Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce (Delphi Classics)

by Ambrose Bierce

  But he did have, however, a real affection for Tom Hood. Of Hood’s personal charm, so much has been written that it may be assumed. Naturally Bierce was fond of him. Hood’s letters to Bierce, very few in number, are touched with the most delightful wit and grace. After the birth of Day, he wrote Bierce that he was coming down to Bath to see the new “Day-Man who is the real Fiend’s Delight.” And, again, on New Year’s he wrote: “A happy new year to you — and to the dawning Day — I suppose you’ll want him made a Knight, your republican tendencies of course being aristocratic as shown by your signature ‘Bierce’ as our Dukes and Earls write ‘Wellington’ or ‘Derby’ — are you sure you are not the real Tichborne?” Throughout their correspondence there is not the suggestion of a quarrel or a misunderstanding: a rare experience with Bierce.

  Bierce used to visit Hood in Penge, a suburb of London, beyond the Crystal Palace. “Back of his odd little house was his odd little garden, and here we were accustomed to burn our cigars after which we commonly passed the entire night in a room upstairs, sipping grog, pulling at our pipes, and talking on all manner of things.... Tom had in him a vein of what in another I should have called superstition, but it was so elusive in character and whimsical in manifestation that I could never rightly assign it a place, nor determine its metes and bounds. It may have been an undeveloped religion, a philosophical conviction, a sentiment — for ought I know a joke.” During many of the nocturnal visits they talked of ghosts, and one night they made the usual death pact with each other that the one who first should die would attempt to communicate with the other. Bierce left London shortly after this for a trip, and during his absence Hood died (1875). One evening after his return to the city, he was walking to his home in Warwickshire, when he felt the presence of his friend rush past. “I need not attempt to describe my feelings; they were novel and not altogether agreeable. That I had met the spirit of my dead friend; that it had given me recognition, yet not in the old way; that it had then vanished — of these things I had the evidence of my own senses. How strongly this impressed me the beating of my heart attested whenever, for many months afterward, that strange meeting came into my memory.” He was to make use of this incident when he wrote “The Damned Thing.”

  Aside from Hood, Bierce was on more intimate terms with Henry Sampson than with any of his other associates. They became the best of friends. Sampson seems to have been of a somewhat quarrelsome nature, and was constantly talking and writing about his “enemies” and their “blackguard tactics” in a most saturnine manner. Along with Bierce, he cherished a particular and special antipathy for Sir Henry Lucy. When Hood died in 1875, Sampson took over the editorship of Fun. Both Hattie O’Connor, Sampson’s only child, and Mrs. Croston (formerly Julia Sampson), knew Bierce well. In fact, they visited the Bierces in San Francisco on a return trip from Australia years later. Mrs. Croston’s slight memoir of Bierce may be found in the London Evening Standard, September 15th, 1922.

  Bierce once related an amusing story about himself. It seems he was in the bar of the Covent Garden Theater with Henry Sampson one evening. Sampson had a habit of practical joking which was well known by all his friends who had been its victims on numerous occasions. Bierce was aware of this trait, and, like the other members of their circle of friends, was constantly on guard. Henry Irving entered the room and saluted them, and was by Sampson introduced to Bierce. “Our foremost actor,” Sampson added by way of showing off his lion. But, as Bierce said, “I mistook the lion — I thought the remark was addressed to Mr. Irving, a bit of fun suggested by the spirit of the place. Still, one does not care to have one’s profession misstated. Looking Mr. Irving gravely in the eye, I said: ‘Mr. Sampson is facetious.’ Irving said nothing, but I soon began to gather from his manner that he did not think Mr. Sampson facetious; and it was not long before I renounced that view of the matter myself. The silence was shocking, but in the midst of it, Sampson managed to signify a sense of thirst. We drank, and at the conclusion of the rite, Mr. Irving said good evening with a considerable vraisemblance. I thought him a good actor.”

