FROM THE FRENCH OF GUSTAVE DROZ.
Last evening I was guilty of a very shameful action. I hid behind a curtained door and listened to a conversation, and, what makes it still more unpardonable in me, I cannot help telling you what I heard. It was this.
I had been at the ball about half an hour when I saw in a corner of the parlor, through the door which leads into the conservatory, a little group of three young girls arrayed in billows of white muslin, who were talking behind their fans with so much animation that it was impossible not to notice them.
These three girls had reached that age when young women's hands are slender but still rosy, when their forms have still that charming delicacy which some people call thinness and others youthfulness, and when their movements have that excessive suppleness which is like awkwardness, but which it would be the height of art to imitate. Leaning back with easy grace in their arm chairs, which were drawn up close together, they were laughing unrestrainedly. Already women and coquettes, they would from time to time stretch out their well-gloved hands and pat their ample draperies with a thousand graceful little gestures. They were already mistresses of the art of looking at things without seeing them, of laughing when they were not amused, of showing their white teeth while smoothing their gloves at the wrist, and while modestly looking down of giving a vibration to their voices like the striking of glass, which cannot fail to attract attention. They had, too, the trick of stopping short in the midst of a movement and posing that you might see the turn of a shoulder or a graceful arm, and of turning their profile to you to show a pretty nose, of catching up their skirts and turning away with a movement like a frightened dove till the ear alone is visible, and replying, "Oh, how you frightened me!" when you have said nothing to them but "How do you do?" Then their way of prattling unceasingly without rhyme or reason, or when both ideas and words fail them of exclaiming, "Oh! oh! oh! yes, indeed!" while stroking their hair!
Ah, dear little creatures! I love them just as they are, so knowing and so pure, so gracious and so skillful. I really love these little angels who make their entrance into the great world between two polkas—who go to a ball instead of going to bed—who broke their doll into pieces two days ago, and now think of painting themselves under the eyes like mamma—who know to a louis the price of a cashmere shawl—are connoisseurs in diamonds, look men straight in the eye, are all worn out when Lent comes, and who during Holy Week, after devoutly nibbling a bit of salmon salad, run off to their religious exercises in boots with tassels and with their hair powdered. I love these little painted lambs as one loves roses in December or green peas in the middle of January. There is simplicity even in their excessive self-possession—something, at any rate, which reminds one of green apples which one longs to taste.
They are already women—in fact, they were when they were born—but still one guesses at their motives, reads their little thoughts: sometimes, too, one finds a clue which is like a revelation. They are—
But pardon me, young ladies! I am afraid I am going too far: perhaps as you turn over these pages you will recall the gentleman who was looking at you so attentively the other evening. Perhaps you will recognize yourselves, however imperfect the sketch may be, and then—But it is too late now not to tell you all.
I slyly opened the library-door, and, turning to the left, I made my way to the conservatory, and stationed myself directly behind you, near the door, in the folds of the curtain, and there I heard it all. I did even more than that: in coming away I snapped off a branch of camellia. What follows is merely the work of a reporter: if memory or skill is lacking, forgive me and I will do better another time.
"No," said the youngest, looking at her pink satin slipper, "I mean the one with the decoration in his buttonhole: don't you see him? He is standing by the mantelpiece, by the side of the big bald man in a white waistcoat."
"Why, the big bald man is not a colonel—no indeed. I know him very well: he comes to see papa. It's Mr. Thingamy—some queer name. After every visit of his we find two casters off the easy-chair. Mamma says he's clever, papa says he's not: as for me, I think he smells of pomade."
"Where does he put his pomade? He has hardly three hairs on his head."
"Yes, but they curl, my dear. I am sure he ought to wear a little crimson velvet cap with tassels. Dear me! how I do hate a man as fat as that! Papa, who is slender in comparison with this bear, seems to me a little—when he is shaving—Well, if it was not papa, I should like to plane him down a little."
"But, girls, I don't mean the stout one: I mean the one by his side, with an aquiline nose and moustaches. There, he is taking an ice. He seems to be a lion. Now he's blowing his nose: he's Colonel C——."
"Oh yes, I see. Dear me! how hard he blows his nose! Your colonel has a cold: one can hear him from here—ha! ha!"
"There is nothing strange in his having a cold: he has just come from Africa: see how tanned he is. Well, my dear, he is a lion."
"Then he is an attaché?"
"Oh, how stupid you are! I said he is a lion because he fought like a tiger, and he—"
"Then say he is a tiger, and have done with it."
—(Shrugging her shoulders) "and that at the battle of Rapata—Ratapa—or Patara—I can't remember exactly what, but it was a frightful battle—where the Arabs bit the dust—That's it, word for word, as papa read it aloud the other day out of the paper."
"Why did they bite the dust?"
"Why, because they were so angry. You know when you are in a passion—Well, in this battle the colonel received a cannon-ball or bullet—I don't remember which—in his left shoulder, and they could not extract it, so he returned to France very ill."
"How terrible those battles must be!"
"It is the day after a battle that is terrible. Just think of it! They found this poor colonel under a mountain of dead men at the very moment the wild beasts were going to devour him like the missionary in the Propagation of the Faith. Being swallowed by a crocodile is indeed terrible."
"That's nothing. When you think you have before you a man with an iron machine in his shoulder that you could hardly lift, you can't help shivering. Oh, it's fine to be a soldier: in fact, you may call it the noblest profession. To begin with, every one respects them, and their life is full of triumph."
"Yes, in time of war, but in time of peace—in time of peace—well, they talk over the way they got their wounds, and the band plays while they are at dinner. It seems the colonel can have the band play whenever he wants to."
"Naturally, since it's his band."
"Well, all that is very nice, and besides that you make calls on the wife of the prefect, the receiver-general and the bishop."
"On the bishop's wife? What are you talking about? Ha! ha!" (She takes off her gloves and begins to bite her nails.)
"I did not say the bishop's wife: you are a naughty girl."
"Besides, it's only a general's wife who makes calls on the prefect's wife, like that."
"I only began with the colonel: one soon gets to be general. Do you suppose that Colonel C——, for instance, won't be a general soon?"
"As for me, I would rather marry a general at once."
"Yes, but a general does not get married in uniform."
"Why not, if you ask him to? That is something fine—a general at the altar. There is nothing more imposing than the military at church. Their gold epaulettes seem to go well with the organ. At the church of the Carmelites there are always one or two officers, but they are little ones, and they do not have the same effect. You did not know I was at the church of the Carmelites on Advent Sunday? Oh, there was a good father there who preached: it was indescribable!—Why don't you wear a braid across the top of your head? My dear child, everybody wears them: won't your mamma let you?"
"It is not that, but you can't possibly make a braid to go over the top and then two rolls behind, all out of your own hair."
"Well, you can get false hair. Ha! ha! what an innocent lamb you are! You can get false hair, my dear child."
"Yes, but papa won't let me: he says I'm too young to begin."
"What a pity! As for me, I had no trouble about it. Mamma said, 'It's vexatious, but what can you do, my child? You can't go to a ball in a cap;' and so we went and bought two beautiful blond braids."
"Why two?"
"Let me finish.—See, there is Madame de V—— coming in: do you hear the door creaking?—Well, as I was saying, I had to buy two braids, for the very simple reason that I lost the first. It was very funny. We had hired a coupé for the day, papa having taken ours for himself: he always does. We started off for the hairdresser's in this hired carriage. I bought a superb braid, and they wrapped it up nicely for me. I got into the coupé and put my little parcel up against the window, you know, under the strap that you pull it up and down by. That was all very nice, but when we got home, and I was looking for my parcel before getting out, no parcel was to be found. I made a great fuss, and mamma did too. Only think! it had slipped in by the glass of the window, and had fallen into the inside of the door. I suppose it's still there. There's no way of getting it again, you see, so I had to buy another braid" (bending down her head coquettishly), "which I have the honor of introducing to you: it is thick, of a good color—one of the very best."
"Oh, I wish I could have one, but I'm afraid I sha'n't before I'm married.—See, there is Jeanne bowing to us. Oh, that everlasting dress of hers! Doesn't she look like a fright with that pink pom-pon in her hair and her red nose? She's a kind-hearted girl, but then that pink! Pink never looks well with light hair. It always looks to me like salmon with white sauce. Ha! ha! Speaking of salmon, by the way, you left too early the other evening: we had such a supper, my dear!"
"Oh, how lovely Juliette looked! Didn't she? What a lovely head she has! I would give ten years of my life to have a head like hers. Ten years, dear me! yes, gladly: life isn't such very good fun, after all. And how becoming that headdress was to her!"
"It was really magnificent: you know it came from Persia."
"Did it, really? From Persia? I heard it came from—you know the place, ever so far off, where the colonies are. And how about her marriage?"
"It's broken off: she said no, and it's all settled."
"But the trousseau? Mamma saw the three cashmere shawls, three wonders! One had red ground with little figures on it—you know the sort they're wearing now: that shawl was really eloquent. I think that sort of thing is like music, it delights one so."
"That was very fine—three cashmeres, and diamonds too, and she said no?"
"She said no, and she was right, for it seems he limped frightfully."
"Who did?"
"The gentleman, of course."
"But, my dear girl, people always give three cashmeres. Only think a minute: the long cashmere for calls in winter—well, that's one; then you must have a square one: it would kill you to wear a long cashmere in hot weather; and then you could not refuse a third to go to the bath or to mass in—well, that makes three, don't you see? I would not be married with fewer. No, thank you, I wouldn't go about looking like a chambermaid. No, indeed I wouldn't."
"Did the gentleman limp very badly? For, after all, he was a consul."
"Oh, as to that, his position is a magnificent one. It seems that in the country where he is consul people are carried in palanquins."
"That's the least thing they can do for lame people. As for me, I think she has done quite right. I have a horror of deformed people: one is never sure that it may not be something catching. Do you remember Sister Adelaide at the convent, who had one leg shorter than the other? Well, I wouldn't have sat down in her chair for a hundred thousand francs."
"What would you have done if you had had to marry her?"
"How silly you are!—Don't look over there: I see M. Pincette coming to ask us to dance. The more I see of him, the more I detest him. He is stupid, he is fair, his whiskers are too large, he doesn't dance in time: he has no attractions. Don't you think he looks like the Abbé Julien, who used to hear our catechisms, and who was always saying, 'Not another word, my children'?"
"Yes, he does look like him, especially when he is waltzing: he has the same eyes. As for me, I don't like a man who looks like a priest. That is not saying anything against priests, my dear. In the first place, a man ought to have brown moustaches: without them he is not worth looking at. Have you seen my brother's moustaches since he left Saint-Cyr? That is the kind of moustaches I like—pointed, pointed and waxed. I used to do them for him last summer, and I fully understand them."
"Ernest is a fine-looking young man; and then he's so strong."
