Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches Part 11

THE EXILE-WORLD OF LONDON.

Leicester Square and the region that lies around it are conventionally regarded as the exile quarter of London. The name of Leicester square suggests the idea of an exile, as surely and readily, even to the mind of one who has never looked on the mournful and decaying enclosure, as the name of Billingsgate does that of fish-woman, or the name of the Temple that of a law-student. Yet, if a stranger visiting London thinks he is likely to see any exile of celebrity, while pacing the streets which branch off Leicester square, he will be almost as much mistaken as if he were to range Eastcheap in the hope of meeting the wild Prince and Poins.

Many a conspiracy has had its followers and understrappers in the Leicester square region; but the great conspirators do not live there any more. The place is falling, falling; the foreign and distinctive character of the population remains as marked as ever, but the foreigners whom London people would care to see are not to be found there any longer. The exiles who have made part of history, whose names are on record, do not care for Leicester square. They are to be found in Kensington, in Brompton, in Hampstead and Highgate; in the Regent's Park district; a few in Bloomsbury, a few in Mayfair. A marble slab and an inscription now mark the house in King street, St. James's, where Louis Napoleon lodged; and there is a house in Belgrave square dear to all true Legitimists, where the Count de Chambord ("Henri Cinq") received Berryer and his brother pilgrims. Only poor exiles herd together now in London. Only poverty, I suppose, ever causes nationalities to herd together anywhere. The men who group around Leicester square are the exiles without a fame; the subterranean workers in politics; the men who come like shadows, and so depart; the men whose names are writ in water, even though their life-paths may have been marked in blood.

Living in London, I had of late years many opportunities of meeting with the exiles of each cla.s.s. I know few men more to be pitied than the great majority of those who make up the latter or Leicester square section. On the other hand, I should say that few men, indeed, are more to be envied by any of their fellow-creatures who love to be courted and "lionized," than the political exiles of great name who come to London and do not stay too long there.

Far away as the days of Thaddeus of Warsaw and the conventional and romantic type of exile now seem, there is still a fervent yearning in British society toward the representative of any Continental nationality which happens to be oppressed. No man had ever before received such a welcome in London as Kossuth did; but Kossuth stayed too long, became domesticized and familiarized, and society in London likes its lions to be always new and fresh. Moreover, the late Lord Palmerston, a warm patron of exiles when the patronage went no further than an invitation to a dinner or an evening party, set his face against Kossuth from the first; and polite society soon took the hint.

The man who most completely conquered all society, even the very highest, in London, during my recollection, was the man who probably cared least about it, and who certainly never sought to win the favor of fashion--I mean, of course, Garibaldi. To this day I am perfectly unable to understand the demeanor of the British peerage toward Garibaldi, when he visited London for a few days some years ago. The thing was utterly unprecedented and inexplicable. The Peerage literally rushed at him. He was beset by dukes, mobbed by countesses. He could not by any human possibility have so divided his day as to find time for breakfasting and dining with one-fifth of the n.o.ble hosts who fought and scrambled for him. It was a perpetual torture to his secretaries and private friends to decide between the rival claims of a Prime Minister and a Prince of the blood; an Archbishop and a d.u.c.h.ess; the Lord Chancellor and the leader of the Opposition. The Tories positively outdid the Whigs in the struggle for the society of the simple seaman, the gallant guerilla. The oddest thing about the business was, that three out of every four of these n.o.ble personages had always previously spoken of Garibaldi--when they did speak of him at all--with contempt and dislike, as a buccaneer and a filibuster.

What did it mean? Was it a little comedy? Was it their fun? Was it a political _coup de theatre_, to dodge the Radicals and the workingmen out of their favorite hero? Certainly some of Garibaldi's friends suspected something of the kind, and were utterly bewildered and confounded by the unexpected rush of aristocratic admirers, who beset the hero from the moment he touched the sh.o.r.e of England.

It was a strange sight, not easily to be forgotten, to see the manner in which Garibaldi sat among the dukes and marchionesses--simple, sweet, arrayed in the calm, serene dignity of a manly, n.o.ble heart. There was something of Oriental stateliness in the unruffled, imperturbable, bland composure, with which he bore himself amid the throng of demonstrative and t.i.tled adulators. I do not think he believed in the sincerity of half of it, any more than I did, but he showed no more sign of distrust or impatience than he did of gratified vanity.

The thing ended in a quarrel between the Aristocracy and the Democracy, between Belgravia and Clerkenwell, for the custody of the hero, and Garibaldi escaped somehow back to his island during the squabble. But I think Lady Palmerston let the mask fall for a moment, when, growing angry at the a.s.surance of Garibaldi's humbler friends, and perhaps a little tired of the whole business, she told some gentlemen of my acquaintance, that quite too much work had been made about a person who, after all, was only a respectable brigand. This was said (and it _was_ said) at the very meridian of the day of n.o.ble homage to the Emanc.i.p.ator of Sicily.

Garibaldi has never since returned to England. Should he ever do so, he will find himself unembarra.s.sed by the attentions of the Windsor uniform and Order of the Garter. The play, however it was got up, or whatever its object, was played out long ago. But the West End is, as a rule, very fond of distinguished exiles, when they come and go quickly; and Lord Palmerston's drawing-room was seldom without a representative of the cla.s.s. No man ever did less for any great cause than Lord Palmerston did; but he liked brilliant exiles, and, perhaps, more particularly the soldierly than the scholarly cla.s.s. Such a man as the martial, dashing, adventurous General Turr, for example, was the kind of refugee that Lord and Lady Palmerston especially favored.

Many English peers have, indeed, quite a _specialite_ in the way of patronizing exiles; but, of course, in all such cases the exile must have a name which brings some gratifying distinction to his host. He must be somebody worth pointing out to the other guests. I know that many Continental refugees have chafed at all this, and some have steadily held aloof from it, and declined to be shown off for the admiration of a novelty-hunting crowd. Many, too, have been deceived by it; have mistaken such idle attention for profound and practical sympathy, and have thought that two or three peers and half a dozen aristocratic petticoats could direct the foreign policy of England. They have swelled with hope and confidence; have built their plans and based their organizations on the faith that Park Lane meant the British government, and that the politeness of a Cabinet Minister was as good as the a.s.sistance of a British fleet; and have found out what idiots they were in such a belief, and have gone nigh to breaking their hearts accordingly. Indeed, the readiness of all cla.s.ses in England to rush at any distinguished exile, and become effusive about himself and his cause is very often--or, at least, used to be--a cruel kindness, sure to be misunderstood and to betray--a love that killed.

