The Autobiography of a Journalist Volume I Part 11

Rome was in those days the Lotophagitis of our century, whose population lived in an artificial peace, a sort of dreamland--artists who, whether German, French, English, Americans, or Russians, were more or less imbued with the feeling of the old art, and who found their _clientele_ in people who believed, as I have heard some say, that _any_ picture painted in Rome was better than any picture painted elsewhere! There was, therefore, a continual exportation of copies, good and bad, of the old masters and a few landscapes for the remembering of localities, but the quality of the art was of trifling importance to the buyers--it was "done in Rome," and that sufficed as merit. The Cafe Greco, haunt of the race of artists since Salvator Rosa, was in its original and charming, if rude, simplicity, and there came all the artists to take their after-dinner cup. Old John Gibson, though not the oldest of the habitues, was the chief of our Anglo-American community; Randolph Rogers, Mosier, Reinhart, Story, and two or three other sculptors, whose names I have forgotten, and two or three American landscape painters, of whom Tilton was chief at the time of my arrival, had the monopoly of American patronage, and every wealthy American who came conceived it his duty to patronize American art, while our government had the tradition of always sending an artist to Rome as consul.

Charlotte Cushman, a famous actress of her day, was the nucleus of a little clique of women sculptors, Miss Stebbins, Harriet Hosmer, and one or two others of lesser fame. Accordingly, she made war on sculptors of the other s.e.x in all the curious ways of womanly malice, in order to the exclusive reaping by her protegees of the golden harvest. I had known her years before, when she was still on the stage and I the dramatic and art critic of the New York "Evening Post," and, as our relations had then been cordial, it was natural that she should "take me up" on my arrival. Her hospitality was large--dinners, musical evenings, etc., and she had a "salon," to all which I was a welcome guest, and the cordiality lasted until she thought it time to make use of me. She then proposed to me to undertake the demolition of the fict.i.tious reputations of the leading American sculptors, especially Story, Mosier, and Rogers, and, when I replied that I had then the intention of returning to the occupation of a landscape painter, and that in that position, as well as in that of consul and in a manner the protector of all my countrymen, it would be inconsistent with the position to publish criticisms on my fellow artists, the thermometer of her regard fell at once, and I had instant evidence that I was out of her list of friends.

Her coolness was changed to active hostility by another case of conflicting interests. The recognition of pa.s.sports issued before the rebellion having been interdicted by the government, the consuls received an order to cancel all such as had been issued prior to the order, and to issue new ones only on the oath of allegiance being taken by the recipient. There was also a charge of five dollars for the pa.s.sport, which was to be renewed after a year. Charlotte was, amongst her other qualities, avaricious, and though wealthy and ostentatious she rebelled at expenditure which did not show, and when it came time for her to leave Rome for the summer, and her pa.s.sport came for visa, I stopped it and notified her to take out a new one.

She refused, and confiding in the friendly personal relations which had existed between her and Seward, she wrote to the department protesting against my action and making formal complaint of my discourtesy. Seward replied that I was obeying my orders and that the pa.s.sport must be taken and paid for. From that day war was open and malignant. Of course I was interdicted from responding in any way to her attacks, but I found them of no great importance; though when I was sent to Crete, four years later, she had influence enough to get her nephew appointed consul in succession.

In the years when Miss Cushman was on the stage I had understood her pretty well, and, though she had done what was possible to give me a good impression of her, I do not think I was ever much persuaded of her goodness or surprised at the enmity she showed when I came into collision with her interests. I think she possessed an utterly selfish nature, was not at all scrupulous in the attainment of her purposes, and was, in effect, that most dangerous member of society, a strong-willed and large-brained woman without a vestige of principle.

She had a diabolical magnetism which in her best part, Meg Merrilies, had a sensuous attraction I have never known so powerful in another woman. Her Queen Katherine was a failure, and she could not play the part of a refined woman, but into that of Meg Merrilies, an adaptation of her own of Sir Walter Scott's novel, she put her whole nature--it was her very self as far as she would let herself be seen.

