The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862

In Rome, an artist's studio may be his castle, or it may be an Exchange. To have it the first, you must affix a notice to your studio-door announcing that all entrance of visitors to the studio is forbidden except on, say, 'Monday from twelve A.M. to three P.M. This is the baronial manner. But the artist who is not wealthy or has not made a name, must keep an Exchange, and receive all visitors who choose to come, at almost any hours—model hours excepted. So Briggs, learning from Shodd, by careful cross-questioning, the artist's name, address, and a description of the painting, walked there at once, introduced himself to Rocjean, shook his hand as if it were the handle of a pump upon which he had serious intentions, and then began examining the paintings. He looked at them all, but there was no portrait. He asked Rocjean if he painted portraits; he found out that he did not. Finally, he told the artist that he had heard some one say—he did not remember who—that he had seen a very pretty head in his studio, and asked Rocjean if he would show it to him.

'You have seen Mr. Shodd lately, I should think?' said the artist, looking into the eyes of Mr. Briggs.

A suggestion of a clean brick-bat passed under a sheet of yellow tissue-paper was observable in the hard cheeks of Mr. Briggs, that being the final remnant of all appearance of modesty left in the sharp man, in the shape of a blush.

'Oh! yes; every body knows Shodd—man of great talent—generous,' said Briggs.

'Mr. Shodd may be very well known,' remarked Rocjean measuredly, 'but the portrait he saw is not well known; he and his family are the only ones who have seen it. Perhaps it may save you trouble to know that the portrait I have several times refused to sell him will never be sold while I live. The common opinion that an artist, like a Jew, will sell the old clo' from his back for money, is erroneous.'

Mr. Briggs shortly after this left the studio, slightly at a discount, and as if he had been measured, as he said to himself; and then and there determined to say nothing to Shodd about his failing in his mission to the savage artist. But Shodd found it all out in the first conversation he made with Briggs; and very bitter were his feelings when he learnt that a poor devil of an artist dared possess any thing he could not buy, and moreover had a quiet moral strength which the vulgar man feared. In his anger, Shodd, with his disregard for truth, commenced a fearful series of attacks against the artist, regaling every one he dared to with the coarsest slanders, in the vilest language, against the painter's character. A very few days sufficed to circulate them, so that they reached Rocjean's ears; a very few minutes passed before the artist presented himself to the eyes of Shodd, and, fortunately finding him alone, told him in four words, 'You are a slanderer;' mentioning to him, beside, that if he ever uttered another slander against his name, he should compel him to give him instantaneous satisfaction, and that, as an American, Shodd knew what that meant.

It is needless to say that a liar and slanderer is a coward; consequently Mr. Shodd, with the consequences before his eyes, never again alluded to Rocjean, and shortly left the city for Naples, to bestow the light of his countenance there in his great character of Art Patron.

'It is a heart-touching face,' said Caper, as one morning, while hauling over his paintings, Rocjean brought the portrait to light which the cunning Shodd had so longed to possess for cupidity's sake.

'I should feel as if I had thrown Psyche to the Gnomes to be torn to pieces, if I had given such a face to Shodd. If I had sold it to him, I should have been degraded; for the women loved by man should be kept sacred in memory. She was a girl I knew in Prague, and, I think, with six or eight exceptions, the loveliest one I ever met. Some night, at sunset, I shall walk over the old bridge, and meet her as we parted; apropos of which meeting, I once wrote some words. Hand me that portfolio, will you? Thank you. Oh! yes; here they are. Now, read them, Caper; out with them!

ANEZKA OD PRAHA

Years, weary years, since on the Moldau bridge,By the five stars and cross of Nepomuk,I kissed the scarlet sunset from her lips:Anezka, fair Bohemian, thou wert there!Dark waves beneath the bridge were running fast,In haste to bathe the shining rocks, whence roseTier over tier, the gloaming domes and spires,Turrets and minarets of the Holy City,Its crown the Hradschin of Bohemia's kings.O'er Wysscherad we saw the great stars shine;We felt the night-wind on the rushing stream;We drank the air as if 'twere Melnick wine,And every draught whirled us still nearer Nebe:Anezka, fair Bohemian, thou wert there!Why ever gleam thy black eyes sadly on me?Why ever rings thy sweet voice in my ear?Why looks thy pale face from the drifting foam—Dashed by the wild sea on this distant shore—Or from the white clouds does it beckon me?My own heart answers: On the Moldau bridge,Anezka, we will meet to part no more.

