for a City. He loves society, bustle, fashion, polish, and
good living. He would do best in some Mercantile House as a
partner, say to Bankers like Prime, Ward, and King. He was at
first a Scholar, a Lawyer in Maine. His wife dying,—sister to
Dr. Nichols’ wife (Gilman),—Mr. C. went abroad. Was supercargo,
then a residing agent of Wm. Gray’s in Europe, Holland, France,
and Italy; was a good Merchant; expensive in his habits, he
did not accumulate; tired of roving, he accepted the office
of Librarian here. He would not manage things under control
of others, and so left College and sat up Round Hill School.
His partner, Bancroft,—an unsuccessful scholar, pet of Dr.
Kirkland’s, who like Everett had four years abroad, mostly
Germany, and at expense of College,—came here unfit for
anything. His manners, style of writing, Theology, etc., bad,
and as a Tutor only the laughing butt of all College. Such an
one was easily marked as unfit for a School.
From whatever cause, he remained as tutor for one year only (1822-23),
leaving Cambridge for the Round Hill School.
It would be curious to dwell on the later influence upon the college of
the other men from whom so much was reasonably expected. Ticknor, the
only one who was not a Harvard graduate, probably did most for Harvard
of them all, for he became professor of Modern Languages, and introduced
in that department the elective system, which there became really the
nucleus of the expanded system of later days. Everett, when President,
actually set himself against that method when the attempt had been
made to enlarge it under Quincy. Cogswell was librarian from 1821 to
1823; left Harvard for the Round Hill School, and became ultimately the
organizer of the Astor Library. Frederic Henry Hedge, who had studied in
Göttingen as a schoolboy and belonged to a younger circle, did not become
professor until many years later.
But while the immediate results of personal service to the college on
the part of this group of remarkable men may have been inadequate,—since
even Ticknor, ere parting, had with the institution a disagreement never
yet fully elucidated,—yet their collective influence both on Harvard
University and on American education was enormous. They helped to break
up that intellectual sterility which had begun to show itself during
the isolation of a merely colonial life; they prepared the way for the
vast modern growth of colleges, schools, and libraries in this country,
and indirectly helped that birth of a literature which gave us Irving,
Cooper, Bryant, and the “North American Review”; and culminated later in
the brilliant Boston circle of authors, almost all of whom were Harvard
men, and all of whom had felt the Harvard influence.
XXIII
OLD NEWPORT DAYS
OLD NEWPORT DAYS
It was my good fortune, after discharge from the army during the Civil
War, to dwell for a time under the hospitable roof of Mrs. Hannah Dame,
in Newport, Rhode Island. Passing out of the front door one day, just as
its bell rang, I saw before me one of the very handsomest men I had ever
beheld, as I thought. He wore civilian dress, but with an unmistakable
military air, and held out to me a card of introduction from a fellow
officer. He had been discharged from the army on the expiration of his
term of service with the regiment he had commanded in Frémont’s Mountain
Department. Being out of employment for a time, and unsettled, as many of
us were at that period, he came back to his early training as a market
gardener, and, having made the professional discovery that most of the
cabbages eaten in Boston were brought from New York, while nearly all
the cauliflowers sold in New York were sent thither from Boston, he
formed the plan of establishing a market garden midway between the two
cities, and supplying each place with its favorite vegetable. This he did
successfully for ten years, and then merged the enterprise in successive
newer ones. In these he sometimes failed, but in the last one he
succeeded where others had failed yet more completely, and astounded the
nation by bringing the streets of New York into decent cleanliness and
order for the first time on record. This man was Colonel George Edward
Waring.
