In art his taste was pure. He delighted to have artists about him, criticised their works with frank sincerity, and at times with an unconventional bluntness that was a little startling. Sir George Harvey, James Drummond, Sir Noel Paton and his brother Waller, Sir Daniel Macnee, Keeley Halswell, Alfred H. Forrester (Alfred Crowquill), with Doré, Giacomelli, and other foreigners, were all among his artist-friends; and to those must be added Mrs. D. O. Hill, William Brodie, Stevenson, and other sculptors, to whom the charms of his tasteful home and its beautiful surroundings were familiar. His remarkably fine and expressive head was a model they prized to work from. His feelings in regard to artists and their works find expression in his letters from time to time, as he notes his sense of the loss created by their death.
William Brodie, a self-taught artist of great simplicity and true genius, whose fine statue of Lord Cockburn holds its place in the old Parliament Hall of Edinburgh alongside of Roubiliac’s Forbes of Culloden, Chantrey’s Lord Melville, and Steel’s Lord Jeffrey, was engaged in 1881 on a marble bust of William Nelson. He had been commissioned to execute for Toronto a bronze statue of Mr. Nelson’s brother-in-law, the Hon. George Brown, leader of the Liberal party in Upper Canada in its protracted struggle for constitutional government. His death, after long suffering, by the pistol-shot of an assassin, created a wide-spread sympathy in Canada, and awakened in the mind of William Nelson the keenest sympathy on behalf of his widowed sister. This, accordingly, gave an exceptional interest to the proposed statue. He discussed the plans with the sculptor, and eagerly anticipated its execution. But the commission had not been long intrusted to him, and the plans for its realization settled, when death arrested the gifted sculptor in the midst of his work. More than one day had been spent in the studio, examining some of his latest productions, including the unfinished bust, and discussing the treatment of the proposed statue. In the following November, William Nelson thus writes:—“You will have heard, ere this reaches you, intelligence of the death of poor William Brodie, the sculptor. He had been suffering for several months past from fatty degeneration of the heart, and on Sunday morning last he was released from earthly care and trouble. I had a note from his wife about a week before his death, in which she stated that he was a little better, and that he had been able to make some drawings for the statue of George Brown, but that no further progress had been made in the matter. The loss is great to art, for he was at his very best, and improving as he progressed. His Sir James Simpson I do not like; but he blamed its low site, buried among the trees, and wanted it removed to the open area of Nicolson Square, where, I daresay, it would show much better. As for his Lord Cockburn, it is the finest thing in the Parliament House. It is not for me to suggest who should now be intrusted with the work; but there can be no doubt that Mrs. D. O. Hill will be looking out for the commission; and if it should come her way, and she were to produce a work equal to her statue of Livingstone, the committee would not have occasion to regret having intrusted her with it.”
Art had ever a charm for William Nelson, and he watched with jealous sensitiveness the memorial statues which adorn the streets and squares of his native city. But a keen personal sympathy gave intensity to his interest in the one to be erected in honour of his own brother-in-law. The execution of it was ultimately intrusted to Mr. C. Bell Birch, A.R.A.; and in February 1884 Mr. Nelson thus writes from London to Mr. James Campbell:—“I am here for a short time, with Mrs. Nelson and my daughter Florence. We have all been out this afternoon at the studio of Mr. Birch, the sculptor, seeing the model of the statue that is to be erected to the memory of poor George Brown. I am glad to say that we are all of opinion that the statue will be a noble one, though we are not quite sure if the likeness will be what can be called a speaking likeness.” The statue did ultimately satisfy in this respect, and now forms an attractive feature in the Queen’s Park at Toronto. As to the love of art here referred to, it is perpetuated by the younger generation. Salisbury Green has its own studio, where both modelling and painting were pursued by a group of young artists with more than ordinary amateur skill. But art has found other rivals in the new home to which the fair critic of Mr. Birch’s model has transferred her penates.
As time wore on, and the thick clustering black locks of early years whitened with the frosts of time, William Nelson courted more than ever his own family reunions, delighted to gather his friends about him, and noted with tender regrets the blanks that death made in the old circle. Thus he writes to me in January 1882: “Several weel kent faces have fled wi’ the year that’s awa’, including old artist-friends who have recently disappeared from our midst that you will mourn.” After referring to William Brodie and Sir Daniel Macnee, he proceeds: “And now I have to inform you that your old friend William Miller [the eminent engraver] has been called away, he having died at Sheffield yesterday. I met him not long ago in the Meadows, as he was going in the direction of Millerfield; and he walked as erect as he ever did, which was a most remarkable thing for a man only four years short of being a nonagenarian. In addition to those I have mentioned as having joined the majority, the name of Sheriff Hallard has to be added; and Edinburgh has lost in him a great deal of happy sunshine.”
CHAPTER IX.
GLIMPSES OF TRAVEL.
REFERENCE has already been made to William Nelson’s love of travel. It was indeed a passion with him, which, with his persistent eagerness for the minutest information on all points brought under his notice, might under other circumstances have won a place for him among distinguished travellers.
During a delightful sojourn which I shared with him in the Vale of Yarrow in 1880, a special object of pilgrimage was the ruined cottage in which the African traveller, Mungo Park, was born; and as he looked on it he recalled the picture, by Sir George Harvey, representing the fainting traveller in the African desert revived by the sight of a little flower that seemed to tell of the divine hand, and renewed his faith in the fatherhood of God. He followed up the subject, recovered an original sketch map executed by the traveller of his intended second route, of which he had a copy made; and among the letters preserved by him is one from Dr. Anderson of Selkirk, in which it is stated:—“Park served his apprenticeship for a surgeon with my grandfather in this house (Dove Cot) where I now live, and where my grandfather, my father, and myself have practised for more than a hundred years. My father served his apprenticeship with Park in Peebles, when he practised there before going off on his second journey. There stands a very handsome tree in front of my house, a horse-chestnut, which was planted by the traveller while courting his intended wife.”
