Shortly after our marriage my husband’s work took us to Chicago, where he was already known as a decorative painter, through his “History of the Vintage”, a frieze and ceiling executed for Mrs. Potter Palmer’s fine house on the Lake Shore Drive. Letters to my family give my early impressions of the place.
[To my Mother.]
Chicago, January, 1888.
I am growing to feel at home in this queer grimy city. Life is pretty laborious. We get to the studio at nine. I drape J’s model, an old German soldier posing for St. Peter. Then I go to my den and grind away till lunch. Last Saturday the studios were turned into fairy land. A dainty table was spread and fourteen leaders of Chicago’s “sassiety” were invited to meet me at luncheon. Mrs. Pretyman, who gave the party, proved a wonderful decorator. All the working details of the rooms were hidden under soft draperies brought out from dark chests and drawers. In J’s studio his portraits of Uncle Sam and Julia Richards were hung, also his new sea babies and the big ceiling panel of cupids with apple blossoms. After luncheon, excellent music and hosts of people. It was as well done as it could have been in London or Paris, a perfect fête d’atelier.
Chicago, May, 1888.
I like the place, I like the people, I love the civic spirit here, but I can never like the climate. Thermometer dropped forty degrees yesterday in eight hours. The lake has as many moods as I have, with the difference that all are beautiful,—storm, squall and sun. Lake Michigan is as handsome as the Mediterranean, but it lacks salt,—salt, the savor of life. This morning to hear David Swing preach. He poured out vials of bitterness against the narrow doctrines of the Puritans. I have sold my story “Phil Owens” to the American for one hundred dollars. Reginald De Koven is the editor. Anna De K. has been kinder than kind. I meet delightful people at her house. I am writing the Vampire story for Oscar Wilde’s magazine. All the women in the house are reading my “Mammon” in Lippincott’s.
[To Laura Richards.]
Chicago, May, 1889.
The last of my lectures to-night. Want to know the titles? P.G. signifies pretty good.
Literature of New England. P.G.
Our Southern Literature. P.G.
The West in Literature.
The Metropolitan School (New York). P.G.
Has America produced a Poet? P.G.
English Poets.
English Novelists. P.G.
France in Literature To-day.
Dawn of Russian Literature. P.G.
Contemporaneous Russian Writers. P.D.G.!
In all the winter’s cramming for these talks, the books I have enjoyed most are Gogol’s “Taras Bulba” and Walter Pater’s “Marius, the Epicurean.” It’s been a beast of a grind to prepare so many, but how I have enjoyed it! I am very happy and busy since I began my hard work. All the devil blues vanished. They came of the fiends ennui and idleness, bara boom, bara boom!
This, my first lecture course, was held at the house of our friends, Mr. and Mrs. George Armour. The talks were given two evenings a week during Lent. In the audience were some of the men who had created Chicago,—Marshall Field, John Crerar, Charles Farwell, Wirt Dexter, Franklin MacVeagh, Potter Palmer, and scions of the powerful Pullman, Deering, and McCormick clans. The generation to which these men belonged loved their city as other men love a favorite child, with a passionate devotion and a pride I have never known equaled. That is the secret of Chicago’s strength; it is founded upon love, the strongest thing in the world. With these merchant princes came their wives and daughters, hardly less active than they in shaping the city’s social and artistic life. What a clever, brilliant group of women they were! By common consent Mrs. Potter Palmer was the acclaimed leader among them. She was greatly beloved and treated like a little queen.
Bertha Honoré Palmer was handsome, elegant, and distinguished, but so were many other women of her set: what made her preëminent among them was a rare gift of leadership combined with great executive ability. After the terrible fire of 1871, her husband, like other prominent business men, found himself a heavy loser from the disaster. It was at this time that the property which later became the Lake Shore Drive came into the market. When a great slice of this land was offered to Mr. Palmer, it seemed a hopeless proposition and he decided to turn it down. His wife, however, persuaded him to make the investment; she had the vision to foresee that what was then mere waste land on the borders of Lake Michigan was destined to become the fashionable quarter of the city. Mr. Palmer, who was much older than his wife, made a will that for chivalry is unsurpassed. After leaving the larger part of his immense fortune to his wife, he added a clause setting aside a certain sum of money, the income from which should be paid to Mrs. Palmer’s husband, in case she should marry again.
Mrs. Leiter and her handsome daughters had already given up Chicago for Washington. They were sometimes at their country place at Geneva Lake, where we spent a pleasant week-end. I studied Mrs. Leiter’s curious use of English with some care and came to the conclusion that she was word blind as some people are color blind.
“Mr. A. is a very deep-seated man,” she once said to me of a common acquaintance, repeating the phrase earnestly, “a very deep-seated man”, shaking her handsome head and dismissing Mr. A. in an imperial manner. I never quite knew what she meant to imply about poor Mr. A.
