MEMORIES OF A HOSTESS
_By the Same Author_
BIOGRAPHICAL
American Bookmen (1898)
Phillips Brooks (in “Beacon Biographies,” 1899)
Life and Letters of George Bancroft (1908)
Life and Labors of Bishop Hare (1911)
Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (with Sara Norton, 1913)
George von Lengerke Meyer: His Life and Public Services (1919)
Memoirs of the Harvard Dead (1920, 1921, ——)
HISTORICAL
Boston, the Place and the People (1903)
Boston Common: Scenes from Four Centuries (1910)
The Boston Symphony Orchestra (1914)
The Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1918)
The Atlantic Monthly and Its Makers (1919)
VERSE
Shadows (1897)
Harmonies (1909)
EDITED
The Beacon Biographies (31 volumes, 1899-1910)
The Memory of Lincoln (1899)
Home Letters of General Sherman (1909)
Lines of Battle, by Henry Howard Brownell (1912)
The Harvard Volunteers in Europe (1916)
A Scholar’s Letters to a Young Lady (1920)
[Illustration: MRS. FIELDS]
MEMORIES OF A HOSTESS
A CHRONICLE OF
EMINENT FRIENDSHIPS
DRAWN CHIEFLY FROM THE DIARIES OF
MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS
BY
M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE
“_I stay a little longer, as one stays_
_To cover up the embers that still burn_”
[Illustration]
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS
BOSTON
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY
M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE
First Impression, October, 1922
Second Impression, December, 1922
PRINTED IN THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
I. PRELIMINARY 3
II. THE HOUSE AND THE HOSTESS 6
III. DR. HOLMES, THE FRIEND AND NEIGHBOR 17
IV. CONCORD AND CAMBRIDGE VISITORS 53
V. WITH DICKENS IN AMERICA 135
VI. STAGE FOLK AND OTHERS 196
VII. SARAH ORNE JEWETT 281
ILLUSTRATIONS
MRS. FIELDS _Frontispiece_
From an early photograph
A NOTE OF ACCEPTANCE 9
Autograph of Julia Ward Howe
THE OFFENDING DEDICATION 15
From First Edition of Hawthorne’s “Our Old Home”
AN EARLY PHOTOGRAPH OF DR. HOLMES 18
REDUCED FACSIMILE OF DR. HOLMES’S 1863 ADDRESS TO THE ALUMNI OF
HARVARD 23
FROM THE PLAY-BILL OF THE NIGHT OF DR. HOLMES’S “GREAT ROUND FAT
TEAR” 24
(Shaw Theatre Collection, Harvard College Library)
FACSIMILE OF THE CONCLUSION OF ULTIMUS SMITH’S DECLARATION 26
MRS. FIELDS 32
From a crayon portrait made by Rowse in 1863
FIELDS, THE MAN OF BOOKS AND FRIENDSHIPS 34
LOUIS AGASSIZ 48
HAWTHORNE IN 1857 54
FROM A LETTER OF HAWTHORNE’S AFTER A VISIT TO CHARLES STREET 61
EMERSON 86
From the Marble Statue by Daniel Chester French in the
Concord Public Library
A CORNER OF THE CHARLES STREET LIBRARY 98
FROM A NOTE OF EMERSON’S TO MRS. FIELDS 100
FACSIMILE OF AUTOGRAPH INSCRIPTION ON A PHOTOGRAPH OF ROWSE’S
CRAYON PORTRAIT OF LOWELL GIVEN TO FIELDS 106
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 106
From the Crayon Portrait by Rowse in the Harvard College
Library
FACSIMILE OF LOWELL’S “BULLDOG AND TERRIER” SONNET 121
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 124
From a Photograph taken in middle life
FROM A NOTE OF “DEAR WHITTIER” TO MRS. FIELDS 130
PROPOSED DEDICATION OF WHITTIER’S “AMONG THE HILLS” TO MRS.
