one of an extemporized troupe: she was a host in herself; she had known
everybody; her memory held the adventures and scandals of a generation,
and these lost nothing on her lips. Then when other resources were
exhausted, and the candles had burned down, and the fire was low, and a
few guests lingered, somebody would be sure to say, “Now, Miss Jane, tell
us a ghost story.” With a little, a very little, of coy reluctance, she
would begin, in a voice at first commonplace, but presently dropping to a
sort of mystic tone; she seemed to undergo a change like the gypsy queen
in Browning’s “Flight of the Duchess”; she was no longer a plain, elderly
woman in an economical gown, but she became a medium, a solemn weaver of
spells so deep that they appeared to enchant herself. Whence came her
stories, I wonder? not ghost stories alone, but blood-curdling murders
and midnight terrors, of which she abated you not an item,—for she was
never squeamish,—tales that all the police records could hardly match.
Then, when she and her auditors were wrought up to the highest pitch, she
began to tell fortunes; and here also she seemed not so much a performer
as one performed upon,—a Delphic priestess, a Cassandra. I never shall
forget how she once made our blood run cold with the visions of coming
danger that she conjured around a young married woman on whom there soon
afterwards broke a wholly unexpected scandal that left her an exile in
a foreign land. No one ever knew, I believe, whether Miss Stuart spoke
at that time with knowledge; perhaps she hardly knew herself; she always
was, or affected to be, carried away beyond herself by these weird
incantations.
She was not so much to be called affectionate or lovable as good-natured
and kindly; and with an undisguised relish for the comfortable things
of this world, and a very frank liking for the society of the rich and
great, she was yet constant, after a fashion, to humbler friends, and
liked to do them good turns. Much of her amiability took the form of
flattery,—a flattery so habitual that it lost all its grossness, and
became almost a form of good deeds. She was sometimes justly accused
of applying this to the wealthy and influential, but it was almost as
freely exercised where she had nothing to gain by it; and it gave to
the humblest the feeling that he was at least worth flattering. Even if
he had a secret fear that what she said of him behind his back might be
less encouraging, no matter: it was something to have been praised to his
face. It must be owned that her resources in the other direction were
considerable, and Lord Steyne himself might have applauded when she was
gradually led into mimicking some rich amateur who had pooh-poohed her
pictures, or some intrusive dame who had patronizingly inspected her
humble cot. It could not quite be said of her that her wit lived to play,
not wound; and yet, after all, what she got out of life was so moderate,
and so many women would have found her way of existence dreary enough,
that it was impossible to grudge her these trifling indulgences.
Inheriting her father’s love of the brush, she had little of his talent;
her portraits of friends were generally transferred by degrees to dark
corners; but there existed an impression that she was a good copyist of
Stuart’s pictures, and she was at one time a familiar figure in Boston,
perched on a high stool, and copying those of his works which were
transferred for safe-keeping from Faneuil Hall to the Art Museum. On one
occasion, it was said, she grew tired of the long process of copying
and took home a canvas or two with the eyes unpainted, putting them in,
colored to please her own fancy, at Newport. Perhaps she invented this
legend for her own amusement, for she never spared herself, and, were she
to read this poor sketch of her, would object to nothing but the tameness
of its outlines.
XV
JOHN BARTLETT
JOHN BARTLETT
In every university town such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is an
outside circle, beyond the institution itself, of cultivated men who
may or may not hold its degrees, but who contribute to the intellectual
atmosphere. One of the most widely known and generally useful of these
at Cambridge—whether in his active youth or in the patient and lonely
seclusion of his later years—was John Bartlett, best known as the author
of the dictionary entitled “Familiar Quotations.”
He was born in Plymouth, June 14, 1820, was educated in the public
schools of that town, and in 1836 entered the bookbinding establishment
connected with the University bookstore in Cambridge, under John Owen,
who was Longfellow’s first publisher. In the next year Bartlett became
a clerk in the bookstore, and soon showed remarkable talent for the
business. In 1846 Mr. Owen failed, and Bartlett remained with his
successor, George Nichols, but became himself the proprietor in 1849.
