Henry M. Stanley And Paul Du Chaillu

( Originally Published 1912 )

IMAGINATION is precipitate, and those who have it know how often it misleads them. It is light-winged and audacious, and cannot hear of any interesting person without at once prefiguring him in a fanciful portrait which is more than likely to be wrong and confusing in every particular. The reading of his books or even his letters serves not in revealing his appearance to us, but from a thin soil of evidence those of us who are blessed or afflicted with the visionary and anticipatory habit draw, to use a phrase of Henry James in relation to Taine, luxuriant flowers of deduction.

Henry M. Stanley is an instance of what I have in mind. I had talked with men who had been with him on his African expeditions, and the impression I gathered from them was that, though he was not inhuman, he spared neither man nor beast when in desperate straits. He would not defer to the counsel or the pleas of others, or have any patience with less than instant and unquestioning obedience to his orders under all circumstances. Nor would he forbear under arguments or excuses, or relax his severity by any familiarity or pleasantries, even when his object had been gained. He was both despot and martinet; exacting, silent, and inscrutable.

"I cannot say we loved him," one of his lieutenants said to me; "we were all afraid of him: but we all believed in him."

What details to inspire an imaginary portrait of him ! The silent man in white, imperturbable in the heart of the African forest, his words restricted to commands, which his followers, recognizing their destiny in him, leaped to obey !

I had not met him in my old newspaper days, when he was a reporter on the New York Herald, but after his return to America from his successful search for Living-stone, he came to one of the monthly dinners of the j Papyrus Club in Boston, that Bohemian gathering of "literary" and "non-literary" members described by Howells in "A Modern Instance." Prominent in it in those golden days were John Boyle O'Reilly, Charles Eyre Pascoe, Robert Grant, John D. Wheelwright, Alexander Young, Frank Underwood (founder of the Atlantic), George F. Babbitt, and Frank A. Harris, dramatist and physician.

A list of the guests would include not only the vanished generation of Boston's Augustan age, in which Motley, Holmes, Emerson, Parkman, and Lowell were preëminent, but also almost every celebrity who ever came to that city.

None of them was received with excessive deference; nor did their presence, however exalted they might be, restrain the customary chaff and exuberance that noisily sped the dinner. I think that when it was announced that Stanley had accepted an invitation, it caused more awe than had ever been seen in the club before, and that others visualized him as I had done in my mind's eye — superhuman rather than human, for whom one's admiration was necessarily qualified by a degree of fear.

Then he appeared, closely-knit, broad-shouldered and below, rather than above, medium height, with a face whose natural pallor had been overlaid by exposure, and whose expression was more of intellectual problems than of the physical problems the solution of which had made him famous.

Probably those who came to entertain him never had a more difficult task. Unusual compliments were paid, and questions asked, apparently without moving him to pleasure or interest. Whether he sat or stood, he fidgeted and answered in monosyllables, not because he was unamiable or unappreciative, but because he this man of iron, God s instrument, whose word in the field brooked no contradiction or evasion, he who defied obstacles and danger and pierced the heart of darkness was bashful even in the company of fellow craftsmen!

His embarrassment grew when, after dinner, the chair-man eulogized him to the audience; he squirmed and averted his face as cheer after cheer confirmed the speaker 's rhetorical ebullience of praise. "Gentlemen, I introduce to you Mr. Stanley, who," etc. The hero stood up slowly, painfully, reluctantly, and, with a gesture of deprecation, fumbled in first one and then another of his pockets without finding what he sought.

It was supposed that he was looking for his notes, and more applause took the edge off the delay. His mouth twitched without speech for another awkward minute before, with a more erect bearing, he produced the object of his search and put it on his head. It was not paper, but a rag of a cap; and, with that on, he faced the company as one who by the act had done all that could be expected of him, and made further acknowledgment of the honours he had received superfluous. It was a cap Livingstone had worn, and Livingstone had given him. The others left their seats and crowded about him for an explanation — not all knew the meaning of it — and after a dry, stammered word or two, he sank with a sigh of relief from a terrifying predicament into his chair.

Years afterward I occasionally met him in London at his house in Richmond Terrace, Whitehall, at parties, and at the House of Commons. He had finished his work in Africa meanwhile, and, with reason to be satisfied with what he had done in opening that continent to civilization, he had settled down with a beautiful, accomplished, and adoring wife. She would have made a society man of him, but he never looked happy at social functions. The only complaint she made against him was that he would stand aside instead of asserting him-self in a crowd. Whenever there was a rush for seats in a train, all the better accommodation would be taken before he made any effort to provide for her or himself, and so elsewhere. He would allow himself to be trodden on without remonstrance; never was there so patient a lion. So, when he entered the House of Commons, he was never as conspicuous as he should have been, on his merits.

