I remained in Pesth over a month, exciting an increasing attention and being unable to account for a further delay, as I was doing nothing, not even sketching, which, in the vicinity of a fortress, would have been the surest way of inviting arrest. I profited by the acquaintance of Dr. Orzovensky's family to pass the time agreeably, and, finally, being unable to extort by post further instructions from Kossuth, or explanations in reply to two urgent letters describing the position I was in, and being unable to give any reason for a longer stay, or to find the people I was sent to, I determined to go back to London and start again with fuller oral instructions and a better understanding of the difficulties. I went to Orzovensky and frankly told him my errand, and asked him if I might leave the dispatches in some place known to him, so that he could indicate to some other person, should my mission be taken up by another, where they were to be found. He burst out on me with violence, accusing me of endangering his family as well as himself, and assuring me that if the slightest suspicion of my mission should transpire they would all be thrown into prison, and he be ruined, refusing to have anything to do or say about the dispatches, and breaking off all communications with me on the spot.
I had not, up to that moment, felt any real fright, though, when I stood under the scrutiny of the officer on the dike, I must confess I felt extremely nervous; but Orzovensky's violence, and his own panic at the thought of having harbored treason so long, making me fear that his anxiety to escape all suspicion might compel him to denounce me, gave me a mauvais quart d'heure. I was instantaneously in an awful funk, and I had a practical demonstration of the "vox haesit in faucibus," for I was unable to reply to the good doctor in anything but the faintest whisper, and my tongue clattered in my mouth, as dry as a stick, in an instant. I threw the dispatches in the sink and took the next train for Vienna, undisturbed by the train running off the track in the night, in the greater anxiety of my position, and, after making at the station of Vienna only a hasty lunch on a boiled sausage and a roll, continued my journey by express until I was out of the Austrian dominions, and stopped to sleep at Frankfort. My panic was as unreasonable as my security had been, for there was no reason to believe that Dr. Orzovensky would warn the authorities, or that I could not have carried the dispatches back to Kossuth in safety. My habitual courage was not the courage of one who realizes his danger and faces it coolly, but that of constitutional inability to realize what the danger is, however clearly it may be shown to him. As a habit the realization of my danger only came to me when the danger itself had gone by, and then I was frightened.
Arrived at London, I went to report to Kossuth, expecting a scene and reproaches, when I was prepared to show him that the failure of the mission was due to his having neglected to inform me that I was going to a man wanted by the police, and in close hiding, so that my failure to find him was probably due to the openness with which I made my approaches, and to his not having then informed his correspondent that I was on the ground expecting to see him, and that he must look out for me. But he only exclaimed, with a tone of regret, "Three months lost!" yet there was, probably, a reciprocal disapproval of our methods of carrying on a conspiracy; for, while he was most gravely disappointed at getting no result from his work and expenditure, no doubt owing largely to my incompetence for that kind of service, I was equally dissatisfied at being sent on an expedition which put my life in imminent danger, with the minor perils of torture and long imprisonment, provided with information utterly insufficient and needlessly incomplete for the mission confided to me.
If Kossuth had cautioned me that his correspondent was in hiding and wanted by the police, I should not have committed the grave error of going openly to find him, and under the eye of a cabman, who would probably report to the police my act. Had he even after that informed his correspondent where I could be found and who I was (which was perfectly practicable, for he told me himself that he had received letters from the correspondent during my stay at Pesth), there could have been communication at once. Kossuth said that I ought to have sought out the friends at the Tiger café, where they were in the habit of meeting publicly, though he knew that the city was swarming with spies, and that the state of siege existed (and of this, even, he did not warn me), and that my chief difficulty was to avoid being brought into contact with suspected Hungarians; nor did he recollect that he had given precise instructions to avoid anything which might lead any one to suppose that I was more than an objectless traveler. I was most reasonably disgusted with having my life exposed in this careless way, and he, perhaps, as reasonably so with my want of resource, and the result was that he decided not to employ me again in such work, and I decided to wait for active insurrectionary movements, in which I could take my place. As it happened, however, the Austrian government had recovered the crown jewels; some one in the secret—Kossuth said Szemere—having learned that Kossuth was sending an expedition to recover them, and, from jealousy of him, disclosed the hiding-place.