When I had a studio in New York I had as next-door neighbor an artist who was scene painter to the company in which Charlotte used to play at the old Park Theatre, and the stories he told me of her in that connection were terrible. My friend had never dared to speak of her openly, and only did so to me with a caution that if what he told me got to Miss Cushman's ears she was quite capable of silencing him in the most effective manner. I am of opinion that he judged her correctly, for she must have been a tiger when her pa.s.sions were aroused, capable of anything, and I was careful never to give her more serious cause of offense than the doing of my official duty. Over those whom she chose to fascinate, she had an extraordinary power, and I have known young women who were so completely under her control as to be unable to escape from it when they found out her real nature except by flight.

If she had been beautiful she might have set the social world topsy-turvy. I think she was the cleverest woman I ever knew. Her tact was extraordinary, and she never failed to impress the visitors to Rome with her sincerity and benevolence, though she really possessed neither of those qualities. She was an immense ill.u.s.tration of a maxim of Dante Rossetti to the effect that artists had nothing to do with morality. She was always on the stage--in the most familiar act and in the presence of strangers she never lost sight of the footlights, and the best acting I ever saw her in was in private and in the representation of some comedy or tragedy of her own interests. She played with a marvelous power one part, and all others were but variations of that or failures--it was not art which dominated her, but the simulation of nature, and that her own, which is not the same thing as art, as we all ought to know.

Between herself and the sculptor Rogers, who was, in his way, as clever as she, there was an implacable war, veiled by the ordinary forms of civility, which both were careful never to break over. Miss Cushman had begun her career as a singer, but, her voice failing, she had to be content to remain on the stage of the theatre; but she always retained a certain dramatic quality of voice, and, within a very limited register, she sang with great power and pathos. Two of her favorite songs were Kingsley's "The Sands of Dee" and the "Three Fishermen," which, as she sang them, rarely failed to affect those who heard them for the first time to tears. Rogers was an admirable mimic and sang those songs with such a close rendering of the voice and manner (for Miss Cushman's voice was rather that of a man than one belonging to her own s.e.x), with just a touch of burlesque, that he brought out roars of laughter; and when the two cordial enemies met in society somebody was sure to ask Rogers to sing "The Sands of Dee,"

which he did with good will, and Miss Cushman was obliged, to her intense anger, to applaud the caricature of her best performance. It was cruel, but he was merciless, and spared no exaggeration of her voice, her dramatic manner, and a way she had of sprawling over the piano, producing an ensemble which made it impossible to hear her again in the same songs without a disposition to laugh.

An incident occurred at this time which made Miss Cushman's position in regard to the quarrel with the consulate still more difficult. It was not long after the advent of the famous horse-tamer John S. Rarey, of whom she had been a pupil in America when he first came out. A person professing to be Rarey was touring Europe and teaching his manner of breaking horses, beginning at Copenhagen and following the seash.o.r.e to Naples, whence he came to Rome and was received with great enthusiasm by Miss Cushman, for at that time, and while the war was in its critical stage, American lions were very rare in Rome. The horse-tamer was, on her authority, made the guest of the American community, breakfasted, dined, and feted, and a large subscription was made for a cla.s.s in horse-breaking. At this juncture I heard of a performance of the _soi-disant_ Rarey at Naples, in which he had nearly killed a beautiful young mare, and, knowing that the system of Rarey did not include cruelty, I began to doubt the ident.i.ty of the tamer. I called for the pa.s.sport with which he had come, and which was, as usual, deposited at the police office, and discovered that it was issued by a "vice-consul _pro tempore_" at Dresden, an officer not recognized by our regulations, bad and loose as they were, and a man whose name, moreover, was not on the consular list, though the pa.s.sport was on a regular form. I at once wrote to the police, requesting them to cause the said John S. Rarey to prove his ident.i.ty.

