Campaigns Of A Non-Combatant, And His Romaunt Abroad During The War Part 24

That was the end of my necessities; money came from home, from this and that serial; my published articles were favorably noticed, and opened the market to me. Whatever I penned found sale; and some correspondence that I had leisure to fulfil for America brought me steady receipts.

Had I been prudent with my means, and prompt to advantage myself of opportunities, I might have obtained access to the best literary society, and sold my compositions for correspondingly higher prices.

Social standing in English literature is of equal consequence with genius. The poor Irish governess cannot find a publisher, but Lady Morgan takes both critics and readers by storm. A d.u.c.h.ess's name on the t.i.tle-page protects the fool in the letter-press; irreverent republicanism is not yet so great a respecter of persons. I was often invited out to dinner, and went to the expense of a dress-coat and kids, without which one pa.s.ses the genteel British portal at his peril; but found that both the expense and the stateliness of "society" were onerous. In this department I had no perseverance; but when, one evening, I sat with the author of "Vanity Fair," in the concert rooms at Covent Garden, as Colonel Newcome and Clive had done before me, and took my beer and mutton with those kindly eyes measuring me through their spectacles, I felt that such grand companions.h.i.+p lifted me from the errantry of my career into the dignity of a renowned art.

I moved my lodgings, after three months, to a pleasant square of the West End, where I had for a.s.sociates, among others, several American artists. Strange men were they to be so far from home; but I have since found, that the poorer one is the farther he travels, and the majority of these were quite dest.i.tute. Two of them only had permanent employment; a few, now and then, sold a design to a magazine; the ma.s.s went out sketching to kill time, and trusted to Providence for dinner.

But they were good fellows for the most part, kindly to one another, and meeting in their lodgings, where their tenure was uncertain, to score Millais, or praise Rosetti, or overwhelm Frith.

My own life meantime pa.s.sed smoothly. I had no rivals of my own nationality; though one expatriated person, whose name I have not heard, was writing a series of prejudiced articles for _Fraser_, which he signed "A White Republican." I thought him a very dirty white. One or two English travellers at the same time were making amusingly stupid notices of America in some of the second-rate monthlies; and Maxwell, a bustling Irishman, who owns _Temple Bar_, the _Saint James_, and _Sixpenny Magazine_, and some half dozen other serials, was employing a man to invent all varieties of rubbish upon a country which he had never beheld nor comprehended.

After a few months the pa.s.sages of the war with which I was cognizant lost their interest by reason of later occurrences. I found myself, so to speak, wedged out of the market by new literary importations. The enforcement of the draft brought to Europe many naturalized countrymen of mine, whose dislike of America was not lessened by their unceremonious mode of departure from it; and it is to these, the ma.s.s of whom are familiarly known in the journals of this country, that we owe the most insidious, because the best informed, detraction of us.

_Macmillan's Magazine_ did us sterling service through the papers of Edward Dicey, the best literary _feuilletonist_ in England; and Professor Newman, J. Stuart Mill, and others, gave us the limited influence of the _Westminster Review_. The _Cornhill_ was neutral; _Chambers's_ respectfully inimical; _Bentley_ and _Colburn_ antagonistically flat; Maxwell's tri-visaged publications grinningly abusive; _Good Words_ had neither good nor bad words for us; _Once a Week_ and _All the Year Round_ gave us a shot now and then. _Blackwood_ and _Fraser_ disliked our form of Government, and all its manifestations. The rest of the reviews, as far as I could see, pitied and berated us pompously. It was more than once suggested to me to write an experimental paper upon the failure of republicanism; but I knew only one American--a New York correspondent--who lent himself to a systematic abuse of the Government which permitted him to reside in it. He obtained a newsboy's fame, and, I suspect, earned considerable. He is dead: let any who love him shorten his biography by three years.