One evening at the Auditorium Theater a friend brought Eugene Field into our box and introduced him to us. We had a brief chat between the acts. What had struck me first about him was his closely cropped, almost shaven head, so unlike other poets I had known. When he had gone, our host asked:
“What do you think of Eugene Field?”
“Doesn’t he look rather like a convict?” I laughed, meaning to be funny. As we were leaving the theater, Mr. Field came up to me in the lobby and said cheerily:
“I hear you say I look like a convict. Remember I am not a bird of plumage, but a bird of song. As for you,” with a low bow, “you look like the daughter of the ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic.’”
I almost forgot my mortification in my admiration for that gracious turning of the tables. He bore no malice, and on the too few occasions when we met, I found him companionable and understanding. The last time I saw Eugene Field was at a dinner at Mrs. John Root’s. He was in great vein and kept us in a gale of laughter till past midnight. John Root, of the firm of Burnham and Root, was already at work making the plans for the Dream City of the World’s Fair. He was a gifted man who had made his mark as an architect. He was a Virginian, a full habited rosso, with a magnificent physique, extraordinarily brilliant in his talk as in his profession. He insisted upon putting me in my carriage though it was below zero weather. I can see him now, standing at the carriage door in evening dress, with bare head, while he said some last witty thing.
“Go back! You will catch your death of cold,” I chided.
The words were prophetic; he took a chill from the exposure and died of pneumonia a few days later.
William Pretyman was at this time established in Chicago as an interior decorator; during our stay my husband was associated with him in the decoration of some of the city’s fine houses. The Pretymans built a home at Edgewater, then a suburb of the city. As soon as they had moved into their new home, these generous people invited us to share it with them. I remember the day we took possession. All morning the lake had been veiled by an opal haze. The sun came out just as we arrived and in an instant it was a sheet of palest green, shimmering with blue and violet shadows.
To reach the great living room two stories high we went down a flight of stairs. In one corner stood the table spread for dinner, in another Pretyman’s easel and drawing stand, opposite were Jennie Pretyman’s grand piano, her work basket, and bookcase. There was an enormous open fireplace where logs of silver birch blazed and crackled on a pair of ancient andirons. The windows were too high to allow us to look out. When I saw the room I exclaimed:
“The world forgetting, by the world forgot!”
Pretyman liked this so much that it became the motto of this unique center which was to become a Mecca to the Pilgrims of Art from many lands.
The day’s work over, we gathered round the hearth. When he was in the mood, Pretyman, who was a thirteenth-century Crusader in nineteenth-century clothes, told of his adventures among the Head Hunters of North Borneo when he was British Resident. More often than not he brought a stranger home to dinner, some stray Englishman sorely in need of a friend. How did they all find him? Or did he find them?
“Chicago is like a sieve,” he used to say, “it is the first place that catches the down-and-out British rancher on his way east.”
How many of his stranded countrymen he helped to tide over a bad moment, only he and his wife know.
I once met at their house her cousin, Mary Leiter, afterwards Lady Curzon. They were as like as two sisters, though Jennie Pretyman was the handsomer and more gracious. The likeness went as far as the speech and even the handwriting.
My mother visited us in Chicago while on one of her western lecture tours.
During the greater part of the time of the World’s Fair we were in Chicago. My mother was active in the World’s Parliament of Religion and I had the pleasant task of editing a volume on the work of women at the Columbian Exposition.
1890 saw our return to Boston and to my mother’s house where I took up my old position as “boss.” Nothing was changed; each day was still too short for the task and frolic it brought. The clan constantly rallied round the old Chieftainess; children, grandchildren, relatives, “near” relatives, distinguished strangers, poor things in need of a bed, a meal, a cup of tea, a “jollying”! How did she do it? In these inhospitable post-war days it seems incredible.
My diary gives glimpses of the busy hive and its queen bee.
January 1st, 1890. Mama down early for breakfast. Her mail was mostly composed of bills. She threw up her hands in mock dismay. J. said, “People ought to send you billets doux instead of billets duns!”
January 14th. John Pickering Putnam proposes my name for membership in the National Club.
This association grew out of Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward.” The book made a great furore. I heard Bellamy speak at Tremont Temple that winter. Edward Everett Hale, who introduced him, said,
“Some time ago I wrote a book called ‘How They Lived at Hampton.’ Nobody read it. Mr. Bellamy has written a book on the same theme and everybody has read that.”
January 15th. Lecture from Professor Royce on Kant. He said the modern man of the best sort to-day embodies Kant’s principles, which were that out of pure reason a man should build up for himself a system of ethics, that he should act as if there was a God, and that he should do right always because it was the manliest part to play.