  Bierce and his family soon gave up their residence in London and returned to Bath, where they spent the winter of 1874. During this period, Bierce was still writing for the weekly and monthly humorous magazines of London. By this time he had published three books: “The Fiend’s Delight,” published by Chatto & Windus as successors to John Camden Hotten; “Nuggets & Dust”; and “Cobwebs from an Empty Skull.” The first two volumes were negligible and were compiled at the suggestion of John Camden Hotten. In “The Fiend’s Delight” is one section of “Aphorisms,” many of which Bierce thought well enough of to give them a place in Volume XVIII of his “Collected Works.” Aside from these few aphorisms, Bierce did not entertain a very high regard for the work printed in these early volumes. Referring to “Cobwebs from an Empty Skull,” he said in a letter to Stoddard (December, 1873): “I am pleased that Mark likes my fables, but your idea that they ought to create a ‘furor’ — I think that is the word — amuses me. I don’t create furors. The book in question has never, I believe, been sent to a single journal for review, is not published in anybody’s list, and is not even advertised — If I had one of Mark’s cocktails I would finish this letter; as it is I have not the spirit to get through it, and if anything else strikes me I’ll telegraph.” And in still another letter to Stoddard (January, 1874): “Do you know I have the supremest contempt for my books, — as books. As a journalist I believe I am unapproachable in my line; as an author, a slouch! I should never put anything into covers if I could afford not to.” This is a singularly revealing statement, not so much because it shows that Bierce had a clear-headed conception of his faults, (one would expect that of such a man), but because of his calm assumption of supreme worth in “my line,” i.e. journalism. Bierce knew that as a satirical journalist he really was “unapproachable.” He remained a great satirist all his life, and it is to be seriously doubted if so immensely effective a journalist, in his own manner, ever wrote in this country. To some it may only be “journalese,” but others will find in “Prattle” such mordant satire, such utterly annihilating sarcasm and abuse, as cannot easily be paralleled.

  But, regardless of their value, Bierce was too modest in his letter to Stoddard about the reception of these early books. As a matter of fact, they were quite well received. Tom Hood was enthusiastic about them; so was Henry Sampson. Hotten, who published them, was pleased and asked Bierce for more copy, suggesting, however, something a “trifle less bloody — less swinging of the meat axe. I am sure you must have written plenty of delightful conceits not entirely of a gory character.” His English associates knew that Bierce was simply amusing himself with these “awful” stories; they were not compelled to convert him into a sadist but were willing to accept his statement, made in “The Fiend’s Delight” — (Page 75)—”One of the rarest amusements in life is to go about with an icicle suspended by a string, letting it down the necks of the unwary. The sudden shrug, the quick, frightened shudder, the yelp of apprehension, are sources of pure, because diabolical, delight.” One reviewer in mentioning “Nuggets & Dust” made this comment:

  “If Artemas Ward may be considered the Douglas Jerrold, and Mark Twain the Sydney Smith of America, Dod Grile will rank as their Dean Swift. There is a grimness and force in him which place his humor far above anything of the kind ever attempted. The New York Nation, a literary authority of ability, is struck with Dod Grile’s wit and delightful badinage, every line of which is written in the most forceful English.”

  When “The Fiend’s Delight” appeared, Bierce reviewed it himself, under a nom de plume in Figaro, and said that it was: “A piece of exasperating blackguardism, begot of comprehensive ignorance and profound conceit. But it is useless to chide this animal; the wise man has said of the fool that though brayed in a mortar yet his folly will not depart from him. Still, it is a grateful task to bray him, anyhow.”

  In the spring of 1874 the Bierces moved
to 20 South Parade, Leamington, Warwickshire. In a letter to Stoddard dated April 26th, 1874, Bierce said: “You will want to see Kenilworth, Warwick, and Stratford-on-Avon again. You have no notion of the beauty of the country now when it is green.” He made innumerable trips through the English countryside and never ceased to praise its beauties. In “Nuggets & Dust,” he tells about a visit to Kenilworth Castle one Sunday. On his return he stopped at a little inn on a hillside.

