a hatterie de cuisine, and be- gan housekeeping with a worthy honne whose sole re- quirements for recreation were satisfied by sitting out on the sidewalk gossiping with the neighbors. I shared the studio with Mr. Edward Boit, who was living in the country that winter, and who came In every day to work. I had the ambition to paint a large painting, more for the practice than with any expectation of great success. As I had a tendency to too finicky a style, I thought a large canvas would broaden my execution and give me greater freedom. Accordingly I attacked a canvas eight feet by ten with a composition "repre- senting " the choice of youth, " with five life-size fig- ures and a child. It was rather beyond my powers, and I found the grouping of the figures difficult; but I thought it better to aim high than to go on with merely easy subjects. The overcoming of difficulties Is one of the joys of life. I worked hard at this work, rarely getting out till after dark, except on Sundays. It is one of the disad- vantages of having a studio In the house where one lives that one is tempted to go to work right after breakfast, without having a walk in the fresh air first, and to work all day as long as the light lasts, with only a few moments snatched for lunch. WINTER IN SIENA 215 I had good models and had made a good start when unfortunately I had a bad fall from a scaffolding which brought on a serious illness. Gradually the vigor with which I had begun the picture faded out with illness, and finally the doctor ordered me to Biarritz, leaving the picture unfinished. As it turned out, he could not have ordered me to a worse place for the nervous dis- order brought on by my fall. I always think of the story of a French doctor who told a friend he was go- ing away for a rest. The friend asked where he was going, and he replied, "Trouville." "Oh," said the friend, " I thought you always sent your patients to Biarritz." "Oh, those were my patients," said the doc- tor; Biarritz being rather dull and Trouville quite the contrary. I returned in April, not much the better for the va- cation, and tried to finish the picture; but my vigor was gone, and I was so little satisfied with the result that I was not surprised, though of course disap- pointed, that it was refused at the Salon the following spring. Couture had come to see it, and praised it, es- pecially the landscape background and the draperies. He was anxious for me to let him touch it up in places, as so many masters do touch up their pupils' work, but I was too proud to let him. Some of the heads were much praised by others, but on the whole the work was not up to so ambitious an attempt, and 2i6 RANDOM MEMORIES could not be considered a success. However, I thought it had been a good lesson, and taught me to paint more from the shoulder. We went that summer to Switzerland, where the dry and bracing air of the High Alps cured my trouble. If doctors would study the climatic influences more, they would not make so many mistakes. We did a good deal of climbing at Chamonix, my wife going mostly on muleback, and finally made the tour of Mont Blanc, coming out at Courmayeur — a wonder- ful trip. From there we went by the Val d'Aosta over the Theodule Pass to Zermatt. After some time passed at the Riffel climbing and sketching, we went down the valley, and climbed up to the Bel-Alp, on the op- posite side of the Rhone Valley. There we made the acquaintance of Tyndall and his charming wife, who had a cottage near the hotel. Tyndall, who reminded me of a New England farmer in his appearance, was very kind, and on one occasion took me, with others, out on the Aletsch Glacier, and gave us a most inter- esting lecture on glacial formations. Unfortunately, the weather turned very bad and the cold and damp of the hotel, which was not properly heated, brought on a rheumatic fever which caused my wife much suiferlng. Mrs. Tyndall, a charming woman, was very kind to my wife in her illness, as was also Mr. Tyndall's WINTER IN SIENA 217 mother, Lady Hamilton, who was staying with them. One cannot help recalling the tragedy of Tyndall's death, when his devoted wife gave him poison in mis- take for another medicine. What a frightful moment for her! With great difficulty I got my wife down to Vevey, where I was able to get a good doctor, as there was none at Bel-Alp; only a fellow-traveller who was a doctor, and had some morphine tablets with which he was able to relieve her pain a little. It was In a great measure owing to this illness that we decided to pass the next winter In Egypt, in the hope of getting the rheumatism out of her system. After a short stay in Paris, and after getting the address of a good dragoman from Mr. John Field, of Philadelphia, who with his wife happened to be In Paris, and had, a short time before, been up the Nile, we were able to make arrangements with some friends from Boston, who were in London, to join us for the winter. Mr. John Field was rather a character, a friend of my father's, and had been often at our house in Cam- bridge. He was a great and interesting talker, very fond of society, and especially loved visiting In Eng- lish country-houses and hobnobbing with the nobil- ity. His wife I had never met before, but she was a dear, unselfish woman, who, not being strong, was content to remain in the shade, so that her John 2i8 RANDOM MEMORIES could enjoy himself; well knowing that Invalid wives are not so welcome at country-houses as are unat- tached husbands. We sailed from Marseilles for the Piraeus In a French steamer, stopping at Naples on the way. I do not remember passing the Straits of Messina or the beautiful view of ^tna that you get farther on, which I have seen so often since ; but I do remember the won- derful color of the mountains of Greece as we coasted its southern shore. We spent a week or so at Athens, as we found friends there, and I made several sketches of the Acrop- olis and temples. We were especially fortunate in being in Athens during a full moon, and I shall never forget how wonderful the Parthenon looked in its sil- very light. All its scars seemed to vanish, and it seemed almost ethereal in its beauty. Modern Athens is a rather stupid city, but its pepper-tree-lined streets and its fantastic Greeks with their ballet-like skirts amused us. From Athens we took ship to Constantinople, that wonderful city. One of the great sights of the world is Constantinople from the Bosphorus. But when you land, the illusion is somewhat dissipated — dirty peo- ple, and dirty streets, a perfect Babel of sound, and people; horses, carriages, and palanquins, jostling each other in fearful confusion. This is surely the WINTER IN SIENA 219 East. We engaged a dragoman to see us through the custom-house and do the sights, and had our first glimpse of the corrupt practices of the East in the amount of baksheesh we were expected to hand over to expedite matters. I could not help hoping, as we stood in Saint So- phia, that the Christians might soon again return to that noble temple which is desecrated by the presence of the Turk and the huge inscriptions from the Koran that disfigure the walls. The bazaars interested us very much, and I tried to make a sketch in the arms bazaar; but the light was bad, and the crowd pressed too close. Indeed, in my efforts to sketch in the town the interest of the popu- lace was so great as to make it almost impossible. On one occasion, I had collected such a crowd that the dragoman thought it unsafe for Mrs. Longfellow to remain with me, as the Turks are no respecters of women, and he took her back to the hotel. I had to take my sketch through a long lane of people, with diflniculty kept from closing in entirely. I really did not know whether I should escape alive, but on the whole they were good-natured enough; but smelly, oh, my! We made several excursions on the Bosphorus, that wonderful strait with its white villas and palaces gleaming amongst the green of its shores. 