Emerson, as I say, I had once met in Cambridge, but Whittier never; and I
have a feeling that poet as Cambridge felt him to be, she had her
reservations concerning him. I cannot put these into words which would
not oversay them, but they were akin to those she might have refined upon
in regard to Mrs. Stowe. Neither of these great writers would have
appeared to Cambridge of the last literary quality; their fame was with a
world too vast to be the test that her own
“One entire and perfect crysolite”
would have formed. Whittier in fact had not arrived at the clear
splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still
from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for
the author of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ her syntax was such a snare to her that
it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the
assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written
into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, in
transposition of phrases, the text was largely rewritten on the margin of
her proofs. The soul of her art was present, but the form was so often
absent, that when it was clothed on anew, it would have been hard to say
whose cut the garment was of in many places. In fact, the proof-reading
of the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ was something almost fearfully scrupulous and
perfect. The proofs were first read by the under proof-reader in the
printing-office; then the head reader passed them to me perfectly clean
as to typography, with his own abundant and most intelligent comments on
the literature; and then I read them, making what changes I chose, and
verifying every quotation, every date, every geographical and
biographical name, every foreign word to the last accent, every technical
and scientific term. Where it was possible or at all desirable the proof
was next submitted to the author. When it came back to me, I revised it,
accepting or rejecting the author’s judgment according as he was entitled
by his ability and knowledge or not to have them. The proof now went to
the printers for correction; they sent it again to the head reader, who
carefully revised it and returned it again to me. I read it a second
time, and it was again corrected. After this it was revised in the
office and sent to the stereotyper, from whom it came to the head reader
for a last revision in the plates.
It would not do to say how many of the first American writers owed their
correctness in print to the zeal of our proof-reading, but I may say that
there were very few who did not owe something. The wisest and ablest
were the most patient and grateful, like Mrs. Stowe, under correction; it
was only the beginners and the more ignorant who were angry; and almost
always the proof-reading editor had his way on disputed points. I look
back now, with respectful amazement at my proficiency in detecting the
errors of the great as well as the little. I was able to discover
mistakes even in the classical quotations of the deeply lettered Sumner,
and I remember, in the earliest years of my service on the Atlantic,
waiting in this statesman’s study amidst the prints and engravings that
attested his personal resemblance to Edmund Burke, with his proofs in my
hand and my heart in my mouth, to submit my doubts of his Latinity. I
forget how he received them; but he was not a very gracious person.
Mrs. Stowe was a gracious person, and carried into age the inalienable
charm of a woman who must have been very, charming earlier. I met her
only at the Fieldses’ in Boston, where one night I witnessed a
controversy between her and Doctor Holmes concerning homoeopathy and
allopathy which lasted well through dinner. After this lapse of time, I
cannot tell how the affair ended, but I feel sure of the liking with
which Mrs. Stowe inspired me. There was something very simple, very
motherly in her, and something divinely sincere. She was quite the
person to take ‘au grand serieux’ the monstrous imaginations of Lady
Byron’s jealousy and to feel it on her conscience to make public report
of them when she conceived that the time had come to do so.
In Francis Parkman I knew much later than in some others a
differentiation of the New England type which was not less
characteristic. He, like so many other Boston men of letters, was of
patrician family, and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons
to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suffering in which he
wrought at what is, I suppose, our greatest history. He wrought at it
piecemeal, and sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head aches
which tormented him, and the disorder of the heart which threatened his
life, allowed him a brief respite for the task which was dear to him. He
must have been more than a quarter of a century in completing it, and in
this time, as he once told me, it had given him a day-laborer’s wages;
but of course money was the least return he wished from it. I read the
regularly successive volumes of ‘The Jesuits in North America, The Old
Regime in Canada’, the ‘Wolfe and Montcalm’, and the others that went to
make up the whole history with a sufficiently noisy enthusiasm, and our
acquaintance began by his expressing his gratification with the praises
of them that I had put in print. We entered into relations as
contributor and editor, and I know that he was pleased with my eagerness
to get as many detachable chapters from the book in hand as he could give
me for the magazine, but he was of too fine a politeness to make this the
occasion of his first coming to see me. He had walked out to Cambridge,
where I then lived, in pursuance of a regimen which, I believe, finally
built up his health; that it was unsparing, I can testify from my own
share in one of his constitutionals in Boston, many years later.