  “As I sat in my little ten-by-twelve parlour, looking upon the gigantic hot joint gracing my table, flanked with a jug of nut-brown ale, and then backward across the remnants of the old priory in the valley, to the solemn Ruin, the westering sun struggled from behind one of those mountains of tumbled cloud which I have never seen but in an English sky, and set the giant pile afire with a great glory. The light burned and flickered upon the angles like the flame of molten iron; broad banners of it seemed flung from every summit; it poured in jagged torrents through the rent sides, and shot in long straight beams through the narrow fissures, ribboning with gold the blue-black shadows darkening broadly about its base! Anon the glow crept athwart my own windows, streamed in, and gilded the brown joint upon the board with a radiance all its own.”

  Stratford-on-Avon and Warwick made similar impressions. Bierce never wrote in this manner about any other experience. It was his introduction into an orderly life in which chaos was but a faint rumble; all the futile landscapes of his youth were replaced by this loveliness of Old England. Memories of Horse Cave, Ohio, were crowded out of mind by the glitter and warmth of the Mitre Tavern. He was happily married; he had an established reputation as a man of letters; he was the comrade of many distinguished writers. He was tasting the sweets of life. The disquieting sense of futility which he had experienced soon after the war, was almost forgotten as he gained confidence in the possibility of orderliness in life.

  Mrs. Day was still living with her daughter at this time. She had traveled to London to gaze upon one grandchild and stayed to witness the birth of another, for in May, 1874, the second son, Leigh, was born at Leamington. Shortly after the birth of this child. Mrs. Day departed for America. It has been bruited about that she returned to America with her daughter. This, of course, is untrue. Bierce never liked his mother-in-law, but this antipathy had nothing whatever to do with the estrangement with Mrs. Bierce which occurred at a much later date.

  The summer that followed on Mrs. Day’s return to America, was far from pleasant for Bierce. Much of the worry of the household fell on him, and he was scarcely the type of man to be delighted with domestic cares. He wrote to Stoddard from Leamington (July 4th): “I have had a deal of worry — having more work than I can do, and Mrs. Bierce having two babies and nursemaid to look after. — Then, too, I have been, and am, up to my ears in work, grinding stuff for five publications: one semiweekly, two weeklies, one monthly, and one ‘occasional’ — a pizen thing of which I write every line. If some of these don’t die of me I shall surely die of them.” The exile was broken by visitors from London and one or two callers from San Francisco, such as Belle Thomas and Prentice Mulford. Belle Thomas visited the Bierces on her way to Paris to study music. She was a great favorite of the Bierces. Mrs. Bierce once remarked that the most delightful evenings in England that she could recall were spent “toasting crumpets with Prentice Mulford.” Later Mulford anticipated Dr. Frank Crane with his catchy, optimistic “White Cross Library,” but with all the inconsistency of the professional smiler he was found dead one morning in a boat at Sag Harbor. He could smile cheerfully through all life’s cruel disappointments, but when “Josie,” the inspiration of Miller and Charles Warren Stoddard also, deserted him he found his philosophy of no assistance. Through these occasional visitors Bierce maintained some contact with San Francisco, but he had ceased to correspond with any of his old friends with the exception of James Watkins. Stoddard was, at the time, in Rome, attempting to see “the Holy, if somewhat eccentric, Father,” as Bierce phrased it; Miller was gone; Twain was no longer in London. The only California newspapers that he read were The News-Letter and the Santa Cruz Sentinel. He had definitely abandoned America in his own mind.

  One of Bierce’s close associates at this time was James Mortimer, editor of Figaro. Mortimer had had a varied experience as journalist in England, America and in France, and was typical of the profession at that date; hard-drinking, witty, irresponsible, and lazy. He had perfected the technique of polite blackmail, then so much in vogue among struggling journalists. He had immediately recognized in Bierce a writer with a genius for satirical expression, and had given him all the work he could do. He kept nagging Bierce for copy, writing “Go at it again, try to be exceptionally bitter,” or “Be as cynical and disagreeable as you like, which is saying much.” He made endless sport of Bierce’s enigmatic initials “A. G.,” referring to him as “Aaron,”

  “Abner” and whatnot. Along with Sampson, Sir Henry Lucy and others of the time, Mortimer belonged to a class of journalists that disappeared about 1890. Their work is hard to read to-day because the personal allusions have been forgotten, and the innuendoes are no longer comprehensible. They specialized in personal abuse of the most scurrilous variety, and often had to flee across the channel, as Mortimer did more than once, to evade the harsh criminal libel laws of England. Bierce was of a much finer caliber than any of these men, but they did instruct him in the art of verbal fencing.

