Hawthorne and His Circle

by Julian Hawthorne

Cataclysmic adventures—On the trail of dazzling fortunes—
"Lovely, but reprehensible Madham"—The throne saves the
artist—English robin redbreast—A sad and weary old man—
"Most indelicate woman I've ever known"—Perfectly chaste—
Something human stirred dimly—"She loves me; she loves
me!"—The Prince of Wales and half-a-crown—Portentous and
thundering title—Honest English simplicity—"The spirit
lacking"—Abelard, Isaac Newton, and Ruskin—A famous and
charming woman of genius—Deep and wide well of human
sympathy—The whooping-cough.

In the spring of 1854 we were visited by John O'Sullivan, his wife and mother, and a young relative of theirs, Miss Ella Rogers. O'Sullivan had been appointed Minister to the Court of Portugal, and was on his way thither. He was a Democrat of old standing; had edited the Democratic Review in 1837, and had made my father's acquaintance at that time through soliciting contributions from him; later they became close friends, and when my sister Una was born, he sent her a silver cup, and was ever after called "Uncle John" in the family, and, also, occasionally, "the Count"—a title which, I believe, had some warrant in his ancestry. For, although an American, Uncle John was born at sea off the coast of Spain, of an Irish father and a mother of aristocratic connections or extraction (I am a little uncertain, I find, on this point); I think her parents were Italian. Uncle John had all the charming qualities of the nations mentioned, and none of their objectionable ones; though this is not to say that he was devoid of tender faults, which were, if anything, more lovable than his virtues. Beneath a tranquil, comely, and gentle exterior burned all the fire and romance of the Celt; his faith and enthusiasm in "projects" knew no bounds; he might be deceived and bankrupted a hundred times, and would toe the mark the next time with undiminished confidence. He was continually, and in the quietest way, having the most astonishing and cataclysmic adventures; he would be blown up, as it were, by a dynamite explosion, and presently would return from the sky undisturbed, with only a slight additional sparkle in his soft eyes, and with the lock of hair that fell gracefully over his forehead only a trifle disordered. The most courteous and affectionate of men, with the most yielding and self-effacing manners, he had the spirit of a paladin, and was afraid of nothing. He would empty his pockets—or if, as too often happened, they were already empty, he would pledge his credit to help a friend out of a hole; and, on the other hand, he was always hot upon the trail of a dazzling fortune, which, like Emerson's Forerunners, never was overtaken. It would not long have availed him, had it been otherwise, for never was there a Monte Cristo who lavished wealth as O'Sullivan habitually did in anticipation, and would undoubtedly have done in fact had the opportunity been afforded him. He was gifted with a low, melodious, exquisitely modulated voice, and a most engaging and winning manner, and when he set out to picture the simple and easy methods whereby he proposed to make millions, it was next to impossible to resist him. He was like a beautiful, innocent, brilliant child, grown up, endowed with an enchanter's wand, which was forever promising all the kingdoms of the earth to him, but never (as our modern phrase is) delivered the goods. He regarded my father as a king of men, and he had, times without number, been on the very edge of making him, as well as himself, a multifold millionaire. However, President Pierce did what he could for him by giving him the Portuguese mission (after first offering it to my father), and O'Sullivan did excellent work there. But he became interested—abstractly—in some copper-mines in Spain, which, as he clearly demonstrated, could be bought for a song, and would pay a thousand per cent, from the start. Partly to gratify him, and partly with the hope of at least getting his money back, my father finally, in 1858 or 1859, advanced him ten thousand dollars to finance the scheme. I saw the dear old gentleman, a generation later, in New York; he had the same clear, untroubled, tranquil face as of old; his hair, though gray, was as thick and graceful as ever; his manner was as sweet and attractive; but though, in addition to his other accomplishments, he had become an advanced spiritualist, he had not yet coined into bullion his golden imagination. He had forgotten the Spanish copper-mines, and I took care not to remind him of them. Peace to his generous, ardent, and loving soul!