The summons to the police office brought him to the consulate the next morning before I was out of bed (the office and my bedroom const.i.tuted the headquarters of the government of the United States of America at Rome), with a pet.i.tion to me to request the police to delay the examination until the next day, as he had two friends who would identify him, but who were that day (it was Sunday) at Tivoli for the day. As an escape was impossible, and he was in a nervous trepidation which, it was clear to see, was awful funk, I wrote the note desired; and, before the day was out, he had gone to my English colleague, the amiable Severn, and confessed that he was an impostor, a Canadian, and asked for English protection. Severn replied that without my consent he could do nothing for him; he had come with an American pa.s.sport and must abide by it, unless I gave him up. He was wilted, in such a fright as I never saw a man in before or since, and he had good reason, for the penalty of coming to Rome with a false pa.s.sport was imprisonment in St. Angelo. Meanwhile Miss Cushman had gone into heroics over the insult I was offering so distinguished a man as to suspect his ident.i.ty, and all her clique were united in abusing me; but on Monday the impostor slipped out of Rome by the connivance of Severn, the police, and myself, after I had attached the amount of the subscriptions for his cla.s.s, which were still lying at the bankers', and pledged him to abstain in future from any similar impersonation.

As Miss Cushman had stood sponsor for him, she having been a pupil of the real Rarey, his confession was a mortification which she visited on my head, but as it disarmed her I was tranquil over the consequences.

I was continually at war with the Confederate Americans, galled to extreme bitterness by the right I had of compelling them to take the oath of allegiance before renewing their pa.s.sports. Amongst them was a very beautiful woman, a Virginian, and the wife of a commodore in the navy of the United States of America, then on service in the Potomac.

She refused to take the oath, and insulted me in the grossest manner and in public, as an insulter of ladies, _etc., etc_. But all the influence she could bring to bear could not get her pa.s.sport from the police without my visa; and at last, despairing of escape from Rome, she came to make her peace, meeting me at the bank, but unwilling to accept the degradation of coming to the consulate. "You are not going to make me come to your dirty little consulate, are you?" she said; to which I replied, "Oh, no; my secretary shall administer the oath to you in your bedroom, if you choose;" but, in the end, she had to take the oath and sign it, as did many of her compatriots. Amongst the Southerners who came under my administration was the wife of General Winfield Scott, commander-in-chief of our army, who actually died under my care, without a friend or relative near her.

This social warfare, the consequence of my official position, had the effect of giving me occupation and excitement, and I was sustained cordially by the loyal Americans in Rome, so that the position, though unremunerative, was rather pleasant than otherwise. In the course of the summer after my arrival, ex-Governor Randall of Wisconsin came as minister, his appointment being intended to "keep the place warm" for General Rufus King, a personal friend of Seward, to whom the place was promised whenever he should be tired of fighting, or qualified by glory for future political contests. Randall was a mere party hack; he knew nothing of diplomacy or good manners, or of any language but Western American. I took for him the house on the Pincian now known as the House of the Four Winds, a magnificent situation for the summer.

He saw the sights, generally in a carriage, with a paper of fruit on the front seat and me as cicerone; was presented at the Vatican, presented me as charge d'affaires, and, having his leave of absence in his pocket, departed for a tour of Europe, bequeathing to me the honor of paying his bills, rent, etc., down to the washing bill, to be settled on his return, and never appeared again. I was left to pay out of my empty pocket; and I never heard from him, though, a long time after, I succeeded in recovering from the Treasury the amount of those bills I had paid for Randall for which I could show vouchers; those for which I had none I had to put to account of profit and loss, which was, as long as I was in Rome, largely to the loss account, drafts on my brother making up the deficiency. I was also, until it suspended publication, Roman correspondent of John Bright's paper, which I think was called the "Star."

After an interregnum of some months came another bed-warmer for General King, this one a New York politician, also a friend of Seward's, an ancient politician, who had recently married a young wife desirous of a stay in some European capital, and, if possible, at the expense of the government. These at least were gentlefolk, and paid their bills without doing anything to scandalize the Romans. They spent the winter and went home, and finally came General King.