Nothing could, in its way, have been more unfortunate and calamitous than the outburst of popular enthusiasm in England about the Polish insurrection four years ago. Some of the Polish leaders living in London were completely deceived by it, and finally believed that England was about to take up arms in their cause. An agitation was got up, outside the House of Commons, by an earnest, well-meaning gentleman, who really believed what he said; and inside the House by a bustling, quickwitted, political adventurer, who certainly ought not to have believed what he said. This latter gentleman actually went out to Cracow, in Austrian Poland, and was received there with wild demonstrations of welcome as a representative of the national will of England and the precursor of English intervention. The Polish insurrection went on; and England wrote a diplomatic note, which Russia resented as a piece of impertinence; and there England's sympathy ended. "I think," said a great English Liberal to me, "that every Englishman who helped to encourage these poor Poles and give them hope of English help, has Polish blood on his hands." I think so, too.

I have always thought that Felice Orsini was in some sort a victim to the kind of delusion which English popularity so easily fosters. I met Orsini when he came to England, not very long before the unfortunate and criminal attempt of the Rue Lepelletier; and I was much taken, as most people who met him were, by the simplicity, sweetness, and soldierly frankness of his demeanor. He delivered some lectures in London, Manchester, Liverpool, and other large towns, on his own personal adventures--princ.i.p.ally his escape from prison--and though he had but a moderate success as a lecturer, he was surrounded everywhere by well-meaning and sympathizing groups, the extent of whose influence and the practical value of whose sympathy he probably did not at first quite understand. He certainly had, at one time, some vague hopes of obtaining for the cause of Italian independence a substantial a.s.sistance from England. A short experience cured him of that dream; and I fancy it was then that he formed the resolution which he afterward attempted so desperately to carry out. I think, from something I heard him say once, that Mazzini had endeavored to enlighten him as to the true state of affairs in England, and the real value of the sort of sympathy which London so readily offers to any interesting exile. But I do not believe Mazzini's advice had much influence over Orsini. Indeed, the latter, at the time I saw him, had but little respect for Mazzini. He spoke with something like contempt of the great conspirator. It would have been well for Orsini if he had, in one thing at least, followed the counsels of Mazzini. People used to say, some years ago, that odious and desperate as Orsini's attempt was, it at least had the merit of frightening Louis Napoleon into active efforts on behalf of Italy. There was so much about Orsini that was worthy and n.o.ble that one would be glad to regard him as even in his crime the instrument of good to the country he loved so well. But doc.u.mentary and other evidence has made it clear since Orsini's death that the negotiations which ended in Solferino and Villafranca were begun before Orsini had ever planned his murderous enterprise. The fact is, that, during the Crimean war, Cavour first tried England on the subject, through easy-going and heedless Lord Clarendon--who hardly took the trouble to listen to the audacious projects of his friend--and then turned to France, where quicker and shrewder ears listened to what he had to say.

I have spoken of Orsini's contempt for Mazzini. Such a feeling toward such a man seems quite inexplicable. Many men detest Mazzini; many men distrust him; many look up to him as a prophet, and adore him as a chief; but I am not able to understand how any one can think of him with mere contempt. For myself, I find it impossible to contemplate without sadness and without reverence that n.o.ble, futile career; that majestic, melancholy dream. But it must be owned that an atmosphere of illusion sheds itself around Mazzini wherever he goes. I believe the man himself to be the very soul of truth and honor; and yet I protest I would not take, on any political question, the unsupported testimony of any devotee of Mazzini to any fact whatsoever. Mazzini's own faith is so sublimely transcendental, so utterly independent of realities and of experience, that I sincerely believe the visions of the opium-eater are hardly less to be relied on than the oracles and opinions of the great Italian. And yet the force of his character, the commanding nature of his genius, are such that his followers become more Mazzinian than Mazzini himself. There is something a good deal provoking about the manner of the minor followers of Mazzini. I mean in England. I do not speak of such men as my friend, Mr. Stansfeld, now a Lord of the Treasury, or my friend, Mr. P. A. Taylor, M. P. These are men of ability and men of the world, whose enthusiasm and faith, even at their highest, are under the control of practical experience and the discipline of public life. But I speak of the minor and less responsible admirers, the men and women who accept oracle as fact, aspiration as experience, the dream as the reality. The calm, self-satisfied way in which they deal with contemporary history, with geography, with statistics, with possibilities and impossibilities, in the hope of making you believe what they firmly believe--that Italy could, if only she had proclaimed herself Republican, have driven the Austrians into the sea in 1859, and the French across the Alps in 1860, while at the same time quietly kicking Pope, Bourbon, and Savoy out of throned existence. The confident and imperturbable a.s.surance with which they can do all this--and I have never met with any genuine devotee of Mazzini who could not--is something to make one bewildered rather than merely impatient. For it is true in politics as in literature or in fashion, the admiring imitator reproduces only the defects, the weaknesses, the mannerisms and mistakes of the original. Mazzini himself is, I need hardly say, a singularly modest and retiring man. While he lived in London, he shrank from all public notice, and was seen only by his friends and followers. He sought out n.o.body. "Sir," said Mr. Gladstone, addressing the Speaker of the House of Commons, one night, when a fierce and factious attack was made on Mr. Stansfeld as a follower of the great exile, "I never saw Signor Mazzini." Yet Gladstone was by far the most prominent and influential of all the English sympathizers with the cause of Italian liberty. One would have thought it impossible for such a man as Mazzini to live for years in the same city with Gladstone without the two ever chancing to meet. But for the modest seclusion and shrinking way of Mazzini, such a thing would, indeed, have been impossible.