He had shown himself in this position an uncommonly good publisher
and adviser of authors. He had there published three editions of
his “Familiar Quotations,” gradually enlarging the book from the
beginning. In 1859 he sold out to Sever & Francis. In 1862 he served as
volunteer naval paymaster for nine months with Captain Boutelle, his
brother-in-law, on board Admiral DuPont’s dispatch-boat. In August,
1863, he entered the publishing house of Little, Brown & Co., nominally
as clerk, but with the promise that in eighteen months, when the
existing partnership would end, he should be taken into the firm, which
accordingly took place in 1865. The fourth edition of his “Familiar
Quotations,” always growing larger, had meanwhile been published by
them, as well as an _édition de luxe_ of Walton’s “Complete Angler,”
in the preparation of which he made an especial and exceptionally fine
collection of works on angling, which he afterwards presented to the
Harvard College Library. His activity in the Waltonian sport is also
commemorated in Lowell’s poem, “To Mr. John Bartlett, who had sent me
a seven-pound trout.” He gave to the Library at the same time another
collection of books containing “Proverbs,” and still another on “Emblems.”
After his becoming partner in the firm, the literary, manufacturing, and
advertising departments were assigned to him, and were retained until
he withdrew altogether. The fifth and sixth editions of his “Quotations”
were published by Little, Brown & Co., the seventh and eighth by
Routledge of London, the ninth by Little, Brown & Co. and Macmillan &
Co. of London, jointly; and of all these editions between two and three
hundred thousand copies must have been sold. Of the seventh and eighth
editions, as the author himself tells us, forty thousand copies were
printed apart from the English reprint. The ninth edition, published
in 1891, had three hundred and fifty pages more than its predecessor,
and the index was increased by more than ten thousand lines. In 1881
Mr. Bartlett published his Shakespeare “Phrase-Book,” and in February,
1889, he retired from his firm to complete his indispensable Shakespeare
“Concordance,” which Macmillan & Co. published at their own risk in
London in 1894.
All this immense literary work had the direct support and coöperation of
Mr. Bartlett’s wife, who was the daughter of Sidney Willard, professor
of Hebrew in Harvard University, and granddaughter of Joseph Willard,
President of Harvard from 1781 to 1804. She inherited from such an
ancestry the love of studious labor; and as they had no children, she and
her husband could pursue it with the greatest regularity. Both of them
had also been great readers for many years, and there is still extant a
manuscript book of John Bartlett’s which surpasses most books to be found
in these days, for it contains the life-long record of his reading. What
man or woman now living, for instance, can claim to have read Gibbon’s
“Decline and Fall” faithfully through, four times, from beginning to end?
We must, however, remember that this was accomplished by one who began by
reading a verse of the Bible aloud to his mother when he was but three
years old, and had gone through the whole of it at nine.
There came an event in Bartlett’s life, however, which put an end
to all direct labors, when his wife and co-worker began to lose her
mental clearness, and all this joint task had presently to be laid
aside. For a time he tried to continue his work unaided; and she, with
unwearied patience and gentleness, would sit quietly beside him without
interference. But the malady increased, until she passed into that
melancholy condition described so powerfully by his neighbor and intimate
friend, James Russell Lowell,—though drawing from a different example,—in
his poem of “The Darkened Mind,” one of the most impressive, I think,
of his poems. While Bartlett still continued his habit of reading, the
writing had to be surrendered. His eyesight being erelong affected, the
reading also was abandoned, and after his wife’s death he lived for a
year or two one of the loneliest of lives. He grew physically lame, and
could scarcely cross the room unaided. A nervous trouble in the head
left him able to employ a reader less and less frequently, and finally
not at all. In a large and homelike parlor, containing one of the most
charming private libraries in Cambridge,—the books being beautifully
bound and lighting up the walls instead of darkening them,—he spent most
of the day reclining on the sofa, externally unemployed, simply because
employment was impossible. He had occasional visitors, and four of his
old friends formed what they called a “Bartlett Club,” meeting at his
house one evening in every week. Sometimes days passed, however, without
his receiving a visitor, he living alone in a room once gay with the
whist-parties which he and Lowell had formerly organized and carried on.