  Mortimer, during the time that he had lived in Paris, had become an intimate of the Emperor and Empress. After they fled to England, he had been able to render them many courtesies and had performed many valuable services. It was but natural that they should consult him when it was announced that Henri Rochefort was coming to England. In order to appreciate fully the significance of what follows, it is necessary to know something about this amazing Rochefort and his relation to the royalty of France.

  Henri Rochefort, Victor Henri, Marquis de Rochefort-Lucay was the scion of a very aristocratic family in France. After first failing very ignominiously as a medical student and later as a clerk, he became a revolutionary demagogue of great rhetorical violence. In 1863 he was one of the editors of Figaro, and soon afterwards began the first of his mordant attacks on the Napoleonic régime. But these early writings were mild indeed compared with the diatribes he began to publish in 1868 after the more arbitrary restrictions on the press were relaxed in France. It was at this point that Rochefort launched his famous weekly, La Lanterne, which immediately upon its publication enjoyed an enormous circulation. In the columns of La Lanterne, so-called because, as its editor said, “A lantern may serve both to lighten the day of the honest men and to hang wrongdoers,” Rochefort left nothing unsaid about the Emperor or the Empress. He even went to the extreme of denying the legitimacy of the Prince Imperial! This abuse continued for some months, but finally Rochefort was convicted of “disrespect against the government” and fled to Brussels, where he joined Victor Hugo, also in exile, and continued the publication of La Lanterne from that retreat.

  In 1873 Rochefort was sentenced to the penal colony at New Caledonia, and it was generally held that a good riddance had been made of bad rubbish. The man was really a most remarkable firebrand. His memoirs, “The Adventures of My Life,” in two volumes, published by Edward Arnold in 1897, is a most interesting account of a life devoted to intellectual carnage, riot and excitement. His days seem to have been entirely taken up with duels, quarrels, plots, and scurrilous attacks on people of the highest estate. And, as might be expected of so violent a temperament, his nights were rarely given over to meditation.

  Aside from the memoirs, the best account of the man to be found is that by John F. MacDonald, published in the Contemporary Review, August, 1913. According to this observer, Rochefort was Baudelaire turned politician. He was known throughout Europe as “Rochefort the Lurid” and “Rochefort the Vicious.” Of his personal appearance MacDonald says: “Pale, steely blue eyes lit up cruelly, evilly at times, a face seamed, sallow and ho
rse-like in shape; he had a harsh, guttural voice; and large, yellowish hands with long, pointed finger nails.” That Rochefort was capable of pithy utterance when aroused is shown by some of the epithets he hurled. He called M. Jaurès “a decayed turnip”; M. Georges Clemenceau, “a loathsome leper”; M. Briand, “a moulting vulture”; President Loubet, “the foulest of assassins”; and President Fallières, “a fat old satyr.” He dallied in the cafés of Paris with a toy lamb on his table, making cruel sport of the people that he met. He was utterly capricious and entirely mad. Purporting to be a liberal, he pursued Captain Dreyfus with relentless vigor and even allied himself with such rank militarists as General Boulanger and Paul Derouledè. For some fifty years he was “a holy terror,” as Bierce would say, in French journalism. His papers, notably Figaro, La Lanterne, L’Intransigeant, and Patrie, were renowned for his vicious, scurrilous, vulgar abuse.

  The Empress Eugénie had come to fear Rochefort’s diabolic attacks during the days when she was in power in France. It is small wonder, then, that she trembled in exile whenever his name was mentioned. She had fled to England after the collapse of the Empire and settled at Chislehurst. Although England was gracious enough to Marie Eugenie Ignace Augustine De Montijo, it was quite a problem to determine just how royally a nominally republican government should treat a fugitive monarchist. Eugénie had fled from France, however, with most of the loose gold of the realm, and with this in mind England was amenable to the ever-pleasant conviction that the rich must necessarily be the just.