Louis Blanc is, perhaps, the only Revolutionary exile who, in my time, has been everywhere and permanently popular in London society. The fate of a political exile in a place like London usually is to be a lion among one clique and a _bete noir_ in another. But Louis Blanc has been accepted and welcomed everywhere, although he has never compromised or concealed one iota of his political opinions. I think one explanation, and, perhaps, _the_ explanation of this somewhat remarkable phenomenon, is to be found in the fact that Louis Blanc never for an hour played the part of a conspirator. He seems to have honorably construed his place in English society to be that of one to whom a shelter had been given, and who was bound not to make any use of that shelter which could embarra.s.s his host. In London he ceased to be an active politician. He refused to exhibit himself _en victime_. He appealed to no public pity. He made no parade of defeat and exile. He went to work steadily as a literary man, and he had the courage to be poor. When he appeared in public it was simply as a literary lecturer. He was not very successful in that capacity. At least, he was not what the secretary of a lyceum would call a success. He gave a series of lectures on certain phases of society in Paris before the great Revolution, and they were attended by all the best literary men in London, who were, I think, unanimous in their admiration of the power, the eloquence, the brilliancy which these pictures of a ghastly past displayed. But the general public cared nothing about the _salons_ where wit, and levity, and wickedness prepared the way for revolution; and I heard Louis Blanc pour out an _apologia_ (I don't mean an apology) for Jean Jacques Rousseau in language of n.o.ble eloquence, and with dramatic effect worthy of a great orator, in a small lecture-room, of which three-fourths of the s.p.a.ce was empty. Since that time he has delivered lectures occasionally at the request of mechanics' inst.i.tutions and such societies; but he has not essayed a course of lectures on his own account. Everyone knows him; everyone likes him; everyone admires his manly, modest character and his uncompromising Republicanism. Lately he has lived more in Brighton than in London; but wherever in England he happens to be, he lives always as a simple citizen; has never been raved about like Kossuth, or denounced like Mazzini; and has occupied himself wholly with his historical labors and his letters to a Paris newspaper.

Another exile of distinction who lived for years in London apart from politics and heedless of popular favor was Ferdinand Freiligrath, the German poet. Freiligrath had to leave Prussia because of his political poems and writings. He had undergone one prosecution and escaped conviction, but Prussia was not then (twenty years ago) a country in which to run such risks too often. So Freiligrath went to Amsterdam and thence to London. He lived in London for many years, and acted as manager of a Swiss banking-house. His life was one of entire seclusion from political schemes or agitations. He did not even, like his countryman and friend, Gottfried Kinkel, take any part in public movements among the Germans in London--and he certainly never went about society and the newspapers blowing his own trumpet, and keeping his name always prominent, like the egotistical and inflated Karl Blind. Indeed, so complete was Freiligrath's retirement that many Englishmen living in London, who delighted in some of his poems--his exquisite, fanciful, melodious "Sand Songs" his glowing Desert poems, his dreamy, delightful songs of the sea, and his burning political ballads--were quite amazed to find that the poet himself had been a resident of their own city for nearly half a lifetime. Freiligrath has now at last returned to his own country. His countrymen invited him home, and raised a national tribute to enable him to give up his London engagement and withdraw altogether from a life of mere business. In a letter I lately received from Freiligrath's daughter (a young lady of great talent and accomplishments, recently married in London), I find it mentioned that Freiligrath expected soon to receive a visit from Longfellow in Germany--the first meeting of these two old friends for a period of some five-and-twenty years.

Alexander Herzen, the famous Russian exile, the wittiest of men, endowed with the sharpest tongue and the best nature, has left us. For many years he lived in London and published his celebrated _Kolokol_--"The Bell," which rang so ominously and jarringly in the ears of Russian autocracy. He has now set up his staff in Geneva, a little London in its attractiveness to exiles; and his arrowy, flashing wit gleams no longer across the foreign world of the English metropolis. I do not know how long Herzen had lived in London, but I fancy the difficulties of the English language must have proved insurmountable to him--a strange phenomenon in the case of a Russian. Certainly he never, so far as I am aware, either spoke or wrote English.

The latest exile of great mark whom we had among us in London was General Prim. When his attempt at revolution in Spain failed some two years ago, Prim went into Belgium. There some pressure was brought to bear upon him by the Ministry, in consequence, no doubt, of certain pressure brought to bear by France, and Prim left Brussels and came to live in London. He lived very quietly, made no show of himself in any way, and was no doubt hard at work all the time making preparation for what has since come to pa.s.s. To all appearance he had an easy and careless sort of life, living out among his private friends, going to the races and going to the opera. But he was incessantly planning and preparing; and he told many Englishmen candidly what he was preparing for. There were many men in London who were looking out for the Spanish Revolution months before it came, on the faith of Prim's earnest a.s.surances that it was coming. So much has of late been written about Prim that his personal appearance and manner must be familiar to most readers of newspapers and magazines. I need only say that there is in private much less of the _militaire_ about him than one who had not actually met him would be inclined to imagine. He is small, neat, and even elegant in dress, very quiet and perhaps somewhat languid in manner, looking wonderfully young for his years, and without the slightest tinge of the Leicester square foreigner about him. He is rather the foreigner of Regent street and the stalls of the opera house--any one who knows London will at once understand the difference.

Prim impressed me with a much greater respect for his intellect, even from a literary man's point of view, than I had had before meeting and conversing with him. I think those who regard him as a mere _sabreur_, the ordinary Spanish leader of a successful military revolution, are mistaken. His animated and epigrammatic conversation seemed to me to be inspired and guided by an intellectual depth and a power of observation and reflection such as I at least was not prepared to find in the dashing soldier of the Moorish campaign.

There is one cla.s.s of the obscure exiles, different from both the favored and the poorest, whose existence has often puzzled me. A political question of moment begins to disturb the European continent.

Immediately there turns up in London, and presents himself at your door (supposing you are a journalist with acknowledged sympathies for this or that side of the question) a mysterious and generally shabby-looking personage, who professes to know all about it, and volunteers to supply you with the most authentic information and the most trustworthy "appreciation" of any events that may transpire. He wants no money; his information is given for the sake of "the cause." You ask for credentials, and he produces recommendations which quite satisfy you that his objects are genuine, although, oddly enough, the persons who recommend him do not seem to have anything whatever to do with the cause he represents. He comes, for example, to talk about the affairs of Roumania, and he brings letters and vouchers from literary friends in Paris. He professes to be an emissary from the Cretans, and his recommendations are from a Manchester cotton-firm. Anyhow, you are satisfied; you ask no explanations; you a.s.sume that your Paris or Manchester friends have enlarged the sphere of their sympathies since you saw them last, and you repose confidence in your new acquaintance.

