Ford Madox Brown, who was his first master, and is commonly considered to have exercised a great influence on Rossetti, in my opinion had none that was permanent. He was Rossetti's antithesis, and in himself as inconsequent as Rossetti was logical. He was severely and uncompromisingly rationalistic; with the conscience of a Puritan he was an absolute skeptic, with a profound contempt for all religious matters, while Rossetti, with all his irregularities, never could escape from his religious feeling, which was the part of his constitution he possessed in common with his sisters. Brown had, of the purely artistic qualities, only the academic; he was neither a colorist nor a great draughtsman; his art was literary, didactic, and, except for occasional dramatic passages, unemotional and unpoetic. The predominance of the intellectual powers in him was so great that the purely artistic view of nature was impossible to him; and his artistic education, while curiously erratic and short-sighted in its elementary and technical stage, was intellectually large in academic and literary qualities, and comprehensive. It appears to me that the telling of the story was, in his estimation, the highest office of art, so that, while his drawing was bad in style, his execution scrappy and amateurish and deficient in breadth and subordination, his compositions were often masterly, fine in conception, and harmonious in line, in the pen-and-ink study; but the want of ensemble and the insubordination of the insistent detail generally made his work less imposing when it was on canvas than in the first study. His habit of finishing from corner to corner, without having the whole work broadly laid out before him to guide him in the proper subordination of the details to the general effect, made it impossible for him to make his pictures broad and effective. His most successful pictures were, therefore, the small ones, in which the impossibility of too much insistence on detail proved an advantage.
I shall always regard Brown as a man carried by a youthful enthusiasm for art out of his true occupation, which was history; for his literary and scientific tendencies and his vehement love of truth were the larger part of his mind, and these qualities are of secondary importance in art. He sympathized strongly with the early phase of the pre-Raphaelite movement, which was what he had attempted with less intensity himself; but when Rossetti entered upon his true artistic development, it was only the personal influence of the past that gave the elder painter any power of influencing the younger. It is possible that Rossetti owed something of his manner of painting—a fragmentary method of completion—to the teaching of Brown; if so, he was indebted to his friend for the weakest side of his art. But, for the rest, this system of working is very general amongst English painters, in whom the amateur is persistent—the building the picture up in detail, with minor reference to the mass of the structure; and this was the weakness of Brown's art, for what he did was done with such intensity that no after treatment could bring it into complete subordination to the general effect. Theodore Rousseau's maxim, "If you have not got your picture in the first five lines you will never get it," seems to me the true golden rule of the art of painting, as in all creation. A picture should grow pari passu in all its parts; otherwise there is no certainty of its keeping together when finished.
Rossetti's influence, though always partial and never leaving a genuine pupil, was very wide, in the end, it seems to me, much exceeding that of Millais and that of Holman Hunt; but it is a question in which of his two functions—poet or painter—it was most effective. I have heard Swinburne say that but for Rossetti's early poetry he would never have written verses, but this I think must be taken conditionally. Swinburne has the poetic temperament so decided and so individual, and his musical quality is so exalted, that it was impossible that he should not have shown it at some time; but it is possible that Rossetti furnished the spark that actually kindled the fire. Perhaps Swinburne himself cannot trace the vein to its hidden sources, and confounded the mastery of Rossetti's temperament and the personal magnetism he exercised on those who came into close relations with him with an intellectual stimulus which, strictly speaking, Rossetti did not exercise. He was too specialized, too exclusively artistic in all his developments, to carry much intellectual weight, and Swinburne was more fully developed in the purely intellectual man; but the warmest friendship existed between them. I often saw Swinburne at Cheyne Walk, and, when they were together, the painter's was certainly the dominant personality, to which Swinburne's attitude was that of an affectionate younger brother.
One day Rossetti had invited us all to dinner, and when we went down to the drawing-room there was great exhilaration, Swinburne leading the fun. Morris was, as usual, very serious, and, in discussing some subject of conversation, Swinburne began to chaff and tease him, and finally gave him a vigorous thrust in the stomach, which sent him backwards into a high wardrobe, on the outer corners of which stood Rossetti's two favorite blue and white hawthorn jars, a pair unrivaled in London, for which he had paid several hundred pounds each. The wardrobe yielded and down came the jars. I caught one, and Morris, I believe, the other, as it was falling on his head. Rossetti was naturally angry, and, for the first and only time in my experience of him, lost control of his temper, bursting out on the culprit with a torrent of abuse which cooled the hilarity of the poet instantly, and reduced him to decorum with the promptness of a wet bath. To hear Swinburne read his own poetry was a treat, and this I enjoyed several times at Rossetti's; the terrible sonnets on Napoleon III. after Sedan, amongst the readings, being the most memorable and effective.
The influence of Rossetti on Morris and Burne-Jones is unquestionable, and they probably both owed their embarking in an artistic career to the stimulus given by the advent of a purely artistic nature which set a new light in their firmament. The little we have of Morris's painting shows only that he had the gift, but his own appreciation of his work was too modest to encourage him to face the strain of going through the necessary education, made more difficult by his want of early training, even of the imperfect and incorrect kind against which Rossetti had so successfully had to make his way to a correct conception of his art. On the whole, I consider Morris to have been the largest all-round man of the group, not merely on account of the diversity of his faculties, for he had in his composition a measure, greater or less, of most of the gifts which go to make up the intellectual man and artist, but because he had, in addition to those, a largeness and nobility of nature, a magnanimity and generosity, which rarely enter into the character of the artist; and perhaps the reason why his gifts were not more highly developed was that his estimation of them was so modest. His facility in versification led him to diffuseness in his poems, and the modest estimation in which he held his work, when done, was a discouragement to the limae labor so necessary to perfection. He told me that he had written eight hundred lines of one of his tales in one night, but at the same time he regretted that he could not invent a plot, though the exquisite manner in which he carried out the old plots which have been the common property of poets since poetry existed in the form of tales is honor enough.
But in the feeling for pure decoration, which is the essential element in art, in the universality of his application of it, and the high excellence to which he brought it in each branch to which he devoted himself, I doubt if Morris has had a rival in our day; and I am inclined to think that in the default of an early education in art, such as the great Italian painters received, we lost one of the greatest artists who have ever lived. For with the high degree in which he possessed taste, technical abilities never fully developed in work, and exquisite feeling for color and invention in design, he had the large human mould which would have made his work majestic beyond that of any of his great contemporaries and co-workers. He remained, owing to the late discovery of himself and the poor opinion of his abilities, only a large sketch of what his completed self would have been. He had that full, sensuous vitality which Madox Brown so completely lacked to his great injury, without the excess of it which was so treacherous with Rossetti. Mr. Mackail's recent life of Morris does great injustice to Rossetti without in any way exalting his friend, for Rossetti always urged Morris to follow his artistic tendencies with the largest and most liberal encouragement and appreciation, and all the stimulus derivable from a most exalted opinion of his native abilities. Rossetti would have set everybody to painting, I think, for, in his opinion, it was the only occupation worth living for, and he was absolutely free from personal jealousy.
Of Burne-Jones I saw little in those days. He was still working out his artistic problem, and came now and then to the studio of Rossetti, who had the highest opinion of his abilities. And, taking art in its special function, that of the decorator, there can hardly be a dispute as to his rank amongst the greatest of romantic designers of the centuries following that of Giotto. His fertility of invention was very great; and, considering that his studies began at a period which for most artists would have been too late for the acquisition of technical excellence of a high degree, his attainment in that direction was most remarkable. Entirely original, if that quality could be predicated of any artist, he certainly was not, and he borrowed of his predecessors to an immense extent, not slavishly but adaptingly, and what he borrowed he proved a good right to, for he used it with a high intelligence and to admirable effect. It seems to me that though he added little or nothing to the resources of art, as Rossetti undoubtedly did, he employed the precedents of past art, and especially of the Italian renaissance, to better effect than any other artist of our epoch; and, in borrowing as he did, he only followed the example of most of the great old masters, who used material of any kind found in their predecessors' works, in perfectly good conscience. His industry was prodigious, and his devotion to art supreme.
