Cambridge began very promptly to show him those hospitalities which he
could value, and continued the fable of his fairy princeliness in the
curiosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts or
his fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon. Pretty presences in the
tie-backs of the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuous
poverty, hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or
incomings might give. The chances were better with the outgoings than
with the incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the final
result of his constitutional delays, as to have the rapidity of the
homing pigeon’s flight, and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickest
eye. It cannot harm him, or any one now, to own that Harte was nearly
always late for those luncheons and dinners which he was always going out
to, and it needed the anxieties and energies of both families to get him
into his clothes, and then into the carriage where a good deal of final
buttoning must have been done, in order that he might not arrive so very
late. He was the only one concerned who was quite unconcerned; his
patience with his delays was inexhaustible; he arrived at the expected
houses smiling, serenely jovial, radiating a bland gaiety from his whole
person, and ready to ignore any discomfort he might have occasioned.
Of course, people were glad to have him on his own terms, and it may be
truly said that it was worth while to have him on any terms. There never
was a more charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest.
It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost
nothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest
word, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the
appreciation of another’s fit word which goes far to establish for a man
the character of boon humorist. It must be said of him that if he took
the honors easily that were paid him he took them modestly, and never by
word or look invited them, or implied that he expected them. It was fine
to see him humorously accepting the humorous attribution of scientific
sympathies from Agassiz, in compliment of his famous epic describing the
incidents that “broke up the society upon the Stanislow.” It was a
little fearsome to hear him frankly owning to Lowell his dislike for
something over-literary in the phrasing of certain verses of ‘The
Cathedral.’ But Lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man who
could say the sort of things that Harte said to him of that delicious
line picturing the bobolink as he
“Runs down a brook of laughter in the air.”
This, Harte told him, was the line he liked best of all his lines, and
Lowell smoked well content with the praise. Yet they were not men to get
on easily together, Lowell having limitations in directions where Harte
had none. Afterward in London they did not meet often or willingly.
Lowell owned the brilliancy and uncommonness of Harte’s gift, while he
sumptuously surfeited his passion of finding everybody more or less a Jew
by finding that Harte was at least half a Jew on his father’s side; he
had long contended for the Hebraicism of his name.
With all his appreciation of the literary eminences whom Fields used to
class together as “the old saints,” Harte had a spice of irreverence that
enabled him to take them more ironically than they might have liked, and
to see the fun of a minor literary man’s relation to them. Emerson’s
smoking amused him, as a Jovian self-indulgence divinely out of character
with so supreme a god, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling how
Emerson at Concord had proposed having a “wet night” with him over a
glass of sherry, and had urged the scant wine upon his young friend with
a hospitable gesture of his cigar. But this was long after the Cambridge
episode, in which Longfellow alone escaped the corrosive touch of his
subtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect of
his reverence. That gentle and exquisitely modest dignity, of
Longfellow’s he honored with as much veneration as it was in him to
bestow, and he had that sense of Longfellow’s beautiful and perfected art
which is almost a test of a critic’s own fineness.