Part 16

Of all the public men of that period Carl Schurz most captivated me. When we first came into personal relations, at the Liberal Convention, which assembled at Cincinnati and nominated Greeley and Brown as a presidential ticket, he was just turned forty-three; I, two and thirty. The closest intimacy followed. Our tastes were much alike. Both of us had been educated in music. He played the piano with intelligence and feeling—especially Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, neither of us ever having quite reached the “high jinks” of Wagner.

To me his oratory was wonderful. He spoke to an audience of five or ten thousand as he would have talked to a party of three or six. His style was simple, natural, unstrained; the lucid statement and cogent argument now and again irradiated by a salient passage of satire or a burst of not too eloquent rhetoric.

He was quite knocked out by the nomination of Horace Greeley. For a long time he could not reconcile himself to support the ticket. Horace White and I addressed ourselves to the task of “fetching him into camp”—there being in point of fact nowhere else for him to go—though we had to get up what was called The Fifth Avenue Conference to make a bridge.

Truth to say, Schurz never wholly adjusted himself to political conditions in the United States. He once said to me in one of the querulous moods that sometimes overcame him: “If I should live a hundred years my enemies would still call me a—Dutchman!”

It was Schurz, as I have said, who brought Lamar and me together. The Mississippian had been a Secession Member of Congress when I was a Unionist scribe in the reporters’ gallery. I was a furious partisan in those days and disliked the Secessionists intensely. Of them, Lamar was most aggressive. I later learned that he was very many-sided and accomplished, the most interesting and lovable of men. He and Schurz “froze together,” as, brought together by Schurz, he and I “froze together.” On one side he was a sentimentalist and on the other a philosopher, but on all sides a fighter.

They called him a dreamer. He sprang from a race of chevaliers and scholars. Oddly enough, albeit in his moods a recluse, he was a man of the world; a favorite in society; very much at home in European courts, especially in that of England; the friend of Thackeray, at whose house, when in London, he made his abode. Lady Ritchie—Anne Thackeray—told me many amusing stories of his whimsies. He was a man among brainy men and a lion among clever women.

We had already come to be good friends and constant comrades when the whirligig of time threw us together for a little while in the lower house of Congress. One day he beckoned me over to his seat. He was leaning backward with his hands crossed behind his head.

As I stood in front of him he said: “On the eighth of February, 1858, Mrs. Gwin, of California, gave a fancy dress ball. Mr. Lamar, of Mississippi, a member of Congress, was there. Also a glorious young woman—a vision of beauty and grace—with whom the handsome and distinguished young statesman danced—danced once, twice, thrice, taking her likewise down to supper. He went to bed, turned his face to the wall and dreamed of her. That was twenty years ago. To-day this same Mr. Lamar, after an obscure interregnum, was with Mrs. Lamar looking over Washington for an apartment. In quest of cheap lodging they came to a mean house in a mean quarter, where a poor, wizened, ill-clad woman showed them through the meanly furnished rooms. Of course they would not suffice.

“As they were coming away the great Mr. Lamar said to the poor landlady, ‘Madam, have you lived long in Washington?’ She said all her life. ‘Madam,’ he continued, ‘were you at a fancy dress ball given by Mrs. Senator Gwin of California, the eighth of February, 1858?’ She said she was. ‘Do you remember,’ the statesman, soldier and orator continued, ‘a young and handsome Mississippian, a member of Congress, by the name of Lamar?’ She said she didn’t.”

I rather think that Lamar was the biggest brained of all the men I have met in Washington. He possessed the courage of his convictions. A doctrinaire, there was nothing of the typical doctrinaire, or theorist, about him. He really believed that cotton was king and would compel England to espouse the cause of the South.

Despite his wealth of experience and travel he was not overmuch of a raconteur, but he once told me a good story about his friend Thackeray. The two were driving to a banquet of the Literary Fund, where Dickens was to preside. “Lamar,” said Thackeray, “they say I can’t speak. But if I want to I can speak. I can speak every bit as good as Dickens, and I am going to show you to-night that I can speak almost as good as you.” When the moment arrived Thackeray said never a word. Returning in the cab, both silent, Thackeray suddenly broke forth. “Lamar,” he exclaimed, “don’t you think you have heard the greatest speech to-night that was never delivered?”

II

Holding office, especially going to Congress, had never entered any wish or scheme of mine. Office seemed to me ever a badge of bondage. I knew too much of the national capital to be allured by its evanescent and lightsome honors. When the opportunity sought me out none of its illusions appealed to me. But after a long uphill fight for personal and political recognition in Kentucky an election put a kind of seal upon the victory I had won and enabled me in a way to triumph over my enemies. I knew that if I accepted the nomination offered me I would get a big popular vote—as I did—and so, one full term, and half a term, incident to the death of the sitting member for the Louisville district being open to me, I took the short term, refusing the long term.