FIELDS 132
CHARLES DICKENS 136
From a portrait by Francis Alexander, for many years in the
Fields house, and now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts
“THE TWO CHARLES’S,” DICKENS AND FECHTER 140
(Shaw Theatre Collection, Harvard College Library)
REDUCED FACSIMILE OF DICKENS’S DIRECTIONS, PRESERVED AMONG THE
FIELDS PAPERS, FOR THE BREWING OF PLEASANT BEVERAGES 147
FACSIMILE PLAY-BILL OF “THE FROZEN DEEP,” WITH DICKENS AS
ACTOR-MANAGER 188
(Shaw Theatre Collection, Harvard College Library)
FACSIMILE NOTE FROM DICKENS TO FIELDS 192
JAMES T. FIELDS AT FIFTEEN 196
From a drawing by a French Painter
FACSIMILE NOTE FROM BOOTH TO MRS. FIELDS 201
BOOTH AS HAMLET 202
JEFFERSON IN THE BETROTHAL SCENE OF “RIP VAN WINKLE” 208
A NAST CARTOON OF DICKENS AND FECHTER 210
(Shaw Theatre Collection, Harvard College Library)
JAMES E. MURDOCK AND WILLIAM WARREN 218
CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN: FROM A CRAYON PORTRAIT 220
(Shaw Theatre Collection, Harvard College Library)
RISTORI AND FANNY KEMBLE 222
The photograph of Fanny Kemble was taken in Philadelphia
in 1863
CHRISTINE NILSSON AS OPHELIA 226
FACSIMILE LETTER FROM WILLIAM MORRIS HUNT TO FIELDS 231
FACSIMILE PAGE FROM AN EARLY LETTER OF BRET HARTE’S 235
BRET HARTE AND MARK TWAIN 242
From early photographs
FACSIMILE VERSES AND LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN TO FIELDS 248-9
CHARLES SUMNER 258
FROM A LETTER OF EDWARD LEAR’S TO FIELDS 279
SARAH ORNE JEWETT 282
THE LIBRARY IN CHARLES STREET 284
Mrs. Fields at the Window, Miss Jewett at the right
AN AUTOGRAPH COPY OF MRS. FIELDS’S “FLAMMANTIS MŒNIA MUNDI”
BEFORE ITS FINAL REVISION 287
MRS. FIELDS ON HER MANCHESTER PIAZZA 288
MISTRAL, MASTER OF “BOUFFLO BEEL” 294
REDUCED FACSIMILE FROM LETTER OF HENRY JAMES 299
(_Most of the photographs reproduced are in the collections of the
Boston Athenæum and the Harvard College Library, to which grateful
acknowledgments are made._)
MEMORIES OF A HOSTESS
I
PRELIMINARY
In the years immediately before the death of Mrs. James T. Fields, on
January 5, 1915, she spoke to me more than once of her intention to
place in my possession a cabinet of old papers—journals of her own,
letters from a host of correspondents, odds and ends of manuscript and
print—which stood in a dark corner of a small reception-room near the
front door of her house in Charles Street, Boston. On her death this
intention was found to have been confirmed in writing. It was also made
clear that Mrs. Fields had no desire that her own life should be made a
subject of record—“unless,” she wrote, “for some reason not altogether
connected with myself.” Such a reason is abundantly suggested in her
records of the friends she was constantly seeing through the years
covered by the journals. These friends were men and women whose books
have made them the friends of the English-speaking world, and a better
knowledge of them would justify any amplification of the records of
their lives. In this process the figure of their friend and hostess in
Charles Street must inevitably reveal itself—not as the subject of a
biography, but as a central animating presence, a focus of sympathy and
understanding, which seemed to make a single phenomenon out of a long
series and wide variety of friendships and hospitalities.
The “blue books”—more than fifty in number—which Mrs. Fields used for
the journals have already yielded many pages of valuable record to her
own books, especially “James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal
Sketches” (1881), and “Authors and Friends” (1896); also even, here and
there, to Mr. Fields’s “Yesterdays with Authors” (1871). Yet she left
unprinted much that is both picturesque and illuminating: so many of the
persons mentioned in the journal were still living or had but recently
died when her books were written. There are, besides, many passages used
in a fragmentary way, which may now with propriety be given complete.
Into these manuscript journals, then, I propose to dip afresh—not
with the purpose of passing in a miscellaneous review all the friends
who crossed the threshold of the Charles Street house in a fixed
period of time, but rather in pursuit of what seems a more promising
quest—namely, to consider separate friends and groups of friends in
turn; to assemble from the journals passages that have to do with
them; to supplement these by drawing now and then upon the old cabinet
for a letter from this or that friend to Mr. or Mrs. Fields, and thus
to step back across the years into a time and scene of refreshing
remembrance. Many a friend, many a friendship, must be left untouched.
In the processes of selection, figures of more than local significance
will receive the chief consideration. In passages relating to one
person, allusions to many others, sometimes treated separately in other
passages, will often be found, for the friendships with one and another
were constantly overlapping and interlocking. Bits of record of no
obviously great importance will be included, not because they or the
subjects of them are taken with undue seriousness, but merely that a
vanished society, interesting in itself to those who care for the past
and doubly interesting as material for a study in contrasts with the
present, may have again its “day in court.” When Fields was publishing
his reminiscences of Hawthorne, Lowell wrote to him: “Be sure and don’t
leave anything out because it seems trifling, for it is out of these
trifles only that it is possible to reconstruct character sometimes, if
not always”; and he commended especially the hitting of “the true channel
between the Charybdis of reticence, and the Scylla of gossip.” Under
sailing orders of this nature, self-imposed, I hope to proceed.
“Another added to my cloud of witnesses,” wrote Mrs. Fields in her
journal, on hearing, in 1867, that Forceythe Willson had died. Nearly
fifty years of life then remained to the diarist, though she continued to
keep her diary with regularity for hardly ten. Before her own death the
cloud of witnesses was infinitely extended. Yet new friends constantly
stood ready to fill, as best they might, the gaps that were left by the
old. It is not the new who will appear in the following pages, but those
with whom Mrs. Fields herself must now be numbered.
II
THE HOUSE AND THE HOSTESS
The fact that Henry James, in “The American Scene,” published in 1907,
and again in an article which appeared in the “Atlantic Monthly” and the
“Cornhill Magazine” in July, 1915, has set down in his own ultimate words
his memories of Mrs. Fields and her Boston abode would be the despair
of anyone attempting a similar task—were it not that quotation remains
an unprohibited practice. In “The American Scene” he evokes from the
past “the Charles Street ghosts,” and gives them their local habitation:
“Here, behind the effaced anonymous door”—a more literal-minded realist
might have noted that a vestibule-door contributed the only effacement
and anonymity—“was the little ark of the modern deluge, here still the
long drawing-room that looks over the water and towards the sunset, with
a seat for every visiting shade, from far-away Thackeray down, and relics
and tokens so thick on its walls as to make it positively, in all the
town, the votive temple to memory.” In his “Atlantic” and “Cornhill”
article he refers to the house, in a phrase at which Mrs. Fields would
have smiled, as “the waterside museum of the Fieldses,” and to them as
“addicted to every hospitality and every benevolence, addicted to the
cultivation of talk and wit and to the ingenious multiplication of such
ties as could link the upper half of the title-page with the lower”;
he pays tribute to “their vivacity, their curiosity, their mobility,
the felicity of their instinct for any manner of gathered relic,
remnant, or tribute”; and in Mrs. Fields herself, surviving her husband
for many years, he notes “the personal beauty of her younger years,
long retained and not even at the end of such a stretch of life quite
lost; the exquisite native tone and mode of appeal, which anciently we
perhaps thought a little ‘precious,’ but from which the distinctive and
the preservative were in time to be snatched, a greater extravagance
supervening; the signal sweetness of temper and lightness of tact.”