To a “Recollection of Tristan and Isolde”, Mr. Preston giving the music on the piano, Ralph Adams Cram reading a description of the opera.
January 17th. To dine with Mrs. Louis Stackpole, where we met Dr. Holmes. He spoke of the pleasure he had in reading his own poems.
“I have written one hundred,” he said, “and I like thirty.” I asked the names of his favorites.
“‘The Last Leaf’,” he said. “Then perhaps ‘The Chambered Nautilus’ and ‘Dorothy Q’.”
He spoke of passing through the old tunnel at Salem this autumn and finding the voice of the train as wicked as ever. “It said, ‘Why don’t you now? Why don’t you now?’ in such a tempting and delightful fashion that if I had been sitting by the Cumaean Sybil I should have taken her hand in mine.”
The Doctor described having made and put up his first “shingle.” He cut out the frame, covered it with tin and painted on it: “Dr. O. W. Holmes, last door but one.” Having nailed up the sign he walked down to Tremont Street and looked down Montgomery Place to see the effect it produced. “No, that will never do!” he exclaimed. “What if it should strike the patient that if I am the last door but one I must be next door to the tomb?” He took the sign down and repainted it, making it read, “Dr. Holmes, 8 Montgomery Place.”
I told Dr. Holmes I thought it was rather hard that he was getting all the credit for my mot about Mama being “seventy years young.”
“Yes,” he said, “I sympathize with you. Many of my good things are credited to Nat Curtis or Tom Appleton.”
I repeated this to Mama. “Never mind,” she said, “you have added a phrase to the language!”
January 18th. To South Boston to make copies of Papa’s letters from the old letter books. The school journals of the early days at the Perkins Institution are very good reading. To Mrs. Fairchild’s in the afternoon where I found a sea of beaux about Sattie and Lucia. John Sargent was there. He is painting Mr. Booth for the Players Club. A gay evening. Mrs. Norman to dine, Arthur Terry and Edward Bacon, the Walker boys and Sam Hall. We had dumb crambo, charades and singing to amuse Mama, who had been headachey but was much jollied up. How she loves the gioventude!
January 20th. With Mama to see Booth and Modjeska in the “Merchant of Venice.” His Shylock greater than ever,—the art so perfect as to be imperceptible. Kate Vannah came from New York. A discussion about a personal devil, in whom she firmly believes. Agreed to ask the people we meet for the next week their opinion. Ned Elliott, Miss Lockwood and Mrs. Fairchild believe in a distinct principle of evil.
January 21. To Professor Royce’s lecture on Fichte and the German idealists who followed Kant. Very interesting. In the evening Mama talked about Papa. She spoke of her having for twenty years lived in thinking about thoughts; i.e. studying metaphysics and philosophy, on which she wrote many papers. She went one Sunday to the Parker Memorial and read a paper about the Causality of Things. When half through she realized that the audience did not understand her and moreover that it was her fault that they did not understand. Then came a period in which she determined to learn from experience, from thinking about people and life, and to think no longer about thoughts. Now she can amuse herself with philosophy, but it is not the pleasure to her that a thorough study of history is, or of the different religions of the world. She enjoys above all other reading the Greek classics, poetry, history and plays.—To a Russian dinner given by Count Zuboff at the Tremont House. Very amusing. All sorts of queer fishes and queer dishes.
January 27th. A letter from Mr. Booth thanking me for mine. I had written telling how much we had enjoyed seeing him act during his Boston engagement. He writes:
“Forgive an old man’s tardiness in thanking you for your charming note anent the plays I struggled through in Boston, it gratified me very, very much indeed, and I cordially thank you for it.”
The handwriting not so firm as formerly, though the signature is perfect. Shylock was the best thing he did this time,—an old man’s part!
February 7th. Fourth anniversary of our marriage. Supper, music, dancing, for a dozen of the original wedding guests,—only true lovers were invited. Mama said that every woman should be allowed to choose her own mate until she was thirty, every man till he was forty; after that the State should marry them. What a scrambling there would be in the twenty-ninth and the thirty-ninth years!
Richard Mansfield had asked me to write a play for him founded on Chamisso’s “Man Without a Shadow.” I found time for this and to give a series of talks of arts and literature in Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Newport during this year and the following. It was a time of great activity and consequent happiness.
April 1st, 1891. Began to work on Act Fourth of “The Man Without a Shadow” and sent the third act to Mansfield. Mr. Herne asks me to sign a petition that a play of his be produced. The petition opens with a letter from W. D. Howells. The moral of the play is like that of the “Kreutzer Sonata”, a plea for the single standard of conduct for man and woman. To see Mr. Howells and ask his advice. He said, “I advise you not to sign a petition to produce a play you never have read.” He thinks highly of Herne, the man and the actor, and spoke of the play as “an epoch-making drama.”