One of his minor achievements was that of organizing, at his house in
Newport, the most efficient literary circle I ever knew, at a time when
there were habitually more authors grouped in that city than anywhere
else in America. But before giving a sketch of these persons, let me
describe the house in which he received them. This house had been made
internally the most attractive in Newport by the combined taste of
himself and his wife, and was for a time the main centre of our simple
and cordial group. In his study and elsewhere on the walls he had placed
mottoes, taken partly from old English phrases and partly from the
original Dutch, remembered almost from the cradle as coming from his
Dutch maternal grandfather. Thus above his writing-desk the inscription
read, _Misérable à mon gré qui n’a chez soi où estre à soi_ (Alas for him
who hath no home which is a home!). Under the mantelpiece and above the
fireplace was the Dutch _Eigen haasd iss goud waard_ (One’s own hearth is
worth gold). In the dining-room there was inscribed above the fireplace,
“Old wood to burn, Old wine to drink, Old friends to trust.” Opposite
this was again the Dutch _Praatjes vullen den buik neit_ (Prattle does
not fill the box). On two sides of the room there were, “Now good
digestion wait on appetite, and health on both,” and also “In every feast
there are two guests to be entertained, the body and the soul.” In almost
every case the lettering of these mottoes was made into a decoration with
peacock’s feathers, and formed a series of charming welcomes quite in
harmony with the unfailing cordiality of the host and the fine and hearty
voice of the hostess.
It was at this house that there were to be found gathered, more
frequently than anywhere else, the literary or artistic people who were
then so abundant in Newport,—where no other house was to be compared
with it except that of Mrs. Howe, who then lived in the country, and had
receptions and a world of her own.
We had, for instance, Dr. J. G. Holland, now best known as the original
founder of the “Century Magazine,” then having but a fugitive literary
fame based on books written under the name of Timothy Titcomb and
entitled “Bitter-Sweet” and “Kathrina, Her Life and Mine.” He was
personally attractive because of his melodious voice, which made him
of peculiar value for singing on all boating excursions. There was
Edwin P. Whipple, a man reared in business, not literature; but with an
inexhaustible memory of books and a fertile gift for producing them,
especially those requiring personal anecdote and plenty of it. There was
Dr. O. W. Holmes, who came to Newport as the guest of the Astor family,
parents of the present English author of that name. At their house I
spent one evening with Holmes, who was in his most brilliant mood, at the
end of which he had talked himself into such an attack of asthma that he
had to bid adieu to Newport forever, after an early breakfast the next
morning.
There was the Reverend Charles T. Brooks, a man of angelic face and
endless German translations, who made even Jean Paul readable and also
unbelievable. There was Professor George Lane, from Harvard, a man so
full of humor that people bought his new Latin Grammar merely for the
fun to be got out of its notes. There was La Farge, just passing through
the change which made a great artist out of a book-lover and a student
of languages. He alone on this list made Newport his home for years,
and reared his gifted and attractive children there, and it was always
interesting to see how, one by one, they developed into artists or
priests.
There was George Boker, of Philadelphia, a young man of fortune,
handsome, indolent, as poetic as a rich young man could spare time to
be, and one whose letters now help to make attractive that most amusing
book, the “Memoirs of Charles Godfrey Leland.” There was my refined and
accomplished schoolmate and chum, Charles Perkins, who trained himself
in Italian art and tried rather ineffectually to introduce it into the
public schools of Boston and upon the outside of the Art Museum. There
was Tom Appleton, the man of two continents, and Clarence King, the
explorer of this one, and a charming story-teller, by the way. Let me
pause longer over one or two of these many visitors.
One of them was long held the most readable of American biographers, but
is now being strangely forgotten,—the most American of all transplanted
Englishmen, James Parton, the historian. He has apparently dropped from
our current literature and even from popular memory. I can only attribute
this to a certain curious combination of strength and weakness which
was more conspicuous in him than in most others. He always appeared
to me the most absolutely truthful being I had ever encountered; no
temptation, no threats, could move him from his position; but when he
came in contact with a man of wholly opposite temperament, as, for
instance, General Benjamin F. Butler, the other seemed able to wind
Parton round his fingers. This would be the harder to believe had not
Butler exerted something of the same influence on Wendell Phillips,
another man of proud and yet trustful temperament. Furthermore, Parton
was absolutely enthralled in a similar way through his chief object of
literary interest, perhaps as being the man in the world most unlike
him, Voltaire. On the other hand, no one could be more devoted to
self-sacrifice than Parton when it became clear and needful. Day after
day one would see him driving in the roads around Newport, with his
palsy-stricken and helpless wife, ten years older than himself and best
known to the world as Fanny Fern,—he sitting upright as a flagstaff and
looking forward in deep absorption, settling some Voltairean problem a
hundred years older than his own domestic sorrow.
