And he lived in London, and brazenly acknowledged that he liked it better than New York.
A serious old friend, writing from oversea to remonstrate with him, spoke of duty and patriotism, and got this pert reply:—
“Duty, my dear, is the last weakness of great minds; and patriotism, as manifested at any rate by such travelling fellow-countrymen of ours as I have met on British soil, patriotism corrupts good manners. Of the patriots themselves I may say, as of divers birds, orators, operas, and women, that they should be seen perhaps, but certainly not heard; and if I could not talk, I should not wish to live.”
As a matter of principle all this rather shocked his young American wife (a Massachusetts girl, who had been bred in the straitest sect of the national religion), though in practice she was nearly as shameless as himself. Anyhow, she submitted cheerfully to a residence in England, and forbore to draw comparisons;—indeed, if she had drawn them, it is not inconceivable that they might have redounded less to the disparagement of the elder country than one could have desired.. But then she fell ill, and came to die, and was smitten with home-sickness; and fond memories of the land of her girlhood begot a sort of dim remorse for the small place she had lately let it hold in her affections; and groping blindly for something in the nature of atonement, she made her husband promise that the boy should be educated as a good American, in an American school, and at Harvard College.
Afterwards, he transported the baby and its nurse to Beacon Street in Boston, and deposited them with the dead lady’s parents. And as soon as he decently could be returned to England; and twenty-five years passed during which neither father nor son crossed the Atlantic.
This I am afraid must be confessed, that he was a very, very frivolous young person;—he carried his age as jauntily as his gloves and his walking-stick, and would have been genuinely surprised if anybody had spoken of him as otherwise than young, though he was fifty-seven.
With a beggarly five hundred a year to his patrimony, he lived at the rate of half as many thousand, he who had never earned a sixpence. He had never had time, he said; he had been kept too busy doing nothing; he had found no leisure for productive industry. What with teas and dinners and dances, with visits in country houses and dashes across the channel, with reading and conversation, dreaming and sleeping, his days and nights had been too full; and so he had had to raise the balance of his expenditures by leaving the greater number of his debts unpaid. For pocket-money he resorted to what he called reversed post-obits. His son would some day, by inheritance from his maternal grandparents, be a rich man; and he would surely not refuse, on his father’s death, to buy up such stamped paper as might bear his father’s autograph; and the Jews (a race that always set great hopes upon posterity) were happy, with this prospect in view, to accommodate him at sixty per cent, per annum.
He was tall and lean and loosely built, much given to lounging about in queer twisted postures, as if double-jointed; whereby a friend was led to suggest for his consideration that, when hard-up, he might turn an honest penny by enlisting in some itinerant menagerie as India-rubber man. One of his eyes met the world unarmoured, with a perfectly vacant stare; the other glimmered ambiguously behind a circular shield of glass. He had an odd, musical, rather piping voice, in which he drawled forth absurdities with such a plaintive, weary, spoiled-child intonation as seemed to hint wits tottering and spirits drooping under an almost insupportable burden of fatigue and disappointment; whence, for a stranger, it was not at once easy to determine if his utterances were funny or only inconsequential. When I first made his acquaintance, I remember, I thought for a minute or two that I had stumbled upon a tired imbecile,—then an amusing one,—then an inspired. Some people branded him a snob, others a sort of metaphysical rake, but all agreed that he was an entertaining man.
He had translated the hitherto incomprehensible-seeming motto of his house, “Estre que fayre,”—“To be rather than to do.” To be: to be on all sides a highly developed mortal,—a scholar, a connoisseur, a good talker, an amiable companion, a healthy animal,—was his aim in life, so nearly as it could be said of him that he had an aim. And therefore he played golf (it was heartrending, he declared, to see how badly), took an intelligent interest in foot-ball, read everything (save the hyperbole!) and kept abreast of what was being done in music, painting’, sculpture, and keramics: in short, went heavily in for all forms of unremunerative culture. The theatre he avoided, because he deemed acting at its best but a bad reflection of the creative arts, and at its worst, as he maintained we got it nowadays, a mere infectious disease of the nervous system. Neither would he hunt, shoot, fish, nor eat of any flesh, because, he explained, it would be unpleasant to have to consider himself a beast of prey. He had a skillful cook, however, and fared sumptuously every day on such comestibles as plovers’ eggs and truffles, milk, honey, fruits, and flowers (is not the laborious artichoke a flower?), and simple bread and cheese served in half a hundred delectable disguises. He dined out, to be sure, six or seven evenings in the week; but these were Barmecide feasts for him, and on coming home he could sup. When he went to stay in the country he took his cook with him, instead of his man; and people bore with his eccentricities because he could say diverting things.
He was an epicure, though a vegetarian, a cynic in a benignant, trifling way, and a pessimist, though a debonair one.