Mr. Howells was enchanting. He wore a black velvet jacket and seemed to be reading a pile of letters when I came in. He said the success of his last book was due in his opinion to the scene having been laid in New York. “Everybody likes to read about New York, only a few people about Boston. I have to describe the place I am in. If I am in Boston, I write about it; when I am in New York I write about that.”
“But New York is such a friendless place,” I said.
“Yes, it is,” Howells replied, “but it is so easy, it always seems to me to be standing about with its hands in its pockets. I can never hope to have so many pleasant friends there, or anywhere, as in Boston.”
I am sorry he is going. He will be greatly missed. Everybody loves the man though not all the novelist.
April 4th. At the Delands’ last evening. Stepniak made an urgent plea for his country, wishing Americans to bring the pressure of their disapproval on the Russian nation. He was eloquent and full of pathos.
April 5th. With J. to the Symphony Concert. The leader was ill and Kneisel conducted extremely well. They gave Beethoven’s Second Symphony: more beautiful than ever. J. much excited by the music. He said that most painters loved music, while the musicians he knew did not care much about pictures. Their ears are trained to the disadvantage of their eyes. “They are so used to looking at dots that they don’t really see.”
Have invited Mr. Mansfield and Miss Beatrice Cameron to lunch next Sunday.
April 6th. Worked hard at my play.—To see “Beau Brummel” with Mama, J. and Arthur Terry. Mr. Mansfield wrote that the rehearsals for “Don Juan” took all his time and that my play will be prepared in the early summer for the stage.
April 10th. Mr. Stepniak addressed a meeting at Mama’s house, the object being to raise money for the paper, Free Russia, and also to send responsible persons to Russia to gather first-hand information about the misrule, outrages and general oppression. Mama would not let me give my name for the committee, as she knows that I want to go to Russia and thinks if I was connected with this movement it would not be expedient for me to go there.
April 18th. To the Lunch Club at Edith Wendell’s. Mrs. Roland Lincoln told us about the sad condition of the pauper asylums. We drew up and signed a letter to Mayor Matthews, asking for a hospital to be built on Rainsford Island for the paupers. It is a puzzling matter. It is not possible to make their state an enviable one and yet it is terrible to think of the helpless mass, the dregs of the city left alone, outside the pale of humanity. I asked Mrs. Lincoln if any one ever thought of them. She said, “No one goes there but the priest!” Cruel that Protestantism is not more imbued with the spirit that made a Father Damien!
April 20th. The reception at the Kindergarten for the Blind. A lovely day, a great crowd of people. Helen Keller the main attraction, as in the old days at the Perkins Institution, Laura Bridgman. She is a most extraordinary child. I think Anagnos has made a mistake in choosing Miss Sullivan for her teacher. Miss S. is well prepared in one way, having herself been educated at the Perkins Institution and having known Laura Bridgman and become familiar with Papa’s methods, but she has not the right feeling, remembering the beautiful modesty of Laura’s behavior, compared to the almost hoydenish ways of this child. Helen recited some verses of Dr. Holmes’. Her voice, Mr. Dwight said, was like that of a Pythoness. It was to me the loneliest sound I have ever heard, like waves breaking on the coast of some lonely desert island. The work of raising the fund for the New Kindergarten building goes bravely on. Twenty thousand dollars is already subscribed. Michael wants fifty thousand and I believe he will get it.
At the instance of Michael Anagnos, my sister Florence Hall and I now set about writing the story of my father’s greatest achievement, the education of Laura Bridgman, a many times told tale, first by S. G. H. in his reports of the Perkins Institution, then by Charles Dickens in the “American Notes”, later by scores of writers in many tongues.
“All history that survives must be rewritten every twenty years for each fresh generation,” Anagnos insisted.
This work brought me nearer my father as a teacher than ever before. The hours spent copying his letters from the ancient files of the Institution and deciphering Laura’s faintly penciled diary taught me much about both of them. M. A. deW. Howe, our kinsman, helped sift the chaff from the wheat in the mass of material that confronted us; my husband brought his craft to our aid, making careful drawings to illustrate the book.
April 22nd. Richard Mansfield gave a matinee performance of “Beau Brummel” at the Globe Theater for the benefit of the Kindergarten for the Blind, an admirable performance.
April 26th. To lunch with Mrs. Fairchild. John Sargent there and Miss Julia Marlowe. She is very sweet, not so sensitive as Beatrice Cameron, but with a larger field probably before her. In the evening music at the Montgomery Sears’. Very lovely. Ernst Perabo and the Adamowski quartette. Mr. Sears a perfect host, the musicians at their best. Mr. Sears spoke of the plan to have J. do a decoration for the Public Library. Said he ought to have it and would be glad to serve on the committee.