You are right. He brings you information, the most rapid, the most surprising, the most accurate. Such a man I knew during the Schleswig-Holstein agitation, which ended in the Danish war of four years since. He was a Prussian--a waif of the Berlin rising of 1848. Was he in the confidence of Von Beust, and Bismarck, and Palmerston, and all the rest of them? I venture to doubt it; yet if he had been, he could hardly have been more quick and accurate in all the information he brought me. Evening after evening he brought a regular minute of the proceedings of the day at the Conference of London, which was sitting with closed doors, and pledged to profoundest secrecy. Perhaps this was only guesswork! Here is one ill.u.s.tration. The Conference was held because some of the European Great Powers, England and France especially, desired to save Denmark from a struggle against the immeasurably superior force of Prussia and Austria. A certain proposal was to be made to the Conference by England and France on the part of Denmark. So much we all knew. One evening my friend came to me, and bade me announce to the world that the proposal had been made that day, and indignantly rejected--by Denmark! The story seemed preposterous, but I relied on my friend. Next day I was laughed at; my news was denounced and repudiated. The day after it was proved to be true--and Denmark went to war.

The last time I saw my friend was in the spring of 1866. He came to tell me that Prussia had resolved--at least that Bismarck had resolved--on war with Austria. "Stick to that statement," he said, "whatever anybody may say to the contrary--unless Bismarck resigns." I took his advice. At this time I am convinced that the English government had not the least idea that a war was really coming. The war came; but I never saw my friend any more.

Another of my mysterious acquaintances was an old, white-haired, grave, placid man who turned up in London during the early part of the French occupation of Mexico. He was a pa.s.sionate Republican and anti-Bonapartist. He was a friend and apparently a confidant of Juarez, and was thoroughly identified with the interests of the Republicans in Mexico, although himself a Frenchman. I doubt whether I have ever met with a finer specimen of the courtly old gentleman, the cla.s.s now beginning to disappear even in France, than this mysterious friend of the Mexican Republic. He might have been fresh from the Faubourg St.

Germain, such was the grave, dignified, and somewhat melancholy grace of his courtly bearing. Yet he had evidently lived long in Mexico, and he was an ardent Republican of the red tinge; there was something of the old _militaire_ about him, too, which lent a certain strength to his bland and placid demeanor. I never quite knew what he was doing in London. He was not what is called an "unofficial representative" of Juarez (at this time diplomatic relations between England and Mexico were of course broken off) for he never seemed to go near any of our ministers or diplomatists, and his only object appeared to be to supply accurate information to one or two Liberal journals which he believed to be honestly inclined toward the right side of every question. His information was always accurate, his estimate of a critical situation was always justified by further knowledge and the progress of events, his predictions always came true. He looked like a poor man, indeed, like a needy man; yet he never seemed to want for money, and he neither sought nor would have any compensation for the constant and valuable information he afforded. His knowledge of European and American politics was profound; and though he spoke not one word of English he seemed to understand all the daily details of our English political life. He was a constant visitor to me (always at night and late) during the progress of the Mexican struggle. When the Mexican Empire was nearly played out he came and told me the end was very, very near, and that in the event of Maximilian's being captured it would be impossible for Juarez to spare his life. He did not tell me that he was at once returning to Mexico, but I presume that he did immediately return, for that was the last I saw or heard of him.

During the quarrels between the Prussian Representative Chamber and Count von Bismarck (before the triumph of Sadowa had condoned for the offences of the great despotic Minister), I had a visit, one night, from a mysterious, seedy, snuffy old German. He came, he said, to develop a grand plan for the extinction of the Junker or Feudal party. Why he came to develop it to me I do not know, as it will presently be seen that I could hardly render it any practical a.s.sistance. It was, like all grand schemes, remarkably simple in its nature. Indeed, it was literally and strictly Captain Bobadil's immortal plan; although my German visitor indignantly repudiated the supposition that he had borrowed it, and declared, I believe, with perfect truth, that he had never heard of Captain Bobadil before. The plan was simply that a society should be formed of young and devoted Germans who should occupy themselves in challenging and killing off, one by one, the whole Junker party. My friend made his calculations very calmly, and he did not foolishly or arrogantly a.s.sume that the swordsmanship of his party must needs be always superior to that of their adversaries. No; he counted that there would be a certain number of victims among his Liberal heroes, and made, indeed, a large allowance, left a broad margin for such losses. But this, in no wise affected the success of his plan. The Liberals, were many, the Junkers few. It would simply be a matter of time and calculation. Numbers must tell in the end. A day must come when the last Junker would fall to earth--and then Astrea would return. Now the man who talked in this way was no lunatic. He had nothing about him, except his plan, which denoted mental aberration. His scheme apart, he was as steady and prosy an old German as you could meet under the lindens of Berlin or on the Lutherplatz of Konigsberg. He was, moreover, as earnest, argumentative, and profoundly wearisome over his project as if he were expounding to an admiring cla.s.s of students the relations of the Ego and Non-Ego. I need hardly add that one single beam, even the faintest, of a sense of the ridiculous, never shone in upon him during his long and eloquent exposition of the patriotic virtue, the completeness and the mathematical certainty of his ingenious project.

