Part 1 (1/2)
Memoirs.
by Charles G.o.dfrey Leland.
PREFACE.
It happened once in Boston, in the year 1861 or 1862, that I was at a dinner of the Atlantic Club, such as was held every Sat.u.r.day, when the question was raised as to whether any man had ever written a complete and candid autobiography. Emerson, who was seated by me at the right, suggested the ”Confessions” of Rousseau. I objected that it was full of untruths, and that for plain candour it was surpa.s.sed by the ”Life of Casanova.” Of this work (regarding which Carlyle has said, ”Whosoever has looked therein, let him wash his hands and be unclean until even”) neither Emerson nor Lowell, nor Palfrey nor Aga.s.siz, nor any of the others present seemed to have any knowledge, until Dr. Holmes, who was more adventurous, admitted he knew somewhat thereof. Now, as I had read it thrice through, I knew it pretty well. I reflected on this, but came to the conclusion that perhaps the great reason why the world has so few and frank autobiographies is really because the world exacts too much. It is no more necessary to describe everything cynically than it is to set forth all our petty diseases in detail. There are many influences which, independent of pa.s.sion or shame, do far more to form character.
Acting from this reflection, I wrote this book with no intention that it should be published; I had, indeed, some idea that a certain friend might use it after my death as a source whence to form a Life. Therefore I wrote, as fully and honestly as I could, _everything_ which I could remember which had made me what I am. It occurred to me as a leading motive that a century or two hence the true inner life of _any_ man who had actually lived from the time when railroads, steamboats, telegraphs, gas, percussion-caps, fulminating matches, the opera and omnibuses, evolution and socialism were quite unknown to his world, into the modern age, would be of some value. So I described my childhood or youth exactly as I recalled, or as I felt it. Such a book requires very merciful allowance from humane reviewers.
It seemed to me, also, that though I have not lived familiarly among the princes, potentates, and powers of the earth, yet as I have met or _seen_ or corresponded with about five hundred of the three thousand set down in ”Men of the Time,” and been kindly cla.s.sed among them, it was worth while to mention my meetings with many of them. Had the humblest scribbler of the age of Elizabeth so much as mentioned that he had ever exchanged a word with, or even looked at, any of the great writers of his time, his record would now be read with avidity. I have really never in my life run after such men, or sought to make their acquaintance with a view of extending my list; all that I can tell of them, as my book will show, has been the result of chance. But what I have written will be of some interest, I think--at least ”in the dim and remote future.”
I had laid the ma.n.u.script by, till I had time to quite forget what I had written, when I unexpectedly received a proposal to write my memoirs. I then read over my work, and determined ”to let it go,” as it was. It seemed to me that, with all its faults, it fulfilled the requisition of Montaigne in being _ung livre de bonne foye_. So it has gone forth into print. _Jacta est alea_.
The story of what is to me by far the most interesting period of my life remains to be written. This embraces an account of my labour for many years in introducing Industrial Art as a branch of education in schools, my life in England and on the Continent for more than twenty years, my travels in Russia and Egypt, my researches among Gypsies and Algonkin Indians, my part in Oriental and Folklore and other Congresses, my discovery of the Shelta or Ogham tongue in Great Britain, and the long and very strangely adventurous discoveries, continued for five years, among _witches_ in Italy, which resulted in the discovery that all the names of the old Etruscan G.o.ds are still remembered by the peasantry of the Toscana Romagna, and that ceremonies and invocations are still addressed to them. All this, however, is still too near to be written about. But it may perhaps some day form a second series of reminiscences if the present volumes meet with public favour.
As some of my readers (and a.s.suredly a great many of the American) will find these volumes wanting in personal adventure and lively variety of experiences, and perhaps dull as regards ”incidents,” I would remind them that it is, after all, only the life of a mere literary man and quiet, humble scholar, and that such existences are seldom very dramatic.
English readers, who are more familiar with such men or literature, will be less exacting. What I have narrated is nowhere heightened in colour, retouched in drawing, or made the utmost of for effect, and I might have gone much further as regards my experiences in politics with the _Continental Magazine_, and during my connection with Colonel Forney, or life in the West, and have taken the whole, not more from my memory than from the testimony of others. But if this work be, as Germans say, at first too subjective, and devoted too much to mere mental development by aid of books, the ”balance” to come of my life will be found to differ materially from it, though it is indeed nowhere in any pa.s.sage exciting.
