That voyage is one of the most delightful memories of my life. I loved the sea; and every phase of it, storm or calm, was a new joy. I had one fellow-passenger, a German doctor of philosophy, Dr. Seemann, who had been an ardent radical in Germany, and had been studying in the United States the development of political intelligence under democratic conditions, returning to his native land with the profound conviction that democratic government was destined to be a failure. We had hot debates on the subject, in which the doctor adduced his conversations with the intelligent farmers of New England, whom he had especially studied, to show that their political education was such as to endanger the best interests of the community from its extreme superficiality; I, with an unfaltering faith in the processes of universal suffrage, disputed his conclusions, so hotly in fact that we quarreled and he took one side of the quarter-deck for his promenades and I the other. But the conditions of sea life, with a companionship limited to two persons, are such that no quarrel that was not mortal, or from rivalry in the affections of a woman, could endure many days, and after a few such days we drew to the same side of the deck and were better friends than before, but we dropped politics.

This was in January of 1850, and I am driven to curiosity as to the subsequent career of the young German savant, who in that state of American political evolution was capable of drawing the horoscope of a nation, as it has been in recent times fulfilled; who saw in the crude notions of political economy of that prosperous yesterday the germs of the political blunders and errors of to-day. I drew his portrait, I made a few studies of sea and sky, but for the most part the sensation of simple existence under the conditions of illimitable freedom in space, with no reminder of anything beyond, was sufficient for me. I used to lie on my back on the roof of the wheel-house and look into the sky, and try to make friends with the sea-gulls which sailed around over me, curiously peering down with their dove-like eyes as if to see what this thing might be. Then the nights, so luminous with the "breeming" of the sea as we got into the Gulf Stream, and the flitting and sudden population of the ocean, always bringing us surprises; the more exciting and delightful storms which came on us in the region in which they were always to be expected, and which, though we had some that made lying in one's berth difficult, were never enough to satisfy my desire for rough weather,—all these things filled my life so full of the pure delight in nature that when, at the end of nearly three weeks at sea, we came in sight of the Irish coast, I hated the land. Life was enough under the sea conditions, and the prospect of the return to the limitations of living amongst men was absolute pain.

We made Liverpool in twenty-one days from New York, and the steamer which had left that port the next week did not arrive till three or four days after, so that my waiting for the letter of credit involved a hotel bill which nearly exhausted my money in hand. The kindly captain, knowing my circumstances, made the hotel keeper throw off fifty per cent. of his bill (for I went to the "captain's hotel"), and thus I succeeded in getting to London with the money which was to have paid my expenses for six weeks (according to the careful calculations I had made, at the rate of a pound a week) reduced to provision for three, after which Providence was expected to provide me with a passage home. In these weeks I had planned to see Turner's pictures, Copley Fielding's, with Creswick's, and all the others Ruskin had mentioned. But the railways and hotels had never come into my arithmetic, and that was always, and remains, my weak point. However, the letter of credit was for fifty pounds, and so I felt justified in my faith in Providence, my brother going to the general credit of that account.



CHAPTER VI

ART STUDY IN ENGLAND

Arrived at Euston Station in the small hours of the morning, I bought a penny loaf and walked the streets eating it and carrying my valise until the day was sufficiently advanced for me to go to present a letter of introduction given me by G.P. Putnam, the publisher, to his agent in England, Mr. Delf, who at once took me to a lodging-house in Bouverie Street, in which I got a room for six shillings a week, service included, and an honest, kindly landlady to whom I still feel indebted for the affectionate interest she took in me. I had letters to Mr. S.C. Hall, editor of the "Art Journal," and the Rev. William Black, pastor of the little Seventh Day Baptist Church at Millyard in Goodmansfields, Leman Street, a very ancient and well-endowed foundation, made by some Sabbatarian of centuries ago, with a parsonage and provision for two sermons every Saturday; and under Mr. Black's preaching I sat all the time I was in London. He was a man of archaeological tastes whose researches had led him to the conviction that the Seventh Day was the true Christian Sabbath, and to fellowship with the congregation of Millyard. I was admitted to honorary membership in the church, and the listening to the two dry-as-dust sermons was compensated for by the cordial friendship of the pastor, an invitation to dinner every Saturday, and the motherly interest of his wife and daughters. My childhood's faith and my mother's creed still hung so closely to me that the observances of our ancient church were to me sacred, and the Sabbath day at Millyard still held me to the simple ways of home. In that secluded nook, out of all the rush and noise of London, we lived as we might have lived in an English village; it was an impasse, and one who entered from the narrow and squalid alleys which led to it was surprised to find the little square of the old and disused graveyard, with its huge hawthorn trees and its inclosure of the parsonage appendages, as peaceful and as far from the world as if it had been in distant Devon.

My letter to Mr. Hall led to introductions to Leslie, Harding, Creswick, and several minor painters, all of whom found me attentive to the lessons they gave me on their own excellences and led me no farther, but it also brought me into contact with a painter of a higher and more serious order, J.B. Pyne, one of the few thinkers and impartial critics I found amongst the English painters. Every Sunday I went out to Pyne's house in Fulham, walking the six or seven miles in the morning and spending the day there. Kitchen-gardens and green fields then lay between Kensington and Fulham where are now the museums, and there the larks sang and the hawthorn bloomed. After an early dinner we passed the afternoon in talk on art and artists. Pyne was one of the best talkers on art I ever knew, and a critic of very great lucidity; his art had great qualities and as great defects, but in comparison with some of the favorites of the public of that day he was a giant, and in certain technical qualities he had no equal in his generation except Turner. He had the dangerous tendency, for an artist, of putting everything he did under the protection and direction of a theory—a course which invariably checks the fertility of technical resource, and which in his case had the unfortunate effect of causing him to be regarded as a mere theorist, whose work was done by line and rule. But I had good reason to know that Turner thought more highly of him than the English public, and I am convinced that as time goes on and his pictures acquire the mellowness of tone for which he carefully calculated in his method and choice of material, he will be more highly esteemed than in his own time, and that the careful and systematic technique which characterized his work, and which is so opposed to the random and hypothetically inspired methods that are the admiration of a half-educated public, will find its true appreciation in the future.

Of all the English artists of that day with whom I became acquainted, Pyne impressed me as by a considerable measure the broadest thinker, and, except Turner in his water-color, the ablest landscape painter; old John Linnell in this respect standing nearest him in technical power, with a more complete devotion to nature and her sentiment. In Harding's work I took no interest; his conventions and tricks of the brush repelled me, and generally his work left me cold and discouraged, for this is the effect of wasted cleverness, that it disheartens a man who, knowing that his abilities are less, finds the achievement of cleverer men so poor in what satisfies the artist of feeling. In it I saw an exaggeration of Pyne's defects and the caricature of his good qualities. Creswick had a better feeling for nature, but convention in his methods gave place to trick, and I remember his showing me the way in which he produced detail in a pebbly brookside, by making the surface of his canvas tacky and then dragging over it a brush loaded with pigment which caught only on the prominences, and did in a moment the work of an hour of faithful painting.

A painter who taught me more than any other at that time was Edward Wehnert, mainly known then as an illustrator, and hardly remembered now even in that capacity. Attracted by one of his water-colors, I went to him for lessons, which he declined to give, while really giving me instructions informally and in the most kindly and generous way, during the entire stay I made in London. Among all the artists I have known, Wehnert's life was, with the exception of Sexton's, the most pathetic. His native abilities were of a very high order, and his education far above that which the British artist of that day possessed. He was a pupil of Paul Delaroche, and the German blood he had from his father gave him an imaginative element which the Englishman in him liberated entirely from the German prescriptive limitations, while there was just enough of the German poet in him to give his design a sentiment which was entirely lacking in the English figure painting of that day. He painted in both oil and water-color, with a facility of design I have never known surpassed, making at a single sitting, and without a model, a drawing with many figures. He was at the moment I knew him engaged in illustrating Grimm's stories, for a paltry compensation, but, as it seemed to me, in a spirit the most completely concordant with the stories of all the illustrations I have ever seen of that folk-lore.

Wehnert had several sisters, who had been accustomed to a certain ease in life, and to maintain this all his efforts and those of a bachelor brother were devoted, to the sacrifice of his legitimate ambitions; he was overworked with the veriest hack-work of his profession, and I never knew him but as a jaded man. He was a graduate of Goettingen, widely read and well taught in all that related to his art as well as in literature, and I used to sit much with him while he worked, and most of my evenings were passed in the family. The sisters were women who had been of the world, clever, accomplished, and with a restricted and most interesting circle of friends; but over the whole family there rested an air of tragic gravity, as if of some past which could never be spoken of and into which I never felt inclined to inquire. Among the memories of my first stay in London the Wehnerts awaken the tenderest, for through many years they proved the dearest and kindest of friends. And the hospitality of London, wherever I found access to it, was unmeasured—the kindly feeling which showed itself to a young and unknown student without recommendation or achievement made on me an indelible impression. I now and then found people who asked me where I had learned to speak English, or if all the people in the section from which I came were as white as I was; but except in a single case, that of a lady who proposed to make me responsible for slavery in the United States, I never found anything but friendship and courtesy, and generally the friendliness took the form of active interest.