"I hate a Hercules. M. de Saint-Flair is not handsome, is he? Well, I can see very well how he fascinated Adèle with his pale face, thin hair and his look of illness."
"Your M. de Saint-Flair looks as if he were just getting over a fever. When he is sitting round in the corners I am always tempted to offer him a bowl of gruel."
"Oh, that's all very well, but as for distinction, I don't see any one who comes up to him. And then, too, they say he writes poetry."
"Still, I must say I prefer M. de P——."
"What an idea! M. de P——! He's a perfect barrel, and besides he's forty-six or forty-eight years old."
"Well, my dear, a man has to be as old as that to be able to offer a woman an acceptable position. It's not at all bad to be the wife of a banker."
At this moment the music began, and the men came forward to ask my little neighbors to dance. They accepted languidly, with a half-indifferent air. The gentlemen placed their opera-hats on the chairs the ladies had left, and they all advanced, talking, to join the dancers. I followed them with my eyes through the crowd. Each abandoned herself with charming grace to her partner's arm, turning her head a little to one side, her hair floating on the waves of the waltz. Perhaps there was exaggerated ease and a trace of childish awkwardness in their manner. In ten minutes they came back to their places, out of breath, but with bright eyes. They took up their fans again, and while fanning themselves went on with their conversation.
"That gentleman dances very well, but he's a queer creature: he talked to me about geography. Do you know the principal town in the department of the Eastern Pyrenees?"
"No I have forgotten. Dear me! how warm I am! I danced with that partner of yours the other evening: he talked about geography to me too. Isn't it strange that some partners always say the same thing over and over again?"
"Oh, there is mamma making me a sign that it is time to go home. Oh dear! no indeed! It will be like the other evening, when we should have gone to bed as early as the hens if mamma hadn't been asked for the German. Tell your cousin to ask mamma to dance, and to ask me. I like him very much: he at least makes you laugh, even if you don't understand very well what he is talking about. He seems sometimes to be making fun of you, but that's no matter: he's very nice; and then, too, he holds you firmly while dancing, so that you feel perfectly comfortable."
Toward two o'clock in the morning, after having looked through M. de B.'s collection of etchings and played a game of whist, I returned to my station behind the three girls. Two were bravely drinking a glass of claret, and the third a cup of chocolate. They were laughing so loud while leaning back in their chairs, and so talking all together, that I could scarcely catch what they said, but I saw by their loosened hair and the brilliancy of their eyes, and their feverish agitation, that they had not wasted their time. Their mothers, who were quite as animated, had collected together, and three or four gentlemen had gathered round them saying a thousand charming bits of nonsense. The gayety had become so fast and furious in that corner that I despaired of hearing anything more, so I went back to the ante-chamber.
What charming women my adorable little girls will have become in a few years!
Pray do not think that the fever of pleasure, that candlelight and love of waltzing will at all impair the solid treasures which a good education has stored up in their little hearts. This very night when they go to bed these three little angels will piously fold their hands beneath the quilt, so as to keep warm, and will thank Heaven for all that has been done for them, and will beg that they may not catch a horrible cold in the head which will prevent their going to the opera to-morrow. Then, having kissed the little gold medal which protects them from fire and spraining their ankles, and makes them dance in time, they will fall fast asleep to the dim murmur of a waltz, like a bird in his nest.
T. S. Perry.
A MODERN ART-WORKSHOP IN UMBRIA.
I met with a book on Italy some little time ago by an American author, whose name was not given—or if it was, I have forgotten it, and beg his pardon for the negligence—of which this was the first sentence: "Art is fast asleep in Italy, and that is why Italy is called the cradle of Art." If the statement be not altogether accurate, it is neatly said enough. But I am afraid that the facts of the case go farther than one would wish to believe toward bearing out the severe critic's judgment. Assuredly, the arts if not fast asleep, are but beginning to arouse themselves from a very long and lethargic nap in their classic cradle-land. But I think that signs are not wanting that they are beginning to shake off their slumber, and that when they shall have effectually done so, it will once again become evident to the world that this Italian race is very specially endowed with those gifts and qualities which go to make up the artistic temperament and to fit eye and head for artistic creation. A recent visit to an Italian country-town, one of the secondary centres of population in the Peninsula, has done much to confirm the correctness of these views, and has at the same time introduced me to some circumstances and scenes so interesting, and lying so far out of the path of the experiences and ideas of our ordinary nineteenth-century world, that I cannot but think some account of them will be acceptable to the general reader, and especially worthy of the attention of lovers of art.
The town in question is Perugia, where I spent a week in the early part of last February, and which boasts the best inn in all Central Italy, ruled by a clever and notable English landlady, who has entirely un-Italian notions of a good fire and warm rooms. Let travelers, whether in winter or in summer, ask for the "Hotel Brufani," disregarding the fact that, being recently established, it is not mentioned in some of the guidebooks, and they will, I am very sure, thank me for the recommendation.
There is an immense wealth of fourteenth, fifteenth and sixteenth century Umbrian art to be seen in Perugia, besides some of the most interesting extant remains of Etruscan antiquity. But I am not going to trespass on the domain of the guidebooks, though, truth to say, the best of them are very defective in completeness as well as accuracy of information. Nor are the professional local ciceroni much more to be trusted. They will indeed probably show the traveler all or almost all that there is to be seen. But he must guard himself against accepting their statements in the matter of names and dates, and such like archæological particulars. If the stranger can have the good fortune to make the acquaintance of Signor Adamo Rossi, the accomplished and learned archivist and librarian of the municipal library, he will hardly fail to bring away with him from this centre of the old Umbrian art-world a considerably larger stock of ideas and information upon the subject than he carried thither with him.
But now for the special experience which it is my present object to share with the reader. We went as a matter of course into the Duomo or cathedral. We did not enter the huge old church in the hope of seeing its special and much-boasted treasure, "the marriage-ring of the Virgin Mary." And if such had been our object, it would have been baffled, for the ring in its casket of mediæval jeweler's work (which really is worth seeing, as far as may be judged from engravings of it) is only shown on St. Joseph's Day; and being locked up under Heaven knows how many different keys, all in the custody of an equal number of ecclesiastical bigwigs, no human power short, I suppose, of that of the pope in person, can get at the relic on any other occasion. But what we did see—what instantly arrested and riveted our attention—was a modern painted window which has been put up for the adornment of the chapel where the ring is kept. It is by far the finest specimen of modern painted glass which I have seen in any country; and I have seen a great deal of all the manufactures, English, Belgian and Bavarian, which have recently been competing for the approval of the artistic world. The window in question in the cathedral at Perugia fills a plain Gothic arch seven mètres in height by one mètre eighty-five centimètres in width, and it is divided into two parts by a slender column of stone eighteen centimètres broad. The window which fills this space is occupied by a representation of one subject only, the Virgin and Child in—or rather sitting in front of—the stable; Saint Joseph leaning on his staff and gazing at the Divine Infant; a knot of shepherds in adoration, some bringing gifts and others playing on bagpipes, exactly similar to the instruments still used in the Neapolitan Apennines; other figures in the middle distance; beyond these a delicious bit of mountain-landscape; "a glory" above; and in the arch of the window a half-figure representation of God the Father. The composition, drawing and disposition of this design, which I had subsequently an opportunity of examining in the cartoon, is truly masterly. The figure of the Virgin, with long flowing locks of the richest and most sunny auburn, is of very great beauty and quite Peruginesque in style and conception. Her figure and the others in the immediate foreground are somewhat above life-size, so that the Virgin would be, if standing, about six feet in height, and the male figures in proportion. Those in the middle distance are about ordinary life-size. And in all of them there is that dignity of pose and conception inseparable from perfect unself-conscious simplicity which is so prevalent in the Italian art up to the period of the end of Raphael's first manner, which he began to lose in his second, and from which his successors strayed ever farther as the generations succeeded each other. The fullness and richness of coloring of the glass leaves really nothing to be desired. It is as brilliant, as jewel-like, and at the same time as free from opacity and heaviness, as the best ancient glass; and it is mainly in these respects that it so far excels the productions of other makers of painted glass. The landscape is treated with a pellucid delicacy and accuracy of truth which I have seen very rarely equaled in ancient windows. In a word, we were absolutely struck dumb with astonishment at finding such a work in such a place. And it may be imagined that this surprise was in no small degree increased, and a vivid sentiment of interest and curiosity added to it, when we were told on inquiry that this magnificent work of an art which was but recently deemed all but lost was produced wholly and entirely in Perugia, and, far more astonishing still, by the brain and hands of one single artist! In other countries—in England, at Munich, at Brussels—a cartoon prepared by an artist who has not the smallest knowledge of glass-painting or its special needs and limitations is taken to a factory, where a variety of artificers are employed in carrying out the various processes needed for the completion of the product. But in this case the conception of the design, the preparation of the cartoon, the selection of the colors, the arrangement of the glass, the coloring and burning of it, all are the work of one brain and one pair of hands.
Our next demand, after again admiring in all its details the work, was to see the man who was the author of it, and our desire was very readily gratified.
We have all heard much of the circumstances and conditions, so different from those of our day, under which the old Italian art-workers of the palmy days of art lived and worked. We have read Vasari's naïve gossiping, and have endeavored to picture to ourselves the life and surroundings of the craftsman of a time when the line which is now-a-days supposed to divide the artist from the artisan did not exist or was ignored. We have followed the patient investigations which Leonardo, while his brain was teeming with forms of beauty and new creations, did not disdain to expend on matters which we in these days deem the province of the colorman. We have been delighted by Cellini's simple accounts of his methods of subjecting matter to the conceptions of his brain, uncaring and unconscious whether such methods involved processes that belonged to high art or low art, fine art or not fine—caring only for the beauty that his handiwork was to create. The modern "studio" is a phrase that claims greater affinity with strictly intellectual processes, but in the days and generations when immortal works were being produced in every little town throughout the central part of Italy, the men who created them were content to call the place in which they worked a bottega—"a shop." And the blacksmith who wrought with sturdy arm and hammer the ironwork that museums now contend against each other for the possession of, and pay for as if it were gold—the wood-carver who produced by his free fancy the gems which our best artists are content to servilely copy—the sculptor who would sign works that now make the cities that possess them famous—the lapicido ("stone-cutter"), like that Agostino Fiorentino whose inimitable chisel produced the front of the oratorio of Saint Bernardino in this same Perugia—the goldsmith, the delicate fancy of whose handiwork puts to shame the coarser and heavier work of our time—the painter for whose presence at their courts princes were bidding against each other,—all these alike lived and labored in a bottega, and would have scorned the notion of calling themselves or imagining themselves other than craftsmen.