However, I at last concluded a book,--if I may so call what never resulted in a volume,--at which, from the first, I had been pegging away. I called it "The War Correspondent," and made it the literal record of my adventures in the saddle. When some six hundred MS. pages were done I sent it to a publisher; he politely sent it back. I forwarded it to a rival house; in this respect only both houses were agreed. Having some dim recollection of the early trials of authors I perseveringly gave that copy the freedom of the city; the verdict upon it was marvellously identical, but the manner of declension was always soothing. They separately advised me not to be content with one refusal, but to try some other house, though I came at last to think, by the regularity of its transit to and fro, that one house only had been its recipient from the first.

At last, a.s.sured of its positive failure, I took what seemed to be the most philosophic course,--neither tossing it into the Thames, after the fas.h.i.+on of a famous novelist, nor littering my floor with its fragments, and dying amidst them like a _chiffonnier_ in his den: I cut the best paragraphs out of it, strung them together, and published it by separate articles in the serials. My name failed to be added to the British Museum Catalogue; but that circ.u.mstance is, at the present time, a matter of no regret whatever.

When done with the war I took to story-writing, using many half-forgotten incidents of American police-reporting, of border warfare, of the development of civilization among the pioneers, of thraldom in the South, and the gold search on the Pacific. The majority of these travelled across the water, and were republished. And when America, in the garb of either fact or fiction, lost novelty, I entered the wide field of miscellaneous literature among a thousand compet.i.tors.

An author's ticket to the British Museum Reading-room put the whole world so close around me that I could touch it everywhere. I never entered the n.o.ble rotunda of that vast collection without an emotion of littleness and awe. Lit only from the roof, it reminded me of the Roman Pantheon; and truly all the G.o.ds whom I had wors.h.i.+pped sat, not in statue, but in substance, along its radiating tables, or trod its noiseless floors. Half the literature of our language flows from thence.

One may see at a glance grave naturalists knee-deep in ichthyological tomes, or buzzing over entomology; pale zealots copying Arabic characters, with the end to rebuild Bethlehem or the ruins of Mecca; biographers gloating over some rare original letter; periodical writers filching from two centuries ago for their next "new" article. The Marquis of Lansdowne is dead; you may see the _Times_ reporter yonder running down the events of his career. Poland is in arms again, and the clever compiler farther on means to make twenty pounds out of it by summing up her past risings and ruins. The bruisers King and Mace fought yesterday, and the plodding person close by from _Bell's Life_ is gleaning their antecedents. Half the _literati_ of our age do but like these bind the present to the past. A great library diminishes the number of thinkers; the grand fountains of philosophy and science ran before types were so facile or letters became a trade.

The novelty of this life soon wore away, and I found myself the creature of no romance, but plodding along a prosy road with very practical people.

I carried my MSS. into Paternoster Row like anybody's book-keeper, and accused the world of no particular ingrat.i.tude that it could not read my name with my articles, and that it gave itself no concern to discover me. Yet there was a private pleasure in the congeniality of my labor, and in the consciousness that I could float upon my quill even in this vast London sea. Once or twice my articles went across the Channel and returned in foreign dress. I wonder if I shall ever again feel the thrill of that first recognition of my offspring coming to my knee with their strange French prattle.

I was not uniformly successful, but, if rejected, my MSS. were courteously returned, with a note from the editor. As a sample I give the following. The original is a lithographed fac-simile of the handwriting of Mr. d.i.c.kens, printed in blue ink, the date and the t.i.tle of the ma.n.u.script being in another handwriting.

OFFICE OF "ALL THE YEAR ROUND."

A WEEKLY JOURNAL CONDUCTED BY CHARLES d.i.c.kENS.

NO. 26 WELLINGTON STREET, STRAND, LONDON, W. C.

_January 27, 1863._

Mr. Charles d.i.c.kens begs to thank the writer of the paper ent.i.tled "A Battle Sunday" for having done him the favor to offer it as a contribution to these pages. He much regrets, however, that it is not suited to the requirements of "All the Year Round."

