Marse Henry Part 23

I was very carefully and for those times not ignorantly taught in music.

Sch.e.l.l, 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 n.i.g.g.e.r-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 sc.r.a.pbook, of all sorts of odds and ends of original text. There is where Foster got his melodies. When the sc.r.a.pbook 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 ma.n.u.scripts 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 pa.s.sed 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 "cla.s.sic 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 gla.s.s 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 G.o.d," 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 pa.s.sed 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 "repet.i.tions" 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 pa.s.sed his life in great cities. The Parisian boulevardier taken away from the asphalt, the c.o.c.kney 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 literatteur, 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 pa.s.sed 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.