220 RANDOM MEMORIES We had one rather exciting experience. We had made a visit to Roberts College by caique, and were so hospitably received that it was rather late when we returned. We had that day a new dragoman, a brother, so he said, of the one we had engaged — a fa- vorite trick in the East — and when we reached the pier at Constantinople the two villainous-looking boat- men who had taken us refused to be satisfied with the money that had been agreed upon for the trip. It was by this time quite dark, and there we were at the mercy of these cut-throats at the end of a long pier, and they could easily have robbed us and chucked us into the Bosphorus and nobody would have been the wiser. They got into a tussle with the dragoman, and got him down and threatened to murder him, unless we paid what they demanded. I felt sure it was a put-up game between him and them; but I saw no way out but to pay, and pay I did, and was thankful to escape with a whole skin. From Constantinople we took a steamer to Alexan- dria, touching at Smyrna on the way. The passengers were most interesting: a great many Turks with their whole families, on the way to Mecca. The women and children camped out on the decks, while their lords and masters had comfortable staterooms. CHAPTER XII EGYPT The approach to Egypt is always interesting. The first thing you see is the tall Pharos of Alexandria rising out of the sea; then the long, low line of the sandy shore, and the wonderful color of the water on the bar, like the colors on a peacock's breast. In those early days, before the English occupation, there was little restraint over the natives, and the steamer was quickly surrounded by hundreds of boats, with howling, yelling pirates, who as soon as the steamer anchored came tumbling over the side in true piratical style, seizing on any pieces of baggage they could lay their hands on, and fighting and strug- gling with the owners and among themselves for its possession. It was a frightful scene, and we were fortunate in having been asked by the captain up on the bridge to escape the melee. Through the struggling mass we presently per- ceived a gorgeously dressed individual forcing his way, who turned out to be the dragoman we had writ- ten to from Paris. He had only one eye, like the one- eyed Calender, but kissed our hands with the grace of a courtier, and with much yelling and cuffing extri- 222 RANDOM MEMORIES cated us from the pandemonium and got us into a boat, and, with liberal supply of baksheesh, through the cus- tom-house and into a carriage, and so to the hotel. We had truly entered a new world. That first intro- duction to the true East is wonderful. The kaleido- scopic effect of the streets, with their hurrying crowds in all sorts of costumes, the constantly recurring groups of people that might have come out of the New Testament or the Arabian Nights, cannot help but delight an artist, and why more pictures of the East are not satisfactory is hard to understand. The ride to Cairo by train the next day was full of interest and excitement; it was all so new and differ- ent. The people working in the fields, the little mud villages, and especially the camels, slow-moving in long strings, as they had been for ages, and would con- tinue for other ages, gave you somehow the feeling of how little time counted in this old, old world. Then the glimpse of the Nile as we crossed it, with its pic- turesque boats with pointed sails, like the wings of birds; altogether it was a scene to be remembered. We reached Cairo after dark, and I shall never for- get that drive through mysterious streets, after we had been extricated from the usual bedlam at the sta- tion. We had selected a hotel more in the centre of the town than the tourist-ridden Shepheard's, as we wished to get if possible more of the local color of the EGYPT 223 East, and not be surrounded with hordes of cockneys. The Muski was in those days much more pic- turesque than it is now — there were few European shops in it, and it was covered over with awnings to keep out the sun, and with its husthng crowds it had a mystery and centuries-old look that it has now in a great measure lost. As we drove through it, at night, it was especially weird, with the queer cries of the coachman demanding right of way, and mysterious figures just escaping being run over; grunting camels looming out of the darkness, and passing on with the indifferent and cynical expression that belongs to them. At last we stopped at the mouth of a dark alley and were requested to. descend. It was a bad-smelling and uninviting alley, and I was afraid we had made a mis- take; it seemed like tempting fate to plunge down it. However, Ibrahim, the dragoman, said, in his queer English, that it was all right, and we ventured. Sud- denly, at a turn of the alley there burst on our view a gate, and, beyond, a fairy garden lighted by lanterns, truly a scene from the Arabian Nights, and this was the Hotel du Nile, our destination. The hotel was only two stories high, and extended on three sides of the garden, the other being enclosed by a high wall, over which was a view of another garden with native houses and palms and a minaret. What could one ask 224 RANDOM MEMORIES more ? The hotel Is now no more, I am sorry to say. A gallery ran round the garden, on which the bed- rooms gave ; it was covered with trailing vines, purple bougainvlllea and others, and the garden below was gay with hibiscus and other strange flowers. As we came out on the balcony, in the morning, to summon the waiter for our breakfast by clapping our hands in Oriental style, as we had been told to do, we were greeted by the delicious cool fresh air of the early morning in Egypt, like one of our October mornings, only spiced with the mysterious perfumes of the East. Our clapping was answered by a gentleman in a tar- boosh, a nightgown, and a pair of slippers, — and that seemed to be all, — who was both chambermaid and waiter. There were no women in the hotel; and all the waiters wore the same style of nightgowns, white or pale blue, which Is so becoming to their dark skins. Thank goodness, there were no swallowtails as there are now, to modernize all the hotels. The air In Egypt is of a crystalline purity and vi- brates with light. The sky, though intensely blue, is soft, and not of that steely blue of the North. Owing to the reflection from the yellow sands of the desert, it takes on a greenish hue toward the horizon, and the undersides of clouds also reflect the warm tone. It is a mistake to think that the colors in the East are vio- lent as so many artists paint them; on the contrary, EGYPT 225 the hues are soft and opaline, and even the wonderful sunsets are softer and less crude than ours. While waiting for our friends to join us, we spent our time visiting the mosques and the bazaars. The bazaars were much more interesting in those days than now, and did not have so many Oriental goods made in Birmingham. They were of unending de- light and interest. The quaint little cubby-holes called shops, in which sat, crosslegged, the owners, ready like spiders to pounce on any poor fly of a tour- ist passing by, the dim light that filtered through the awnings, overhead, and the constant crowds, in all sorts of picturesque costumes, that pushed and jostled each other, made constant pictures to delight the ar- tistic eye. After the crowd in the bazaars and the dust and hubbub of the Muski, it seemed like a haven of rest to plunge down our narrow alley and emerge into the quiet of the hotel garden, with nothing but the cries of the kites flying overhead, and the occasional voice of the muezzin, calling the faithful to prayer, which came floating down from the minaret of a near-by mosque. It always reminded me of the voice of a lark quavering far up in the blue. One day we went to inspect the dahabiyeh that Ib- rahim thought would do for our party. It belonged to an Englishman, who took us in his own carriage with 226 RANDOM MEMORIES a fine pair of Arab horses to see It, at Bulak, a sub- urb of Cairo. I was disgusted by the way the coach- man lashed with his whip the people that did not get out of our way quickly enough; especially when he struck over the head a native woman holding an in- fant. I could not help remonstrating to the owner of the carriage over such brutality, but he only laughed and said that was the only way to treat the natives — "dirty niggers," he called them — if they did not get out of the way. It is such callousness on the part of Englishmen in the East that endears them to the sub- ject peoples! As every