Most of my time was passed in hunting up pictures by Turner, and of course I made the early acquaintance of Griffiths, a dealer in pictures, who was Turner's special agent, and at whose gallery were to be seen such of his pictures as he wished to sell,—for no inducement could be offered which would make him dispose of some of them. Griffiths told me that in his presence an American collector, James Lenox, of New York, after offering Turner L5000, which was refused, for the Old "Temeraire," offered him a blank check, which was also rejected. Griffiths's place became one of my most common resorts, for Griffiths was less a picture dealer than a passionate admirer of Turner, and seemed to have drifted into his business through his love for the artist's pictures; and to share in his admiration for Turner was to gain his cordial friendship.

Here I first saw Ruskin and was introduced to him. I was looking at some little early drawings of Turner, when a gentleman entered the gallery, and, after a conversation between them, Griffiths came to me and asked if I should not like to be presented to the author of "Modern Painters," to which I naturally replied in the affirmative. I could hardly believe my eyes, expecting to find in him something of the fire, enthusiasm, and dogmatism of his book, and seeing only a gentleman of the most gentle type, blonde, refined, and with as little self-assertion or dogmatic tone as was possible consistently with the holding of his own opinions; suggesting views rather than asserting them, and as if he had not himself come to a conclusion on the subject of conversation. A delightful and to me instructive conversation ended in an invitation to visit his father's collection of drawings and pictures at Denmark Hill, and later to spend the evening at his own house in Grosvenor Street. After the lapse of forty-eight years, it is difficult to distinguish between the incidents which took place in this first visit to England in 1850 and those belonging to another a little later, but my impression is very strong that it was during the former that I spent the evening at the Grosvenor Street residence, at which I met several artists of Ruskin's intimacy, and amongst them G.F. Watts. I then saw Mrs. Ruskin, and I have a very vivid impression of her personal beauty. I remember saying to a friend, to whom I spoke of the visit just after, that she was the most beautiful woman I had seen in England. As I approached the house there was a bagpiper playing near it, and the pipes entered into the conversation in the drawing-room. On my making some very disparaging opinion of their music, which I heard for the first time, Mrs. Ruskin flamed up with indignation, but, after an annihilating look, she said mildly, "I suppose no Southerner can understand the pipes," and we discussed them calmly, she telling some stories to illustrate their power and the special range of their effect.

At that time Ruskin held very strong Calvinistic notions, and as I kept my Puritanism unshaken we had as many conversations on religion as on art, the two being then to me almost identical and to him closely related. I remember his saying once, in speaking of the doctrine of foreordination (to me a dreadful bugbear), as I was drinking a glass of sherry, that he "believed that it had been ordained from all eternity whether I should set that glass down empty or without finishing the wine." This was to me the most perplexing problem of all that Ruskin put before me, for it was the first time that the doctrine of Calvin had come before me in a concrete form. Another incident gave me a serious perplexity as to the accuracy of Ruskin's perceptions of nature. Leslie had given me a card to see Mr. Holford's collection of pictures, in which was one of Turner's, the balcony scene in Venice, called, I think, "Juliet and her Nurse." It was a moonlight, with the most wonderful rendering of a certain effect seen with the moon at the spectator's back, and I noted in speaking to Ruskin, later on, that no other picture I had ever seen of moonlight had succeeded so fully in realizing it, to which he replied that he had never noticed that it was a moonlight picture; but when I called his attention to the display of fireworks on the Grand Canal, he admitted that it was not customary to let off fireworks by day, and that it must be a night scene.

My acquaintance with Ruskin lasted with varying degrees of intimacy, and some interruptions due to his sympathy with the South during the civil war and bitterness against our government, till 1870, when it was terminated by a trivial personal incident to which his morbid state of mind at that time gave a false color. We separated more and more widely in our opinions on art in later years, and the differences came to me reluctantly, for my reverence for the man was never to be shaken, while my study of art showed me finally that, however correct his views of the ethics of art might be, from the point of view of pure art he was entirely mistaken, and all that his influence had done for me had to be undone before any true progress could be made. What little I had learned from the artists I knew had been in the main correct, and had aided to show me the true road, but the teaching of "Modern Painters," and of Ruskin himself later, was in the end fatal to the career to which I was then devoted, for I was unable to get back to the dividing of the ways.

But the first mistake was my own. What I needed was practical study, the training of the hand, for my head had already gone so far beyond my technical attainment that I had entered into the fatal condition of having theories beyond my practice. My execution was so far in arrear of my perceptions of what should be in the result, that instead of the delight with which I had, untaught, and in my stolen hours, given myself to painting, I felt the weight of my technical shortcomings so heavily as to make my work full of distress instead of that content with which the artist should always work. Everything became conscious effort and the going was too much uphill. I had always been groping my own way, scarcely as much assisted by the fragmentary good advice I received as laid under heavier disabilities by the better knowledge of what should be done. In art education the training of the hand should, I am persuaded, always be kept in advance of the thinking powers, so that the young student should feel that his ideal is just before him if not at his finger's end. That this is so rarely the case with art students in our day is, I am convinced, the chief reason of the technical inferiority of our modern painters and the root of the inferiority of modern art. The artist does not begin early enough. I was already belated, and every advance I made in the study of the theory of art put me farther behind, practically.

The hope of getting much technical instruction from competent masters in England was speedily dispelled. Lessons in water-color I could get at a guinea an hour, and to enter as a pupil with one of the better painters was impossible. Pyne received from his pupils L100 a month. I had calculated how far I could mate my fifty pounds go and put it at six months. By the advice of Wehnert, I applied to Charles Davidson, a member of the New Water-Color Society, for instruction, and went down into Surrey, where he lived, to be able to follow him in his work from nature. He lived at Red Hill, and in the immediate vicinity John Linnell had built his then new home. In the few weeks I lived there I saw a great deal of the old man, one of the most remarkable examples of the old English type I have ever known, and to me as interesting a problem from the religious point of view as from the artistic. Barring differences of the creed, of which I knew and cared nothing (for my own religious horizon had always included all "good-willing men," and I had no conception of the distinctions of creed which would send on one side of the line of safety an Established Churchman and on the other a Nonconformist), we agreed very well, and in the general impression I set Linnell down as a devout Christian of the Cromwellian type, and he certainly was a man of remarkable intellectual powers, both in art and in theology. His Christianity might have taken a form of less domestic sternness, but I remembered my own father too well to find it inconsistent with genuine piety, though not even my mother ever inspired the awe Linnell and his religious severity excited in me.

Linnell's landscape seemed to me the full expression of a healthy love of nature, possible only to a moral sanity in the man—a cheery Wordsworthian enjoyment of her, which as a rule I have never found in perfection out of the English school and its derivatives; the outpouring of a robust nature which prefers to see the outer world with the spectacles of no school, and through the memory of no other man; not self-taught in the sense of owing nothing to another mind, but in the sense that what he had learned he had digested and forgotten except as a chance word in the universal gospel of art; technically weak, slovenly in style, but eminently successful in telling the story he had to tell. Even then, with my limited knowledge of painting, he seemed to me to furnish the antithesis to Pyne,—one too careful of style and running to excessive precision, the other too negligent and running into indecision; and this judgment still holds. Of Davidson, my immediate teacher, there was only to be got certain ways of doing certain things, limited to the elements of landscape; how to wash in the sky, to treat foliage in masses, and those tricks of the brush in which the English water-color school abounds; but no larger views, or more individual, of art itself. What he taught was, perhaps, what I most needed to learn, but I was already too far on the way to learn it easily.

I made a visit of ten days to Paris and saw with great profit the work of the landscape painters and of Delacroix, the other figure painters in general not interesting me much. I carried a letter of introduction from the Wehnerts to Mademoiselle Didot, the daughter of Firmin Didot, the famous publisher, then an old blind man, but one of the most interesting Frenchmen I ever knew, as Mademoiselle Didot was the most brilliant Frenchwoman. The old man was much interested in what I had to say of America, and he paid us the national compliment of saying that we spoke English more intelligibly than Englishmen in general. As I spoke no French, our conversation was in English, and he understood me perfectly, though he said he rarely could follow without difficulty the conversation of an Englishman, while Americans in general he understood readily. To accomplish all that I did with my fifty pounds it may be easily understood that I had to cut my corners close, and in fact they were so closely cut in my Continental excursion that I landed at Newhaven on my return with one shilling in my pocket, and when, at the end of my stay in England, I took the train for Liverpool, I had only sixpence (my passage being provided for), and my good friend Delf, who saw me off, on finding the state of my purse, insisted at the railway station on my taking a sovereign for contingencies.

