alliteration only) but if you would like it for the “Atlantic,”
why here it is on the next leaf. Or, if too late, why not
“Every Saturday”? I could not even think of it sooner, for I
have been wrestling with a bad head and an article on Chaucer,
and I fear they have thrown me. I want rest, and a bath of
poetry, but where may the wicked hope for either? My sonnet
(if Leigh Hunt would let me call it so) hit me like a stray
shot from nowhere that I could divine, and five minutes saw it
finished. So why may it not be good? It came, anyhow, as a poem
comes—though it isn’t just that. But my dog isn’t bad? He is
from the life at any rate.
I shall make use of my first leisure to get into Boston.
But I have got bedevilled with the text of Chaucer and am
working on it with my usual phrenzy—thirteen hours, for
example, yesterday, collating texts and writing into margins.
I comfort myself that my Chaucer will bring a handsome price
at my _vandoo_! I shall be easier in my coffin if it run up
handsomely for Fanny and Mabel.
Do you want an essay for your “Almanac” if one should come,
which is doubtful? I need one or two more to make a little
volume, and I need a little volume for nameless reasons. O, if
I could sell my land! I would transmute that gold into poetry.
Or if only poems would come when you whistle for ’em!
Give my kindest regards to Mrs Fields.
Yours always,
J. R. L.
From my study, this first day for three weeks without a drowsy
pain in my knowledge box, I really feel a little lively, and
wonder at myself. But don’t be alarmed—it won’t last, any more
than money does, or principle in a politician, or hair, or
popular favor—or paper.
Lowell and Longfellow continue to make their appearances in Mrs. Fields’s
diary.
_December 7, 1871._—Last Sunday Charlotte Cushman dined here.
Our guests asked to meet her were Mr. and Mrs. Lowell and
Mr. Longfellow; Miss Stebbins and Miss Chapman, her guests,
also came. We had a lovely social time, Lowell making himself
especially interesting, as he always does when he can once work
himself up to the pitch of going out at all. He talked a while
with me about poetry and his own topics after dinner. He said
he was one of the few people who believed in absolute truth;
that he always looked for certain qualities in writers, which
if he could not discover, they no longer interested him and
he did not care to read them. He discovered, for instance, in
the writers who had survived the centuries the same kindred
points, those points he studied until he discovered what the
adamant was and where it was founded; then he would look into
the writers of our own age to see if he could find the same
stuff; there was little enough of it unfortunately. He does
not like Reynolds’s portrait of Johnson, thought it untrue,
far too handsome, yet highly characteristic in the management
of the hands, which portray the man as he was when talking
better probably than anything ever did. Mrs. Lowell appeared to
enjoy herself. J. says L. is always more himself if Mrs. L. is
happy and talkative. They are thinking of Europe. Mabel is to
be married in April, and afterward they probably go at once to
Europe.
A small party of friends assembled in the evening. Longfellow
was the beloved and observed and worshipped among all.
[Illustration: HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
_From a photograph taken in middle life_]
_April 11, 1872._—Last night Jamie dined with Longfellow. John
Field of Pennsylvania and Lowell were the two other guests.
J. was there twenty minutes before the rest arrived, and
Longfellow gave him an account of the wedding of a school-mate
of mine, —— ——, an excellent generous-hearted, generously built
woman, with a little limping old clergyman who has already had
three wives and whose first name is ——. Longfellow said, in
memory of what had gone before, the organist, as if driven
by some evil spirit, played “Auld Lang Syne,” as the wedding
procession came in, consisting of the bride and her brother,
two very well-made large persons and the elderly bridegroom
limping on behind all alone. The organist suddenly stopped at
this point, breaking off with a queer little quirk and shiver
as if he only then discovered what he was doing. Indeed the
whole wedding appeared to have points to affect the risibles
of the poet. He could hardly speak of it without laughter.
He said, moreover, that it was, he thought, disgusting and
outrageous for old men to get married.
_Tuesday, September 23, 1872._—Longfellow came to town to see
Jamie, in one of his loveliest moods. The day was so warm and
fine, such a day of dreams, that he proposed to him every kind
of excursion. “Come,” he said, “let us go to the tea stores
and smell the tea; the warm atmosphere will bring out all the
odors and we can get samples!” And again, “Come, let us go to
the wharves and see the vessels just in from Italy or Spain.
