The suppers of the Dante Club were a relaxation from the severity of
their toils on criticism, and I will not pretend that their table-talk
was of that seriousness which duller wits might have given themselves up
to. The passing stranger, especially if a light or jovial person, was
always welcome, and I never knew of the enforcement of the rule I heard
of, that if you came in without question on the Club nights, you were a
guest; but if you rang or knocked, you could not get in.
Any sort of diversion was hailed, and once Appleton proposed that
Longfellow should show us his wine-cellar. He took up the candle burning
on the table for the cigars, and led the way into the basement of the
beautiful old Colonial mansion, doubly memorable as Washington’s
headquarters while he was in Cambridge, and as the home of Longfellow for
so many years. The taper cast just the right gleams on the darkness,
bringing into relief the massive piers of brick, and the solid walls of
stone, which gave the cellar the effect of a casemate in some fortress,
and leaving the corners and distances to a romantic gloom. This basement
was a work of the days when men built more heavily if not more
substantially than now, but I forget, if I ever knew, what date the
wine-cellar was of. It was well stored with precious vintages, aptly
cobwebbed and dusty; but I could not find that it had any more charm than
the shelves of a library: it is the inside of bottles and of books that
makes its appeal. The whole place witnessed a bygone state and luxury,
which otherwise lingered in a dim legend or two. Longfellow once spoke
of certain old love-letters which dropped down on the basement stairs
from some place overhead; and there was the fable or the fact of a
subterranean passage under the street from Craigie House to the old
Batchelder House, which I relate to these letters with no authority I can
allege. But in Craigie House dwelt the proud fair lady who was buried in
the Cambridge church-yard with a slave at her head and a slave at her
feet.
“Dust is in her beautiful eyes,”
and whether it was they that smiled or wept in their time over those
love-letters, I will leave the reader to say. The fortunes of her Tory
family fell with those of their party, and the last Vassal ended his days
a prisoner from his creditors in his own house, with a weekly enlargement
on Sundays, when the law could not reach him. It is known how the place
took Longfellow’s fancy when he first came to be professor in Harvard,
and how he was a lodger of the last Mistress Craigie there, long before
he became its owner. The house is square, with Longfellow’s study where
he read and wrote on the right of the door, and a statelier library
behind it; on the left is the drawing-room, with the dining-room in its
rear; from its square hall climbs a beautiful stairway with twisted
banisters, and a tall clock in their angle.
The study where the Dante Club met, and where I mostly saw Longfellow,
was a plain, pleasant room, with broad panelling in white painted pine;
in the centre before the fireplace stood his round table, laden with
books, papers, and proofs; in the farthest corner by the window was a
high desk which he sometimes stood at to write. In this room Washington
held his councils and transacted his business with all comers; in the
chamber overhead he slept. I do not think Longfellow associated the
place much with him, and I never heard him speak of Washington in
relation to it except once, when he told me with peculiar relish what he
called the true version of a pious story concerning the aide-de-camp who
blundered in upon him while he knelt in prayer. The father of his
country rose and rebuked the young man severely, and then resumed his
devotions. “He rebuked him,” said Longfellow, lifting his brows and
making rings round the pupils of his eyes, “by throwing his scabbard at
his head.”
All the front windows of Craigie House look, out over the open fields
across the Charles, which is now the Longfellow Memorial Garden. The
poet used to be amused with the popular superstition that he was holding
this vacant ground with a view to a rise in the price of lots, while all
he wanted was to keep a feature of his beloved landscape unchanged. Lofty
elms drooped at the corners of the house; on the lawn billowed clumps of
the lilac, which formed a thick hedge along the fence. There was a
terrace part way down this lawn, and when a white-painted balustrade was
set some fifteen years ago upon its brink, it seemed always to have been
there. Long verandas stretched on either side of the mansion; and behind
was an old-fashioned garden with beds primly edged with box after a
design of the poet’s own. Longfellow had a ghost story of this quaint
plaisance, which he used to tell with an artful reserve of the
catastrophe. He was coming home one winter night, and as he crossed the
garden he was startled by a white figure swaying before him. But he knew
that the only way was to advance upon it. He pushed boldly forward, and
was suddenly caught under the throat-by the clothes-line with a long
night-gown on it.