This present work treats of my infancy in Philadelphia, with some note of the quaint and beautiful old Quaker city as it then was, and many of its inhabitants who still remembered Colonial times and Was.h.i.+ngton's Republican Court; reminiscences of boyhood in New England; my revolutionary grandfathers and other relatives, and such men as the last survivor of the Boston Tea-party (I also saw the last signer of the Declaration of Independence); an account of my early reading; my college life at Princeton; three years in Europe pa.s.sed at the Universities of Heidelberg, Munich, and Paris, in what was emphatically the prime of their quaint student-days; an account of my barricade experiences of the French Revolution of Forty-Eight, of which I missed no chief scene; my subsequent life in America as lawyer, man of letters, and journalist; my experiences in connection with the Civil War, and my work in the advancement of the signing the Emanc.i.p.ation by Abraham Lincoln; recollections of the Oil Region when the oil mania was at its height; a winter on the frontier in the debatable land (which was indeed not devoid of strange life, though I say it); my subsequent connection for three years with Colonel John Forney, during which Grant's election was certainly carried by him, and in which, as he declared, I ”had been his right-hand man;” my writing of sundry books, such as the ”Breitmann Ballads,” and my subsequent life in Europe to the year 1870.
I can enumerate in my memory distinctly half-a-dozen little-known men whom I have known, and could with time recall far many more, compared to whose lives my uneventful and calm career has been as that of the mole before the eagle's. Yet not one of their lives will ever be written, which is certainly a pity. The practice of writing real autobiographies is rapidly ceasing in this our age, when it is bad form to be egoistic or to talk about one's self, and we are almost shocked in revising those chronicled in the _Causeries de Lundi_ of Sainte-Beuve. Nowadays we have good gossipy reminiscences of _other_ people, in which the writer remains as unseen as the operator of a Punch exhibition in his _schwa.s.sel_ box, while he displays his puppets. I find no fault with this--_a chacun sa maniere_. But it is very natural under such influences that men whose own lives are full of and inspired with their _own_ deeds will not write them on the model of Benvenuto Cellini. One of the greatest generals of modern times, Lord Napier of Magdala, told me that he believed I was the only person to whom he had ever fully narrated his experiences of the siege of Lucknow. He seemed to be surprised at having so forgotten himself. In ancient Viking days the hero made his debut in every society with a ”_Me voici_, _mes enfants_! Listen if you want to be astonished!”
and proceeded to tell how he had smashed the heads of kings, and mashed the hearts of maidens, and done great deeds all round. It was bad form--and yet we should never have known much about Regner Lodbrog but for such a canticle. If I, in this work, have not quite effaced myself, as good taste demands, let it be remembered that if I had, at the time of writing, distinctly felt that it would be printed as put down, there would, most certainly, have been much less of ”me” visible, and the dead- levelled work would have escaped much possible shot of censure. It was a little in a spirit of defiant reaction that I resolved to let it be published as it is, and risk the chances. As Uncle Toby declared that, after all, a mother must in some kind of a way be a relation to her own child, so it still appears to me that to write an autobiography the author must say _something_ about himself; but it is a great and very popular _tour de force_ to quite avoid doing this, and all art of late years has run to merely skilfully overcoming difficulties and avoiding interesting _motives_ or subjects. It may be, therefore, that in days to come, my book will be regarded with some interest, as a curious relic of a barbarous age, and written in a style long pa.s.sed away--
”When they sat with ghosts on a stormy sh.o.r.e, And spoke in a tongue which men speak no more; Living in wild and wondrous ways, In the ancient giant and goblin days.”
Once in my younger time, one of the most beautiful and intellectual women whom I ever knew, Madame Anita de Barrera--(Daniel Webster said she was beautiful enough to redeem a whole generation of blue-stockings from the charge of ugliness)--once made a great and pathetic fuss to me about a _grey hair_ which had appeared among her black tresses. ”And what difference,” I said, ”can one white hair make to any friend?” ”Well,”
she replied, ”I thought if I could not awaken any other feeling, I might at least inspire in you veneration for old age.” So with this work of mine, if it please in naught else, it may still gratify some who love to trace the footsteps of the past, and listen to what is told by one who lived long ”before the war.”