His cheerful courage, however, was absolutely unbroken, and he came
forward to meet every guest with a look of sunshine. His voice and
manner, always animated and cheerful, remained the same. He had an
inexhaustible store of anecdotes and reminiscences, and could fill the
hour with talk without showing exhaustion. Seldom going out of the house,
unable to take more than very short drives, he dwelt absolutely in the
past, remembered the ways and deeds of all Cambridge and Boston literary
men, speaking genially of all and with malice of none. He had an endless
fund of good stories of personal experience. Were one to speak to him,
for instance, of Edward Everett, well known for the elaboration with
which he prepared his addresses, Bartlett would instantly recall how
Everett once came into his bookstore in search of a small pocket Bible
to be produced dramatically before a rural audience in a lecture; but in
this case finding none small enough, he chose a copy of Hoyle’s “Games”
instead, which was produced with due impressiveness when the time came.
Then he would describe the same Edward Everett, whom he once called
upon and found busy in drilling a few Revolutionary soldiers who were
to be on the platform during Everett’s famous Concord oration. These he
had drilled first to stand up and be admired at a certain point of the
oration, and then to sit down again, by signal, that the audience might
rather rise in their honor. Unfortunately, one man, who was totally deaf,
forgot the instructions and absolutely refused to sit down, because
the “squire” had told him to stand up. In a similar way, Bartlett’s
unimpaired memory held the whole circle of eminent men among whom he had
grown up from youth, and a casual visitor might infer from his cheery
manner that these comrades had just left the room. During his last
illness, mind and memory seemed equally unclouded until the very end, and
almost the last words he spoke were a caution to his faithful nurse not
to forget to pay the small sum due to a man who had been at work on his
driveway, he naming the precise sum due in dollars and cents.
He died at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the morning of December 3, 1905,
aged eighty-five. Was his career, after all, more to be pitied or envied?
He lived a life of prolonged and happy labor among the very choicest gems
of human thought, and died with patient fortitude after all visible human
joys had long been laid aside.
XVI
HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER
HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER
It has been generally felt, I think, that no disrespect was shown to John
Fiske, when the New York “Nation” headed its very discriminating sketch
of him with the title “John Fiske, Popularizer”; and I should feel that
I showed no discourtesy, but on the contrary, did honor to Horace Elisha
Scudder, in describing him as Literary Workman. I know of no other man
in America, perhaps, who so well deserved that honorable name; no one,
that is, who, if he had a difficult piece of literary work to do, could
be so absolutely relied upon to do it carefully and well. Whatever it
was,—compiling, editing, arranging, translating, indexing,—his work
was uniformly well done. Whether this is the highest form of literary
distinction is not now the question. What other distinction he might have
won if he had shown less of modesty or self-restraint, we can never know.
It is true that his few thoroughly original volumes show something beyond
what is described in the limited term, workmanship. But that he brought
such workmanship up into the realm of art is as certain as that we may
call the cabinet-maker of the Middle Ages an artist.
Mr. Scudder was born in Boston on October 16, 1838, the son of Charles
and Sarah Lathrop (Coit) Scudder, and died at Cambridge, Massachusetts,
on January 11, 1902. He was a graduate of Williams College, and after
graduation went to New York, where he spent three years as a teacher.