one knows, a dahabiyeh is nothing but a house-boat, with a large lateen sail, and a small jigger behind to help steer it, a deck in front, where the crew lives, and arrangements for rowing by taking up part of the deck when necessary. The cooking galley is away up forward in front of the mast, and it is in- credible what delicious meals can be prepared in such' an exposed position. The crew consists, according to the size of the boat, of about twelve or fourteen sailors, a captain or reisj and an assistant rets or steersman. These are all in- cluded in the price of the boat, and they furnish their own meals, consisting mostly of sour black bread and beans. The dahabiyehs were at that time all gathered in a long line at Bulak. Now they are mostly moored EGYPT 227 along the bank at the Gesireh Island, just below the bridge. Our Englishman owned two or three boats which he let for the winter at prices a little lower than Cook, so we selected one that we liked as to the arrangement of cabins, etc., and agreed to sign a contract as soon as our friends arrived and could look at the boat. In a day or two they came, and we inspected the boat with them again and arranged as to cabins, and signed a contract for three months for one hundred and twenty pounds a month, before the American Consul; also another contract with the dragoman at a pound a day apiece for our own food, he providing a good cook and two waiters to serve us. This made for our party of six a little less than two pounds apiece a day, for all our expenses, including donkeys and donkey boys for the excursions, all of which were furnished by the dragoman. This did not include, of course, any baksheesh that we chose to give during the trip or at the end. It took about a week for the dragoman to lay in provisions, after submitting a list for our approval. The wine we ordered we were to pay for ourselves; any that was left over to be returned to the merchant. We found, as a matter of fact, that owing to the dry- ness of the climate we did not care much for wine, and returned the greater part of it. 228 RANDOM MEMORIES '^ At last came the day when all was ready and we were to start. We discovered later that, as we were to pay extra for each day over the three months of the contract, it was to the interest of the owner of the boat, and of the dragoman, to make our voyage last as long as possible, and all sorts of expedients for delay were invented. It became a constant battle between us, we urging the reis to push on, they holding back on any pretence. So it was at the start; we should have started above the bridge, and so saved a day, but we had not yet learned our lesson. We could pass the bridge only at a certain hour, along with a lot of native boats, when the draw was opened. When that happened, all the boats tried to go through at once and there was a great jam, accompanied by much yelling and howl- ing. Our big boat seemed to get stuck for a moment in the draw, and to our astonishment one of our sail- ors stripped off his clothing and plunged into the river, stark naked, to carry a rope. We thought that a little strong with ladies looking on, and remonstrated with Ibrahim. He said that we must buy drawers for the men then, and there was another day's delay to do that. I discovered later that they all had them, and that it was another excuse for delay and to furnish a little baksheesh. Such are the ways of the Egyptians; it is not they always that are despoiled. EGYPT 229 The prevailing winds In the winter on the Nile are from the north ; otherwise it would be difficult, indeed, to make headway against the current, which runs nearly three miles an hour. This wind will last a week or ten days at a time, and then die down and a calm ensue, or a light wind come from the south, against which it is impossible to proceed without "tracking," which means sending all the crew on shore with a rope to tow the boat. This naturally is very hard work, and cannot be done if the south wind is at all strong. At best only a few miles a day can be made, whereas with a strong north wind you can sail as much as twenty or thirty miles in the day. As the wind usually dies down at sunset, it is cus- tomary to tie up to the bank at that time. Sometimes when the moon is full and gives plenty of light, and the wind holds, one can sail well into the night, but the men hate to do it, as it shortens the voyage, and in some places is dangerous owing to sudden squalls coming down off the high cliffs. The year before we were there a dahablyeh had been upset and two young ladies drowned while passing a dangerous bit of the river, because they with their brother were hurrying to overtake another boat, and were sailing at night. The brother, who was on deck, and the crew were saved. Finally in spite of delays we got off. The great sail 230 RANDOM MEMORIES was loosened, and slowly and majestically we pointed our bow up the river. Nothing can be more delicious than that smooth movement in calm waters, gliding between banks lined with palm trees, with an occa- sional mud village, and the constant interest of the life on shore; men working in the fields or trotting along the raised bank, or donkeys or camels rhythmically swaying as they follow each other in long lines ; but above all, the blue-clad women with their earthen jars poised on their heads, coming down to the river to get water. Clad in their long straight garments showing their slender forms, the Egyptian women are wonderfully graceful, and the carrying of heavy jars of water on their heads, even from childhood, gives them a superb carriage. The management of the boat, so different from deep-sea sailing, was full of interest. At first all the sailors looked alike to us, like "Ceesar and Pompey, very much alike, especially Pompey," but in a few days we began to differentiate them and soon knew them by name and had our favorites. The Nile is a very muddy, shallow stream full of sandbars, and requires very skilful navigation. The captain, or reis, always sat at the top of the stairs leading from the lower deck to the one above, over our cabins. From this vantage-ground, he conned the boat, giving directions to the steersman who wielded the long tiller at the stern. EGYPT 231 In going up the river, it Is necessary to keep out of the strongest current and to take advantage of any back eddies, and keep, therefore, in the shallow water, being careful, however, not to run aground on any of the shoals. It will be seen that this is not an easy job, as the captain has nothing to guide him except a knowledge of the river and the surface Indications or ripples on the water. As the sandbars are constantly changing, it is quite marvellous how he does it. The dahabiyehs draw only about three or three and a half feet of water, in spite of which, with all care, espe- cially if the river is low, they often do run aground. Then comes the great task of finding the proper chan- nel and getting the boat off. Most of the men have to get overboard and, putting their shoulders under her sides, with many grunts and heaves work her free. Going up the river the current helps to get the boat off, but coming down, it only pushes her on harder. I have known the steamboats to remain stuck for a week. The only way then is to get out an anchor and pull her off by main force. Our first day, as we started late owing to last things that were conveniently forgotten by the dragoman, we only reached Bedrashen, where one starts for the expedition to Sakkara. It is important always to stop near a village at night, so as to get fresh milk, eggs, etc., and also to get a guard, generally two men 232 RANDOM MEMORIES with sticks, who squat on the bank all night to keep off thieves. As we draw up to the bank, the great sail is furled by the men swarming up the tall yard. With their arms and kicking feet they gather the sail to the yard and by an ingenious knot fasten it, so that with one pull of a long guiding rope the whole sail is loosened at once when they wish to unfurl it. The men always chant a weird song as they take the sail in, and it is one of the picturesque events of the day. We generally drew up to the bank to have a walk on shore before dark, and then sat on deck to enjoy the wonderful sunsets and afterglow, and still more