CHAPTER XXV
RETURN TO JOURNALISM
Miss Spartali and I were married in the Spring of 1871, and in justice to her I came to the hazardous decision to make my home in England, and there to devote myself to general literature and correspondence with America. As my financial condition at that moment, thanks to the various contributions to it, was better than it had ever been before, I had the courage needed to face the great change in my life. I brought with me from Lowell a letter to Leslie Stephen, whose friendship has ever since been one of the pleasantest things in my English life. Mrs. Stephen, the elder daughter of Thackeray, was to us an angel of goodness, and never since has the grateful recognition of her loving hospitality in thought and deed diminished in my mind. Our debt to her was a debt of the heart, and those are never paid. Her sister, later Mrs. Ritchie, added much to the obligations of our early life in London, and still remains our friend. Mr. Stephen gave me an introduction to the "Pall Mall Gazette," then under the charge of Greenwood, and I contributed in incidental ways to its columns; and with contributions to "Scribner's" and other magazines it seemed that we might forgather, and we decided to bring the children out.
An article on the Cretan insurrection, printed while I was still in the island, had led the way to an acquaintance with Froude, in whose magazine it appeared, and I had been put on the staff of the "Daily News," which had printed a contribution on the Greek question as a leading article; so that, on the whole, the venture did not seem too rash for a man who never looked far ahead for good fortune. My friendship with Froude lasted as long as he lived. He was a warm and sincere friend, always ready with word or deed to help one who needed it, and one of the men for whom I retain the warmest feeling of all I knew at this epoch of my life. In New York I had made an arrangement with Dr. Holland to hold the literary agency for "The Century" (then "Scribner's") for England, and on returning to London we took a small furnished house at Notting Hill Way, where our daughter Effie was born. In the following spring we moved out to Clapham Common, to be near the parents of my wife, and in the comparative quiet of that then delightful neighborhood we gave our experiment full scope. The life as a literary life was ideal, but as a practical thing it failed. Here I had the pleasure of extending hospitality to Emerson on his way to Egypt, and Lowell on the way to Madrid. To make the acquaintance of Lowell we had Professor and Mrs. Max Müller to meet him at dinner, and Tom Taylor was of the company, he living as a near neighbor.
But Russie's condition was a shadow over my life, growing deeper every day. Though he had been discharged from Boston as incurable, we put him under the care of one of the best of English surgeons, and one of the kindest-hearted men I have ever known, the late Mr. John Marshall, one of the warm and constant friends I had made through my relations with Rossetti, of whom Marshall was a strong admirer. Though his charges were modified to fit our estate, they aggregated, with all his moderation, to a sum which I could ill support; but to save, or even prolong Russie's life, I would have made any sacrifice. He was then not far from nine, and, though crippled by his disease, with his once beautiful face haggard with pain and no longer recognizable by those who had known him in his infancy, he was to me still the same,—a dear and loving child, the companion of my fortunes at their worst; and his devotion to me was the chief thing of his life. I had carried him in my arms at every change of vehicle in all the journeys from Athens to Boston and from Boston to London again, and to him I was all the world; to me he was like a nursling to its mother, the first thought of every day, an ever-present care, and his long struggle with death was an inseparable sadness in my existence. I remarked to Lowell one day that I feared he would die, and Lowell replied, "I should be afraid he would not die." The seeming cruelty of the expression struck me like a sentence of death, and momentarily chilled my feeling towards Lowell; but the incident made me understand some things in life as I could not have otherwise understood them, enabling me to take a larger view of our individual sorrows. There is no doubt that to Russie's sufferings and death I owe a large part of my experience of the spiritual life, and especially a comprehension of the secret of the mother's heart, so rarely understood by one of the other sex.
But my unfailing facility for getting into hot water was not to find an exception in London. As agent for "Scribner's" I had to secure contributions from English authors, not so easy then as now. Amongst other items I was instructed to secure a story from a certain author, and I contracted with her for the proof sheets of her next novel, about to be published in England in the—Magazine, the price to be paid for the advance proofs being £500, if I remember rightly. There was then no international copyright with America, but a courtesy right between publishers, with a general understanding amongst the trade that the works of an author once published by a house should be considered as belonging by prescription to it. On the announcement by "Scribner's" of the coming publication of this author's novel, the firm who had published her prior works announced that they would not respect the agreement with the author, but would pirate the story. As the result of the quarrel, "Scribner's" resigned the story to its rival on payment to the lady of the sum agreed on. But now appeared an utterly unsuspected state of things: the—Magazine had already sold the proof sheets of the story to a third American house, and an exposé of the situation showed that English publishers had been in the practice of selling the advance proofs of their most popular works of fiction to the American houses, and recouping the half of the price paid the authors.
On the heels of this discovery by the public, there happened one of the periodical outbreaks of English journalism against the "American" system of literary piracy, and simultaneously the visit of a committee of the American publishers deputed by the government of the United States to study out an arrangement for a treaty of international copyright on the basis of equality of right and privileges in both countries of the authors of both countries, but with no recognition of publishers' rights or privileges. The English government, taking advice from a committee of authors and publishers, in which the interest of the publishers was dominant, declined the offer of the American form of treaty, insisting on the protection of publishers' rights, and the negotiations fell through, with great increase of the outcry in the English press. Being in communication with Mr. William H. Appleton, the head of the American committee, and in possession of the facts of the case as regarded the courtesy right, I wrote to the English papers, putting the American view of the matter, and the facts, dwelling on the hitherto unknown point that the depredations on the authors' interests were committed by the English publisher, who sold to the American the wares the latter was accused of stealing, whereas the fact was that he bought and paid equally for the right of publication, while the English publisher continued to reprint American books without the least regard for analogous transatlantic rights.
The consequences to me were variously disastrous. In the first place I was deluged with applications from authors of still unestablished transatlantic reputation to secure for them offers from "Scribner's" for the advance sheets of their books. In the second I was treated to a torrent of abuse as "the friend of piracy" ("Daily News" leading article), and for some days not a single London paper would print a word of reply or explanation from me. The "Echo" was the first to do me the justice of printing a defense, and it was followed by the "Times," which printed my letter and one from Mr. Appleton; but of the authors who, having a transatlantic reputation, had profited by the "courtesy right," only Mr. Trollope came forward to sustain me with the statement that he had received more from the Harpers—his American publishers—than from his English publishers. The author whose novel had been the occasion of the original trouble, grateful for what I had done in her case, declared that the English authors ought to make me a testimonial (or perhaps it was a monument she suggested), but from no other source did I receive a word of thanks. And the third consequence was that the "Pall Mall Gazette" dropped me "like a hot potato." As my monthly cheques had reached the sum of ten pounds, and were slowly increasing, the inroad on my income arising from my crusade against publishing abuses was a serious item in my outlook.
