Part II Seymour Haden in America
The former chapter of my article on Sir Seymour Haden referred entirely to my experiences with him in Europe; this second and concluding portion will contain nothing except an account of his sayings and doings during his visit to the United States in the year 1882. The purpose of his American visit was to expound and vindicate the importance of original etching as a fine art. This he did by delivering a series of lectures on the subject, and these lectures, in the main, were very well received.
Being a born and case-hardened controversialist he soon found out that in America no man’s unproved ipse dixit, however eminent he might be, was dutifully accepted as it would have been in one of the older civilizations of Europe, and so it came about that several unprofitable controversies were hotly waged on both sides. Seymour Haden was by nature pugnacious and “toplofty,” and such an attitude went down badly in America. But, all the same, the man himself was treated with distinguished consideration here, and his lectures did genuine good to the cause of true art. He lectured in all our principal cities from New York to Chicago, and although when he landed here I think he had very few personal acquaintances (except myself), yet when he sailed back to England he took with him the cordial friendship and good will of many Americans of the right sort.
His first lecture was delivered before a distinguished audience in Chickering Hall, Fifth Avenue, New York. He had plenty of voice to make his auditors hear him; but his lecture dragged considerably—for a peculiarly British reason: it is known to some of us that in an Englishman’s public oration he is not genteel or distinguished if he speaks freely and fluently. No, no; he must befog and entangle his words with all sorts of hesitations and amendments. It is the same in the British House of Commons. I do not mean such master orators as Gladstone was, but the public speech of the average British member,—let us call him Sir Huddleston Fuddleston—sounds like this: “The honorable, hum—the honorable and gallant member from—ha—hum—from Hull, has been good enough to—a—um—to say—etc.”
Well, Seymour Haden modeled his oratory on this preposterous but genteel British usage; and yet, in private conversation, I have never known a man who used more elegant and appropriate language than he. On the day following that of the lecture, I received a visit from my kind and valued friend the Right Reverend Monsignor Doane, who was a genuine lover of fine prints, and he said to me: “Well, I heard your English friend last evening humming and hawing through his lecture.” Soon afterward I had the opportunity of bringing these two distinguished men together, and after that, during his yearly visit to England, the monsignor used to be a welcome and honored guest of Sir Seymour and Lady Haden. The artist’s lectures in Boston were listened to with earnest attention and he was the guest of honor at a reception given at the St. Botolph Club; but even there storms and tempests arose. He quarreled with the one eminent American whom, the rest of us would think, nobody could quarrel with,—namely, Oliver Wendell Holmes. It was all about a “fool” difference of opinion on some question of medical ethics and usages in America as compared with England.
Before the evening of his reception at the St. Botolph Club, Seymour Haden procured a list of the principal personages whom he was to meet there. He brought it to me, and said: “Now, what should I know about these people?” I wrote down for him as many notes as I could, and when he met the Bostonians, I was astonished to see how well he had coached himself about them. On his return to New York, he received a great number of letters. He was staying at the old Hotel Brunswick, Fifth Avenue, and every morning I had to go there and tell him “who was who” among the writers of the letters. One day he was called down to the parlor by a message that a lady wished to see him. He went down and when he came back to his room carrying a card in his hand, he said to me, “Well, I certainly am in an extraordinary country. That visitor, whom I never knew, is evidently a lady, and she has invited me to come and spend a week with her husband and herself at Yonkers.” Glancing at the card, I read the name of Mrs. James B. Colgate, and said to Seymour Haden, “I should certainly advise you to accept,” and I went on to say that it was easy enough for a stranger from England to see our public show places, big hotels, etc., but not so easy to get an entrée to the home of a really nice American family. Seymour Haden accepted the invitation and spent a week with Mr. and Mrs. Colgate. In those years, I myself lived in Yonkers, and I called on him at the Colgate house the day after his arrival there. The eminent banker showed us into his library, and leaving us alone he closed the door. The English visitor, first looking around to see that there was no other person present, said to me in a sort of whisper: “I am very comfortable here, with but one serious drawback. I have been in the habit, all my life, of taking wine with my dinner; but last evening, what do you suppose they gave me in the place of wine?—milk!” This was about nine o’clock at night, and when I got home I stated the case to my dear old mother. She laughed a little wickedly, and said, “I think I can help your friend in this case.” We happened to have some very good sherry. The old lady got a large flat bottle, filled it with the wine, corked it and put it into an innocent-looking pasteboard box, telling me to take it to him. Before leaving my home, I wrote a brief note to Seymour Haden saying that the package which I had to deliver to him must be opened only in the privacy of his own chamber. The Colgates were total abstainers of so pronounced a kind that when Mr. Colgate rented any house of his in Yonkers, he made a condition in the lease that no intoxicants of any kind were ever to be received in that house. Further than that, one of his principles was, not only never to drink wine or spirits, but never to touch or carry them. When I got back to Mr. Colgate’s house, it was ten o’clock at night, and all the lights in the big house were extinguished and the doors locked. I rang and rang at the bell, and at last Mr. Colgate himself, wearing trousers and slippers, opened the door. I had to manufacture a small fiction, which recalls Sir Walter Scott’s couplet:
Oh, what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practise to deceive.