the moonlight nights or the stars, which seem brighter in this clear atmosphere than farther north. After the second day from Cairo the wind fell flat, and the men had to go on shore and pull the boat with a long rope or "track," as it is called: a tedious proc- ess for all concerned. Without the wind the after- noons are very hot, and the flies, the greatest plague in Egypt, have a fine opportunity to make themselves a nuisance. The Egyptian fly is an unmitigated devil; he is most persistent and sticky and makes a spe- cialty of getting in your eyes or up your nose. He is the spreader of ophthalmia, which afflicts so many of the people, and is really dangerous on that account. The natives have a superstition against brushing EGYPT 235 them off, and you see the children's eyes especially black with clusters of them; no wonder there are so many blind people in Egypt. The river for many miles above Cairo is rather flat and uninteresting. With the desert on one side and cultivated fields on the other, this part of the river is apt to have little wind, so that it is really better to begin the voyage farther up, at Minieh. We did not know this, and had ten days of weary tracking, mak- ing little progress each day. Finally the north wind came again, and joyfully the great sail filled, and we swept along at a great rate. Beyond Minieh begin the beautiful limestone cliffs which add so much to the pleasure and excitement of the voyage. At some places you have to sail close under these cliffs and here it is dangerous at night, as wandering gusts of wind are apt to come rushing down with- out showing at all on the surface of the water. The sheet of the great sail must never be fastened, but held by a man with a turn round a bitt, so as to let it run if the boat should tip too much, because, being so flat-bottomed and shallow, the boat is easily over- turned, especially as the current runs very strong under these cliffs and may easily help to upset her. There are also many native boats that get in the way, and therefore there is much yelling and swear- ing and many exciting episodes. Altogether the life 234 RANDOM MEMORIES on a dahabiyeh Is full of interest, and seldom dull ex- cept when tracking, and even then there is the life on shore passing like a panorama constantly before you. What can be pleasanter than to sit and do noth- ing and at the same time have constant change of scene? Those beautiful cliffs on the Nile, with their changing colors, reaching to bright crimson some- times, in the setting sun, are a never-ending delight. They are flat on top forming a tableland, through which the Nile in countless ages has cut its bed. The limestone is full of fossil shells, and this immense de- posit of limestone, several hundred feet in thickness, must once have formed the bottom of a sea whose myr- iads of shells have formed layer on layer by slow ac- cumulation this wonderful product of nature. Truly man is but a small speck on this marvellous world, and his brief life is nothing to the ages that have gone to the making of it. In Egypt one is more impressed with the antiquity of the world than in any other country. We have here the ancient temples and other vestiges of a civilization that flourished many thousands of years ago. And must our own boasted civilization pass in the same way? Who knows? At least it seems probable, and some later antiquarian will easily prove that the inhabitants of New York lived underground, else why these deep excavations and mysterious tunnels running everywhere? EGYPT 235 On one of those limestone cliffs is perched a Coptic monastery, and as we passed, one of the monks swam out to our boat for alms. As he was quite naked, he had to be given some clothes before he could present himself before the ladies. The Copts are the direct descendants of the early Christians and their form of Christianity probably more closely resembles the teaching of Christ than any other. Our sailors, all Mahometans, treated this poor Copt with much scorn. A little farther along we came to a very small island or sandbar, on which sat an old man with nothing on but a loincloth. "Him very holy man," the dragoman said, and food was sent to him by boat. It appeared that he had sat there for years, and depended on pass- ing boats to feed him. So it only depends on the point of view, which is worthy, and which is not. To be- come a holy man, all that is necessary in the East is to take off your clothes, be very dirty, do nothing, and expect others to feed you. I must confess my rever- ence for the prophets was greatly shaken by coming in contact with the modern article. I wonder if Eli- jah, when he was fed by ravens, was as old and dirty as the gentleman on the sandbank. It took us three weeks, sailing and tracking, to reach Luxor; stopping for a day at Dendera to visit our first temple. The temple smelled of bats, and be- ing partly buried In sand was not as impressive as I 236 RANDOM MEMORIES had expected, though the colors on the. columns were wonderfully preserved. At Luxor we spent a couple of weeks, visiting Kar- nak and the temples on the other side of the river. From Luxor the view of the hills opposite is one of surpassing beauty. The ever-changing colors of those limestone mountains, from early morning, when they seem to float in a pearly mist, to the late after- noon, when they become almost crimson in the rays of the setting sun, are a constant delight. Kamak with its mighty columns we found most impressive, especially by moonlight, when it seemed like wandering through some gigantic forest. In after years, coming from the sky-scrapers of New York, I was surprised to find how values had changed, and these columns no longer seemed so wonderful in their height. At the time of our visit the temple of Luxor had not been excavated and was buried deep in sand, with mud houses built above it. We were fortunate in reaching Luxor just in time for Christmas, and our dragoman had the dahablyeh decorated with palm branches for the occasion. A neighboring dragoman had procured some branches of orange trees with oranges on them, which distressed our dragoman, to think that he had been outdone, till he had the happy thought of tying oranges on his palm branches. EGYPT 237 when he was happy again. We had a wonderful Christmas dinner with all sorts of marvellous dishes, showing oif the capabilities of our cook, who, so he said, had once been cook to the Shah of Persia. The climate of Luxor is the best in Egypt. At Cairo and for some distance above, the nights in December are quite cold, owing to the rapid evaporation, some- times as low as 40° F., but at Luxor the difference be- tween night and day is not so excessive. In February, however, it begins to be too warm. Assuan, which some people like, is excessively dry; being surrounded by desert, it is also very hot. Doctors think it is good — if you don't die, one might add. In those early days, Assuan had no big hotels or nervous patients, but was quite a primitive village with interesting bazaars where one could buy things from London and "Madam Nubias," a girdle or apron of leather strips and beads, the sole garment of the ladies of the Upper Nile. I might add also that they wear a coating of castor oil that would keep most people at a safe distance, and that enables you to smell a village a mile off. At Assuan, you are at the foot of the First Cata- ract, and get your first sight of the orange sand of Nu- bia, flowing down over its black basalt rocks. Here also came the excitement of being pulled up the cata- ract by hundreds of white-clad natives, led by a chief 238 RANDOM MEMORIES who reminded me of a cheer leader in college games. There was no dam then and boats had to be pulled up the rapids in the side eddies to avoid the full force of the current. It- took us three days to make the as- cent, because, after two or three hours of pulling and hauling with many ropes out, and much excitement and yelling, the crowd would quit for the day, and de- mand more baksheesh if they were to go on again the next. These natives of the Cataract are a fine-looking race, with regular features, almost black skins, and slender, athletic figures. Some of the chiefs were su- perbly handsome in their white flowing garments. All the men are