I find in my diary (June 25, 1871) only this reference to one of the
disappointing visitors at Newport:—
“Bret Harte is always simple and modest. He is terribly tired of ‘The
Heathen Chinee,’ and almost annoyed at its popularity when better things
of his have been less liked”—the usual experience of authors.
I find again, May 15, 1871: “I went up last Wednesday night to the Grand
Army banquet [in Boston] and found it pleasant. The receptions of Hooker
and Burnside were especially ardent. At our table we were about to give
three cheers for Bret Harte as a man went up to the chief table. It
turned out to be Mayor Gaston.” This mistake, however, showed Harte’s
ready popularity at first, though some obstacles afterwards tended to
diminish it. Among these obstacles was to be included, no doubt, the San
Francisco newspapers, which were constantly showered among us from the
Pacific shores with all the details of the enormous debts which Bret
Harte had left behind him, and which he never in his life, so far as I
could hear, made a serious effort to discharge. Through some distrust
either of my friendship or of my resources, he never by any chance even
offered, I believe, to borrow a dollar of me; but our more generous
companion, George Waring, was not so fortunate.
Another person, of nobler type, appears but imperfectly in my letters,
namely, Miss Charlotte Cushman. I find, to be sure, the following
penetrating touches from a companion who had always that quality, and
who says of Miss Cushman, in her diary: “She is very large, looks like
an elderly man, with gray hair and very red cheeks—full of action
and gesture—acts a dog just as well as a man or woman. She seems
large-hearted, kind, and very bright and quick—looks in splendid health.
She will be here for this month, but may take a house and return.” This
expectation was fulfilled, and I find that the same authority later
compared Miss Cushman in appearance to “an old boy given to eating apples
and snowballing”; and, again, gave this description after seeing Miss
Cushman’s new house: “The wildest turn of an insane kaleidoscope—the
petrified antics of a crazy coon—with a dance of intoxicated
lightning-rods breaking out over the roof.” This youthful impulsiveness
was a part of her, and I remember that once, as we were driving across
the first beach at Newport, Miss Cushman looked with delight across the
long strip of sand, which the advancing waves were rapidly diminishing,
as the little boys were being driven ashore by them, and exclaimed, “How
those children have enjoyed running their little risk of danger! I know
I did when I was a boy,” and there seemed nothing incongruous in the
remark, nor yet when she turned to me afterwards and asked, seriously,
whether I thought suicide absolutely unpardonable in a person proved to
be hopelessly destined to die of cancer,—a terror with which she was
long haunted. Again, I remember at one fashionable reception how Miss
Cushman came with John Gilbert, the veteran actor, as her guest, and how
much higher seemed their breeding, on the whole, than that of the mere
fashionables of a day.
Kate Field, who has been somewhat unwisely canonized by an injudicious
annotator, was much in Newport, equally fearless in body and mind, and
perhaps rather limited than enlarged by early contact with Italy and Mrs.
Browning. She would come in from a manly boating-trip and fling herself
on the sofa of the daintiest hostess, where the subsequent arrival of the
best-bred guests did not disturb her from her position; but nothing would
have amused her more than the deification which she received after death
from some later adorers of her own sex.
I find the following sketches of different Newport visitors in a letter
dated September 2, 1869:—
“We had an elder poet in Mr. [William Cullen] Bryant, on whom
I called, and to my great surprise he returned it. I never saw
him before. There is a little hardness about him, and he seems
like one who has been habitually bored, but he is refined and
gentle—thinner, older, and more sunken than his pictures—eyes
not fine, head rather narrow and prominent; delicate in
outline. He is quite agreeable, and ⸺ chatted to him quite
easily. I saw him several times, but he does not warm one.
