I spent several hours with Gurowski on this occasion, and, as we both at that time had ample leisure, we soon grew intimate, and fell into the habit of passing a large part of the day together. For a long period I was accustomed to visit him every day at his lodgings, generally in the morning, while he came almost every afternoon to my house. He had a good deal of wit, but little humor, and did not relish badinage. His chief delight was in serious discussions on questions of politics, history, or theology, on which he would talk all day with immense erudition and a wonderful flow of "the best broken English that ever was spoken." He was well read in Egyptology and in mediæval history, and had a wide general knowledge of the sciences, without special familiarity with any except jurisprudence. He disdained the details of the natural sciences, and despised their professors, whose pursuits seemed to him frivolous. He was jealous of Agassiz, and of the fame and influence he had attained in this country, and was in the habit of spitefully asserting that the Professor spoke bad French, and was a mere icthyologist, who would not dare in Europe to set up as an authority in so many sciences as he did here. Even the amiable Professor Guyot, the most unassuming man in the world, who then lived in Cambridge, was also an object of this paltry jealousy. "How finely Guyot humbugs you Americans with his slops," Gurowski said to me one day. I replied that "slops" was a very unworthy and offensive word to apply to the productions of a man like Guyot, who certainly was of very respectable standing in his department of physical geography. "O bah! bah! you do not understand," exclaimed Gurowski. "I do not mean the slops of the kitchen, but the slops of the continent,—the slops and indentations which he talks so much about." Slopes was, of course, the word he meant to use; and the incident may serve as a good illustration of the curious infelicities of English with which his conversation teemed.
But the truth is that Gurowski spared nobody, or scarcely anybody, in his personal criticisms. Of all his vast range of acquaintance in New England, Felton, Longfellow, and Lowell were the only persons of note of whom he spoke with uniform respect. It was really painful to see how utterly his vast knowledge and his great powers of mind were rendered worthless by a childishness of temper and a habit of contradiction which made it almost impossible for him to speak of anybody with moderation and justice. He had also a sort of infernal delight in detecting the weak points of his acquaintances, which he did with fearful quickness and penetration. The slightest hint was sufficient. He saw at a glance the frail spot, and directed his spear against it. Failings the most secret, peculiarities the most subtle, which had, perhaps, been hidden from the acquaintances of years, seemed to reveal themselves at the first glance of his single eye.
He was very fond of controversy, and would prolong a discussion from day to day with apparently unabated interest. I remember once we had a discussion about some point of mediæval history of which I knew little, but about which I feigned to be very positive, in order to draw out the stores of his knowledge, which was really immense in that direction. After a hot dispute of several hours we parted, leaving the question as unsettled as ever. The next day I called at his lodgings early in the afternoon. I knocked at the door of his room. He shouted, "Come in"; but as I opened the door I heard him retreating into his adjacent bedroom. He thrust his head out, and, seeing who it was, came back into the parlor, absolutely in a state of nature. He had not even his spectacles on. In his hand he held a pair of drawers, which he had apparently been about to assume when I arrived. Shaking this garment vehemently with one hand, while with the other he gave me a cigar, he broke out at once in a torrent of argument on the topic of the preceding day. I made no reply; but at the first pause suggested that he had better dress himself. To this he paid no attention, but stamped round the room, continuing his argument with his usual vehemence and volubility. Half an hour had elapsed, when some one knocked. Gurowski roared, "Come in!" A maid-servant opened the door, and of course instantly retreated. I turned the key, and again entreated the Count to put on his clothes. He did not comply, but kept on with his argument. Presently some one else rapped. "It is Desor," said the Count; "I know his knock; let him in." Desor was a Swiss, a scientific man, who lodged in the adjacent house. Gurowski apparently was involved in a dispute with him also, which he immediately took up, on some question of natural history. The Swiss, however, did not seem to care to contest the point, whatever it was, and soon went away. On his departure Gurowski again began his mediæval argument; but I positively refused to stay unless he put on his clothes. He reluctantly complied, and went into his bedroom, while I took up a book. Every now and then, however, he would sally out to argue some fresh point which had suggested itself to him; and his toilet was not fairly completed till, at the end of the third hour, the announcement of dinner put an end to the discussion.
Disappointed in his hopes of getting employment as a lecturer or teacher, on which he had relied for subsistence, Gurowski felt himself growing poorer and poorer as the little stock of money he had brought from Europe wasted away. The discomforts of poverty did not tend to sweeten his temper nor to abate his savage independence. He grew prouder and fiercer as he grew poorer. He was very economical, and indulged in no luxuries except cigars, of which, however, he was not a great consumer, seldom smoking more than three or four a day. But with all his care, his money was at length exhausted, his last dollar gone. He had expected remittances from Poland, which did not come; and he now learned that, from some cause which I have forgotten, nothing would be sent him for that year at least. He used to tell me from day to day of the progress of his "decline and fall," as he called it, remarking occasionally that, when the worst came to the worst, he could turn himself into an Irishman and work for his living. I paid little attention to this talk, for really the idea of Gurowski and manual labor was so ridiculously incongruous that I could not form any definite conception of it. But he was more in earnest than I supposed.
