Stillman the Many-Sided

THE CONTRIBUTORS’ CLUB.

IT was on board the steamer Vanderbilt, from Havre to New York, that I first met Stillman. Dear old Huntington, the Tribune correspondent, had most warmly commended him as a fellow traveler sure to blossom into a friend. He spoke of him cordially in the carriage which conveyed us to the Havre station; and when, a few hours later, I recognized a figure familiar from Huntington’s whimsical description, I boldly uttered the magic word, and was heartily grasped by the hand ere two syllables had been uttered. As Moore says of a letter of introduction : —

And in truth I had found a delightful companion, whose conversation was an animated pictography while his quickmoving fancy literally “ played with the clouds and mocked the skies.” Our fellow voyagers consisted principally of some coal barons from Pennsylvania, so oppressed by their possessions as to be scarcely articulate. So Mr. Stillman fell back on my companion and myself (both students from Heidelberg) for society. Thus we saw a great deal of him during the long days and nights required for the old-fashioned side-wheeler to make the voyage. Sitting on the deck, mechanically watching the never ceasing play of working beam and piston rod, we listened to a world of description, and it seems now a lifetime of experience crowded into those days and hours, almost recalling the marvels of the hasheesh dreamer in condensation. From the Adirondack forests which he loved, to Hungary where he had served with Kossuth, he sped with dizzying rapidity, making mention of times and places and men and women, we had all read of, but never hoped to see. Of Ruskin, Lowell, and other magnates of the pen he spoke delightedly, though with the calm assurance of long familiarity, while something in the modesty of his tone and the sincerity of his manner gave his listeners a confidence in the truthfulness of his assertions, which else might have sorely taxed our credulity, — so various were his opportunities and his acquaintanceship.

Stillman was at this period in the prime of early manhood ; yet I noted that his daily improvisations dealt only with the past. The future and its problems had at that time no interest for him. The gigantic war-cloud then looming up, the events whose culmination was so soon to drench in blood our fair native land (a war in which we all were to take part), all was unnoticed, as were the events now troubling the European horizon. He professed no desire to advise or direct or even to scrutinize the future, bringing to its contemplation a fatalism which was temperamental. In short, it was only when Ruskin concerned himself with Modern Painters that Stillman withheld his allegiance. As if to give credibility to all that we had been hearing of that intimacy it may be noted that Ruskin did come on to Southampton to bid Stillman good-by, bringing with him an armful of books for the latter’s reading during the voyage; and I may mention among the oddities of great men, none ever puzzled me more than their taste in fiction. I had thought that nothing could surprise me on this subject after learning that Charles Sumner chose the Henrietta Temple of D’Israeli for his printed compagnon de voyage, but the armful brought by Ruskin to solace Stillman’s sea dreams or realities were of such a character that I never cared to tell, well knowing that, to be believed, one must be credible.

A few months later we met again — this time in Washington. Great events had come to pass since we parted from our Southern fellow students on the wharf at New York, — they to go South, and we also, but by a different route. Fort Sumter had been taken, Bull Run had been fought, and the war was advancing in full crimson tide when I met Stillman on Pennsylvania Avenue and took him out to the camp of the 4th Penn. Cavalry, to see our companion of the steamer Vanderbilt. Stillman was unchanged as to his looks, nor had his originality of attire and appearance deserted him. Almost as tall as the tallest of Presidents, yet overtopped by our gigantic commander in chief General Scott, he looked the ideal recruit, and had come to offer his services as a Sharpshooter, a duty for which his Adirondack training admirably fitted him. In all else unchanged excepting that he faltered somewhat in his Ruskinian faith, giving as a reason that he had too long been the lone trumpeter for a lost cause — that the consensus of artistic opinion veered away from the autocratic arrogance of any man’s ipse dixit; and in short we found that an ecstatic convert, a zealous acolyte, by no means promised a willing martyr, in his case. Mr. Bryant had adopted a similar attitude when he deserted the Democratic party, alleging that it was the party that had changed, not he.

