The Autobiography of a Journalist Volume I Part 3

In entering the church, Dr. Nott had deprived the world of a statesman of no ordinary calibre, but in the eyes of the Protestant, as of the Catholic Church, in the country which had its precedents to make, as in that which had precedents a thousand years old, the maxim, "once a priest always a priest," kept him in the pulpit, to which he had no irresistible call, and to which the accident of his career only had led him. Had the church to which he belonged been organized with an episcopal government, he had certainly been its primate; but in the vague and incoherent condition of the Congregational churches, to one of which he belonged, there was no career beyond that of the isolated pastorate of a single congregation. In this insufficiency of interest for an active and influential life there was only the educational calling left to satisfy his enormous mental activity, and in this he found his place. The future, which may look for his record in libraries, or in the results of research, scientific or literary, will not find him to occupy a position. He had, however, great mechanical inventive powers, as well as a marvelous knowledge of human nature; the former solved the problem, amongst others, of anthracite coal combustion for American steamers. In the latter lay his qualifications as the greatest teacher of young men of his generation.

n.o.body could know him except the pupils to whom he disclosed himself, and to whom his kindly and magnanimous nature was unreservedly open, and they were few, and the list is fast being canceled; when we are gone, no one will ever comprehend how he could have been what he was. But the power he always exercised over his favorite boys was extraordinary; any of us would have done anything permitted to human nature to satisfy his wish. An instance of his influence, occurring later in my life, will ill.u.s.trate his power over his old pupils. When, several years subsequent to my graduation, and on the election of Lincoln as President, I had used what influence I could enlist with the government (my brother being a prominent Republican) to get the appointment as consul to Venice, which was generally given to an artist, the princ.i.p.al pet.i.tion in my favor went from Cambridge. It was written by Judge Gray (now on the Supreme Court bench), headed by Aga.s.siz and signed by nearly every eminent literary or scientific man in Cambridge, but it lay at the Department of State more than six months, unnoticed. In the interim the war broke out and I had gone home from Paris, where I was then living, to volunteer in the army; but, being excluded by the medical requirements, and the ranks being full,--800,000 volunteers being then enrolled,--I turned to my project for Venice, and wrote a word to Dr. Nott, recalling his promise of years before to use his influence in my favor, if ever it were needed.

He inclosed my letter, with one containing an indors.e.m.e.nt of it, and sent it to Seward, the Secretary of State, and the appointment--not to Venice, which had just been given to Howells, but to Rome--came by return of post.

Union was then the only university of importance not under some form of denominational control, and for this reason had, perhaps, more than the usual share of extreme liberalism, or atheism, as it was at that time considered amongst the students; and one of my cla.s.smates, a man a couple of years older than myself, and of far more than the average intellectual power, made an active propaganda of the most advanced opinions. He also introduced Philip James Bailey's "Festus" to our attention, and for a time I was carried away by both. The great revulsion from my previous straitened theological convictions was the cause of infinite perplexity and distress. Up to that time nothing had ever shaken me in my orthodox persuasions, and the necessity of concealing from my mother and family my doubts and halting faith in the old ideas made it all the more perplexing. I had to fight out the question all alone. It was impossible to follow my cla.s.smate so completely as to accept his conclusions and become the materialist that he was, and so find a relative repose; and the conflict became very grave. The entire scheme of Christianity disappeared from my firmament; but, in the immediately previous years, I had been a reader of Swedenborg, and I held immovably an intuition of immortality,--or, if the term intuition be denied me, the conviction that immortality was the foundation of human existence, grounded in my earliest thoughts, and as clear as the sense of light,--and this never failed me. In this respect Swedenborg helped my reason in its struggle, though I could never see my way to the entire acceptance of his doctrine.