The ma.n.u.script will be returned, under cover, if applied for as above.

The prices of miscellaneous articles in London are remunerative.

Twenty-four s.h.i.+llings a magazine page is the common valuation: but specially interesting papers rate higher. Literature as a profession, in England, is more certain and more progressive than with us. It is not debased with the heavy leaven of journalism. Among the many serial publications of London, ability, tact, and industry should always find a liberal market. There is less of the vagrancy of letters,--Bohemianism, Mohicanism, or what not,--in London than in either New York or Paris.

I think we have the cleverer fugitive writers in America, but those of England seemed to me to have more self-respect and conscientiousness.

The soul of the scribe need never be in pledge if there are many masters.

While a good writer in any department can find work across the water, I would advise no one to go abroad with this a.s.surance solely. My success--if so that can be called which yielded me life, not profit--was circ.u.mstantial, and cannot be repeated. I should be loth to try it again upon purely literary merits.

After nine months of experiment I bade the insular metropolis adieu, and returned no more. The Continent was close and beckoning; I heard the confusion of her tongues, and saw the shafts of her Gothic Babels probing the clouds, and for another year I roamed among her cities, as ardent and errant as when I went afield on my pony to win the spurs of a War Correspondent.

CHAPTER XXVII.

SPURS IN THE PICTURE GALLERIES.

Florence, city of my delight! how do I thrill at the recollection of the asylum afforded me by thee in the Via Parione. The room was tiled, and cool, and high, and its single window looked out upon a real palace, where the family of Corsini, presided over by a porter in c.o.c.ked hat and an exuberance of gold lace, gave me frequent glimpses of gauze dresses and glorious eyes, whose owners sometimes came to the cas.e.m.e.nt to watch the poor little foreigner, writing so industriously.

Every young traveller has two or three subjects of unrest. Mine were girls and art. The copyists in the galleries were more beautiful studies to me than the paintings. The next time I go to Europe, I shall take enough money along to give all the pretty ones an order; this will be an introduction, and I shall know how they live, and how much money they make, and what pa.s.sions have heaved their beautiful bosoms, to make their slow, quiet lives forever haunted and longing.

Love, love! There are only two grand, unsatiated pa.s.sions, which keep us forever in freshness and fever,--love and art.

In Italy I breathed the purest atmosphere; all the world was a landscape picture; all the skies were spilling blueness and crimson upon the mountains; all the faces were Madonnas; all the perspectives were storied architecture. Westward the star of Empire takes its way, but that of art s.h.i.+nes steadily in the East. Thither look our American young men, no matter at which of its altars they make their devotions,--painting, sculpture, or architecture. And I, who had known some fondness for the pencil till lured into the wider, wilder field of letters, felt almost an artist's joy when I stood in the presence of those solemn masters whose works are inspired and imperishable, like religion.

Having pa.s.sed the first thrill and disappointment,--for pure art speaks only to the pure by intuition or initiation, and I was yet a novice,--my old newspaper curiosity revived to learn of the successful living rather than of the grand dead.

Correspondents, like poets, are born, not made: the venerable a.s.sociations around me--monuments, cloisters, palaces, the homes and graves of great men whom I revered, the aisles where every canvas bore a spell name--could not wean me from that old, reportorial habit of asking questions, peeping into private nooks, and making notes upon contemporary things, just as I had done for three years, in cities, on routes, on battle-fields. And as the old world seemed to me only a great art museum, I longed to look behind the tapestry at the Ghobelin weavers, pulling the beautiful threads.

"Where dwell these gay and happy students, who quit our hard, bright skies, and land of angularities, to inhale the dews of these sedative mosses, and, by attrition with masterpieces, glean something of the spirit of the masters?"

Straightway the faery realm opened to me, and two months of Italian rambling were spent in a.s.sociation with the folk I esteemed only less than my own exemplars.