Discouraged at failing to be assigned service among the Sharpshooters, Mr. Stillman tried to find patriotic occupation for his too versatile powers, but eventually the good President thought he could find better use for our friend as a non-combatant, in helping to eliminate the Goth and Vandal abroad, and in warring on the Philistine : so he appointed him consul to Civita Vecchia, the ancient port of Rome.

Stillman went to his new duties sadly and reluctantly — not that he was enamored of war, but he felt that in the present crisis every able-bodied young man had a mission, and that his training in the forests admirably fitted him for any martyrdom of steel and lead that might befall him. I heard of him from time to time as doing yeoman service for his struggling country, but eventually the dark red tidal wave engulfed all save very near and immediate interests and peoples.

Many years had passed, in which, although I heard of my friend, I never actually met him, seeming to miss the opportunity, frequently, by the merest accident. Finding myself in Rome during the springtime of 1896,I resolved to look up Stillman, who was at that date living in Rome as correspondent for the London Times. He was occupying a modest apartment in the newer part of Rome, a position readily accessible, as becomes the abode of a journalist. Received by his beautiful wife with a cordiality that seemed to bridge a lifetime of absence, — for I had not seen her husband since his marriage, and now the children were grown, — I was ushered into the sickroom, where I found my old friend convalescing from an attack of pneumonia. Not much changed ; the thin, high-strung face had left but little space for wrinkles, while the bushy consistency of his hair rather concealed the gradual lapses from blond to gray. The rapid, nervous utterance was softened somewhat, either from ripening years or, more probably, because attuned to the now familiar sweet “ bastard Latin ” within whose spell he dwelt. He was fondling a small gray or brown squirrel from the Schwarzwald, while the darkened apartment not only shut out the glare of the Roman summer light, but imparted a domestic penumbra to the scene.

It was easy to note that Stillman’s was the love for Italy that comes to all who sojourn long beneath her skies. “ Yes,” he said, “ I suppose that I know more about Italian politics than any one else who speaks the English language ; at least, so say my friends. And yet, my successor is in training, under my direction, for my place as correspondent of the London Times. I am now sixty-eight, and must retire soon. Pity I could n’t have stayed in America. Why, I was once on the staff of what is now the Century. To leave that opportunity was one of my mistakes.”

I ventured here to hint the remark of D’Israeli, uttered in the prime of his glory : “ Youth is a blunder, manhood a struggle, and age a regret, — no matter how well timed it all may have been, still a regret.”

“ Perhaps so,” Stillman replied. “And now I’m trying to bring up my boy in the same reverence for truth that has grown with my growth and sustained me in so many lands. Ah ! the waste of time spent in lying ; the misuse of faculties employed to exaggerate, to make the worse appear the better reason, turning history into a fairy tale, and theology into special pleading.”

I asked about his plans and purposes for the future.

“ No, I’ll return to America only as a visitor. After all, I’m only an emeritus Yankee, I ’m afraid ; or, to speak more accurately, my patriotism reaches back beyond the stirring times of Valley Forge or the Boston tea party, to include Hampden and Cromwell as well as Washington; so probably England will be my home after I shall have been retired and made my bow to the London Times and its readers. In fact, the older I grow, the more inclined I feel to recognize London as the capital of the Anglo-Saxon world, of our greater America as of Greater Britain. Our country is old enough to need no witnessing of rampant boastfulness, and is grown enough to feel proud of her ancestry. Ever since a New York board of aldermen voted to open the Brooklyn Bridge on the birthday of England’s Queen, I have felt that deep down in our bosoms we are still colonists of Great Britain, not in aims nor politics, but in the best interpretation of the word.”

The sweet face of Mrs. Stillman now appeared, and a tender shade of solicitude upon it gave warning, without word or gesture, that invalids must have rest. So I took my leave, and as the lady was conducting me to the outer air with the gentle courtesy of a privileged old friend, I found myself repeating sadly the favorite apothegm of Stillman the unresting, uttered on the steamer Vanderbilt to an accompaniment of hurrying machinery : “ My respect for a man is in inverse ratio to the space between his promise and his performance.” A sentiment unconsciously condensed by one of his old Adirondack friends, a guide : “ He done his level best.”