This habit of making no provision for accidents had been a part of my moral training, the faith in the overruling Providence never forsaking me for an instant, so that, whatever I set about to do, I made no provision for accidents. To go ahead and do what I thought I ought to do, and let the consequences take care of themselves, has been the habit of mind in which I have always worked and probably still work. If the thing to be done was right, I never thought of what might come after, or even whether I had the means to carry a resolution into effect, taking it for granted that the means would be provided because the thing was to be done. I retain the distinct recollection of an expression of my mother while I was making preparations for this first voyage to Europe, and she was packing my clothes for the voyage and her lips were silently moving and the slow tears running down her cheeks. She said in her low and murmuring voice as if in comment on her prayer, "Oh! no, he is too pure-hearted," and I knew that the prayer was for my protection from the temptations of that world of which she only knew the terrors and dangers from her Bible, and that she was so wrapt in her spiritual yearnings that she had quite forgotten my presence. Poor mother! I never deserved the great trust she had in me, but the memory of that moment has served me in many devious moments to keep me in the path. But if I had no such virtues as those which she attributed to me, I had what was perhaps more potent, the intuitions which I inherited from her, and such as often take a man out of temptation before he is aware of its strength, and before it becomes a real danger; nor can any man remember such confidence on the part of his mother without, from very shame, if no sterner motive should exist, maintaining a higher tone of life.

I did not leave London without a sight of Turner himself, due to the friendly forethought of Griffiths, who so appreciated my enthusiasm for the old man that he lost no opportunity to satisfy it. Turner was taken ill while I was on this visit, with an attack of the malady which later killed him, and I had begged Griffiths to ask him to let me come and nurse him. He declined the offer, but was not, Griffiths told me, quite unmoved by it. One day, after his recovery, I received a message from Griffiths to say that Turner was coming to the gallery at a certain hour on a business appointment, and if I would happen in just before the time fixed for it I might see him.

At the appointed hour Turner came and found me in an earnest study of the pictures in the farther end of the gallery, where I remained, unnoticing and unnoticed, until a sign from Griffiths called me up. He then introduced me as a young American artist who had a great admiration for his work, and who, being about to return home, would be glad to take him by the hand. It was difficult to reconcile my conception of the great artist with this little, and, to casual observation, insignificant old man with a nose like an eagle's beak, though a second sight showed that his eye, too, was like an eagle's, bright, restless, and penetrating. Half awed and half surprised, I held out my hand. He put his behind him, regarding me with a humorous, malicious look, saying nothing. Confused, and not a little mortified, I turned away, and, walking down the gallery, went to studying the pictures again. When I looked his way again, a few minutes later, he held out his hand to me, and we entered into a conversation which lasted until Griffiths gave me a hint that Turner had business to transact which I must leave him to. He gave me a hearty handshake, and in his oracular way said, "Hmph—(nod) if you come to England again—hmph (nod)—hmph (nod)," and another hand-shake with more cordiality and a nod for good-by. I never saw a keener eye than his, and the way that he held himself up, so straight that he seemed almost to lean backwards, with his forehead thrown forward, and the piercing eyes looking out from under their heavy brows, and his diminutive stature coupled with the imposing bearing, combined to make a very peculiar and vivid impression on me. Griffiths afterwards translated his laconism for me as an invitation to come to see him if I ever came back to England, and added that though he was in the worst of tempers when he came in, and made him expect that I should be insulted, he was in fact unusually cordial, and he had never seen him receive a stranger with such friendliness except in the case of Cattermole, for whom he had a strong liking. In the conversation we had during the interview, I alluded to our good fortune in having already in America one of the pictures of his best period, a seacoast sunset in the possession of Mr. Lenox, and Turner exclaimed, "I wish they were all put in a blunderbuss and shot off!" but he looked pleased at the simultaneous outburst of protest on the part of Griffiths and myself. When I went back to England for another visit he was dead.

I may frankly say as to Turner's art, that I enjoyed most the water-colors of the middle period, though the latest gave me another kind of delight,—that of the reading of a fairy-story, of the building of glorious castles in the air in my younger days, that of something to desire and despair of. The drawings of the England and Wales series in the possession of Ruskin seemed to my critical faculty the ne plus ultra of water-color painting,—especially the "Llanthony Abbey," of which I recall those early impressions with the greatest distinctness[1]. I saw in the Academy Exhibition the last pictures he ever exhibited, some whaling subjects, fresh from his retouching of two days before, gorgeous dreams of color art, but only dreams—the actuality had all gone out. I saw them years after when they had become mere wrecks, hardly recognizable.

[Footnote 1: I saw it again in the Guildhall Exhibition of 1899.]

I saw also that year a picture by Rossetti and one by Millais, and the latter impressed me very strongly; in fact it determined me in the manner in which I should follow art on my return home. I did not and could not put it on the same plane as the "Llanthony Abbey," but the straight thrust for the truth was evidently the shortest way to a certain excellence, and this of the kind most akin to my own faculties, and I said to Delf, who was with me at the exhibition of the Academy, that if ever English figure painting rose out of mediocrity it would be through the work of the P.R.B. My impression is that the picture was the "Christ in the Carpenter's Shop," but of this I cannot be sure, though I am certain that it was in the exhibition of 1850. The Rossetti was in the old "National Society," and was either the "Childhood of the Virgin Mary" or the "White Lady." Beautiful as it was, it did not impress me as did the temper of Millais's work, the scrupulous conscientiousness of which chimed with my Puritan education. I left England with a fermentation of art ideas in my brain, in which the influence of Turner and Pyne, the teachings of Wehnert, and the work of the Pre-Raphaelites mingled with the influence of Ruskin, and especially the preconception of art work derived from the descriptions, often strangely misleading, of the "Modern Painters."

I received from my brother, as I had anticipated, the order for a passage on the Atlantic, one of the Collins line of steamers, and one of my fellow-passengers was Jenny Lind, on her way for her first visit to America under the guidance of Barnum. She gave a concert on board for the benefit of the firemen and sailors, and to this the half of Delf's sovereign contributed, the other half going for a bottle of Rhine wine, to return the compliment of my next neighbor at the table, who had invited me to take a glass of wine one day. Thus, as usual, I landed penniless from my venture, but fortunately found my brother on the wharf expecting the arrival of the steamer, her trips having been made with such precision that the hour of arrival was generally anticipated correctly. In those days the steamers were rarely driven, and a voyage of fourteen days was not considered a bad one. A day's run of 336 knots was a triumph of steaming and rarely attained. But we were at the beginning of the contest between the Collins and the Cunard steamers, and up to that time the American line had generally a little the better of it.

The rest of that year and the year following were given to hard and monotonous painting from nature while the weather permitted, and in the winter to working out clumsily the mysteries of picture-making, a work which, as I was without direction or any correct appreciation of what I had it in me to do, became a drudgery which I went through as an indispensable duty, but with no satisfaction. My larger studies from nature (25x30 inches) had attracted attention and had been hung on the line, getting for me the election to the Associateship of Design, and the appellation of the "American Pre-Raphaelite,"—all which for a man so lately embarked in the profession was considered a high honor, as it really was. But the success only confirmed me in my incorrect views of art and carried me farther from the true path. As studies from nature, the fidelity and completeness of them, even in comparison with Durand's, was something which the conventional landscape known then and there had never approached, and to the respectable amateurs of that day they were puzzles. In one of them, a study of a wood scene with a spring of water overshadowed by a beech-tree, all painted at close quarters, I had transplanted a violet which I wanted in the near foreground, so as to be sure that it was in correct light and proportion. This was in the spirit of the Ruskinian doctrine, of which I made myself the apostle. On that study I spent such hours of the day as the light served, for three months, and then the coming of autumn stopped me. Any difficulty in literal rendering of a subject was incomprehensible to me, and in fact in that kind of work there is little difference, for it is but copying, and requires only a correct eye and infinite patience, both of which I had; and it was a puzzle to me rather than a compliment when the veteran Durand said to me of one of my studies, that it was a subject he would not have dared attack on account of the difficulty of the effect of light, for to me it was simply a question of time and sticking to it. It was not art, but the public did not know it any more than I did, and I was admitted to a place which I believe was one of the highest amongst my contemporaries at home in a way that led to little even in its complete success. I influenced some of my contemporaries and gave a jog to the landscape painting of the day, and there it ended, through a diversion of my ambition to another sphere, but there it must have ended; even if I had never been so diverted.



CHAPTER VII

ON A MISSION FOR KOSSUTH

The arrival, in December, 1851, of Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot, on his mission for the redemption of Hungary, set all America in a flame of shallow enthusiasm, and I went to hear his appeals. What he asked for was money to arm his country, to renew the struggle with the House of Hapsburg. His eloquence carried away all deliberation in the Northern States, and even shook the government at Washington; but, in the end, the only practical result was his gain of the dollars which the hearers paid to hear him speak, and which no one regretted who heard him, for such oratory no one in the country ever had heard, even from men to whom the English language was native. Before making his discourse in any town, he took the pains to find out something of the local history, and thus touched the patriotism of his audience in the parish bounds, and the past glories of America were revived in terms of a new and strange flattery. We were like the Athenians after hearing the Philippics of Demosthenes,—all ready to march against the Austrian. Before he left New York I had volunteered to fight or conspire, or take any part in the struggle which might fall to me. I kept my counsel from my family, and when Kossuth went on his westward tour it was settled that, on or after his return to Europe, I was to follow.

