What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

It has been said by some observers that this materially flourishing establishment has so many points of similarity with the conventual institutions of Roman Catholicism that it may be considered as supplying the same natural want to which those institutions are supposed to correspond, an asylum, that is to say, for those of either sex, who, from various circumstances of fortune, or of temperament, are unfitted for the struggles of the world, and find themselves left stranded on the banks of the great social stream. The impressions I received from my visit to Mount Lebanon do not dispose me to accept any such explanation of the Shaking Quaker raison d’être. I saw no signs whatever, among either the men or the women, of individuals who had been tempest-tossed in any of the world’s maelstroms, or of temperaments for which the contemplative life might be supposed to have had greater attractions than the active life of the world. The characteristics which were most notably observable were of a diametrically opposed kind. One would say that they were men and women thoroughly and unanimously minded to make for themselves in the most judiciously contrived manner a comfortable and clean sty, with abundant and perennial supply of everything needed for their bodily wants. Whether love or hatred, as they are found to exist in monastic communities, existed among them, of course I had not sufficient opportunity for even guessing. But assuredly it may be said with some confidence of not being mistaken, that neither those nor any other passions had left any of their usual marks on those sleek bodies and placid meaningless faces. One would have said that the main and engrossing object of existence at Mount Lebanon was digesting.

I have recently learned that the community continues to exist under the same conditions as those under which I saw it.

I made acquaintance, I remember, at Cincinnati, with Mr. Longworth, who was, or became well known throughout America for his successful efforts in viticulture. He was one of those men who, being by no means entertaining companions on any other subject, become so, if you will talk to them upon their own. I have often thought that the “sink the shop” maxim is a great mistake. If I had to pass an hour with a chimney-sweep, I should probably find him very good company if he would talk exclusively about sweeping chimneys. Mr. Longworth was extremely willing to talk exclusively on schemes for the introduction of the vine into the western states, and on that subject was well worth listening to. I find a note in a diary, written by me at that time, to the effect that he was then (1828) employing a large number of Germans on his estate at Columbia near Cincinnati at a little less than one shilling a day and their food. I remarked that this seemed scarcely in accord with the current accounts of the high price of labour in the states, and was answered that his—Mr. Longworth’s—bailiff had said to him the other day, “If those men get to Cincinnati they will be spoiled”—a little touch which rather vividly illustrates one phase of the difference made in all things by railway communication.

But the most remarkable acquaintance we made at Cincinnati was Hiram Powers, the subsequently well-known sculptor, with whom I again fell in many years afterwards at Florence, when he was living there with his large family, having just acquired a large and lucrative degree of celebrity by his statue of “The Greek Slave,” purchased by an Englishman whom my mother had taken to visit his studio. I do not know by what chance she had first become acquainted with him at Cincinnati.

He was at that time about eighteen years old, much about my own contemporary; and my mother at once remarked him as a young man of exceptional talent and promise. He was at that time seeking to live by his wits, with every prospect of finding that capital abundantly sufficient for the purpose. There was a Frenchman named Dorfeuille at Cincinnati, who had established what he called a “museum,”—a show, in fact, in which he collected anything and everything that he thought would excite the curiosity of the people and induce them to pay their quarter dollars for admission. And this M. Dorfeuille, cleverly enough appreciating young Powers’s capabilities of being useful to him, had engaged him as factotum and general manager of his establishment. Powers, casting about for some new “attraction” for the museum, chanced one evening to talk over the matter with my mother. And it occurred to her to suggest to him to get up a representation of one of Dante’s bolgias as described in the Inferno, The nascent sculptor, with his imaginative brain, artistic eye, and clever fingers, caught at the idea on the instant. And forthwith they set to work, my mother explaining the poet’s conceptions, suggesting the composition of “tableaux,” and supplying details, while Powers designed and executed the figures and the necessary mise en scène.