Well, we sought and easily found an introduction to the artist who had produced the new window in the cathedral. His name is Signor Francesco Moretti. A common friend accompanied us to his workshop-studio. It is situated in a part of a suppressed convent, or some such place, which has come into the hands of the municipality, and a vast chamber in which has been placed at the disposition of the artist. The locale itself has an Old-World look about it. A huge stair, up which you might almost drive a coach and four, ascends from a cloister running round a quadrangle. At the top of this we knocked at a great door, which looked wormeaten and decayed. It was opened by a little boy, and strange and striking indeed was the scene that presented itself. The room is an immense and very lofty one, reaching to the rafters of the building. It is lighted by one enormous window to the north, giving the artist just the light his work requires. On one wall, opposite to the window, was the cartoon which Signor Moretti had executed for the window we had been admiring. It is of the size of the original, and is in all respects a perfectly and highly finished drawing in black and white. The colors are not shown on it. On an easel near it was the drawing of a colossal head of Saint Donato, bishop and martyr, destined for a window for a church in Arezzo. It is full of life and vigor. The head is that of an evidently born and Nature-ordained ruler of men. And such Rome's bishops for the most part were in the days when Saint Donato gave his life for the faith. The window for which this drawing has been made will be a circular one in the centre of the west front of the church in Arezzo. Other designs, large and small, were hung with a total disregard of symmetry or order on the wide white walls, and among them an infinity of plaster casts of almost every part of the human body. The floor and furniture of the vast chamber seemed to the eye of a stranger to offer an inextricable and wellnigh indescribable medley of objects in the utmost confusion. Quaint-looking bottles and jars of every conceivable and inconceivable form, and of many more than all the colors of the rainbow, were on all sorts of tables and brackets and shelves, containing the coloring-matters which, when let out from beneath the stoppers that held them down, were, like imprisoned genii in the Arabian Nights' tales, destined to produce such marvelous effects. Other suspicious-looking flasks, wearing a warning touch-me-not air, contained chemical agents of varied kinds and properties. And everywhere, upon, among and under all this heterogeneous litter, was glass of every kind—plain glass, colored glass of every hue under the sun, unshaped panes of glass, glass cut into every imaginable form. And all to any eye save that of the master seemed to be a very type of orderless confusion. On a large easel backed against the abundant light from the great window was the partly-completed portion of another work, also destined for Arezzo, consisting of two life-sized figures of Saint John the Baptist and Saint Francis. They appeared to me to be treated in a somewhat more archaic style than the subject of the window in the cathedral, but were in no degree inferior in truth and accuracy of drawing and brilliancy of color.
Above all, on one side of the room, were the furnaces in which the great work of burning in the colors is achieved. Does the reader know under what conditions of difficulty this part of the work is performed? When the harmony of the coloring of a picture, especially in a branch of art in which color goes for so much, has been duly considered and determined on, it would not do to have that which was intended for a scarlet robe turning out a crimson one, nor a brilliant emerald-green changed to a bottle-green, nor, even yet more fatal, the delicate azures and lilacs and grays of a distant landscape changed to comparative opacity, or indeed altered by the shadow of a half-tint from that which the artist's eye has designed for them. But if this is so with respect to the hues of drapery or of landscape, it is easy to imagine how much more fatal would be the slightest alteration of tint in those pieces of the glass which are destined to represent the naked portions of the human body—in the faces, the hands, the feet. And when, bearing these considerations in mind, we further learn that the very smallest degree of heat in excess of that which is required for the purpose in hand, or the very smallest deficiency in the heat, or the greater or less degree of rapidity with which this heat is communicated to the glass—any variation from the exact point needed in each of these conditions—will without fail have the effect of altering the result, it may be imagined how great are the difficulties with which the artist has to struggle. And let it be remembered that in other establishments for the revival of this beautiful art the great modern principle of the division of labor is called into aid in producing the result. The man whose business it is to manage the furnace does this alone. All the power of his intelligence, all the rule-of-thumb derived from his practice, is devoted to this alone. Unable to do anything else, he has acquired the art of heating a furnace to the exact degree needed. It is hardly necessary to insist on the greatness of the change in the conditions when this specialty has to be undertaken by the same brain and hands which perform equally all the purely mental and all the purely mechanical portions of the work. The conditions of the problem may be assimilated to those which would surround the search for a first-rate astronomer who was also capable of manufacturing first-rate mathematical instruments. And yet, on the other hand, let the inevitable results of applying the principle of the division of labor to the fine arts be considered. Mechanical excellence attained at the cost of artistic deadness is and must be the result. The individuality, the soul of the artist, the expression which his cunning hand can put into his work, is found to have been lost, evaporated in the process. What is the special value, of which the world has heard so much lately, of an etching? A first-rate engraving is per se a more beautiful thing than an etching; but the value, the charm of the latter is that it is the work of the hand which was directed by the designer's brain—that, in a word, there is no division of labor in the production of the result. And it is impossible to avoid the conviction that the wonderfully artistic feeling and power which pervades the work in the Duomo of Perugia are due in a great measure to the fact that there has been no division of labor in the production of it.
Truly, it was a remarkable and striking scene, that strange workshop, appealing very powerfully to the imagination, and carrying the visitor very forcibly out of the ordinary surroundings of this nineteenth-century world, and back to the habits, ways and associations of the great centuries of art. There in the midst of it was the master-spirit, the artist; and in truth he was, mere outward circumstances of costume apart, a worthy representative of the olden time, and one well calculated to carry on and complete the illusion. Signor Francesca Moretti is a man, I should suppose, on the better side of forty, of a tall, stalwart figure, such as becomes a genuine workman, with a bearded face which, put a velvet toque above it, might well recall some of the heads which the wood-cut blocks in the old editions of Vasari have preserved for us. A modest, unassuming man—that one might, a priori, have been quite sure of—delighted to talk of his work and of the processes connected with them, doing so with frankness, enthusiasm and unreserve—utterly above the affectation of mystery or secresy as to his modus operandi, and quite ready to say to all the world, "Do the same if you will, and better if you can." I need hardly say that he received us with the utmost courtesy, and with that genuinely unaffected simplicity of manner which is the heritage and the specialty of genius, and is the true workman's patent of gentlemanhood.
Our talk was long and various, and the subject-matter of it did not tend to dispel the illusion that we were by means of some strange magic-lantern taking a peep into a resuscitated bit of the old cinquecento art-life, so full were the mind and heart of the artist of the special art-glories of his native city. Social philosophers have much to say against the restricted nature of that intensely concentrated form of patriotism in which the love and pride in one's own native place—one's paese, as the old Italian phrase went—is a species of religion. But it would not be difficult to show that the objections these philosophers adduce would, if carried out logically, be fatal to the reasonableness of all patriotism. Pure philanthropy no doubt is a very grand sentiment, but, somehow or other, it has never as a motive-power produced the great achievements that the narrower sentiment of love of country has produced. And I am inclined to believe that in the case, at all events, of ordinary people the love of one's own "paese"—that church-steeple patriotism that it has become a fashion with a certain school of politicians to deride—is very often a yet stronger passion and a more powerful incentive to great deeds than even the love of country in a larger sense. Such was undoubtedly the case during the great days of Italian hegemony in literature and the arts. It is difficult for those who have not made a special study of the subject to conceive the strength of the tie that during the whole of the mediæval period, and for a couple of centuries beyond it, bound every Italian citizen to the special community of which he was a member. The fact and the consideration that he was an Italian in no degree stirred his sympathies or moved his imagination, but that he was a Venetian, a Florentine, a Pisan, or even that he was an Aretine, a Bolognese, a Comasque, a Sienese or a Perugian, was all in all to him. The tie, save perhaps in the cases of some of the greater of the historical families, was a stronger one than even that of family. The Capulet or the Montague may have felt that his place in the world was marked as such, but the simple burgher who, had he not been entitled to call himself so, would have been little better than a pariah, one whom all might have kicked because he had no friends, a mere waif on the turbulent current of the surging and unruly life of those days, felt in every fibre of his being, and from his cradle to his grave, that what he was in the world, and what all that he cared for in the world depended on, was the fact that he was a constituent part of this, that or the other civic community. His fellow-citizens were his friends; and it but too naturally followed that the members of other, and especially of neighboring communities, were his enemies: even in the best times, and in the case of the best and largest natures, they were his rivals. The relative superiority of his own city in arts, in arms and in glory of every kind was the strongest sentiment and most fondly-cherished belief of all those men on whom the world now looks back as forming the diadem by virtue of which Italy claims to have led the van of modern European civilization, but who in their own estimation belonged wholly and exclusively to their own city. If Dante, the range of whose intellectual sympathies can hardly be deemed a narrow one—Dante the exile, whose chequered life made him the denizen of so many foreign homes—could speak of the degeneration of the pure Florentine blood by the admixture of that of foreigners whose native place was some five or ten miles outside the walls of Florence it may be estimated how smaller minds and narrower natures would feel on the subject. Each townsman felt that he was the heir to all the glories achieved or inherited by his community. Each artist, each workman who attained to praise and excellence in his craft, felt that he was increasing the store of those glories, and was deserving well of a body of compatriots who would lovingly appreciate his works and be the jealous guardian of his fame. Dreadful that men living within walls on the eastern slope of a valley should be bred to hatred of those inhabiting other walls on the opposite slope, and be ever ready at a moment's notice and on the smallest cause to fly at the others' throats! Contrary to every principle alike of morality, religion, political economy and social science! All true; and yet how wonderful, how matchless was the amount of deathless work produced under the conditions of that order of things!
Doubtless, Signor Francesco Moretti would not feel the smallest desire to belittle the works of any contemporary artist of the still rival cities around him. Doubtless he would fraternize with any such with all courtesy and a genuine sentiment of the universal brotherhood of art. But that Perugia was not greater and more glorious in arts and in arms than any of her rival cities in the great olden time—that her artistic history is not the richest, her school the most worthy of persistent study—this it would be too much to expect him to think possible for an instant. And accordingly our talk was of the school that had produced Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, Pintusicchio, Perugino, Giannicola (generally but erroneously called Giannicola Manni) and so many others. Signor Moretti's own style has very evidently been formed on a long and loving study of the works of Pietro Vannucci, more generally known as Perugino, unquestionably the greatest of the school. The delicious figure of the Virgin in his great window in the cathedral is thoroughly and entirely Peruginesque. Yet in the treatment especially of his male figures Signor Moretti has profited by the wider range of study possible at the present day, and by the juster feeling springing from it, to avoid that mannerism and too constantly recurring affectation of dainty grace—often much out of place—which must be admitted to be a marking characteristic of Perugino. There is a sturdy unself-consciousness about Signor Moretti's figures which is incompatible with the somewhat dandified airs and attitudinizing which Perugino often attributes to figures to whom such characteristics seem the least appropriate, and in cases where they would be least expected. It cannot be denied that Perugino's figures are dignified, and that in a very remarkable degree; but they are so by virtue of bearing, of proportion, of grace, and, above all, of expression of face and feature; and in the case of his full-length figures especially it is the dignity of a fine gentleman, rather than that of a grand nature, objective and in no wise subjective in its thoughts and preoccupations. In a word, it cannot, I think, be denied that the grandeur and dignity of Perugino's men and women are due rather to outward than to inward characteristics. It occurred to me to reflect whether certain portions of our conversation in Signor Moretti's studio might not, while illustrating in a singular manner the value of much of the current talk of the present day about the great Umbrian painter, throw at the same time some light on the peculiarity which I have been mentioning. And I am the more tempted to give my readers the gist of the conversation alluded to in that it discloses certain interesting facts and anecdotes which are new to the world, and will not be made known to any other part of it save the readers of Lippincott's till next year.