It will be a lovely sight in this soft sky, and we can hear
the men speak in their native tongues.” Unhappily all these
seductions were in vain, for Jamie was busy and was to lecture
in Grantville in the evening. L. said: “At half-past eight I
shall think of you doing thus and thus” (sawing the air with
his arms). L. continued: “You know I have very strange people
come to me—a man came a day or two ago by the name of Hyers,
who has just published a book describing his own career. He
believes that he is fed by the Lord! ‘How do you mean?’ asked
I, with the knowledge that we were all fed in the same way.
‘Why,’ said H., ‘He leaves _pies and peanuts on the sidewalks
for me_.’” Longfellow could hardly contain himself—but “after
all,” he said, “that is very like Greene: when Greene comes to
me, he always takes his money to come and go, just like my own
sons and without so much as a thank you. But I like to have
Greene come because he enjoys it so much and it is so strange.
He amuses me. Then Appleton too, with his odd fancies, it would
be hard to find a stranger man than he. He amused me immensely
the other day by fancying an Indian, ‘Great Fire,’ or ‘Hole in
the Wall,’ or some such fellow, coming to Boston for the first
time. Passing a perruquier’s, he sees the window filled with
masses of false hair; taking them to be scalps and the window
to be an exhibition of these tokens of prowess, he rushes in,
embraces the little perruquier behind the counter, treats him
like a brother, and almost frightens the small hairdresser out
of his senses!!”
L. likes Joaquin [Miller] much. Of course, he said, there
are some things about him not altogether agreeable, such as
flinging a quid of tobacco out of his mouth under the table;
“but I don’t mind those things; perhaps,” he added, “perhaps I
might have done the same as a youth of 20!!!”
_Thursday, June 12, 1873._—Dined last night with the Aldriches
and Mr. Bugbee at Mr. Lowell’s beautiful old Elmwood.[21] It
was a perfect night, cool, fresh, moon-lighted, after a muggy
day of heat. After dinner I went into the fine old study with
Aldrich, where he showed me two or three little poems he has
lately written. He was all ready to talk on literary topics
and much in earnest about his own satisfaction over “Miss
Mehitable’s Son” (which is indeed a very good story), and was
full of disgust over the “Nation’s” cool dismissal of it.
It was too bad; but that Dennet of the “Nation” is beneath
contempt because of the slights he throws upon good literary
work. Aldrich says he found “Asphodel” all worn to pieces, read
and reread in the upstairs study. He finds Mr. Lowell’s library
in curious disorder with respect to modern books. He is an easy
lender and an easy borrower. The result is, everything is at
loose ends. Only two volumes of Hawthorne can be found, for
instance....
Such wonderful colors overspread our bay this evening, the
wide heavens, and all that lay between, it seemed an unreal
and magic glory, and I recall dimly Hawthorne’s disgust when
he endeavored to describe a landscape. The Lord, he says,
expressed himself in this glory; how shall we therefore
interpret into language when he himself has taken this form of
speech as the only adequate expression to convey his meaning to
us? Who does not feel this in looking at the glories of Nature
in this perfect season?
And here is a final glimpse of Longfellow, at Manchester-by-the-Sea,
shortly after Don Pedro of Brazil had visited him in Cambridge:—
_Thursday, July 6, 1876._—A fine rushing wind—no rain, but a
wind that seemed to tear everything up by the roots. I dared
not venture out in the morning. To our surprise and delight Mr.
Longfellow came to dine. He was pleased to find Anna here, and
fell to talking of Heidelberg in German with her and quoting
the poets most delightfully. We sat in the front hall and
rejoiced over his presence as he talked, for he was in a fine
talking mood. He told us of the Emperor’s visit and of his
soldierly though most simple bearing; how he came to call upon
him after his dinner, and when, as he rose to go, Longfellow
said, “Your Majesty, I thank you for the honor you have done
me.” He said, “Ah! no, Longfellow, none of your nonsense, let
us be friends together. I hope you will write to me. I will
write you first and you must promise to answer.” As they walked
down the garden path together, Longfellow raised his hat and
stepped one side as he was about to get into his carriage. “No,
no,” he said laughingly, “there you are at it again.” In short,
he has left a pleasant memory behind.