wonderful swimmers and play about in the rapids like frogs. For a consideration a dozen of them, with a short log under their chests, went down the grand rapid for our benefit. It is really a danger- ous sport, and Englishmen who thought they were good swimmers have lost their lives in attempting it. At last we were pulled out into the smooth water above the falls, and wendcjd our way, amid huge rounded polished rocks, to the beautiful island of Philse, with its palms and temples; not as now buried half the year up to its waist, so to speak, with all its palms dead and its beauty gone — • all to make a few pounds for speculators in the Nile delta, but of that later. SKETCHES MADE ON THE NILE EGYPT 239 After a few days enjoying the temple and making sketches, we hurried on to Abu Simbel, as there is lit- tle to see above Philse, and the scenery is not so inter- esting as below. Abu Simbel Is a rock-cut temple with four gigantic statues guarding its entrance. It is worth coming far to see. I was struck by the almost exact likeness of these statues to one of our sailors, showing how the type had survived. There is a great slope of orange sand outside the temple, leading to the desert above, where my wife used to bury herself in the hot sand, which quite finished her cure of the rheumatism. On the top, the desert stretched away for miles of undulating surface, broken with ledges of rock and here and there conical mounds or tumuli that reminded one of the pyramids on the lower part of the river, and I wondered if the much-discussed origin of the pyramids was not here solved, and if the in- habitants of these parts on descending the river might not have set up, in lands that were flat, the pyramids as a reminder of these home mounds. We remained at Abu Simbel several days rather than spend the time going up to Wady Haifa, where our course would be barred by the Second Cataract. The time was occupied by the crew in getting the daha- biyeh ready for the descent of the river; that is, taking down the great yard with its sail and stretching it lengthwise above our heads, and putting the small 240 RANDOM MEMORIES after sail or jigger on the mast in its stead. This is be- cause it is impossible to sail down the river with the big sail, as, with all the view shut, it would be impos- sible, running with the current, to steer the boat; and all the windows have to be shut tight, and the grit gets into your mouth and food, and makes you think life not worth living. In spite of all these thorns, in- cluding the flies, a winter on the Nile is the most won- derful experience; that is, if you are not in a hurry. People who are always in a hurry hate it, also those who live solely for society. We met one party who were thus disappointed; they had been told you met such charming people on the Nile, and they had met nobody and were evidently tired to death of each other. You have to be very sure of your companions, shut up as you are for two or three months in a small boat, with perhaps divergent views as to what to do, or what excursions to make. Many people quarrel under these conditions; they don't speak to each other, and almost invariably go to different hotels when they get back to Cairo. I am happy to say this did not happen to us, though there were moments when friction threatened, and people were surprised to find us as fond of each other as ever, and staying again at the same hotel. Finding we were going to have plenty of time, we stayed two weeks at Philse, on the way down, and EGYPT 241 thoroughly enjoyed it. There were some dear little children, a boy and girl about six or seven, who used to swim out to the island from the mainland every day quite naked, with their clothes in a bundle on their heads, and they would then attach themselves to us as we sketched, and partake of our lunch. They were friendly little beggars, and we got quite fond of them. On the way down to Luxor, we visited some of the temples, like Kom Ombo and Edfu, that we had passed with longing eyes on the way up. Edfu especially charmed us, it being more complete than most of the others, and we passed one never-to-be-forgotten eve- ning there, with a glorious full moon. I leave the de- scription of these wonderful ruins to the many books on the Nile. To me it was the whole life that was so charming, the wonderful sunsets, the mysterious after- glow, the stars at night so bright and palpitating, and the ever-changing life on the river. The Duke of Ar- gyll, whom I met once at Cairo, said he did not enjoy it, it was all tombs, which made his wife, Princess Louise, laugh delightedly. We spent several days again at Luxor, visiting again Karnak and the temples on the other side of the river, and made a very hot and tiring journey on don- keys to the valley of the tombs of the kings. I may say that in those days all the excursions were made on 242 RANDOM MEMORIES donkeys; now you drive out to Karnak and even to the tombs of the kings in carriages. The tombs, ■ even, are lighted by electricity, and, you are almost tempted to add, have all the comforts of home. Gradually we worked our way down to Cairo, and our wonderful three months were over ! Never have I enjoyed a winter so much. We had kept the pyra- mids for our return to Cairo, because, that year there was an unusually high Nile, and the plain was still flooded right up to the pyramids, and part of the causeway leading to them had been carried away, so that it was impossible to drive there; even in March we had to be ferried across the gap on a flat- boat. There was no Mena House there then, so we carried our own lunch. Of course, we thought it necessary to climb the pyramid. I, being in good training, from the previous summer in Switzerland, disdained the help of the Arabs, much to their disgust, and even carried a sun umbrella over my head to keep off the sun. Arabs who remained below with my wife assured her that the last person who at- tempted the ascent with an umbrella had been blown off, in spite of which evil prophecy and the size of the blocks of stone, which are about the height of a table, I reached the top in twenty minutes. There I en- countered a gentleman who said he was Mark Twain's Arab, and offered for a certain sum, which I have for- EGYPT 243 gotten, to descend the pyramid, cross the space to the pointed pyramid, and reach the top of that in twelve minutes. So I held the watch on him while he made his reckless descent, jumping from stone to stone in his wild flight. Why he was not killed or tripped up by his flying garments, I do not under- stand, but he reached his goal with a minute to spare, and was rewarded to his satisfaction on his return. We then visited the Sphinx, some of us on foot and some on donkeys. Why the Sphinx has been given the feminine gen- der I cannot understand ; the head is obviously that of a man, and an Ethiopian at that. It was probably suggested by some cumulus projecting above the sand that looked like a man's head. The cheeks still retain some of the red coloring, as also the headdress with blue and red stripes on it. The headdress was that of a king. The tall part of the headdress, which was set into a depression in the top of the Sphinx as it is now, was recently discovered, buried in the sand, not far distant. To make it more like a Sphinx paws were con- structed out of stone, reaching out in front of the figure. Between these paws was situated a temple or shrine. The paws, by the way, are quite out of scale with the size of the head. When we saw it at that time the Sphinx was buried in the sand up to the neck. 244 RANDOM MEMORIES The sand Is always drifting, and has to be continually dug out. A curious effect of this drifting sand is that it has cut away the neck till it is much smaller than it was originally. I failed to see any of the mysterious smile so much talked about, but in the evening, by moonlight, when all the defects are hidden, the massive head gazing out over the valley of the Nile is tremendously im- pressive. Unfortunately, the hordes of laughing, chattering tourists generally arrive to spoil the ro- mance. A thing that interested me very much In Egypt was the Mohammedan religion. It seemed to enter so much more into the life of the people than the Christian religion does with us. How much more