We were talking, as I have said, of Perugino and his works, apropos of the spirit in which those of Signor Moretti have been conceived, and our friend Signor Adamo Rossi was present. I had been reading an English magazine article in which, after the manner of a certain English school in literature and art, a great deal was said of the spirituality and piety of sentiment which are thought to characterize the great Umbrian painter's works, and I cited some of the remarks which I had been reading. I saw a somewhat wicked smile mantling on the learned professor's face and a merry twinkle shining in his eye, which led me to ask him if his estimate of this quality in Perugino's works differed from that of the English writer.
"Only in that it is rather amusing," said he, "to hear those special qualities attributed to the work of a man who had no belief whatsoever, and no sympathy with the devotional feeling he is thought to have expressed so well."
The statement was quite new to me, as it will probably be to every reader of these lines; and with no little surprise I asked whether the professor were drawing an inference from any general circumstances of probability, or whether he had any documentary evidence to support his assertion. I was aware that Signor Adamo Rossi is one of the most accomplished and indefatigable readers of archives in Italy, especially on the subject of Umbrian art, and I was sure that if any documentary evidence were in existence which could throw any light on the facts, he would be in possession of it.
"Documentary evidence!" cried he: "to be sure there is. Here is a little anecdote which I came upon the other day. Perugino fell ill at a village about half-way between Città di Piese (where, as I may mention, by the by, a second large fresco by his hand, fully equal, I am assured to the well-known Adoration of the Magi still preserved in that little town, has quite recently been discovered) and Perugia. He was very sick, and like to die. The parish priest of the place came to him as a matter of course, and would have proceeded to administer the last sacraments, but the apparently dying artist refused to avail himself of the priest's ministry in any way. He absolutely declined to confess, saying that he had a mind to see whether one did not fare quite as well where he was going without any such practices."
Somewhat later he did die, and his infidelity was then so notorious that he was refused burial in holy ground. He obtained the rites of Christian burial eventually, it is true, but it was under the following somewhat amusing circumstances, as appears from a notarial contract, the original draft of which Signor Rossi has recently discovered. This very curious document is the legal record and stipulation of a contract between the prior of the Augustinian monastery in Perugia and the son of Perugino. It is recited that whereas a portion of the sum due from the convent to the deceased artist for a series of pictures painted for the convent of the Augustines (these works, with the exception of one part of them stolen by the French, and now, I believe, in the Musée at Lyons, are to be seen at the present day in the Pinacotheca of Perugia, and very grand they are) had not been paid at the time of the painter's death, it was now hereby agreed between the prior and the representative of the creditor that in consideration of five ducats in money paid down, and on condition that the prior should at his own cost cause the remains of the artist to be transported from the place where they lay in unhallowed ground to Perugia, and should there give them Christian burial in the church of his convent of the Augustines, the outstanding balance of the debt should be considered to be thereby discharged and canceled. I may mention that this curious anecdote, together with a variety of other interesting matter respecting Perugino and the other artists of the Umbrian school, will be found in a volume by Professor Adamo Rossi, to be published in 1876 under the auspices of the Italian government commission for the preservation and publication of historical documents regarding Tuscany and Umbria.
It will be admitted that the professor's documentary evidence throws a very singular and instructive light on the speculations of the transcendental rhapsodists who are never weary of going into ecstasies over the profound and touching piety of the works inspired by the vivid and simple belief of the "ages of faith."
"But there is," I ventured to object, after having heard the professor's anecdotes, "an unmistakable expression of devout feeling to be seen in many of Perugino's faces."
"Therein," replied the professor, "you have a measure of the power of the man's imagination. If he felt no devotion himself, he was able to conceive the frame of mind, and consequent expression of face and feature, in those who did."
Perugino was therefore giving us not the outcome of his own heart and emotions, as Beato Angelico did, but only his imagination of what would be under certain given circumstances the outcome of another man's heart and emotions. Now, may not the same exercise of the imagination account for those special mannerisms which have been noticed as observable in Perugino's figures? The great Umbrian painter was not a man who lived in the companionship and intimacy of the great and noble, as several of his successors of a generation or two later did. He was the son of a piccolo possidente (a small landowner), doubtless cultivating his own fields, and in all respects little removed from the condition of a contadine, or peasant. Look at the speaking portrait of the artist by his own hand which hangs on the wall of the Collegio dell' arti del Cambio in Perugia, the walls of which are covered with immortal frescoes by him. It is a broad, bluff, open face, with abundance of brain-development, with plenty of shrewd intelligence, and not a little of strong volition—the presentation of a strong, highly-gifted and thoroughly self-radiant character, but the last face in the world to have belonged to a man accustomed to sacrifice much to the graces or elegancies of life. Yet this is the man who may be accused, not without some show of reason, of having deemed it desirable to array saints and martyrs in the attitudinizing airs of dancing-masters. Is not the explanation of the inconsistency to be found in the fact that here also the artist was representing not what he felt and was conscious of himself, but what his imagination told him was likely to be the expression of the feelings and consciousness of others?
Much as Signor Moretti has of Peruginesque in the treatment of his art, his figures, especially his male figures, are free from the faults that have been signalized. There is a robust simplicity about them that is far removed from affectation of any kind. In a small darkened room opening off his studio he showed us some portions of his restoration of a painted window belonging to the east end of the church of the Dominicans in Perugia, on which he has been, and will for the next two years be engaged, for the municipality of the city. The window is, as regards dimensions, the finest in all Italy—a noble work of the later but still brilliant period of the art. The state of dilapidation into which it had been allowed to fall was such that, coming restored as it will from Signor Moretti's workshop, it will in many parts be almost equivalent to a new work. The five or six full-sized figures which we saw restored are very grand. I do not know who the original artist may have been—I think that it is not known—but, whoever he was, the design of the figures is as simply grand and as free from affectation as could be wished. And whether the restorer found the remains of the almost destroyed work sufficient to guide him satisfactorily in this respect, or whether their excellence as now seen be due to his own conception, it is clear that the principles of taste on which he has formed his style are free from faults which might have resulted from a servile following of the manner of his great townsman.
One other reason besides the object of directing the attention of the lovers of art to the works of a real and genuine artist has led me to think it desirable to make Signor Moretti and his workshop known to American and English readers. The custom, an excellent one, of putting up in churches or other public buildings painted windows as memorials of those lost to their country or to those dear to them has become common on both sides of the Atlantic; and I am sure that I am giving good counsel to any persons contemplating such an undertaking in recommending them to pay a visit to Signor Moretti's studio at Perugia before finally deciding on giving their commissions.
T. Adolphus Trollope.
A STORY OF AMERICAN CHIVALRY.
"America is the paradise of women," is a foreign proverb that must frequently recur to every American woman who travels or resides in the Old World. Whenever in my Transatlantic journeyings I witness, or hear of, or experience any flagrant act of discourtesy, or injustice arising from contempt of the weaker sex, I am reminded by contrast of an incident which occurred to me in early youth, and which I have often related to astonished, almost incredulous, hearers in Europe, as a specimen of the truly chivalrous sentiments and behavior commonly exhibited by men toward women in every part of our great republic.
Once, when I was a very young girl, it became necessary for me to take a journey of several hundred miles to visit a near relative who lived in the State of Pennsylvania, a little over the New York border. It happened that I was obliged to go alone and in an inclement season of the year, but the circumstances were imperative, and my love of traveling prevented any anticipation of fear or danger.
The morning of the third day after my departure from home found me seated at breakfast in the large hotel at Corning, N. Y., which stands within a few steps of the Corning and Blossburg railway-station. From the conversation going on around me, I inferred that several of the guests besides myself were going by the Blossburg train, but I could not see the point of the landlord's jokes on the subject, which, however, appeared to be fully understood and heartily appreciated by my neighbors. He laughed and chuckled, and repeatedly wished us all patience and perseverance to carry us safely through the trials in store for us; and when we started in a body for the station, he followed us to the door and called out that he would be sure to have a nice hot supper of beefsteak and fried potatoes awaiting us on our return.
The train comprised only the engine and a few coal-cars, one passenger-car, and two smaller cars for luggage. Altogether, it looked very shabby and old-fashioned in comparison with the luxurious appointments of the trains upon the more important lines; but the way was short and the passengers were few, so that the accommodations were as good as we had a right to expect.
The travelers consisted of eight or ten sportsmen equipped with rifles and other accoutrements; two young men, one of them a lawyer, the other a merchant (as I discovered from their conversation); an elderly gentleman, evidently of wealth and position, whom the young lawyer addressed as "Judge;" a middle-aged widow from Chicago; a brisk little milliner on her way back to some Pennsylvania village with the latest fashions from New York; and myself, a lively girl just out of school. There was also a negro huddled up in the farthest corner of the car, whose business it was to attend to the fire.
At eleven o'clock the train started with a great jerk, and crept slowly out of the town. The motion was very disagreeable; the seats were hard; the air was stuffy, and became after a while almost unbearable from the accumulated breaths and the dry heat of the stove, into which the negro was continually thrusting more coal. The hunters, in the forward part of the car, exchanged remarks now and then: the rest of us read newspapers and looked out of the windows at the monotonous winter landscape. Wondering at the snail's pace at which we moved, I recalled the landlord's mysterious jokes, and at last ventured to ask the little milliner, who sat in the next seat to mine, what he meant by his allusions. "Oh, it was nothing," she replied; "only this is an old road, and there have been so many break-downs on it that Mr. Smith likes to make fun of all the Blossburg passengers."
"But is anything the matter now?" I asked.
"No: we always creep along this way. You see, the distance is only eighteen miles, or nobody could stand it. I always feel as though I should fly out of my skin the whole way; but, after all, it is better than a stage in cold weather. They are going to build a new road soon."