Perhaps it was at the end of a long night of the Dante Club that I heard
him tell this story. The evenings were sometimes mornings before the
reluctant break-up came, but they were never half long enough for me. I
have given no idea of the high reasoning of vital things which I must
often have heard at that table, and that I have forgotten it is no proof
that I did not hear it. The memory will not be ruled as to what it shall
bind and what it shall loose, and I should entreat mine in vain for
record of those meetings other than what I have given. Perhaps it would
be well, in the interest of some popular conceptions of what the social
intercourse of great wits must be, for me to invent some ennobling and
elevating passages of conversation at Longfellow’s; perhaps I ought to do
it for the sake of my own repute as a serious and adequate witness. But
I am rather helpless in the matter; I must set down what I remember, and
surely if I can remember no phrase from Holmes that a reader could live
or die by, it is something to recall how, when a certain potent cheese
was passing, he leaned over to gaze at it, and asked: “Does it kick? Does
it kick?” No strain of high poetic thinking remains to me from Lowell,
but he made me laugh unforgettably with his passive adventure one night
going home late, when a man suddenly leaped from the top of a high fence
upon the sidewalk at his feet, and after giving him the worst fright of
his life, disappeared peaceably into the darkness. To be sure, there was
one most memorable supper, when he read the “Bigelow Paper” he had
finished that day, and enriched the meaning of his verse with the beauty
of his voice. There lingers yet in my sense his very tone in giving the
last line of the passage lamenting the waste of the heroic lives which in
those dark hours of Johnson’s time seemed to have been
“Butchered to make a blind man’s holiday.”
The hush that followed upon his ceasing was of that finest quality which
spoken praise always lacks; and I suppose that I could not give a just
notion of these Dante Club evenings without imparting the effect of such
silences. This I could not hopefully undertake to do; but I am tempted
to some effort of the kind by my remembrance of Longfellow’s old friend
George Washington Greene, who often came up from his home in Rhode
Island, to be at those sessions, and who was a most interesting and
amiable fact of those delicate silences. A full half of his earlier life
had been passed in Italy, where he and Longfellow met and loved each
other in their youth with an affection which the poet was constant to in
his age, after many vicissitudes, with the beautiful fidelity of his
nature. Greene was like an old Italian house-priest in manner, gentle,
suave, very suave, smooth as creamy curds, cultivated in the elegancies
of literary taste, and with a certain meek abeyance. I think I never
heard him speak, in all those evenings, except when Longfellow addressed
him, though he must have had the Dante scholarship for an occasional
criticism. It was at more recent dinners, where I met him with the
Longfellow family alone, that he broke now and then into a quotation from
some of the modern Italian poets he knew by heart (preferably Giusti),
and syllabled their verse with an exquisite Roman accent and a bewitching
Florentine rhythm. Now and then at these times he brought out a faded
Italian anecdote, faintly smelling of civet, and threadbare in its
ancient texture. He liked to speak of Goldoni and of Nota, of Niccolini
and Manzoni, of Monti and Leopardi; and if you came to America, of the
Revolution and his grandfather, the Quaker General Nathaniel Greene,
whose life he wrote (and I read) in three volumes: He worshipped
Longfellow, and their friendship continued while they lived, but towards
the last of his visits at Craigie House it had a pathos for the witness
which I should grieve to wrong. Greene was then a quivering paralytic,
and he clung tremulously to Longfellow’s arm in going out to dinner,
where even the modern Italian poets were silent upon his lips. When we
rose from table, Longfellow lifted him out of his chair, and took him
upon his arm again for their return to the study.
He was of lighter metal than most other members of the Dante Club, and he
was not of their immediate intimacy, living away from Cambridge, as he
did, and I shared his silence in their presence with full sympathy. I was
by far the youngest of their number, and I cannot yet quite make out why
I was of it at all. But at every moment I was as sensible of my good
fortune as of my ill desert. They were the men whom of all men living I
most honored, and it seemed to be impossible that I at my age should be
so perfectly fulfilling the dream of my life in their company. Often, the
nights were very cold, and as I returned home from Craigie House to the
carpenter’s box on Sacramento Street, a mile or two away, I was as if
soul-borne through the air by my pride and joy, while the frozen blocks
of snow clinked and tinkled before my feet stumbling along the middle of
the road. I still think that was the richest moment of my life, and I
look back at it as the moment, in a life not unblessed by chance, which I
would most like to live over again--if I must live any. The next winter
the sessions of the Dante Club were transferred to the house of Mr.
Norton, who was then completing his version of the ‘Vita Nuova’. This
has always seemed to me a work of not less graceful art than Longfellow’s
translation of the ‘Commedia’. In fact, it joins the effect of a
sympathy almost mounting to divination with a patient scholarship and a
delicate skill unknown to me elsewhere in such work. I do not know
whether Mr. Norton has satisfied himself better in his prose version of
the ‘Commedia’ than in this of the ‘Vita Nuova’, but I do not believe he
could have satisfied Dante better, unless he had rhymed his sonnets and
canzonets. I am sure he might have done this if he had chosen. He has
always pretended that it was impossible, but miracles are never
impossible in the right hands.