Mr. Colgate said to me rather fretfully that all the household had retired, and that Mr. Seymour Haden must wait until the morning. I said to him in reply, that he would do me a great favor, if when he was passing his guest’s chamber door, he would knock at it and deliver the package, and this Mr. Colgate consented to do. Some days later a reception was given to Seymour Haden at the Lotos Club, Fifth Avenue, and I accompanied him from Yonkers to New York on that occasion. When Mr. Haden found himself safe in the train, he said to me: “I couldn’t have slept a wink except for that excellent sherry that your mother sent me, but I took deucéd good care to carry away the empty bottle in my bag.” I remember that from the train we saw the gorgeous sight of the sun setting behind the Palisades, and mirrored in the Hudson River, and Mr. Haden said to me, with something like reproach in his voice: “Now, why have I never been told of the beauty of all this?” Later on, he said to me, looking about in the crowded train: “Now, isn’t it melancholy to think that nobody among all these people, except myself (and perhaps you), has the slightest sense of the beauty of this magnificent sunset!” I was tempted to say to him that he had no right to assume such callous insensibility on the part of the Americans, but though I thought it, I did not say it. Seymour Haden’s reception at the Lotos Club was a notable function. I remember that the President, the Hon. Whitelaw Reid, made a very graceful speech in honor of his guest, and I recall vividly the marvelous cleverness of a very young man who had been invited to entertain the company. One of this young man’s monologues represented an intimate talk between three Italian opera singers, the soprano, the tenor, and the basso; the three continually interrupting one another. The speaking of the young man was in “fake” Italian, and the three speaking voices were admirably differentiated. I inquired who this young man was, and was told that he was the son of the famous oratorio singer, Madame Rudersdorf of Boston, that his name was Richard Mansfield, and that he was studying for the stage. I then uttered a prophecy that that young man would be a great actor later on; and so he was.
After his return from Boston, the artist spent several weeks in New York, and while he was there, I arranged for him the first public exhibition of his etchings which was ever made in America. The New York press took up the subject with enthusiasm, and every important newspaper printed a long review of the artist and his work. I collected all of these very laudatory articles, and took them to Mr. Haden at the Hotel Brunswick. Next day he said to me, “Do you know that these reviews of the New York press are distinctly abler and more intelligent than if they had been written in London?” He added, “I wish you would pay my particular compliments to the gentleman who wrote the review in the New York World; that article in particular I found to be admirable.” He was surprised when he saw me begin to laugh, but I explained to him that the “gentleman” in question was a lady, and the article which he so greatly admired was from the pen of Mrs. Schuyler van Rensselaer.
One very seldom finds that the imaginative and creative artist is also endowed with a logical and judicial cast of mind. It was so with Seymour Haden. He had brought from England a large collection of excellent lantern-slides to illustrate these lectures by means of a stereopticon, and in the lecturer’s zeal to glorify original etching at the expense of prints done by any other method, he had procured one lantern slide of the beautiful little portrait which Rembrandt had etched of himself, the complete print of which is hardly bigger than a postage stamp. It was the Rembrandt à trois moustaches. Alongside of this, Mr. Haden had printed a morsel of the same size, taken from a crude and unimportant part of the foreground of William Sharp’s famous line-engraving of the Holy Family, after the painting by Sir Joshua Reynolds. Thus this special pleader, Haden, displayed an etching in its entirety, and less than one-hundredth part of a line-engraving of very large size. Wherever, during his lectures, this illustration was exhibited by a stereopticon, there was a universal outcry against the unfairness of it. People all, with one accord, declared that if the artist wanted to confront and contrast etching with line-engraving, fairness would require the lecturer to have chosen two prints of the same size; but there was no “budging” Seymour Haden, when he had formed an opinion.
While in New York, he visited the exhibition of paintings at the National Academy of Design, and was escorted through the galleries by the late James D. Smillie, N.A. When his eye fell upon a certain painting, he suddenly stopped as if he were paralyzed. “Who did that picture?” “It is the work of one of our New York artists, Miss So-and-So.” “Why do you allow such dreadful things on your walls?” “Well,” said Mr. Smillie, “we like to exemplify various phases in art.” “Hum,” rejoined Seymour Haden, while glaring at the picture; “she ought to be disemboweled!”
Of at least one of our well-known American artists, Seymour Haden expressed the strongest admiration. This was the late John Lafarge, N.A., and he also spoke with enthusiasm of the original American etchings of thirty years ago, the work of such men as Stephen Parrish, Charles A. Platt, Peter Moran, and Joseph Pennell. On seeing a very large, intricate plate by Mr. Parrish, Mr. Haden made the remark to me, “That young man does not know what the sense of fatigue in making a picture is.” Even at this period, Seymour Haden was known throughout Europe as being the judge par excellence of a fine print, and he was also recognized as an admirable judge of paintings.
