As it fell out, I lived without farther difficulty to the day and hour of
the dinner Lowell made for me; and I really think, looking at myself
impersonally, and remembering the sort of young fellow I was, that it
would have been a great pity if I had not. The dinner was at the
old-fashioned Boston hour of two, and the table was laid for four people
in some little upper room at Parker’s, which I was never afterwards able
to make sure of. Lowell was already, there when I came, and he presented
me, to my inexpressible delight and surprise, to Dr. Holmes, who was
there with him.
Holmes was in the most brilliant hour of that wonderful second youth
which his fame flowered into long after the world thought he had
completed the cycle of his literary life. He had already received full
recognition as a poet of delicate wit, nimble humor, airy imagination,
and exquisite grace, when the Autocrat papers advanced his name
indefinitely beyond the bounds which most immortals would have found
range enough. The marvel of his invention was still fresh in the minds
of men, and time had not dulled in any measure the sense of its novelty.
His readers all fondly identified him with his work; and I fully expected
to find myself in the Autocrat’s presence when I met Dr. Holmes. But
the fascination was none the less for that reason; and the winning smile,
the wise and humorous glance, the whole genial manner was as important to
me as if I had foreboded something altogether different. I found him
physically of the Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps,
and I could look into his face without that unpleasant effort which
giants of inferior mind so often cost the man of five feet four.
A little while after, Fields came in, and then our number and my pleasure
were complete.
Nothing else so richly satisfactory, indeed, as the whole affair could
have happened to a like youth at such a point in his career; and when I
sat down with Doctor Holmes and Mr. Fields, on Lowell’s right, I felt
through and through the dramatic perfection of the event. The kindly
Autocrat recognized some such quality of it in terms which were not the
less precious and gracious for their humorous excess. I have no reason
to think that he had yet read any of my poor verses, or had me otherwise
than wholly on trust from Lowell; but he leaned over towards his host,
and said, with a laughing look at me, “Well, James, this is something
like the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands.” I took
his sweet and caressing irony as he meant it; but the charm of it went to
my head long before any drop of wine, together with the charm of hearing
him and Lowell calling each other James and Wendell, and of finding them
still cordially boys together.
I would gladly have glimmered before those great lights in the talk that
followed, if I could have thought of anything brilliant to say, but I
could not, and so I let them shine without a ray of reflected splendor
from me. It was such talk as I had, of course, never heard before, and
it is not saying enough to say that I have never heard such talk since
except from these two men. It was as light and kind as it was deep and
true, and it ranged over a hundred things, with a perpetual sparkle of
Doctor Holmes’s wit, and the constant glow of Lowell’s incandescent
sense. From time to time Fields came in with one of his delightful
stories (sketches of character they were, which he sometimes did not mind
caricaturing), or with some criticism of the literary situation from his
stand-point of both lover and publisher of books. I heard fames that I
had accepted as proofs of power treated as factitious, and witnessed a
frankness concerning authorship, far and near, that I had not dreamed of
authors using. When Doctor Holmes understood that I wrote for the
‘Saturday Press’, which was running amuck among some Bostonian
immortalities of the day, he seemed willing that I should know they were
not thought so very undying in Boston, and that I should not take the
notion of a Mutual Admiration Society too seriously, or accept the New
York Bohemian view of Boston as true. For the most part the talk did not
address itself to me, but became an exchange of thoughts and fancies
between himself and Lowell. They touched, I remember, on certain matters
of technique, and the doctor confessed that he had a prejudice against
some words that he could not overcome; for instance, he said, nothing
could induce him to use ‘neath for beneath, no exigency of versification
or stress of rhyme. Lowell contended that he would use any word that
carried his meaning; and I think he did this to the hurt of some of his
earlier things. He was then probably in the revolt against too much
literature in literature, which every one is destined sooner or later to
share; there was a certain roughness, very like crudeness, which he
indulged before his thought and phrase mellowed to one music in his later
work. I tacitly agreed rather with the doctor, though I did not swerve
from my allegiance to Lowell, and if I had spoken I should have sided
with him: I would have given that or any other proof of my devotion.
Fields casually mentioned that he thought “The Dandelion” was the most
popularly liked of Lowell’s briefer poems, and I made haste to say that I
thought so too, though I did not really think anything about it; and then
I was sorry, for I could see that the poet did not like it, quite; and I
felt that I was duly punished for my dishonesty.
Hawthorne was named among other authors, probably by Fields, whose house
had just published his “Marble Faun,” and who had recently come home on
the same steamer with him. Doctor Holmes asked if I had met Hawthorne
yet, and when I confessed that I had hardly yet even hoped for such a
thing, he smiled his winning smile, and said: “Ah, well! I don’t know
that you will ever feel you have really met him. He is like a dim room
with a little taper of personality burning on the corner of the mantel.”
They all spoke of Hawthorne, and with the same affection, but the same
sense of something mystical and remote in him; and every word was
priceless to me. But these masters of the craft I was ‘prentice to
probably could not have said anything that I should not have found wise
and well, and I am sure now I should have been the loser if the talk had
shunned any of the phases of human nature which it touched. It is best
to find that all men are of the same make, and that there are certain
universal things which interest them as much as the supernal things, and
amuse them even more. There was a saying of Lowell’s which he was fond
of repeating at the menace of any form of the transcendental, and he
liked to warn himself and others with his homely, “Remember the
dinner-bell.” What I recall of the whole effect of a time so happy for
me is that in all that was said, however high, however fine, we were
never out of hearing of the dinner-bell; and perhaps this is the best
effect I can leave with the reader. It was the first dinner served in
courses that I had sat down to, and I felt that this service gave it a
romantic importance which the older fashion of the West still wanted.
Even at Governor Chase’s table in Columbus the Governor carved; I knew of
the dinner ‘a la Russe’, as it was then called, only from books; and it
was a sort of literary flavor that I tasted in the successive dishes.
When it came to the black coffee, and then to the ‘petits verres’ of
cognac, with lumps of sugar set fire to atop, it was something that so
far transcended my home-kept experience that it began to seem altogether
visionary.
Neither Fields nor Doctor Holmes smoked, and I had to confess that I did
not; but Lowell smoked enough for all three, and the spark of his cigar
began to show in the waning light before we rose from the table. The
time that never had, nor can ever have, its fellow for me, had to come to
an end, as all times must, and when I shook hands with Lowell in parting,
he overwhelmed me by saying that if I thought of going to Concord he
would send me a letter to Hawthorne. I was not to see Lowell again
during my stay in Boston; but Doctor Holmes asked me to tea for the next
evening, and Fields said I must come to breakfast with him in the
morning.