There is one more of Henry James’s remarks about Mrs. Fields that must
be quoted, “All her implications,” he says, “were gay, since no one so
finely sentimental could be noted as so humorous; just as no feminine
humor was perhaps ever so unmistakingly directed, and no state of
amusement, amid quantities of reminiscence, perhaps ever so merciful.”
Mirth and mercy do not always, like righteousness and peace, kiss each
other. In Mrs. Fields the capacity for incapacitating laughter was such
that I cannot help recalling one occasion, near the end of her life,
when an attempt to tell a certain story—of which I remember nothing but
that it had to do with a horse—involved her in such merriment that after
repeated efforts to reach its “point,” she was forced to abandon the
endeavor. What I cannot recall in a single instance, in the excellent
telling of innumerable anecdotes, is unkindness, in word or suggestion,
toward the persons involved in them. Mr. James did well to include this
item in his enumeration of Mrs. Fields’s qualities.
Through all his lenses of memory and phrase he brought so vividly to
one’s own vision the Mrs. Fields a younger generation had known that,
on reading what he had written, I wrote to him in England, then nearly
ending its first year in the war, and must have said that his pages would
help me, at some future day, to deal with these of my own, now at last
taking form. Thus, in part, he replied:—
_July 20th, 1915_
Your appreciation reached me, alas, but through the most
muffling and deadening thickness of our unspeakable actuality
here. It was to try and get out of that a little that I wrote
my paper—in the most difficult and defeating conditions, which
seemed to me to make it, with my heart so utterly elsewhere,
a deplorably make-believe attempt. Therefore if it _had_ any
virtue, there must still be some in my poor old stump of a pen.
Yes, the pipe of peace is a thing one has, amid our storm and
stress, to listen very hard for when it twitters, from afar,
outside; and when you shall pipe it over your exhibition of
dear Mrs. Fields’s relics and documents I shall respond to your
doing so with whatever attention may then be possible to me. We
are not detached here, in your enviable way—but just exactly so
must we therefore make some small effort to escape, even into
whatever fatuity of illusion, to keep our heads above water at
all. That in short is the history of my “Cornhill” scrap.
[Illustration: _A Note of Acceptance_]
The time into which Henry James escaped by “piping” of Mrs. Fields has
now grown far more remote than the added span of the last seven years,
merely as years, could have made it. Remote enough it seemed to him
when, at the end of his reminiscences of the Fieldses, he recalled a
small “feast” in the Charles Street dining-room at which Mrs. Julia
Ward Howe—it must have been about 1906—rose and declaimed, “a little
quaveringly, but ever so gallantly, that ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’
which she caused to be chanted half a century before and still could
accompany with a real breadth of gesture, her great clap of hands and
indication of the complementary step, on the triumphant line, ‘Be swift
my hands to welcome him, be jubilant my feet!’”
Now it fell to my lot that night, as perhaps the youngest of the party,
to convoy Mrs. Howe across two wintry bits of sidewalk into the carriage
which bore her to and from the memorable dinner-party, and to accompany
her on each of the little journeys. Quite as clear in my memory as her
recitation of the “Battle Hymn” was the note of finality in her voice,
quite free from unkindness, as she settled down for the return drive to
her house in Beacon Street, far from a towering figure, and announced
in the darkness: “Annie Fields has shrunk.” The hostess we were leaving
and the guest some fifteen years her senior, and nearing ninety with
what seemed an immortally youthful spirit, appear, when those words
are recalled, as they must have been before either was touched by the
diminishing hand of age; and the house whose door had just closed upon
us—a house more recently obliterated to make room for a monstrous
garage—came back as the scene of many a gathering of which the little
feast described by Henry James was but a type.
Early in January of 1915 this door, which through a period of sixty
years had opened upon extraordinary hospitality, was finally closed.
Since 1866 it had borne the number 148. Ten years earlier, in 1856, when
the house was first occupied by James T. Fields, afterwards identified
with the publishing firms of Ticknor and Fields, and Fields, Osgood and
Company, it was numbered 37, Charles Street. This Boston man of books
and friendships, who before his death in 1881 was to become widely known
as publisher, editor, lecturer, and writer, had married, in 1850, Eliza
Josephine Willard, a daughter of Simon Willard, Jr., of the name still
honorably associated with the even passage of time. She died within a
few months, and in November of 1854 he married her cousin, Annie Adams,
not yet twenty years old, the beautiful daughter of Dr. Zabdiel Boylston
Adams. For those who knew Mrs. Fields toward the end of her four score
and more years, it was far easier to see in her charming face and
presence the exquisite, eager young woman of the mid-nineteenth century
than to detect in the Charles Street of 1915, of which she was the last
inhabitant of her own kind, any resemblance to the delightful street of
family dwellings, many of them looking out over the then unfilled “Back
Bay,” to which she had come about sixty years before. The Fieldses had
lived here but a few years when, in 1859, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes—with
the “Autocrat” a year behind him and the “Professor” a year ahead—became
their neighbor at 21, subsequently 164, Charles Street. On the other side
of them, nearer Beacon Street, John A. Andrew, the great war governor of
Massachusetts, was a friend and neighbor. Across the way, for a time,
lived Thomas Bailey Aldrich. In hillside streets near by dwelt many
persons of congenial tastes, whose work and character contributed greatly
to making Boston what it was through the second half of the last century.