beautiful the call to prayer by the muezzin from his lofty minaret, his quavering voice floating over the busy city, than the harsh clangor of some persistent bell that too often summons the Christian to his de- votions. Our sailors said their prayers regularly morning and night, and sometimes between, without any shame at doing it in public, but as a matter of course, taking the greatest care to face in the supposed di- rection of Mecca. We had one sailor who was not really a sailor, but lured from a cafe to do the singing for the crew. He sung In a high nasal quaver, and at EGYPT 245 the end of each stanza all the crew would come In as a chorus with a long-drawn Ah! I asked what his songs were about, and was told by the dragoman that they were love songs and not proper to be translated. I mention him particularly because he was always say- ing his prayers at all sorts of odd moments, perhaps to make up for his scandalous songs. He especially became very devout when there was need of all hands to pull a rope or shove us off a sand- bank, but nobody took any notice of him or cursed him for shirking as would have happened in any Christian land. Nobody must ever interfere with a Mussulman's prayers ; or even pass in front of him, or cast his shadow upon him, when he is engaged in his devotions. Of course there is a good deal of fanaticism in their religion, but perhaps not more than used to be dis- played in Christian countries. I remember being made very angry, when we visited the mosque of El Azar, or University, at two of the students turning round and spitting in the direction of the ladies of our party. Of course it would not have been safe to take any no- tice of such a thing, but it was not pleasant. We were fortunate in seeing in Cairo the Doce, the semi-religious, semi-barbaric festival, when a sheik on horseback rides over the prostrate bodies of fanati- cal dervishes. The ceremony took place in a vacant 246 RANDOM MEMORIES lot, on two sides of which were booths of a sort of a fair, where, besides things to sell, the howling and whirling dervishes performed to attract crowds. We had very good seats on top of one of these booths, well out of reach of the motley throng that surged below. A hundred or more dervishes lay face down In a long line, head to foot, and as close together as pos- sible, as, if the horse should step between them, they might have their ribs broken. It was intensely hot and the friends of the dervishes in many instances stood at their heads with fans to keep them from faint- ing and to encourage them. Presently at the other end of the line we saw the sheik all in white mounted on a beautiful full-blooded white Arab. The sheik was very fat and evidently under the influence of hashish, as he reeled in his saddle and had to be sup- ported by a dervish on each side while another led the horse. The horse had had his shoes removed and I noticed was very reluctant to tread on the prostrate forms before him. Some of the dervishes got up and walked off unconcernedly after the horse and his rider had passed over them, showing they were none the worse; others had to be helped up by their friends, as if they were in a trance ; while still others rose up writhing and throwing their arms about, as if in si:rf- fering, but I really think it was more religious frenzy EGYPT 247 than anything else. Some may have been really hurt, but all were able to walk away, if not alone, with the help of friends. This festival was supposed to be so cruel that it was suppressed two years later. I am sure more men are hurt in a football scrimmage than occurred when we saw it. The Assuan dam does not properly come into this narrative, as it was not built till many years later, but I cannot help saying a few words about it, as 1 was much interested in its construction from an engineer's point of view. I have been in Egypt many times since this first visit in 1878-79, perhaps twelve or fourteen times, and have seen the dam while under construction and several times since its completion. Knowing the Nile as I do, I could not see, taking Into account the width and depth of the channel, how any amount of water let out gradually from the dam in the spring and summer could benefit the land above Cairo. It is only in the delta, where like all deltas the land on either side of the river is apt to be lower than the bed of the river, that side canals could develop new land and utilize the held-back water. Indeed, I think this was proved by the necessity of building a supplementary dam at Assiut to furnish water to a canal leading off to the west, but which I noticed had hardly any water in it by the first of March. How much good it did later I do not know. . 248 RANDOM MEMORIES On one of my visits to the great dam I noticed that there was an excessive seepage at the western end. This is always a danger signal, and I learned that in the rush of water from the sluices the rather soft stone on which the dam was built had been gullied out and the dam at this point had gone out several inches. They were obliged to build what is called an "apron" dam, below the big dam, to correct this. I have seen it stated in print that the actual cost of the dam has never been made public, much less the balance sheet as to whether it has ever paid interest on the cost. That it has not been perfectly successful is proven by their finding it necessary to raise the dam nine feet, to get enough water to extend the ir- rigated land in the delta. It is impossible to get in- formation from English officials; they shut up like clams when any outsider tries to find out anything. Everything Englishmen do must be perfect in their eyes, and always with the most philanthropic ob- ject. The English always remind me of little "Jack Homer," who " sat in a corner Eating a Christmas pie. He put in his thumb and pulled out a plum, And said, ' What a good boy am L' " It is a rather significant fact that the man who furnished the money to build the dam, — Sir Ernest EGYPT 249 Cassel, — doubtless at a good rate of interest, was also the man who in connection with a Cairo capital- ist, also, I believe, a Jew, bought up all the Govern- ment land in the delta before the dam was built, and when the dam was finished, sold it at more than three times what they paid for it. How much of the land in the delta is owned by Englishmen or other exploit- ers I do not know. It is now chiefly used to raise cot- ton, which during the war was extremely profitable. A good deal of wheat land has, I fancy, been sacrificed to cotton. Egypt used to export large quantities of grain; now I believe it has to import. Why is this.? In 1879 when I made the long and delightful donkey ride across the whole width of the cultivated land to the Temple of Abydos, which is on the edge of the desert, I noticed that the crops in the middle of Feb- ruary were already nearly breast high. Not many years ago, since the dam was built, at exactly the same season of the year, they were not more than a foot high. This set me to thinking. The first year we were on the Nile the water was of a dark chocolate color, and the water, if left standing in your tub overnight, would show quite a thick deposit of mud in the bottom of the tub. Now it is of a cafe-au-lait color and leaves much less of a deposit. Every one knows that the wonderful fertility of 250 RANDOM MEMORIES Egypt in the olden time was owdng to the yearly floods, which spread over the land and deposited a layer of mud that acted as a fertilizer; also the water that was pumped up by artificial means for irrigation, after the flood had subsided, left its deposit. Now it stands to reason that the vast lake impounded by the dam, about the size of the Lake of Geneva, is constantly depositing on its bottom the mud held in solution, which like that in your bathtub must amount day by day to an enor- mous quantity lost to the enriching of the soil in the Nile Valley. As a matter of fact the water that is let out of the sluices in the bottom of the dam is pale in color, but is also intensely cold so that I have seen quite a number of fish floating dead from this cause. The dam ought, I think, to be spelled with an w, be- cause, owing to the vast body of water constantly evaporating in the hot sun, it has quite changed the