April 27th. To the fiftieth anniversary of the Church of the Disciples. Very long and tiresome remarks from the early speakers. When Mama got up to speak, the audience woke up. An electric current ran through the house. It was quite wonderful. She spoke beautifully of Theodore Parker and dear James Freeman Clarke, and drew a fine parallel between them.
June 5th. My dear brother-in-law, Edward Elliott, was drowned this day at Prospect Hill Lake, Colorado Springs.
June 10th. At half past ten Phillips Brooks came to the house. I had arranged the back parlor like a little chapel with many flowers. He read the service in memory of dear Ned, prayed with us and left my dear J. a little lifted up from his black grief. Ned had been with us to the New Year’s Eve service and had been much impressed with the sermon and the personality of the great preacher. This was a gracious and a loving act.
Ned Elliott was my husband’s brother, a gallant young sailor, to whom we were all much attached. He had gone to Colorado Springs to recover from an attack of pneumonia. He entirely regained his health and was on the point of coming to join us in Boston when this strange accident took place. Prospect Hill Lake is a small artificial sheet made by damming the mountain streams of ice-cold water. It was constructed to serve as a plaything for strangers who come to Colorado Springs in search of health. Having created the lake, the next thing was to provide a boat to sail upon it. My brother-in-law was the only sailor in the place and he, with two other young men, launched the sailboat for its first trip. She proved to be a crank affair and turned bottom upward, throwing them all into the icy lake. The other two were saved by clinging to the keel, but Ned, who had sailed the high seas for years, been twice shipwrecked, and had many hairbreadth escapes, was drowned in nine feet of water of a toy lake. It is believed that his death was due to a cramp. It seemed like an old pagan sacrifice to the darker gods!
July 17th. Mama said this morning;
“You owe me two dollars.” I replied that I owed her two dollars and thirty-five cents. Then she cried out:
“You owe me for all sorts of things.”
“I owe you my life.”
“On the whole,” with a twinkle, “that has been of so much advantage to me that I won’t charge you for it.”
January 3rd, 1892. Went with Mama to church, she preaching, as Mr. Ames is ill with grippe. Her prayer was very moving. She asked for faith, inspiration, and love. Also spoke of the church and the noble souls who had built it up. The sermon was on the text, “Thou Art Peter.” One of her best efforts. Have heard it before and went largely with the idea of studying her methods of delivery. Daisy Chanler advised me to study with her rather than any one else, said she thought Mama’s was the most beautiful manner and speech she had ever heard. Soon, however, the matter and the manner overcame me, and I forgot to mark the intonations save to be moved by them. The thought in the sermon was the strength of simple humanity. Sinful, deceitful sometimes, but capable of heroism and self-sacrifice. On this rock of the common sense and the right feeling of the simple human being, Christ’s church was builded. The congregation was much moved, I thought, and I bore her off rather fiercely from “congregationing.” She had been very anxious about this service and had hardly slept the night before. She is never so wearied as by prayer; it is the thing she loves best. She was flushed and beautiful at the end of the service.
November 11th, 1893. To the funeral of Francis Parkman, to which I went as a matter of historical interest. It took place at King’s Chapel, without pomp, ceremony or trappings of woe. The music was pure classic, but passionless, the voice of the clergyman grave, reverent, without emotion. It seemed as if all elder Boston had come to the obsequies of one of the last great New Englanders. The service was impressive from its very impassiveness. No rending either of hearts or garments, no shrouding of pale faces with crape,—all stern, granite, real. Barrett Wendell had been that morning to the funeral of his choreman at the Catholic cathedral. He compared the gorgeous ceremony for this humble servant with the incense, the vestments, the velvet pall, the emotional music, to the grave function at King’s Chapel. He spoke of the ringing Latin words of the mass, in sæcula sæculorum. “In the matter of funerals,” he said, “Thomas certainly had the best of it.”
“Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay!”
The absurd words, the maddening air, greeted us when we marched on London, four strong, in that dazzling season of 1892. My husband, my mother, my niece, Alice Richards, and myself made up the swaggering contingent,—“four precious souls and all agog to dash through thick and thin.”
The Columbian epoch glitters resplendently when I look back along the line of years that stretch behind me, a motley company dressed in cloth-of-gold, sackcloth, and brown holland. Something of the glow of new life that came to the world four hundred years earlier was reflected in the time.
The old intoxication seized upon my mother and me the moment we stepped out of Saint Pancras Station and into the moldy-smelling four-wheeler. Alice, fresh from boarding school, was not less deeply stirred perhaps, but showed it less, according to the manner of her generation. A fellow traveler on the train had said to us:
“I call this the American season! You Americans are furnishing more of the year’s sensations than ever.”
At Earl’s Court our old acquaintance, Buffalo Bill, with his bronco busters and cowboys was making a great hit. A friend offered me a seat in the weather-beaten Deadwood Coach during the pursuit by Arapahoe Indians.