My dogmatic theological education had been entirely incidental, for my mother never discussed dogmas or doctrines, but the simple duties and promises of religion, and my intelligence had never been, therefore, so kept captive as to make release grateful. Christianity had never been a doctrinal burden to me, or any form of belief inconsistent in my mind with true Christianity. In my mother's thought there was only one thing utterly profane, and that was self-righteousness. And there happened to me in this conjuncture, what has in my later life been often seen, that the modification of religious views imposed on us by the superior force of another mind--a persuasion of what seems to be truth as it is only seen by others' vision--could not hold its own against the early convictions, and that a revulsion to the old faith was sooner or later inevitable and generally healthy. The epidemic pa.s.sed, and, though it gave me great distress for the time, it made my essential religious convictions stronger in the end. It is, I think, Max Muller who says that no man can escape from the environment of his early religious education. I have seen, in my experience of life and men, many curious proofs of that law, men who have lived for many years in the most absolute rejection of all religions, returning in their old age to the simple faith of childhood, ending as they began.

The change of religious convictions which holds its own against all influences is that which comes from the healthy evolution of our own thought. At any rate, in my own case, the rationalistic revolution completed its circle and brought me back to that simple faith to remain in which is a reproach to no man, and the departure from which, to be healthy, must be made on lines conformed to our better natures.

I felt the better for my excursion into new regions, and the freedom of movement I acquired I never lost.

As I am telling the story of a phase of human life in which the study of the religious character will be to some readers, perhaps, one of the chief subjects of interest, and as to me the whole subject is now purely objective, as a mental phenomenon in the life of another man would be, I am tempted to tell a romantic incident of this period of my evolution, because it ill.u.s.trates clearly the state of mind and sentiment developed by the peculiar education and surroundings of my youth. In one of the winter vacations of my course, my brother Paul, who was an ardent and sanguine proselyter in the Seventh-Day doctrine, charged me with an expedition up the Mohawk valley as a colporteur, to distribute Sabbath tracts, and, occasion arising, to discuss, with those who offered, the doctrine involved. The snow was deep, and, wading in it from house to house in all the towns as far as Utica, I finished with a visit to the home at Whitestown, near by, of my old friend the former preceptress of the De Ruyter Academy, with whom I had always been a favorite, and who had taught me French (very little) and drawing (very little more), but who was a charming and poetical creature. I had not heard of her for years, and the latest news was that she had become insane through a cruel disappointment in love,--her lover having wantonly, and without offering a pretext, broken off the engagement just before the wedding day,--and had been sent to a lunatic asylum. I found her at home, a wretched shadow of her old self, listless, and in a settled melancholy, which the doctors said was incurable. She had in fact been discharged from the asylum as a hopeless lunatic, though the violent phase of the insanity had pa.s.sed. It occurred to me that a diversion to old times would awaken her again to a sense of the present, and I tried to draw her back to the academy life by talking of it as if nothing had happened. That something unwonted was pa.s.sing in her mind soon became evident, and finally she burst out with, "Why, Willie" (she had always so called me in the old times), "didn't you know I had been crazy?" The manner, the suddenness of the conflict between old a.s.sociations and her present state, the mingling of our old affection, for I had in my boyhood held her very dear, as she had me, so overpowered me that I burst into tears, and she threw her arms around me and kissed me again and again.

What the feeling which sprang up on her part was I could never quite understand,--doubtless it was partly the delight of a sudden relief from the old, monotonous pain, the unexpected unbending of a tense and overborne mind and momentary obliteration of the dreary immediate past, and partly the outburst of a pa.s.sionate temperament which I had never suspected; but on my part there arose an attachment as chivalric as ever a knight of Arthur's time felt, yet perfectly platonic. That she was nearly old enough to have been my mother did not in the least matter--it was no question of love as young folks feel it; but in my heart I offered myself a bearer of her sorrows. I had only recently recovered from my wandering into the wilderness of doubt, and my religious faith was as vivid as when I had been at my mother's knee--Providence ruled, and G.o.d answered prayer. This phase of my life, juvenile as I now perceive it to be, I respect as the most honest in it. I honor the weakness as I cannot always what seems the later strength. Those who read my life may put the estimate on it which suits their creed; I only speak of it as a phenomenon of my Puritan youth. I prayed earnestly that I might take on myself her afflictions, if so she might be healed and come back to her right mind. That was Friday night, for her family were "Seventh-Day keepers," and I had gone to pa.s.s the Sabbath with them, so I stayed two days, continuing my devotions earnestly. On Monday I went back to my colportage, but that night I was taken with a sharp attack of bronchitis, with high fever, and obliged to keep my room at the hotel.

