June 26, 1837, and in the following year to Mrs. Elizabeth (Davis) Bliss.
By the first marriage he had several children, of whom John Chandler
(Harvard, 1854) died in Europe, and George (Harvard, 1856) has spent most
of his life in foreign countries.
X
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON
CHARLES ELIOT NORTON
It is a tradition in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, that Howells
used to exult, on arriving from his Western birthplace, in having at
length met for the first time, in Charles Eliot Norton, the only man he
had ever seen who had been cultivated up to the highest point of which
he was capable. To this the verdict of all Cambridge readily assented.
What the neighbors could not at that time foresee was that the man thus
praised would ever live to be an octogenarian, or that in doing so he
would share those attractions of constantly increasing mildness and
courtesy which are so often justly claimed for advancing years. There
was in him, at an earlier period, a certain amount of visible self-will,
and a certain impatience with those who dissented from him,—he would not
have been his father’s son had it been otherwise. But these qualities
diminished, and he grew serener and more patient with others as the years
went on. Happy is he who has lived long enough to say with Goethe, “It
is only necessary to grow old to become more indulgent. I see no fault
committed which I have not committed myself.” This milder and more
genial spirit increased constantly as Norton grew older, until it served
at last only to make his high-bred nature more attractive.
He was born in Cambridge, November 16, 1827, and died in the very house
where he was born, October 21, 1908. He was descended, like several other
New England authors, from a line of Puritan clergymen. He was the son
of Professor Andrews Norton, of Harvard University, who was descended
from the Rev. John Norton, born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1651.
The mother of the latter was the daughter of Emanuel Downing, and the
niece of Governor John Winthrop. Mrs. Bradstreet, the well-known Puritan
poetess, was also an ancestress of Charles Norton. His mother, Mrs.
Caroline (Eliot) Norton, had also her ancestry among the most cultivated
families in New England, the name of Eliot having been prominent for
successive generations in connection with Harvard College. His parents
had a large and beautiful estate in Cambridge, and were (if my memory
serves me right) the one family in Cambridge that kept a carriage,—a fact
the more impressed upon remembrance because it bore the initials “A.
& C. N.” upon the panels, the only instance I have ever seen in which
the two joint proprietorships were thus expressed. This, and the fact
that I learned by heart in childhood Wordsworth’s poem, “The White Doe
of Rylstone, or The Fate of the Nortons,” imparted to my youthful mind
a slight feeling of romance about the Cambridge household of that name,
which was not impaired by the fact that our parents on both sides were
intimate friends, that we lived in the same street (now called Kirkland
Street), and that I went to dancing-school at the Norton house. It is
perhaps humiliating to add that I disgraced myself on the very first
day by cutting off little Charlie’s front hair as a preliminary to the
dancing lesson.
The elder Professor Norton was one of the most marked characters in
Cambridge, and, although never a clergyman, was professor in the
Theological School. It was said of him by George Ripley, with whom he had
a bitter contest, that “He often expressed rash and hasty judgments in
regard to the labors of recent or contemporary scholars, consulting his
prejudices, as it would seem, rather than competent authority. But in his
own immediate department of sacred learning he is entitled to the praise
of sobriety of thought and profoundness of investigation” (Frothingham’s
“Ripley,” 105). He was also a man of unusual literary tastes, and his
“Select Journal of Foreign Periodical Literature,” although too early
discontinued, took distinctly the lead of all American literary journals
up to that time.
