The Last American Aristocrat by David S. Brown

Author:David S. Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2020-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

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As Henry sought Theodore Dwight’s company following Clover’s death, so he now prevailed upon the traveling companionship of John La Farge, paying for his friend’s passage and various expenses. Of aristocratic French descent and raised Roman Catholic, the Manhattan-born La Farge, bald, bespectacled, and sporting a thick salt-and-pepper mustache, read widely and developed an interest in exotic cultures. A gifted muralist and maker of stained-glass windows, he had met Henry, three years his junior, in one of Boston’s literary-artistic circles, perhaps at Harvard where he briefly taught art composition. He possessed, so Adams said, “the neatest humor, the nicest observation, and the evenest temper you can imagine.” Though responsible for a wife and several children in Newport, Rhode Island, La Farge, committed to professional success, had lived independently in New York since the late 1870s. “He was going to lead his own life,” remembered one relative. Talented, praised, and inundated with commissions, he established the La Farge Decorative Art Company in 1883, but the business soon dissolved following a bitter dispute with his partners over artistic control. Accused of taking designs belonging to the company, La Farge was arrested in May 1885. Though settled out of court with all charges dropped, the case made headlines; the New York World reported that the commotion caused “a decided scandal in both social and art circles and became the general topic of conversation whenever or wherever artists or connoisseurs met.”5 Now, a year later, with his name being gossiped about, a deeply embarrassed La Farge accepted Henry’s invitation to seek his own season of peace.

In early June the two voyagers embarked from Albany and began a “brilliant run” aboard the Union Pacific Railroad, whose director, Adams’s brother Charles, kindly lent them his private company car. La Farge spent much of the trip sketching the spacious western landscape, while a more academic Henry read up on Buddhism. “Our journey,” he told one correspondent, “was a glorious success.” Arriving in “dusty, wintry, and seedy” San Francisco on the 10th, they briefly put up at the Palace Hotel before setting off on the Pacific Mail Steamship Company line’s City of Sydney. Suffering through his usual mal de mer, Henry complained to Dwight that “the Pacific Ocean is different from other oceans.… It contains nothing but head-winds, chopping seas, rains, cold and seasickness.”6 After three unpleasant weeks of fighting the elements and his stomach, Henry arrived in Yokohama on the second of July.

During the more than two centuries of national seclusion, in which foreigners were directed to Nagasaki (Japan’s “window on the world”), Yokohama remained a sleepy fishing village. The 1853 arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s small flotilla of U.S. Navy ships into Tokyo Bay, however, eventuated the opening of select Japanese ports to American vessels. This had the effect of turning Yokohama into a bustling metropolitan center of some seventy-five thousand, complete with gas-powered street lamps and a railway connection to Tokyo. Already an observer of “modernity’s” progress on two continents, Henry would now measure its advance in Asia.

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