“Places are not easy to get,” he assured me. “You will be in the best of company,—peeresses, professional beauties, members of Parliament.”
A lady wishing to take us to the play advised, “‘Cleopatra’, with your pretty compatriot, Mrs. James Brown Potter, and Kyrle Bellew.” This was New Orleans over again!
At the Royal Academy everybody talked of John Sargent’s seven magnificent portraits;
“Have you seen Sargent’s Wertheimer? Best thing in the show—perfectly rippin’.”
It certainly was. More to my liking was a portrait of a different Hebrew type, a young chemist in his laboratory,—subtle, delicate, all spirit, in strong contrast to that other, which was of the flesh “fleshly.” At the exhibition of the Society of Portrait Painters we saw an excellent portrait of Paderewski by the Princess Louise of Lorne, which was deservedly much noticed.
In the House of Commons Mr. Gladstone was still the leading figure: he was supported by Lord Rosebery—who now looked almost grown up—and Sir Vernon Harcourt. Sir Randolph Churchill was much in evidence and Mr. Arthur Balfour was already a recognized leader.
Thoughtful people were feeling the menace of Germany’s growing aggression and of the constantly increasing host of Germans holding positions of trust in the business world.
“From the Bank of England down, German clerks are employed everywhere,” a friend complained. “They work for less money than our own people and they know our resources, our strength, and our weakness better than we do ourselves!”
The comic papers were full of cartoons of the Emperor William, now as Jack-in-the-Box-Universal, popping up unexpectedly in the affairs of the army, the navy, art, science, society, education, and religion: again under the caption “Cuts, or we never speak as we pass by”, turning his back upon Bismarck. A few prophetic voices were lifted by men of imperial mold who saw with the wide world vision, like Rudyard Kipling and Lord Roberts. Kipling, with his “flanneled fools”, had angered the England he attacked, and though “Little Bobs” was listened to indulgently for the great love borne him, he was not heeded. London, as a whole, was taking the comfortable Little Englander point of view. If she did not stone her prophets, neither did she heed them. At a military tournament we heard Lord Roberts sound his note of warning for “preparedness.” His was a small martial figure, with close-cropped white hair and moustache and eagle eyes. There was a sort of desperate earnestness in voice and gesture that I well recall and now, in the light of the World War he foresaw, understand.
“An English friend is a friend for life,” was a saying of my mother’s. As if in proof her old friends gathered around her and her days were filled with pleasant engagements. J. R. Seeley, the historian, now Sir John, invited us to Cambridge. He writes, “You must, however, give up the expectation of hearing me.” She regretted this, as she had much enjoyed hearing him speak on earlier visits. A note from Eva McLaren mentions an appointment to meet Mrs. Fawcett, and one from Mrs. Ormiston Chant gives a picture of the political activity of the time, in which we took some part.
49 Gower St., July 2, 1894.
Dear Mrs. Howe;
It is delightful to know you are in London but alas, I am in the thick of the fight over the Gen. Election, and only at home in the afternoon for the next ten days. Is it possible you will come and hear Stopford Brooke to-morrow and return with us to lunch? You shall have quiet and repose all alone after it and then bless us with your presence at afternoon tea. I shall keep a sharp look out for you at chapel, which building is but a short way from here.
What a tremendous political fight we are having. I am everywhere at express speed—four huge meetings at Darlington last Monday and so on every day somewhere, and to-night I have two meetings in different parts of London. To-morrow is a breathing space, and on Monday I have two more meetings in London and am off for three Cornish constituencies on Tuesday.
This is merely to explain why I am prevented from doing what I should so love to do, to welcome you. I hope I shall see you, it will be such a pleasure. Is there anyone you want to be introduced to, I wonder?
My love to you and please tell me how long you are going to stay here.
Yours very sincerely,
L. Ormiston Chant.
I find many notes from Lady Aberdeen, Lady Somerset, and her sister, the Duchess of Bedford, and communications from the Central National Society for Women’s Suffrage. Mr. Gladstone had lately published a most unsympathetic pamphlet on “Female Suffrage”, for which he was soundly rated by our suffrage friends. In spite of this nearly all the people we played with were on his side in the great fight of the General Election. Our old friend Cyril Flower was running for parliament to represent the Rothschild interests. He was a supporter of Mr. Gladstone’s and a staunch Liberal. We went down with him and his wife (Constance de Rothschild) to Battersea and heard him address his future constituents. The whole affair was more like the election in Pickwick than like anything I had ever seen. The speeches were highly spiced with personalities, the orators were chaffed by the crowd, till everybody was in a good humor, and of course, the band played “Ta-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.” The contest seemed gayer, lighter, less sordid than such things at home. I wonder if the fact that the contested office carried no salary had anything to do with this? There is much to be said in favor of unpaid representatives!