The very beginning of Charles Norton’s career would seem at first sight
singularly in contrast with his later pursuits, and yet doubtless had
formed, in some respects, an excellent preparation for them. Graduating
at Harvard in 1846, and taking a fair rank at graduation, he was soon
after sent into a Boston counting-house to gain a knowledge of the
East India trade. In 1849 he went as supercargo on a merchant ship
bound for India, in which country he traveled extensively, and returned
home through Europe in 1851. There are few more interesting studies in
the development of literary individuality than are to be found in the
successive works bearing Norton’s name, as one looks through the list
of them in the Harvard Library. The youth who entered upon literature
anonymously, at the age of twenty-five, as a compiler of hymns under
the title of “Five Christmas Hymns” in 1852, and followed this by “A
Book of Hymns for Young Persons” in 1854, did not even flinch from
printing the tragically Calvinistic verse which closes Addison’s famous
hymn, beginning “The Lord my pasture shall prepare,” with a conclusion
so formidable as death’s “gloomy horrors” and “dreadful shade.” In
1855 he edited, with Dr. Ezra Abbot, his father’s translations of the
Gospels with notes (2 vols.), and his “Evidences of the Genuineness of
the Gospels” (3 vols.). Charles Norton made further visits to Europe in
1855-57, and again resided there from 1868 until 1873; during which time
his rapidly expanding literary acquaintanceships quite weaned his mind
from the early atmosphere of theology.
Although one of the writers in the very first number of the “Atlantic
Monthly,” he had no direct part in its planning. He wrote to me (January
9, 1899), “I am sorry that I can tell you nothing about the _primordia_
of the ‘Atlantic.’ I was in Europe in 1856-57, whence I brought home
some MSS. for the new magazine.” It appears from his later statement in
the Anniversary Number that he had put all these manuscripts by English
authors in a trunk together, but that this trunk and all the manuscripts
were lost, except one accidentally left unpacked, which was a prose paper
by James Hannay on Douglas Jerrold, “who is hardly,” as Norton justly
says, “to be reckoned among the immortals.” Hannay is yet more thoroughly
forgotten. But this inadequate service in respect to foreign material
was soon more than balanced, as one sees on tracing the list of papers
catalogued under Norton’s name in the Atlantic Index.
To appreciate the great variety and thorough preliminary preparation
of Norton’s mind, a student must take one of the early volumes of the
“Atlantic Monthly” and see how largely he was relied upon for literary
notices. If we examine, for instance, the fifth volume (1860), we find
in the first number a paper on Clough’s “Plutarch’s Lives,” comprising
ten pages of small print in double columns. There then follow in the same
volume papers on Hodson’s “Twelve Years of a Soldier’s Life in India,” on
“Friends in Council,” on Brooks’s “Sermons,” on Trollope’s “West Indies
and the Spanish Main,” on “Captain John Brown,” on Vernon’s “Dante,”
and one on “Model Lodging-Houses in Boston.” When we remember that his
“Notes of Travel and Study in Italy” was also published in Boston that
same year, being reviewed by some one in a notice of two pages in this
same volume of the “Atlantic,” we may well ask who ever did more of
genuine literary work in the same amount of time. This was, of course,
before he became Professor in the college (1874), and his preoccupation
in that way, together with his continuous labor on his translations of
Dante, explains why there are comparatively few entries under his name
in Atlantic Indexes for later years. Again, he and Lowell took charge of
the “North American Review” in 1864, and retained it until 1868, during
which period Norton unquestionably worked quite as hard as before, if we
may judge by the collective index to that periodical.
It is to be noticed, however, that his papers in the “North American” are
not merely graver and more prolonged, but less terse and highly finished,
than those in the “Atlantic”; while in the development of his mind they
show even greater freedom of statement. He fearlessly lays down, for
instance, the following assertion, a very bold one for that period:
“So far as the most intelligent portion of society at the present day
is concerned, the Church in its actual constitution is an anachronism.
Much of the deepest and most religious life is led outside its wall, and
there is a constant and steady increase in those who not only find the
claims of the Church inconsistent with spiritual liberty, but also find
its services ill adapted to their wants.... It becomes more and more a
simple assemblage of persons gathered to go through with certain formal
ceremonies, the chief of which consists in listening to a man who is
seldom competent to teach.” It must be remembered that the expression
of such opinions to-day, when all his charges against the actual Church
may be found similarly stated by bishops and doctors of divinity, must
have produced a very different impression when made forty years ago by a
man of forty or thereabouts, who occupied twenty pages in saying it, and
rested in closing upon the calm basis, “The true worship of God consists
in the service of his children and devotion to the common interests of
men.” It may be that he who wrote these words never held a regular pew
in any church or identified himself, on the other hand, with any public
heretical organization, even one so moderate as the Free Religious
Association. Yet the fact that he devoted his Sunday afternoons for many
years to talking and Scripture reading in a Hospital for Incurables
conducted by Roman Catholics perhaps showed that it was safer to leave
such a man to go on his own course and reach the kingdom of heaven in his
own way.