As misfortunes never come alone, this was followed by my supersession, as literary agent of "Scribner's," by Mr. Gosse, who had been making a visit to New York. It was in curious coincidence with these disasters that I addressed (with a letter of introduction from Madame Bodichon, who always was the kindest of friends to me) a distinguished lady member of the staff of an evening paper, with a request to help me to get work on it, and was told distinctly that she did not favor the entry of foreigners on the staff, as English writers had too much competition amongst themselves, and "the crumbs from the table" should be reserved for them, so that while I had opened the door for English writers in my native land, to the disadvantage of myself and my compatriots, I was to be excluded from the English market as a foreigner. My old friend the editor of the "Daily News," had, during my absence in America, been appointed to the "Gazette," and the new Pharaoh "knew not Joseph." And so we decided to throw up the sponge and go back to America, though even there the new influx of English competitors (for which I was in part responsible) had made our chance less brilliant. My father-in-law offered us, if we withdrew from our decision, to settle £400 a year on my wife. With this aid we felt that we might carry through; and to her the change from English life, surrounded by old friends and an artistic atmosphere, to the strange and comparatively cruder surroundings of America, was to be avoided at any possible price, and I had no right to hesitate.
The great Exhibition of Vienna, in 1873, found the New York "Tribune" unprovided in time for its correspondence, and the European manager, my friend G.W. Smalley, proposed to me to go out for the paper. There were three months still to the opening, but the preparation of the groundwork of a continuous correspondence, on an occasion to which the American public attached much importance, was a matter of gravity, and the time was not too long. The editor had neglected the matter, owing to considerations which deluded him, and I was just in time to forestall the worst effects of a scandal which made its noise in its day. The chief commissioner, General Van Buren, had had associated with him, through influences which need not be cited, several under-commissioners who were Jews, formerly of Vienna, and of course obnoxious to the society, official and polite, of the Austrian capital, and who were exercising a most unfortunate influence on the prospects of the American exhibitors. In addition to this, they had entered into a system of trading in concessions for their personal advantage, the competition being very keen, especially in the department of American drinks, and their dealings with the competitors had excited great indignation in certain quarters. One of the disappointed applicants, whose concession had been unjustly annulled in favor of a higher bidder, came to me for advice. I at once instituted a rigorous though secret inquiry, and collected a body of evidence of corrupt practices, which I laid before the American minister, Mr. Jay, with a demand that it should be communicated to the government. Mr. Jay at first declined to take cognizance of the matter, and accused me of doing what I did with political partisan bias, Van Buren being a prominent politician. I assured him that I did not even know to which party Van Buren belonged; but, what probably moved him more was my assurance that the affair was not going to be whitewashed, that if it was not corrected quietly I was determined to make a public exposure, and that whoever tried to whitewash it would need a whitewashing himself, whereupon he decided to take, under oath, the evidence I had laid before him and send it to Washington, which he did.
The result was a cable dismissal of the entire commission and the nomination in their places of several American gentlemen who had come to Vienna to witness the opening of the Exhibition, amongst whom were two of my warmest personal friends. They immediately offered me the official position of secretary to the commission, which I declined. Having enlisted on the "Tribune," and considering myself held "for the war," I could not desert, though the inducement was very strong, for I should not only have been better paid than by the "Tribune," but should have been practically director of the Exhibition, so far as the American department was concerned. The exposure of the old commission which I sent the "Tribune" was printed reluctantly, for Van Buren was a personal friend of the editor-in-chief; but as I had taken the pains to make the substance of it common property so far as the other correspondents were concerned, it could not be suppressed.
For the opening ceremony there was great rivalry amongst the leading papers of New York, and the "Herald" made very expensive arrangements to cable a full account; and, beside its European manager, John Russell Young, and its telegraphic manager, Mr. Sauer, it had Edmund Yates and a well-known European lady novelist to make up the report. The "Tribune" sent to my assistance an old friend, Bayard Taylor, and one of the staff from New York, E.V. Smalley. The "Herald" was prepared for practically unlimited expenditure on the occasion; the "Tribune" simply ordered me to telegraph 6000 words to Smalley at London, leaving the question of cabling open. Young thought me a rival to be held in poor account, and was careless. All the "Herald" staff took their places in the Exhibition building for the ceremony of opening by the Emperor, which was no doubt spectacular; but, as the doors were to be closed until the ceremony was over, and the Emperor rose to make the tour of the Exhibition, no one could get at the telegraph till all was complete. I stayed outside and sacrificed the spectacle. I had found who was to be the telegraph inspector for the day, and I went to him with an offer to hire a wire for the day. This was impossible, he said, as there was to be but one wire for all the foreign press. I put my case to him as that of a beginner in the service, to whom a success was of great importance for the future, and asked to be allowed to declare 6000 words to follow continuously; but this too, he said, was against the regulations. But I secured his sympathy, and he finally promised me that if I got first on the wire, and my message came without interruption, one section being laid before the operator before the other was finished, they should go on without interruption, as one message; but, if one minute lapsed and another message came in the interval, I must take my turn with the others.
As Taylor was an old hand, and wrote a most legible script, and style currente calamo, I told him to write what he could as the ceremony went on, and, the moment the doors were opened, to consign what he had written to a messenger whom I had hired for the day,—an American clerk of one of the exhibitors under some little obligation to me, a sharp Yankee, for whose use I had hired a cab, with the fastest horse I could find, to run back and forth between the Exhibition and the telegraph. Taylor was then to finish his account of the opening ceremonies and bring it or send it by the messenger to me at the telegraph office, the messenger waiting or returning for the first installment of Smalley's account of the imperial inspection, which he was to follow closely. After this he was to continue to write the incidents of the opening; and when the whole approximated to the 6000 words needed, he was to come himself to the telegraph. I, meanwhile, went into the streets and devoted myself to picking up incidents of the procession, the deportment of the population, and the weather; and when I supposed that the opening of the doors was about to take place I went to the telegraph office and deposited 1200 words. Long before these could be sent, Taylor's first installment came, and then Taylor himself with the second. Young, seeing my staff always present, and thinking me asleep, took his time.
When Taylor's second part had been deposited and paid for, I saw coming down the street in a furiously driven carriage Mr. Sauer, with the first part of his message. I slipped out at a back door and was not seen, and Sauer returned for the continuation of his telegram. When Smalley's first dispatch had been put on, I saw Sauer coming again with his second. Then I sat tight and saw that the message had been written in columns of words on large paper, so that the counting should be rapid. It made a huge packet, and he deposited it with evident satisfaction and turned to go out, when he saw Archibald Forbes, who was writing his telegram to the "Daily News" at the table in the office, and turned to speak to him. When leaving him he caught sight of me in the corner, and started as if he had been hit by a bullet, then made as if he had not seen me and was going out, but reconsidered and came to speak to me. "Well, what have you done?" he said. I replied that I had put about 5000 words on, and was only waiting for the odds and ends from Smalley. He flushed with surprise and vexation, and began to curse the telegraph officials "who never kept their engagements," and went off in a towering rage. My 6000 words went on before a single word of the message to the "Herald" could go.
Mr. Young had ordered for that evening a magnificent dinner for his staff, to which mine was invited to celebrate his unquestioned feat. While waiting for the dinner to come on, he took me apart and asked confidentially what we had really done. I told him, and he asked if we cabled, to which I replied that as to that I knew nothing, that I had wired G.W. Smalley in London, but what he had done I could not say. "Well," said he, "if you have cabled you have beaten us, and if you have not cabled you may have beaten us," and then he went on to say that if I would drop the "Tribune" and come over to the "Herald" he would give me a good post and good pay. "No," I replied, "I have taken service with the 'Tribune' for the campaign, and I cannot desert them." (My recompense was a curt dismissal from the "Tribune" as soon as the urgent work of the reporting of the opening was done.) Mr. Whitelaw Reid's nerve had failed him when it came to the question of the expense of cabling, and the 6000 words had gone by steamer from Queenstown. I had given the "Tribune" the best beat it had ever had except the Sedan report, if the editor had had the courage to profit by it. The "Herald" received 150 words of its report in time for the press the next morning, and had to make up its page of dispatches from matter sent by post in advance and by expansion of the 150 words received. Edmund Yates, in his autobiography, tells a story of the affair which is in every important detail untrue, and he probably knew nothing of it except what Young had admitted, and that was certainly very little, for Young was a very reticent man, and not likely to tell his defeat even to his staff.