Longfellow told us his maids broke everything he possessed; at
last they had broken a very beautiful Japanese vase or bowl
which Charley brought home—so he had made a Latin epitaph for
the maid. Unhappily I recall only the last line:—
_Nihil tetigit quod non fregit._
He described Blumenbach very amusingly, whose lectures on
Natural History he attended as a youth in Heidelberg. He
descended from his desk one day and came and rested his hand on
the rail just before which L. was seated. He had been speaking
of Platonic love. “Und die Platonische Liebe ist nach Amerika
gegangen,” he said, looking at Longfellow. The whole student
audience roared and applauded.
He was in the loveliest spirits and manners. His friendly
ways to my three friendless girls were not only such as to
excite them profoundly, but there was sincere feeling in his
invitation to them to call upon him and in his questions in
their behalf.
The wind subsided as we sat together; the two young Bigelows
sang “Maid of Athens” and one or two other songs, and then
he departed. How sorry we were as we watched his retreating
figure, as he and dear J. wound down the hill in the little
phaeton.
Mrs. Fields’s gallery of friends would be incomplete without a single
sketch of Whittier’s familiar outline. Out of many which the diaries
contain, one may best be taken, for it shows him in company with that
other friend, Celia Thaxter, whom also Mrs. Fields counted among the
few to whose memory she devoted special chapters in her “Authors and
Friends”; and it brings the three together at Mrs. Thaxter’s native Isles
of Shoals, so long a mecca of the “like-minded.”
[Illustration: _From a note of “Dear Whittier” to Mrs. Fields_]
_July 12, 1873._—I shall not soon forget our talk one afternoon
in the parlor at “The Shoals.” Whittier, as if inspired by
that spirit residing in us which is the very ground-work of
the Quaker belief, began to speak of Emerson’s faith and of
the pain it gave him to see the name of Jesus placed in his
writings as but one among many. When he discoursed with Emerson
of these things, he could have no satisfaction. Celia, on the
other hand, said she did not understand these things; she never
prayed. “I am sure thee does without knowing it,” said W.;
“else what do thy poems mean? Thee has not set prayer perhaps,
but some kind of a prayer thee must have. No human being can
exist without it. But what troubles me also in Emerson is that
I can find no real faith in immortality.” Here I took up the
question. I had heard Mr. Emerson at Thoreau’s grave, afterward
speaking expressly on immortality, and in both discourses I
felt deeply his faith in our future progress and enduring
life. Whittier was inclined to think me mistaken. I think
too that his use of Jesus’ name is to prevent the worship
of him instead of the One God. Whittier asked Celia to read
a discourse of Emerson’s, which she did aloud; and again he
spoke of the beauty of childlike worship, the necessity for it
in our natures, and quoted some lovely hymns. His whole heart
was alive and poured out toward us as if he longed tenderly
like the prophet of old to breathe a new life into us. I could
seem to see that he reproached himself that so many days had
passed without his trying to speak more seriously. He was not
perfectly well after this—a headache overtook him before our
talk was over and did not leave him until he found himself in
Amesbury again. I trust it did so there....
Whittier said one day, when we were talking of the “Life of
Charlotte Brontë” by Mrs. Gaskell, and I was saying how sad it
was she should have made the old man, her father, suffer unto
death, as she did, by telling the tale of his bad son’s life,
and “still worse,” I said, “she came out in the Athenæum and
declared that her story was false, when she knew it was true,
hoping to comfort the old man,”—“I don’t know,” said Whittier;
“I am inclined to think that was the best part of it, if her
lie would have done the old man any good!”
After we had our long afternoon session of talk over Emerson
and future existence and the unknowable, Celia stood up and
stretched herself and said, “How good it has been with the
little song-sparrow putting in his oar above it all!”
And what of Mrs. Fields herself, a woman of nearly forty
when this last passage was written? For the most part the
diary reveals her but indirectly. Yet in the midst of all her
pictures of her friends, a fragment of self-portraiture is
occasionally found; and to one of them the reader of these
pages is entitled.