Uncle John's wife was a good mate for him, in her own way as brilliant and fascinating as he and with an unalterable belief in her husband's destiny. She was a tall, slender woman, with kindling eyes, a lovely smile, and a wonderful richness and vivacity of conversation; nor have I ever since known so truly witty a woman. But she lacked the delightful mellowness and tenderness for which Uncle John was so remarkable. The mother, Madame O'Sullivan, as she was called, was a type of the finegrained, gently bred aristocrat, every outline softened and made gracious by the long lapse of years through which she had lived. She sat like a picture of reverend but still animated age, with white, delicate lace about her pale cheeks and dark, kindly, weary eyes, and making a frost-work over her silvery hair. As for Miss Ella Rogers, it is with some embarrassment that I refer to her; inasmuch as I fell violently in love with her at first sight, and I have reason to think that she never fully appreciated or adequately responded to my passion, though, at the time, I was nearly one-third of her age—she being five-and-twenty. She was a dark and lively beauty, thoroughly self-possessed, and versed in social accomplishments, and gifted with dramatic talent. She afterwards made a great impression in the court of the Portuguese monarch, and more than once the King himself chose her as his partner in the ball. Reports of these gayeties came to my ears; and I found the other day part of a letter which I addressed to her, remonstrating against these royal flirtations. It is written in pencil, upon the blue office-paper of the consulate, and I can recall distinctly the small, indignant boy and knight-errant, sitting at the desk opposite his hugely diverted father, and beginning his epistle thus: "Lovely, but reprehensible Madham!" I suspect that I consulted my father as to the spelling of the second adjective, for it shows signs of having been overhauled; but after that my feelings became too strong for me, and the remainder of the letter is orthographically so eccentric that it was probably cast aside and a copy made of it. But the rough draught, by some inconceivable chance, was kept, and turns up now, after half a century, with a strange thread of pathos woven by time into the texture of its absurdity. Poor, little, lovely reprehensible Madham! Her after-career was not a happy one.

These agreeable persons filled our stuccoed villa full, and gave poignant addition to the quiet, gray beauty of that English spring. A year or so later, when my mother's health compelled her to escape to a warmer climate from fog-ridden Liverpool, she went with my sisters to Lisbon, where the O'Sullivans were by that time established, and spent several months with them, and saw all the splendors of the naive but brilliant little court of Dom Pedro V. She brought home a portfolio of etchings presented to her, and done by his youthful Majesty; which indicate that his throne, little as he cared for it, preserved him from the mortification of failing as an artist.

Early in the winter of the following year (1855), Mr. James Buchanan, appointed Minister to the Court of St. James, found his way to my father's retreat in Rock Park. The English winter was a mild affair compared with our recent experiences of the arctic snows of Lenox; there was no coasting, and not much snow-balling; but we had the pleasure of making friends with the English robin-redbreast, a most lovable little creature, who, every morning, hopped confidingly on our window-sill and took bread-crumbs almost from our hands. The old American diplomatist and President that was to be (though he vehemently disclaimed any such possibility) distracted our attention from robin for a day or two. He had the aspect, perhaps cultivated for political and democratic purposes, of a Pennsylvania farmer; he was, I believe, born on a farm in Franklin County, in that State, at the beginning of the last decade of the eighteenth century. He was tall and ungainly in figure, though he bore himself with a certain security and dignity; his head was high and thinly covered with gray hair; he carried it oddly, a little on one side; it was said at the time that this was due to his having once attempted suicide by cutting his throat. His visage—heavy, long, and noticeable—had the typical traits of the American politician of that epoch; his eyes were small, shrewd, and twinkling; there was a sort of professional candor in his bearing, but he looked like a sad and weary old man. He talked somewhat volubly to my father, who kept him going by a question now and then, as his way generally was with visitors. There was a flavor of rusticity in his speech; he was not a man of culture or polish, though unquestionably of great experience of the world. He was dressed in a wide-skirted coat of black broadcloth, and wore a white choker put on a little askew. The English, who were prone to be critical of our representatives, made a good deal of fun of Mr. Buchanan, and told anecdotes about him which were probably exaggerated or apocryphal. It was alleged, for example, that, speaking of the indisposition of a female relative of his, he had observed that it was due to the severity of the English climate. "She never enjoyed delicate health at home," he had declared; "in fact, she was always one of the most indelicate women I've ever known." And it was asserted that he had been admonished by the Lord High Chamberlain, or by the Gold Stick-in-Waiting, for expectorating upon the floor of her Majesty's palace at a levee. Such ribaldries used to be popular in English mouths concerning American visitors before the war; they were all of similar tenor. Mrs. Abbott Lawrence was described as having bought a handsome shawl at a shop on Lord Street, in Liverpool, and to have walked down that populous thoroughfare with her new purchase on her shoulders, ignorant that it bore the legend, inscribed on a white card, which the salesman had neglected to remove, "Perfectly chaste." The same lady was reported as saying, in asking an invitation to a ball on behalf of Mrs. Augustus Peabody, of Boston, "I assure you, on our side of the water, Mrs. Peabody is much more accustomed to grant favors than to ask them." Such anecdotes seem to bear upon them the stamp of the British manufacturer. There would not seem to be much harm in them, yet it is such things that sometimes interfere most acutely with the entente cordials between nations. We had another glimpse of Mr. Buchanan, in London, about a year later, and he then remarked to my mother, indirectly referring to such reports, that the Queen had treated him very kindly. For the present, he faded from the Rock Park horizon, and we returned to the robin; nor have I been able to understand how it happened that he made so distinct an impression upon my memory. But a child's memory is unaccountable, both in what it loses and in what it retains.

