What I Remember, Volume 1

by Thomas Adolphus Trollope

I should unquestionably have been a far happier young fellow, if I had undoubtingly believed myself to have been adapted in all respects to attract the favourable attention and conciliate the liking of all I met. But can I even now, looking back over the vista of sixty years, regret that I was able to see myself as others saw me, and wish that I had inhabited that fool’s paradise, which is planted with conceits in place of insights?

So I got no dancing with the Cincinnati girls. But there were theatricals, also at the house of Dr. and Mrs. Price, and in those I did not refuse to join. It may seem that this would have been at least as great a trial to a shy man as any other form of self-exhibition; but it was not so. I think, so far as I am able at this distance of time to examine my mind upon the subject, it would have been impossible for me to attempt the representation of any personage intended to be attractive to the spectator, or such as to be confounded in his mind with my own personality. But it was proposed that I should act Falstaff in the Merry Wives of Windsor, and to this the difficulties referred to did not apply. I played Falstaff with immense success to an assuredly not very critical audience. My own impression however is, that I did it well. I think that I had reason to flatter myself, as I did flatter myself at the time, that all those, who heard me, understood the play, and enjoyed the humour of the situations better than they had done before.

I have played many parts since on various stages in different parts of the world, but that, I think, was my sole Shakesperian attempt. And the members of that merry and kindly theatrical company! They have made their last exit from the larger boards we are all treading, every man and woman, every lad and lass of them. Not one but the old Falstaff of the company remains to write this chronicle of sixty years since!

There were very few formal meetings among the notabilities of the little Cincinnati world of that time, but there was an amount of homely friendliness that impressed me very favourably; and there was plenty of that generous and abounding hospitality which subsequent experience has taught me to consider an especially American characteristic. I have since that time shared the splendid hospitality of splendid American hosts, and I have been under American roofs where there was little save a heartfelt welcome to offer. But the heartwarming effect produced by the latter was the same in both cases. How often have we all sat at magnificent boards where the host’s too evident delight consisted in giving you what you could not give him, and in the exulting manifestation of his magnificence. This is very rarely the feeling of an American host. He is thinking not of himself, but of you; and the object he is striving at when giving you of his best is that you should enjoy yourself while under his roof; that you should have, as he would phrase it, “a good time.” And upon my word he almost invariably succeeds.

Nor were the Cincinnati girls in 1829 like the New York belles of 1887. But there was much of the same charm about them, which arises from unaffected and unself-regarding desire to please. American girls are accused of being desperate flirts. But many an Englishman has been deceived by imagining that the smiles and cheerfulness and laughing chatter of some charming girl new to Europe were intended for his special benefit, when they were in truth only the perfectly natural and unaffected outcome of a desire to do her duty in that state of life to which it had pleased God to call her! Only beams falling, like those of the sun, upon the just and the unjust alike!

There is another point on which Americans, both men and women, are very generally called over the coals by English people, as I think somewhat unreasonably. They are, it is said, everlastingly talking about the greatness and grandeur of their country, and never easy without extorting admissions of this. All this is to a great extent true—at least to this extent, that an American is always pleased to hear the greatness of his country recognised. But when I remember the thoroughness with which that cardinal article of an Englishman’s faith (sixty years ago!), that every Englishman could thrash three Frenchmen, was enforced with entire success on my youthful mind, I can hardly find it in my conscience to blame an American’s pride in his country. Why, good heavens! what an insensible block he would be if he was not proud of his country, to whose greatness, it is to be observed, each individual American now extant has contributed in a greater degree than can be said to be the case as regards England and every extant Englishman; inasmuch as our position has been won by the work of, say, a thousand years, and his by that of less than a century. Surely the creation of the United States as they now exist within that time is such a feat of human intelligence and energy as the world has never before seen, and is scarcely likely to see again. I confess that the expression of American patriotism is never offensive to me. I feel somewhat as the old Cornish wrestler felt, who said with immense pride, when he was told that his son had “whopped” the whole parish, “Ay, I should think so! Why, he has whopped me afore now!”

Yes! I liked the Americans as I first made acquaintance with them almost among the backwoods at Cincinnati sixty years ago; and I like them as I have since known them better. For I have seen a great deal of them; far more than an Englishman living at home would be likely to do, during my many years’ residence in Italy. The American “colony,” to use the common though incorrect phrase, is large both at Florence and in Rome—of late years fully as large, I think, as that from England. And not only do the two bodies associate indiscriminately with each other in perfect neighbourliness and good fellowship, but they do so, forming one single oasis in the midst of the surrounding continental life, in a manner which makes one constantly feel how infinitely nearer an American is to an Englishman in ideas, habits, ways, and civilisation, than either of them are to any other denizen of earth’s surface.

I was sorry when the time came for us to leave Cincinnati, though as usual with me, the prospect of the journey, which we were to make by a different route from that by which we had travelled westward, was a joy and a consolation. My father and I returned, leaving my mother, my two sisters still quite children, and my brother Henry at Cincinnati. The proposed institution—bazaar, athenæum, lecture-hall, or whatever it was to be, or to be called—had been determined on, and the site, to the best of my recollection, selected and purchased; but nothing had yet been done towards raising the building. Contracts had been entered into, and my father was on his return to London to send out a quantity of goods for the carrying out of the commercial part of the scheme.

He did so. But I had no share in or knowledge of the operations undertaken for this purpose, and may therefore as well relate here the upshot of the ill-fated enterprise. I learned subsequently that very large quantities of goods were sent out, of kinds and qualities totally unfitted for the purpose. The building was duly raised, and I have been told by Americans who had seen it, that it was a handsome and imposing one. But the net result was disaster and ruin. My father having been educated to be a Chancery barrister, was a good one. He became a farmer with no training or knowledge necessary for the calling, and it proved ruinous to him. He then embarked on this commercial speculation, which, inasmuch as he was still more ignorant of all such matters, than he was even of farming, turned out still more entirely disastrous.

My father and I, as I have said, did not return from Cincinnati to New York by the same route by which we had travelled westward. We went by the lakes and Niagara, visiting also Trenton Falls en route. Had I written this page immediately after my journey, instead of sixty years after, I might have been justified in attempting—and no doubt should in any case have attempted—some description of the great “water privilege,” which I saw as it will never be seen again. The two great cataclysms which have occurred since that time, have entirely changed, and in a great measure spoiled, the great sight. And now, I am told, this “so-called nineteenth century” (as I read the other day in the fervid discourse of some pessimist orator) intends before it closes to utilise the lake as a milldam and the fall as so much “power.”