As I spoke German, I became intimate with Jaell. He could not sing at all. Once I suggested to him that he should compose variations on an air, a German popular song. For a day or two he hummed it as well as he could. On the third morning he took me into a room where there was a piano, and asked me to sing while he played accompaniments. All at once he said, “Stop! I have got it!” and then he played the air with marvellously beautiful variations. He was a great genius, but I never heard him play in public as he played then. He was in a “high hour.” It was wonderful. I may here say that in after years, while living at a hotel, I became well acquainted with Thalberg, and especially with Ole Bull, the violinist, who told me much about Heine.
So time rolled on for three years. I passed my examination and took an office in Third Street, with a sign proclaiming that I was attorney-at-law and Avokat. During six months I had two clients and made exactly three pounds. Then, the house being wanted, I left and gave up law. This was a very disheartening time for me. I had a great many friends who could easily have put collecting and other business in my hands, but none of them did it. I felt this very keenly. Quite apart from a young man’s pushing himself, despite every obstacle, there is the great truth that sometimes the obstacles or bad luck become insuperable. Mine did at this time.
The author of “Gossip of the Century” has well remarked that “it has been said that however quickly a clever lad may have run up the ladder, whether of fame or fortune, it will always be found that he was lucky enough to find some one who put his foot on the first rung.” Which is perfectly true, as I soon found, if not in law, at least in literature.
I went more than once to New York, hoping to obtain literary employment. One day Dr. Rufus Griswold came to
me in great excitement. Mr. Barnum—the great showman—and the Brothers Beech were about to establish a great illustrated weekly newspaper, and he was to be the editor and I the assistant. It is quite true that he had actually taken the post, for which he did not care twopence, only to provide a place for me, and he had tramped all over New York for hours in a fearful storm to find me and to announce the good news.
Then work began for me in tremendous earnest. Let the reader imagine such a paper as the London Illustrated News with one editor and one assistant! Three men could not have read our exchanges, and I was expected to do that and all the minor casual writing for cuts, or cutting down and occasional outside work. And yet even Mr. Barnum, who should have had more sense, one day, on coming in, expressed his amazement on seeing about a cartload of country exchanges which I had not opened. But there was something in Philadelphia which made all work seem play to me, and I long laboured from ten in the morning till midnight. My assiduity attracted attention.
Dr. Griswold was always a little “queer,” and I used to scold and reprove him for it. He had got himself into great trouble by his remarks on Edgar A. Poe. Mr. Kimball and others, who knew the Doctor, believed, as I do, that there was no deliberate evil or envy in those remarks. Poe’s best friends told severe stories of him in those days—me ipso teste—and Griswold, naught extenuating and setting down naught in malice, wrote incautiously more than he should. These are the words of another than I. But when Griswold was attacked, then he became savage. One day I found in his desk, which he had committed to me, a great number of further material collected to Poe’s discredit. I burnt it all up at once, and told the Doctor what I had done, and scolded him well into the bargain. He took it all very amiably. There was also much more matter to other men’s discredit—ascensionem expectans—awaiting publication, all of which I
burned. It was the result of long research, and evidently formed the material for a book. Had it ever been published, it would have made Rome howl! But, as I said, I was angry, and I knew it would injure Dr. Griswold more than anybody. It is a pity that I had not always had the Doctor in hand—though I must here again repeat that, as regards Poe, he is, in my opinion, not so much to blame as a score of writers have made out. The tales, which were certainly most authentic, or at least apparently so, during the life of the latter, among his best friends regarding him, were, to say the least, discreditable, albeit that is no excuse whatever for publishing them. I have always much disliked the popular principle of judging men’s works entirely by their lives, and deciding against the literary merit of Sartor Resartus because Carlyle put his wife’s money to his own account in banco.
And it is, moreover, cruel that a man, because he has been a poet or genius or artist, must needs have every weakness (real or conjectured) in his life served up and grinned at and chatted over, as if he forsooth were a clergyman or some kind of make-believe saint. However, the more vulgar a nature is the more it will gloat on gossip; and herein the most pretentious of the higher classes show themselves no better than the basest.
I lived at Dan Bixby’s, at the corner of Park Place and Broadway, where I came very near being shot one night by a man who mistook me, or rather my room, for that of the one below, in which his wife was, or had been, with another person. Being very tipsy, the injured individual went one storey too high, and tried to burst in to shoot me with a revolver, but I repelled him after a severe struggle, in which I had sharp work to avoid being shot. I would much rather fight a decent duel any time than have such a “hog-fight.” I only had a loaded cane. The worst of it was that the injured husband, having traced his wife, as he erroneously thought, to my room, went to Bixby and the clerk, and asked who lived in it. But as they were my friends, they dismissed