She had scarcely finished speaking when the train, which had been moving more and more slowly, came to a dead stop. There was no station in sight, nor any house or other sign of human occupation. We were in the woods: a high hill was close against us on one side, and on the other a steep embankment went down to the shore of a rapid stream that ran through the valley. After waiting several minutes in vain for the train to move on, one of the hunters went out to see what was the matter, and came back laughing with the news that a piece had fallen out of the bottom of the boiler, so that the water had put out the fire, and there was no chance of our getting any farther until the boiler was mended. Whereupon all the men rushed out to watch the progress of affairs, and remained away for a time that seemed to us an age. At last they came dropping back, one after another, each later arrival bringing more encouraging news of the prospect of a speedy start, until finally the same hunter who had announced the disaster appeared, saying that it was all right and we should now go ahead. In the profound stillness of the forest we could hear the hissing of the steam, and presently came the welcome whistle; then two or three pantings of the engine and that preparatory jarring of the whole train which precedes its regular motion, and then all was still again. The same impatient hunter went out again, and returned—this time not laughing—to inform us that as soon as the water had begun to boil the hole had broken open again, and put out the fire as before. Again all the men rushed out: even the half-torpid negro in the corner became excited and followed the procession of males, while we "womanites" waited in patience for the sequel of the calamity.
It was now three o'clock in the afternoon, and the short winter day was drawing near its close. The frequent opening and shutting of the door had replaced the heavy atmosphere with a stream of cold air, at first very refreshing, but soon uncomfortably cool, especially as the stove had for some time ceased to give out heat, the negro, with the improvidence that characterizes his race, having burned up the fuel as fast as possible, without taking into account the probability of detention. We began, too, to be dreadfully hungry, and not one of us had brought any lunch, as we had fully expected to arrive at the end of the railway-journey by dinner-time. To crown our miseries, the sky, which had lowered above us gray and heavy all day, began to relieve itself in a thick fall of snow.
The widow vented her discomfort in a monotonous grumble; the cheery little milliner, who knew the road of old, kept up a hopeful prophesying that we should come out all right; as for myself, I was young enough to enjoy anything in the shape of an adventure, although this part of our experience began after a time to seem rather tedious.
At last we heard our fellow-passengers approaching, all talking together and apparently much excited. They brought bad news. The old engine could not be properly mended, and it was useless to try to fire up again; we had come only six miles, and it was twelve miles farther to the nearest station; the conductor and engineer had decided to go on, to prevent the evening train from starting, and to obtain another engine to remove our train; but considering the distance they must go, and the heavy storm that was coming on, they could not probably get back before morning. So there we were, on a high ridge of road just wide enough to hold the track; a mountain on one side of us and a deep river on the other; no house in sight, and no way of getting at it if there had been one; our fire gone out; nothing to eat or drink; night coming on, and the snow falling as it seems to me I never saw it fall before or since.
The hunters made short work of the problem. They decided to follow the train-hands to the next village, twelve miles off; so they picked up their guns and knapsacks, and sprang over the ditch that lay on the mountain side of the track and wound along the base of the hill to the level beyond where the train had stopped. After they were gone the three remaining men proceeded to discuss the situation. The old gentleman mentioned that he was one of the directors of the road, and therefore felt a degree of responsibility in our unfortunate circumstances; moreover, as a man, he could not think of leaving three helpless women to take care of themselves in such a dilemma, and he was sure the young men must share this feeling; to which appeal they gave a hearty assent. As neither of my companions seemed ready to speak, I ventured to thank the gentlemen for their kindness, and to ask what we could do to lighten their task—whether we could not go to some house near by, or even walk back to Corning. But the brisk little milliner exclaimed, "I know the whole road, and there isn't a house anywhere in this neighborhood. About a mile back there is one in sight, but it is away over marshes and fields, and the road is built so high up that we can't possibly get down the bank; besides, it's a poor little hut when you get there, and I don't believe the people could take us in."
Here the widow burst out crying, and the gentlemen, taking up the parable, said that we could not walk to Corning. A good part of the way the road was built over marshes and laid only upon timbers, so that we might easily meet with some accident; besides, six miles in such a snowstorm, and with empty stomachs! No, it was not to be thought of.
They went out to see what could be done, and we awaited their decision in great anxiety, the widow bemoaning her fate and wishing she had never begun the journey, and the milliner rehearsing numerous other misfortunes which had befallen the Blossburg train when she had been a passenger; not one of which, however, had proved such a "fix" as we were in now.
Before long the Judge returned, calling out in a cheerful voice, "We have it! We are going to put you into the hinder baggage-car, and give you a ride back to Corning. So pick up your traps and follow me: it is only a few steps through the snow, and then you will be as snug as possible."
We gladly followed our leader out of the cold, dismal car, and he helped us, one after another, over the narrow passage separating the track from the ditch, until we came to the open space between the train and the baggage-car, which the young men had detached and pushed a few steps back. It was a queer little car—like an enormous goods-box set upon end—and the interior was nearly filled with trunks, barrels and freight of various kinds. But by pushing about and piling up the things room was made for us, and two of the smaller boxes were left near the door to serve as seats, which the two elder women were invited to occupy, while I, as the youngest and smallest of the company, was assisted by the director to climb up into a rocking-chair that stood on the top of a hogshead in the corner, where I had an excellent seat, except that I was obliged to crouch a little in order not to hit my head against the ceiling.
Having disposed of us, the three gentlemen set themselves to the work of pushing the car back toward Corning. They could only move it by resting their hands against the sill of the open door and then pressing forward with all their might, their feet being braced against the earth, so that their bodies seemed almost in a horizontal position. After once starting it, they were in hopes to be able to keep it in motion without much difficulty. But the task proved to be a harder one than they had anticipated. The car was strongly built and cumbrous in itself, and the freight it carried was heavy, to say nothing of our additional weight. Then, too, the snow had fallen to the depth of several inches, clogging the wheels and encumbering the footsteps of the men and darkness added to the difficulty.
After struggling along for a considerable time there was a pause for rest and consultation. Just then a light twinkled far over the meadows, probably in the little hut which the milliner had described; and it was decided that the two young men should go there and try to borrow a horse. Accordingly, they scrambled down the steep bank, while the director shook the snow off his clothes and came into the car to rest until their return. We did our best to be hospitable. The milliner wanted him to take her seat on the box, and I offered to descend from my perch and let him have the rocking-chair; but he refused both proposals, and, finding a small barrel in an opposite corner, seated himself upon it and declared that he was quite comfortable. He seemed to look upon the whole adventure as a good joke, and we thought we could do no less than be merry also; so we chatted and laughed and told stories, and at last, discovering that he was very fond of music, I sang several songs, with which he expressed himself highly pleased. When I say we, I mean the little milliner and myself, for I am ashamed to say that the widow was all the while discontented and cross, maintaining a sullen silence, excepting when she broke it to grumble over our misfortunes, and appearing totally insensible to the generous kindness of our protectors, who could so easily have taken care of themselves if we had not been in their way.
By and by we heard footsteps and voices, and the two young men reappeared with a farmer's boy leading a horse. But, oh, misery! the lad had forgotten the rope which he was told to bring, and there was no other way but for him to go back to the farm for it. Reproaches were useless, and so the lad was despatched for the missing rope, with a warning that he was to come back "in less than no time;" and the young men joined us in the car, glad to find shelter from the snow, although there was scarcely any room for them to stand, and none at all for them to sit down. The horse, too, seemed inclined to join our group, as one of the young men held him by the bridle so that his head was inside the door.
The director gave such brilliant accounts of the entertainment he had enjoyed during the absence of his companions that they bewailed their deprivation most bitterly, nor would they be comforted until the milliner had repeated her story of "Mrs. Perkins's Tea-party" and I had sung over again all my songs. As soon as the boy reported himself the three gentlemen hurried out to superintend the hitching up. We could see nothing of what was going on, excepting now and then a bright gleam cast by the lantern across the snow opposite our open door, but we could hear all that was said, and we soon learned that there was more trouble in store for us. The horse would not go. It was not that the load was too much for him, for when all was ready the three men came back to their old place and started the car, with the intention of helping the horse all the way. But it was of no use: he would not stir a step. Perhaps he disliked the look of the wagon; more likely, he was afraid to walk upon the timbers; at all events, he refused to budge an inch. The boy chirruped and hallooed and swore; the men pushed the car until it came up to the horse's heels; but he only kicked and baulked, and would not draw. There was nothing to be done but to dismiss the beast and his driver, and try again. So the three gallant knights went bravely to work, and we watched them, ashamed of our helplessness, and yet feeling that it was out of our power to prevent their self-sacrifice. The most that we could do was to keep up their spirits by cheerful talk and merry songs; and I must say that when not contrasted with their greater merit our courage in keeping up the semblance of gayety is not to be despised, considering that we had been sitting still for hours in cold and darkness, and had had nothing to eat or drink since our early breakfast. Even the one disconsolate member of our company was perhaps really incapable of exerting herself so much as we younger and naturally gayer women succeeded in doing.
For myself, wretch that I was, I enjoyed, away up in my rocking-chair, many a stolen moment of pure fun during the intervals my forced jollity for the benefit of others. There was a comical side to the adventure which made me shake with suppressed laughter even more than with cold. The whole affair of the horse was so ridiculous! The long journey in search of him, the forgetting of the rope, and finally the utter failure of the plan through the obstinacy of the sagacious beast! I laughed till the tears ran down my cheeks while listening to the discussions going on outside. And then to see those long-suffering men pushing our lumbering old car, with their six hands in a row on the doorsill, and their feet stretched so far out behind as to look almost as though not belonging to their bodies, the more so because their clothing was entirely white with snow! Once, one of them slipped and fell down flat, and I only laughed the harder, though feeling all the while that I could have beaten myself for my want of gratitude. The sighings of the patient little milliner, who sat near the door with her precious bandboxes around her, and the occasional moans and groans of the fretful widow in her dark corner, only ministered to my mirth, which was probably the more irresistible because I was obliged to smother it with the greatest care lest my companions should become aware of my inexcusable levity.
In one of the pauses for rest the young lawyer gave a shout on discovering an apple in his coat-pocket. But instead of eating it himself or sharing it with his fellow-laborers, he cut it into three pieces and handed it to us, together with a snowball to quench our thirst; and then they all set to work again as bravely as though they themselves had just been refreshed with food and drink.