climate of Assuan, so that there is rain where it never rained before, and the north wind blowing up the river over the cold water is sometimes very dis- agreeable, to say nothing of ruining the temple of the beautiful island of Philse, and turning out of their homes the Cataract people, the finest tribe on the Nile, and scattering them nobody knows where. I offer these observations for what they are worth. I may be entirely wrong; but there are others who EGYPT 251 think as I do, that the dam was a gigantic speculation to put money into somebody's pocket, and not, as pretended, to benefit the Egyptians. I ought to have mentioned in this connection the primitive methods of raising water to irrigate the fields. People have asked why they do not use steam pumps; there are two reasons, the people are poor and could not afford the expense of the pump and of the coal, which is very dear in Egypt, and also, where it has been tried, the river when in flood cuts in around the foundations and destroys the whole thing. Some of the sugar factories have them, but they are obliged to revet the bank with stone for a long distance and at great expense. So the natives stick to the old ways ; the shadoof, where the water is lifted from one level to another by hand, with leather buckets on a sweep with a coun- terweight of clay, very much like an old New England well-sweep. The men who work these shadoofs are wonderfully picturesque, with only a loincloth about them and their brown skins glistening like bronze. It is very fatiguing work, however, and is done in relays. The sakieh is worked by oxen, or sometimes by a camel and a donkey, blindfolded so as not to get dizzy and going round and round attached to two cog-wheels that hoist an endless string of buckets from a well. These are mostly used back from the river. 252 RANDOM MEMORIES They give forth a most dismal creaking, and, if worked all night, are most undesirable neighbors. As I was anxious to see the Suez Canal, we caught a P. & O. steamer at Suez and traversed the whole canal. It was hardly worth while, however, as it proved a very stupid trip; nothing but a ditch with desert on either hand. We stopped at Port Said to coal, which recalls to me that a few years later we were also there for coaling when an Italian troop-ship came In crammed with soldiers on their way to fight the Abysslnlans. A number of oflficers came ashore in immaculate uniforms with white helmets and each carrying a small fan. The Idea of going to fight the Abysslnlans with fans struck me as very comical. Poor devils, very few of them ever returned to Italy after the massacre of Massowah, but perhaps the Abyssinian belles rejoiced In the fans. On the steamer was an English woman, returning from India all alone. In a dying condition. She had relatives at Malta waiting for her, but unfortunately she died the day before we reached there, and was Im- mediately burled at sea. It seemed to me very brutal that her body could not have been kept a few hours, and delivered to her relatives, to be given a Chris- tian burial on land, but the captain explained that if he arrived in port with a dead body there might EGYPT 253 be complications, and he might be detained a day or so. We had a few hours on shore at Malta, another of England's plums, but thought it a rather dreary place, though with a magnificent harbor. From there we went on to Gibraltar, a very large English plum, where we landed to go up through Spain. We stayed there several days, seeing a review and sham battle of the " Black Watch " and visiting the celebrated gal- leries cut in the rock and now of no use for defensive purposes. We were very much tempted to join two English- men in a trip to Ronda on horseback; but concluded wisely that it would be too hard an excursion with bad roads and bad inns. We had been told that Ronda was a wonderfully picturesque town situated in a ravine. A number of years later we went there by rail, and found that the ravine was in the town and not the town in the ravine. The town was not very interest- ing, situated on a plateau, with the ravine dividing it in two, with a splendid arch of a bridge connecting the two parts. We found that in order to get to Seville we should have to go to Cadiz, either by diligence from Alge- ciras, or by a small coasting steamer. We chose the latter as the lesser of the two evils, but it was pretty bad. 254 RANDOM MEMORIES Cadiz is a wonderfully bright and clean-looking city, with its shining whitewashed walls, its gay har- bor, and its inviting patios. We went to Seville by rail in time for Easter week and the church processions. We arrived there late in the evening only to find the hotel we had written to could not take us in, but sent us forth with a man to find lodgings outside. The streets were dark and badly lighted, and rather forbidding. We were shown first a room beneath the sidewalk, which we promptly refused. Then we were taken to the house of a dressmaker, who kindly gave up her own nicely furnished room on the first floor. I think the woman had already retired to bed, as she appeared after some delay in a dressing- gown, and we had to wait some time for the bed to be made up afresh. The next morning, when we went forth to get our breakfast at the hotel, we found the hallway filled with a half-dozen smiling and quite pretty sewing girls, hard at work, each with a flower behind her ear and her hair elaborately arranged. They made a pretty sight, and I was glad that we could not get into the hotel except for meals, as their smiling faces greeted us as we passed in and out. With the help of a valet-de-place we got very good seats for the proces- sions which took up the whole of Holy Week. They were very interesting; but after a time tedious, as the EGYPT 2SS images on platforms from the different churches are carried on the backs of men whose plebeian trousers and shabby shoes, protruding from beneath the dra- peries, do not harmonize very well with the gorgeous images of saints, and who have to stop and rest every hundred yards or so, as some of the images must be very heavy. We also saw the rending of the veil in the cathedral on Easter morning with much noise of exploding gun- powder. The cathedral at Seville has a vast, dimly lighted interior, and is very impressive, but the exte- rior is disappointing. Of course the gem of Seville is the Giralda Tower, with its beautiful fretwork, feebly imitated in the Madison Square Garden Tower. I suppose the expense prevented an exact copy. On Easter afternoon with all the world we went to the bull-fight, which is a great affair as being the first after Lent. The pageant of the bull-fighters' entry into the ring, and the demand of the matador for the key to the bull-pens were very medieval and fine. The brilliant costumes of the bull-fighters, the bright sun- shine, the gay crowds, which included many women, made a scene never to be forgotten, but when the first bull was let out and the slaughter of the horses began, I was filled with disgust. These poor brutes, only ready for the knackers, some of which could hardly stand up, were blindfolded and literally stood 256 RANDOM MEMORIES up broadside to the bull, who did not seem over- anxious to charge them, recognizing, it seemed, that it was poor sport to rip up a helpless fellow-animal. There was one poor white horse, whose entrails were hanging out, that was taken out, sewed up, and brought in twice again. I imagine that in the olden time, when the picadors were mounted on good horses and were expected to hold off the bull with their lances, there might have been some sport in It. Now the picadors are so band- aged about the legs, to escape injury, that they have to be lifted on their horses. We saw three bulls killed, and then left. I wish never to see another bull-fight unless the odds are more even. Our sympathies were entirely with the bull, which seemed to have absolutely no chance. I should have liked to see some of his persecutors chucked over the barriers, where they constantly took shelter, like rabbits running to their burrows. After visiting the annual fair on the river-bank on the following day, where all the swells of Seville have tents in which they receive their friends and dance, all dressed in their old national costumes, the