The distinctive flavor of the neighborhood derived nothing more from
any of its households than from that of Mr. and Mrs. Fields. Their
dining—room and drawing-room[1]—that green assembling-place of books,
pictures, music, persons, associations, all to be treasured—were the
natural resort, not only of the whole notable local company of writers
whose publisher was also their true and valued friend, but, besides, of
many of the eminent visitors to Boston, of the type represented most
conspicuously by Charles Dickens. After the death of Mr. Fields there was
far more than a tradition carried on in the Charles Street house. Not
merely for what it had meant, but for all that the gracious personality
of Mrs. Fields caused it to go on meaning, it continued through her
lifetime—extending beyond that of Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, for so many
years of Mrs. Fields’s widowhood her delightful sister-hostess—the
resort of older and younger friends, whose present thus drew a constant
enrichment from the past.
It was not till 1863, nearly ten years after her marriage, that Mrs.
Fields, who had kept a diary during a visit to Europe in 1859-60 with
her husband, and for other brief periods, applied herself regularly
to this practice, maintained through 1876, and thereafter renewed but
intermittently. She wrote on the cover of the first slender volume: “No.
1. Journal of Literary Events and Glimpses of Interesting People.” A
few of its earliest pages, revealing its general purpose and character,
may well precede the passages relating, in accordance with the plan
already indicated, to individual friends and groups of friends. In the
first pages of all, on which Mrs. Fields built a few sentences for her
“Biographical Notes,” I find:—
_July 26, 1863._—What a strange history this literary life in
America at the present day would make. An editor and publisher
at once, and at this date, stands at a confluence of tides
where all humanity seems to surge up in little waves; some
larger than the rest (every seventh it may be) dashes up in
music to which the others love to listen; or some springing
to a great height retire to tell the story of their flight to
those who stay below.
Mr. Longfellow is quietly at Nahant. His translation of Dante
is finished, but will not be completely published until the
Year 1865, that being the 600th anniversary since the death of
the great Italian. Dr. Holmes was never in healthier mood than
at present. His oration delivered before a large audience upon
the Fourth of July this year places him high in the rank of
native orators. It is a little doubtful how soon he will feel
like writing again. He has contributed much during the last two
years to the “Atlantic” magazine. He may well take a temporary
rest.
Mr. Lowell is not well. He is now travelling. Mr. Hawthorne
is in Concord. He has just completed a volume of English
Sketches of which a few have been printed in the “Atlantic
Monthly.” He will dedicate the volume to Franklin Pierce, the
Democrat—a most unpopular thing just now, but friendship of the
purest stimulates him, and the ruin in prospect for his book
because of this resolve does not move him from his purpose.
Such adherence is indeed noble. Hawthorne requires all that
popularity can give him in a pecuniary way for the support of
his family.
The “Atlantic Monthly” is at present an interesting feature of
America. Purely literary, it has nevertheless a subscription
list, daily increasing, of 32,000. Of course the editor’s
labors are not slight. We have been waiting for Mr. Emerson
to publish his new volume containing his address upon Henry
Thoreau; but he is careful of words and finds many to be
considered again and again, until it is almost impossible to
extort a manuscript from his hands. He has written but little,
of late.
_July 28._—George William Curtis has done at least one great
good work. He has by a gentle but continuously brave pressure
transformed the “Harper’s Weekly,” which was semi-Secession,
into an anti-slavery and Republican journal. The last issue is
covered with pictures as well as words which tend to ameliorate
the condition of the colored race. Mr. Curtis’s own house
at Staten Island has been threatened by the mob; therefore
his wife and children came last week to New England. I fear
the death of Colonel Shaw, her brother, commanding the 54th
Massachusetts (colored infantry), will induce them to return
home. His death is one of our severest strokes.
_July 31, 1863._—We have been in Concord this week, making
a short visit at the Hawthornes’. He has just finished his
volume of English Sketches, about to be dedicated to Franklin
Pierce. It is a beautiful incident in Hawthorne’s life, the
determination at all hazards to dedicate this book to his
friend. Mr. P.’s politics at present shut him away from the
faith of patriots, but Hawthorne has loved him since college
days and he will not relent.[2] Mrs. Hawthorne is the stay of
the house.
The wood-work, the tables and chairs and pedestals, are all
ornamented by her artistic hand or what she has prompted her
children to do. Una is full of exquisite maidenhood. Julian was
away, but his beautiful illuminations lay upon the table. The
one illustrating a portion of King Arthur’s address to Queen
Guinevere (Tennyson) was remarkably fine.