ANTHONY TROLLOPE ON AMERICA

Mr. Anthony Trollope's work entitled North-America has been republished in this country, and curiosity has at length been satisfied. Great as has been this curiosity among his friends, it can not, however, be said to have been wide-spread, inasmuch as up to the appearance of this book of travels, comparatively few were aware of the presence of Mr. Trollope in this country. When Charles Dickens visited America, our people testified their admiration of his homely genius by going mad, receiving him with frantic acclamations of delight, dining him, and suppering him, and going through the 'pump-handle movement' with him. Mr. Dickens was, in consequence, intensely bored by this attestation of popular idolatry so peculiar to the United States, and looked upon us as officious, absurd, and disgusting. Officious we were, and absurd enough, surely, but far from being disgusting. He ought hardly to beget disgust whose youth and inexperience leads him to extravagance in his kindly demonstrations toward genius. However, Mr. Dickens went home rather more impressed by our faults, which he had had every opportunity of inspecting, than by our virtues, which possessed fewer salient features to his humorous eye. Two books—American Notes and Martin Chuzzlewit—were the product of his tour through America. Thereupon, the American people grew very indignant. Their Dickens-love, in proportion to its intensity, turned to Dickens-hate, and ingratitude was considered to be synonymous with the name of this novelist. We gave him every chance to see our follies, and we snubbed his cherished and chief object in visiting America, concerning a copyright. There is little wonder, then, that Dickens, an Englishman and a caricaturist, should have painted us in the colors that he did. There is scarcely less wonder that Americans, at that time, all in the white-heat of enthusiasm, should have waxed angry at Dickens' cold return to so much warmth. But, reading these books in the light of 1862, there are few of us who do not smile at the rage of our elders. We see an uproariously funny extravaganza in Martin Chuzzlewit, which we can well afford to laugh at, having grown thicker-skinned, and wonder what there is to be found in the Notes so very abominable to an American. Mr. Dickens was a humorist, not a statesman or philosopher, therefore he wrote of us as a disappointed humorist would have been tempted to write.

It is not likely that Mr. Trollope's advent in this country would have given rise to any remark or excitement, his novels, clever though they be, not having taken hold of the people's heart as did those of Dickens. He came among us quietly; the newspapers gave him no flourish of trumpets; he traveled about unknown; hence it was, that few knew a new book was to be written upon America by one bearing a name not over-popular thirty years ago. Curiosity was confined to the friends and acquaintances of Mr. Trollope, who were naturally not a little anxious that he should conscientiously write such a book as would remove the existing prejudice to the name of Trollope, and render him personally as popular as his novels. For there are, we believe, few intelligent Americans (and Mr. Trollope is good enough to say that we of the North are all intelligent) who are not ready to 'faire l'aimable' to the kindly, genial author of North-America. It is not being rash to state that Mr. Trollope, in his last book, has not disappointed his warmest personal friends in this country, and this is saying much, when it is considered that many of them are radically opposed to him in many of his opinions, and most of them hold very different views from him in regard to the present war. They are not disappointed, because Mr. Trollope has labored to be impartial in his criticisms. He has, at least, endeavored to lay aside his English prejudices and judge us in a spirit of truth and good-fellowship. Mr. Trollope inaugurated a new era in British book-making upon America, when he wrote: 'If I could in any small degree add to the good feeling which should exist between two nations which ought to love each other so well, and which do hang upon each other so constantly, I should think that I had cause to be proud of my work.' In saying this much, Mr. Trollope has said what others of his ilk—Bulwer, Thackeray, and Dickens—would not have said, and he may well be proud, or, at least, he can afford not to be proud, of a superior honesty and frankness. He has won for himself kind thoughts on this side of the Atlantic, and were Americans convinced that the body English were imbued with the spirit of Mr. Trollope, there would be little left of the resuscitated 'soreness.'

