Out of the vague of that far-off time another face and figure, as
essentially New En&land as this, and yet so different, relieve
themselves. Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as
far as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized Yankee.
He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking, and he so
became a literary product of a rarer and stranger sort than our
literature had otherwise known. He had gone from Cleveland to London,
with intervals of New York and the lecture platform, four or five years
before I saw him in Boston, shortly after I went there. We had met in
Ohio, and he had personally explained to me the ducatless well-meaning of
Vanity Fair in New York; but many men had since shaken the weary hand of
Artemus Ward when I grasped it one day in front of the Tremont Temple. He
did not recognize me, but he gave me at once a greeting of great
impersonal cordiality, with “How do you do? When did you come?” and
other questions that had no concern in them, till I began to dawn upon
him through a cloud of other half remembered faces. Then he seized my
hand and wrung it all over again, and repeated his friendly demands with
an intonation that was now “Why, how are you; how are you?” for me alone.
It was a bit of comedy, which had the fit pathetic relief of his
impending doom: this was already stamped upon his wasted face, and his
gay eyes had the death-look. His large, loose mouth was drawn, for all
its laughter at the fact which he owned; his profile, which burlesqued.
an eagle’s, was the profile of a drooping eagle; his lank length of limb
trembled away with him when we parted. I did not see him again; I
scarcely heard of him till I heard of his death, and this sad image
remains with me of the humorist who first gave the world a taste of the
humor which characterizes the whole American people.
I was meeting all kinds of distinguished persons, in my relation to the
magazine, and early that winter I met one who remains in my mind above
all others a person of distinction. He was scarcely a celebrity, but he
embodied certain social traits which were so characteristic of literary
Boston that it could not be approached without their recognition. The
Muses have often been acknowledged to be very nice young persons, but in
Boston they were really ladies; in Boston literature was of good family
and good society in a measure it has never been elsewhere. It might be
said even that reform was of good family in Boston; and literature and
reform equally shared the regard of Edmund Quincy, whose race was one of
the most aristocratic in New England. I had known him by his novel of
‘Wensley’ (it came so near being a first-rate novel), and by his Life of
Josiah Quincy, then a new book, but still better by his Boston letters to
the New York Tribune. These dealt frankly, in the old anti-slavery days
between 1850 and 1860, with other persons of distinction in Boston, who
did not see the right so clearly as Quincy did, or who at least let their
interests darken them to the ugliness of slavery. Their fault was all
the more comical because it was the error of men otherwise so correct, of
characters so stainless, of natures so upright; and the Quincy letters
got out of it all the fun there was in it. Quincy himself affected me as
the finest patrician type I had ever met. He was charmingly handsome,
with a nose of most fit aquilinity, smooth-shaven lips, “educated
whiskers,” and perfect glasses; his manner was beautiful, his voice
delightful, when at our first meeting he made me his reproaches in terms
of lovely kindness for having used in my ‘Venetian Life’ the Briticism
‘directly’ for ‘as soon as.’
Lowell once told me that Quincy had never had any calling or profession,
because when he found himself in the enjoyment of a moderate income on
leaving college, he decided to be simply a gentleman. He was too much of
a man to be merely that, and he was an abolitionist, a journalist, and
for conscience’ sake a satirist. Of that political mood of society which
he satirized was an eminent man whom it was also my good fortune to meet
in my early days in Boston; and if his great sweetness and kindness had
not instantly won my liking, I should still have been glad of the glimpse
of the older and statelier Boston which my slight acquaintance with
George Ticknor gave me. The historian of Spanish literature, the friend
and biographer of Prescott, and a leading figure of the intellectual
society of an epoch already closed, dwelt in the fine old square brick
mansion which yet stands at the corner of Park Street and Beacon, though
sunk now to a variety of business uses, and lamentably changed in aspect.
The interior was noble, and there was an air of scholarly quiet and of
lettered elegance in the library, where the host received his guests,
which seemed to pervade the whole house, and which made its appeal to the
imagination of one of them most potently. It seemed to me that to be
master of such circumstance and keeping would be enough of life in a
certain way; and it all lingers in my memory yet, as if it were one with
the gentle courtesy which welcomed me.
Among my fellow-guests one night was George S. Hillard, now a faded
reputation, and even then a life defeated of the high expectation of its
youth. I do not know whether his ‘Six Months in Italy’ still keeps
itself in print; but it was a book once very well known; and he was
perhaps the more gracious to me, as our host was, because of our common
Italian background. He was of the old Silver-gray Whig society too, and
I suppose that order of things imparted its tone to what I felt and saw
in that place. The civil war had come and gone, and that order accepted
the result if not with faith, then with patience. There were two young
English noblemen there that night, who had been travelling in the South,
and whose stories of the wretched conditions they had seen moved our host
to some open misgiving. But the Englishmen had no question; in spite of
all, they defended the accomplished fact, and when I ventured to say that
now at least there could be a hope of better things, while the old order
was only the perpetuation of despair, he mildly assented, with a gesture
of the hand that waived the point, and a deeply sighed, “Perhaps;
perhaps.”
He was a presence of great dignity, which seemed to recall the past with
a steadfast allegiance, and yet to relax itself towards the present in
the wisdom of the accumulated years. His whole life had been passed in
devotion to polite literature and in the society of the polite world; and
he was a type of scholar such as only the circumstances of Boston could
form. Those circumstances could alone form such another type as Quincy;
and I wish I could have felt then as I do now the advantage of meeting
them so contemporaneously.