One Sunday forenoon, when it was not too cold for the young folks to be swinging on that gate which has been mentioned, and the elders were in-doors, enjoying the holiday in their own way, we descried an old gentleman approaching up the winding street. As he drew nearer he presented rather a shabby, or, at least, rusty appearance. His felt hat was not so black as it had been; his coat was creased and soiled; his boots needed a blacking. He swung a cane as he stumped along, and there was a sort of faded smartness in his bearing and a knowingness in his grim old visage, indicating some incongruous familiarity with the manners of the great world. He came to a halt in front of the house, and, after quizzing it for a moment, went up the steps and beat a fashionable tattoo with the knocker.

Summoned in-doors soon afterwards, we found this questionable personage sitting in the drawing-room. His voice was husky, but modulated to the inflections of polite breeding; he used a good many small gestures, and grinned often, revealing the yellow remains of his ancient teeth; he laughed, too, with a hoarse sound in his throat. There was about him an air of determined cheerfulness and affability, though between the efforts the light died down in his wrinkled old eyes and the lines of his face sagged and deepened. He offered to kiss my sisters, but they drew back; he took my hand in his own large, dry one with its ragged nails and swollen joints. At length he inveigled my younger sister to his knee, where she sat gazing unflinchingly and solemnly into him with that persistence which characterizes little girls of four or five who are not quite sure of their ground. Her smooth, pink-and-white cheeks and unwinking eyes contrasted vividly with his seamed yellowness and blinking grin; for a long time he coquetted at her, and played peep-bo, without disturbing her gravity, making humorous side comments to the on-lookers meanwhile. There was a ragged and disorderly mop of gray hair on his head, which showed very dingy beside the clear auburn of the child's. One felt a repulsion from him, and yet, as he chatted and smirked and acted, there was a sort of fascination in him, too. Some original force and fire of nature still glowed and flickered in his old carcass; something human stirred dimly under the crust of self-consciousness and artificiality. Rose's adamantine seriousness finally relaxed in a faint smile, upon which he threw up his hands, emitted a hoarse cackle of triumph, and exclaimed, "There—there it is! I knew I'd get it; she loves me—she loves me!" He then permitted her to slip down from his knee and withdraw to her mother, and resumed the talk which our entrance had interrupted. It was chiefly about people of whom we youngsters knew nothing—though our ignorance only argued ourselves unknown, for he named persons all famous in their day. He had seen George IV., Napoleon, Talleyrand, Wellington; he had been intimate with Coleridge, De Quincey, Wordsworth, Lamb, Monk Lewis; he was a sort of elder brother or deputy uncle to Tennyson, Browning, Dickens; he had quaffed mountain-dew with Walter Scott and had tramped the moors shoulder to shoulder with Kit North; the courts of Europe were his familiar stamping-grounds; he had the nobility and gentry at his finger-ends; he was privileged, petted, and sought after everywhere; if there were any august door we wished to enter, any high-placed personage we desired to approach, any difficult service we wanted rendered, he was the man to help us to our object. Who, then, was he? He has long been utterly forgotten; but he was well known, or notorious, during the first half of the last century; he was such a character as could flourish only in England. His name was William Jerdan; he was born in 1785, and was now, therefore, about seventy years old. He had started in life poor, with no family distinction, but with some more or less useful connections either on the father's or the mother's side. He had somehow got an English education, and he had pursued his career on the basis of