[Illustration: _The Offending Dedication_]
All this takes one back into a past sufficiently remote. The 1859-60
diary of travel achieves the more remarkable spectacle of Mrs. Fields
in conversation with Leigh Hunt less than two months before he died,
and reporting the very words of Shelley to this friend of his. They may
be found in the “Biographical Notes” published by Mrs. Fields after
her husband’s death. Shelley says, “Hunt, we write _love_-songs; why
shouldn’t we write hate-songs?” And Hunt, recalling the remark, adds,
“He said he meant to some day, poor fellow.” Perhaps one of his subjects
would have been the second Mrs. Godwin, for, according to Hunt, he
disliked her particularly, believing her untrue, and used to say that
when he was obliged to dine with her “he would lean back in his chair
and languish into hate.” Then, wrote Mrs. Fields, “he said no one could
describe Shelley. He always was to him as if he came from the planet
Mercury, bearing a winged wand tipped with flame.” It is now an even
century since the death of Shelley, and here we find one of the older
generation of our own time talking, as it were, with him at but a single
remove. Almost the reader is persuaded to ask of Mrs. Fields herself,
“Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?”
Thus from the records of bygone years many remembered figures might be
summoned; but the evocations already made will suffice to indicate the
point of vantage at which Mrs. Fields stood as a diarist, and to set the
scene for the display of separate friendships.
III
DR. HOLMES, THE FRIEND AND NEIGHBOR[3]
If any familiar face should appear at the front of the procession that
constantly crossed the threshold of 148, Charles Street, it should be
that of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, for many years a near neighbor, and
to the end of his life a devoted visitor and friend. Here, then, is an
unpublished letter written from his summer retreat while Fields was still
actively associated with the “Old Corner Bookstore” of Ticknor, Reed, and
Fields, and in the year before his marriage with Annie Adams:—
PITTSFIELD, _Sept. 6th, 1853_
MY DEAR MR. FIELDS:—
Thank you for the four volumes, and the authors of three of
them through you. You did not remember that I patronized you to
the extent of Aleck before I came up; never mind, I can shove
it round among the young farmeresses and perhaps help to work
off the eleventh thousand of the most illustrious of all the
Smiths.
I shall write to Hillard soon. I have been reading his book
half the time today and with very great pleasure. I am
delighted with the plan of it—practical information such as
the traveller that is to be or that has been wishes for, with
poetical description enough to keep the imagination alive,
and sound American thought to give it manly substance. It is
anything but a _flash_ book, but I have not the slightest doubt
that it will have a permanent and very high place in travelling
literature. Many things have pleased me exceedingly,—when I
have read a little more I shall try to tell him what pleases me
_most_,—as I suppose like most authors he likes as many points
for his critical self-triangulation as will come unasked for.
Hawthorne’s book has been not devoured, but _bolted_ by my
children. I have not yet had a chance at it, but I don’t doubt
I shall read it with as much gusto as they, when my turn comes.
When you write to him, thank him if you please for me, for I
suppose he will hardly expect any formal acknowledgment.
I bloomed out into a large smile of calm delight on opening
the delicate little “Epistle Dedicatory” wherein your name is
embalmed. I cannot remember that our friend has tried that pace
before; he wrote some pleasing lines I remember to Longfellow
on the ship in which he was to sail when he went to Europe some
years—a good many—ago.
Don’t be too proud! Wait until you get a prose dedication from
a poet,—if you have not got one already,—and then consider
yourself immortal.
Yours most truly,
O. W. HOLMES
[Illustration: AN EARLY PHOTOGRAPH OF DR. HOLMES]
This letter contains several provocations to curiosity. “Aleck, ... the
most illustrious of all the Smiths,” was obviously Alexander Smith,
the Scottish poet of enormous but strictly contemporaneous vogue, in
whom the English reviewers of the time detected a kinship to Tennyson,
Keats, Shelley, and Shakespeare. George S. Hillard’s new book was “Six
Months in Italy,” and Hawthorne’s, “not devoured, but bolted” by the
Holmes children, was “Tanglewood Tales.” The “delicate little ‘Epistle
Dedicatory’” has been found elusive.
From this early letter of Dr. Holmes a seven-league step may be taken
to a passage in a diary Mrs. Fields was writing in 1860,—the year
following the removal of the Holmes household from Montgomery Place to
Charles Street,—before her long unbroken series of journals began. The
occasion described was one of those frequent breakfasts in the Fields
dining-room, which bespoke, in the term of a later poet, the “wide
unhaste” of the period. Of the guests, N. P. Willis was then at the top
of his distinction as a New York editor; George T. Davis, a lawyer of
Greenfield, Massachusetts, afterwards of Portland, Maine, a classmate
of Dr. Holmes, was reputed one of the most charming table-companions
and wits of his day: the tributes to his memory at a meeting of the
Massachusetts Historical Society after his death in 1877 stir one’s envy
of his contemporaries; George Washington Greene of Rhode Island was
perhaps equally known as the friend of Longfellow and as the grandson and
biographer of General Nathanael Greene; Whipple was, of course, Edwin P.
Whipple, essayist and lecturer; the household of three was completed by
Mrs. Fields’s sister, Miss Lizzie Adams.
_Thursday, September 21, 1860._—Equinoctial clearing after a
stormy night and morning. Willis came to breakfast, and Holmes
and George T. Davis, G. W. Greene, Whipple, and our little
household of three. Holmes talked better than all, as usual.
Willis played the part of appreciative listener. G. T. Davis
told wonderful stories, and Mr. Whipple talked more than usual.