Art, in all ages, is the flowery way. No pursuit gives so great joy in the achieving, none achieved yields higher meed of competence, contentment, and repute. Its ambition is more genial and subdued than that of literature, its rivalry more courteous and exalting; its daily life should be pastoral and domestic, free from those feverish mutations and adventures which cross the incipient author, and it is forever surrounded by bright and beautiful objects which linger too long upon the eye to stir the mind to more than emulation.

Is it harsh to say that artists have been too well rewarded, and thinkers and writers too ill? Vasari dines at the ducal table, while Galileo's pension is the rack; the mob which carries Cimabue's canvas in triumph, drives Dante into exile; Rubens is a king's amba.s.sador, and Grotius is sent to jail; to Reynolds's levees, poor, bankrupt Goldsmith steals like an unwelcome guest, and Apelles's gold is paid to him in measures, while Homer, singing immortal lines, goes blind and begging.

Art students take rank in Italy among the best of travellers, but Bohemianism in art is at one's peril. There are many wasted lives among the clever fellows who go abroad ostensibly for study. I recall Jimman, who was an expert with the pencil, and who colored with excellent discrimination. He went to Dusseldorf at first, and became known to Leutze, who praised his sketches. He began to a.s.sociate at once with students and tipplers, and dissipated less by drinking than by talking.

I have a theory that more men are lost to themselves and the age by a love of "gabbing" than by drinking. It is not hard to eschew cognac and claret, but there is no cure for "buzzing." There is a drunkenness of talk which takes possession of one, and Jimman would have had the _delirium tremens_ in a week, with n.o.body to listen to him. To my mind the Trappiste takes the severest of monastic vows.

Jimman used to rise in the morning betimes, full of inflexible resolution. Having stretched his canvas, and carefully prepared his pigments, he went to breakfast, pondering great achievements. Here he fell in with a lot of Germans,--the most incurable race of gossipers in the world,--and while they discussed, in a learned way, every subject under the sun, the meal extended into the afternoon, and Jimman concluded that it was then too late to undertake anything. In this way his ambition burnt away, his money was squandered, he lost facility of manipulation, and came back to Paris at the age of twenty-eight, to pursue the same listless, garrulous existence; debts and grisettes, buzzing and brandy, the utterance of resolves which expired in the utterance, and Jimman finally became, perforce, a common apprentice to a moulder, that he might not entirely starve.

I saw him, for the last time, in the Louvre, looking at Zurbaran's "Kneeling Monk."

"Ah, Townsend," he said, "I might have done something like that. All my zeal is gone."

And he began to chat in the same loose, familiar way. Dumbness and deafness would have been endowments rather than deprivations for him.

I had rooms in Florence with Gypsum and Stagg. The former was a young, industrious fellow, of German descent, who worked hard, but not wisely.

He spent half a year in copying a face by Paul Veronese, and the other half in sketching an old convent yard. But he did not visit, and an artist, to get orders and take rank, must be seen as well as be earnest.

He need not be hail-fellow, but should keep well in the circle of respectable travellers; for these are to be his patrons, if he pleases them. Gypsum was over-modest and too conscientious; he had only a trifle of money, and was careless of his attire. So he disregarded society, and society forgot him. Therefore, at dawn, he betook himself to the old convent-yard, and stood at his easel bravely, never so unhappy as when one of the church's innumerable holy days arrived, for then he was forbidden to work upon the convent premises. With all his conscientiousness he received no orders; while Stagg, who was not more clever, proportioned to his longer experience, was befriended on every hand, because he went to the American chapel regularly and wore a dress-coat at the sociables.

Stagg used the old studio of Buchanan Read, just off the Via Seragli.

I stumbled upon him one morning, and saw more than I antic.i.p.ated.

A young, plump girl, without so much as a fig-leaf upon her, was posing before his easel, so motionless that she scarcely winked, one hand extended and clasping her loosened tresses, and bending upon one white and dimpled knee.