His tour of the Northern States was a triumph that caused him to entertain hopes which a man of more sobriety and common-sense would not have conceived. Against the indifference to liberty and the selfishness of the slave States, his flood of eloquence broke in vain. He knew that the North contained most of the capital and energy of America, and he supposed that they ruled, and was late in learning that the South ruled us. At Washington he came into contact with the statesmanship and the demagogy of the republic, and, while the former gave him a magnificent reception, the latter quietly and undemonstratively quenched his hopes. The South had no sympathy with Hungarian or any other liberty, and we felt the chill fall on Kossuth and his eloquence. But, for the politicians, there was something to be made out of him and the naturalized voters, mainly republicans and refugees from the various revolutions which had failed in Europe; so he was not denied the expectation of some private assistance, though the hope that the United States should openly declare Hungary a belligerent, and thus give its moral weight to Kossuth, the recognized governor, was soon seen to be an idle and fallacious one. "Something might be done," said the politicians. So Kossuth waited.

A presidential election was near, and negotiations were initiated between Kossuth and the party leaders for his influence on the foreign vote, and, pending these, he could decide nothing as to his future movements. I was in the habit of going to see him at night, and sometimes waited for the departure of the committees of the politicians who were in discussion with him. One night, when I went in, I found him in a state of nauseated irritation, and he broke out, saying, "Mr. Stillman, if your country does not get rid of these politicians it will be ruined in fifty years." He had just received a Democratic committee, which had formally promised him, in return for the influence he might exert in favor of their candidate, two ships of war ready for service, and a sum of money, the exact amount of which I cannot now remember, but I think it was half a million dollars. Naturally he did not tell me if he had closed with the proposition, but the making of it by the committee was a revelation as to the purity of American politics which he fully understood. This committee had presented itself with the authority of Franklin Pierce, Democratic candidate for the presidency.

The scheme in which he at first proposed to utilize my services was the formation of a deposit of arms and materials of war at a point in the Mediterranean from which he could descend promptly on the coast of Croatia, and this indicated that the two men-of-war of the committee entered into his plans. The desired point he found in the little island of Galita, south of Sardinia, unoccupied and apparently unclaimed by any power, but on which, he told me, the flag of the United States had been hoisted some years before by one of our cruisers; evidently as a joke on the part of some of our sailors. I was to visit it and report on its fitness for his purpose; but negotiations dragged, or there was some hitch, nothing was concluded until Kossuth's departure for Europe became necessary, and Pulzsky, his alter ego, was given full instructions concerning me. I was to follow when affairs were in a certain state of readiness; and, in fact, after a few weeks, I was summoned to London. I received from Pulzsky the clue to Kossuth's quarters, in a quiet street, Bayswater way, if I remember rightly, to which I was to go only late at night, and by some roundabout road, as the Austrian spies were always watching him.

I had a letter to a Madam Schmidt, a German refugee, and an advanced republican, at whose house I used to meet a little assembly of refugees,—German, French, Russian, etc. Every Sunday night we used to meet and discuss the politics of Europe. Of my friends of this circle I remember only one,—a Mr. Norich, a young Russian, with whom I contracted a close friendship, never since renewed. Nothing more was said of the Galita plan, which seems to have depended on the success of the political negotiations with the Americans, and it was finally decided that I should go to Milan and carry the proclamations which Kossuth was to issue to the Hungarian soldiers of the Italian garrison there, ordering them, in case of any revolt, not to fire on insurgent Italians. This was in prevision of the insurrection which Mazzini had determined for the spring of 1853, and with regard to which there were grave dissensions between the two chiefs. Kossuth was not ready for the Hungarian rising, and refused to order it till there was a prospect of success, while Mazzini believed that, even if unsuccessful, the rising was necessary to keep his influence on the Italian population, which was already shaken. Kossuth said to me that he disapproved Mazzini's plans, for he refused "to play with the blood of the nations;" but, if Mazzini persisted, he would give the order to the Hungarian troops not to fire on the people if any rising should take place; more than that he could not do.

Pending the ripening of Mazzini's scheme I waited in London, at the orders of Kossuth, but before the moment came for my undertaking this mission a new one became urgent. When the Hungarian insurrection of 1848-49 had become evidently a failure, and Kossuth was about to escape into Turkey, he decided to conceal, in some place secure from Austrian discovery, the crown jewels, including the crown of St. Stephen, which was considered by the Hungarian people as necessary to the lawful coronation of their king, and with which Francis Joseph had not been crowned; and he and Bartholomew Szemere, one of his colleagues in the ministry—employing for their operations a detachment of prisoners, who were shot after the concealment was complete—buried the jewels at some point down the Danube. Having received information that Szemere, who was then opposed to Kossuth, was about to disclose their hiding-place to the Austrian government, Kossuth determined to remove them, and organized an expedition to this end, of which I was to become the apparent head. The description of the hiding-place was written in a most complicated cipher dispatch, the key to which was contained in a stanza of a song known to Kossuth's correspondent in Pesth. Each letter in the dispatch was represented by a fraction, of which the numerator was the number of the letter in one of the lines of the song, and the denominator the number of the line. This dispatch was then written in four parts; the first, fifth, ninth, etc., letters being put in the first part; the second, sixth, tenth, etc., in the second; the third, seventh, eleventh, etc., in the third; the fourth, eighth, twelfth, etc., in the fourth, and so on to the end. Of these parts of the dispatch, written on the finest paper, I had charge of two; one for myself, and one for a person indicated at Pesth, and the other two were to go by way of Constantinople, one for the confederate who carried it and one for the correspondent who had the song-key. We were to meet and spell out the directions and go to the hiding-place, and, when the jewels were recovered, they were to be hidden in a box of a conserve for which that vicinity was noted, and then carried to Constantinople, from which point I was to take charge of them and deliver them in Boston to Dr. S.G. Howe, the well-known Philhellene.

I folded my portion of these dispatches small, wrapped them in thin gutta-percha, and, going to the most obscure shoemaker in the part of London which I knew, had the heel of one of my boots excavated and the packet deposited in the hole and covered over again by a stout heel-tap. My orders were to take at least six weeks for the journey, to go by a roundabout route, and travel as if for pleasure. From the Austrian territory I was to write to Kossuth all the political information I could collect, the messages being conveyed in a cryptograph in which the form of the letter was to be that of a correspondence between lovers. The words composing the message were to be written on spaces left in a mask of which each had a copy, and the spaces between the words then filled up so that the letter would carry some meaning when read as a whole. Love-letters were supposed to give most room for nonsense. Knowing very little French, I bought a pocket dictionary and a copy of Racine, and, during a ten days' stay in Paris, by diligent use of the former in all my transactions, I picked up enough for the needs of travel, and, spending all my leisure over the latter, I was, before my mission was over, able to converse with considerable fluency and knew my Racine thoroughly.

From Paris I made the journey to Brussels in the company of an American gentleman, Mr. Coxe, of Alabama, traveling with his wife and daughter. At Brussels I made, through the Coxes, the acquaintance of M. Le Hardy de Beaulieu, the leader of a section of the Belgian Liberals, whose father had held a command in the Belgian contingent at Waterloo. My acquaintance with M. Le Hardy lasted many years, he being much interested in America, and having, with his brother, founded a Belgian colony in Alabama. The ancestral estate of the Le Hardys included part of the field of Waterloo, and we visited it in company with M. Le Hardy, who pointed out the trenches made by the heavy artillery of Napoleon still distinguishable on the surface of the fields in spite of the subsequent ploughings. I suppose that his familiarity with the fields from his boyhood gives authority to his assurance that the depressions we saw were the effect of the ploughing of the guns in the wet, soft earth, and did not exist in the natural lay of the land, and the incident brought one very near to the great struggle which fixed for long the position of England in European politics. M. Le Hardy had been, like his father before him, urged to resume the title of nobility which the father had renounced in the warmth of the republican movement prior to the Empire, having burned the patent in the square at Brussels; but, like the father, he had always refused. He was a consistent and, as he would now be classed, a moderate republican.

Visiting Dusseldorf for the sake of the school of art there, I seemed to go into the Middle Ages. We landed from the Rhine steamer in the night, finding the streets deserted even by the police, and dimly lighted by oil lamps hung across them at wide intervals, and I wandered a long time at random with my valise in hand, searching for a hotel, and not meeting a living person to ask guidance of. I blundered at length on a little inn in whose drinking-room still burned a light, and in which I found a night's lodging. Such a primitive state of civilization was to me, fresh from Paris and Brussels, romantic. At Berlin I made the acquaintance of Varnhagen von Ense, through a letter of introduction from Frau Schmidt, my republican refugee friend of London. He treated me with great consideration, and promised me a winter of brilliant social life if I would stay at Berlin. The chief inducement offered was the acquaintance of Humboldt, then absent from the city. Of Varnhagen von Ense I retain the most delightful memory. I found him courteous, genial, and hospitable, with a large-minded outlook on politics and a great interest in America. I saw also the new museum, with Kaulbach at work on his frescoes, and, going by Dresden, reached Prague, where I began my political reports to Kossuth.