Let me close my random reminiscences with one recollection of a sadder nature. Some three or four years ago there came to London from Naples an Italian of high education and character--a lawyer by profession; a pa.s.sionate devotee of Italian unity, and filled naturally with a hatred of the expelled Bourbons. This gentleman had discovered in one of the Neapolitan prisons a number of instruments of torture--rusty, hideous old iron chairs, and racks, and screws, and "cages of silence," and such other contrivances. He became the possessor of these, and he obtained from the new government a certificate of the genuineness of his treasure-trove--that is to say, a certificate that the things were actually found in the place where the owner professed to have found them. The Italian authorities, of course, could say nothing as to whether they had or had not been used as instruments of torture in any modern reign. They may have lain rusting there since hideous old days when the Inquisition was a fashionable inst.i.tution; they may have been used--public opinion and Mr. Gladstone said things as horrible had been done--in the blessed reign of good King Bomba. The Neapolitan lawyer firmly believed that they had been so used; and he became inspired with the idea that to take these instruments, first to London and then to the United States, and exhibit them, and lecture on them, would arouse such a tempest of righteous indignation among all peoples, free or enslaved, as must sweep kingcraft and priestcraft off the earth. This idea became a faith with him. He brought his treasure of rusty iron to London, and proposed to take a great hall and begin the work of his mission. I endeavored to dissuade him (he had brought some introductions to me). I told him frankly that, just at that time, public opinion in London was utterly indifferent to the Bourbons. The fervor of interest about the Neapolitan Revolution had gone by; people were tired of Italy, and wanted something new; the Polish insurrection was going on; the great American Civil War was occupying public attention; London audiences cared no more about the crimes of the Bourbons than about the crimes of the Borgias. He was not to be dissuaded. He really believed at first that he could induce some great English orator, Gladstone or Bright, to deliver lectures on those instruments and the guilt of the system which employed them. Then he became more moderate, and applied to this and that professional lecturer--in vain. No one would have anything to do with a project so obviously doomed to failure--he himself spoke no English. At last he induced a lady who was somewhat ambitious of a public career, to lecture for him; and he took a great hall for a series of nights, and advertised largely, and went to great expense. I believe he staked all he had in money or credit on the success of the enterprise; and the making of money was not his object; he would have cheerfully given all he had to create a flame of public indignation against despotism. Need I say what a failure the enterprise was? The London public never manifested the slightest interest in the exhibition.

The lecture-hall was empty. I believe the poor Neapolitan tried again and again. The public would not come, or look, or listen. He spent his money in vain; he got into debt in vain. His instruments of torture must have inflicted on their owner agonies enough to have satisfied Maniscalco or Carafa. At last he could bear it no longer. He wrote a few short letters to some friends (I have still that which I received--a melancholy memorial), simply thanking them for what efforts they had made to a.s.sist him in his object, acknowledging that he had been over sanguine, and intimating that he had now given up the enterprise.

Nothing more was said or hinted. A day or two after, he locked himself up in his room. Somebody heard an explosion, but took no particular notice. The lady who had endeavored to give voice to my poor friend's scheme came, later in the day, to see him. The door was broken open--and the poor Neapolitan lay dead, a pistol still in his hand, a pistol bullet in his brain.

THE REVEREND CHARLES KINGSLEY.

I wonder how many of the rising generation in America or in England have read "Alton Locke"? Many years have pa.s.sed since I read or even saw it.

I do not care to read it any more, for I fear that it would not now sustain the effect of the impression it once produced on me, and I do not desire to destroy or even to weaken that impression. I know the book is not a great work of art. I know that three-fourths of its value consists in its blind and earnest feeling; that the story is heavily constructed, that many of the details are extravagant exaggerations, and that the author after all was not in the least a democrat or a believer in human equality. I have not forgotten that even then, when he braved respectable public opinion by taking a tailor for his hero, he took good care that the tailor should have genteel relations. Still I retain the impression which the book once produced, and I do not care to have it disturbed. Therefore I do not read or criticise "Alton Locke" any more; I remember it only as it struck me long ago--as a generous protest against the brutal indifference, literary and political, which left the London artisan so long to toil and suffer and sicken, to run into debt, to drink and fight and pine and die, in the darkness. Is it necessary--perhaps it is--to explain to some of my readers the story of "Alton Locke"? It is the story of a young London tailor-boy who has instincts and aspirations far above his cla.s.s; who yearns to be a poet and a patriot; who loves and struggles in vain; who is supposed to sum up in his own weakly body all the best emotions, the vainest pinings, the wildest wishes, the most righteous protests of his fellows; who joins with the Chartist movement for lack of a better way to the great end, and sees its failure, and himself utterly broken down goes out to America to seek a new life there, and only beholds the sh.o.r.e of the promised land to die. Here at least was a grand idea. Here was the motive of a prose epic that ought to have been more thrilling to modern ears than the song of Ta.s.so. The effect of the work at the time was strengthened by the fact that the author was a clergyman of the Church of England, who was believed to be a man of aristocratic family and connections. The book was undoubtedly a great success in its day. The strong idea which was in the heart of it carried it along. The Rev.

Charles Kingsley became suddenly famous.

"Alton Locke" was published more than twenty years ago. Then Charles Kingsley was to most boys in Great Britain who read books at all a sort of living embodiment of chivalry, liberty, and a revolt against the established order of baseness and cla.s.s-oppression in so many spheres of our society. The author of "Alton Locke" about the same time delivered a sermon in the country church where he officiated, so full of warm and pa.s.sionate protest against the wrongs done to the poor by existing systems, that his spiritual chief, the rector or dean or some other dignitary, arose in the church itself--morally and physically arose, as Mrs. Gamp did--and denounced the preacher. Need it be said that the report of so unusual and extraordinary a scene as this excited our youthful enthusiasm into a perfect flame for the minister of the State Church who had braved the public censure of his superior in the cause of human right? For a long time Charles Kingsley was our chosen hero--I am speaking now of young men with the youthful spirit of revolt in them, with dreams of republics and ideas about the equality of man. If I were to be asked to describe Charles Kingsley now, having regard to the tendency of his writings and his public att.i.tude, how should I speak of him? First, as about the most perverse and wrong-headed supporter of every political abuse, the most dogmatic champion of every wrong cause in domestic and foreign politics, that even a State Church has for many years produced. I hardly remember, in my practical observation of politics, a great public question but Charles Kingsley was at the wrong side of it. The vulgar glorification of mere strength and power, such a disgraceful characteristic of modern public opinion, never had a louder-tongued votary than he. The apostle of liberty and equality, as he seemed to me in my early days, has of late only shown himself to my mind as the champion of slave-systems of oppression and the iron reign of mere force. Is this a paradox? Has the man undergone a wonderful change of opinions? It is not a paradox, and I think Charles Kingsley has not changed his views. Perhaps a short sketch of the man and his work may reconcile these seeming antagonisms and make the reality coherent and clear.

I was present at a meeting not long since where Mr. Kingsley was one of the princ.i.p.al speakers. The meeting was held in London, the audience was a peculiarly c.o.c.kney audience, and Charles Kingsley is personally little known to the public of the metropolis. Therefore when he began to speak there was quite a little thrill of wonder and something like incredulity through the listening benches. Could that, people near me asked, really be Charles Kingsley, the novelist, the poet, the scholar, the aristocrat, the gentleman, the pulpit-orator, the "soldier-priest," the apostle of muscular Christianity? Yes, that was indeed he. Rather tall, very angular, surprisingly awkward, with thin, staggering legs, a hatchet face adorned with scraggy gray whiskers, a faculty for falling into the most ungainly att.i.tudes, and making the most hideous contortions of visage and frame; with a rough provincial accent and an uncouth way of speaking, which would be set down for absurd caricature on the boards of a comic theatre; such was the appearance which the author of "Glaucus" and "Hypatia" presented to his startled audience.