Bennett was too fickle and whimsical an employer to suit me, and I had no disposition to expose myself to his whims. With Young I was always on the best terms, and he was disposed to employ me when a momentary service was required, but I had had one experience with his chief, which was sufficient. He had offered me the London agency of the "Herald" at a time when any constant occupation would have been acceptable, and we had come to terms, when suddenly he was taken with the notion that Edmund Yates, in addition to the service to the paper, would be of use to him in social ways, and he dropped me and appointed Yates, to drop him a little later, paying him a year's salary to break the contract.
One bit of work I did for the "Herald" which I remember with much pleasure. It was the reporting of Beaconsfield's Aylesbury speech, not a stenographic report, for that they had from the English press, but a letter on the occasion as a demonstration. I went to Aylesbury, and, as Beaconsfield was to speak twice,—once at the farmers' ordinary and then at the assembly rooms,—I dined at the ordinary; and as all the places in the assembly rooms had been taken before the dinner was over, I had to employ some assurance to hear the principal speech. As soon as the company rose from the table, I pushed through to where Beaconsfield was standing, and, presenting my card as correspondent of the New York "Herald," asked him to be kind enough to put me in the way of hearing him, explaining why I had lost my chance through remaining to hear him at the dinner. He turned to one of the young men who were with him, remarking that my card would take me anywhere, and said, "See that Mr. Stillman has a place near me," and to me, "Keep close to me," which I did, and took a seat on the edge of the platform, at his feet; and I certainly never heard a more effective speech. The lordly, triumphant manner with which he bantered Gladstone for his dealings in the Straits of Malacca, the demonstrative confidence with which he took victory for granted, and the magnetism of his personal bearing, made an impression on me quite unique in my experience of men. Gracious is the only word which I can apply to his manner to those around him, and it had a fascination over them which I could perfectly understand, and I could easily comprehend that he should have a surrounding of devotees. The serene, absolute self-confidence he evidently felt was of a nature to inspire a corresponding confidence in his followers. It was an interesting display of the power of a magnetic nature, and gave me a higher idea of the man than all his writings had given or could give. For his intellectual powers and their printed results I never had a high opinion, but his was one of the most interesting and remarkable personalities I ever encountered.
As Russie continued to hold his own against his terrible disease, Mr. Marshall thought that the operation of resecting the leg at the hip might save his life, and though such a maimed existence as his would then be was but a doubtful boon, the boy eagerly caught at the chance of life; and, to recruit strength for the operation, I decided to take him, by Marshall's advice, to America, and give him a summer in the woods, camping out. I took him to the Maine woods instead of my old haunts of the Adirondacks, because the rail served to the verge of the wilderness, and we had, on Moosehead Lake, the resource of a good hotel to take refuge in if matters went ill. They did go ill, and I found that life was too low in him to give the woodland air and the influence of the pine-trees power to help him. Hope left me, and we turned homeward again, sailing from Boston direct to London. It was in late December, and we had a terrific voyage, and one of the hairbreadth escapes of which I have had so many. In the height of the gale Russie and I were standing in the companion-way, watching the storm, for the boy loved the sea dearly and enjoyed the heaviest weather, when the captain called to me to say that we were not safe there and had better go below. Only a few minutes later an exceptionally heavy sea broke over the deck, took five boats out of the davits or crushed them, carried away in splinters the companion-way in which we had been standing, and swept the decks, the chief officer being saved only by being lashed to the railing of the bridge, and the fall of the mass of water on the deck breaking several of the deck beams. We had to lie to for the rest of the gale. We landed at Gravesend just before Christmas, Russie being in much worse condition than when we left England. Up to that time I had clung to hope, for to lose the boy was like tearing my soul in two. Mr. Marshall no longer held out a hope, but said if he had known the strength of the boy's constitution he would have operated when he first saw him, which was what Russie then begged for and had always looked forward to. Through five years he had resisted the pain of that most painful disease, hoping always, always reading, almost always cheerful.
Our lease expiring, I decided to leave London, and Mr. Spartali offered us a cottage on one of his estates in the Isle of Wight, where the children, Russie especially, might have sweet English air. Marie being engaged in finishing her pictures for the spring exhibition, I went down alone with the children, stopping at an inn at Sandown till the furniture was in the cottage. While so waiting Russie was taken with the first convulsion peculiar to his malady, and then I realized that Death had come, and, unwilling to face him in the semi-publicity of an inn, I took the boy in my arms to the railway, and from the station nearest to the cottage bore him thither.
I tried to prepare him for the impending death, by showing him that it was the end of pain, but his horror of it was inextinguishable, and he cried in agony, "Oh, no, no! Papa, I wish to live as long as you do;" and, though his faculties were fortunately failing, he beckoned me to lay my head by his on the pallet I had prepared for him on the floor, and offered me a last feeble caress and showed his pleasure in having me by him. He had loved me above all things on earth, even more than his loving mother, and to be with me had always been his dearest delight, and now we met Death alone, he and I, and I could only remember David's cry, "Absalom, my son!" I watched the fading life, the diminishing breath in the midnight silence of the solitary house, and almost desired Death to hasten, for the final struggle had begun, and the suspense was torture to me. And when the last long breath was drawn, and the limp, deserted body was all that was left to me of my thirteen years of passionate devotion, my pride and hope, and the nursing care of so many years, I walked out into the midnight and left my boy to Death. The long tension was over, and I could give way to tears.
It was only a child's death, a common thing, almost as common as family existence, but it gave a new color to my life, establishing forever a sympathy with the common grief, and a community of sorrow with all bereft fathers and mothers, in the premature dissipation of the hopes of their future, and the lapse of a dear companionship into the eternal void. This is the human brotherhood of sorrow, sacred, ennobling, sanctifying where it abides, the deepest lesson of the school of life. My feet have wandered far, and my thoughts still further from the places and beliefs of my childhood; but whatever and wherever I may be, this grief at times catches me and holds me in a pause of dumb tears, and every similar bereavement I witness renews the sympathetic grief. I have never been able to find a consolation for that loss, for it carried with it the future and its best dreams. When his mother died, I thought that any death were easier to bear than the sudden and terrible tragedy of that; but in the devastated youth and the lingering pain of Russie's leaving, I found that
"not all the preaching since Adam Has made Death other than Death."