[Illustration: _Proposed Dedication of Whittier’s “Among the Hills” to
Mrs. Fields. In a letter to Mrs. Fields, Whittier wrote: “I would like
thy judgment about it. Would this do?” In altered form it appears in the
book._]
_December 18, 1873._—Have been looking over “Wilhelm Meister”!
I struck upon that marvellous passage, “I reverence the
individual who understands distinctly what he wishes; who
unweariedly advances; who knows the means conducive to his
object, and can seize and use them. How far his object may be
great or little is the next consideration with me”; and much
more quite as good to the same end. It prompts me to say what I
wish to do in life.
Aristotle writes: “Virtue is concerned with action, art with
production.” The problem of life is how to harmonize the
two—either career must become _prominent_ according to the
nature of the individual. I discern in myself: 1st, the desire
to serve others unselfishly according to the example of our
dear Lord; 2nd, the desire to cultivate my powers in order
to achieve the highest life possible to me as an individual
existence by stimulating thought to its finest issues through
reflection, observation, and by profound and ceaseless study of
the written thoughts of the wisest in every age and every clime.
To fulfil these aims we must be able to answer the simple
question promptly to ourselves: “What then shall I do tomorrow
and today?” Then, the decision being made, the thing alone must
have all the earnestness put into it of a creature who knows
that the next moment he may be called to his account.
As a woman and a wife my first duty lies at home; to make that
beautiful,—to stimulate the lives of others by exchange of
ideas, and the repose of domestic life; to educate children and
servants.
2nd, To be conversant with the very poor; to visit their homes;
to be keenly alive to their sufferings; never allowing the
thought of their necessities to sleep in our hearts.
3rd, By day and night, morning and evening, in all times and
seasons when strength is left to us, to study, study, study.
Because I have put this last, it does not stand last in
importance; but to put it first and write out the plan for
study which my mind naturally selects would be to ignore that
example of perfect life in which I humbly believe, and to
return to the lives of the ancients, so fine in their results
to the few, so costly to the many. But in the removed periods
of existence, when solitude may be our blessed portion, what a
joy to fly to communion with the sages and live and love with
them!
I have written this out for the pleasure of seeing if “I
distinctly understand what I wish.” It is a wide plan, too
wide, I fear, for much performance, but therefore perhaps more
conducive to a constant faith.
V
WITH DICKENS IN AMERICA[22]
When Mrs. Fields wrote the “Personal Recollections” of Oliver Wendell
Holmes which appear in her “Authors and Friends,” she quoted, with a few
changes prompted by modesty, this passage from a letter received from him
at Christmas, 1881: “Except a few of my immediate family connections, no
friends have seen me so often as a guest as did you and your husband.
Under your roof I have met more visitors to be remembered than under any
other. But for your hospitality I should never have had the privilege
of personal acquaintance with famous writers and artists whom I can now
recall as I saw them, talked with them, heard them in that pleasant
library, that most lively and agreeable dining-room. How could it be
otherwise with such guests as he entertained with his own unflagging
vivacity and his admirable social gifts?”
One of the visitors thus encountered by Dr. Holmes was Charles Dickens.
Here was a guest after the host’s own heart—and the hostess’s. The host
stood alone among publishers as a friend of the authors with whom it was
his business to deal. Out of them all there was none with whom he came to
stand on terms of closer sympathy and friendship than with Dickens. They
had first met when Dickens came to America in 1842, and Fields was by no
means the conspicuous figure he was to become. When he visited Europe in
1859-60, with his young wife, whose personality was to contribute its own
beauty and charm to the hospitality of 148 Charles Street for many years
to come, they dined with Dickens in London, visited him at Gad’s Hill,
and had much discussion of a plan, which Fields had been urging upon
him in correspondence, for Dickens to come to America for a course of
readings. As early as in one of the letters of this time, Dickens wrote
to Fields: “Here I forever renounce ‘Mr.’ as having anything whatever to
do with our communication, and as being a mere preposterous interloper.”
From such beginnings grew the intimacy which caused Dickens, when he drew
up the humorous terms of a walking-match between Dolby, his manager,
and Osgood, Fields’s partner, while the Boston readings of 1868 were in
progress, to define Fields as “Massachusetts Jemmy” and himself as the
“Gad’s Hill Gasper” by virtue of his “surprising performances (without
the least variation) on that true national instrument, the American
catarrh.”