Going one day at my usual hour to his lodgings, I found him absent. I called again in the course of the day, but he was still not at home, and the people of the house informed me that he had been absent since early morning. The next day it was the same. On the third day I lay in wait for him at evening at his lodgings, to which he came about dark, in a most forlorn condition, with his hands blistered, his clothes dusty, and exhibiting himself every mark of extreme fatigue. He was cheerful, however, and very cordial, and gave me an animated account of his adventures in his "Irish life," as he called it. It seems he had formed an acquaintance with Mr. Hovey, the proprietor of the large nurseries between Boston and the Colleges, and on the morning of the day on which I found him absent from his lodgings he had gone to Hovey and offered himself as a laborer in his garden. Hovey was astounded at the proposition, but the Count insisted, and finally a spade was given to him, and he set to work "like an Irishman," as he delighted to express it. It was dreadfully wearisome to his unaccustomed muscles, but anything, he said, was better than getting in debt. He could earn a dollar a day, and that would pay for his board and his cigars. He had clothes enough, he thought, to last him the rest of his life,—especially, he added somewhat dolefully, as he was not likely to live long under the Irish regimen.
I thought the joke had been carried far enough, and that it was time to interfere. I accordingly went next day to Boston, and, calling on the publisher of a then somewhat flourishing weekly newspaper, now extinct, called "The Boston Museum," I described to him the situation and the capacities of Gurowski, and proposed that he should employ the Count to write an article of reasonable length each week about European life, for which he was to be paid twelve dollars. I undertook to revise Gurowski's English sufficiently to make it intelligible. The publisher readily acceded to this proposition; and the Count, when I communicated it to him, was as delighted as if he had found a gold mine, or, in the language of to-day, "had struck ile." He was already, in spite of his philosophic cheerfulness, heartily sick of his labor with the spade, for which he was totally unfitted. He resumed his pen with alacrity, and wrote an article on the private life of the Russian court, which I copied, with the necessary revision, and carried to the publisher of the Museum, who was greatly pleased with it, and readily paid the stipulated price.
For several months Gurowski continued to write an article every week, which he did very easily, and the pay for them soon re-established his finances on what, with his simple habits, he considered a sound basis. In fact, he soon grew rich enough, in his own estimation, to spend the summer at Newport, which he said he wanted to do, because the Americans of the highest social class evidently regarded a summer visit to that place as the chief enjoyment of their life and the crowning glory of their civilization. He went thither in June, 1851, and after that I only saw him at long intervals, and for very brief periods.
His stay at Newport was short, and he went from there to New York, where he soon became an editorial writer for the Tribune. To a Cambridge friend of mine, who met him in Broadway, he expressed great satisfaction with his new avocation. "It is the most delightful position," he said, "that you can possibly conceive of. I can abuse everybody in the world except Greeley, Ripley, and Dana." He inquired after me, and, as my friend was leaving him, sent me a characteristic message,—"Tell C—— that he is an ass." My friend inquired the reason for this flattering communication; and Gurowski replied, "Because he does not write to me." Busy with many things which had fallen to me to do after his departure, I had neglected to keep up our correspondence, at which he was sometimes very wrathful, and wrote me savagely affectionate notes of remonstrance.
Besides writing for the Tribune, Gurowski was employed by Ripley and Dana on the first four volumes of the New American Cyclopædia, for which he wrote the articles on Alexander the Great, the Alexanders of Russia, Aristocracy, Attila, the Borgias, Bunsen, and a few others. It was at this time also that he wrote his books, "Russia as it is," and "America and Europe." In preparing for publication his articles and his books, he had the invaluable assistance of Mr. Ripley, who gratuitously bestowed upon them an immense amount of labor, for which he was very ill requited by the Count, who quarrelled both with him and Dana, and for a time wantonly and most unjustly abused them both in his peculiar lavish way.
For two or three years longer I lost sight of him, during which period he led a somewhat wandering life, visiting the South, and residing alternately in Washington, Newport, Geneseo, and Brattleborough. The last time I saw him in New York was at the Athenæum Club one evening in December, 1860, just after South Carolina had seceded. A dispute was raging in the smoking-room, between Unionists on one side and Copperheads on the other, as to the comparative character of the North and South. Gurowski, who was reading in an adjoining room, was attracted by the noise, and came in, but at first said nothing, standing in silence on the outside of the circle. At last a South-Carolinian who was present appealed to him, saying, "Count, you have been in the South, let us have your opinion; you at least ought to be impartial." Gurowski thrust his head forward, as he was accustomed to do when about to say anything emphatic, and replied in his most energetic manner: "I have been a great deal in the South as well as in the North, and know both sections equally well, and I tell you, gentlemen, that there is more intelligence, more refinement, more cultivation, more virtue, and more good manners in one New England village than in all the South together." This decision put an end to the discussion. The South-Carolinian retreated in dudgeon, and Gurowski, chuckling, returned to his book or his paper.