Arriving at Vienna, I was beforehand with the famous police, which I found not to merit its reputation for sharpness, and went at once, after establishing myself at the hotel, and before my name was reported to the authorities and a spy put on me, to the address of a republican, known to Kossuth, and to whom I was directed to apply for the identification of some Hungarian resident in the city on whom Kossuth could depend to reestablish communication with the Viennese malcontents, broken by a misadventure of his former agent. This adventure Kossuth recounted to me, I suppose to keep up my courage in the perilous business he was sending me on. One of his agents had been sent on a round tour with instructions for certain officers or soldiers, and, having been detected in communication with the barracks and arrested, a memorandum book was found on him in which, amongst many addresses of persons to whom he had no mission, those to which he was directed were interspersed. All were arrested, among them the Vienna agent, who, ignorant of the reason of his arrest, suspecting treachery, and fearing the disclosures that might be extorted from him by torture, rolled himself in his bedclothes and set fire to them with his candle, the only means of suicide left him. When he felt that the burning was fatal he made an alarm and bade the attendant call the council of war, which immediately met in his cell. He then avowed his complicity in treasonable plans, and, assuring them that nothing more could be extorted from him by any torture they might inflict, that his chief would soon come and make all things right, and that there were thousands more as ready to die as he, he refused to say any more and died in silence.

My business was to find a man to take this agent's place. The individual to whom I was sent was a ribbon manufacturer on one of the main streets, and, pretending a desire to visit his weaving rooms, we went to the manufactory in the upper stories, and then I disclosed, with no preamble, my mission. The good man was in ecstasies, and to show his joy invited me down into his living apartments and introduced me to his wife, daughters, and the lover of one of his daughters, as a messenger from Kossuth! If my hair did not rise on end, I am certain that at no crisis of my life could it ever have done so. During my ten days' stay in Vienna and the four weeks I afterward passed in Pesth, I never lost a nervous apprehension of the consequences of this singular imprudence, for I was in the enemy's country, on business the slightest suspicion of which meant an obscure prison and complete disappearance from any friend. With cipher dispatches on my person in the handwriting of Kossuth, well known to all the authorities, and with my secret in the possession of five women and two men, the uneasiness I felt for the first two or three days can better be imagined than expressed. I did nothing all day long but walk the streets, drink coffee, and smoke cigars with constant apprehension of an arrest.

But I did not neglect my business. I found a Hungarian whose name Kossuth had given me as the alternative probable medium of the renewed relations with Vienna, but he not only refused to have any relations with the late dictator, but strongly warned me of the possible consequences to myself of the mission I was on, and made me see very clearly that Kossuth overrated his influence on the Hungarians after the debacle, for which he was largely responsible. But it never occurred to me that it was possible to withdraw or do less than obey my instructions. I reported to Kossuth that the only person I could find who was willing to assume the responsibility of entering into relations with him was the ribbon-maker, and then, having acquired the confidence of the American consul, who was a zealous agent of the imperial government, and got his vise for Hungary, I made my way to Pesth.

Once on the scene of my real labors, I discovered how incompetent a conspirator Kossuth was. He had given me the name of his correspondent in Pesth and his residence, in the Karolyisches Haus, as if that were his ordinary residence, without warning me, though he knew it, that he was really in hiding from the police, and probably only to be reached with precaution and indirectly. Adopting the same tactics as in Vienna, and not to attract attention by inquiries, I went at once in a cab to the house. The porter, of course, in reply to my inquiries, being in hearing of the cab-driver, who was probably a spy, denied any knowledge of such a person. I drove back to the hotel, and then went on foot alone and asked again for the individual, but got the same reply, this time angrily delivered. Utterly at a loss what to do, I wrote at once to Kossuth that the person wanted was not at the address indicated. Instead of writing to him to find me and giving him my address, Kossuth only reiterated through the post the former instructions. I repeated the denial, and then waited. In conversation with the hotel people I inquired as fully as was possible without exciting suspicion, about persons of liberal tendencies and such as I conceived that I might make use of, and studied the position as best I could. Pending this study I was summoned to the police headquarters to give an account of myself. This I did in a manner which must have been satisfactory, as they found that I knew little German and was a very stupid and unpractical individual, which I must have really been, to find myself there. I accounted for myself as a landscape painter on his travels, and as I knew nobody and made no acquaintances they dismissed all suspicion of me, our consul's assurance no doubt covering all doubts, and I waited still. But after a few days more a convenient attack of illness gave me a pretext for calling a physician, and I chose Dr. Orzovensky, who I had learned had been chief of the medical staff under the revolutionary authorities. Through him I made such inquiries as were possible about the people to whom I was sent, and then for the first time discovered that they were all under accusation as conspirators and searched for by the police, and of this I had no warning from Kossuth.

But in all this wandering my boot-heel was wearing away, and it was a question of wearing into the packet of dispatches, or putting them in a place of security. I accordingly dug them out, and, hiding them in a convenient corner of the cupboard in my room, where they must soon have been discovered in case of a domiciliary visit, took the excavated boots out to throw them into the river, choosing the earliest darkness of the rainy evening of the same day. I knew that if the bootblack saw the excavated heel he would in all probability report the fact, and my arrest would follow. In my ignorance of the fact that the city was under martial law, and that without a pass no one could be in the streets after 8 P.M., I had waited till 9 to be screened by the darkness, and then, walking down the river on the dike, I slipped down to the water's edge by the path, and gently tossed the boots into the rapid current. Seeing the dangerous articles float away into the dark, I turned to go up the dike to the road running along the top of it, when, to my dismay, I heard a sentinel directly across the road challenge, saw the officer of the guard coming on his rounds, and heard his reply to the challenge. I hurried down the bank, hoping that I had not attracted attention, but feeling that in the contrary case I was in most imminent danger of arrest, and the thought of the dispatches left where they must be found in case of suspicion gave me a moment's anxiety. I hurried back along the water's edge till I judged that I was out of sight from the post, and then walked up on the dike and towards the hotel.

It was very dark and raining slightly, but as I came within the circle of light of one of the street lamps the vigilant eye of the officer of the guard caught me, and he hailed, "Who goes there?" I did not reply, but, acting as if I did not hear, hurried to get directly under the lamp which was near, with a feeling that if the officer saw me there he would see that I was what I pretended to be, a stranger, and also with a feeling that I was safer at a distance if the challenge were followed by a bullet. Under the lamp I stopped for the officer to come up. I was not really frightened, but I cannot deny that I felt very nervous, as he came up, and, in an inquisitorial tone, asked, "What are you doing here?" I replied in German which was certainly comical and not a little shaky, for it was a fragmentary remembrance of the German read in my early college course, and never since revived, that "I was doing nothing—that I was a strangers" (ich bin ein Fremden), and had come out to see the effects on the river, pointing to the glimmering lights; but, fortunately, my German was so funny that he burst out laughing, and after a "sehr schoen, sehr schoen," as I had said "strangers" in the plural, he replied, "When you are a strangers you must stay in the house," and gave me friendly directions as to how to get back to my hotel without falling in with the police, "who wouldn't let you off as I have." I was fortunate enough to arrive without any further notice. The officers of the army hated to do police service, and my inquisitor was no doubt glad not to pass me into the custody of the police. I have always wished to know the name of my protector, for such he was.

I remained in Pesth over a month, exciting an increasing attention and being unable to account for a further delay, as I was doing nothing, not even sketching, which, in the vicinity of a fortress, would have been the surest way of inviting arrest. I profited by the acquaintance of Dr. Orzovensky's family to pass the time agreeably, and, finally, being unable to extort by post further instructions from Kossuth, or explanations in reply to two urgent letters describing the position I was in, and being unable to give any reason for a longer stay, or to find the people I was sent to, I determined to go back to London and start again with fuller oral instructions and a better understanding of the difficulties. I went to Orzovensky and frankly told him my errand, and asked him if I might leave the dispatches in some place known to him, so that he could indicate to some other person, should my mission be taken up by another, where they were to be found. He burst out on me with violence, accusing me of endangering his family as well as himself, and assuring me that if the slightest suspicion of my mission should transpire they would all be thrown into prison, and he be ruined, refusing to have anything to do or say about the dispatches, and breaking off all communications with me on the spot.

I had not, up to that moment, felt any real fright, though, when I stood under the scrutiny of the officer on the dike, I must confess I felt extremely nervous; but Orzovensky's violence, and his own panic at the thought of having harbored treason so long, making me fear that his anxiety to escape all suspicion might compel him to denounce me, gave me a mauvais quart d'heure. I was instantaneously in an awful funk, and I had a practical demonstration of the "vox haesit in faucibus," for I was unable to reply to the good doctor in anything but the faintest whisper, and my tongue clattered in my mouth, as dry as a stick, in an instant. I threw the dispatches in the sink and took the next train for Vienna, undisturbed by the train running off the track in the night, in the greater anxiety of my position, and, after making at the station of Vienna only a hasty lunch on a boiled sausage and a roll, continued my journey by express until I was out of the Austrian dominions, and stopped to sleep at Frankfort. My panic was as unreasonable as my security had been, for there was no reason to believe that Dr. Orzovensky would warn the authorities, or that I could not have carried the dispatches back to Kossuth in safety. My habitual courage was not the courage of one who realizes his danger and faces it coolly, but that of constitutional inability to realize what the danger is, however clearly it may be shown to him. As a habit the realization of my danger only came to me when the danger itself had gone by, and then I was frightened.