We buried him quietly in the churchyard at Arreton, the kind rector not asking for a baptismal certificate, for he knew that I was not a churchman, and Russie had never been baptized. In these things we follow prejudices. Mine were Baptist; his mother was an advanced Unitarian, and had been born in the Brook Farm community, of which her father was a member, so that we had no sympathy with paedobaptism, while the terrible effect of my own religious education forbade me to encumber the boy's mind with religious dogmas, and from the beginning I had forbidden any one in the house to teach him the name of God until he was old enough to understand what "God" meant; but one day during his illness I found him, when he should have been sleeping, weeping bitterly, and to my inquiry as to the cause of his trouble, he replied, "Do you think, Papa, that, if I went to sleep saying my prayers, God would be satisfied if I finished them after I woke?" That terrible hereditary conscience could not be laid, and perhaps the boy was fortunate in his early death.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE MONTENEGRINS AND THEIR PRINCE
To me Russie's death was a crushing disaster. The care and constant preoccupation of my life was taken away, and nothing moved me to activity. I missed him every moment that I was awake, and in my condition I could not rally from the depression caused by the mental void and grief. I do not think I should have recovered from it had not Mr. Spartali conceived the idea of my going off to Herzegovina, where the insurrection of 1875 was just beginning to stir, and, to cut short my hesitation at the venture as a volunteer correspondent, got me an introduction to the manager of the "Times," and offered to pay my expenses should the "Times" not accept my letters. I knew so well the condition in which the Turkish Empire had been left by the Cretan affair, and the apathy that had ruled ever since, that I was convinced that a disaster was pending, and the state to which Russia had brought matters in the Ottoman Empire in 1869 pointed to a Slavonic movement this time. The manager was not of my opinion; he thought the disturbances would blow over in a few weeks, and nothing serious would come of it. I went home, but watched the news, and a few days after went again to the office and offered to go out at my own expense, with the understanding that if they printed my letters they should pay me for them, but that they ran no risk and need not print them unless they wished. The review of my Cretan book in the "Times" now served me as credentials by showing my knowledge of Turkish ways. At the same time I arranged to send letters to the New York "Herald," also as a volunteer, for no one then attached any importance to the rising.
Arriving at Trieste in August, 1875, I found that a committee was at work sending arms and ammunition, and, following the coast down, I found other committees at work at Zara and elsewhere, under Austrian auspices, without any attention being paid to their action by the Imperial authorities. At Ragusa I found the headquarters of the agitation, there under the direction of the captain of the port, Kovachevich, a zealous Slavonic patriot. The movement was evidently regarded benevolently by the Kaiserlich-Koeniglich, and the insurgents came openly into the city, and returned again to their fighting with fresh supplies of ammunition and provisions. I pushed on to the Bocche di Cattaro, and at Castel Nuovo found the insurgents coming and going freely, and at Sutorina, in the corner of Herzegovina, which comes to the Gulf of Cattaro, their depot and manufactory of cartridges. The information to be obtained there was abundant, if not always absolutely trustworthy; but on the whole I found the only fault of that which I got from the insurgents was its exaggeration, while what I got from the Turkish consul-general at Ragusa was simple fabrication. Volunteers fully armed went by every steamer, and when they had enough of campaigning they went to Castel Nuovo and refreshed themselves, and returned, quite regardless of the Austrian regulations. I found that the insurrection was spreading through all the mountain section of Herzegovina and along the border of Montenegro, and it was said that strong detachments of Montenegrins were aiding in the operations. The Prince of Montenegro had opposed the insurrection in the early stages of it, and had even sent old Peko Pavlovich to arrest the Herzegovinian leader, Ljubibratich, and carry him to Ragusa, where he left him under Austrian authority, to return freely as soon as his band had reunited. But as, according to the general Slav opinion, there was nothing important to be done without Montenegro, I pushed on to Cettinje to see with my own eyes what there was to see.
The little world about Cettinje has changed so much since this my first visit there, and was so little known then by the outer world, that my experiences there will be to the present day like those which one might have in a perished social organization. The only access to the capital of the principality was by a zigzag bridle-path up from Cattaro to a height of 4500 feet above the sea,—a hard, rough road, more easily traveled on foot than in the saddle, and so I traveled it, in the company of a Scotch cavalry officer intending to volunteer. Passing the rocky ridge along which ran the boundary between freedom and Austria, one descended by another precipitous path into the valley of Njegush, the birthplace of the family of the Prince, a circular amphitheatre of rocks, a narrow ridge here and there holding still a little earth on which the people raised a few stalks of maize or a few potatoes, a few square yards of wheat, or a strip of poor grass for the sheep or goats. Every tiny field was terraced against the wash of the rains so that the soil should not be carried away, for the geological formation of this part of the principality, Montenegro proper, is a porous rock, which allows water to filter through it, and which is even so fissured that no stream will form, and the drainage is through the rocks or in katavothra which gush out in mysterious fountains in the Gulf of Cattaro or into the Lake of Scutari.
Njegush, the village in which the Prince was born, was a collection of a score or more of stone cottages of two rooms on the ground floor, with two or three—of which one was the house of the Petrovich family—of two stories, simple as the people we saw moving about, the women carrying heavy loads on their backs, and a few ragged children peeping round the corners of the houses at the foreigners passing through. Suspicion was on every face, for the foreigner was still an enemy. We had taken the trouble to send word to Cettinje that we were coming up on that day, and the coming of a correspondent of the "Times" apparently had some importance to Montenegro, for we had found and made friends with, in the market-place where our baggage horses were to be hired, a senator of the principality who had accidentally come down from Cettinje, and we did not suspect that he had been sent down to see if there was danger in our visit or not; and so suspicious was the little community that every Montenegrin set himself, without orders and by the instinct of danger, to watch every stranger within the gates.
The road from Njegush to Cettinje, at present replaced by a good carriage road, was worse than that from Cattaro, a craggy climb over which it would have been hardly possible to ride a mule, had I had one to ride; but from the crown of the pass over which we had to go, there is one of the finest wide views I have ever seen, over the plains of Northern Albania and the Lake of Scutari, with the mountains of Epirus in the extreme distance. The bad roads were part of the Montenegrin system, which, as the Prince later explained to me, was not to make roads for Austrian artillery.
Cettinje was a poor village of one-story houses, with two or three exceptions of two-storied ones, of which the principal was the "palace," a residence which in another country would have been a poor gentleman's country house. Our senatorial herald had gone ahead and announced our coming and our friendliness, and the hotel, the second largest building in the village, had rooms ready for us, and the little world of the Montenegrin capital had put on the air of nonchalance, as if such things as the arrival of a "Times" correspondent and a foreign cavalry officer were things of everyday occurrence. No one would condescend to show curiosity; all were as impassive as Red Indians; and though we were the only strangers there, no one seemed at all curious about our business. This was the manner of the entire population, and it was a trait which I soon realized in everybody, from highest to lowest, that they kept the habitual garb of an incurious reticence, neither asking nor giving information. We found, as if carelessly loitering around the hotel, or playing billiards in it, several young men who spoke excellent French, and we laid cautious traps for conversation, but no one could tell us any news or give us any information about the fighting, or answer any questions other than evasively. And it was only after a long acquaintance, and when I had become in a way naturalized, that I was able to provoke confidence in any Montenegrin. The generations of isolation, surrounded only by enemies whom it was a duty to mislead,—four hundred years of a national existence of combat and ruse, always at war, with no friend except far-off Russia,—had developed the natural Slav indifference to the truth into a fine and singularly subtle habit of communicating nothings to any inquiring outsider, which never failed even the most humble clansman. I was, however, pushed on from hand to hand by casual suggestions until I reached the Prince, who gave us audience under the famous tree where he heard appeals of all kinds, from petitions for help to the last recourse from the judgments of the tribunals, a final appeal to which every Montenegrin was entitled, and without which none submitted to an unfavorable judgment.
The moment was critical, for communications had been passing between Servia and Montenegro for an alliance and a declaration of war against the Sultan, for which the entire population of the principality was impatient, and when I arrived the rumor had begun to spread that Servia had yielded to diplomatic pressure and would decline the alliance. The young Montenegrins were chafing, and the old men complaining that the young ones were growing up without fighting and would be nerveless. The Prince was very guarded, but it was easy to gather from what he said that he neither could nor cared to restrain the people from going in limited numbers, and in an unobtrusive way, into Herzegovina to fight the Turks, and in fact he was perfectly within his rights to send his army there, for, curious as it may seem, the Turkish government had never terminated the de jure state of war with the principality, or acknowledged its independence, and the fighting in the vicinity of Niksich had been going on in an intermittent way for more than three hundred years, during which the city had been in a small way in as close a state of siege, probably, as Troy was for ten years. As to operations in Herzegovina, small bands had been going and coming, concentrating when there was a movement to be made by either combatant, and slipping back across the frontier when they had had a brush, but all sub rosa.