Finding that my fees and sales of pictures (for I had taken up my painting again and had sold a few small pictures) amounted to about six hundred dollars a year, and were slowly increasing, I decided to go home and bring my wife and child out. I had been absent more than a year, and several months after being in Rome had the news of the birth of a son. It was near being my death, for, on the evening of receiving the news, I had gone to make a call on an English lady who lived in the Villa Negroni, where the railway station now is, and close by the prison where all the political offenders were kept, and which was guarded by French soldiers. I was in a vein of profound meditation on the news I had just received, and absorbed to that extent that I kept on my course along the sidewalk in front of the prison, walking towards the sentry, and did not hear his challenge till it had been repeated three times, when I heard his rifle rattle as it came down to the take aim, and suddenly became conscious that I had heard a sound, the meaning of which must be "_Qui vive_?" I sung out l.u.s.tily, "_Ami_"

and was told that if I was a friend the other side of the road was my place.

I had discovered that the consular agent left by my predecessor at Civita Vecchia was engaged in a system of espionage on behalf of the Papal authorities, and had been issuing American pa.s.sports to spies whom they were employing in Italian territory, and I at once dismissed him and informed the Italian government through Mr. Marsh, our minister to Italy, and received a letter of thanks from that government. From Washington a new consular agent was sent, and, putting him in charge of the consulate, I started for home, going by way of Turin, to see Mr. Marsh, and by diligence over Mont Cenis.

Subsequent events brought me much in contact with that admirable diplomat and scholar, at that time the one bright feature of our diplomatic service on the Continent. Our government received great credit for sending such a man abroad to represent us, but the chance of it was in the fact that he was closely related to Senator Edmunds of Vermont, whose influence with the administration was sufficient to secure any single nomination he insisted on, and who did insist on the maintenance of Marsh in the diplomatic service. As Marsh had been conspicuous in the advocacy of the Italian cause during the unitary movement, he was designated by the circ.u.mstances for the American legation to Italy, in which he honored his appointment as few of our representatives at that epoch had done.

In fact, with the exception of Adams, at London, and Marsh, at Turin, we had hardly a representative abroad, either consular or diplomatic, who was a credit to the country. As the war continued, the importance of being respected in Europe became more evident, and a change took place; but the few men of respectable standing who were in foreign countries representing the United States of America were appointed on account of political pressure, and not on their merits. My colleague at Venice, Howells, one of Mr. Lincoln's most fortunate appointments, owed his position, not to his literary abilities, which were then unknown to the country at large, but to his having written a campaign life of Lincoln, a service which was always considered by the successful candidate as ent.i.tling the biographer to some appointment.

A term of consular service was and is still considered the reward for campaign services, personal or vicarious, and at the next change of administration the consul was superseded by another, equally crude, and with all to learn in his business.

What the character of the Americans as well as of the government, as such, has suffered of derogation abroad from this political huckstering with public offices, no one can know who was not much abroad in the years preceding our war. Marsh was honored and beloved at Rome by both King and people, as was Adams by the Court of St.

James, but the dead weight which the standing disrepute of our diplomacy imposed on both those distinguished men can hardly now be estimated. My predecessors at Rome, and the ministers before my time, had left a bad odor behind them. One of them was notorious for his devotion to a form of dissipation much and scandalously known at Naples during the reign of the Bourbons as a springtime sport, and which has since been the occasion of a noted crusade in England led by Mr. Stead. Of a minister of the United States of America found drunk in the streets of Berlin by the police, and a charge d'affaires who, in an outbreak at Constantinople, hoisted the flag over a brothel he frequented, the memory is perhaps too old to have reached men born much later than I, but for the twenty years of my first knowledge of European matters our representation abroad was a disgrace to America.

I landed in New York the day after the battle of Gettysburg, and for the first time in the history of our trouble I felt a.s.sured as to the end, for I perceived that the attempt at invasion by the Confederacy showed that the government of it felt its affairs to be in a desperate condition, and the determination on the part of the North was evidently unshaken. From that time I never felt any anxiety as to the final result. I found my brother at the head of the construction department of the revenue service, his friend Salmon P. Chase being Secretary of the Treasury. He was desirous to keep me at home to a.s.sist him, with which desire I was ready to conform, but the opposition of his wife was so bitter that he had to decide against my staying, and, taking my wife and boy, I returned to Rome. My brother was already attacked by the malady of which, two years later, he died.