Since Brougham's time nothing so ungainly, odd, and ludicrous had been displayed upon an English platform. Needless to say, Charles Kingsley has not the eloquence of Brougham. But he has a robust and energetic plain-speaking which soon struck home to the heart of the meeting. He conquered his audience. Those who at first could hardly keep from laughing; those who, not knowing the speaker, wondered whether he was not mad or in liquor; those who heartily disliked his general principles and his public att.i.tude, were alike won over, long before he had finished, by his bluff and blunt earnestness and his transparent sincerity. The subject was one which concerned the social suffering of the poor. Mr. Kingsley approached it broadly and boldly, talking with a grand disregard for logic and political economy, sometimes startling the more squeamish of his audience by the Biblical frankness of his descriptions and his language, but, I think, convincing every one that he was sound at heart, and explaining unconsciously to many how it happened that one endowed with sympathies so humane and liberal should so often have distinguished himself as the champion of the stupidest systems and the harshest oppressions. Anybody could see that the strong impelling force of the speaker's character was an emotional one; that sympathy and not reason, feeling rather than logic, instinct rather than observation, would govern his utterances. There are men in whom, no matter how robust and masculine their personal character, a disproportionate amount of the feminine element seems to have somehow found a place. These men will usually see things not as they really are, but as they are reflected through some personal prejudice or emotion.

They will generally spring to conclusions, obey sudden impulses and instincts, ignore evidence and be very "thorough" and sweeping in all their judgments. When they are right they are--like the young lady in the song--very, very good; but like her, too, when they happen to be wrong they are "horrid." Of these men the author of "Alton Locke" is a remarkable ill.u.s.tration. It seems odd to describe the expounder of the creed of Muscular Christianity as one endowed with too much of the feminine element. But for all his vigor of speech and his rough voice, Mr. Charles Kingsley is as surely feminine in his way of reasoning, his likes and dislikes, his impulses and his prejudices, as Harriet Martineau is masculine in her intellect and George Sand in her emotions.

Mr. Charles Kingsley is a man of ancient English family, very proud of his descent, and full of the conviction so ostentatiously paraded by many Englishmen, that good blood carries with it a warrant for bravery, justice, and truth. The Kingsleys are a Cheshire family; I believe they date from before the Conquest--it does not much matter. I shall not apply to them John Bright's epigram about families which came over with William the Conqueror and never did anything else; for the Kingsleys seem to have been always an active race. They took an energetic part in the civil war during Charles the First's time, and stood by the Parliament. I am told that the family have still in their possession a commission to raise a troop of horse, given to a Kingsley and signed by Oliver Cromwell. One of the family emigrated to the New World with the Pilgrim Fathers, and I believe the Kingsley line still flourishes there like a bay-tree. Irrepressible energy, so far as I know, seems to have always been a characteristic of the household. Charles Kingsley was born near Dartmouth, in Devonshire; every one who has read his books must know how he revels in descriptions of the lovely scenery of Devon. He was for a while a pupil of the Rev. Derwent Coleridge, son of the poet, and he finally studied at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Mr. Kingsley was originally intended for the legal profession, but he changed his mind and went into the church. He was first curate and soon after rector of the Hampshire parish of Eversley, the name of which has since been so constantly kept in a.s.sociation with his own. I may mention that Mr.

Kingsley married one of a trio of sisters--the Misses Grenfell--a second of whom was afterwards married to Mr. Froude, and is since dead, while the third became the wife of one of the foremost English journalists.

Pa.s.sing away from these merely personal facts, barely worth a brief note, we shall find that Kingsley's real existence, if I may use such a phrase, began and developed under the guidance of a remarkable man and under the inspiration of a strange movement. The man to whose leadership and teaching Mr. Kingsley owed so much was the Rev. Frederick Denison Maurice, who died in the first week of last April.

It would not be easy to explain to an American reader the meaning and the extent of the influence which this eminent man exercised over a large field of English society. The life of Mr. Maurice contains nothing worthy of note as to facts and dates; but its spirit infused new soul and sense into a whole generation. He was not a great speaker or a great thinker; he was not a bold reformer; he had not a very subtle intellect; I doubt whether his writings will be much read in coming time. He was simply a great character, a grand influence. He sent a new life into the languid and decaying frame of the State Church of England. He quickened it with a fresh sense of duty. His hope and purpose were to bring that church into affectionate and living brotherhood with modern thought, work, and society. An early friend and companion of John Sterling (the two friends married two sisters), Maurice had all the sweetness and purity of Carlyle's hero, with a far greater intellectual strength. Mr.

Maurice set himself to make the English Church a practical influence in modern thought and society. He did not believe in a religion sitting apart on the cold Olympian heights of dogmatic theology, and looking down with dignified disdain upon the common life and the vulgar toils of humanity. He held that a church, if it is good for anything, ought to be able to meet fair and square the challenge of the skeptic and the infidel, and that it ought to concern itself about all that concerns men and women. One of the fruits of his long and valuable labor is the Workingmen's College in Red Lion Square, London, an inst.i.tution of which he became the princ.i.p.al and to which he devoted much of his time and attention. Only a few weeks before his death he presided at one of the public meetings of this his favorite inst.i.tution. He was the parent of the scheme of "Christian socialism," which sprang into existence more than twenty years ago and is bearing fruit still--a scheme to set on foot cooperative a.s.sociations among working men on sound and progressive principles; to help the working men by advances of capital, in order that they might thus be enabled to help themselves. One of Mr. Maurice's earliest and most ardent pupils was Charles Kingsley; another was Thomas Hughes. In helping Mr. Maurice to carry out these schemes Kingsley was brought into frequent intercourse with some of the London Chartists, and especially with the working tailors, who have nearly all a strong radical tendency. Kingsley's impulsive sympathies took fire, and flamed out with the novel "Alton Locke, Tailor and Poet."