The next day, finding the matter serious, I sallied out and returned to the house of her parents, and remained there while the attack lasted. A naturally strong const.i.tution was my safety, and made light of what was really a sharp attack of acute trouble, which kept me in the house a considerable time, the care and happy charge of my friend.

What any physician of minds would have foreseen took place. She found in the attention to her patient the diversion from all the train of past preoccupations, and forgot in this absolutely novel situation the old trouble. To the delight of the family she began to take an interest in the affairs of the house, and, though for years she had utterly neglected the most trivial attention to her dress and personal appearance, and had shown such a determinedly suicidal disposition that her mother had been obliged to sleep in the same bed with her to be able to watch her effectively, she now became bright and cheerful and seemed her old self again. From that time forward she rapidly recovered, and when I went back to college we began a close correspondence which was the beginning of my real literary education, for her taste in literature was excellent, if a little sentimental, and her criticisms were so sound that in some respects they have never lost their effect on my way of thinking and expressing thought. She was persuaded to come to Schenectady and pa.s.s the period of my next vacation in our family. Her insanity absolutely disappeared, she returned to healthy activity in her old vocation as teacher, and the year after, to my great annoyance, married her former fiance. I was angry with her, not for marrying, but for marrying him after his shameful treatment of her. She seemed to me, and to her family also, to have thrown herself away on a man who had proved himself utterly unworthy any woman's devotion. All my chivalry, too, seemed wasted, and the only result of the experiment was the dissipation of an ideal, the nave expectation of the vicarious penalty to which I had in my sincerity offered myself having pa.s.sed away. Convinced, that I had cured her, I was indignant at having cured her for him, but I suffered no visitation of contempt for women, and my indignation was the deepest feeling that remained from the experience, except the literary impulse born of the persistent effort to interest her in my correspondence and the consequent search for material for letters in the details of college life and the nature around us; and the habit of noticing and memorizing what might be of interest to others in the most trivial incidents of life never quite left me. I became a profuse letter-writer from inclination, and, though all the letters of that part of my life and for years after were recalled and burnt scrupulously, I am convinced that what literary ability I possess is in a great degree owing to the impulse I received in that romantic attachment.

What was, perhaps, more important, was that the vicarious offering of myself, made in my morbid enthusiasm, and the commonplace result of it, hastened the end of that phase of my religious experience. It was only because my boyhood had been frozen up in those seven years of apathy and began to thaw out in later years, when manhood should have been taking the reins, that all that pa.s.sage of childhood and unsophisticated devotion intruded in the wrong place, to fill up the void in the formation. My religious status, as well as my conception of life, were only advanced to where they should have been at an earlier period.

Atheism was at that time beginning to work strongly among the students, and in opposition to it there began an antagonistic evangelical movement, with prayer-meetings amongst those religiously inclined. In my cla.s.s, at this time, were several who became in after life eminent in clerical activity, and amongst them were the brothers Nevius, distinguished in the missionary service in the far East. I had no liking for the prayer-meetings of the students, but I joined the movement for holding religious services in the city almshouse, a primitive inst.i.tution which had no chaplain, and where were sent not only the incurably poor and the incurably sick, but the idiots and half-witted, as well as the temporarily incapacitated poor, who would have been, in a better and more complete social organization, sent to a hospital, which did not exist in Schenectady. With several other students and two or three young ladies of the city we held services at the "poorhouse" every Sunday. Short exhortations with prayers and the singing of hymns composed the service, and I remember that one day, in giving out a hymn in long metre, I started it to a short metre tune, and had to go through it alone, the ladies whose business was the musical part of the service not being able to accommodate their measure to my leading. I made my solo as short as possible, and finished with the ill-suppressed giggling of the girls, but my audience of poor cripples and weak-minded were equally impressed.