Though it was midsummer and Congress was about to adjourn I went to Washington and was sworn in. A friend of mine, Col. Wake Holman, had made a bet with one of our pals I would be under arrest before I had been twenty-four hours in town, and won it. It happened in this wise: The night of the day when I took my seat there was an all-night session. I knew too well what that meant, and, just from a long tiresome journey, I went to bed and slept soundly till sunrise. Just as I was up and dressing for a stroll about the old, familiar, dearly loved quarter of the town there came an imperative rap upon the door and a voice said: “Get up, colonel, quick! This is a sergeant at arms. There has been a call of the House and I am after you. Everybody is drunk, more or less, and they are noisy to have some fun with you.”

It was even as he said. Everybody, more or less, was drunk—especially the provisional speaker whom Mr. Randall had placed in the chair—and when we arrived and I was led a prisoner down the center aisle pandemonium broke loose.

They had all sorts of fun with me, such as it was. It was moved that I be fined the full amount of my mileage. Then a resolution was offered suspending my membership and sending me under guard to the old Capitol prison. Finally two or three of my friends rescued me and business was allowed to proceed. It was the last day of a very long session and those who were not drunk were worn out.

When I returned home there was a celebration in honor of the bet Wake Holman had won at my expense. Wake was the most attractive and lovable of men, by nature a hero, by profession a “filibuster” and soldier of fortune. At two and twenty he was a private in Col. Humphrey Marshall’s Regiment of Kentucky Riflemen, which reached the scene of hostilities upon the Rio Grande in the midsummer of 1846. He had enlisted from Owen county—“Sweet Owen,” as it used to be called—and came of good stock, his father, Col. Harry Holman, in the days of aboriginal fighting and journalism, a frontier celebrity. Wake’s company, out on a scout, was picked off by the Mexicans, and the distinction between United States soldiers and Texan rebels not being yet clearly established, a drumhead court-martial ordered “the decimation.”

This was a decree that one of every ten of the Yankee captives should be shot. There being a hundred of Marshall’s men, one hundred beans—ninety white and ten black—were put in a hat. Then the company was mustered as on dress parade. Whoso drew a white bean was to be held prisoner of war; whoso drew a black bean was to die.

In the early part of the drawing Wake drew a white bean. Toward the close the turn of a neighbor and comrade from Owen county who had left a wife and baby at home was called. He and Wake were standing together, Holman brushed him aside, walked out in his place and drew his bean. It turned out to be a white one. Twice within the half hour death had looked him in the eye and found no blinking there.

I have seen quite a deal of hardihood, endurance, suffering, in both women and men; splendid courage on the field of action; perfect self-possession in the face of danger; but I rather think that Wake Holman’s exploit that day—next to actually dying for a friend, what can be nobler than being willing to die for him?—is the bravest thing I know or have ever been told of mortal man.

Wake Holman went to Cuba in the Lopez Rebellion of 1851, and fought under Pickett at the Battle of Cardenas. In 1855-56 he was in Nicaragua, with Walker. He commanded a Kentucky regiment of cavalry on the Union side in our War of Sections. After the war he lived the life of a hunter and fisher at his home in Kentucky; a cheery, unambitious, big-brained and big-hearted cherub, whom it would not do to “projeck” with, albeit with entire safety you could pick his pocket; the soul of simplicity and amiability.

To have known him was an education in primal manhood. To sit at his hospitable board, with him at the head of the table, was an inspiration in the genius of life and the art of living. One of his familiars started the joke that when Wake drew the second white bean “he got a peep.” He took it kindly; though in my intimacy with him, extending over thirty years, I never heard him refer to any of his adventures as a soldier.

It was not possible that such a man should provide for his old age. He had little forecast. He knew not the value of money. He had humor, affection and courage. I held him in real love and honor. When the Mexican War Pension Act was passed by Congress I took his papers to General Black, the Commissioner of Pensions, and related this story.

“I have promised Gen. Cerro Gordo Williams,” said General Black, referring to the then senior United States Senator from Kentucky, “that his name shall go first on the roll of these Mexican pensioners. But”—and the General looked beamingly in my face, a bit tearful, and says he: “Wake Holman’s name shall come right after.” And there it is.

III

I was very carefully and for those times not ignorantly taught in music. Schell, his name was, and they called him “Professor.” He lived over in Georgetown, where he had organized a little group of Prussian refugees into a German club, and from my tenth to my fifteenth year—at first regularly, and then in a desultory way as I came back to Washington City from my school in Philadelphia, he hammered Bach and Handel and Mozart—nothing so modern as Mendelssohn—into my not unwilling nor unreceptive mind, for my bent was in the beginning to compose dramas, and in the end operas.