Now for a last word--which involves the only point of any importance to me personally in this preface--I would say that there will be certain readers who will perhaps think that I have exaggerated my life-work, or blown my own trumpet too loudly. To these I declare in plain honesty, that I believe there have been or are in the United States _thousands_ of men who have _far_ surpa.s.sed me, especially as regards services to the country during the Civil War. There were leaders in war and diplomacy, editors and soldiers who sacrificed their lives, to whose names I can only bow in reverence and humility. But as it was said of the great unknown who pa.s.sed away--the _fortes ante Agamemnon_--”they had no poet, and they died.” These most deserving ones have not written their lives or set themselves forth, ”and so they pa.s.s into oblivion”--and I regret it with all my soul. But this is no reason why those who did something, albeit in lesser degree, should not chronicle their experiences exactly as they appear to them, and it is not in human nature to require a man to depreciate that to which he honestly devoted all his energies. Perhaps it never yet entered into the heart of man to conceive how much has really been done by everybody.
And I do most earnestly and solemnly protest, as if it were my last word in life, that I have said nothing whatever as regards my political work and its results which was not seriously said at the time by many far greater men than I, so that I believe I have not the least exaggerated in any trifle, even unconsciously. Thus I can never forget the deep and touching sympathy which Henry W. Longfellow expressed to me regarding my efforts to advance Emanc.i.p.ation, and how, when some one present observed that perhaps I would irritate the Non-Abolition Union men, the poet declared emphatically, ”But it is a great idea” or ”a n.o.ble work.” And Lowell, Emerson, and George W. Curtis, Bayard Taylor, and many more, spoke to the same effect. And what they said of me I may repeat for the sake of History and of Truth.
The present work describes more than forty years of life in America, and it is therefore the American reader who will be chiefly interested in it.
I should perhaps have mentioned what I reserved for special comment in the future: that during more than ten years' residence in Europe I had _one thing steadily in view all the time_, at which I worked hard, which was to qualify myself to return to America and there introduce to the public schools of Philadelphia the Industrial or Minor Arts as a branch of education, in which I eventually succeeded, devoting to the work there four years, applying myself so a.s.siduously as to neglect both society and amus.e.m.e.nts, and not obtaining, nor seeking for, pay or profit thereby in any way, directly or indirectly. And if I have, as I have read, since then ”expatriated” myself, my whole absence has not been much longer than was that of Was.h.i.+ngton Irving, and I trust to be able to prove that I have ”left my country for my country's good”--albeit in a somewhat better sense than that which was implied by the poet.
And I may here incidentally mention, with all due modesty, that since the foregoing paragraph came to me ”in revise,” I received from Count Angelo di Grubernatis a letter, beginning with the remark that, in consequence of my _gentile ed insistence premura_, or ”amiable persistence, begun four-years ago,” he has at length carried out my idea and suggestion of establis.h.i.+ng a great Italian Folklore Society, of which I am to rank as among the first twelve members. This is the fourth inst.i.tution of the kind which I have been first, or among the first, to found in Europe, and it has in every case been noted, not without surprise, that I was an American. Such a.s.sociations, being wide-reaching and cosmopolitan, may be indeed considered by every man of culture as patriotic, and I hope at some future day that I shall still further prove that, as regards my native country, I have only changed my sky but not my heart, and laboured for American interests as earnestly as ever.
CHARLES G.o.dFREY LELAND.
BAGNI DI LUCCA, ITALY, _August 20_, _1893_.
I. EARLY LIFE. 1824-1837.
My birthplace--Count Bruno and Dufief--Family items--General Lafayette--The Dutch witch-nurse--Early friends and a.s.sociations--Philadelphia sixty years ago--Early reading--Genealogy--First schools--Summers in New England--English influences--The Revolutionary grandfather--Centenarians--The last survivor of the Boston Tea-party and the last signer of the Declaration--Indians--Memories of relations--A Quaker school--My ups and downs in cla.s.ses--Arithmetic--My first ride in a railway car--My marvellous invention--Mr. Alcott's school--A Transcendental teacher--Rev. W. H. Furness--Miss Eliza Leslie--The boarding-school near Boston--Books--A terrible winter--My first poem--I return to Philadelphia.
I was born on the 15th of August, 1824, in a house which was in Philadelphia, and in Chestnut Street, the second door below Third Street, on the north side. It had been built in the old Colonial time, and in the room in which I first saw life there was an old chimney-piece, which was so remarkable that strangers visiting the city often came to see it.
It was, I believe, of old carved oak, possibly mediaeval, which had been brought from some English manor as a relic. I am indebted for this information to a Mr. Landreth, who lived in the house at the time. {1}
It was then a boarding-house, kept by a Mrs. Rodgers. She had taken it from a lady who had also kept it for boarders. The daughter of this latter married President Madison. She was the well-known ”Dolly Madison,” famous for her grace, accomplishments, and _belle humeur_, of whom there are stories still current in Was.h.i.+ngton.