Norton never wrote about himself, if it could be avoided, unless his
recollections of early years, as read before the Cambridge Historical
Society, and reported in the second number of its proceedings, may
be regarded as an exception. Something nearest to this in literary
self-revelation is to be found, perhaps, in his work entitled “Letters of
John Ruskin,” published in 1904, and going back to his first invitation
from the elder Ruskin in 1855. This was on Norton’s first direct trip
to Europe, followed by a correspondence in which Ruskin writes to him,
February 25, 1861, “You have also done me no little good,” and other
phrases which show how this American, nine years younger than himself,
had already begun to influence that wayward mind. Their correspondence
was suspended, to be sure, by their difference of attitude on the
American Civil War; but it is pleasant to find that after ten months
of silence Ruskin wrote to Norton again, if bitterly. Later still, we
find successive letters addressed to Norton—now in England again—in this
loving gradation, “Dear Norton,” “My dearest Norton,” “My dear Charles,”
and “My dearest Charles,” and thenceforth the contest is won. Not all
completed, however, for in the last years of life Ruskin addressed
“Darling Charles,” and the last words of his own writing traced in pencil
“From your loving J. R.”
I have related especially this one touching tale of friendship, because
it was the climax of them all, and the best illustration of the essential
Americanism of Norton’s career.
He indeed afforded a peculiar and almost unique instance in New England,
not merely of a cultivated man who makes his home for life in the house
where he was born, but of one who has recognized for life the peculiar
associations of his boyhood and has found them still the best. While
Ruskin was pitying him for being doomed to wear out his life in America,
Norton with pleasure made his birthplace his permanent abode, and fully
recognized the attractions of the spot where he was born. “What a fine
microcosm,” he wrote to me (January 9, 1899), “Cambridge and Boston
and Concord made in the 40’s.” Norton affords in this respect a great
contrast to his early comrade, William Story, who shows himself in his
letters wholly detached from his native land, and finds nothing whatever
in his boyhood abode to attract him, although it was always found
attractive, not merely by Norton, but by Agassiz and Longfellow, neither
of whom was a native of Cambridge.
The only safeguard for a solitary literary workman lies in the
sequestered house without a telephone. This security belonged for many
years to Norton, until the needs of a growing family made him a seller
of land, a builder of a high-railed fence, and at last, but reluctantly,
a subscriber to the telephone. It needs but little study of the cards
bearing his name in the catalogue of the Harvard Library to see on
how enormous a scale his work has been done in this seclusion. It is
then only that one remembers his eight volumes of delicately arranged
scrap-books extending from 1861 to 1866, and his six volumes of “Heart
of Oak” selections for childhood. There were comparatively few years of
his maturer life during which he was not editor of something, and there
was also needed much continuous labor in taking care of his personal
library. When we consider that he had the further responsibility of being
practically the literary executor or editor of several important men of
letters, as of Carlyle, Ruskin, Lowell, Curtis, and Clough; and that in
each case the work was done with absolute thoroughness; and that even in
summer he became the leading citizen of a country home and personally
engaged the public speakers who made his rural festals famous, it is
impossible not to draw the conclusion that no public man in America
surpassed the sequestered Norton in steadfastness of labor.
It being made my duty in June, 1904, to read a poem before the Harvard
Phi Beta Kappa, I was tempted to include a few verses about individual
graduates, each of which was left, according to its subject, for the
audience to guess. The lines referring to Norton were as follows:—
“There’s one I’ve watched from childhood, free of guile,
His man’s firm courage and his woman’s smile.
His portals open to the needy still,
He spreads calm sunshine over Shady Hill.”
The reference to the combined manly and womanly qualities of Norton
spoke for itself, and won applause even before the place of residence
was uttered; and I received from Norton this recognition of the little
tribute:—
ASHFIELD, 2 July, 1904.