It was there that he wrote his first stories for children, entitled
“Seven Little People and their Friends” (New York, 1862). After his
father’s death he returned to Boston, and thenceforward devoted himself
almost wholly to literary pursuits. He prepared the “Life and Letters
of David Coit Scudder,” his brother, a missionary to India (New York,
1864); edited the “Riverside Magazine” for young people during its four
years’ existence (from 1867 to 1870); and published “Dream Children” and
“Stories from My Attic.” Becoming associated with Houghton, Mifflin,
and Company, he edited for them the “Atlantic Monthly” from 1890 to
1898, preparing for it also that invaluable Index, so important to
bibliographers; he also edited the “American Commonwealths” series,
and two detached volumes, “American Poems” (1879) and “American Prose”
(1880). He published also the “Bodley Books” (8 vols., Boston, 1875
to 1887); “The Dwellers in Five Sisters’ Court” (1876); “Boston Town”
(1881); “Life of Noah Webster” (1882); “A History of the United States”
for schools (1884); “Men and Letters” (1887); “Life of George Washington”
(1889); “Literature in School” (1889); “Childhood in Literature and
Art” (1894), besides various books of which he was the editor or
compiler only. He was also for nearly six years (1877-82) a member of
the Cambridge School Committee; for five years (1884-89) of the State
Board of Education; for nine years (1889-98) of the Harvard University
visiting committee in English literature; and was at the time of his
death a trustee of Williams College, Wellesley College, and St. John’s
Theological School, these making all together a quarter of a century of
almost uninterrupted and wholly unpaid public service in the cause of
education. After May 28, 1889, he was a member of the American Academy,
until his death. This is the simple record of a most useful and admirable
life, filled more and more, as it went on, with gratuitous public
services and disinterested acts for others.
As a literary workman, his nicety of method and regularity of life
went beyond those of any man I have known. Working chiefly at home,
he assigned in advance a certain number of hours daily as due to the
firm for which he labored; and he then kept carefully the record of
these hours, and if he took out a half hour for his own private work,
made it up. He had special work assigned by himself for a certain
time before breakfast, an interval which he daily gave largely to the
Greek Testament and at some periods to Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus,
and Xenophon; working always with the original at hand and writing out
translations or commentaries, always in the same exquisite handwriting
and at first contained in small thin note-books, afterwards bound in
substantial volumes, with morocco binding and proper lettering. All his
writings were thus handsomely treated, and the shelves devoted to his own
works, pamphlet or otherwise, were to the eye a very conservatory and
flower garden of literature; or like a chamberful of children to whom
even a frugal parent may allow himself the luxury of pretty clothes.
All his literary arrangements were neat and perfect, and represented
that other extreme from the celebrated collection of De Quincey in Dove
Cottage at Grasmere, where that author had five thousand books, by his
own statement, in a little room ten or twelve feet square; and his old
housekeeper explained it to me as perfectly practicable “because he had
no bookcases,” but simply piled them against the walls, leaving here and
there little gaps in which he put his money.
In the delicate and touching dedication of Scudder’s chief work, “Men and
Letters,” to his friend Henry M. Alden, the well-known New York editor,
he says: “In that former state of existence when we were poets, you wrote
verses which I knew by heart and I read dreamy tales to you which you
speculated over as if they were already classics. Then you bound your
manuscript verses in a full blue calf volume and put it on the shelf,
and I woke to find myself at the desk of a literary workman.” Later, he
says of himself, “Fortunately, I have been able for the most part to
work out of the glare of publicity.” Yet even to this modest phrase he
adds acutely: “But there is always that something in us which whispers
_I_, and after a while the anonymous critic becomes a little tired of
listening to the whisper in his solitary cave, and is disposed to escape
from it by coming out into the light even at the risk of blinking a
little, and by suffering the ghostly voice to become articulate, though
the sound startle him. One craves company for his thought, and is not
quite content always to sit in the dark with his guests.”
The work in which he best achieves the purpose last stated is undoubtedly
the collection of papers called by the inexpressive phrase “Men and
Letters”; a book whose title was perhaps a weight upon it, and which
yet contained some of the very best of American thought and criticism.
It manifests even more than his “Life of Lowell” that faculty of keen
summing up and epigrammatic condensation which became so marked in him
that it was very visible, I am assured, even in the literary councils of
his publishers, two members of which have told me that he often, after
a long discussion, so summed up the whole situation in a sentence or
two that he left them free to pass to something else. We see the same
quality, for instance, in his “Men and Letters,” in his papers on Dr.