That extraordinary Chartist movement, so long in preparation and so suddenly extinguished, how completely a thing of the past it seems to have become! Only twenty-four years have pa.s.sed since its collapse. Men under forty can recall, as if it were yesterday, all its incidents and its princ.i.p.al figures. People in the United States know that my friend Henry Vincent is still only in his prime; he was one of its earliest and foremost leaders. But it seems as old and dead as a peasant-war of the Middle Ages. It was a strange jumble of politics and social complaints.

It was partly the blind, pa.s.sionate protest of working men who knew that they had no right to starve and suffer in a prosperous country, but who hardly knew where the real grievance lay. It was partly the protest of untaught and eager intelligence against the brutal apathy of government which would do nothing for national education. Its political demands were very modest. Some of them have since been quietly carried into law; some of them have been quietly dismissed into the realm of anachronisms.

Chartism was indeed rather a wild cry, a pa.s.sionate yearning of lonely men for combination, than any definite political enterprise. One looks back now with a positive wonder upon the savage stupidity of the ruling cla.s.ses which so nearly converted it into a rebellion. Of course it was in some instances seized hold of by selfish and scheming politicians, who played with it for their own purposes. Of course it had its evil counsellors, its false friends, its cowards, and its traitors. But on the whole there was a n.o.ble spirit of manly honesty pervading the movement, which to my mind fills it with a romantic interest and ought to secure for it an honorable memory. It found leaders in many cases outside its own cla.s.ses. There was, for example, "Tom Duncombe," a sort of Alcibiades of English Radicalism; a brilliant talker in Parliament, a gay man of fashion, steeped deep in reckless debt and sparkling dissipation; hand and glove with the fast young n.o.blemen of the West End gambling houses, and the ardent Chartist working men of Sh.o.r.editch and Clerkenwell. There was Feargus O'Connor--huge, boistering, fearless--a burlesque Mirabeau with red hair; a splendid mob-speaker, who could fight his way by sheer strength of muscle and fist through a hostile crowd; vain of his half-mythical descent from Irish kings, even when he delighted in being hail fellow well met with tailors and hod-carriers; revelling in the fiercest struggles of politics and the wildest freaks of prolonged debauchery. O'Connor tried to crowd half a dozen lives into one, and the natural result was that he prematurely broke down. For a long time before his death he was a mere lunatic. A strange fact was that as his manners were always eccentric and boisterous, he had become an actual madman for months before those around him were fully aware of the change. In the House of Commons the freaks of the poor lunatic were for a long time supposed to be only more marked eccentricities, or, as some thought, insolent affectations of eccentricity. He would rise while Lord Palmerston was addressing the House, walk up to the great minister, and give him a tremendous slap on the back. One night he actually a.s.saulted a member of the House, and the Speaker ordered his arrest.

Feargus sauntered coolly out into the lobbies. The sergeant-at-arms was bidden to go forth and arrest the offender. Lord Charles Russell (brother of Earl Russell), then and now sergeant-at-arms, is a thin, little, feeble man. I have been told by some who witnessed it that the scene in the lobbies became highly amusing. Lord Charles went with reluctant steps about his awful task. By this time everybody was beginning to suspect that O'Connor was really a madman. Anyhow, he was a giant, and at his sanest moments perfectly reckless. Now it is not a pleasant task for a weak and little man to be sent to arrest even a sane giant; but only think of laying hands on a giant who appears to be out of his senses! The dignity of his office, however, had to be upheld, and Lord Charles trotted quietly after his huge quarry. He cast imploring looks at member after member, but it was none of their business to interfere, and they had no inclination to volunteer. Some of them indeed were deeply engrossed in speculations as to what would happen if Feargus were suddenly to turn round. Would the sergeant-at-arms put his dignity in his pocket and actually run? Or, if he stood his ground, what would be the result? Happily, however, just as Feargus and his unwilling pursuer reached Westminster Hall, the eager eye of Lord Charles Russell descried a little knot of policemen; he hailed them; they came up, and the sergeant-at-arms did his duty and the capture was effected. I can well remember seeing O'Connor, somewhere about this time, sauntering through Covent Garden market, with rolling, restless gait; his hair, that once was fiery red, all snowy white; his eye gleaming with the peculiar, quick, shallow, ever-changing glitter of madness. The poor fellow rambled from fruit-stall to fruit-stall, talking all the while to himself, sometimes taking up a fruit as if he meant to buy it, and then putting it down with a vacant laugh and walking on. It was a pitiable spectacle. His light of reason soon flickered out altogether, and death came to his relief.

I must not omit to mention, when speaking of the Chartist leaders, the brave, disinterested, and highly-gifted Ernest Jones, who sacrificed such bright worldly prospects for the cause of the People's Charter.

Long after the Charter and its agitation were dead, Jones emerged into public life again, still comparatively a young man, and he seemed about to enter on a career both brilliant and valuable. An immature and unexpected death interposed.

However, I have wandered away from the subject of my paper. Charles Kingsley came to know the princ.i.p.al working men among the Chartists, and his impulsive nature was greatly influenced by their words and their lives. Most of their leaders drawn from other cla.s.ses, O'Connor especially, he distrusted and disliked. But the rank and file of the movement, the working men, the sufferers, the "proletaires" as they would be called nowadays, attracted his kindly heart. Chartism had fallen. It collapsed suddenly in 1848; died amid Homeric laughter of the public. It fell mainly because it had come to occupy a false position altogether. Partly by ignorance, partly by the selfish folly of some of its leaders, and partly by the severity of the government measures, the movement had been driven into a dilemma which it never originally contemplated. It must either go into open rebellion or surrender. It was jammed up like MacMahon at Sedan. Chartism had no real wish to rebel, although of course the flame of the recent revolution in Paris had glared over it and made it wild; and it had no means of carrying on a revolt for a single day. So it could only surrender; and the surrender took place under conditions which made it seem utterly ridiculous.

Kingsley was seized with the idea of crystallizing all this into a romance. He had as a further stimulant and guide the work which Henry Mayhew was then publishing, "London Labor and the London Poor," a serial which by its painful and startling revelations was working a profound impression on England. Mayhew's narratives were often inaccurate, for he could not conduct the whole enterprise himself, and had sometimes to call in the aid of careless and untrustworthy a.s.sociates, who occasionally found it easier to throw off a bit of sentimental or sensational romance than to pursue a patient inquiry. But the general effect of the publication was healthful and practical, and it became the parent of nearly all the efforts that followed to lay bare and ameliorate the condition of the London poor. There can be no doubt that it had a great influence on the impressionable mind of Charles Kingsley.

