Frank was the son of the Rev. William Henry Channing, who was pastor of a Unitarian church in Liverpool; he had brought his family to England at about the same time that we came. He was a nephew, I believe, of the William Ellery Channing who was one of the founders of American Unitarianism, and the brother, therefore, of the Ellery Channing of Concord. Frank inherited much of the talent of his family. He was afterwards sent to Oxford, where he took the highest honors. All intellectual operations came easy to him. He also showed a strong proclivity to art, and he was wonderfully clever in all kinds of fine handwork. He was at this time a tall and very handsome boy, about two years my senior. He was, like myself, fanatically patriotic, an American of Americans, and this brought us together in a foreign land; but, aside from that, I have seldom met a more fascinating companion. I followed him about with joy and admiration. He used to make for me tiny little three-masted ships, about six inches long, with all the rigging complete; they were named after the famous American clippers of the day, and he painted microscopic American flags to hoist over the taff-rail. He tried to teach me how to paint in water-colors, but I responded better to his eloquence regarding the future of our country. He proved to me by a mathematical demonstration, which I accepted without in the least understanding it, that in fifty years New York would be larger and more populous than London at the end of the same period. This brilliant boy seemed fitted for the highest career in his native country; his father did not contemplate a permanent stay in England, and in after years I used to look for his name in our Senate, or among the occupants of the Supreme Bench. But, as it turned out, he never revisited America, except for short periods. His father was induced to remain abroad by the success of his preaching, and Frank, after his career at Oxford, was overpowered by the subtle attractions of English culture, and could not separate himself from the old country. I saw him once while I was at Harvard. He was an Englishman in all outward respects, and seemed to be so inwardly likewise. The other day I heard of a Frank Channing in Parliament; probably the same man. But either the effect upon him of his voluntary expatriation—his failure to obey at eve the voice obeyed at prime—or some other cause, has prevented him from ever doing anything to attract attention, or to appear commensurate with his radiant promise. Henry James is the only American I know who has not suffered from adopting England; and even he might have risen higher than he has done had he overcome his distaste to the external discomforts of the democracy and cast in his lot with ours.
Frank's father was a tall, intellectual, slender Yankee, endowed with splendid natural gifts, which he had improved by assiduous cultivation. In the pulpit he rose to an almost divine eloquence and passion, and a light would shine over his face as if reflected from the Holy Spirit itself. My father took a pew in his church, and sent me to sit in it every Sunday; he never went himself. He was resolved, I suppose, if there was any religion in me, to afford it an opportunity to come out. Now, I had a religious reverence for divine things, but no understanding whatever of dogma of any sort. I never learned to repeat a creed, far less to comprehend its significance. I was moved and charmed by Mr. Channing's discourses, but I did not like to sit in the pew; I did not like "church." I remember nothing of the purport of any of those sermons; but, oddly enough, I do recall one preached by a gentleman who united the profession of preacher with that of medicine; he occupied Channing's pulpit on a certain occasion, and preached on the text in John xix., 34: "But one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side, and forthwith came thereout blood and water." The good doctor, drawing on his physiological erudition, demonstrated at great length how it was possible that blood should be mingled with the water, and showed at what precise point in Christ's body the spear must have entered. I seem to hear again his mellifluous voice, repeating at the close of each passage of his argument, "And forthwith came thereout blood-AND WATER!" I did not approve of this sermon; I was not carried to heaven in the spirit by it, as by Channing's; but somehow it has stuck in my memory all these forty-eight years.
Often I stayed for a few days at a time at Channing's house; his wife was a handsome, delicate, very nervous woman; his daughter Fanny was a beauty, and became still more beautiful in after years; she was married, when past her first youth, to Edwin Arnold, author of "The Light of Asia," and of many rhetorical leading articles in the London Telegraph. She died a few years ago. They were, all of them, kind to me. I did the best I could to be a good little boy there; but I recollect Mrs. Channing's face of sorrow and distress when, one day at dinner, I upset into my lap my plate, which she had just filled with Irish stew—one of my best-loved dishes. "Frank never does that," she murmured, as she wiped me up; "never-never!" Nobody looked cheerful, and I never got over that mortification.
XI
Bennoch and Bright like young housekeepers—"What did you
marry that woman for?"—"Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures"—
"The worst book anybody ever wrote"—"Most magnificent eye I
ever saw"—A great deal of the feminine in Reade—Fire,
pathos, fun, and dramatic animation—A philosophical library
in itself—Amusing appanage of his own book—Oily and
voluble sanctimoniousness—Self-worship of the os-rotundus
sort—Inflamed rather than abated by years—"Every word of
it true; but—"—Better, or happier, because we had lived—
Appropriated somebody else's adventure—Filtering remarks
through the mind of a third person—A delightful Irishman—
Unparalleled audacity—An unregenerate opinion—The whole
line of Guelphs in it—"Oh, that somebody would invent a new
sin!"—"The Angel in the House"—Very well dressed—
Indomitable figure, aggressively American—Too much of the
elixir of life—A little strangeness between us—Sunshine
will always rest on it.