“At Governor Morgan’s I went to a reception for the [General]
Grants. He is a much more noticeable man than I expected, and
I should think his head would attract attention anywhere,
and Richard Greenough [the sculptor] thought the same—and
so imperturbable—without even a segar! Mrs. Grant I found
intelligent and equable.... Sherman was there, too, the
antipodes of Grant; nervous and mobile, looking like a country
schoolmaster. He said to Bryant, in my hearing, ‘Yes, indeed! I
know Mr. Bryant; he’s one of the veterans! When I was a boy at
West Point he was a veteran. He used to edit a newspaper then!’
“This quite ignored Mr. Bryant’s poetic side, which Sherman
possibly may not have quite enjoyed. Far more interesting than
this, I thought, was a naval reception where Farragut was
given profuse honors, yet held them all as a trivial pleasure
compared to an interview with his early teacher, Mr. Charles
Folsom, the superintendent of the University Printing-Office at
Cambridge. To him the great admiral returned again and again,
and we saw them sitting with hands clasped, and serving well
enough, as some one suggested, for a group of ‘War and Peace,’
such as the sculptors were just then portraying.”
Most interesting, too, I found on one occasion, at Charles Perkins’s, the
companionship of two young Englishmen, James Bryce and Albert Dicey,
both since eminent, but then just beginning their knowledge of this
country. I vividly remember how Dicey came in rubbing his hands with
delight, saying that Bryce had just heard a boarder at the hotel where
he was staying say _Eurōpean_ twice, and had stopped to make a note of
it in his diary. But I cannot allow further space to them, nor even to
Mr. George Bancroft, about whom the reader will find a more ample sketch
in this volume (page 95). I will, however, venture to repeat one little
scene illustrating with what parental care he used to accompany young
ladies on horseback in his old age, galloping over the Newport beaches.
On one of these occasions, after he had dismounted to adjust his fair
companion’s stirrup, he was heard to say to her caressingly, “Don’t call
me Mr. Bancroft, call me George!”
In regard to my friend, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and her Newport life, I have
written so fully of her in the article on page 287 of this volume that I
shall hardly venture it again. Nor have I space in which to dwell on the
further value to our little Newport circle of such women as Katharine P.
Wormeley, the well-known translator of Balzac and Molière and the author
of “Hospital Transports” during the war; or of the three accomplished
Woolsey sisters, of whom the eldest, under the name of “Susan Coolidge,”
became a very influential writer for young people. She came first to
Newport as the intimate friend of Mrs. Helen Maria Fiske Hunt, who was
more generally known for many years as “H. H.” The latter came among us
as the widow of one of the most distinguished officers whom the West
Point service had reared. She was destined in all to spend five winters
at Newport, and entered upon her literary life practically at that time.
She lived there as happily, perhaps, as she could have dwelt in any town
which she could christen “Sleepy Hollow,” as she did Newport; and where
she could look from her window upon the fashionable avenue and see, she
said, such “Headless Horsemen” as Irving described as having haunted the
valley of that name.
After her second marriage she lived far away at the middle and then at
the extreme western part of the continent, and we met but few times. She
wrote to me freely, however, and I cannot do better than close by quoting
from this brilliant woman’s very words her description of the manner in
which she wrote the tale “Ramona,” now apparently destined to be her
source of permanent fame. I do not know in literary history so vivid a
picture of what may well be called spiritual inspiration in an impetuous
woman’s soul.
THE BERKELEY, February 5, 1884.
I am glad you say you are rejoiced that I am writing a story.
But about the not hurrying it—I want to tell you something— You
know I have for three or four years longed to write a story
that should “tell” on the Indian question. But I knew I could
not do it, knew I had no background—no local color for it.
Last Spring, in So. Cal. [Southern California] I began to feel
that I had—that the scene laid there—& the old Mexican life
mixed in with just enough Indian, to enable me to tell what had
happened to them—would be the very perfection of coloring. You
know I have now lived six months in So. Cal.
Still I did not see my way clear; got no plot; till one morning
late last October, before I was wide awake, the whole plot
flashed into my mind—not a vague one—the whole story just as it
stands to-day: in less than five minutes: as if some one spoke
it. I sprang up, went to my husband’s room, and told him: I was
half frightened. From that time till I came here it haunted me,
becoming more and more vivid. I was impatient to get at it.