Arriving in Rome, and resuming the direction of the consulate, I found to my dismay that General King had appointed as secretary of legation a local American banker, a "Copperhead," who had in the name of the government, but without authority, requested the Roman Ministry of Foreign Affairs to dispense with the visa on the pa.s.sports of all American visitors, and Antonelli was, of course, too glad to be relieved of the embarra.s.sment which had been often caused him by the regulation, which all the Southerners had asked to be relieved from.

Thus I found that the princ.i.p.al resource of the consulate was gone. As the home government had given the strongest orders to protest against any such exception being made of American pa.s.sports, I, of course, protested, but was informed that the rule had been taken at the request of my own government; and, though Antonelli knew perfectly that Hooker had no authority to enter into any negotiations with him on any subject, and that he had no official position, it suited him to accept the contrary, and my remonstrances to the minister, General King, had no effect. I then laid the matter before the Department of State at Washington, but, as General King was the close personal friend of Seward, who was quite indifferent to diplomatic scandals away from England, no attention was paid to my complaints, and I gave up the consulate to Brown, the consular agent at Civita Vecchia, to get what he could from it, and devoted myself entirely to painting, by which, with a little writing, I made enough to live in the simple manner which I was accustomed to.

Released from all obligations to remain at the consulate, I spent the most of my time in sketching on the Campagna. Of all the landscape I have ever seen, in the Alps, Sicily, Greece, the American forests and lakes, or semi-tropical Florida, nothing has impressed me as did the Roman Campagna in its then condition of decay and neglect. The beauty of line of its mountain framework is still there, and pa.s.sages here and there are untouched, but the improvements of progress have intruded in so many points that, as a whole, the solemn and poetic aspect of those days is irretrievably lost. I used to sit out in the most lonely pa.s.sages painting into the twilight until I could no longer distinguish my colors, and then tramp back to Rome at my fastest, to get in before the gates closed for the night. If it was not the rapture of art, it was the pa.s.sion of poetic nature.

As fortune would have it, there was in Rome that winter Mr. George G. Fogg, the minister of the United States of America at Berne, a personal friend of Lincoln, and chairman of the Young Men's National Committee, which arranged the convention that nominated him. On Lincoln's election Fogg was offered his choice of the diplomatic appointments, and selected Berne, the most modest position he could take. He came to pa.s.s the Christmas holidays at Rome, and of course I laid my case before him. He in turn put it before his late colleagues in the House, and the committee on foreign affairs made a strong representation at the Department of State; and, when Seward refused to recall King, or take any measures to correct the injustice done me, they struck out from the consular and diplomatic appropriation bill the appropriation for the legation at Rome, which meant the abolition of the legation, and I was a little later transferred to Crete, a salaried post, where there was supposed to be nothing to do but make my quarterly report.

My commission must have been one of the very last Lincoln signed, for he was a.s.sa.s.sinated before it reached me. I was spending the evening at the quarters of one of my best Roman friends, Mr. John A. King (a cousin of, but not a sympathizer with, the general), when the news came of the murder of Lincoln and the attempt on Seward, and very vivid still is the recollection of the horror and grief we all felt.

But we also felt that the President's work was done, and that his fame was set securely in history, beyond the chance of any political blunder to damage it. Could he ever have devised a better death in view of his future influence and honor? I learned from one of Lincoln's Illinois friends, whom I later saw in Rome, that the appointment in Crete was intended by the President as the recognition of the injustice with which Seward had treated my case. My experience of Seward's way of looking at public appointments and public interests, when crossed by his personal relations, certainly went to confirm the apprehensions of Mr. Fogg and his friends that Seward's personal following would stand between him and the best interests of the state. As Fogg used to put it, "He won't steal, himself, but he don't care how much his friends steal." But my misfortune brought about the abolition of what had always been a scandal and a job--the legation of the United States of America to the Pope.