MY DEAR HIGGINSON,—Your friendly words about me in your Phi
Beta poem give me so much pleasure that I cannot refrain from
thanking you for them. I care for them specially as a memorial
of our hereditary friendship. They bring to mind my Mother’s
affection for your Mother, and for Aunt Nancy, who was as
dear an Aunt to us children at Shady Hill as she was to you
and your brothers and sisters. What dear and admirable women!
What simple, happy lives they led! No one’s heart will be more
deeply touched by your poem than mine.
One most agreeable result of Norton’s Cambridge boyhood has not been
generally recognized by those who have written about him. His inherited
estate was so large that he led a life absolutely free in respect to the
study of nature, and as Lowell, too, had the same advantage, they could
easily compare notes. In answer to a criticism of mine with reference
to Longfellow’s poem, “The Herons of Elmwood,” on my theory that these
herons merely flew over Elmwood and only built their nests in what were
then the dense swamps east of Fresh Pond, he writes to me (January 4,
1899): “I cannot swear that I ever saw a heron’s nest at Elmwood. But
Lowell told me of their nesting there, and only a few weeks ago Mrs.
Burnett told me of the years when they had built in the pines and of
the time of their final desertion of the place.” To this he adds in a
note dated five days later: “As to the night-herons lighting on pines,
for many years they were in the habit of lighting and staying for hours
upon mine and then flying off towards the [Chelsea] beach.” This taste
accounts for the immense zest and satisfaction with which Norton edited a
hitherto unknown manuscript of the poet Gray’s on natural history, with
admirable illustrations taken from the original book, seeming almost
incredibly accurate from any but a professional naturalist, the book
being entitled, “The Poet Gray as a Naturalist with Selections from His
Notes on the Systema Naturæ of Linnæus with Facsimiles of Some of his
Drawings.”
In the Charles Eliot Norton number of the “Harvard Graduates’ Magazine”
commemorating his eightieth birthday, Professor Palmer, with that
singular felicity which characterizes him, says of Norton: “He has been
an epitome of the world’s best thought brought to our own doors and
opened for our daily use.” Edith Wharton with equal felicity writes
from Norton’s well-known dwelling at Ashfield, whose very name, “High
Pasture,” gives a signal for what follows:—
“Come up—come up; in the dim vale below
The autumn mist muffles the fading trees,
But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breeze
Has stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow,
Night is not, autumn is not—but the flow
Of vast, ethereal and irradiate seas,
Poured from the far world’s flaming boundaries
In waxing tides of unimagined glow.
“And to that height illumined of the mind
He calls us still by the familiar way,
Leaving the sodden tracks of life behind,
Befogged in failure, chilled with love’s decay—
Showing us, as the night-mists upward wind,
How on the heights is day and still more day.”
But I must draw to a close, and shall do this by reprinting the very
latest words addressed by this old friend to me; these being written very
near his last days. Having been away from Cambridge all summer, I did
not know that he had been at Cambridge or ill, and on my writing to him
received this cheerful and serene answer, wholly illustrative of the man,
although the very fact that it was dictated was sadly ominous:—
SHADY HILL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., 6 October, 1908.
MY DEAR HIGGINSON,—Your letter the other day from Ipswich gave
me great pleasure....
It had never occurred to me that you were associated with
Ipswich through your Appleton relatives. My association with
the old town, whose charm has not wholly disappeared under the
hard hoof of the invader, begins still earlier than yours,
for the William Norton who landed there in 1636 was my direct
ancestor; and a considerable part of his pretty love story
seems to have been transacted there. I did not know the story
until I came upon it by accident, imbedded in some of the
volumes of the multifarious publications of our historical
society. It amused me to find that John Norton, whose
reputation is not for romance or for soft-heartedness, took an
active interest in pleading his brother’s cause with Governor
Winthrop, whose niece, Lucy Downing, had won the susceptible
heart of W. N.
My summer was a very peaceful and pleasant one here in my old
home till about six weeks ago, when I was struck down ... which
has left me in a condition of extreme muscular feebleness, but
has not diminished my interest in the world and its affairs.
Happily my eyes are still good for reading, and I have fallen
back, as always on similar occasions, on Shakespeare and Scott,
but I have read one or two new books also, the best of which,
and a book of highest quality, is the last volume of Morley’s
essays.