The Prince, Nicholas, is personally a prepossessing man, and it was a good fortune which permitted me to study him and his people at a time when the primitive, antique virtue of the little nation had not been deteriorated by civilization, for it was then a pure survival of the patriarchal state, holding its own in the midst of an enslaved condition of all the population around. He is a man of large mould, of a robust vigor which gave him a distinct physical preëminence amongst his people, with the effusive good humor which belongs, as a rule, to large men, and a hearty bonhomie which with that simple people was a bond to the most passionate devotion. He is quick-witted and diplomatic, with a knowledge of statecraft sufficient for the elementary condition of government over which he presided; and his subjects were not then so many that he did not know by name every head of a family amongst them. He could give you off-hand the genealogy of each of the families which had, after the defeat of Kossovo, taken refuge in the Bielopolje, the central valley of the principality, from the defeat of Dushan down, and he knew all the traditions of their early history. When the young men played at games of strength or skill, there were few who could pitch the stone so far or shoot so well, and perhaps those few had the tact not to let it be seen, so that he stood amongst his people as the model and type of all the heroic virtues. In spite of his great physical proportions he was nervous and excitable. In all but military abilities he had grown curiously to the measure of his place, and his diplomatic abilities more than compensated for the want of the military. And what was most singular was that his early education in Paris had not spoiled the Montenegrin in him.
Probably much of this conserved character was due to the Princess, an admirable woman, who deserves a place amongst the world's remarkable female sovereigns; for her energy, patriotism, and instinct of the obligations of the crisis were more remarkable than anything else connected with the house of Njegush. Beautiful even at the period in which I first saw her, gifted with a tact and sympathetic manner quite regal in their reach, she held her husband up to action and decision when his own nerves were shaken. A Montenegrin of voivode stock, the daughter of the commander-in-chief of the army, who had been the right-hand man of Mirko, the father of the Prince, the commander-in-chief of the previous reign, she had the true Amazonian temper, and would not have hesitated to take the field had the courage of her husband failed him; though, in tranquil times, she was a true Slavonic woman, domestic, affectionate in her family, and effacing herself before her husband. I remember that the Prince told me that, after the splendid victory of Vucidol, he sent two couriers to announce to the Princess at Cettinje the news of the victory, and the first question she asked of them was, "Did the Prince show courage?" and when they replied, with a little Montenegrin craft, that they had had to hold him by force to keep him from plunging into the mêlée, she gave them each a half ducat. "And," said the Prince, "if they had said that I had led the charge, she would have given them a whole ducat."
But, with all his civic virtues, the Prince was the very type of a despotic ruler. The word "constitution" was his bugbear, and he would not abate one particular of his absolute power, or tolerate the slightest deflection of his authority in his family, any more than in the principality. His will was the law, and though, in the details of administration, the voivodes and the "ministers" were trusted, nothing could be decided without his personal supervision, nor was any decision of a tribunal settled without an appeal to him in person. One day, as I sat with him under the Tree of Judgment, we saw in the distance a number of the common people approaching the tree. "Now," said he, "you will see a curious thing. This is a case of appeal from the decision of the head men of a village on which there had been quartered more of the Herzegovinian refugees in proportion to their population than they thought they should support, so that they sought relief by sending a part of the refugees to a neighboring village which had not had what they considered its due charge. The villagers of the second village appeal from this overcharge, alleging that their means do not permit them to receive more than they actually have." The rival deputations approached the tree, cap in hand, and, on the Prince giving the order to open the case, it was stated through the head men as the Prince had summarized it. The Prince heard both cases and then asked the head man of the lesser village if they had done as much as they could do in the way of relief, and the head man explained that their village was small and poor (which was quite unnecessary to say of a Montenegrin village), and they could not support more refugees; whereupon the Prince, addressing himself to the deputation of the larger village, repeated to them the parable of the widow and her mite, and, assuring them that the little village had done its best, as the widow did, and they must be content, dismissed the case, and without a word of complaint the two deputations went off together, discussing with each other in the most friendly manner; and the discontent, so far as we could see, was at an end.
But if this patriarchal form of government was interesting, the character of the people under it was still more so, and it was to me a great pleasure and privilege to be enabled to study, as I did for the three years of the insurrection and war, a nation in the earliest stage of true civilization, corresponding as nearly as we can reconstruct ethnology to that of the Greeks in the time of the Trojan war, arms but not men being changed. The honesty and civic discipline were perfect, hospitality limited only by the ability to give it, and the courage and military discipline absolutely unquestioning. If the Prince ordered a position to be stormed, no man would return from the attack till the bugle sounded the recall. I remember charges made during the war in which the half of the battalion was down, dead or wounded, before they could strike a blow, and this without the presence of the Prince to stimulate the soldier; but, before him, no man would flinch from certain death when an order was given.
The honesty was singular. I remember that one day, when I was in Cettinje, two Austrian officers came up from Cattaro, and one of them lost on the road a gold medal he wore, which was picked up by a poor woman passing with a load over the same road, and she went to Cattaro and spent a large portion of the day hunting for the officer who had lost the medal. Sexual immorality was so rare that a single case in Cettinje was the excited gossip of the place for weeks; but to this virtue the influence of the Russian officers during the year of the great war was disastrous. The Russians introduced beggary and prostitution, and the crowd of adventurers from everywhere during the two later years made theft common; but stealing was considered such a disgrace by the Montenegrins that during all my residence there I had only one experience,—the theft of a small pocket revolver by my first Dalmatian horse-keeper, and I think that robbery with violence was never heard of in the principality. During the third year I carried, for distribution among the families of the killed and wounded, the large subsidies of the Russian committees, amounting to several hundred pounds in gold, and in this service I penetrated to the remotest parts of the principality until I reached the Turkish posts in Old Servia, countries of the wildest character, with a very sparse population; and, though it was known that I carried those sums, I was never molested, though I had only one man for escort. And during the two campaigns which I made with the Prince, living in a tent, on the pole of which hung my dispatch-bag containing my store of small money (it being impossible to obtain change for a piece of gold anywhere in the interior), and no guard being kept on the tents, I never lost a zwanziger, or any other article than a girth by which the blanket was fastened on my horse when grazing at night; and, as the blanket came back, even that did not look like a theft.
And yet so poor and so contented were they that the life of the primitive man could not have been much simpler. I have seen, in the cold end of September, in the high mountain districts, a whole family of little children, whose united rags would not have made a comfortable garment for one of them, playing with glee in the fields. On one occasion, when I had been caught by the heavy autumn rains in remote Moratcha, roads washed away and riding a mile impossible, I had to take with me two or three men, beside my guide and horse boy, to make a road where I had to travel, and we were obliged to halt for the night at one of the poorest villages I ever saw in Montenegro. The best house in it was offered me, with such fare as they had, to supplement bread which I had brought from the convent. The house had but one room, with a large bedstead built in it of small trees in the rough, and the beaten ground for floor. The bed was given up to me, and the family lay on the ground with a layer of straw, which was all that the bedstead had in the way of bedding. When we left in the morning I was asked for no compensation, nor did it seem to be expected; but, as my silver had been expended, I gave the woman of the house (the husband being at the war) a gold ten-franc piece. She took it shamefacedly, turned it over and over, looked at it curiously, and then asked my guide, "What is this?" It was the first time in her life that she had seen a gold coin, and the guide had to explain to her that it could be changed into many of the zwanzigers or beshliks which were the only coins she knew. And with all this poverty they seemed most happy when they could extend their poor hospitality to a stranger, and always reluctant to receive any compensation, though the Prince was obliged to furnish to the general population about half the breadstuffs they used in the year.