No doubt the struggles with Festus and my atheistic friend, and the partial influence of the ambient, the sincere piety of the old doctor, which dominated the life of the college, helped to strengthen the reaffirmation of my orthodox Christianity, and, for several years after, I had no more question of the divine authority of the tenets of our church, including the Seventh Day Sabbath, than I had of the laws of nature; but the truly spiritual character of my mother's religion saved me from becoming a bigot. If I had been trained in the dogmas of Christianity, I have no doubt I should have then become an atheist.

Nor was I a prig. I must confess that I enjoyed the occasional larks in which my cla.s.smates sometimes led and sometimes followed me, as well as any of them. Our Greek professor, Doctor R., was a bit of a sn.o.b, and the plebeians of the cla.s.s, much the largest part, always held him in ill will; and as his garden bordered on our section, and his fowls roosted in the trees overhanging the green, we one day decided to mulct him in a supper. That night a party of the students of the section scaled the fence (I well remember tearing my trousers in climbing it) and wrung the necks of four of his fowls, which we sent into town next morning to be roasted, and which, accompanied by sundry mince-pies and a huge bowl of eggnog, made us a luxurious supper next midnight, the fragments being carefully--bones and bits of pie-crusts included--deposited at the professor's front door before daylight of next day, which happened to be Sunday. The package, carefully made up and directed like an express parcel, was addressed to him in all the fullness of formality, but it had rained in the interval, and when in the morning the servant took it up, on opening the door, the wet paper broke and the remnants of the feast bestrewed the doorway. The boy afterwards told me that the profanity of the professor was terrible to hear, and as he cut me two in my report of the Greek that term, I always suspected that he comprised me in the execration. As it happened the cut was undeserved, for there were few men in the cla.s.s who did their Greek better than I, and the cut cost me the Phi Beta Kappa, which went to all the cla.s.s whose aggregate marks made an average per term of 98, mine being 98. But as he always held me in disrespect on account of my father's occupation, and as a.s.siduously paid court and gave good reports to the sons of wealthy men, there was a mutual aversion. He gave _max_. that term to the son of a famous quack doctor, who always came to me to be crammed for the recitation, while I got 98. Naturally we had little respect for the marking.

Of my college course, I retained only what held my sympathies. I never went in for honors, or occupied myself beyond the required measure with studies which did not _per se_ interest me. Greek and Latin, but especially physics, the humanities, and literature enlisted all my ambitions, and the little weekly paper which was read at the meetings of our secret society occupied me more than was in due measure perhaps. I took my degree of course, but not with distinction. The majority of the family having, prior to my graduation, gathered at or near New York city, my father and mother, having attained their object in remaining in Schenectady, moved to New York, and I, finally liberated for the study of art, gave myself seriously to that end.

CHAPTER V

ART STUDY IN AMERICA

During the time of my preparation for entry to college, a wandering artist had happened to find his way to Schenectady, one of the restless victims of his temperament, to whose unrest fate had given other motives for change than his occupation. He was an Englishman by the name of John Wilson, a pupil of the brothers Alfred and Edward Chalons, fas.h.i.+onable London miniature painters of the early part of the century. In years long gone by he had established himself at St. Petersburg as a portrait painter, but, losing his wife and two children by a flood of the Neva, which occurred during his momentary absence in England, he abandoned Russia and went to one of the Western States of America and gave himself up to agriculture. Here fate found him again, and, after losing another wife and other children, he became a wanderer, interested in everything new and strange. He had been taken by Pitman's then new phonography, and his chief occupation at that time was teaching it wherever at any school he could form a cla.s.s. He came to Union College, to this end, and had been recommended to my mother for board and lodging, and she gladly availed herself of the opportunity to get for me lessons in drawing in return for his board. He was a const.i.tutional reformer, a radical as radicalism was then possible, had become an atheist with Robert Dale Owen, indignant at the treatment accorded him by destiny, and was _au fond_ an honest and philanthropic man. He taught me the simplest rudiments of portrait and landscape in water-color, and of perspective, of which he was master, and, as he failed to find a field for his phonographic mission, I got up a small cla.s.s in drawing for him, and after our dozen lessons he went his way to new regions and I never heard from him again. What he taught me I soon lost, except the perspective.