His experience in laying the groundwork for his history, and his
researches in making it thorough, were such as to have liberated him to
the knowledge of other manners and ideals, but he remained strictly a
Bostonian, and as immutably of the Boston social and literary faith as
any I knew in that capital of accomplished facts. He had lived like an
Indian among the wild Western tribes; he consorted with the Canadian
archaeologists in their mousings among the colonial archives of their
fallen state; every year he went to Quebec or Paris to study the history
of New France in the original documents; European society was open to him
everywhere; but he had those limitations which I nearly always found in
the Boston men, I remember his talking to me of ‘The Rise of Silas
Lapham’, in a somewhat troubled and uncertain strain, and interpreting
his rise as the achievement of social recognition, without much or at all
liking it or me for it. I did not think it my part to point out that I
had supposed the rise to be a moral one; and later I fell under his
condemnation for certain high crimes and misdemeanors I had been guilty
of against a well-known ideal in fiction. These in fact constituted
lese-majesty of romanticism, which seemed to be disproportionately dear
to a man who was in his own way trying to tell the truth of human nature
as I was in mine. His displeasures passed, however, and my last meeting
with our greatest historian, as I think him, was of unalloyed
friendliness. He came to me during my final year in Boston for nothing
apparently but to tell me of his liking for a book of mine describing
boy-life in Southern Ohio a half-century ago. He wished to talk about
many points of this, which he found the same as his own boylife in the
neighborhood of Boston; and we could agree that the life of the
Anglo-Saxon boy was pretty much the same everywhere. He had helped
himself into my apartment with a crutch, but I do not remember how he had
fallen lame. It was the end of his long walks, I believe, and not long
afterwards I had the grief to read of his death. I noticed that perhaps
through his enforced quiet, he had put on weight; his fine face was full;
whereas when I first knew him he was almost delicately thin of figure and
feature. He was always of a distinguished presence, and his face had a
great distinction.
It had not the appealing charm I found in the face of James Parton,
another historian I knew earlier in my Boston days. I cannot say how
much his books, once so worthily popular, are now known but I have an
abiding sense of their excellence. I have not read the ‘Life of
Voltaire’, which was the last, but all the rest, from the first, I have
read, and if there are better American biographies than those of Franklin
or of Jefferson, I could not say where to find them. The Greeley and the
Burr were younger books, and so was the Jackson, and they were not nearly
so good; but to all the author had imparted the valuable humanity in
which he abounded. He was never of the fine world of literature, the
world that sniffs and sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. But
he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American
character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage,
and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he
had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived
the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came
near him without in some measure loving him. To me he was of a most
winning personality, which his strong, gentle face expressed, and a cast
in the eye which he could not bring to bear directly upon his vis-a-vis,
endeared. I never met him without wishing more of his company, for he
seldom failed to say something to whatever was most humane and most
modern in me. Our last meeting was at Newburyport, whither he had long
before removed from New York, and where in the serene atmosphere of the
ancient Puritan town he found leisure and inspiration for his work. He
was not then engaged upon any considerable task, and he had aged and
broken somewhat. But the old geniality, the old warmth glowed in him,
and made a summer amidst the storm of snow that blinded the wintry air
without. A new light had then lately come into my life, by which I saw
all things that did not somehow tell for human brotherhood dwarfish and
ugly, and he listened, as I imagined, to what I had to say with the
tolerant sympathy of a man who has been a long time thinking those
things, and views with a certain amusement the zeal of the fresh
discoverer.
There was yet another historian in Boston, whose acquaintance I made
later than either Parkman’s or Parton’s, and whose very recent death
leaves me with the grief of a friend. No ones indeed, could meet John
Codman Ropes without wishing to be his friend, or without finding a
friend in him. He had his likes and his dislikes, but he could have had
no enmities except for evil and meanness. I never knew a man of higher
soul, of sweeter nature, and his whole life was a monument of character.
It cannot wound him now to speak of the cruel deformity which came upon
him in his boyhood, and haunted all his after days with suffering. His
gentle face showed the pain which is always the part of the hunchback,
but nothing else in him confessed a sense of his affliction, and the
resolute activity of his mind denied it in every way. He was, as is well
known, a very able lawyer, in full practice, while he was making his
studies of military history, and winning recognition for almost unique
insight and thoroughness in that direction, though I believe that when he
came to embody the results in those extraordinary volumes recording the
battles of our civil war, he retired from the law in some measure. He
knew these battles more accurately than the generals who fought them, and
he was of a like proficiency in the European wars from the time of
Napoleon down to our own time. I have heard a story, which I cannot
vouch for, that when foreknowledge of his affliction, at the outbreak of
our civil war, forbade him to be a soldier, he became a student of
soldiership, and wreaked in that sort the passion of his most gallant
spirit. But whether this was true or not, it is certain that he pursued
the study with a devotion which never blinded him to the atrocity of war.
Some wars he could excuse and even justify, but for any war that seemed
wanton or aggressive, he had only abhorrence.
The last summer of a score that I had known him, we sat on the veranda of
his cottage at York Harbor, and looked out over the moonlit sea, and he
talked of the high and true things, with the inextinguishable zest for
the inquiry which I always found in him, though he was then feeling the
approaches of the malady which was so soon to end all groping in these
shadows for him. He must have faced the fact with the same courage and
the same trust with which he faced all facts. From the first I found him
a deeply religious man, not only in the ecclesiastical sense, but in the
more mystical meanings of the word, and he kept his faith as he kept his
youth to the last. Every one who knew him, knows how young he was in
heart, and how he liked to have those that were young in years about him.
He wished to have his house in Boston, as well as his cottage at York,
full of young men and young girls, whose joy of life he made his own, and
whose society he preferred to his contemporaries’. One could not blame
him for that, or for seeking the sun, wherever he could, but it would be
a false notion of him to suppose that his sympathies were solely or
chiefly with the happy. In every sort, as I knew him, he was fine and
good. The word is not worthy of him, after some of its uses and
associations, but if it were unsmutched by these, and whitened to its
primitive significance, I should say he was one of the most perfect
gentlemen I ever knew.