Adelina Patti was among my child companions. Once in the national capital, when I was 12 years old and Adelina 9, we played together at a charity concert. She had sung “The Last Rose of Summer,” and I had played her brother-in-law’s variation upon “Home, Sweet Home.” The audience was enthusiastic. We were called out again and again. Then we came on the stage together, and the applause increasing I sat down at the keyboard and played an accompaniment with my own interpolations upon “Old Folks At Home,” which I had taught Adelina, and she sang the words. Then they fairly took the roof off.

Once during a sojourn in Paris I was thrown with Christine Nilsson. She was in the heyday of her success at the Theater Lyrique under the patronage of Madame Miolan-Carvalho. One day I said to her: “The time may come when you will be giving concerts.” She was indignant. “Nevertheless,” I continued, “let me teach you a sure encore.” I played her Stephen Foster’s immortal ditty. She was delighted. The sequel was that it served her even a better turn than it had served Adelina Patti.

I played and transposed for the piano most of the melodies of Foster as they were published, they being first produced in public by Christy’s Minstrels.

IV

Stephen Foster was the ne’er-do-well of a good Pennsylvania family. A sister of his had married a brother of James Buchanan. There were two daughters of this marriage, nieces of the President, and when they were visiting the White House we had—shall I dare write it?—high jinks with our nigger-minstrel concerts on the sly.

Will S. Hays, the rival of Foster as a song writer and one of my reporters on the Courier-Journal, told me this story: “Foster,” said he, “was a good deal of what you might call a barroom loafer. He possessed a sweet tenor voice before it was spoiled by drink, and was fond of music, though technically he knew nothing about it. He had a German friend who when he died left him a musical scrapbook, of all sorts of odds and ends of original text. There is where Foster got his melodies. When the scrapbook gave out he gave out.”

I took it as merely the spleen of a rival composer. But many years after in Vienna I heard a concert given over exclusively to the performance of certain posthumous manuscripts of Schubert. Among the rest were selections from an unfinished opera—“Rosemonde,” I think it was called—in which the whole rhythm and movements and parts of the score of Old Folks at Home were the feature.

It was something to have grown up contemporary, as it were, with these songs. Many of them were written in the old Rowan homestead, just outside of Bardstown, Ky., where Louis Philippe lived and taught, and for a season Talleyrand made his abode. The Rowans were notable people. John Rowan, the elder, head of the house, was a famous lawyer, who divided oratorical honors with Henry Clay, and like Clay, was a Senator in Congress; his son, “young John,” as he was called, Stephen Foster’s pal, went as minister to Naples, and fought duels, and was as Bob Acres wanted to be, “a devil of a fellow.” He once told me he had been intimate with Thackeray when they were wild young men in Paris, and that they had both of them known the woman whom Thackeray had taken for the original of Becky Sharp.

The Foster songs quite captivated my boyhood. I could sing a little, as well as play, and learned each of them—especially Old Folks at Home and My Old Kentucky Home—as they appeared. Their contemporary vogue was tremendous. Nothing has since rivalled the popular impression they made, except perhaps the Arthur Sullivan melodies.

Among my ambitions to be a great historian, dramatist, soldier and writer of romance I desired also to be a great musician, especially a great pianist. The bone-felon did the business for this later. But all my life I have been able to thumb the keyboard at least for the children to dance, and it has been a recourse and solace sometimes during intervals of embittered journalism and unprosperous statesmanship.

V

Theodore Thomas and I used to play duos together. He was a master of the violin before he took to orchestration. We remained the best of friends to the end of his days.

On the slightest provocation, or none, we passed entire nights together. Once after a concert he suddenly exclaimed: “Don’t you think Wagner was a —— fraud?”

A little surprised even by one of his outbreaks, I said: “Wagner may have written some trick music but I hardly think that he was a fraud.”

He reflected a moment. “Well,” he continued, “it may not lie in my mouth to say it—and perhaps I ought not to say it—I know I am most responsible for the Wagner craze—but I consider him a —— fraud.”

He had just come from a long “classic entertainment,” was worn out with travel and worry, and meant nothing of the sort.

After a very tiresome concert when he was railing at the hard lines of a peripatetic musician I said: “Come with me and I will give you a soothing quail and as dry a glass of champagne as you ever had in your life.”

The wine was poured out and he took a sip.

“I don’t call that dry wine,” he crossly said, and took another sip. “My God,” without a pause he continued, “isn’t that great?”