Arrived at London, I went to report to Kossuth, expecting a scene and reproaches, when I was prepared to show him that the failure of the mission was due to his having neglected to inform me that I was going to a man wanted by the police, and in close hiding, so that my failure to find him was probably due to the openness with which I made my approaches, and to his not having then informed his correspondent that I was on the ground expecting to see him, and that he must look out for me. But he only exclaimed, with a tone of regret, "Three months lost!" yet there was, probably, a reciprocal disapproval of our methods of carrying on a conspiracy; for, while he was most gravely disappointed at getting no result from his work and expenditure, no doubt owing largely to my incompetence for that kind of service, I was equally dissatisfied at being sent on an expedition which put my life in imminent danger, with the minor perils of torture and long imprisonment, provided with information utterly insufficient and needlessly incomplete for the mission confided to me.

If Kossuth had cautioned me that his correspondent was in hiding and wanted by the police, I should not have committed the grave error of going openly to find him, and under the eye of a cabman, who would probably report to the police my act. Had he even after that informed his correspondent where I could be found and who I was (which was perfectly practicable, for he told me himself that he had received letters from the correspondent during my stay at Pesth), there could have been communication at once. Kossuth said that I ought to have sought out the friends at the Tiger cafe, where they were in the habit of meeting publicly, though he knew that the city was swarming with spies, and that the state of siege existed (and of this, even, he did not warn me), and that my chief difficulty was to avoid being brought into contact with suspected Hungarians; nor did he recollect that he had given precise instructions to avoid anything which might lead any one to suppose that I was more than an objectless traveler. I was most reasonably disgusted with having my life exposed in this careless way, and he, perhaps, as reasonably so with my want of resource, and the result was that he decided not to employ me again in such work, and I decided to wait for active insurrectionary movements, in which I could take my place. As it happened, however, the Austrian government had recovered the crown jewels; some one in the secret—Kossuth said Szemere—having learned that Kossuth was sending an expedition to recover them, and, from jealousy of him, disclosed the hiding-place.

Kossuth's practical incapacity for the minutiae of conspiracy in this case was, I judged from what I afterward learned of his compatriots, characteristic of him. He continually neglected the details of important affairs, working by magnificent inspirations, which left out of consideration the defects of human nature. His self-exaltation had offended many patriots who did not fall under his personal magnetism, and his assumption of authority in military matters where he had no knowledge to justify it, alienated the competent officers. The treason of Goergey, as it was popularly considered, was probably due to the perception that Kossuth was an impracticable head for an active revolution, under whose dictature there was no hope of final success while he at the same time refused to abandon his impracticable ideals; and I heard from actual participants that there was great dissatisfaction amongst the officers with his assumption of dignity, out of place, and of command, for which he was incompetent. The fact was that he could not distinguish between the practicable and the impracticable, and though not so visionary as Mazzini, he believed that his power of arousing the wild enthusiasm of the Honveds and masses of Hungarians, due to his marvelous eloquence, was enough to carry on war with, and he would not see that, from the moment that Russia intervened, it was only a question of time when and how the insurrection should end. Then his treatment of the Slavonic element of the population was fatal to the movement. The Serbs only asked to be admitted on an equal footing with the Magyars to the struggle against the centralizing tendency of the German element at Vienna, and Kossuth contemptuously exclaimed, in response to their demand, "These Rascians, who consider themselves a nation and are only a band of robbers," etc.,—a reply hardly calculated to conciliate—one which in fact threw the Slavonic population against the movement and made the Russian intervention inevitable. Kossuth, like Mazzini, was simply an insurrectionary force—the administrative power existed only in great and imposing schemes which lacked adaptation to ordinary human nature and existing circumstances. The personal fascination of the man was beyond anything I have ever known, but his failure as the chief of a state was, I believe, inevitable.

I took my conge as secret agent, but it was understood that when the renewal of the revolt from Austria, to which he looked forward at no distant time, was at hand, I should take the place to which I had looked forward in the beginning. I saw one of Kossuth's associates subsequently, after the failure of Mazzini's Milan movement in the spring of 1853; and he then told me of the failure, and how the Hungarian soldiers, as had been ordered, refused to fire on the insurgents and had been decimated and sent to Croatia. More than thirty years after, I went to see Kossuth at Turin, and introduced myself as the young man who went to Hungary for him to carry off the crown jewels. He burst out with an impetuous denial of the existence of the expedition. "But," said I, "I have your letters written to me in Pesth." "I should like to see those letters," he replied. I promised to send them, conditionally on his promise to return them; but thinking it over, I sent him only one, inclosed in a stamped envelope directed to myself, with a letter recalling the promise to send it back. I never heard from him again, however, and saw that he only wanted to get the letters to suppress their evidence.



CHAPTER VIII

AN ART STUDENT IN PARIS

I went to Paris to wait for the impending rising in Milan, and meanwhile entered the atelier of Yvon, not to lose my time. My only English-speaking companion in the atelier was a younger brother of Edward Armitage, the Royal Academician; the popular atelier at that time for the English and American students being that of Couture. Yvon had about thirty pupils, to whom his attentions were given gratuitously and conscientiously, three times a week, with rare exceptions of the Saturday visit, by the pupils regarded as the least important. Of the thirty there were not more than a half dozen who showed any degree of special aptitude for their work, and only two were regarded by their colleagues as likely to be an honor to the atelier in the future, and of these, unless they have changed their names, no renown has come in later times. There was a marquis whose income was one hundred francs a month, and a count whose father gave him five sous and a piece of bread for his breakfast when he left home, but the rest were plebeians, with neither past nor future, whose enthusiasm in the face of their weekly failures, and patience in following an arid path, were most interesting as a social phenomenon. I have always found more to wonder at in the failures than in the great successes of artist life—seeing the content and even happiness which some of the hopelessly enthusiastic found in their futile and endless labor. We used to go to work at six in the morning, draw two hours and then go to a little laiterie and take our bowl of cafe au lait and a small loaf of bread, and then draw till noon, when we went home for the second breakfast. Armitage and myself used to breakfast at the Palais Royal, or some other quarter where the bill of fare was by the rest of the men considered luxurious, and we were dubbed the "aristocrats" of the atelier, my breakfast costing me one franc and a half and my dinner two francs. I had fixed my expenses, as in London, at the limit of twenty-five francs a week, which had to pay all the expenses of atelier, food, and lodging, and it was surprising how much comfort could then be got for that sum.

I had found a tiny room in the maison meublee in the Cite d'Antin where Mrs. Coxe lived, and Mr. Coxe in returning to America had given me charge of his women folk, so that I had a social resource and a relief from tedium which gave me no expense. On Sunday the daughter came home from school, and we all went out to dine at one or another of the Palais Royal restaurants, or made, in the fine weather, an excursion into the environs. Now and then, Mrs. Coxe invited me to take them to the theatre, and thus I saw some of the famous actors, Rachel and Frederic Lemaitre being still vividly impressed on my memory. The afternoons of the week days were given to the galleries and visiting the studios of the painters whose work attracted me, and who admitted visitors. I thus made the acquaintance of Delacroix, Gerome, Theodore Rousseau, and by a chance met Delaroche and Ingres; but Delacroix most interested me, and I made an application to him to be received as a pupil, which he in a most amiable manner refused, but he seemed interested in putting me on the right way and gave me such advice as was in the range of casual conversation. I asked him what, in his mind, was the principal defect of modern art, as compared with ancient, and he replied "the execution." He had endeavored to remedy this in his own case by extensive copying of the old masters, and he showed me many of the copies—passages of different works, apparently made with the object of catching the quality of execution.

In fact, if we consider the differences between the system of education in painting and that in music or any other art or occupation in which the highest executive ability is required, we shall see that we give insufficient opportunity for the painter's hand to acquire the subtle skill we find in the successful violinist or pianist, and which is due to the early and incessant practice in the manual operations of his art. The fact is recognized, that the education of a violinist must begin in the early years, when the will and hand are flexible, and not merely the training, but the occupation, is almost exclusive, for the specialist is made only by a special and relatively exclusive devotion to the particular faculties which are desired to be trained. It is useless to attempt to develop the finest qualities of the draughtsman without the same attention to the condition of training which we insist on in the musician. The theory may come later, the intellectual element may develop under many influences, and healthily, later in life, but the hand is too fine and subtly constituted an implement to be brought into its best condition and efficiency unless trained from the beginning to the definite use imposed on it.

Admitting, therefore, as I do, that the criticism of Delacroix was just, it is evident that, until we give to the modern student of painting a similar training to that which the early one had, we cannot expect him to attain the executive powers of the Italian renaissance, nor can we be sure that he appreciates the subtlety of the work of the masters, any more than the member of a village choir can understand the finesse of the highest order of musical execution, or its first violinist appreciate the touch of a Joachim or a Sarasate. For it is just in the last refinement of touch of a Raphael drawing or the rapid and expressive outline of a Mantegna that we find the analogy between the two arts, in a refinement of touch which is lost on the public, and appreciated only by the practiced student either of music or painting. This final attainment of the hand is only possible to a man who has been trained as a boy to his work. We find it in a water-color drawing of Turner, as in a pencil drawing of Raphael, and in the outlines of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but in modern figure painting never, even in France, where the youth generally takes up the training at fourteen to sixteen. I believe that the reason why this supreme manual excellence is so completely lacking, even in French art, that, so far as I know, only Meissonier amongst them has attained a measure of it, is that the seriousness of life and purpose necessary for any consummate achievement is so rarely found there in conjunction with that early and sound training.