The visits of Dickens to America, first in 1842, then in the winter of
1867-68, have been the subject of abundant chronicle. For the first
of them there is the direct record of his “American Notes,” besides
those indirect reflections in “Martin Chuzzlewit,” which wrought an
effect described by Carlyle in the characteristic saying that “all
Yankee-doodledom blazed up like one universal soda bottle.” Many
memorials of the second visit are preserved in Fields’s “Yesterdays
with Authors,” and in John Forster’s “Life” both visits are of course
recorded.
[Illustration: CHARLES DICKENS
_From a portrait by Francis Alexander, for many years in the Fields
house, and now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts_]
There is, besides, one source of intimate record of Dickens in America
which hitherto has remained almost untouched.[23] This is found in the
diaries of Mrs. Fields, filled, as the preceding pages have shown, not
merely with her own sympathetic observations, but with many things
reported to her by her husband. To him it was largely due that Dickens
crossed the Atlantic near the end of 1867. Landing in Boston, and soon
beginning his extraordinarily popular readings, he found in the Charles
Street house of the Fieldses a second home. “Steadily refusing all
invitations to go out during the weeks he was reading,” wrote Fields
in his “Yesterdays with Authors,” “he went only into one other house
besides the Parker, habitually, during his stay in Boston.” In that
house Mrs. Fields wrote the diaries from which the following passages
are taken. There Dickens was not merely a warmly welcomed friend and
guest at dinner, but for a time an inmate. Henry James, summoning after
Mrs. Fields’s death his remembrances of her and of her abode, found in
it “certain fine vibrations and dying echoes” of all the episode of
Dickens’s second visit. “I liked to think of the house,” he wrote, “I
couldn’t do without thinking of it, as the great man’s safest harborage
through the tremendous gale of those even more leave-taking appearances,
as fate was to appoint, than we then understood.”
In Dickens’s state of physical health while the Fieldses were thus seeing
him, lay the only token of an end not far off. All else was gayety and
delight. The uncontrollable laughter—where does one hear quite parallel
notes to-day?—the simplicities of game and anecdote, the enthusiastic
yielding of complete admiration, the glimpses of august figures of an
earlier time—all these serve equally to take one back over more than
half a century, into a state of society about which an element of myth
begins to form, and to bring out of that past the living, human figure of
Dickens himself.
For the most part these extracts from the diaries call for no
explanations.
Several months before the great visitor’s arrival his coming was heralded
by his business agent, of whom Mrs. Fields wrote:—
_August 14, 1867._—Mr. Dolby arrived today from England (Mr.
Dickens’s agent), a good, healthy, kindly natured man of
whom Dickens seems really fond, having followed him to the
steamer in Liverpool from London to see that all things were
comfortably arranged for him. He says Dickens has lamed one of
his feet with too much walking of late. He is here to arrange
for 100 nights, for which he hears he may receive $200,000; the
readings to begin the first of December and to be chiefly given
in New York City.
_August 15, 1867._—Our day was quiet enough, but when J.
came down, he held us quite spellbound and magnetized all the
evening with his account of Dickens, which Mr. Dolby had given
him. He says Dolby himself is a queer creature when he talks.
He has a stutter which leads him to become suddenly stately in
the middle of a homely phrase and to give a queer intonation to
his voice, so that he did not dare look at Osgood (who was a
listener also) lest they should both explode with laughter.
Dickens now has five dogs; for these the cook prepares daily
five plates of dinner. One day the plates were all ready when a
small pup stole in and polished off the five plates. He fainted
away immediately, and in this condition was discovered by the
cook, who put him under the pump and revived him; but he had
been going about looking like the figure 8 ever since.
Dickens is a warm friend of Fechter. One day, returning from
a reading tour, his man met him at the station saying, “The
fifty-eight boxes have come, sir.” “What?” said Mr. Dickens.
“The fifty-eight boxes have come, sir.” “I know nothing of
fifty-eight boxes,” said the other. “Well, sir,” said the man,
“they are all piled up outside the gate and we shall soon see,
sir.” They proved to be a Swiss chalet complete, handles,
blinds, not a bit wanting, which Fechter had sent him. It is
put up in a grove near the house, where it presents a very
picturesque effect.