But good-will was not all that was necessary to make their enterprise successful. Their strength was giving out, and on seeing the gleam of another light at a distance it was thought best to try to procure another horse. Again the two young men set off across the meadows, and again the good old Judge came into the car and took his seat on top of the barrel. But the sequel of the second endeavor was more satisfactory than the first had been. The young men returned with a lively young horse, which, after being duly fastened with the rope that this boy had not forgotten, started off at a good pace as soon as the car had been got underway. He seemed to draw the load so easily that the three exhausted men thought they might rest a while, and so they all piled into the car and drew the door partly to, in order to keep out the cold wind, which had begun to blow quite hard. They, poor souls! rejoiced greatly over their change of base, and imagined themselves in wonderful luck; while we, the former occupants, realized that our misery had a lower depth than we had yet experienced, since we were nearly stifled by the confined air, and at the same time chilled to the very marrow of our bones by the close proximity of those animated bundles of melting snow. But an unexpected piece of good-fortune fell to us all just then. The Judge, while swinging his foot over the side of his barrel, happened to strike one of them against a small object that tumbled over and rolled away between the boxes. He sprang down to the floor in a moment. "Hurrah!" he cried: "I believe I have run down a keg of oysters." A match was lighted and the precious freight hunted for. It turned out to be not oysters, but a tin box of oyster-crackers. "Never mind," said the Judge: "it is something to eat, at any rate, and the owner will never need it as much as we do. What's the use of being a director of the road if one cannot help himself to the property once in a while?" So saying, he pried open the box, the young lawyer keeping the matches going in order to give him light, and soon the contents were distributed among the company. While we were munching away at our dry food, now and then varying the fare by a pull at a snowball, the driver gave a shout and the car suddenly stopped.
On going out the men were told that we had come to a culvert, over which the horse could not go, and so one of the party unhitched the horse and led him carefully down the steep bank and up the other side on to the track again, while the others pushed the car across the partially-open space. Then the horse was hitched up anew, the car started, and our guests again darkened the doorway. But the culverts multiplied, and as the same process must be gone through with each one, the gentlemen gave up trying to come under shelter between-times, and patiently plodded along in the deep snow behind the car.
By and by the horse began to show signs of giving out, and the old mode of pushing was resorted to in order to help him. But he was young and easily tired, and finally the driver said he must not draw any more; so he was unhitched, the boy was paid and dismissed, the men bent their weary backs again to grasp the low doorsill, and we creaked along more slowly than ever.
At last the lights of Corning became visible, and the work immediately stopped. We were within about a mile of the town, and the director now proposed that his two companions should go on and return with a conveyance, while he remained in charge of us. This was done, and in less time than it had taken to procure a steed for our railway vehicle our deliverers appeared in the road below us, looking very grand in a large sleigh carrying lamps, filled with fur robes, and drawn by two fiery black horses that promised to bring our prolonged discomforts to a speedy close. But how to reach this tantalizing object? The railway was on an embankment, and between us and the road was another ridge, a deep ditch filled with half-frozen water lying between. The young men debated for a few moments, and at last went to a neighboring fence and broke off a long board, which they brought and laid across from the track to the ridge; and then one of them stood nearly knee-deep in the ditch and supported the board on his shoulder, while the other climbed up the ridge and told the director to hand us over, one at a time, as far as his arm would extend, and he would reach out to us from the other side. In this way we all passed over safely, and had no further mishap, excepting that once the horses became unmanageable, and we came very near being run away with on our way to the hotel.
As we drove up to the door the landlord appeared, rubbing his hands and chuckling, just as he had done on our departure, and crying out, "Didn't I tell you I should see you again to-day? and it hasn't struck twelve yet! And I told you, too, that I would have a good supper of beefsteak and fried potatoes ready: there they are smoking hot in the dining-room this blessed minute; so come and eat."
The deliciousness of that meal I will not attempt to describe, nor the comfort of the night's rest that followed it. Before separating from our generous companions we three women (for even the widow came out strong after the trouble was over) tried to express in some degree our gratitude for their extreme kindness, but they laughed at the very idea of any obligation on our side, and declared that the pleasure of our society had far outweighed the hardships of the journey.
As a fitting sequel to this story I will add that the next morning the two young gentlemen (one of whom resided in the town which I was intending to visit, and knew my relations well) hired a sleigh and invited me to drive across the country to my destination with them. And about a week after my arrival I was surprised by a visit from the director, who said that, having business in the county, he had come twenty miles out of his way to see the little girl who had been so cheerful and good-humored under so severe a trial of fortitude as was our railroad disaster among the Pennsylvania hills. I believe that the noble old gentleman really thought me more deserving of praise than himself; and I am certain that not one of the three ever considered that there was anything wonderful in having thus sacrificed their comfort and risked their health in behalf of three women, insignificant in themselves and having no claim, not even that of previous acquaintance, upon their attention and care.
E.
WILLIAM, EARL OF SHELBURNE.
Among the English statesmen of a century ago, William, earl of Shelburne, seems to us to have a peculiar claim upon the recollection of citizens of the United States—one, too, that involves none of those offensive associations that cluster round the names of, let us say, Grenville and North. For in looking at Lord Shelburne's career we see a man whose clear-sighted judgment from the first, and consistently, protested against that system of high-handed imperialism which drove thirteen reluctant colonies into a war of independence; who both in office and out of office did his utmost, first to avert, by a policy never of cowardly concession, but of just expediency, the impending storm, and then, when it had burst, to withstand and counteract its fury; and the last great act of whose public life was to conclude the struggle which he had always deprecated and deplored.
It is therefore with no ordinary interest that we welcome the first installment of a work[C] whose promise—and, we at once cordially add, performance—heralds a really satisfactory account, a realizable flesh-and-blood portraiture, of the English prime minister under whose administration the peace preliminaries of 1782 were signed. The present biographer comes before us with advantages for the treatment of his subject never before possessed. He has enjoyed access not only to his great-grandfather's papers at Lansdowne House, but to those of two other most important actors in the British drama of a century ago—Lord Bute, "the favorite," and Henry Fox; and these documents, pieced together and set side by side, throw upon the events to which they relate, and the motives and objects of their authors, that light, unquestionable and convincing, which is the peculiar and happy characteristic of this kind of evidence. It is all very well for an acrid Walpole, or in our own day a scandal-mongering Greville, to draw, with plausibly life-like touches, his version of this or that historical transaction—to tell us, with the authority of one seemingly in the secret, that in such and such a matter Lord A. was scheming for this, and that we are to find the key to Mr. B.'s conduct in the knowledge that he was all along intriguing for that; but how often it happens that when, by good luck, the contemporaneous documentary evidence of correspondence, private memoranda and the like is forthcoming, the off-hand allegations of the memoir-writer are in infinite particulars tried and found wanting in correctness, and sometimes fall refuted altogether! More than one notable instance of this will strike the historical student in reading this first volume of Lord Shelburne's Life; and in the eventful and disputed years which Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice has yet to chronicle it may safely be assumed that he will have plenty to say in the way of correction and explanation of previous histories of the time.
An autobiographical fragment, composed by Lord Shelburne in his closing years, and found among the Shelburne papers at Lansdowne House, presents with a vividness of detail and verisimilitude that leaves nothing to be desired the outlines of the first twenty years of his life. The Second George had been ten years on the throne, the Young Pretender, alike the bugbear and the consolidator of the House of Hanover, was a stripling of seventeen, when, in the summer of 1737, William Fitzmaurice, afterward earl of Shelburne (the name by which history best knows him) and marquis of Lansdowne, was born in Dublin. "I spent the four first years, of my life" (he tells us) "in the remotest part of the south of Ireland, under the government of an old grandfather [Thomas Fitzmaurice, earl of Kerry], who reigned, or rather tyrannized, equally over his own family, and the neighboring country as if it was his family, in the same manner as I suppose his ancestors, lords of Kerry, had done for generations since the time of Henry II., who granted to our family one hundred thousand acres in those remote parts in consideration of their services against the Irish, with the title of barons of Kerry.... My grandfather did not want the manners of the country nor the habits of his family to make him a tyrant. He was so by nature. He was the most severe character which can be imagined—obstinate and inflexible: he had not much understanding, but strong nerves and great perseverance, and no education except what he had in the army, where he served in his youth, with a good degree of reputation for personal bravery and activity. He was a handsome man, and, luckily for me and mine, married a very ugly woman, who brought into his family whatever degree of sense may have appeared in it, and whatever wealth is likely to remain in it." In 1741 the stern grandfather died, and in the course of the next ten years the grandson picked up such bits of education as an Irish public school of the period, supplemented by a clerical private tutor, might afford. At sixteen he went to Christ Church, Oxford (in those days boys were commonly taking their degrees at the universities at an age when they would now be well content to have won their way into a school sixth form), and there read law, history, Demosthenes, and "by myself a great deal of religion."
And here our autobiographer abruptly turns aside from the incidents of his own story to sketch the antecedents, existing condition and character of the politics and politicians of the time of his first entry into public life. No one, we take it, will be disposed to quarrel with the interruption, for it gives us, in the space of a few pages, a picture of men and manners which, painted as it is by the mature hand of a shrewd contemporary observer, cannot but form a most important addition to our stock of knowledge of those times. The literary style of this piece of writing shows Lord Shelburne to have had in him the making of a successful memoirist. Gossip, anecdote, passages of sarcasm and epigram are mingled in skillful proportions; and there is certainly no waste of the milk of human kindness. Pitt (Lord Chatham) is dissected with ruthless elaboration: half a dozen minor statesmen are scarified with a single sentence apiece. Horace Walpole himself, with all his sinister acidity, nowhere hits harder—we had almost said more bitterly—than does Lord Shelburne in this short sketch of his. But just as an English House of Commons loves nothing so well as a "personal explanation," so the personalities of literature have a way of attracting us in the direct ratio of their piquancy and severity. Lord Shelburne has quite a gift of killing two birds with one stone in his trenchant criticisms. He cannot crush George III.'s father without demolishing poor Lord Melcombe en passant. "The prince's life (he says) may be judged in some degree from the account given of it in Lord Melcombe's diary—a man who passed his life with great men whom he did not know, and in the midst of affairs which he never comprehended, but recites facts from which others may draw deductions which he never could. The prince's activity could only be equaled by his childishness and his falsehood. His life was such a tissue of both as could only serve to show that there is nothing which mankind will not put up with where power is lodged."
The elder Pitt—with whom, it will be remembered, Lord Shelburne acted in the memorable events that immediately preceded and accompanied the beginning of the war of independence—comes in for his full share of severe animadversion, but the portrait is undeniably vigorous and alive. Here is a specimen: "It was the fashion to say that Mr. Pitt was insolent, impetuous, romantic, a despiser of money, intrigue and patronage, ignorant of the characters of men, and one who disregarded consequences. Nothing could be less just than the whole of this, which may be judged by the leading features of his life, without relying on any private testimony. He certainly was above avarice, but as to anything else, he only repressed his desires and acted; he was naturally ostentatious to a degree of ridicule; profuse in his house and family beyond what any degree of prudence could warrant. His marriage certainly had no sentiment in it. The transaction at the time of his resignation does not carry with it an absolute indifference as to money or other advantages, nor did there appear in any of his subsequent negotiations, in or out of power, that he went beyond what was necessary to satisfy the people at the time or to secure his wished-for situation. In truth, it was his favorite maxim that a little new went a great way.... I was in the most intimate political habits with him for ten years, the time that I was secretary of state included, he minister, and necessarily was with him at all hours in town and country, without drinking a glass of water in his house or company, or five minutes' conversation out of the way of business. I went to see him afterward in Somersetshire, where I fell into more familiar habits with him, which continued and confirmed me in all that I have said. He was tall in his person, and as genteel as a martyr to the gout could be, with the eye of a hawk, a little head, thin face, long aquiline nose, and perfectly erect. He was very well bred, and preserved all the manners of the vieille cour, with a degree of pedantry, however, in his conversation, especially when he affected levity, I never found him when I have gone to him—which was always by appointment—with so much as a book before him, but always sitting alone in a drawing-room waiting the hour of appointment, and in the country with his hat and stick in his hand."