In his introduction, Mr. Trollope frankly acknowledges that 'it is very hard to write about any country a book that does not represent the country described in a more or less ridiculous point of view.' He confesses that he is not a philosophico-political or politico-statistical or a statistico-scientific writer, and hence, 'ridicule and censure run glibly from the pen, and form themselves into sharp paragraphs, which are pleasant to the reader. Whereas, eulogy is commonly dull, and too frequently sounds as though it were false.' We agree with him, that 'there is much difficulty in expressing a verdict which is intended to be favorable, but which, though favorable, shall not be falsely eulogistic, and though true, not offensive.' Mr. Trollope has not been offensive either in his praise or dispraise; and when we look upon him in the light in which he paints himself—that of an English novelist—he has, at least, done his best by us. We could not expect from him such a book as Emerson wrote on English Traits, or such an one as Thomas Buckle would have written had death not staid his great work of Civilization. Nor could we look to him for that which John Stuart Mill—the English De Tocqueville—alone can give. For much that we expected we have received, for that which is wanting we shall now find fault, but good-naturedly, we hope.

Our first ground of complaint against Mr. Trollope's North-America, is its extreme verbosity. Had it been condensed to one half, or at least one third of its present size, the spirit of the book had been less weakened, and the taste of the public better satisfied. The question naturally arises in an inquiring mind, if the author could make so much out of a six months' tour through the Northern States, what would the consequences have been had he remained a year, and visited Dixie's land as well? The conclusions logically arrived at are, to say the least, very unfavorable to weak-eyed persons who are condemned to read the cheap American edition. Life is too short, and books are too numerous, to allow of repetition; and at no time is Mr. Trollope so guilty in this respect as when he dilates upon those worthies, Mason and Slidell, in connection with the Trent affair. It was very natural, especially as England has come off first-best in this matter, that Mr. Trollope should have made a feature of the Trent in reporting the state of the American pulse thereon. One reference to the controversy was desirable, two endurable, but the third return to the charge is likely to meet with impatient exclamations from the reader, who heartily sympathizes with the author when he says: 'And now, I trust, I may finish my book without again naming Messrs. Slidell and Mason.'

It certainly was rash to rave as we did on this subject, but it was quite natural, when our jurists, (even the Hon. Caleb Cushing) who were supposed to know their business, assured us that we had right on our side. It was extremely ridiculous to put Captain Wilkes upon a pedestal a little lower than Bunker-Hill monument, and present him with a hero's sword for doing what was then considered only his duty. But it must be remembered that at that time the mere performance of duty by a public officer was so extraordinary a phenomenon that loyal people were brought to believe it merited especial recognition. Our Government, and not the people, were to blame. Had the speech of Charles Sumner, delivered on his 'field-day,' been the verdict of the Washington Cabinet previous to the reception of England's expostulations, the position taken by America on this subject would have been highly dignified and honorable. As it is, we stand with feathers ruffled and torn. But if, as we suppose, the Trent imbroglio leads to a purification of maritime law, not only America, but the entire commercial world will be greatly indebted to the super-patriotism of Captain Wilkes.

'The charming women of Boston' are inclined to quarrel with their friend Mr. Trollope, for ridiculing their powers of argumentation apropos to Captain Wilkes, for Mr. Trollope must confess they knew quite as much about what they were talking as the lawyers by whom they were instructed. They have had more than their proper share of revenge, however, meted out for them by the reviewer of the London Critic, who writes as follows:

'Mr. Trollope was in Boston when the first news about the Trent arrived. Of course, every body was full of the subject at once—Mr. Trollope, we presume, not excluded—albeit he is rather sarcastic upon the young ladies who began immediately to chatter about it. 'Wheaton is quite clear about it,' said one young girl to me. It was the first I had heard of Wheaton, and so far was obliged to knock under.' Yet Mr. Trollope, knowing very little more of Wheaton than he did before, and obviously nothing of the great authorities on maritime law, inflicts upon his readers page after page of argument upon the Trent affair, not half so delightful as the pretty babble of the ball-room belle. With all due respect to Mr. Trollope, and his attractions, we are quite sure that we would much sooner get our international law from the lips of the fair Bostonian than from his.'

After such a champion as this, could the fair Bostonians have the heart to assail Mr. Trollope?