I wrote the first word of it Dec. 1st. As soon as I began it
seemed impossible to write fast enough. In spite of myself, I
write faster than I would write a letter. I write two thousand
to three thousand words in a morning, and I _cannot_ help it.
It racks me like a struggle with an outside power. I cannot
help being superstitious about it. I have never done _half_
the amount of work in the same time. Ordinarily it would be a
simple impossibility. Twice since beginning it I have broken
down utterly for a while—with a cold ostensibly, but with great
nervous prostration added. What I have to endure in holding
myself away from it, afternoons, on the days I am compelled to
be in the house, no words can tell. It is like keeping away
from a lover, whose hand I can reach!
Now you will ask what sort of English it is I write at this
lightning speed. So far as I can tell, the best I ever wrote!
I have read it aloud as I have gone on, to one friend of keen
literary perceptions and judgment, the most purely intellectual
woman I know—Mrs. Trimble. She says it is smooth, strong,
clear—“Tremendous” is her frequent epithet. I read the first
ten chapters to Miss Woolsey this last week—she has been
spending a few days with me ... but she says, “Far better than
anything you ever have done.”
The success of it—if it succeeds—will be that I do not even
suggest my Indian history till the interest is so assured in
the heroine—and hero—that people will not lay the book down.
There is but one Indian in the story.
Every now & then I force myself to stop & write a short story
or a bit of verse: I can’t bear the strain: but the instant I
open the pages of the other I write as I am writing now—as fast
as I could copy! What do you think? Am I possessed of a demon?
Is it a freak of mental disturbance, or what?
I have the feeling that if I could only read it to you, you
would know. If it is as good as Mrs. Trimble, Mr. Jackson &
Miss Woolsey think, I shall be indeed rewarded, for it will
“tell.” But I can’t believe it is. I am uneasy about it—but try
as I may, all I can, I cannot write slowly for more than a few
moments. I sit down at 9.30 or 10, & it is one before I know
it. In good weather I then go out, after lunching, and keep
out, religiously till five: but there have not been more than
three out of eight good days all winter:—and the days when I am
shut up, in my room from two till five, alone—with my Ramona
and Alessandro, and cannot go along with them on their journey,
are maddening.
Fifty-two last October and I’m not a bit steadier-headed, you
see, than ever! I don’t know whether to send this or burn it
up. Don’t laugh at me whatever you do.
Yours always,
H. J.
XXIV
A HALF-CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
A HALF-CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
(1857-1907)
I
The brilliant French author, Stendhal, used to describe his ideal of
a happy life as dwelling in a Paris garret and writing endless plays
and novels. This might seem to any Anglo-American a fantastic wish;
and no doubt the early colonists on this side of the Atlantic Ocean,
after fighting through the Revolution by the aid of Rochambeau and his
Frenchmen, might have felt quite out of place had they followed their
triumphant allies back to Europe, in 1781, and inspected their way of
living. We can hardly wonder, on the other hand, that the accomplished
French traveler, Philarète Chasles, on visiting this country in 1851,
looked through the land in despair at not finding a humorist, although
the very boy of sixteen who stood near him at the rudder of a Mississippi
steam-boat may have been he who was destined to amuse the civilized world
under the name of Mark Twain.[23]
That which was, however, to astonish most seriously all European
observers who were watching the dawn of the young American republic,
was its presuming to develop itself in its own original way, and not
conventionally. It was destined, as Cicero said of ancient Rome, to
produce its statesmen and orators first, and its poets later. Literature
was not inclined to show itself with much promptness, during and after
long years of conflict, first with the Indians, then with the mother
country. There were individual instances of good writing: Judge Sewall’s
private diaries, sometimes simple and noble, sometimes unconsciously
eloquent, often infinitely amusing; William Byrd’s and Sarah Knight’s
piquant glimpses of early Virginia travel; Cotton Mather’s quaint and
sometimes eloquent passages; Freneau’s poetry, from which Scott and
Campbell borrowed phrases. Behind all, there was the stately figure of
Jonathan Edwards standing gravely in the background, like a monk at the
cloister door, with his treatise on the “Freedom of the Will.”