Another acquaintance made in these days, which has always remained a delight to me, was that of Theodore Rousseau, to my mind the greatest of the French landscape painters. Though living and working mostly at Barbison, he had a studio in Paris, and there I used to see him, always received in the friendly and helpful way which was characteristic of most of the French artists of the higher order. Later I went to Barbison, where, besides Rousseau, I knew J.F. Millet, and a minor, but in his way a very remarkable, painter, Charles Jacque. Rousseau was a most instructive talker on art, beyond the sphere of which he hardly seemed to care to go in his thinking. He had never been out of France, had never seen the Alps, and did not care for mountain scenery, but concentrated all his feelings and labor on what he used to call "sujets intimes," the picturesque nooks of landscape one can always find in a highly cultivated country, where nature is tamed to an intimacy with the domestic spirit, or where she vainly struggles against the invasion of culture, as in the borders of the forest of Fontainebleau. In such material, nature withdraws farther and makes a wider margin for art, and the wedding and welding of the two become more subtle and playful.

It has always seemed to me that with all the differences inherent in the antagonism of the characters of the two men, the essential features of the art of Rousseau and Turner were the same; pure impressionism based on the most intimate and largest knowledge of the facts of nature, but without direct copying of them—rather working from memoranda or memories, for neither ever painted directly from nature; the same conception of the subject as a whole, its rhythmic and harmonic unity as opposed to the fragmentary manner of treatment of most of their contemporaries; the lyric passion in line and tint; the same originality which often became waywardness in the conception of subject in itself; the same revolt from all precedent; and the same passion for subtle gradation and infinite space, air, and light—and some of Rousseau's skies were the most vaporous I have ever seen. These are the fundamental agreements of the art of the two great masters, and in those qualities no other man of their countries and epoch has equaled them, but outside of these the contrasts are of the most pronounced. Pyne told me that Turner said he wished he could do without trees; Rousseau worshiped them. Turner loved the mountains; Rousseau never cared to see them and never painted one. Turner, a colorist, reveled in color like a Bacchanal; Rousseau, a tonalist, felt it like a vestal; but both had the sense of color in the subtlest refinement.

Rousseau used to say that if you had not your picture in the first five lines you would never have it, and he laid down as a rule that whenever you worked on it you should go over the whole and keep it together, growing in all parts pari passu. Wishing to give me a lesson in values one day as he was painting, he turned his palette over and painted a complete little scheme of a picture on the back of it, suggested by the subject before us as we looked out of the studio window. He showed me his studies from nature, mere notes of form and of local color and pastel. It was to me always a puzzle that, even in the educated art circles of Paris, Corot should have found so great a popularity as compared to that of Rousseau. Without in the least disparaging the greatness of Corot's best work, such for instance as the St. Sebastian and some other classical subjects, the names of which I cannot recall, the range of conception and treatment is limited as compared with that of Rousseau. This alone would give Corot a lower rank, in the absence of a marked superiority in some special high quality—superiority which does not exist, for the picked work of Rousseau possesses technical excellences all its own, as consummate as anything in the world's landscape art, while the range of treatment and subject, so much greater in Rousseau than in Corot, puts the limited and mannered art of the latter as a whole in a distinct inferiority.

Of Millet I saw much less, but enough to know the man and his art, simple and human, the one as the other. His love for manhood in its most primitive attainable types, those furnished by the peasant, was the outcome of his conception of art, such as the Greek of the early schools conceived it, the expression of humanity in a simple and therefore noble state, and of the honest, open, healthy nature of the man himself, averse to all sophistication of society, reverent of an ideal in art, and intolerant of affectations. He conceived and executed his pictures in the pure Greek spirit, working out his ideal as his imagination presented it to him, not as the model served him. The form is of his own day, the spirit of his art that of all time and of all good art, the elaboration of a type and not merely the reproduction of a picturesque model. It is the custom now to class all peasant subjects, emulating the forms of Millet, as belonging to his art. Nothing is more absurd, for the art of Millet was subjective, not realistic; it was in the feeling of the art of Phidias and the Italian renaissance, not in the modern pose plastique. The peasant in it was merely incidental to his sympathy with ideal life. Millet was himself a peasant, he used to say, and his moral purpose, if he had any, was the glorification, so far as art can effect it, of his class, the class which above all others in his eyes dignified humanity and held his sympathy. This feeling was with him no affectation, but the deliberate, final conclusion of his life—he reverenced the sabot and the blouse, the implements of tillage and work, as the Greek did his gods and the implements of war and glory; he saw humanity reduced to its simplest and most noble physical functions and possibilities, as the Greek did the perfection of the physical form, but he lacked the perception of the types of pure beauty of the Greek.

The personal relations between Rousseau and Millet were in the best sense of the word fraternal, and from neither did I ever hear a word to the disparagement of a brother artist, while Rousseau used to talk in the subtlest vein of critical appreciation of his rivals among the landscape painters, the Dupres, Ziem, Troyon, and others, so that I regret that in those days I thought only of my own instruction, and not of the putting on record the opinions of a man whose ideas of art were amongst the most exalted I have known.

A charming nature was that of Troyon, a simple, robust worker, and, like all the larger characters in the French art world with whom I became acquainted, full of sympathy and guidance for those who wanted light and leading. But the lives of these three great painters, like that of Corot (whom I never knew personally), show how completely the French public, so proud of its intelligence of art, ignored the best qualities of it till outsiders pointed to them. Troyon told me that for the first ten years of his career he had never sold a picture, but lived by painting for Sevres; the prosperity of Millet came from the patronage of American collectors, led by the appreciation of a Bostonian painter, William Hunt, and I well remember his famous "Sowers" on the highest line in the Salon, so completely skied that only one who looked for a Millet was likely to see it; while Rousseau, at the time I speak of, was glad to accept the smallest commission, and sold mostly to American collectors. Nor is it otherwise with the Rousseaus, Millets, and Troyons of to-day—the public taste, and the banal criticism of a journalism at its best the tardy echo of the opinions of the rare wise man, find genius only when it has ceased to have the quality of the new and unforeseen.

Yvon, in whose atelier I worked, was essentially a teacher, and his more recent assignment to the directorship of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts put him in his true place, that of a master of style in drawing and the elements of art instruction. He was engaged, when I knew him, on the battle-pieces of the Crimean war, the chief of which were already at Versailles. His was an earnest, indefatigable nature. He was as kindly and zealous a teacher as if he were receiving, like his English confreres, a guinea a lesson. Nothing so strongly marked the difference between the French and the English feeling for art as this characteristic feature of the disinterestedness of the French artist in giving instruction without compensation, while his English colleague of equal distinction gave instruction only at a price impracticable for a poor artist, if indeed he would give it at any price. And even thus, the English drawing-master did not teach art, but facile tricks of the brush. Need one seek any other reason for the curious fact that, with a marked superiority in the occasional highest attainment of rare and original abilities which English art shows, France has become the school of Europe, than that in England the master will teach only on terms which are prohibitive of the formation of a school, while in France, with few exceptions, the most eminent painters regard it as a duty to open their ateliers to pupils often gratuitously, but in any case freely and on terms which are adaptable to the modest means of the poorest class of workers? In how different a position in relation to the art of the world would English art now be in, had Sir Joshua, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Turner, and two or three others who could be named, thrown open their studios to the young enthusiasts who followed them, and the sterling talents which have never been wanting in England been enabled to profit by the experience and art of their elders, instead of groping their way alone to efficiency, or, still worse, going to South Kensington, generally "arriving" too late to succeed fully!

Waiting the word from Kossuth which should call me to join the ever-impending and ever-postponed insurrection, I passed the winter thus, profiting as I could by all opportunities for the study of art and making acquaintance with the artists. My money was running to an end, but this was a matter in which my faith in Providence did not allow me to borrow trouble, and I made it a rule never to run into debt. That I never borrowed I cannot say, but I never did so except in cases where I was in such personal relations with the lender that if I died without paying the debt, it would neither weigh on him nor on my conscience. I kept up my regular round of economy and work, and one Saturday, when I had paid for my dinner at the Palais Royal restaurant, I found myself with fifty centimes in my pocket, and went on a long walk in the streets of Paris, to meditate on my immediate future. Mrs. Coxe, one of the kindest of friends, would, I knew, gladly lend me what I needed, but I did not allow her to know that I needed, and how to pay for my next day's dinner I did not see. Still, confident that something would turn up, I walked towards my lodgings through the Rue Royale and its arcades, feeling the ten-sou piece in my pocket, when I saw a young girl dart out from one of the recesses of the arcade, dragging after her a boy of two or three years, and then, as if her courage failed, turn and hide herself and him again in the doorway from which she had come. I saw her case at once,—want and shame at begging,—went to her and gave her the ten-sou piece, and went to bed feeling better.