He wrote "Alton Locke," and the book became a great success. The Tailor and Poet was the hero of the hour. "Blackwood" at once christened Alton Locke "Young Remnants;" but Young Remnants survived the joke. The novel is full of nonsense and extravagance; and with all its sympathy for tailors, it has a great deal of Kingsley's characteristic affection for rank and birth. But it had a really great idea at its heart, and struck out one or two new characters--especially that of the old Scotch bookseller--and it made its mark. The peculiarity, however, to which I wish now especially to direct attention is its utter absence of practical thinking-power. Nowhere can you find any proof that the author is able to think about anything. An idea strikes him; he seizes it, and, to use Hawthorne's expression, "wields it like a flail." Then he throws it down and takes up something else, to employ it in the same wild and incoherent fashion. This is Kingsley all out, and always. He is not content with developing his one only gift of any literary value--the capacity to paint big, striking pictures with a strong glare or glow on them. He firmly believes himself a profound philosopher and social reformer, and he will insist on obtruding before the world on all occasions his absolute incapacity for any manner of reasoning on any subject whatsoever. Wild with intellectual egotism, and blind to all teaching from without, Kingsley rushes at great and difficult subjects head downwards like a bull. Thus he tackled Chartism, and society, and compet.i.tion, and political economy, and what not, in his "Alton Locke"; and thus he has gone on ever since and will to the end of his chapter, always singling out for the display of his powers the very subjects whereof he knows least, and is by the whole const.i.tution of his intellect and temperament least qualified to judge.

I am writing now rather about Kingsley himself than about his books, with which the readers of "The Galaxy" are of course well acquainted. I therefore pa.s.s over the many books he produced between "Alton Locke" and "Westward Ho!"--and I dwell upon the latter only because it ill.u.s.trates the next great idea which got hold of the author after the little fever about Chartism had pa.s.sed away. I suppose "Westward Ho!" may be regarded as the first appearance of the school of Muscular Christianity. Mr.

Kingsley started for our benefit the huge British hero who could do anything in the way of fighting and walking, and propagated the doctrines of the English Church. To read the Bible and to kill the Spaniards was the whole duty of the ideal Briton of Elizabeth's time, according to this authority. The notion was a success. In a moment our literature became flooded with pious athletes who knocked their enemies down with texts from the Scriptures and left-handers from the shoulder.

All these heroes were of necessity "gentlemen." One of the princ.i.p.al articles of the new gospel according to Kingsley was that truth, valor, muscle, and theological fervor were only possessed in their fulness by the scions of good old English county families. Other nations seldom had such qualities at all; never had them to perfection; and even favored Britain only saw them properly ill.u.s.trated in country gentlemen of long descent. Of course this sort of thing, which was for the moment a sincere idea with Kingsley, became a mere affectation among his followers and admirers. The fighting-parson pattern of hero was for a while as great a bore as the rough and ugly hero after Jane Eyre's "Rochester," or the colossal and corrupt guardsman whom "Guy Livingstone" sent abroad on the world. Certainly Kingsley's hero was a better style of man than Guy Livingstone's, for at the worst he was only an egotistical savage, and not a profligate. But I think he did a good deal of harm in his day. He helped to encourage and inflate that feeling of national self-conceit which makes people such nuisances to their neighbors, and he fostered that odious reverence for mere force and power which Carlyle had already made fashionable. Kingsley himself appears to have become "possessed" by his own idea as if by some unmanageable spirit. It banished all his chartism and democracy and liberalism, and the rest of it. Under its influence Kingsley out-Carlyled Carlyle in the worship of strong despotisms and force of any kind. He went out of his way to excuse slavery in the Southern States. He became the fervent panegyrist of Governor Eyre of Jamaica.

When two sides were possible to any question of human politics, he was sure to take the wrong one. Nothing for long years, I think, has been more repulsive, and in its way more mischievous, than the cant about "strength" which Kingsley did so much to diffuse and to glorify.

Meanwhile his irrepressible energy was always driving him into new fields of work. It never allowed him time to think. The moment any sort of idea struck him, he rushed at it and crushed it into the shape of a book or an essay. He wrote historical novels, philosophical novels, and theological novels. He wrote poetry--yards of poetry--volumes of poetry.

There really is a great deal of the spirit of poetry in him, and he has done better things with the hexameter verse than better poets have done.

There was for a long time a fervid school of followers who swore by him, and would have it that he was to be the great English poet of the century. He published essays, tracts, lectures, and sermons without number. He seems to have made up his mind to publish in book form somehow everything that he had spoken or written anywhere. He inundated the leading newspapers with letters on this, that, and the other subject. He was appointed professor of modern history at the University of Cambridge on the death of Sir James Stephen, and he launched at once into a series of lectures, which were almost immediately published in book form. Why he published them it was hard for even vanity itself to explain, because with characteristic bluntness he began his course with the acknowledgment that he really knew nothing in particular about the subjects whereon he had undertaken to instruct the University and the world. He made up in courage, however, for anything he may have lacked in knowledge. He went bravely in for an onslaught on the positive theory of history--on Comte, Mill, Buckle, Darwin, and everybody else. He made it perfectly clear very soon that he did not know even what these authors profess to teach. He flatly denied that there is any such thing as an inexorable law in nature. He proved that even the supposed law of gravitation is not by any means the rigid and universal sort of thing that Newton and such-like persons have supposed. How, it may be asked, did he prove this? In the following words: "If I choose to catch a stone, I can hold it in my hands; it has not fallen to the ground, and will not till I let it. So much for the inevitable action of the laws of gravity." This way of dealing with the question may seem to many readers nothing better than downright buffoonery. But Kingsley was as grave as a church and as earnest as an owl. He fully believed that he was refuting the pedants who believe in the inevitable action of the law of gravitation, when he talked of holding a stone in his hand. That an impulsive, illogical man should on the spur of the moment talk this kind of nonsense, even from a professor's chair, is not perhaps wonderful; but it does seem a little surprising that he should see it in print, revise it, and publish it, without ever becoming aware of its absurdity.