his native wits, his indomitable effrontery and persistence, his faculty of familiarity, his indifference to rebuffs, his lack of shame, conscience, and morality. How he found the means to live nobody could tell, but he uniformly lived well and had enjoyed the good things of the world. After maintaining his ground during the first twenty or thirty years, it had probably been easier for him to forge along afterwards, for he could impose upon the new generation with his stories of success in the former one. Uncouth and ugly though he was by nature, the external polish and trick of good form which he had acquired, and, no doubt, some inner force of social genius in him, had influenced men to tolerate and often to like him, and had given him extraordinary good-fortune with women. He had not only been twice married, and had many children born in wedlock, but his intrigues and liaisons had been innumerable, and they had by no means been confined to the lower ranks of society. That he was a practised liar there can be no doubt, but he had the long memory which the proverb recommends to liars, and he was so circumspect that few of his claims and pretensions lacked solid basis enough to make them pass current in a hurrying and heedless world. Now, however, in his age, he was wellnigh at the end of his tether; what we should call his "pull" was losing its efficiency; he was lapsing to the condition where he would offer to introduce a man to the Prince of Wales or to Baron Rothschild, and then ask him for the loan of five pounds—or half a crown, as the case might be. He was a character for Thackeray. He haunted my father for a year or two more, and then vanished I know not where.

Poor, dingy old Jerdan purported to be himself a literary man, though the only thing of his that I ever heard of was a work in four pretentious volumes of "wretched twaddle"—as my father called them—which he published under the title of My Autobiography. It contained a long array of renowned names, with passages appended of perfectly empty and conventional comment.

But other men crossed our path who had much sounder claims to renown in literature; among them Samuel Warren, author of half a dozen books, two of which are still sometimes heard of—The Diary of a Late Physician and Ten Thousand a Year. He lived upon the reputation which these brought him, though they were published, the first as long ago as 1830 and the other only ten years later. Like many other authors, he fancied himself capable of things far better than belonged to his true metier; and among the books in my father's library is one called The Moral and Intellectual Development of the Present Age—a thin volume, despite its portentous and thundering title—it carries the gloss, in Warren's handwriting, "the fruit of many a long year's reflection." So does every light comedian imagine that he can play Hamlet. Of Warren himself I barely recall a slight, light figure with a sharp nose and a manner lacking in repose; indeed, he was very much like a light comedian in light comedy, eager to hold the centre of the stage, full of small movements and remarks, and—which more interested us children—with a gift for turning himself into other people by slight contortions of countenance and alterations of voice. The histrionic abilities of Dickens probably affected the social antics of many writers at this epoch. Warren also told stories in a vivacious and engaging manner, though, as they were about things and people out of the sphere of his younger auditors, I remember only the way of the telling, not what was told. I recalled, later, his anecdotes of Kit North, who was a friend of his, on account of the contrast between the stalwart proportions of that old worthy and the diminutive physique of the novelist; they must have looked, together, like a bear and a monkey. Warren was born in Wales, though whether of Welsh ancestry I know not.

When we saw him he was only a trifle over five-and-forty years of age, so his famous books must have been written when he was hardly more than a boy.