Among the happy hours were those spent at Cromwell Road with Henry and Aline Harland. They kept open house for literary folk and musicians. Harland, who in America had written his first books under the name of Sidney Luska, had now taken root in England and seemed more British than American. He was one of the best talkers I have ever heard; the conversation at his table never lagged. His wife was a singer with a heavenly voice. Among the familiars of this house were Theodore Marzials, the composer, and Henry James. Marzials had a winning personality, a little eccentric—his boots were usually unbuttoned—a little timid. He sang many of his compositions for us, and, on being urged, his most popular if not his best song, “Twickenham Ferry.” Harland’s attitude towards James was that of an admiring disciple. It was pleasant to see them together, the elder Henry responding affectionately to the devotion of the younger. James had begun to soften already and the eyes had lost something of the keenness that recalled those penetrating glances of his father, when as a naughty child I sat upon his knee and exchanged personal remarks with him.
At that time James was living at Number 34 De Vere Gardens. He was beginning to weary of London life and casting about as to how he might escape its exactions. We had many pleasant excursions together; he was a famous sight-seer and knew his London well. I always felt in him a certain defenselessness in the matter of guarding his own time. He was forever being called upon to write introductions to other people’s books and to listen to other writers’ manuscripts. He was over generous in these things and I often felt a righteous indignation against the swarm of less important authors, Mrs. Humphry Ward among them, who somehow managed to steal his only possession, his time, and impose upon his good nature.
We went much to the theater. While the English stage at this time could not be seriously compared to the French or Italian, it was far better than the American, and there were some good companies in London. Charles Wyndham, Mr. and Mrs. Kendal, Beerbohm Tree, John Hare, and Forbes-Robertson were all acting. At the Lyceum Ellen Terry and Henry Irving, both at the height of their powers, were playing Shakespeare. We saw magnificent productions of the “Merchant of Venice”, “Henry the Eighth”, and “Hamlet.” Witty Mary Abbott told us of a cockney comedian’s criticism of Sir Henry.
“Look at ‘Enery Hirving! Look at ’is ’Amlet! Asthmatic, I grant you, but werry wulgar. Give ’im a song and dance and where is ’e?”
Not long after seeing Ellen Terry’s entrancing acting of Beatrice, J. and I met her former husband, the great artist George F. Watts. My diary gives an account of our visit, but does not mention that I was haunted throughout by Miss Terry’s voice and face. I could not imagine her at home in Watts’ quiet, well-ordered house. They seemed as far apart as the poles, and yet she once reigned here supreme. There’s a legend that during their brief married life Watts often gave large stag dinners where his child wife was not expected to appear. This was little to her liking. One evening, when a grave company of distinguished men were seated at the board, the lovely madcap appeared suddenly from under the table, where she had been hiding, dressed as Cupid in silk tights and wings, sprang upon the table, and ran its length before the astonished guests. “Se non è vero, è ben trovato.”
July 8, 1892. To lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Watts, Little Holland House, Melbourne Road, Kensington. Found them waiting for us in the drawing-room. She was a Miss Gordon Cumming. Watts is a man of perhaps seventy-six, slender, small, deaf in one ear. Keen blue eyes, fine teeth, the rest of him a delicate and dignified wreck. He was oddly dressed in a little claret-colored skullcap, a brown coat, very old, canvas shoes, unlaced, and linen ruffles at his wrists instead of cuffs. His presence was a benediction. The gentleness, the otherworldliness, the purity and spirituality of the great little man brought tears to my eyes. He made me think of Mr. Emerson, and a little of Papa, at the end. We lunched in a room filled with pictures and portraits and afterwards went into the gallery, thrown open to the public Saturday and Sunday afternoons. The “Life and Love”, a picture I always liked, grows on one.
“I think of giving this to America,” Watts said, “it may have a lesson for your country. Life is a poor thing at best, toiling up a steep, rough path, and unless helped by Love, not worth having. Love does not lift the burden from Life, nor give it very much support, but touches it gently, tenderly, and makes the stony path endurable.”
I admired a portrait of Mrs. Langtry.
“I call it the Dean’s Daughter,” he said. “She came in one day in a simple little bonnet and dress. There was a feather in the bonnet that I asked her to take out. Then I painted her just as she was.”
The portrait is a perfect, womanly thing. Not the professional beauty, the actress, or the pleasure-loving woman the world knows, just the sweet loveliness of the Dean’s Daughter.
“There is something very good about her,” he said.
Remembering her smile, which kept the childlike quality and the brightness of sunshine, I understood.
A portrait of Lord Tennyson is among his latest work. During one of the sittings, Tennyson said to Watts:
“If John Keats had lived he would have been the greatest of the English poets.”