Mulford and Longfellow. The first is an analysis of the life and literary
service of a man too little known because of early death, but of the
rarest and most exquisite intellectual qualities, Dr. Elisha Mulford,
author of “The Nation” and then of “The Republic of God.” In this, as
everywhere in the book, Mr. Scudder shows that epigrammatic quality which
amounted, whether applied to books or men, to what may be best described
as a quiet brilliancy. This is seen, for instance, when, in defending
Mulford from the imputation of narrowness, his friend sums up the whole
character of the man and saves a page of more detailed discussion by
saying, “He was narrow as a cañon is narrow, when the depth apparently
contracts the sides” (page 17). So in his criticism called “Longfellow
and his Art,” Scudder repeatedly expresses in a sentence what might well
have occupied a page, as where he says of Longfellow, “He was first
of all a composer, and he saw his subjects in their relations rather
than in their essence” (page 44). He is equally penetrating where he
says that Longfellow “brought to his work in the college no special
love of teaching,” but “a deep love of literature and that unacademic
attitude toward his work which was a liberalizing power” (page 66). He
touches equally well that subtle quality of Longfellow’s temperament,
so difficult to delineate, when he says of him: “He gave of himself
freely to his intimate friends, but he dwelt, nevertheless, in a charmed
circle, beyond the lines of which men could not penetrate” (page 68).
These admirable statements sufficiently indicate the rare quality of Mr.
Scudder’s work.
So far as especial passages go, Mr. Scudder never surpassed the best
chapters of “Men and Letters,” but his one adequate and complete work as
a whole is undoubtedly, apart from his biographies, the volume entitled
“Childhood in Literature and Art” (1894). This book was based on a
course of Lowell lectures given by him in Boston, and is probably that
by which he himself would wish to be judged, at least up to the time of
his excellent biography of Lowell. He deals in successive chapters with
Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Mediæval, English, French, German, and American
literary art with great symmetry and unity throughout, culminating, of
course, in Hawthorne and analyzing the portraits of children drawn in his
productions. In this book one may justly say that he has added himself,
in a degree, to the immediate circle of those very few American writers
whom he commemorates so nobly at the close of his essay on “Longfellow
and his Art,” in “Men and Letters”: “It is too early to make a full
survey of the immense importance to American letters of the work done by
half-a-dozen great men in the middle of this century. The body of prose
and verse created by them is constituting the solid foundation upon which
other structures are to rise; the humanity which it holds is entering
into the life of the country, and no material invention, or scientific
discovery, or institutional prosperity, or accumulation of wealth will so
powerfully affect the spiritual well-being of the nation for generations
to come” (page 69).
If it now be asked what prevented Horace Scudder from showing more fully
this gift of higher literature and led to his acquiescing, through life,
in a comparatively secondary function, I can find but one explanation,
and that a most interesting one to us in New England, as illustrating
the effect of immediate surroundings. His father, so far as I can
ascertain, was one of those Congregationalists of the milder type who,
while strict in their opinions, are led by a sunny temperament to be
genial with their households and to allow them innocent amusements. The
mother was a Congregationalist, firm but not severe in her opinions;
but always controlled by that indomitable New England conscience of the
older time, which made her sacrifice herself to every call of charity and
even to refuse, as tradition says, to have window curtains in her house,
inasmuch as many around her could not even buy blankets. Add to this
the fact that Boston was then a great missionary centre, that several
prominent leaders in that cause were of the Scudder family, and the house
was a sort of headquarters for them, and that Horace Scudder’s own elder
brother, whose memoirs he wrote, went as a missionary to India, dying
at his post. Speaking of his father’s family in his memoir, he says of
it, “In the conduct of the household, there was recognition of some more
profound meaning in life than could find expression in mere enjoyment of
living; while the presence of a real religious sentiment banished that
counterfeit solemnity which would hang over innocent pleasure like a
cloud” (Scudder’s “Life of David Coit Scudder,” page 4). By one bred in
such an atmosphere of self-sacrifice, that quality may well be imbibed;
it may even become a second nature, so that the instinctive demand for
self-assertion may become subordinate until many a man ends in finding
full contentment in doing perfectly the appointed work of every day.
If we hold as we should that it is character, not mere talent, which
ennobles life, we may well feel that there is something not merely
pardonable, but ennobling, in such a habit of mind. Viewed in this light,
his simple devotion to modest duty may well be to many of us rather a
model than a thing to be criticised.
XVII
EDWARD ATKINSON
EDWARD ATKINSON