common people walking up and down and looking at them, we were glad to leave the noise and heat of Seville for the cool shades of the Alhambra with the perpetual sound of plashing or running water in our ears. EGYPT 257 What an enchanting spot! We had arranged to spend three days there, and stayed three weeks; we simply could not get away. There was much to sketch and I was busy morning and afternoon. The pink walls of the old fortress in contrast to the fresh spring green of the foliage and the beautiful color of the diiferent courts of the Alhambra itself, with all the delicate tracery of Arab art, was too much for an artist to resist. Then there was the picturesque figure of the King of the Gipsies, who insisted he was Fortuny's model, that had to be painted. I began a picture of him in a gorgeous costume, when to my horror he appeared the next day in a shabby old suit, and said he had sold the previous costume to a Russian artist. Whether he had or not, I was not going to be treated in that way a second time, so I told him to go down into Granada and buy for me the best costume he could find. He returned next day with a beautiful costume, a leather jacket with red and blue cloth let in in places, a rather shabby pair of blue knee breeches with silver buttons down the side, a bright red sash, and, best of all, a pair of finely stamped Cordovan leather leggings, not to mention a broad-brimmed Spanish hat and a handkerchief tied round his head, and all, if I remember right, for twenty-five francs, or its equivalent. 258 RANDOM MEMORIES Some of the best sketches I ever made I made In the Alhambra, but I am sorry to say that, going back there in the spring of 19 14, 1 found much of the glam- our gone. The restorer had been at work and fixed it up with new work that did not harmonize with the old, and had scraped oif many of the vines and lichens that give charm to old ruins. From Granada we went to Madrid, stopping at Cordova on the way, to see the old mosque with its myriad columns, and the fine Roman bridge. Madrid we did not like much; it is a dreary city, either too cold and rainy or too hot and dusty, and always too windy. We went to Toledo for a day and night. Toledo is gloomy, but very interesting and very picturesquely situated, with its magnificent bridge. On the way back to Madrid, the train was three hours late, and we spent the time on the station platform, cold and hungry, as there was nothing to eat and we had expected to get back in time for dinner. On our way to France, we had intended stopping at Burgos, but found that we should arrive at two in the morning and could not leave till two the next morning. I could stand one morning getting up at that unearthly hour, but two was too much, so we went directly through to Biarritz and then to Paris. After closing up our afi'airs there, packing my pictures left in the studio, and selling the EGYPT 259 things we did not want to take to America, we crossed to England. We made one or two visits to friends in the country and then took a trip through Scotland. It happened to be a very cold and wet summer and Scotland was too cold for much enjoyment. I was disappointed in the Trossachs. There are plenty of equally beautiful spots In New England, but no Scott to write about them. Edinburgh is very picturesque, and all the romance of Mary Queen of Scots adds so much to one's Interest. It is these romances of the Old World that Americans enjoy so much. I think we liked Stirling Castle best of all, and I had the energy to get up at an early hour to make a sketch of it before our train left at eleven. On the way to Oban we had to go part-way by stage-coach. It was raining hard and we could get seatsonly with the guard, behind. There we sat with our umbrellas up and a tarpaulin across our laps. In which every once in a while the rain made such a lake that the water had to be shaken out. Our luggage In the meantime rested on the top of the coach without anything over it. I remonstrated, but the guard said they never covered the luggage, and this in a land where it rains most of the time! The thick English leather portmanteaus may be able to stand it, but American trunks cannot, and we found our clothes quite wet when we reached Oban. When It did not rain, we made an excursion to 26o RANDOM MEMORIES the islands so associated with Black's novels and up the Caledonian Canal and back. We needed all our winter clothes at Oban, and were glad when the time came to take our departure by boat to Glasgow, and so to Liverpool and home. CHAPTER XIII PROFESSIONAL FORTUNES On my return from Europe I at last began to feel that I was getting a firm grasp on my technique, which I knew was my weak point. In spite of this, when I had an exhibition of some of my work, it was not a success. I got no credit for some of the best heads, as people seemed to assume that they were only copies of Cou- ture or too much in his style. When Duveneck had brought home his wonderfully cleverwork from Munich, — 'in 1865,! think, — every- body went into raptures over it, and not without rea- son, and did not lay it to its being a mere copy of his master's style; perhaps partly because people were not so familiar with the Munich school. A pupil neces- sarily reflects many of the mannerisms of his master till he has worked out his own style. I may say that Duveneck, when he changed his style to one more in the French manner, and not so brown and bituminous, was not so successful. He seemed to fall between two stools. Some of Paris Bor- done's pictures look like Titian's, but nobody thinks the less of them on that account. However, in the next two or three years I found I 262 RANDOM MEMORIES had increased my reputation considerably; my pic- tures were accepted, and well hung in exhibitions in Boston and New York. I was elected Vice-President of the Boston Art Club, and had charge of the exhi- bitions held there, thereby, of course, acquiring the enmity of several artists who thought they had not been treated as well as they deserved. Such is the re- sult of well-doing! I began to feel that success was in sight. An elderly Frenchman who had seen some of my pictures said to my father, just before his death, that " I had a future," to which my father replied, "How fortunate to have a future! you and I are too old to have a future." Alas! there was no future; the Fates decided other- wise. In justice to myself I must add that when I parted with Couture in Paris, he expressed himself as so much pleased with my work that he wanted me to establish a school in America to carry out his ideas of what he called the "grand manner," and to send the advanced pupils out to him to be finished. Unfortunately, he died shortly afterwards, and I found that the artistic taste of America, which formerly admired his work, had changed, and Americans had become followers of Sargent or the Impressionists. My association with Couture was very close, and I may fairly say that I was his favorite pupil in the last ERNEST W. LONGFELLOW PROFESSIONAL FORTUNES 263 days of his life. Manet, although a former pupil of his, he did not admire; he had none of his style in drawing, and his vulgarity and realism repelled him. Manet, it seems to me, is largely responsible for the vulgarity and coarseness of modern art. He started the cult of the ugly. Compare his vulgar "Olym- pia," so much admired by artists of the present day, with Titian's Venus: the one only an unidealized rep- resentation of a common courtesan, cold in color, but strong If you like; the other the idealization of a beau- tiful nude woman, the flesh palpitating with life, and wonderful In color. And see Manet's treatment of a subject similar to one treated byGIorglone — "The Pastoral" — of two men and a nude woman sitting together out of doors : Glorgione's so beautiful In color and so charming that the nude does not seem Incon- gruous, while Manet's "Le Dejeuner sur I'Herbe," with the men In modern costume and the vulgar nude, is simply repulsive. On March 24, 1882, my father died and a great light seemed to have gone out of my life. For years I could not enter his study without a pang — the gentle presence had passed away, the affectionate greeting was no longer to be mine. 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