Mr. Trollope treats of our civil war at great length; in fact, the reverberations of himself on this matter are quite as objectionable as those in the Trent affair. But it is his treatment of this subject that must ever be a source of regret to the earnest thinkers who are gradually becoming the masters of our Government's policy, who constitute the bone and muscle of the land, the rank and file of the army, and who are changing the original character of the war into that of a holy crusade. It is to be deplored, because Mr. Trollope's book will no doubt influence English opinion, to a certain extent, and therefore militate against us, and we already know how his mistaken opinions have been seized upon by pro-slavery journals in this country as a bonne bouche which they rarely obtain from so respectable a source; the more palatable to them, coming from that nationality which we have always been taught to believe was more abolition in its creed than William Lloyd Garrison himself, and from whose people we have received most of our lectures on the sin of slavery. It is sad that so fine a nature as that of Mr. Trollope should not feel conscience-stricken in believing that 'to mix up the question of general abolition with this war must be the work of a man too ignorant to understand the real subject of the war, or too false to his country to regard it.' Yet it is strange that these 'too ignorant' or 'too false' men are the very ones that Mr. Trollope holds up to admiration, and declares that any nation might be proud to claim their genius. Longfellow and Lowell, Emerson and Motley, to whom we could add almost all the well-known thinkers of the country, men after his own heart in most things, belong to this 'ignorant' or 'false' sect. Is it their one madness? That is a strange madness which besets our greatest men and women; a marvelous anomaly surely. Yet there must be something sympathetic in abolitionism to Mr. Trollope, for he prefers Boston, the centre of this ignorance, to all other American cities, and finds his friends for the most part among these false ones, by which we are to conclude that Mr. Trollope is by nature an abolitionist, but that circumstances have been unfavorable to his proper development. And these circumstances we ascribe to a hasty and superficial visit to the British West-India colonies.

It is well known that in his entertaining book on travels in the West-Indies and Spanish Main, Mr. Trollope undertakes to prove that emancipation has both ruined the commercial prosperity of the British islands and degraded the free blacks to a level with the idle brute. Mr. Trollope is still firm in this opinion, notwithstanding the statistics of the Blue Book, which prove that these colonies never were in so flourishing a condition as at present. We, in America, have also had the same fact demonstrated by figures, in that very plainly written book called the Ordeal of Free Labor. Mr. Trollope, no doubt, saw some very lazy negroes, wallowing in dirt, and living only for the day, but later developments have proved that his investigations could have been simply those of a dilettante. It is highly probable that the planters who have been shorn of their riches by the edict of Emancipation, should paint the present condition of the blacks in any thing but rose-colors, and we, of course, believe that Mr. Trollope believes what he has written. He is none the less mistaken, if we are to pin our faith to the Blue Book, which we are told never lies. And yet, believing that emancipation has made a greater brute than ever of the negro, Mr. Trollope rejoices in the course which has been pursued by the home government. If both white man and black man are worse off than they were before, what good could have been derived from the reform, and by what right ought he to rejoice? Mr. Trollope claims to be an anti-slavery man, but we must confess that to our way of arguing, the ground he stands upon in this matter is any thing but terra firma. Mr. Trollope was probably thinking of those dirty West-India negroes when he made the following comments upon a lecture delivered by Wendell Phillips:

'I have sometimes thought that there is no being so venomous, so bloodthirsty, as a professed philanthropist; and that when the philanthropist's ardor lies negro-ward, it then assumes the deepest die of venom and bloodthirstiness. There are four millions of slaves in the Southern States, none of whom have any capacity for self-maintenance or self-control. Four millions of slaves, with the necessities of children, with the passions of men, and the ignorance of savages! And Mr. Phillips would emancipate these at a blow; would, were it possible for him to do so, set them loose upon the soil to tear their masters, destroy each other, and make such a hell upon earth as has never even yet come from the uncontrolled passions and unsatisfied wants of men.'