African travel had a peculiar fascination for William Nelson. The return of the venerable missionary, Dr. Robert Moffat, from his life-long labours among the Hottentots and Bechuanas, awakened in him the liveliest interest; and his son-in-law, Livingstone, was an object of special veneration. When the startling news of Stanley’s meeting with him at Ujiji was reported, it greatly excited and gratified him. And when Mr. Henry M. Stanley visited Edinburgh on his return from Africa, he received a hearty welcome at Salisbury Green. Keith Johnston, another of the explorers of the Dark Continent, who fell a victim to the deadly climate, was the son of an old friend. He watched with interest the news of his early efforts, and tenderly mourned his fate. The same summer in which the ruined cottage in the Vale of Yarrow was the object of William Nelson’s curious interest, he had as his guest at Salisbury Green Mr. Joseph Thomson, then recently returned from his exploratory wanderings in previously unvisited regions to the south of the Victoria Nyanza, and gratified his intelligent curiosity, plying him with questions about the strange land and its people.
His own wanderings extended beyond the ordinary routes of the tourist. He visited Norway and Sweden on more than one occasion; travelled in Denmark and Russia, through Spain, Morocco, and Algiers; journeyed, as we have seen, in Palestine; explored Egypt and the Nile; crossed the American continent to the Pacific; and was on the eve of an extended visit to Greece and Asia Minor when his active life came to a close. His correspondence is voluminous, and supplies ample details of his experience on successive journeys; but a few illustrations will suffice for needful glimpses of personal characteristics. His journey across the American continent in 1870 has already been referred to. The Yosemite Valley, and the wonders of the Yellowstone Region, are now familiar to tourists; but at that date they were recently discovered and little known. He landed at New York on the 18th of May, had the excitement of a threatened Indian raid as they traversed the territory of the Sioux, but reached the Rocky Mountains in safety. He passed through the defiles of the mountains with unexpected ease; and then he notes: “If the passage of the Rocky Mountains has been easy, this has been made up by the crossing of the Sierra Nevada in California, which is the most difficult task in railway engineering that has yet been undertaken. These mountains are between eight and nine thousand feet high, and over these the railway passes, the roadway being in many places cut out of solid rock, with perpendicular walls of many hundred feet deep, falling straight down from the very edge of the railway.” The famous Yosemite Valley he describes as “a valley of about twelve miles in length by two in breadth, that has apparently been formed by the ground sinking down to a depth of some three or four thousand feet, and leaving perpendicular cliffs all round. In these are many fine waterfalls, the largest being no less than two thousand six hundred feet high;” and after a minute description of its features, he pronounces the valley to be “one of the greatest wonders of the world.” The Indians were a subject of unfailing interest. He longed to see the aborigines in their genuine condition of savage simplicity; and at a later date, when referring to this subject in a letter to Captain James Chester of the 3rd U.S. Artillery, he says:—“I send you a cutting from the Times. We all know that the Scotch are a practical people; but I never before, in all my reading, met with an instance of their getting the credit for goaheadness in the way referred to. The Marquis of Lorne, while Governor-General of Canada, was on the look-out for the genuine native; and some of his first experiences, as he travelled beyond the frontiers of civilization, are thus described by a correspondent who accompanied him:—‘We begin to-morrow with an address from some Indians at Little Current, on Manitoulin Island, who ought to be real, full-blooded Indians, if any faith can be put in Indian names. But probably little faith can be put in them. The mixture of races has been carried on,—more especially by the Scotch, always foremost in everything,—with so much energy that it is never easy to know whether an Indian is full-blooded, or, as some stranger to the laws of orthography and pronunciation tersely phrased it, “half Ingin, half Ingineer.” In one of his speeches Lord Lorne told us of his once expressing a wish to see a real, full-blooded Indian, his first; and being rather astonished when the Canadian who undertook to gratify his wish summoned the required real specimen of the aboriginal race by shouting, “Come here, MacDonald.” ’ ”
The Falls of Niagara had no such fresh wonder as belonged to the newly-discovered marvels of California; but familiarity does not lessen their effect, and the impression produced on Mr. Nelson’s mind is worth reproducing in his own words. He travelled in company with Mrs. Nelson, and he thus writes:—“One misses the true height of the falls at first—one hundred and sixty-three feet—owing to looking down upon them as they plunge into a deep gorge, in addition to their great extent in breadth. But still the impression is overpowering. Before dinner we went on to Goat Island, which divides the Horse Shoe, or Canadian Fall, from the American Fall; got over to the Three Sisters—three lovely wooded islands anchored amid the roar of waters—and then looked up the great rapids from the head of Goat Island. This I really think almost finer than the actual falls. There is no hill or rising ground visible. The flat shore scarcely seems to reach above the water’s brink; and here is a great tumbling flood that looks as if it came right out of the sky, and was going to sweep everything before it. After dinner we crossed the ferry, right under the falls, and formed a more definite idea of their height. We then found our way to a spot on the Canadian side above the falls, where we looked down on the Horse Shoe Fall. It has eaten its way back into the rock; and an old residenter on the spot told us it has greatly changed since he remembered it. It now looks as though the whole mighty flood were poured into a narrow cleft, and disappears in a rising cloud of vapour, in which, when the sun is shining, there is a constant rainbow.”