"There are only one or two subjects on which I should care to speak," he said to me one afternoon at "tea on the Terrace." "For instance, when African questions have come up, I have thought my knowledge of that country sufficient to be of service; but, somehow or other, another fellow is always on his feet before me, and though he may never have been in Africa, the Speaker gives him the floor.

That was the only time I ever heard him bewail his ineffectiveness in Parliament, the only murmur of discontent. Knighthood, the freedom of great cities, and the highest degrees of the universities and learned societies had been conferred on him. His table and sideboard were loaded with caskets of silver and gold holding tributes to his achievements, which his wife loved to display. She herself, a woman of wit and beauty, was the painter and exhibitor in the Royal Academy of the best portrait of him. But he often seemed as distraught in London as he had been at the Papyrus so many years before.

Such was the impression I received of him. I quote, however, a letter of Lady Stanley's which portrays him from her more intimate point of view:

DEAR MR. RIDEING:

You have certainly hit the mark, when you describe Stanley as very shy; but in any public assemblage where he had to speak, he quickly overcame that feeling of bashfulness and spoke with easy power. I think your memory played you a trick, when you say that one of his officers told you that they feared Stanley more than they loved him.* I think perhaps they did both, but love was deep and lasting. Stanley, however, was not the stern, relentless, sombre man, without fun or humour, so often imagined. He was bubbling over with fun and boyish spirits, when the occasion allowed it, though of course in Africa he probably had to repress himself.

Stanley never read his Bible in the presence of his officers, and he never spoke of his religious convictions; indeed, he was extremely reticent on this subject. In a crowded assemblage his one idea was to get away, but to see him at Furze Hill, with his friends, you would have found him full of spirits.

What a contrast between Stanley and Paul du Chaillu! "I, Paul, ' as Du Chaillu usually spoke of himself. He reminded me of the old story of the Marseillaise and the Gascon. "I," said the former, "love art — music, painting, poetry." The latter declared, "I love sport, always sport, nothing but sport." He then described his recent experiences in Africa.

"Ten lions in twenty minutes — not a bad record, eh? After breakfast I went out again. Lighted a cigarette. Heard a noise in the bushes to the left. An-other lion. Bang! Killed him! Went a little farther, took a sip from my flask. Noise in the bushes to the right. Another lion. Bang ! Killed him ! Had a nap and a sandwich. Getting tired of it. This time a sound in the bushes right ahead. The biggest lion you ever saw — thirty feet from his muzzle to the tip of his tail, every inch of it. Levelled my gun and aimed."

The Marseillaise could stand it no longer. "See here, if you kill that lion, I'll kill you."

The warning was promptly taken. "Bang! Missed him!"

Du Chaillu claimed too many lions, and listening to him one had the not unpleasant feeling of reverting to childhood and sitting in the lap of the amazing Münchausen. He was dark, small, volatile, and voluble, and no matter how a conversation with him drifted, it was almost sure to end in the tropical bush, among gorillas and beasts of prey. With fierce gesticulations and a flashing eye, he pictured the scene dramatically. "Bang! Another lion!" or a mammoth ape, excelling in temper and strength all the monstrous prodigies that had already been introduced to us.

I remember his account of his first lecture in Boston.

"Bah! I had ten gorillas behind me on the platform, stuffed, and about twenty in the audience before me, unstuffed. I, Paul —I—I—I!"

His habit of rodomontade discredited him. He was like a braggart boy who has done something and so obviously exaggerates it that he is deprived of even the lesser glory his actual feats should earn for him. He might have desired to refrain from romancing and embellishing, but his imagination rode him like a highway-man and spurred him into many flights through the moonshine of illusion. When his work was winnowed, the bulk of it preserved substantial values to science and geography. What had to be cast aside could be attributed, not to intentional imposture, but to that rough rider of temperamental exuberance that risks its neck without other motive or goal than the diversion of spectators. So many admirable qualities had he — he was so genial, so vivacious, and so witty that I disquiet my conscience in mentioning his foibles at all, and question whether the consciousness of what I have said may not aggravate rather than extenuate the unkindness of it.