The central event of 1856 was the return from Lisbon and Madeira of my mother and sisters. Measuring time, as boys do (very sensibly), not by the regulated pace of minutes, but by the vast spaces covered by desire, it appeared to me, for some decades, that they had been absent in those regions for years—two years at least; and I was astonished and almost incredulous when dates seemed to prove that the interval had been six or eight months only. It was long enough.
In the course of the previous spring my father made two or three little excursions of a few days or a week or so in various directions, commonly convoyed by Bright or Bennoch, who were most enterprising on his behalf, feeling much the same sort of ambition to show him all possible of England and leading English folk that a young housekeeper feels to show her visiting school-friend her connubial dwelling and its arrangements, and to take her up in the nursery and exhibit the children. Had my father improved all his opportunities he would have seen a great deal, but the consulate would have been administered by the clerks. He took trips through Scotland and the north of England, and south to London and the environs; dined at the Milton Club and elsewhere, visited the Houses of Parliament, spent a day with Martin Farquhar Tupper, author of Proverbial Philosophy, and still was not remarkably absent from the dingy little office down by the docks, or from the euchre games in Mrs. Blodgett's smoking-room. For the most part, I did not accompany him on these excursions, being occupied in Liverpool with my pursuit of universal culture; yet not so much occupied as to prevent me from feeling insolvent while he was away, and rich as Aladdin when he got back. For his part, he struggled with low spirits caused by anxiety lest the next mail from Portugal should bring ill news of the beloved invalid there (instead of the cheerful news which always did come); his real life was suspended until she should return. Partings between persons who love each other seem to be absolute loss of being; but that being revives, with a new spiritual strength, when all partings are over.
Of the people whom he met on these sallies, I saw some, either then or later: Disraeli, Douglas Jerrold, Charles Reade, Tom Taylor, Bailey, the author of that once-famous philosophic poem, "Festus"; Samuel Carter Hall, and a few more. Disraeli, in 1856, had already been chancellor of the exchequer and leader of the house, and was to hold the same offices again two years later. He had written all but two of his novels, and had married the excellent but not outwardly attractive lady who did so much to sustain him in his career. At a dinner of persons eminent in political life, about this juncture, Mr. and Mrs. Disraeli were present, and also Bernal Osborne, a personage more remarkable for cleverness and aggressiveness, in the things of statesmanship, than for political loyalty or for a sense of his obligations to his associates. This gentleman had drunk a good deal of wine at dinner, and had sat next to Mrs. Disraeli; when the ladies had left the table he burst out, with that British brutality which often passes for wit, "I say, Disraeli, what on earth did you marry that woman for?" All talk was hushed by this astounding query, and everybody looked at the sallow and grim figure to whom it was addressed. Disraeli for some moments played with his wineglass, apparently unmoved; then he slowly lifted his extraordinary black, glittering eyes to those of his questioner. "Partly for a reason," he said, measuring his words in the silence, "which you will never be capable of understanding—gratitude!" The answer meant much for both of them; it was never forgotten, and it extinguished the clever and aggressive personage. It was ill crossing swords with Disraeli.
Douglas Jerrold was at the height of his fame and success in this year; he died, I think, the year following, at the age of fifty-four. He was very popular during his later lifetime, but he seems to have just missed those qualities of the humorist which insure immortality; he is little more than a name to this generation. He was the son of an actor, and had himself been on the stage; indeed, he had tried several things, including a short service as midshipman in his Majesty's navy. He wrote some two-score plays, and was a contributor to Punch from its outset; there are several books to his credit; and he edited Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper, which was first called by his own name. But people who have read or heard of nothing else of his, have heard of or read "Mrs. Caudle's Curtain Lectures." Douglas Jerrold, however, is by no means fully pictured by anything which he wrote; his charm and qualities came out in personal intercourse. Nor does the mere quotation of his brightnesses do him justice; you had to hear and see him say them in order to understand them or him. He was rather a short man, with a short neck and thick shoulders, much bent, and thick, black hair, turning gray. His features were striking and pleasing; he had large, clear, prominent, expressive black eyes, and in these eyes, and in his whimsical, sensitive mouth, he lived and uttered himself. They took all the bitterness and sting out of whatever he might say. When he was about to launch one of his witticisms, he fixed his eyes intently on his interlocutor, as if to call his attention to the good thing coming, and to ask his enjoyment of it, quite apart from such application to himself as it might have. It was impossible to meet this look and to resent whatever might go with it. Thus a friend of his, who wished to write telling books but could not quite do it, came to him in haste one day and exclaimed, aggrievedly, "Look here, Douglas, is this true that was told me—that you said my last book was the worst I'd ever written?" Douglas gazed earnestly into the flushed and troubled face, and said, in his softest tones, "Oh no, my dear fellow, that isn't what I said at all; what I did say was that it was the worst book anybody ever wrote." Such a retort, so delivered, could not but placate even an outraged author.