That was the end of my necessities; money came from home, from this and that serial; my published articles were favorably noticed, and opened the market to me. Whatever I penned found sale; and some correspondence that I had leisure to fulfil for America brought me steady receipts.
Had I been prudent with my means, and prompt to advantage myself of opportunities, I might have obtained access to the best literary society, and sold my compositions for correspondingly higher prices. Social standing in English literature is of equal consequence with genius. The poor Irish governess cannot find a publisher, but Lady Morgan takes both critics and readers by storm. A duchess's name on the title-page protects the fool in the letter-press; irreverent republicanism is not yet so great a respecter of persons. I was often invited out to dinner, and went to the expense of a dress-coat and kids, without which one passes the genteel British portal at his peril; but found that both the expense and the stateliness of "society" were onerous. In this department I had no perseverance; but when, one evening, I sat with the author of "Vanity Fair," in the concert rooms at Covent Garden, as Colonel Newcome and Clive had done before me, and took my beer and mutton with those kindly eyes measuring me through their spectacles, I felt that such grand companionship lifted me from the errantry of my career into the dignity of a renowned art.
I moved my lodgings, after three months, to a pleasant square of the West End, where I had for associates, among others, several American artists. Strange men were they to be so far from home; but I have since found, that the poorer one is the farther he travels, and the majority of these were quite destitute. Two of them only had permanent employment; a few, now and then, sold a design to a magazine; the mass went out sketching to kill time, and trusted to Providence for dinner. But they were good fellows for the most part, kindly to one another, and meeting in their lodgings, where their tenure was uncertain, to score Millais, or praise Rosetti, or overwhelm Frith.
My own life meantime passed smoothly. I had no rivals of my own nationality; though one expatriated person, whose name I have not heard, was writing a series of prejudiced articles for Fraser, which he signed "A White Republican." I thought him a very dirty white. One or two English travellers at the same time were making amusingly stupid notices of America in some of the second-rate monthlies; and Maxwell, a bustling Irishman, who owns Temple Bar, the Saint James, and Sixpenny Magazine, and some half dozen other serials, was employing a man to invent all varieties of rubbish upon a country which he had never beheld nor comprehended.
After a few months the passages of the war with which I was cognizant lost their interest by reason of later occurrences. I found myself, so to speak, wedged out of the market by new literary importations. The enforcement of the draft brought to Europe many naturalized countrymen of mine, whose dislike of America was not lessened by their unceremonious mode of departure from it; and it is to these, the mass of whom are familiarly known in the journals of this country, that we owe the most insidious, because the best informed, detraction of us. Macmillan's Magazine did us sterling service through the papers of Edward Dicey, the best literary feuilletonist in England; and Professor Newman, J. Stuart Mill, and others, gave us the limited influence of the Westminster Review. The Cornhill was neutral; Chambers's respectfully inimical; Bentley and Colburn antagonistically flat; Maxwell's tri-visaged publications grinningly abusive; Good Words had neither good nor bad words for us; Once a Week and All the Year Round gave us a shot now and then. Blackwood and Fraser disliked our form of Government, and all its manifestations. The rest of the reviews, as far as I could see, pitied and berated us pompously. It was more than once suggested to me to write an experimental paper upon the failure of republicanism; but I knew only one American—a New York correspondent—who lent himself to a systematic abuse of the Government which permitted him to reside in it. He obtained a newsboy's fame, and, I suspect, earned considerable. He is dead: let any who love him shorten his biography by three years.
However, I at last concluded a book,—if I may so call what never resulted in a volume,—at which, from the first, I had been pegging away. I called it "The War Correspondent," and made it the literal record of my adventures in the saddle. When some six hundred MS. pages were done I sent it to a publisher; he politely sent it back. I forwarded it to a rival house; in this respect only both houses were agreed. Having some dim recollection of the early trials of authors I perseveringly gave that copy the freedom of the city; the verdict upon it was marvellously identical, but the manner of declension was always soothing. They separately advised me not to be content with one refusal, but to try some other house, though I came at last to think, by the regularity of its transit to and fro, that one house only had been its recipient from the first.
At last, assured of its positive failure, I took what seemed to be the most philosophic course,—neither tossing it into the Thames, after the fashion of a famous novelist, nor littering my floor with its fragments, and dying amidst them like a chiffonnier in his den: I cut the best paragraphs out of it, strung them together, and published it by separate articles in the serials. My name failed to be added to the British Museum Catalogue; but that circumstance is, at the present time, a matter of no regret whatever.
When done with the war I took to story-writing, using many half-forgotten incidents of American police-reporting, of border warfare, of the development of civilization among the pioneers, of thraldom in the South, and the gold search on the Pacific. The majority of these travelled across the water, and were republished. And when America, in the garb of either fact or fiction, lost novelty, I entered the wide field of miscellaneous literature among a thousand competitors.
An author's ticket to the British Museum Reading-room put the whole world so close around me that I could touch it everywhere. I never entered the noble rotunda of that vast collection without an emotion of littleness and awe. Lit only from the roof, it reminded me of the Roman Pantheon; and truly all the gods whom I had worshipped sat, not in statue, but in substance, along its radiating tables, or trod its noiseless floors. Half the literature of our language flows from thence. One may see at a glance grave naturalists knee-deep in ichthyological tomes, or buzzing over entomology; pale zealots copying Arabic characters, with the end to rebuild Bethlehem or the ruins of Mecca; biographers gloating over some rare original letter; periodical writers filching from two centuries ago for their next "new" article. The Marquis of Lansdowne is dead; you may see the Times reporter yonder running down the events of his career. Poland is in arms again, and the clever compiler farther on means to make twenty pounds out of it by summing up her past risings and ruins. The bruisers King and Mace fought yesterday, and the plodding person close by from Bell's Life is gleaning their antecedents. Half the literati of our age do but like these bind the present to the past. A great library diminishes the number of thinkers; the grand fountains of philosophy and science ran before types were so facile or letters became a trade.
The novelty of this life soon wore away, and I found myself the creature of no romance, but plodding along a prosy road with very practical people.