Of course he was impulsive, even impetuous. Beneath his seeming cold exterior and admirable self-control—the discipline of the master artist—lay the moods and tenses of the musical temperament. He knew little or nothing outside of music and did not care to learn. I tried to interest him in politics. It was of no use. First he laughed my suggestions to scorn and then swore like a trooper. German he was, through and through. It was well that he passed away before the world war. Pat Gilmore—“Patrick Sarsfield,” we always called him—was a born politician, and if he had not been a musician he would have been a statesman. I kept the peace between him and Theodore Thomas by an ingenious system of telling all kinds of kind things each had said of the other, my “repetitions” being pure inventions of my own.

Chapter the Fourteenth

Henry Adams and the Adams Family—John Hay and Frank Mason—The Three _Mousquetaires_ of Culture—Paris—“The Frenchman”—The South of France

I

I have been of late reading The Education of Henry Adams, and it recalls many persons and incidents belonging to the period about which I am now writing. I knew Henry Adams well; first in London, then in Boston and finally throughout his prolonged residence in Washington City. He was an Adams; very definitely an Adams, but, though his ghost may revisit the glimpses of the moon and chide me for saying so, with an English “cut to his jib.”

No three brothers could be more unlike than Charles Francis, John Quincy and Henry Adams. Brooks Adams I did not know. They represented the fourth generation of the brainiest pedigree—that is in continuous line—known to our family history. Henry thought he was a philosopher and tried to be one. He thought he was a man of the world and wanted to be one. He was, in spite of himself, a provincial.

Provincialism is not necessarily rustic, even suburban. There is no provincial quite so provincial as he who has passed his life in great cities. The Parisian boulevardier taken away from the asphalt, the cockney a little off Clapham Common and the Strand, is lost. Henry Adams knew his London and his Paris, his Boston and his Quincy—we must not forget Quincy—well. But he had been born, and had grown up, between the lids of history, and for all his learning and travel he never got very far outside them.

In manner and manners, tone and cast of thought he was English—delightfully English—though he cultivated the cosmopolite. His house in the national capital, facing the Executive Mansion across Lafayette Square—especially during the life of his wife, an adorable woman, who made up in sweetness and tact for some of the qualities lacking in her husband—was an intellectual and high-bred center, a rendezvous for the best ton and the most accepted people. The Adamses may be said to have succeeded the Eameses as leaders in semi-social, semi-literary and semi-political society.

There was a trio—I used to call them the Three Musketeers of Culture—John Hay, Henry Cabot Lodge and Henry Adams. They made an interesting and inseparable trinity—Caleb Cushing, Robert J. Walker and Charles Sumner not more so—and it was worth while to let them have the floor and to hear them talk; Lodge, cool and wary as a politician should be; Hay, helterskelter, the real man of the world crossed on a Western stock; and Adams, something of a litératteur, a statesman and a cynic.

John Randolph Tucker, who when he was in Congress often met Henry at dinners and the like, said to him on the appearance of the early volumes of his History of the United States: “I am not disappointed, for how could an Adams be expected to do justice to a Randolph?”

While he was writing this history Adams said to me: “There is an old villain—next to Andrew Jackson the greatest villain of his time—a Kentuckian—don’t say he was a kinsman of yours!—whose papers, if he left any, I want to see.”

“To whom are you referring?” I asked with mock dignity.

“To John Adair,” he answered.

“Well,” said I, “John Adair married my grandmother’s sister and I can put you in the way of getting whatever you require.”

I have spoken of John Hay as Master of the Revels in the old Sutherland-Delmonico days. Even earlier than that—in London and Paris—an intimacy had been established between us. He married in Cleveland, Ohio, and many years passed before I came up with him again. One day in Whitelaw Reid’s den in the Tribune Building he reappeared, strangely changed—no longer the rosy-cheeked, buoyant boy—an overserious, prematurely old man. I was shocked, and when he had gone Reid, observing this, said: “Oh, Hay will come round all right. He is just now in one of his moods. I picked him up in Piccadilly the other day and by sheer force brought him over.”

When we recall the story of Hay’s life—one weird tragedy after another, from the murder of Lincoln to the murder of McKinley, including the tragic end of two members of his immediate family—there rises in spite of the grandeur that pursued him a single exclamation: “The pity of it!”

This is accentuated by Henry Adams’ Education. Yet the silent courage with which Hay met disaster after disaster must increase both the sympathy and the respect of those who peruse the melancholy pages of that vivid narrative. Toward the end, meeting him on a public occasion, I said: “You work too hard—you are not looking well.”

“I am dying,” said he.

“Yes,” I replied in the way of banter, “you are dying of fame and fortune.”

But I went no further. He was in no mood for the old verbal horseplay.