Seven senators were always on duty near the Prince; they received about $250 a year each when on duty, at other times nothing. The entire civil list of the Prince amounted to about $250,000 a year, from which all the expenses of the government, civil, military, and diplomatic, had to be paid. But for the subsidies of Russia and Austria-Hungary the entire people must have migrated long ago, and I have several times heard Montenegrins say, when asked why they did not build more substantial houses, that "they were not going to stay there long, but meant to get a better country." And yet, like most mountaineers, they were so attached to this rugged and infertile country of theirs that there was no punishment so hard as exile.
During the greater part of the time I spent in the principality the entire male adult population was on the frontier, or fighting just beyond it, and, when a messenger was wanted, the official took a man out of the prison and sent him off, with no apprehensions of his not returning. One such messenger I remember to have been sent to Cattaro, in Austrian territory, with a sum of three thousand florins to be paid to the banker there, and he came back before night and reported at the prison. Jonine told me that one day, being in Cattaro, he was accosted by a Montenegrin, who begged for his intercession with the Prince to let him out of prison. "But," said the Russian official, "you are no more in prison than I am; what do you mean?" "Oh," said the man, "I have only come down for a load of skins for Voivode So-and-so, but I must go into prison again when I get back to Cettinje." The prison was a ramshackle building, in the walls of which a vigorous push of several strong men would have made a breach, and I have often seen all the prisoners out in the sun with a single guard, on absolutely equal terms; and if, as sometimes happened, the guard was called away, any of the prisoners was ready to take his rifle and duties for the moment.
I have seen it stated that the Montenegrin is a lazy man, who puts off the hard work on the women; but this is quite untrue, the fact being that any work which he considers the work of a man he is eager to do. He is an admirable road-maker and navvy, goes far and wide to get work on public works, and at home, when peace allows it, he does the heavy work; but as, in the ordinary life of the past four centuries, he was almost constantly on the frontier to meet the Turkish invasions or the Albanian raids, the agricultural and much other work fell necessarily to the women. When there were considerable flittings from Cettinje, and the amount of baggage to be carried down to Cattaro was large, it was always allotted to one of the most intelligent men to judge of the weight; and when it was a heavy package he said, "This is the load of a man," or, if a light load, "This is for a woman," many of whom were waiting, eager for the chance of gaining something by their labor. But no compensation will induce a Montenegrin to accept a work which is considered not the work of a man.
In military courage and docility the Montenegrin probably stands at the head of European races. He is born brave, and comes under the law of military obedience as soon as he can carry arms. The good wish for the boy baby in his cradle is, "May you not die in your bed," and to face death is to the boy or man the most joyous of games. I have seen a man, in the midst of a hot interchange of rifle bullets between the Turkish trenches and our own, the trenches occupying the crests of two parallel ranges of low hills, go around outside the works and climb with the greatest deliberation up the hillside, exposed to the Turkish fire, and back over the breastwork into our trenches, all the time under a hail of rifle bullets. During the siege operations at Niksich the Prince was obliged to issue an order of the day forbidding burial to any man killed in this ostentatious exposure to the Turkish fire, so many men having been killed while standing on the crests of the shelter trenches in pure bravado. While lying at headquarters at Orealuk (where the Prince had a little villa), waiting the opening of the campaign of 1877, I was walking on the terrace with him one day after dinner when I noticed a boy of sixteen or eighteen standing at the end of the terrace with his cap in his hand, the usual form of asking for an audience. "Now I'll show you an interesting thing," said the Prince, as he made a sign to the boy to approach. "This boy is the last of a good family, whose father and brothers were all killed in the last battle, and I ordered him to go home and stay with his mother and sisters, that the family might not become extinct." As the boy drew near and stopped before us, his head down and his cap in his hands, the Prince said to him, "What do you want?" "I want to go back to my battalion," the boy replied. "But," replied the Prince, "you are the last of the family, and I cannot allow a good family to be lost; you must go home and take care of your mother." The boy began to cry bitterly. The Prince then asked him if he would go home quietly and stay there, or take a flogging and be allowed to fight. He shook his head and stood silent a little while and then broke out, "Well! it isn't for stealing; I'll take the flogging!" that being the deepest disgrace which can befall a Montenegrin. And he broke down utterly when the Prince finally said that he must go home, for his family was a distinguished one, and he was not willing that no man should be left of it to keep the name. "But," said the boy, "I want to avenge my father and brothers," this being the highest obligation of every Montenegrin. The boy went away still crying, but when he had gone the Prince said, "I know that he will be in the next battle in spite of anything I can say."
CHAPTER XXVII
THE INSURRECTION IN HERZEGOVINA
I have anticipated the events of the year, but this illustration of the character of the little people whose tenacity and courage put their mark on European history during the subsequent three years will help to give significance to the story. Without being undiplomatically frank, on the one hand, or attempting to conceal his rôle on the other, the Prince allowed me to see that everything depended on Montenegrin action, and that he, to a certain extent, must permit his people to follow their sympathies. The young men went in groups without any pretense of organization, with their rifles and yataghans, and, when the opportunity offered, took part in any pending skirmish, and then came home, to be replaced by others. To have forbidden this would have made the people mutinous, and the Dalmatians, though under the authority of Austria, were no more closely held to neutrality than the Montenegrins. The Austrian Slavs could not be permitted to be more patriotic than the Montenegrin; and the Prince, after having attempted to quiet the former by sending old Peko Pavlovich to bring them to reason, and found that the matter could not be settled in that way, allowed Peko to take a band of young men into Herzegovina and assume the direction of the insurrection.
There was nothing more to be learned in Montenegro that belonged to war correspondence, and I went back to Cattaro. There I learned that there was a great assemblage of refugees at Grahovo, a remote corner of the principality, which could best be reached from the Bocche; and enlisting the agent of the Austrian Lloyds as guide and interpreter, I went by way of Risano and the country of the Crivoscians, a Slavonic tribe who gave great trouble to the Romans in their day, and to their successors in that part of the world, the Austrians, whom they defeated disastrously in 1869. The Crivoscians contributed an important element to the forces of the insurrection; they were held to be great thieves, but greater Turk fighters, and on the way to Grahovo we met many of them coming home wounded, or carrying their booty from the recent battles (one amongst them had forgotten whether he was seventy-five or seventy-six), for there had been serious fighting in the corner of the Herzegovina adjacent.
Then we came into the long procession of refugees, mostly women and children, a dribbling stream of wretched humanity, carrying such remnants of their goods as their backs could bear up under, with a few old men, too old to fight, all seeking some hiding-place until the storm should be over,—wretched, ragged, worn out by the fatigues of their hasty flight from "the abomination of desolation," for it seemed as if he that was on the housetop had not gone down to take anything out of his house, and woe had been pronounced upon them that were with child and them that gave suck in those days. I had seen enough of the horrors of suppression of Christian discontent by the Mussulmans of Crete, but the brutality of the Slavonic Islam in time of peace was other and bitterer than the Cretan, and the miserable remnant of escaped rayahs of Herzegovina was the very ragged fringe of humanity. I wish every statesman who had ever favored tonics for the "sick man" could have stood where I did and have seen the long reiteration of the damning accusation against the "unspeakable Turk" in these escapes of the peaceful stragglers from massacre and rapine which every rising in the provinces of Turkey brings forth for the shame of our civilization. There were whole families in such rags that they would not have been permitted to beg in the streets of any English city, lucky even to have escaped as families; parents whose daughters, even more miserable, had not been permitted to escape to starvation. We found at Grahovo the body of which those we had seen were the fringe,—a mass of despairing, melancholy humanity, brooding over the misery to come, homeless, foodless, and the guests of a people only less poor than themselves, the hospitable hovels of the Montenegrins housing a double charge.