Mr. Trollope should have thought twice before he wrote thus of the American negro. Were he a competent authority on this subject, his opinion might be worth something; but as he never traveled in the South, and as his knowledge of the negro is limited to a surface acquaintance with the West-Indies, we maintain that Mr. Trollope has not only been unjust, but ungenerous. Four millions of slaves, none of whom have any capacity for self-maintenance or self-control! Whom are we to believe? Mr. Trollope, who has never been on a Southern plantation, or Frederick Law Olmsted? Mr. Pierce, who has been superintendent of the contrabands at Fortress Monroe and at Hilton Head, officers attached to Burnside's Division, and last and best, General David Hunter, an officer of the regular army, who went to South-Carolina with anti-abolition antecedents? All honor to General Hunter, who, unlike many others, has not shut his eyes upon facts, and, like a rational being, has yielded to the logic of events. It is strange that these authorities, all of whom possess the confidence of the Government, should disagree with Mr. Trollope. None self-maintaining? Robert Small is a pure negro. Is he not more than self-maintaining? Has he not done more for the Federal Government than any white man of the Gulf States? Tillman is a negro; the best pilots of the South are negroes: are they not self-maintaining? Kansas has welcomed thousands of fugitive slaves to her hospitable doors, not as paupers, but as laborers, who have taken the place of those white men who have gone to fight the battles which they also should be allowed to take part in. The women have been gladly accepted as house-servants. Does not this look like self-maintenance? Would negroes be employed in the army if they were as Mr. Trollope pictures them? He confesses that without these four millions of slaves the South would be a wilderness, therefore they do work as slaves to the music of the slave-drivers' whip. How very odd, that the moment men and women (for Mr. Trollope does acknowledge them to be such) own themselves, and are paid for the sweat of their brow, they should forget the trades by which they have enriched the South, and become incapable of maintaining themselves—they who have maintained three hundred and fifty thousand insolent slave-owners! Given whip-lashes and the incubus of a white family, the slave will work; given freedom and wages, the negro won't work. Was there ever stated a more palpable fallacy? Is it necessary to declare further that the Hilton Head experiment is a success, although the negroes, wanting in slave-drivers and in their musical instruments, began their planting very late in the season? Is it necessary to give Mr. Trollope one of many figures, and prove that in the British West-India colonies free labor has exported two hundred and sixty-five millions pounds of sugar annually, whereas slave labor only exported one hundred and eighty-seven millions three hundred thousand? And this in a climate where, unlike even the Southern States of North-America, there is every inducement to indolence.

Four millions of slaves, none of whom are capable of self-control, who possess the necessities of children, the passions of men, and the ignorance of savages! We really have thought that the many thousands of these four millions who have come under the Federal jurisdiction, exercised considerable self-control, when it is remembered that in some localities they have been left entire masters of themselves, have in other instances labored months for the Government under promise of pay, and have had that pay prove a delusion. Certainly it is fair to judge of a whole by a part. Given a bone, Professor Agassiz can draw the animal of which the bone forms a part. Given many thousands of negroes, we should be able to judge somewhat of four millions. Had Mr. Trollope seen the thousands of octoroons and quadroons enslaved in the South by their own fathers, it would have been more just in him to have attributed a want of self-control to the masters of these four millions. We do not know what Mr. Trollope means by 'the necessities of children. Children need to be sheltered, fed, and clothed, and so do the negroes, but here the resemblance ends; for whereas children can not take care of themselves, the negro can, provided there is any opportunity to work. It is scarcely to be doubted that temporary distress must arise among fugitives in localities where labor is not plenty; but does this establish the black man's incapacity? Revolutions, especially those which are internal, generally bring in their train distress to laborers. Then we are told that the slaves are endowed with the passions of men; and very glad are we to know this, for, as a love of liberty and a willingness to sacrifice all things for freedom, is one of the loftiest passions in men, were he devoid of this passion, we should look with much less confidence to assistance from the negro in this war of freedom versus slavery, than we do at present. In stating that the slaves are as ignorant as savages, Mr. Trollope pays an exceedingly poor compliment to the Southern whites, as it would naturally be supposed that constant contact with a superior race would have civilized the negro to a certain extent, especially as he is known to be wonderfully imitative. And such is the case; at least the writer of these lines, who has been born and bred in a slave State, thinks so. As a whole, they compare very favorably with the 'poor white trash,' and individually they are vastly superior to this 'trash.' It is true, that they can not read or write, not from want of aptitude or desire, as the teachers among the contrabands write that their desire to read amounts to a passion, in many cases, even among the hoary-headed, but because the teaching of a slave to read or write was, in the good old times before the war, regarded and punished as a criminal offense. What a pity it is that we can not go back to the Union as it was! In this ignorance of the rudiments of learning, the negroes are not unlike a large percentage of the populations of Great Britain and Ireland.