Holmes described the line of beauty which is made by any two
persons who talk together congenially thus 〰, whereas, when an
adverse element comes in, it proceeds thus Ʌ; and by and by
one which has a frightful retrograde movement, thus ∕. Then
blank despair settles down upon the original talker. He said
people should dovetail together like properly built mahogany
furniture. Much of all this congeniality had to do with the
physical, he said. “Now there is big Dr. ——; he and I do very
well together; I have just two intellectual heart-beats to his
one.” Willis said he thought there should be an essay written
upon the necessity that literary men should live on a more
concentrated diet than is their custom. “Impossible,” said the
Professor, “there is something behind the man which drives him
on to his fate; he goes as the steam-engine goes and one might
as well say to the engine going at the rate of sixty miles,
‘you had better stop now,’ and so make it stop, as to say it
to a man driven on by a vital preordained energy for work.”
Each man has a philosophical coat fitted to his shoulders, and
he did not expect to find it fitting anybody else.
At another breakfast, in 1861, we find, besides the favorite humorist of
the day, Dr. Holmes’s son and namesake, then a young officer in the Union
army, now Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States.
_Sunday, December 8, 1861._—Yesterday morning “Artemus Ward,”
Mr. Browne, breakfasted with us, also Dr. Holmes and the
lieutenant, his son. We had a merry time because Jamie was in
grand humor and represented people and incidents in the most
incomparable manner. “Why,” said Dr. Holmes to him afterward,
“you must excuse me that I did not talk, but the truth is there
is nothing I enjoy so much as your anecdotes, and whenever I
get a chance I can’t help listening to them.” The Professor
complimented Artemus upon his great success and told him the
pleasure he had received. Artemus twinkled all over, but said
little after the Professor arrived. He was evidently immensely
possessed by him. The young lieutenant has mostly recovered
from his wound and speaks as if duty would recall him soon to
camp. He will go when the time comes, but home evidently never
looked half so pleasant before. Poor fellows! Heaven send us
peace before long!
The finely bound copy of Dr. Holmes’s Fourth of July Oration at the
Boston City Celebration of 1863, to which the following passage refers,
is one of the rarities sought by American book-collectors. It was a
practice of Dr. Holmes at this time to have his public speeches set up
in large, legible type for his own reading at their delivery. One of
these, an address to the alumni of Harvard on July 16, 1863, with the
inscription, “Oliver Wendell Holmes to his friend James T. Fields. One
of six copies printed,” is found among the Charles Street papers, and
contributes, like the passage that follows, to the sense of pleasant
intimacy between the neighboring houses.
_August 3, 1863._—Dr. Holmes dropped in last night about his
oration which the City Council have had printed and superbly
bound. He has addressed it to the “Common Council” instead of
the “City Council,” and he is much disturbed. J. T. F. told
him it made but small consequence, and he went off comforted.
One of the members of the Council told Mr. F. it was amusing
to see “the Professor” while this address was passing through
the press. He was so afraid something would be wrong that he
would come in to see about it half a dozen times a day, until
it seemed as if he considered this small oration of more
consequence than the affairs of the state. Yet laugh as they
may about these little peculiarities of “our Professor,” he is
a most wonderful man.
[Illustration: _Reduced facsimile of first page of Dr. Holmes’ 1863
Address to the Alumni of Harvard_]
In explanation of the ensuing bit, it need only be said that in October
of 1863 Señorita Isabella Cubas was appearing at the Boston Theatre
in “The Wizard Skiff, or the Massacre of Scio,” and other pantomimes.
“The Wizard Skiff,” according to the “Advertiser,” was given on the
fourteenth. On the sixteenth, a characteristic announcement read: “At ¼
past 8 Señorita Cubas will dance La Madrilena.” The tear of Dr. Holmes at
the spectacle may be remembered with the “poetry and religion” anecdote
of Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Fanny Ellsler.
_October 16, 1863._—Mr. F. went in two evenings since to find
Professor Holmes. His wife said he was out. “I don’t know where
he is gone, I am sure, Mr. Fields,” she said in her eager way,
“but he said he had finished his work and asked if he might go,
and I told him he might, though he would not tell where he was
going.”
Yesterday the “where” transpired. “By the way,” said the
Professor, “have you seen that little poem by Mrs. Waterston
upon the death of Colonel Shaw, ‘Together’? It made me cry.
However, I don’t know how much that means, for I went to see
the ‘beautiful Cubas’ in a pantomime the other night, and the
first thing I knew down came a great round fat tear and went
splosh on the ground. Wasn’t I provoked!”
[Illustration: FROM THE PLAY-BILL OF THE NIGHT OF DR. HOLMES’S “GREAT
ROUND FAT TEAR”]
The next fragment is neither a letter nor a passage from the diary, but a
bit of excellent fooling, in Dr. Holmes’s handwriting, on a sheet of note
paper. The meteorological records of 1864 would probably show that there
were heavy rains in the course of the year. From Dr. Holmes’s interest
in the tracing of Dr. Johnson’s footsteps an even century before his
own, it is easy to imagine his fancy playing about the rainfall of the
century ahead. I cannot find that this _jeu d’esprit_, with its entirely
characteristic flavor of the “Breakfast Table,” was ever printed by its
author.
_Letter from the last man left by the Deluge of the year 1964
to the last woman left by the same_
MY DEAR SOLE SURVIVORESS:—
Love is natural to the human breast. The passion has seized me,
and you, fortunately, cannot doubt as to its object.
Adored one, fairest, and indeed only individual of your sex,
can you, could you doubt that if the world still possessed its
full complement of inhabitants, 823,060,413 according to the
most recent estimate, I should hesitate in selecting you from
the 411,530,206½ females in existence previous to the late
accident? Believe it not! Trust not the deceivers who—but I
forget the late melancholy occurrence for the moment!
It is still damp in our—I beg your pardon—in my neighborhood.