The next day being Sunday and no atelier, I slept late, and was awaked by a knock at my door, when to the spoken "Entrez" came in no other than my friend Dr. Ruggles, between whom and myself there were various communities of feeling which made us like brothers. He sat down by my bedside, and, salutations passed, broke out, "Do you want any money?" His grandfather, just dead, had left him a legacy, and he had come to Paris, artist-like, to spend it. I took from him, as I would have given him the half of my last dollar, a hundred francs, and on this I lived my normal life until, some weeks later, a friend of my brother arriving from New York with instructions to find me out and provide for my wants if I had any, supplied me for any probable emergency, including an order for a free passage home on a steamer of which my brother was part owner. I waited till the spring homesickness made it too irksome to live quietly in Paris, and then finding that the revolution so long waited for had gone by, I went home and to my painting.

In American landscape the element of the picturesque is in a serious deficiency. What is old is the wild and savage, the backwoods and the wild mountain, with no trace of human presence or association to give it sentiment; what is new is still in the crude and angular state in which the utilities are served, and the comfort of the man and his belongings most considered. Nothing is less paintable than a New England village; nothing is more monotonous than the woodland mountain of any of the ranges of eastern North America. The valley of the Mohawk is one of the earliest settled and least unpicturesque sections of the Eastern States, with its old Dutch farmhouses and the winding of the beautiful river; but I had explored it on foot and in every direction for miles around my birthplace, and found nothing that seemed to "make up" save trees and water. I spent one summer after my return amongst these familiar scenes, but found the few subjects which repaid study too remote from any habitable centre to repay the labor needed to get at them. I made long foot excursions through the valleys of the Connecticut and Housatonic; but, after my experience in rural England, it was very discouraging to ransack that still unhumanized landscape for pictures. Everything was too neat and trim, and I remember that one day, when I was on my search for a "bit," I found a dilapidated barn which tempted me to sit down before it, when the farmwife, guessing my intentions, ran out to beg me "not to take the barn yet; they were going to do it up the next week as good as new, and wouldn't I wait?"

An accident drove me to pass one of these summers in as complete seclusion from society as I could find, and where I should be able to do nothing but paint. I had been, two years before, hit in the face by a snow missile, during one of the snowballing saturnalia the New York roughs indulged in after every fall of snow; in this case the missile was a huge block of frozen snow-crust, which flattened my nose on my face and broke the upper maxillary inclosing all the front teeth. I modeled the nose up on the spot, for it was as plastic as clay, but the broken bone became carious, and, after enduring for two years the fear of having my head eaten off by caries, and having resigned the chance of having it shot off in the revolution, I decided to let my brother operate. The bone inclosing the front teeth was taken out with the six teeth, and I was sent into retirement for three months at least, while the jaw was getting ready for the work of the dentist.

I had seen, when last in England, the picture by Millais, "The Proscribed Royalist," which gave me a suggestion of the treatment of a landscape which should be mainly foreground, such as I particularly delighted in. Hoping to find a woodland subject which admitted of this treatment, I went to pass the summer on the farm of an old uncle (where I had caught my first trout), knowing it to be heavily wooded. Of course when one goes out to look for a particular thing he never finds it, nor did I then find the tree subject I wanted, but I found a little spring under a branching beech and surrounded by mossy boulders, and, taking a canvas of my usual size,—25x30 inches,—I gave three months to painting it and carried it home still somewhat unfinished. It was an attractive subject, though not what I had wanted, and was hung in one of the best places in the Academy exhibition, making its mark and mine. It was absolutely unconventional, and the old stagers did not know what to say of a picture which was all foreground. There was much discussion, and, amongst the younger painters, much subsequent emulation; but it did not find a purchaser at my price—$250. Anything so thoroughly realistic that, as President Durand said, "The stones seemed to be, not painting, but the real thing," puzzled the ordinary picture buyer; and the American Art Union, which was the principal buyer of the day, and the dernier ressort of the young artist, was managed by a committee of ordinary picture buyers. The picture gave rise to a hot discussion when exhibited, the old school of painters denouncing such slavish imitation of nature. As the negative photographic process had just then been introduced in America, I had the picture photographed, and a friend took a print of it to the head of the old school, without any explanation. My antagonist and critic looked at it carefully and exclaimed, "What is the use of Stillman making his pre-Raphaelite studies when we can get such photographs from nature as this!" As I had my brother's generosity to fall back on, I was not obliged to sell, and the picture remained in my studio for two or three years. Later Agassiz saw it and was so delighted with its botany that I decided to give it to him; but when a fellow painter offered—when I was leaving again for Europe—to "raffle it off," I allowed him to do so, and he appropriated the proceeds. I had made a rule of giving the pictures which were not sold in the exhibition to the person who had shown the finest appreciation of them,—a habit which did not contribute to pecuniary success, but which helped my amour propre, and I have always regretted not having sent that picture to Agassiz, who, in later years, became one of my best friends.



CHAPTER IX

SPIRITISM

During the subsequent winter the subject of spiritism occupied the world of the curious and the thoughtful a good deal; and, with my brother Paul, who was a disciple of Swedenborg, I took every occasion that offered to investigate it. Many of my friends were interested in it, and I soon became convinced that it was not the foolish delusion which the scientific world and most religious people pronounced it. In fact, if there be any basis of reality in the phenomena, it is hard to conceive a subject of such vital importance as the determination of the actuality of an individual existence after the physical death. It had always been evident to me that the immense majority of men had no real belief in human immortality, all their pursuits and acquisitions being of a purely material character. My own convictions were ingrained and immovable, but a physical demonstration of their verity seemed to me an eminently desirable result, if attainable, and I entered into the investigation with earnestness and all my patience. Society was largely occupied by the table-tippings and the "rappings." "Circles" were forming amongst all classes, and the mediums became an important element in the world of New York. I very soon came to the conclusion that the professional, paid mediums were, in many cases, the worst kind of impostors, and, in all cases, so far as any intellectual evidence was concerned, of an absurd triviality. Even in the private circles, where no trace of fraud could be suspected, the good faith of all entering them being assured, I found sometimes such extraordinary credulity that the subject would have been offensive to any dispassionate investigator who was not, like myself, determined to get to the bottom of it. The majority of the persons who entered into a circle were ready to believe any extraordinary thing that came to them, and the inanity of the general proceedings, even when fraud was excluded, was sufficient to indispose serious people to take part in them. To me the question had such vital importance that I was determined that neither fraud nor the inconsequent nature of the pretended communications should dissuade me from the most thorough investigation possible.

This investigation lasted several years, and included, to greater or less extent, every form of psychological and physical phenomenon which was offered by spiritism. My experience with the professional mediums was such that I soon ceased to pay any attention to them, finding that, what with the frivolity of their utterances and the evident imposture which, in the case of some of them, invariably marked the display of their powers, the sittings were simply farcical; nor did I ever find, in the doings of the mediums, or in the revelations of the regular spiritistic circles (and I sat in the most important one of them, that over which Judge Edmonds presided, during the two winters) in which no paid medium took part, anything which was not, or could not have been, imposture.

The reason is simple. The professional medium, paid to display certain powers, which are in any case extremely uncertain in their response to the call for them, invariably begins to imitate them when they fail. The mediums are invariably persons of an inferior order of intellect, avid of notoriety, and mostly mercenary, so that the results of the consultations with them were almost sufficient to deter serious-minded people from dealing with them a second time, while the people who formed the regular circles and had made a sect with a devotional character in it, rapidly degenerated into a credulity and materialism which were more discouraging than the most arid skepticism. Physical phenomena which met every demand for absolute guarantee of their genuineness, were very rare, and to meet with them required great patience and persistence, while the scientific student, in the habit of dealing with experiments that had definite results, obeying known or conjectured laws, if entering into an investigation which met at the threshold a frivolous, and possibly fraudulent, "manifestation," threw up the subject, the more readily that in general the student of physical science has no sympathy with psychical research.

Recognizing the correctness of this attitude and the unreliability as well as the utter want of essential importance in the physical manifestations and the invariable inconsequence and silliness of the intellectual results, I withdrew entirely from circles in which mediums took part or in which physical phenomena were sought for, and limited my investigations to the cases in which the good faith of all the company was unquestionable, and the investigation conducted in privacy and sincerity. Here, of course, there was still great uncertainty, and often the most curious triviality and low intelligence, but we were able to check the possible tendency to the simulation of the supra-normal activity. And even so the character of the "manifestation" was generally so trivial and opposed to all preconceived ideas of spiritual intelligence as to justify the conclusion that the departed had left their wits behind them, so that even in those "circles" which included only personal friends and individuals of unquestionable sincerity the results rarely had any intellectual importance. And I came to the conclusion that that form of the phenomena which alone gave any intellectual result, i.e. which manifested ideas in any way transcending the commonplace capacities of commonplace minds, had nothing in common with the physical manifestations, but seemed rather to consist in an exaltation of the intellectual powers of the subject, so that the evidence of any supra-normal power was rather moral than scientific, and had value only according to the relation between the subject and the hearer, and therefore no determinable value to physical science.