All this, it must not be forgotten, was written in the year 1801, long after the writer had finally retired from the battlefield of politics, upon which, at the period when his own account of his youth breaks off, he had not yet made his first essay. Some practical experience of actual battlefields was to be gained by the future statesman before his appearance in the parliamentary arena. Just before the time when, between nineteen and twenty years of age, he was leaving Oxford, the Seven Years' War broke out, and finding "home detestable, no prospect of a decent allowance to go abroad [he had a trifling six hundred pounds a year from his father, though], neither happiness nor quiet," he joined the army and went on foreign service. Here he had the good-fortune to come under the chivalrous General Wolfe, whom he eulogizes in terms the genuine warmth and heartiness of which is all the more striking from the contrast with his generally severe judgments upon his contemporaries. At the battle of Minden in 1759, and again at Kloster Kampen in the following year, he displayed conspicuous personal courage, which was rewarded, on his return to England, with the rank of colonel and the court appointment of aide-de-camp to the new king, George III.
Hardly had camp been exchanged for court when circumstances offered the young Lord Fitzmaurice his first introduction to a kind of political employ which was to be thenceforward, through a series of years, his frequent and peculiar function. Lord Bute, the favorite, had begun to climb the ladder of ministerial office, and had cast his eyes upon that unscrupulous and greedy but undeniably able politician, Henry Fox, as the man most desirable for his purpose by way of a House-of-Commons ally. Owing, very possibly, to the fact that there existed some connection between Fox and Fitzmaurice's father, Lord Fitzmaurice fell into the place of intermediary between the parties to this negotiation, which had hardly passed out of its first stage when the death of his father removed him, now Lord Shelburne, to the House of Lords before he had ever taken the family seat, into which he had been elected at the last general election, in the lower House. The negotiation was successfully carried through. Fox named his price—a peerage for his wife—and after considerable haggling got it, and in return undertook a position which Shelburne announced to Bute in a letter dated October 31, 1761, as follows: "Mr. Fox will attend [the House of Commons] every day, and will, either by silence or by speaking, as he finds it prudent according to the occasion, do his best to forward what your lordship wishes, and will enter into no sort of engagement with any one else whatever." But before the year was out Bute found himself in want of a closer and more positive support on the part of Fox than he had in the first instance contracted for. The peace party, which he (Bute) headed, had at last the close of the continental war full in sight, peace preliminaries were about to be laid before Parliament, but there was a prospect of the war party fighting over the terms proposed by ministers, and Bute felt that he must have a strong leader to champion his treaty in the House of Commons. Fox was his man for the place, and Shelburne was again commissioned to treat with him. The details of a negotiation of this kind are not of a character to call for very particular attention a century afterward, but the letters between the parties—many of them now for the first time published—are not without considerable interest from the light they throw upon the characters and motives of their writers. The position of a go-between is always more or less perilous; his task, however well performed, is generally a thankless one; nor in such matters can the adeptest diplomacy, joined to the most thorough bona fides, always ensure the conduct of the common agent against misapprehension and sore feelings. Of this the particular negotiation of which we are now speaking is a typical instance. Bute's offer (through Shelburne) to Fox was the leadership of the Commons, with a peerage for himself to follow. Fox at the time held the very lucrative post of paymaster-general—lucrative, because in those days it was deemed a perfectly legitimate practice for the paymaster to make a private profit out of the investment of the public moneys for the time being under his control. Shelburne appears to have assumed—and so, indeed, it was only natural to assume—that Fox would not dream of accepting high office in the ministry without at the same time resigning his extra-ministerial berth at the Pay Office; and there is evidence that such—at first, at any rate—was Fox's own intention. The king was given to understand that Fox's resignation of the Pay Office would be a term of the proposed arrangements, and consented to them on that footing; and then all at once Fox came out in the character of Injured Innocent, protested that he had never meant to resign, that he had all along intended to have his cake as well as eat it, and that Shelburne had entrapped and betrayed him. The story goes, but on what authority history saith not, that Bute afterward owned to Fox that Shelburne's conduct in this transaction had been a "pious fraud," and that Fox retorted, "I can see the fraud plainly enough, but where is the piety?" The correspondence and the other evidence which, with a pardonable jealousy for his ancestor's fair fame, Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice sets out with much detail in his biography, requires, we think, at the very least, that a verdict of "Not proven" should be entered in Shelburne's favor; but a man who chooses to make personal negotiation his specialty must not be surprised to find his tact sometimes called trickery, and his double agency set down as double dealing. It is certain that the part he played in the Bute-Fox negotiations entailed upon Shelburne imputations of duplicity which he never succeeded in entirely dissipating. The king himself wrote of him as "the Jesuit of Berkeley Square," alluding, no doubt, to the nickname "Malagrida" (the name of a prominent Italian Jesuit of the day) which somebody had fastened upon him, and which served Goldsmith as the text of that deliciously maladroit remark of his to the earl: "Do you know, I never could conceive the reason why they call your lordship Malagrida, for Malagrida was a very good sort of man."
Bute, however, obviously retained undiminished confidence in his favorite agent, for in his arrangements for the formation of a new ministry under the ostensible headship of George Grenville in the spring of 1763, he not only employed Shelburne in negotiations with no less than seven politically important personages, but he even wished to get him the seals of secretary of state. This, however, was more than Grenville would consent to. He objected that the old peers would be jealous of the elevation of the representative of a family which, however great its note in Ireland, was a comparatively recent addition to the peerage of Great Britain; and also—reasonably enough, one is inclined to say—that Shelburne's youth and total inexperience of office rendered it advisable that he should at least try his 'prentice hand in one of the lower administrative offices. Shelburne was at this time, it must be remembered, only five-and-twenty years of age. A man of his parts and rank and opportunities might rise rapidly in those days, but he had hitherto had absolutely no official training; and the English Parliament had not yet seen, what it was soon to see in the younger Pitt, a chancellor of the exchequer of the almost undergraduate age of three-and-twenty. However, Bute persisted in forcing upon his friend—who appears to have been not unwilling to stand for the time aside—a place in the new ministry, and he accordingly accepted the presidency of the Board of Trade, was sworn a privy councillor, and entered the cabinet of the so-called "Triumvirate" administration. Immediately he found himself called upon to face American questions in which he was destined to play so important a part. Some time before he took office, Fox, in one of his shrewd letters to Bute, had marked out Shelburne as a man pre-eminently fitted to effect "that greatest and most necessary of all schemes, the settlement of America;" and he had hardly been a month at the Board of Trade when a communication from Lord Egremont, the "Southern" secretary of state, directed his particular attention to this subject.
The North American colonies—or, as they were commonly called, plantations—labored in those days, in their relation with the home-country, under the inconveniences of a system of dual government. The Board of Trade was the working colonial office, framed instructions to the governors, gave information and advice, and carried on the every-day colonial business generally; but the secretary of state for the southern department, whose sphere of supervision embraced all the colonies wherever situate, had always a permanent right to interfere in and control the conduct of colonial affairs. It was in virtue of this right that in May, 1763, Secretary Lord Egremont took the initiative in setting the Board of Trade to work to solve the problem of how best to arrange for the administration of the wide area of North American territory that the peace had transferred from French to British rule. His instructions were short and pointed. "The questions (he wrote) which relate to North America in general are—1st, What new governments should be established there? what form should be adopted for such a government? and where the capital or residence of each governor should be fixed? 2dly, What military establishment will be sufficient? what new forts should be erected? and which, if any, may it be expedient to demolish? 3dly, In what way, least burdensome and most palatable to the colonies, can they contribute toward the support of the additional expense which must attend their civil and military establishments upon the arrangement which your lordships shall propose?" Mark the "3dly." It is interesting, as illustrating the ideas and circumstances which led to the famous Stamp Act, to see how completely Lord Egremont's question assumes not only the right of the mother-country to tax her colonies, but the probable expediency of her actually exercising that right. In his reply, Shelburne, while admitting the revenue question to be a "point of the highest importance," practically evaded it on the plea of the inability of the board to form a satisfactory opinion without further materials. With regard to the new territory, his advice, which was followed, was, in effect, not to attempt to annex the whole of the north-western acquisitions, but to form a new colony of Canada, limited by definite geographical boundaries.
"American historians," remarks Lord Shelburne's biographer, "have seen in the policy thus pursued a deliberate intention of closing the West against further emigration, from the fear that remote colonies would claim the independence which their position would favor. The statesmen of the eighteenth century have follies enough to answer for without charging them with this in addition. However impossible it was in practice to dam up the ever-advancing tide of the English race, it was equally impossible in theory openly to avow the intention of dispossessing the still powerful savage nations, which were bound to England by numerous conventions, and were regarded for the most part as subjects of George III., equally entitled with the inhabitants of Boston, or even of London, to the protection of his government. To adjust the relations between savage and civilized man during the period of the struggle which can have but one result is a task as difficult as it is thankless, but American Presidents have not been accused of attempting to prevent further colonization of their continent because they have from time to time issued proclamations ascertaining and attempting to protect the ever-retiring bounds of the Indian reservations."
