May 6th.—Mine is a painful, self-imposed task: but why write when I have nothing to chronicle but disaster?[78] So I read instead: First, Consuelo, then Columba, two ends of the pole certainly, and then a translated edition of Elective Affinities. Food enough for thought in every one of this odd assortment of books.
At the Prestons’, where I am staying (because Mr. Chesnut has gone to see his crabbed old father, whom he loves, and who is reported ill), I met Christopher Hampton. He tells us Wigfall is out on a war-path; wants them to strike for Maryland. The President’s opinion of the move is not given. Also Mr. Hampton met the first lieutenant of the Kirkwoods, E. M. Boykin. Says he is just the same man he was in the South Carolina College. In whatever company you may meet him, he is the pleasantest man there.
A telegram reads: “We have repulsed the enemy at Williamsburg.”[79] Oh, if we could drive them back “to their ain countree!” Richmond was hard pressed this day. The Mercury of to-day says, “Jeff Davis now treats all men as if they were idiotic insects.”
Mary Preston said all sisters quarreled. No, we never quarrel, I and mine. We keep all our bitter words for our enemies. We are frank heathens; we hate our enemies and love our friends. Some people (our kind) can never make up after a quarrel; hard words once only and all is over. To us forgiveness is impossible. Forgiveness means calm indifference; philosophy, while love lasts. Forgiveness of love’s wrongs is impossible. Those dutiful wives who piously overlook—well, everything—do not care one fig for their husbands. I settled that in my own mind years ago. Some people think it magnanimous to praise their enemies and to show their impartiality and justice by acknowledging the faults of their friends. I am for the simple rule, the good old plan. I praise whom I love and abuse whom I hate.
Mary Preston has been translating Schiller aloud. We are provided with Bulwer’s translation, Mrs. Austin’s, Coleridge’s, and Carlyle’s, and we show how each renders the passage Mary is to convert into English. In Wallenstein at one point of the Max and Thekla scene, I like Carlyle better than Coleridge, though they say Coleridge’s Wallenstein is the only translation in the world half so good as the original. Mrs. Barstow repeated some beautiful scraps by Uhland, which I had never heard before. She is to write them for us. Peace, and a literary leisure for my old age, unbroken by care and anxiety!
General Preston accused me of degenerating into a boarding-house gossip, and is answered triumphantly by his daughters: “But, papa, one you love to gossip with full well.”
Hampton estate has fifteen hundred negroes on Lake Washington, Mississippi. Hampton girls talking in the language of James’s novels: “Neither Wade nor Preston—that splendid boy!—would lay a lance in rest—or couch it, which is the right phrase for fighting, to preserve slavery. They hate it as we do.” “What are they fighting for?” “Southern rights—whatever that is. And they do not want to be understrappers forever to the Yankees. They talk well enough about it, but I forget what they say.” Johnny Chesnut says: “No use to give a reason—a fellow could not stay away from the fight—not well.” It takes four negroes to wait on Johnny satisfactorily.
It is this giving up that kills me. Norfolk they talk of now; why not Charleston next? I read in a Western letter, “Not Beauregard, but the soldiers who stopped to drink the whisky they had captured from the enemy, lost us Shiloh.” Cock Robin is as dead as he ever will be now; what matters it who killed him?
May 12th.—Mr. Chesnut says he is very glad he went to town. Everything in Charleston is so much more satisfactory than it is reported. Troops are in good spirits. It will take a lot of ironclads to take that city.
Isaac Hayne said at dinner yesterday that both Beauregard and the President had a great opinion of Mr. Chesnut’s natural ability for strategy and military evolution. Hon. Mr. Barnwell concurred; that is, Mr. Barnwell had been told so by the President. “Then why did not the President offer me something better than an aideship?” “I heard he offered to make you a general last year, and you said you could not go over other men’s shoulders until you had earned promotion. You are too hard to please.” “No, not exactly that, I was only offered a colonelcy, and Mr. Barnwell persuaded me to stick to the Senate; then he wanted my place, and between the two stools I fell to the ground.”