A little later, and while at work in my father's shop, there came in for a piece of ironwork our local artist, a man of curious artistic faculties, a shoemaker by trade, who had taught himself painting and had made himself a certain position as the portrait painter of the region. He desired to make for himself a lay-figure, and for the articulations had conceived a new form of universal joint, which he desired my father to put into shape. My father refused the job, as out of the line of his work, and I volunteered to take it, stipulating for some instruction in painting in return. The joint did not answer when worked out, but the friends.h.i.+p between s.e.xton and myself lasted through his life, and a truer example of the artistic nature never came under my study. All that he knew of painting he got from books, save for an annual visit to the exhibition of the American Academy at New York, but his conception of the nature of art was very lofty and correct, and had his education been in keeping with his natural gifts, he would have taken a high position as a painter. His was one of the most pathetic lives I can recall--a fine sensitive nature, full of the enthusiasms of the outer world, with rare gifts in the embryonic state and mental powers far above the average, limited in every direction, in facilities, in education in art and in letters, and having his lot cast in a community where, except the wife of President Nott, there was not a single person who was capable of giving him sympathy or artistic appreciation. Not least in the pathos of his situation was the simplicity and humility with which he accepted himself, with his whole nature yearning towards an ideal which he knew to be as unattainable as the stars, without impatience or bitterness towards men or fate. If he was not content with what was given him, no one could see it, and he was so filled with the happiness that nature and his limited art gave him that he had no room for discontent at the limitations.

Happy days were those in which my leisure gave me the opportunity to share this man's walks and make my crude sketches of his favorite nooks and bends of our beautiful river Mohawk, and listen to his experiences while he worked. I can see now that it was more nature than art that evoked my enthusiasms, and that in art I felt mainly the expression of the love of the beauty of nature. s.e.xton gave me some idea of the use of oils, and from that time most of my leisure hours and my vacant days were given to painting in an otherwise untaught manner, copying such pictures as I could borrow, or translating engravings into color--wretched things most certainly, but to me then, with my crude enthusiasm, productive of greater pleasure than the better productions of later years.

The three years of my college course had left me little room or leisure for such studies, and at the end of them I realized that so far as the object I had set before me was concerned, I had wasted the years and blunted the edge of my enthusiasms. In preparation for the career which I proposed to myself I had, however, been in correspondence with Thomas Cole, then the leading painter of landscape in America, and an artist to this day unrivaled in certain poetic and imaginative gifts by any American painter. He was a curious result of the influence of the old masters on a strongly individual English mind, inclined to nature wors.h.i.+p, born in England in the epoch of the poetic English school to which Girtin, Turner, and their colleagues belonged, and migrating to America in boyhood, early enough to become impressed by the influence of primitive nature as a subject of art.

Self-taught in technique and isolated in his development, he became inevitably devoted to the element of subject rather than to technical attainment, and in the purely literary quality of art he has perhaps been surpa.s.sed by no landscape painter of any time. His indifference to technical qualities has left him in neglect at present, but in the influence he had on American art, and for his part in the history of it, he remains an important individuality now much underrated. It was settled that I should become his pupil in the winter following my graduation, but a few months before that he died.

At that moment there was not in the United States a single school of art, and except Cole, who had one or two pupils when he died, there was no competent landscape painter who accepted pupils, nor perhaps one who was capable of teaching. Drawing masters there were here and there, mostly in the conventional style adapted to the seminaries for young ladies. Inman, the leading portrait painter of the day, had taken pupils, but his powers did not extend to the treatment of landscape, and my sympathies did not go beyond it. I applied to A.B.