I hope you are careful of your precious health—so much depends
upon it! The dodo is extinct—what if Man—but pardon me. Let me
recommend long india-rubber boots—they will excite no remark,
for reasons too obvious to mention.
May I hope for a favorable answer to my suit by the bearer of
this message, the carrier-goose, who was with me during the
rainy season in the top of the gigantic pine?
If any more favored suitor—What am I saying? If any
recollection of the past is to come between me and happiness,
break it gently to me, for my nerves have been a good deal
tried by the loss of the human species (with the exception of
ourselves) and there is something painful in the thought of
shedding tears in a world so thoroughly saturated with liquid.
I am (by the force of circumstances)
Your Only lover and admirer
ULTIMUS SMITH
_O. W. H. Fixit._
[Illustration: _Facsimile of the Conclusion of Ultimus Smith’s
Declaration_]
A few brief items of May of 1864 bring back a time of sadness for all the
friends of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
_May 11, 1864._—J. T. F. went to see Dr. Holmes about
Hawthorne’s health. The latter came to town looking very very
ill. O. W. H. thinks the shark’s tooth is upon him, but would
not have this known. Walked and talked with him; then carried
him to “Metcalf’s and treated him to simple medicine as we
treat each other to ice cream.”
O. W. H. picked up a New York pamphlet full of sneers against
Boston “Mutual Admiration Society.” “These whipper-snappers of
New York will do well to take care,” he says; “the noble race
of men now so famous here is passing down the valley—then who
will take their places! I am ashamed to know the names of these
blackguards. There is ——, a stick of sugar-candy —— and, ——,
who is not even a gum-drop, and plenty like them.”
_Sunday. May 14._—Terrible days of war and change....
_May 19._—Hawthorne is dead.
Less than a year later came the record of another death—unique in that
every survivor of the war-time seems to have remembered the very moment
and circumstances of learning the overwhelming fact.
_April 15, 1865._—Last night when I shut this book I wondered a
little what event or person would come next, powerful enough to
compel me to write a few words; and before I was dressed this
morning the news of the assassination of the President became
our only thought. The President, Seward, and his son!
Mrs. Andrew came in before nine o’clock to ask if we thought it
would be expected of her to receive “the Club” on Monday. We
decided “No,” immediately, which chimed with her desire.
The city is weighed down by sadness. But Dr. Holmes expresses
his philosophy for the consolation of all. “It will unite the
North,” he says. “It is more than likely that Lincoln was not
the best man for the work of re-construction,” etc. His faith
keeps him from the shadows which surround many.
But it is a black day for us all. J. Wilkes Booth is in
custody. Poor Edwin is in Boston.
_April 22._—False report. Up to this date J. Wilkes Booth has
not been taken. A reward of nearly $200,000 is set upon his
head, but we believe him to have fled into Maryland or farther
south, with some marauding party.
Henry Howard Brownell, the author of “War Lyrics,” appears in the
following extract, with Dr. Holmes, whose high opinion of this singer of
naval battle was set forth in print of no uncertain tone. Of Forceythe
Willson, a poet, not yet thirty years old, of whom great things were
expected, Mrs. Fields wrote later in the same volume of the journal: “He
affects me like a wild Tennyson.... He is an indigenous growth of our
middle states. He was a pupil of Horace Mann, and appreciated him.”
_April 29, 1865._—Club dinner for J. T. F. Mr. Brownell was
present, author of “The Bay Fight,” as Dr. Holmes’s guest. Dr.
H. said privately to us, “Well, ’tain’t much for some folks
to do what I’m doing for this man, but it’s a good deal for
me. I don’t like that kind of thing, you know. I find myself
unawares in something the position of a lion-hunter, which
is unpleasant!!!” He has lately discovered that Forceythe
Willson, the author of a noble poem called the “Color Sergeant”
[“The Old Sergeant”], has been living two years in Cambridge.
He wrote to him and told him how much he liked his poem and
said he would like to make his acquaintance. “I will be at
home,” the young poet replied to the elder, “at any time you
may appoint to call upon me.” This was a little strange to O.
W. H., who rather expected, as the elder who was extending
the right hand, to be called upon, I suppose, although he did
not say so. He found a fortress of a man, “shy as Hawthorne,”
and “one who had not learned that the eagle’s wings should
sometimes be kept down, as we people who live in the world
must,” said the Professor to me afterward. “In State” by F. W.
is a great poem.
More than a year later is found this characteristic glimpse of Dr. Holmes
in the elation of finishing one of his books.
_Wednesday, September 12, 1866._—After an hour J. went in to
see Dr. Holmes. This was important. He had promised a week ago
to hear him read his new romance, and he did not wish to show
anything but the lively interest he really feels....
Jamie returned in two hours perfectly enchanted. The novel
exceeded his hopes. No diminishing of power is to be seen; on
the contrary it seems the perfect fruit of a life. It is to be
called “The Guardian Angel.” Four parts are already completed
and large books of notes stand ready for use and reference.
Mrs. Holmes came in to tell Mr. Fields she wished Wendell would
not publish anything more. He would only call down newspaper
criticism, and where was the use. “Well, Amelia, I have written
something now which the critics won’t complain of. You see
it’s better than anything I have ever done.” “Oh, that’s what
you always say, Wendell, but I wish you’d let it alone!” “But
don’t you see, Amelia, I shall make money by it, and that won’t
come amiss.” “No indeed, Mr. Fields, not in these times with
our family, you know.” “But there’s one thing,” said the little
Professor, suddenly looking up to Mr. Fields; “if anything
should happen to me before I get the story done, you wouldn’t
come down upon the widder for the money, would you now?” Then
they had a grand laugh all round. He is very nervous indeed
about his work and read it with great reluctance, yet desired
to do so. He had read it to no one as yet until Mr. Fields
should hear it.