But I began meaning only to thank you for your pleasant note
and to send a cheer to you from my slower craft as your gallant
three-master goes by it with all sails set....
Always cordially yours,
C. E. NORTON.
XI
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN
The sudden death of Edmund Clarence Stedman at New York on January 18,
1908, came with a strange pathos upon the readers of his many writings,
especially as following so soon upon that of his life-long friend and
compeer, Aldrich. Stedman had been for some years an invalid, and had
received, in his own phrase, his “three calls,” that life would soon be
ended. He was born at Hartford, Connecticut, on October 8, 1833, and was
the second son of Colonel Edmund Burke Stedman and his wife Elizabeth
Clement (Dodge) Stedman. His great-grandfather was the Reverend Aaron
Cleveland, Jr., a Harvard graduate of 1735, and a man of great influence
in his day, who died in middle life under the hospitable roof of Benjamin
Franklin. Stedman’s mother was a woman of much literary talent, and
had great ultimate influence in the training of her son, although she
was early married again to the Honorable William B. Kinney, who was
afterwards the United States Minister to Turin. Her son, being placed in
charge of a great-uncle, spent his childhood in Norwich, Connecticut, and
entered Yale at sixteen, but did not complete his course there, although
in later life he was restored to his class membership and received the
degree of Master of Arts. He went early into newspaper work in Norwich
and then in New York, going to the front for a time as newspaper
correspondent during the Civil War. He abandoned journalism after ten
years or thereabouts, and became a member of the New York Stock Exchange
without giving up his literary life, a combination apt to be of doubtful
success. He married, at twenty, Laura Hyde Woodworth, who died before
him, as did one of his sons, leaving only one son and a granddaughter as
his heirs. His funeral services took place at the Church of the Messiah
on January 21, 1908, conducted by the Reverend Dr. Robert Collyer and the
Reverend Dr. Henry van Dyke.
Those who happen to turn back to the number of the “Atlantic Monthly”
for January, 1898, will read with peculiar interest a remarkable paper
entitled “Our Two Most Honored Poets.” It bears no author’s name, even
in the Index, but is what we may venture to call, after ten years, a
singularly penetrating analysis of both Aldrich and Stedman. Of the
latter it is said: “His rhythmic sense is subtle, and he often attains
an aerial waywardness of melody which is of the very essence of the
lyric gift.” It also remarks most truly and sadly of Stedman that he
“is of those who have suffered the stress of the day.” The critic adds:
“Just now we felt grateful to Mr. Aldrich for putting all this [that is,
life’s tragedies] away in order that the clarity and sweetness of his art
might not suffer; now we feel something like reverence for the man [Mr.
Stedman] who, in conditions which make for contentment and acquiescence,
has not been able to escape these large afflictions.” But these two
gifted men have since passed away, Aldrich from a career of singular
contentment, Stedman after ten years of almost constant business failure
and a series of calamities relating to those nearest and dearest.
One of the most prominent men in the New York literary organizations,
and one who knew Stedman intimately, writes me thus in regard to the
last years of his life: “As you probably know, Stedman died poor. Only
a few days ago he told me that after paying all the debts hanging over
him for years from the business losses caused by ⸺’s mismanagement, he
had not enough to live on, and must keep on with his literary work. For
this he had various plans, of which our conversations developed only a
possible rearrangement of his past writings; an article now and then for
the magazines (one, I am told, he left completed); and reminiscences
of his old friends among men of letters—for which last he had, during
eight months past, been overhauling letters and papers, but had written
nothing. He was ailing, he said—had a serious heart affection which
troubled him for years, and he found it a daily struggle to keep up
with the daily claims on his time. You know what he was, in respect of
letters,—and letters. He could always say ‘No’ with animation; but in
the case of claims on his time by poets and other of the writing class,
he never could do the negative. He both liked the claims and didn’t. The
men who claimed were dear to him, partly because he knew them, partly
because he was glad to know them. He wore himself quite out. His heart
was exhausted by his brain. It was a genuine case of heart-failure to do
what the head required.”