Durand, then the president of our Academy, the only rival of Cole, though in a purely naturalistic vein, and a painter of real power in a manner quite his own, which borrowed, however, more from the Dutch than from the Italian feeling, to which Cole inclined. Durand was originally an engraver of the first order, and afterwards a portrait painter, but his careful painting from nature and a sunny serenity in his rendering of her marked him, even in the absence of imaginative feeling, as a specialist in landscape, to which he later gave himself entirely. His was a serene and beautiful nature, perfectly reflected in his art, and he first showed American artists what could be done by faithful and unaffected direct study of nature in large studies carefully finished on the spot, though never carried to the elaboration of later and younger painters. But he was so restrained by an excess of humility as to his own work, and so justly diffident of his knowledge of technique, that he could not bring himself to accept a pupil, and I finally applied to F.E. Church, a young painter, pupil of Cole, and for many years after the leading landscape painter of the country. He was then in his first success, and I was his first pupil.

Church in many respects was the most remarkable painter of the phenomena of nature I have ever known, and had he been trained in a school of wider scope, he might have taken a place amongst the great individualities of his art. But he had little imagination, and his technical training had not emanc.i.p.ated him from an exaggerated insistence on detail, which so completely controlled his treatment of his subject that breadth and repose were entirely lost sight of. A graceful composition, and most happy command of all the actual effects of the landscape which he had seen, were his highest qualities; his retention of the minutest details of the generic or specific characteristics of tree, rock, or cloud was unsurpa.s.sed by the work of any landscape painter whose work I know, and everything he knew he rendered with a rapidity and precision which were simply inconceivable by one who had not seen him at work. I think that his vision and retention of even the most transitory facts of nature pa.s.sing before him must have been at the maximum of which the human mind is capable, but he had no comprehension of the higher and broader qualities of art. His mind seemed a camera obscura in which everything that pa.s.sed before it was recorded permanently, but he added in the rendering of its record nothing which sprang from human emotion, or which involved that remoulding of the perception that makes it conception, and individual. The primrose on the river's brim he saw with a vision as clear as that of a photographic lens, but it remained to him a primrose and nothing more to the end. All that he did or could do was the recording, form and color, of what had flitted past his eyes, with unsurpa.s.sed fidelity of memory; but it left one as cold as the painting of an iceberg. His recognition of art as distinguished from nature was far too rudimentary to fit him for a teacher, for his love of facts and detail blinded him to every other aspect of our relations with nature, in the recognition of which consist the highest gifts of the artist.

My study with Church lasted one winter, and showed me that nothing was to be hoped for from him, and that the most intimate superficial acquaintance with nature did not involve the perception of her more intimate relation with art. I learned from him nothing that was worth remembering, but I made acquaintance with a young portrait painter, who had a studio in the same building, an Irishman named Boyle, a pupil of Inman, whose ideas of art were of a far higher order, and to my intercourse with him during that winter and the following summer, which we spent together sketching in the valley of the Mohawk, I owe the first clear ideas of what lay before me in artist life. At Church's studio I met Edgar A. Poe, a slender, nervous, vivacious, and extremely refined personage. But at that juncture I came across "Modern Painters," and, like many others, wiser or otherwise, I received from it a stimulus to nature wors.h.i.+p, to which I was already too much inclined, which made ineffaceable the confusion in my mind between nature and art. Another acquaintance I made that winter was of great importance in developing my technical abilities--that of a well-known amateur of New York, afterwards a professional artist, Dr.

Edward Ruggles, a physician whose love of painting finally drove him out of medicine. He had the most catholic and correct taste I had then met, and he introduced me to William Page, the most remarkable portrait painter in many respects America has ever produced, whose talks on art used to make me sleepless with enthusiasm. Page was the most brilliant talker I ever met, and a dear friend of Lowell.