I was desirous to learn from themselves the details of their oppression, and my friend questioned one group as to what they had to complain of. It was practically everything but death,—their cattle taken, their crops ravaged or reaped by the agas, the honor of wives and daughters the sport of any Mussulman ruffian who passed their way. One tall, gaunt old woman, who had not spoken, but listened, with a face like a stone, to all that the others replied, suddenly threw her ragged robe over her head and burst into a tempest of tears. Another turned to me a stolid face, saying, "Gospodin! we do not know what a virgin is!" I saw enough of it before I had finished to have made the world turn Turcophobe. And twenty years later we hear of the same fruits of the same régime and, as I found then, Christian statesmen who tolerate it.
I tried to penetrate to the scene of the fighting in Herzegovina, but was on all sides warned that from Grahovo it was impossible; it was necessary to return to Ragusa. There I learned that a fight had just taken place on the road between Trebinje and Ragusa. There is a good carriage road between the two cities, and, in company with two colleagues, and under the guidance of a daring carriage driver, we went to Trebinje. The plain between the frontier and Trebinje is a waste of limestone crags and blocks, scattered as if after a combat of Titans, a miserable stunted vegetation springing between the rocks, capable of hiding thousands of men within a rifle-shot from the road, and, as we found, actually hiding a good many. But word had been sent before by our friends the patriots, and we only caught a glimpse of one insurgent, and saw one dead Turk, a victim of the last skirmish, whose body the garrison had not dared come out to bury.
We brought the first news the pasha had received in five days. He gave me, for official information, his version of the late fight, in which old Peko had drawn a convoy of provisions into an ambush and captured it, killing eighty men of the escort, whose heads one of my colleagues had seen stuck up on poles at the insurgent camp, but in which the pasha admitted a loss of only twenty or thirty men. I had seen many Turkish pashas, but never one of that type,—amiable, lethargic, and quite indisposed to do any harm to anybody, and he could not understand why the insurgents could not let him alone; he did not want to disturb them. He complained bitterly that ill-disposed people had been stirring up the population of his province and that, though he had a force of two thousand men, the disorderly Herzegovinians made it very difficult for his men to go about. It was really pathetic to hear him. He wished harm to no one; so courteous and civilized-over was he that one could easily imagine that such officials at Constantinople might give the Turcophile color to a corps diplomatique. Invited to coffee by the Austrian consul, I heard the views of a man whose experiences have been equaled by few, for he had been fourteen years at that post; and he fully confirmed the impressions I had from the refugees at Grahovo. But, on the other side of the matter, I was really interested in the Turkish troops, so good-natured, so patient, and not in the least concerned at having been several months besieged and blockaded, supplies short, and relief not even hoped for. I hated the system, but I could not help liking its victims on both sides.
Returning to Ragusa, I found Ljubibratich on the point of returning to the insurgents' camp at Grebci, just over the Austrian frontier, and only about three hours' walk, we were told, from Ragusa. They came with unrestricted freedom from camp into Ragusa, carried away what supplies of any kind they needed, and, when ill, came to the hospital of the city. Dalmatia and its medley of races are still in the Eastern state of activity, in which time is of no account; and, instead of getting off in the early morning to return before night, as arranged, we left Ragusa at 2 P.M. We were in October, and the shortening days did not favor long journeys, and the road was even worse than those in Montenegro. On the way across the frontier the going was simply climbing a Cyclopean stairway, and we reached the camp only at dusk.
Grebci was an abandoned village of the Herzegovinian population, robbed and maltreated even here within a rifle-shot of the Austrian territory, and the entire population had taken refuge across the frontier. There was a reunion of all the bands, amounting to about 900 men, of whom 250 were Montenegrins under old Peko Pavlovich, a wiry, wily, Slavonic Ulysses, who had been in more than ninety battles with the Turks, and who knew and used every stratagem of this border warfare. There was Melentie, the fighting Archimandrite of the convent of Duzi; Luka Petcovich, a Herzegovinian of the Montenegrin frontier, a tried Turk fighter; and the fighting popes of three villages of Orthodox Christians, Bogdan Simonich, Minje, and Milo. There was a small band of Italians, with one Frenchman, Barbieux,—one of the bravest of the brave and an ex-Zouave officer,—ten Russians, and a few Servians. We were in for a night, and had brought no provender, while all the food in camp was the half of an old goat and some flinty ship's biscuit. The goat was roasted before the camp-fire, laid on a timber platform, which served for bed by night and table by day, and hacked to pieces by the yataghans which had come from the battle two days before. The meat was tough beyond exaggeration, and the biscuit had to be broken with a stone into small pieces; but we had wine, for this abounded across the frontier and was indispensable. We heard the story of the fight at Utovu, where the insurgents had been taken in a trap by treachery of the weak chiefs of a Catholic village, and escaped with the loss of only four killed, owing to the precautions of the wily Peko, who, like an experienced fox, never went into a possible trap without seeing the way out of it; but they brought away the visible proofs of their fight in the noses of fifty-eight Turkish soldiers killed. In the custom of the country the nose of an enemy stands as the logarithm of his head, which is inconvenient of transportation in number; and, though the Prince had forbidden the mutilation of the dead, it was impossible to enforce the prohibition out of Montenegro, and this was the only proof of the actual fruits of victory permitted by the circumstances.
The Italians sang songs, and the whole band made merry till far into the night, when the correspondents, the honored guests, to be served with the best of the accommodations, were shown to the abandoned house of the captain of the village, a stone-built hut, the only one of two stories, which gave us a board floor to sleep on in the upper story, garnished with a bundle of straw for each of us, on which we lay down to sleep, tired to exhaustion. My overcoat was my only covering, and there had been a slight snowfall the day before. I slept, to be awakened ten minutes later by swarms of fleas so numerous that it was like lying in an ant-hill. Three times in the night I went out to shake the fleas from my clothing in the cold night air, and when the first daylight came we turned out and made our way back to Ragusa.
Dissensions and mutual recriminations followed the defeat of Utovu, Peko openly expressing his disgust with the insurgents of the plain, who were braver when there was no enemy than when the fighting was imminent, and he marched off to a position in the hilly country nearer the Montenegrin frontier, leaving Ljubibratich with the men of the low country. The lull brought into action that Shefket Pasha who, the following year, inaugurated the "Bulgarian atrocities," and who, declining to attack the band of Peko, came to vent his prowess on the people of the Popovo plain, of whom about five thousand had returned from exile in Dalmatia under the guarantee of the Turkish authorities of freedom from molestation on resuming their ordinary vocations. These were all Catholics, and the Catholics of Herzegovina and Bosnia have always been submissive, even to all the rigors of the Turkish rule, while the Orthodox Christians have been the rebels, the popes being generally the captains in time of war. Shefket, disregarding the guarantees of his government, marched on the villages of Popovo, killed or carried away prisoners all the men who did not escape again over the frontier, and allowed the bashi-bazouks to plunder and ravage. Male children were killed with the men; and the women, abandoning everything they could not carry, returned to Austrian territory, where I visited them to get the facts of the matter.