Kossuth's practical incapacity for the minutiae of conspiracy in this case was, I judged from what I afterward learned of his compatriots, characteristic of him. He continually neglected the details of important affairs, working by magnificent inspirations, which left out of consideration the defects of human nature. His self-exaltation had offended many patriots who did not fall under his personal magnetism, and his assumption of authority in military matters where he had no knowledge to justify it, alienated the competent officers. The treason of Görgey, as it was popularly considered, was probably due to the perception that Kossuth was an impracticable head for an active revolution, under whose dictature there was no hope of final success while he at the same time refused to abandon his impracticable ideals; and I heard from actual participants that there was great dissatisfaction amongst the officers with his assumption of dignity, out of place, and of command, for which he was incompetent. The fact was that he could not distinguish between the practicable and the impracticable, and though not so visionary as Mazzini, he believed that his power of arousing the wild enthusiasm of the Honveds and masses of Hungarians, due to his marvelous eloquence, was enough to carry on war with, and he would not see that, from the moment that Russia intervened, it was only a question of time when and how the insurrection should end. Then his treatment of the Slavonic element of the population was fatal to the movement. The Serbs only asked to be admitted on an equal footing with the Magyars to the struggle against the centralizing tendency of the German element at Vienna, and Kossuth contemptuously exclaimed, in response to their demand, "These Rascians, who consider themselves a nation and are only a band of robbers," etc.,—a reply hardly calculated to conciliate—one which in fact threw the Slavonic population against the movement and made the Russian intervention inevitable. Kossuth, like Mazzini, was simply an insurrectionary force—the administrative power existed only in great and imposing schemes which lacked adaptation to ordinary human nature and existing circumstances. The personal fascination of the man was beyond anything I have ever known, but his failure as the chief of a state was, I believe, inevitable.
I took my congé as secret agent, but it was understood that when the renewal of the revolt from Austria, to which he looked forward at no distant time, was at hand, I should take the place to which I had looked forward in the beginning. I saw one of Kossuth's associates subsequently, after the failure of Mazzini's Milan movement in the spring of 1853; and he then told me of the failure, and how the Hungarian soldiers, as had been ordered, refused to fire on the insurgents and had been decimated and sent to Croatia. More than thirty years after, I went to see Kossuth at Turin, and introduced myself as the young man who went to Hungary for him to carry off the crown jewels. He burst out with an impetuous denial of the existence of the expedition. "But," said I, "I have your letters written to me in Pesth." "I should like to see those letters," he replied. I promised to send them, conditionally on his promise to return them; but thinking it over, I sent him only one, inclosed in a stamped envelope directed to myself, with a letter recalling the promise to send it back. I never heard from him again, however, and saw that he only wanted to get the letters to suppress their evidence.
CHAPTER VIII
AN ART STUDENT IN PARIS
I went to Paris to wait for the impending rising in Milan, and meanwhile entered the atelier of Yvon, not to lose my time. My only English-speaking companion in the atelier was a younger brother of Edward Armitage, the Royal Academician; the popular atelier at that time for the English and American students being that of Couture. Yvon had about thirty pupils, to whom his attentions were given gratuitously and conscientiously, three times a week, with rare exceptions of the Saturday visit, by the pupils regarded as the least important. Of the thirty there were not more than a half dozen who showed any degree of special aptitude for their work, and only two were regarded by their colleagues as likely to be an honor to the atelier in the future, and of these, unless they have changed their names, no renown has come in later times. There was a marquis whose income was one hundred francs a month, and a count whose father gave him five sous and a piece of bread for his breakfast when he left home, but the rest were plebeians, with neither past nor future, whose enthusiasm in the face of their weekly failures, and patience in following an arid path, were most interesting as a social phenomenon. I have always found more to wonder at in the failures than in the great successes of artist life—seeing the content and even happiness which some of the hopelessly enthusiastic found in their futile and endless labor. We used to go to work at six in the morning, draw two hours and then go to a little laiterie and take our bowl of café au lait and a small loaf of bread, and then draw till noon, when we went home for the second breakfast. Armitage and myself used to breakfast at the Palais Royal, or some other quarter where the bill of fare was by the rest of the men considered luxurious, and we were dubbed the "aristocrats" of the atelier, my breakfast costing me one franc and a half and my dinner two francs. I had fixed my expenses, as in London, at the limit of twenty-five francs a week, which had to pay all the expenses of atelier, food, and lodging, and it was surprising how much comfort could then be got for that sum.
I had found a tiny room in the maison meublée in the Cité d'Antin where Mrs. Coxe lived, and Mr. Coxe in returning to America had given me charge of his women folk, so that I had a social resource and a relief from tedium which gave me no expense. On Sunday the daughter came home from school, and we all went out to dine at one or another of the Palais Royal restaurants, or made, in the fine weather, an excursion into the environs. Now and then, Mrs. Coxe invited me to take them to the theatre, and thus I saw some of the famous actors, Rachel and Frédéric Lemaître being still vividly impressed on my memory. The afternoons of the week days were given to the galleries and visiting the studios of the painters whose work attracted me, and who admitted visitors. I thus made the acquaintance of Delacroix, Gérôme, Théodore Rousseau, and by a chance met Delaroche and Ingres; but Delacroix most interested me, and I made an application to him to be received as a pupil, which he in a most amiable manner refused, but he seemed interested in putting me on the right way and gave me such advice as was in the range of casual conversation. I asked him what, in his mind, was the principal defect of modern art, as compared with ancient, and he replied "the execution." He had endeavored to remedy this in his own case by extensive copying of the old masters, and he showed me many of the copies—passages of different works, apparently made with the object of catching the quality of execution.