Returning to Schenectady the following summer, I made my first direct and thorough studies from nature, and amongst these was one, a view from my window across gardens and a churchyard with the church spire in the distance; a small study which incidentally had a most potent effect on all my later life. It was bought in the autumn by the Art Union of New York, and on the proceeds, thirty dollars, the first considerable sum of money I had ever earned, I decided to go to Europe and see what the English painters were doing. Of English art I then knew only directly the pictures of Doughty, an early artistic immigrant from England, and, as afterwards appeared to me, a fair example of the school which had its lead from Constable, to whom he had, however, no resemblance except in choice of motive. He had a comprehension of technique possessed by none of our home painters--a rapid and masterly execution with a scale of color limited to cool grays, but, within this gamut, of exquisite refinement. Constant repet.i.tions of the same motive wore out his welcome on the part of the American public, but his pictures had a charm which was long in losing its power over me, and had an influence in determining me to go to England at the first opportunity. But to see Turner's pictures was always the chief motive, and was the one which decided me to go.

I was, in knowledge of worldly life, scarcely less a child then than I had been when, at the age of ten, I determined to go out into the world and make my own career, free from the obstacles I imagined to be preventing me from following my ideals. The ever-present feeling developed in me by the religious training of my mother, that an overruling Providence had my life in keeping, made me quite oblivious of or indifferent to the chances of disaster, for the a.s.surance of protection and leading to the best end left no place for anxieties. It was a mental phenomenon which I now look back on with a wonder which I think most sane people will share, that, at the age when most boys have become men, for I graduated at twenty, I should have been capable of going out into a strange world like one of the children of the Children's Crusade, with an unfaltering faith that I should be led and cared for by Providence as I had been by my parents. I had no apprehension, from the moment that one of the s.h.i.+p-owners who was in business relations with my elder brother offered me a free pa.s.sage on one of his sailing s.h.i.+ps to Liverpool, that I should not find a similar bridge back again; and with my thirty dollars changed into six sovereigns, and a little valise with only a change of clothes, I went on board the Garrick, a packet of the Black Ball line, sailing in the last days of December, 1849. There had been a thaw and the Hudson River was full of floating ice, which in the ebbing of the tide endangered the s.h.i.+pping lying out in the stream, and the captain made such haste to get out of the danger (the extent of which was shown by the topmasts of an Austrian brig, showing above water where she had been sunk by the floating ice) that the s.h.i.+p had her anchor apeak before the boat which carried my brother and myself out could reach it. We barely arrived in time for me to get aboard, the difficulty of threading our way amongst the ma.s.ses of ice making our boating difficult. That my childish faith in Providence was a family trait might be deduced from the fact that my brother, who had from boyhood stood to me _in loco parentis_, had not asked me, until I was on the point of going aboard, what my means of subsistence were, and, when he found that I had only my six sovereigns, he told me to wait at Liverpool for a letter of credit he would send me by the steamer which followed.

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-pa.s.senger, 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 companions.h.i.+p 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 circ.u.mstances, 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 pa.s.sage 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 s.h.i.+llings 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 Sat.u.r.day; 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 fellows.h.i.+p with the congregation of Millyard. I was admitted to honorary members.h.i.+p in the church, and the listening to the two dry-as-dust sermons was compensated for by the cordial friends.h.i.+p of the pastor, an invitation to dinner every Sat.u.r.day, 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 _impa.s.se_, 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 pa.s.sed 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 ill.u.s.trator, 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 s.e.xton'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 surpa.s.sed, making at a single sitting, and without a model, a drawing with many figures. He was at the moment I knew him engaged in ill.u.s.trating 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 Gottingen, 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 pa.s.sed 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 friends.h.i.+p and courtesy, and generally the friendliness took the form of active interest.

Most of my time was pa.s.sed 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 5000, 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 pa.s.sionate 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 friends.h.i.+p.

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-a.s.sertion or dogmatic tone as was possible consistently with the holding of his own opinions; suggesting views rather than a.s.serting 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 ill.u.s.trate 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 gla.s.s of sherry, that he "believed that it had been ordained from all eternity whether I should set that gla.s.s down empty or without finis.h.i.+ng 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 Ca.n.a.l, 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 a.s.sisted 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 100 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.