While on this subject of Haden’s learned judgment of pictures, I will record what he remarked to me after he had visited Niagara for the first time. What he said was: “No artist, except Turner, should have ever dared to attempt making a picture of the Falls of Niagara.”
One of Seymour Haden’s exceptionally good days was the Sunday which he spent in visiting that famous art collector and admirable man, James L. Claghorn, of Philadelphia. On that occasion, I myself was included as a sort of “make-weight.” The Englishman, with genuine zeal, went through Mr. Claghorn’s collection of prints, and he wrote with pencil on several of them that they were exceptionally fine.
On another side Mr. Haden excelled as a judge, and that was in the matter of first-class food and first-class cooking. At lunch, our host treated us to a delicious dish of terrapin. Seymour Haden found it wonderfully good and declared that not only had he never tasted terrapin before, but he had never heard of the dish. “Oh, yes,” said I to him; “you certainly have heard of terrapin; don’t you remember at church on Sundays, when they sing the ‘Te Deum,’ they sing, ‘Terrapin and Seraphim.’” “Oh, tut, tut,” said he, “I want to hear no irreverence.”
Seymour Haden had ranked as a very able physician. An incident occurred while we were at Mr. Claghorn’s house which shows how wise he was in this respect: Mr. Claghorn was a huge and corpulent man of about sixty, but he was full of force and energy. While we were in his library he got up and bustled out on some errand, and Seymour Haden said to me: “Your friend will not live long, and when he dies he will go off very suddenly.” I was shocked on hearing such an unexpected prophecy, and I asked Mr. Haden how long Mr. Claghorn was likely to live. In answer he said, “Just about two years.” Two years later, within ten days of the time Haden had designated, Mr. Claghorn suddenly fell dead.
Still continuing the subject of Mr. Haden’s critical judgment in dining. I may mention that wherever he went, he would never partake, at a hotel, of a table d’hôte meal. He insisted on selecting particular dishes which he wished for, and he had them specially cooked for him. On his return from Cincinnati, he told me that while there he met my own dear friend, the late Herman Goepper, and he had given him, at a club, the very best, and best-served, dinner that he had ever partaken of.
Seymour Haden’s course of lectures at Chicago was a great success, and a very notable reception was tendered to him. During the course of that reception, a very influential Chicago lady marched up and said in a loud voice: “Why don’t you educate your women in England?” “I know what you mean,” said the Englishman, “but we don’t like to have our English women crammed with a lot of abstruse isms and ologies.” Another lady, who thought the English guest had been rather unfairly attacked, said to him, “Now, Mr. Haden, can’t you attack her in return?” “Well, yes,” said he: “in America, you don’t know how to make tea, and your table knives will not cut anything.” Another little dispute arose in Detroit. Haden had arrived late at night, very much fatigued, at the Russell House. At about eight o’clock in the morning he was awakened from a much-needed sleep by a sound of hammering and grinding in the wall outside his window. He got up, raised the window, and saw two men boring a hole into the front wall of the hotel, for the purpose of inserting an iron bar from which a sign was to be swung. Mr. Haden remonstrated at being disturbed. The two mechanics answered that they were “on that job” and that they were going to do it. Then, as the Detroit Free Press related the incident, the elderly gentleman, dressed in night-clothes and a nightcap, had pushed out both his arms, seized the offending and disturbing crowbar, hauled it into his room and shut down the window. Very soon after, the proprietor of the hotel came, knocked at his guest’s door, and said that the crowbar which had been seized was not his property and that he would get into trouble if it were not given up at once, but Seymour Haden before giving it up stipulated that he was not to be disturbed with any more noise until such time as he was ready to leave his bed.
It will be noticed that, while in my former article I called him Sir Seymour Haden, in the present one I call him plain Mister. This was because it was after his return from America to England that Queen Victoria gave him his title, and although in London he had a large medical practice he never was even Doctor Haden. In England a surgeon, however eminent, is never addressed as Doctor.
This change to a title of nobility reminds me of a couplet in Thackeray’s fine Irish ballad, “Mr. Molony’s Account of the Ball”:
There was Lord Crowhurst, I knew him first
When only Misther Pips he was.
During his stay in America he learned to like our people greatly, and it was his intention to make us a second visit and to bring his charming American wife along with him; but this purpose of his was never carried out.
Shortly before leaving our shores, he said to me: “One thing alone would render it impossible for me ever to reside permanently in the United States, and that is the intolerable and brutal insolence of the lower classes.” To this I made answer: “But, Mr. Haden, in America we have no ‘lower classes.’ What you suffered from these people was really your own fault. It is all very well in England for a fine gentleman to bully and denounce the cabman, the railway-porter, and the servants at hotels, but it will not do here, and no American, however eminent, ever does it.”
When Seymour Haden returned to England he took with him the genuine good will of many Americans, and the lasting friendship of not a few.