Watts’ very latest portrait of Walter Crane is in his most vigorous manner. It is painted in soft tones, face, coat, hair, background, all a mellow range of browns. The expression is characteristic, a really superb portrait. It reminded me of the day when Crane lunched with us in Beacon Street, and I tried to dissuade him from going to speak at an anarchistic sort of a meeting at Boston Music Hall.
“As I do not sell my pictures,” Watts said, “I feel that I have the right to carry out an idea in many ways.”
This a propos of a subject he has treated several times, the “Angel of Death.”
“Too much gloom and terror is associated with death,” he said. “It is sad to lose our dear ones, but beyond that death is not to be feared.” He pointed to a picture he calls “The Messenger.”
“I wish that picture to be understood by all people, not merely by Christians. The picture should tell its story to the Jew or the Mohammedan equally well.”
The Messenger is a queenly figure, slow and stately, advancing towards a dying woman on a couch. “The Court of Death”, an enormous canvas just sketched in, is fine in composition and thought. Death, the same majestic figure, sits enthroned; below her is an altar. In the foreground a cripple brings his crutch to lay upon the shrine, a king casts his crown upon it. A soldier, a superb figure of a man standing with his back towards the spectator, throws down his sword. A girl sits at Death’s feet; the drapery of the seated figure flows into a winding sheet about her. In the lap of Death lies a young child, suggesting the new birth into the other life. Behind on either side stands a tall angel guarding the door that opens into the mystery beyond.
“Too many young men and women are taking up art as a career to-day,” Watts declared. “Any boy who has a little facility with brush or pencil is praised and petted into believing he is an artist. An artist must dress well and must appear as a gentleman should. If he has a wife and children, he must have a comfortable house for them. Many of them would starve to death were it not for the immense number of illustrations needed to-day for books.”
In answer to a question of J.’s about his methods of work, Watts said:
“I never paint my ideal pictures direct from the model—I cannot think it right to paint either an angel or an ideal figure from life. Make as many studies from the model as you like, but paint the ideal from the ideal.”
He took us into his modeling studio, whence a small tramway runs out into the garden. On the tram is a platform bearing an equestrian statue he has been working on for years. We had seen at the New Gallery a picture by Philip Burne-Jones of Watts in his white blouse at work on this colossal group. The horse is full of mettle, the rider equally spirited.
“I call this ‘Physical Energy’ in contradistinction to intellectual or spiritual energy,” Watts said. “The youth has just accomplished the feat of subduing and reining in this fiery steed. He lifts his hand to shade his eyes and looks out into the distance for the next struggle, the next conquest to be made.”
He is making the group out of hard plaster which he chips away with a chisel, as the wet clay gives him rheumatism! J. says it is the most difficult medium possible to work in.
“If it is ever finished and cast,” Watts began, then paused,—
“If!” I said. “It must be.”
“It is a very costly matter to put such a thing into bronze,” he answered. “I do not know if I can ever afford to do it. I do not paint my pictures to sell, but to serve another end. I give them to the nation. For a long time I was in doubt whether I had a right to do this because money is a great power for good, and I can make a great deal of money with my portraits, but on the whole I felt that my example and my best work would be of more value to my country. We need very little money. We go nowhere. Mrs. Watts spends next to nothing on her dress and we only need to live as we do, very quietly and comfortably.”
The colossal horse and its rider of whose future Watts was so doubtful have found a place worthy of themselves and their creator. The group now forms part of the magnificent memorial to Cecil Rhodes in South Africa. It stands at the foot of the great flight of steps with a background of purple mountains and Africa stretching endlessly below it.
We had much pleasure in again meeting Sir Henry Stanley, the African explorer. He had been at our house in Boston the year before with his handsome wife, his mother-in-law Mrs. Tennant, and their relative, Hamilton Aïdé. Stanley was a masterful looking man who on most occasions was inclined to be silent. Once, however, he talked graphically with us about his experiences in Africa. He spoke with modesty of his own personal exploits, but in spite of this he gave the impression that he deserved the name given him by the African chieftainess and written on a photograph I still possess,—Bula Matari, breaker of stone!
Two years before General Booth had paraphrased Stanley’s famous book “In Darkest Africa” with a volume called “In Darkest England.” The book laid strong hold on my imagination. During our first days in London I was too busy renewing old friendships, revisiting beloved haunts, to think about “Darkest England.” One hot night, as we were driving home from a ball, our way took us along the Thames Embankment, where under the shadow of the Egyptian obelisk, Cleopatra’s Needle, I saw certain silent figures sleeping on the ground, crouching on the benches. There was, then, another London I did not know, and these forlorn men and women were among its people! I could not sleep for thinking of them, and the next day began my exploration of “Darkest England.” My diary during the rest of this London visit is almost entirely devoted to this subject.