Some months of preparation were needed before the work could be accomplished, and Dorfeuille, I remember, began to have misgivings as to recouping himself for the not inconsiderable cost. But at last all was ready. A vast amount of curiosity had been excited in the place by preliminary announcements, and the result was an immense success. I have preserved for nearly sixty years, and have now before me, the programme and bill of the exhibition as it was drawn up by my mother. It is truly a curiosity in its kind, and I am tempted to reproduce it here. But it is too long, occupying four pages of a folio sheet. There are quotations from the Inferno, translated by my mother (no copy of any published translation being then and there procurable), explanations of the author’s meaning, and descriptions in very bugaboo style, and in every variety of type with capitals of every sort of size, of all the horrors of the supposed scene.

The success was so great, and the curiosity, not only of the Cincinnati world but of the farmers round about and their families, was so eager, that the press of spectators was inconveniently great, and M. Dorfeuille began to fear that his properties might be damaged by indiscreet desires to touch as well as see. So Powers arranged a slight metal rod as a barrier between the show and the spectators, and contrived to charge it with electricity, while an announcement, couched in terrible and mystic terms and in verse, by my mother, to the effect that an awful doom awaited any mortal rash enough to approach the mysteries of the nether world too nearly, was appended to the doors and walls. The astonishment and dismay felt, and the laughter provoked, by those who were rash enough to do so, may be imagined!

Upon the whole those autumn and winter months passed pleasantly, and have left pleasant recollections in my memory. Doubtless there were many causes of anxiety for my elders; but to the best of my remembrance they touched us young people very lightly. We had many more or less agreeable acquaintances, and I have a vivid recollection of the pleasure I received from the fact that they all belonged to types that were altogether new to me—if indeed it could be said of people, to me so apparently unclassifiable, that they belonged to any type at all. The cleverest among them was a Dr. Price, a very competent physician with a large practice, a foolish friendly little wife and a pair of pretty daughters. He was a jovial, florid, rotund little man who professed, more even, as I remember, to my astonishment than my horror, perfect Atheism. His wife and daughters used to go to church without apparently producing the slightest interruption of domestic harmony. “La! the Doctor don’t think anything more of the Bible than of an old newspaper!” Mrs. Price would say; “but then doctors, you know, they have their own opinions!” And the girls used to say, “Papa is an Atheist,” just as they would have said of the multiform persuasions of their acquaintances, “Mr. This is a Baptist,” and “Mrs. That is a Methodist.” And I remember well the confusion and displacement occasioned in my mind by finding that Dr. Price did not seem on the whole to be an abandoned man, and enjoyed to a high degree the respect of his townsmen.

The two pretty daughters, girls of eighteen or nineteen, used to have at their house frequent dances. We were constant and welcome guests, but alas! I was not—either then or ever since—a dancer; the reason being precisely the same as that which prevented my fighting at Winchester, as above recorded. I was too shy! In other words I had too low an opinion of myself, of my performance as a dancer, should I attempt it, and above all of my acceptability as a partner, ever to overcome my diffidence.

I was, as I have said when speaking of my earliest years, by no means a prepossessing child, and as a young man I was probably less so. I had never any sort of pretension to good looks, or to elegance of figure. I was five feet eight in height, and thick, sturdy, and ungainly in make, healthy and pure in complexion and skin as a baby, but with an “abbreviated nose”—as George Eliot says of me in finding me like a portrait of Galileo—and pale coloured lanky hair. All which would not have signified a button, if I could have been as ignorant of the facts in question as hundreds of my contemporaries, labouring under equal disadvantages, were in their own case; but I was not ignorant of these facts, and the consciousness of them constituted a most mischievous and disqualifying little repast off the tree of knowledge. It has, among many other results, prevented me from ever dancing. I should have liked much, very much to do so. I was abundantly well disposed to seek the society of the other sex. Though I never had a very perfect ear for tune, I had a markedly strong perception of time, and feeling for rhythm, and therefore should probably have danced well. But the persuasion that any girl, whom I might have induced to dance with me, would have far rather been dancing with somebody else, was too much for me!