But the march of events was soon to take the responsibility of the "settlement" (save the mark!) of American affairs out of the hands of Shelburne. He had joined the ministry more because of the insistance of his friend, Bute, the potent cabinet-maker, than from any general sympathy with the views of the men with whom he had to act; and every week put him more and more out of touch with them. He protested formally to Egremont against the dual government of the colonies, and when the latter tried to shelve the question by professing fatigue, curtly told him—what was true enough—that he must expect more if the affairs of America were to be put in order. He questioned the legality of the action of his colleagues, the Triumvirate (Grenville, Halifax and Egremont), in ordering the arrest of Wilkes of North Briton fame. But, oddly enough, considerations of a wholly different character appear to have influenced his actual resignation of office. Bute, nominally in retirement, but really playing the rôle of ministerial wirepuller-in-ordinary, had a surprising fancy for devising unlikely combinations; and now he was minded to conjure with the still potent name of Pitt. Once more, and, as it happened, for the last time, he sought the service of Shelburne as negotiator, and once more Shelburne, undeterred by past experiences, undertook the difficult position. Pitt nibbled, and for a time seemed about to bite, but in the end he drew off unhooked; whereupon (at the beginning of September, 1763) Shelburne immediately resigned the Board of Trade. What his real motive in taking this step was, his own letters do not at all clearly show. Doubtless he felt his uncordial relations with his colleagues irksome, but we can also hardly doubt that the attraction Pitt was beginning to exercise over him formed a material factor in his resolve. Freed from the trammels of office, Shelburne boldly stood forward as an opponent of the arbitrary and fatuous course which the Grenville ministry, all subservience to the king's wishes, adopted in the miserable business of Wilkes. Jeremy Bentham has said of Shelburne that he was the only statesman he ever heard of who did not fear the people. Certainly, Shelburne on this occasion showed, with an unmistakableness that simply infuriated George III., that he did not fear the court. The king made no secret of his displeasure. He dismissed the ex-minister even from his post of royal aide-de-camp, and when he appeared at court snubbed him pointedly by pretending not to notice his presence. Bute followed suit, and from this time all intercourse between him and Shelburne ceased.
For upward of a year after these events Shelburne kept entirely aloof from the world of politics, busying himself with the management of his estates in the country, collecting a vast number of historical documents (which are now in the British Museum), and every now and then coming up to London to enjoy the society of the "young orators" (as Walpole calls them) who frequented his house in Hill street, and the non-political clubs of littérateurs. Benjamin Franklin was among his visitors at this time, and the two, as Shelburne in a letter to Franklin nineteen years afterward reminds him, "talked upon the means of promoting the happiness of mankind."
But it was not in nature that a man of Shelburne's energetic and practical temperament should long be content to remain in his tent when a Grenville was afield with such (to say the least) debatable measures as the taxation of the colonies and the Regency Bill inscribed upon his banner. His marriage happening to occur just at the time when the famous Stamp Act was in the House of Lords kept Shelburne away from the debates on that measure, to which we may be sure he would, if present, have offered a persistent and uncompromising opposition; but at the end of April, 1765, he appeared in his place in Parliament to deliver a vigorous speech against the Regency Bill, and showed the courage of his opinions by leading a minority of eight into the lobby. To Rockingham, now at the head of the ministry, it was obvious that Shelburne, despite his years—he was barely eight-and-twenty—was a personage whose support was worth conciliating, and in July he offered to replace him in the Board of Trade. The offer was declined, and not unnaturally. Shelburne had always, with Pitt, protested against the policy of the Stamp Act, and could hardly have sat in a cabinet which, domineered over by the king, was preparing to carry it into execution. We may surmise, too, that he was not unalive to the advantages of a waiting game, and that, closely allied with Pitt as he had now become, and heartily believing in him, he was unwilling to take office on any other than what we may call the Pitt platform. Indeed, he himself says as much in writing to Pitt, a few months afterward, apropos of the Rockingham overtures: "My answer was very short and very frank—that, independent of my connection, I was convinced, from my opinion of the state of the court, as well as the state of affairs everywhere; no system could be formed, durable and respectable, if Mr. Pitt could not be prevailed on to direct and head it." In the same letter—the date is about December, 1765—he tells Pitt, "'Tis you, sir, alone, in everybody's opinion, can put an end to this anarchy, if anything can. I am satisfied your own judgment will best point out the time when you can do it with most effect. You will excuse me, I am sure, when I hazard my thoughts to you, as it depends greatly upon you whether they become opinions, but, by all I find from some authentic letters from America, nothing can be more serious than its present state; and though it is my private opinion it would be well for this country to be back where it was a year ago, I even despair of a repeal [of the Stamp Act] effecting that if it is not accompanied with some circumstances of a firm conduct, and some system immediately following such a concession."
Whatever the faults and weaknesses of the Rockingham administration of 1765-66—and they were many—their moral courage in proposing and carrying through the repeal of the Stamp Act ought to stand weightily to their credit. The king was well known to be vehemently averse to the slightest tampering with the act; and it is difficult for any body of statesmen, even where—which here was anything but the case—public opinion unanimously admits that a false step has been taken, to face the obloquy and sneers sure to attend upon any proposal to retrace it. However, the repealing measure was proposed and carried, Shelburne supporting the ministers with all his might, though, doubting as he did even the abstract right of England to tax her colonies, he with only four other peers divided the House against them on the question of the well-known declaratory resolution. Sic vos non vobis. Though the Rockingham administration repealed the Stamp Act, it was the popular belief that Pitt had been the real moving cause in the matter. Pitt, and none other, was demanded by the national voice. The king reluctantly yielded. Pitt marched into the royal closet with words of profoundest deference upon his tongue and the stern triumph of a conqueror in his heart, and proceeded to form an administration in which there was not even the offer of a place for Rockingham. For Shelburne, on the other hand, he immediately sent, and offered him the seals of secretary of state. Such an appointment must have been a bitter pill indeed to George III., but Pitt stood firm, and the king had to swallow his dislike as best he might. What Choiseul, the French minister, thought of the new arrangement appears from an interesting letter from him to Guerchy in London, which Lord Edmond Fitzmaurice quotes from a copy at Lansdowne House. His conclusion is: "Alors le ministère d'Angleterre aura une certaine consistance; sans cela, avec l'opposition de my Lord Temple, l'ineptie de M. Conway, la jeunesse et peut-être l'étourderie de my Lord Shelburne quoique gouverné par M. Pitt, il ne sera pas plus fort qu'il ne l'étoit ci-devant. My Lord Chatham à pris une charge trop forte d'être le gouverneur de tout le monde et le protecteur de tous." At this critical point, the mosaic administration (as Burke felicitously nicknamed it) just formed, Pitt entering the House of Lords as earl of Chatham, to the annoyed surprise of the multitude to whom he had so long been distinctively the Great Commoner, Shelburne at nine-and-twenty essaying the grave responsibilities of a secretaryship of state, the first volume of the biography before us comes, most tantalizingly, to a close. We stand on the threshold of the ever-memorable events of the war of independence, and our appetite is keenly whetted for the feast of freshly interesting details which, though Mr. Bancroft has enjoyed most liberal access to the papers at Lansdowne House, may confidently be expected to be brought to light by one possessed of the opportunities, and, as the volume before, us abundantly shows, the diligence and judgment of Lord Shelburne's present biographer. The main outlines of Shelburne's career throughout the war are familiar, doubtless, to most American readers. How he dissented from his colleagues' treatment of the American difficulty, and was driven, in consequence, to resign his office; how, in opposition, he struggled with all the energy of his character against the policy of North; how, when that policy received its deathblow in the surrender of Cornwallis, he had the quiet triumph of seeing the king come over to the views which he had so long vainly advocated; how, placed at the head of affairs, he arranged and got the king's consent to preliminaries of peace; and how, before he had time to finish his work, he was overthrown by the most disgraceful coalition that British parliamentary government has seen;—are not all these things written in a hundred history books? But pending the detailed and authentic narrative of these things that we shall look for in a future volume of this new life of Shelburne, we have here, by anticipation, a most powerful sketch, by Shelburne's own hand, of one of the principal—we cannot add famous—actors in the conduct of the war; we mean the notorious Lord George Sackville, who, after being cashiered for cowardice at Minden, was whitewashed by the first Rockingham ministry, and thenceforward so boldly held up his head again, and traded on his plausible gravity of manner and family connections, that in the heat of the war the court actually got him appointed to the peculiarly responsible post of American secretary. Shelburne is terribly severe upon his conduct. "He sent out (writes Shelburne) the greatest force which this country ever assembled, both of land and sea forces, which together perhaps exceeded the greatest effort ever made by any nation, considering the distance and all other circumstances, but was totally unable to combine the operations of the war, much less to form any general plan for bringing about a reconciliation. The best plan which was formed in the office was one which was given in by General Arnold. The inconsistent orders given to Generals Howe and Burgoyne could not be accounted for except in a way which it must be difficult for any person who is not conversant with the negligence of office to comprehend. Among many singularities he had a particular aversion to being put out of his way on any occasion. He had fixed to go into Kent or Northamptonshire at a particular hour, and to call on his way at his office to sign the despatches, all of which had been settled, to both these generals. By some mistake, those to General Howe were not fair copied, and, upon his growing impatient at it, the office, which was a very idle one, promised to send it to the country after him, while they despatched the others to General Burgoyne, expecting that the others could be expedited before the packet sailed with the first, which, however, by some mistake, sailed without them, and the wind detained the vessel which was ordered to carry the rest. Hence came General Burgoyne's defeat, the French declaration, and the loss of thirteen colonies." What, indeed, could have been, even a priori, greater fatuity than to entrust the direction of a war to a man who years before, on the continent of Europe, had over and over again proved himself to be utterly destitute of every military quality—of whose general repute the following lines, quoted by Shelburne (from a newspaper of the time of the Seven Years' War), with the caustic commentary, "It is feared there was too much foundation for what is insinuated, and more need not be said," are a sufficiently suggestive indication?—
All pale and trembling on the Gallic shore,
His lordship gave the word, but could no more:
Too small the corps, too few the numbers were,
Of such a general to demand the care.
To some mean chief, some major or a brig.,[D]
He left his charge that night, nor cared a fig.
'Twixt life and scandal, honor and the grave,
Quickly deciding which was best to save,
Back to the ships he ploughed the swelling wave.
Our view of Shelburne would be but a one-sided one if it regarded him solely and wholly as a public character, and took no count of the domestic and private side of him. We are proportionately grateful for some extracts from a diary kept at the time by his wife, Lady Shelburne, which her great-grandson has been able to lay before us. They picture to us a quietly-ordered, rather serious home, pretty constantly frequented, however, by company, as one would expect from the many interests and associations of its busy-minded master. He seems to have been in the habit of treating his wife, in private, to solid readings in history, politics and theology. One morning breakfast is followed by some chapters of Thucydides, the next by part of one of Abernethy's sermons, another day "Lord Shelburne read to us a paper concerning the Stamp Act in America;" while on a fourth occasion Lady Shelburne, after dining at the French ambassador's and going to a couple of gossipy assemblies afterward, comes home to her lord, who very appropriately reads to her "a sermon out of Barrow against judging others—a very necessary lesson delivered in very persuasive and pleasing terms." More of Lord Shelburne's private life we shall no doubt learn in the second volume of his biography, in which we are promised "a picture of the society of which Bowood [Lord Shelburne's country-seat in Wiltshire] was the centre during the latter part of the century." Here, for the present, we conclude by registering once more our cordial appreciation of the service that is rendered to history by the publication of such biographies of leading men as that treated of in this paper. Documentary evidence carefully collected, besides correcting the hasty and generally biased assertions of irresponsible contemporary chroniclers, forms the only trustworthy foundation for the judgment of the impartial historian.
W. D. R.