Among his friends were the Thoreaus, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes and Agassiz.
I must hurry over the charm of those college days to Moncure Conway’s first Unitarian Church, in Washington. So pronounced were his sermons on anti-slavery that his father advised him not to come home on a visit. He did come and had the humiliation of being ordered from Falmouth under pain of tar and feathers, an indignity which cut him to his soul. His success in Washington was brilliant, but he found trouble, owing to his abolitionist opinions, and had to resign. In 1856 he accepted a call to a Cincinnati church, whose literary and artistic circles made much of the new preacher. The wealth of that larger population enabled Conway to establish several charitable homes. He married there Ellen Davis Dana, and there published his first book, “Tracts For Today.” He edited a paper, The Dial, to which Emerson contributed.
He went to England to the South Place Chapel, London, an ethical society, and the round peg seemed to have found its proper hole at last. Here he labored for twenty years, and became known through all Europe. His personal recollections of Alfred Tennyson, the Brownings their courtship; of Carlyle, are classics. A very interesting light is thrown on Freud. He was intimate with the whole pre-Raphaelite school and gives account among others of Rossetti and his lovely wife, all friendships he formed in Madam Brown’s charming home.
Burne Jones, Morris, Whistler, Swinburne, Arthur Hughs, DeMaurier (was there ever such a collection of genius in one country) are all described in Conway’s vivid pen pictures. Artemus Warde was his friend, and Conway conducted the funeral services over that world’s joy giver, and in his same South End Chapel, preached memorial addresses on Cobblen, Dickens, Maurice, Mazzanni, Mill, Straus, Livingstone, George Eliot, Stanley, Darwin, Longfellow, Carlyle, the beloved Emerson, Tennyson, Huxley and Abe Lincoln, whom he never admired, though he recognized his brain and personality. He accused him of precipitating the horrible war for the sake of a flag and thus murdering a million men.
Samuel Clemens (Mark Twain) and his wife visited England in 1872 and Moncure Conway and his wife knew them intimately and afterwards visited them in this country. Joseph Jefferson, John Motley, George Eliot, Mrs. Humphrey Ward (whose book, Robert Elsmere, he flays) and W. S. Gilbert, all were his friends. The man was a genius, a social Voltaire; a master of thought and phrase. Where before did an exile from his own country ever achieve a friendship circle where the names now scintillate over all the world?
He Travels Through Russia
He visited Paris in 1867 and the story of his travels in Russia later are full of charm, of folk lore and religious mysticism. But before long we find him back in his South Place Chapel. His accounts of several woman preachers there are interesting, as is that of Annie Besant—the wondrous before-her-time—whom Mrs. Conway befriended in her bitter persecution by her parson husband for agnosticism. In 1875 Conway returned to America, and Falmouth town, grieving over the war ravages and his lost boyhood friends. He toured through the West, lecturing on Demonology, and the great Englishmen he knew. The death of his son, Dana, and of his wife in 1897, were blows, and his remaining years were spent in Europe with several visits between to his brother, Peter V. D. Conway, of Fredericksburg, and friends in America. His life ended in 1907 in Paris. A great man, a brilliant and a brave one. He fought for his beliefs as bravely as ever did any warrior or explorer in unknown lands.
Beautiful “Belmont”
On Falmouth Heights, Now the Home of Mr. and Mrs. Gari Melchers
A Great American Artist