Wendell, his son, had just returned from England, bringing
a young English Captain of Artillery home with him for the
night, the hotels being crowded. The captain’s luggage was
in the entry. The Professor drew J. aside to show him how
the straps of the luggage were arranged in order to slip in
the address-card. “D’ye see that—good, ain’t it? I’ve made a
drawing of that and am going to have some made like it.”
Near the end of 1866, Mrs. Fields, after a few words of realization that
something lies beyond the age of thirty, pictures “the Autocrat” at her
own breakfast-table, with General John Meredith Read, afterwards minister
to Greece, and already, before that age of thirty which the diarist was
just completing, an important figure in the military and political life
of New York. A few sentences from the following passage are found in Mrs.
Fields’s article on Dr. Holmes, which appeared first in the “Century
Magazine,” and then in “Authors and Friends.”
It comes over me to put down here and now the fact that this
year for the first time others perceived, as well as myself,
that I have passed the freshness and lustre of youth—but I
do not feel the change as I once thought I must—life is even
sweeter than ever and richer though I can still remember the
time when thirty years seemed the desirable limit of life—now
it opens before me full of uncompleted labor, full of riches
and plans—the wealth of love, the plans of eternity.
_Friday morning._—Professor Holmes and Adjutant General Read
of New York (a young man despite his title) breakfasted here
at eight o’clock. They were both here punctually at quarter
past eight, which was early for the season, especially as the
General was late out, at a ball, last night. He was only too
glad of the chance, however, to meet Dr. Holmes, and would
have made a far greater effort to accomplish it. The talk at
one time turned upon Dickens. Dr. Holmes said he thought him
a greater genius than Thackeray and was never satisfied with
admiring his wondrous powers of observation and fertility
of reproduction; his queer knack at making scenes, too, was
noticeable, but especially the power of beginning from the
smallest externals and describing a man to the life though
he might get no farther than the shirt-button, for he always
failed in profound analysis. Hawthorne, beginning from within,
was his contrast and counterpart. But the two qualities which
Dickens possesses and which the world seems to take small
account of, but which mark his peculiar greatness, are the
minuteness of his observations and his endless variety.
Thackeray had sharp corners in him, something which led you
to see he could turn round short upon you some day, although
sadness was an impressive element in his character—perhaps a
sadness belonging to genius. Hawthorne’s sadness was a part of
his genius—tenderness and sadness.
[Illustration: MRS. FIELDS
_From a crayon portrait made by Rowse in 1863_]
On Monday, February 25, 1867, Mrs. Fields made note of the Saturday
Club dinner of two days before, at which the guests were George William
Curtis, “Petroleum V. Nasby,” and Dr. Hayes of Arctic fame, of whom
Mrs. Fields had written a few days before: “He wears a corrugated face,
and his slender spirited figure shows him the man for such resolves and
expeditions. We were carried away like the hearers of an Arabian tale
with his vivid pictures of Arctic life.” But apparently he was not the
chief talker at the Saturday Club meeting, for Mrs. Fields wrote of it:
“Dr. Holmes was in great mood for talk, but Lowell was critical and
interrupted him frequently. ‘Now, James, let me talk and don’t interrupt
me,’ he once said, a little ruffled by the continual strictures on his
conversation.” But by the time that Longfellow’s sixtieth birthday came
round on the following Wednesday, Dr. Holmes was ready for it with the
verses, “In gentle bosoms tried and true,” recorded in Longfellow’s
diary, and for another encounter with Lowell, who also celebrated the day
with a poem, beginning “I need not praise the sweetness of his song.”
Mrs. Fields’s diary records her husband’s account of the evening:—
_February 28, 1867._—Thursday morning. Jamie had a most
brilliant evening at Longfellow’s. A note came in from O. W.
H. towards night, saying he was full of business and full of
his story, but he _must_ go to L.’s. Lowell’s poem in the
morning had helped to stir him. J. reached his door punctually
at eight. There stood the little wonder with hat and coat on
and door ajar, his wife beside him. “I wouldn’t let him go
with anybody else,” she said. “Mr. Fields, he ought not to
go out tonight; hear him, how he wheezes with the asthma.
Now, Wendell, _when_ will you get home?” “Oh,” said he, “I
don’t know. I put myself into Mr. Fields’s hands.” “Well, Mr.
Fields, how early can you get him home?” “About twelve,” was
the answer. “Now that’s pretty well,” said the Doctor. “Amelia,
go in and shut the door. Mr. Fields will take care of me.”
So between fun and anxiety they chatted away until they were
fairly into the street and in the car. “I’ve been doing too
much lately between my lectures and my story, and the fine
dinners I have been to, and I ought not to go out tonight. Why,
it’s one of the greatest compliments one man ever paid another,
my going out to Longfellow’s tonight. By the way, Mr. Fields,
do you appreciate the position you hold in our time? There
never was anything like it. Why, I was nothing but a roaring
kangaroo when you took me in hand, and I thought it was the
right thing to stand up on my hind legs, but you combed me down
and put me in proper shape. Now I want you to promise me one
thing. We’re all growing old, I’m near sixty myself; by and by
the brain will begin to soften. Now you must tell me when the
egg begins to look addled. People don’t know of themselves.”