Dickens repeated all his speech to me, as I believe I have
said above, never dropping a word. “I feel,” he said, “as if I
were listening to the sound of my own voice as I recall it. A
very curious sensation.” Jamie asked him if Curtis was quite
right in the facts of his speech. He said, “Not altogether,
as, for instance, in that matter about the Queen and our
little play, ‘Frozen Deep.’ We had played it many times with
considerable success, when the Queen heard of it and Colonel
Phipps (?) called upon me and said he wished the Queen could
see the play. Was there no hall which would be appropriate for
the occasion? What did I think of Buckingham Palace? I replied
that could not be, for my daughters played in the piece and I
had never asked myself to be presented at court nor had I ever
taken the proper steps to introduce them there, and of course
they could not go as amateur performers where they had never
been as visitors. This seemed to trouble him a good deal, so I
said I would find some hall which would be appropriate for the
purpose and would appoint an evening, which I did immediately,
taking the Gallery of Illustration and having it fitted up for
the purpose. I then drew up a list of the company, chiefly of
artists, literary and scientific men, and interesting ladies,
which I caused to be submitted to the Queen, begging her to
reject or add as she thought proper, setting aside forty seats
for the royal party. The whole thing went off finely until
after the first play was over, when the Queen sent round a
request that I would come and see her. This was considered an
act of immense condescension and kindness on her part, and the
little party behind the scenes were delighted. Unfortunately,
I had just prepared myself for the farce which was to follow
and was already standing in motley dress with a red nose. I
knew I could not appear in that plight, so I begged leave to
be excused on that ground. However, that was forgiven and
all passed off well, although the large expense of the whole
thing of course fell on me, which amounted to one hundred and
fifty or two hundred pounds. Several years after, when Prince
Albert died, the Queen sent to me for a copy of the play. I
told Colonel Phipps the play had never been printed and was the
property of a gentleman, Mr. Wilkie Collins. Then would I have
it copied? So I had a very beautiful copy made and bound in the
most perfect manner, and presented to her Majesty. Whereupon
the Princess of Prussia, seeing this, asked for another for
herself. I said I would again ask the permission of Mr. Collins
and again I had a beautiful copy made with great labor. Then
the Queen sent to ask the price of the books. I sent word that
my friend, Mr. Wilkie Collins, was a gentleman who would, I was
sure, hear to nothing of the kind and begged her acceptance of
the volumes.” “How has the Queen shown her gratitude for such
favors?” I said. “We have never heard anything more from her
since that time.” Good Mr. Dolby said quietly, “You know in
England we call her ‘Her Ungracious Majesty.’” Certainly one
would not have believed it possible for even a queen’s nature
to have become so hardened as this to the kindly acts of any
human being, not to speak of the efforts of one of her most
noble subjects and perhaps the greatest genius of our time.
If any reader wishes to follow the further course of the friendship
between Dickens and the Fieldses, he has only to turn to “Yesterdays
With Authors,” in which many letters written by Dickens after April,
1868, are quoted, and many remembrances of their intercourse when the
Fieldses visited England in 1869, the year before Dickens’s death, are
presented. Here it will suffice to quote one out of several passages in
Mrs. Fields’s diary relating to Dickens, and to bring to light a single
characteristic little note from Dickens, not hitherto printed.
On Wednesday, May 12, 1869, Mrs. Fields wrote of Dickens:—
He drove us through the Parks in the fashionable afternoon
hour and afterward to dine with him at the St. James, where
Fechter and Dolby were the only outsiders. Mrs. Collins was
like one of Stothard’s pictures. I felt this more even after
refreshing my memory of Stothard’s coloring at the Kensington
Museum yesterday. C. D. told me that the book of all others
which he read perpetually and of which he never tired, the book
which always appeared more imaginative in proportion to the
fresh imagination he brings to it, a book for inexhaustiveness
to be placed before every other book, is Carlyle’s “French
Revolution.” When he was writing “A Tale of Two Cities,” he
asked Carlyle if he might see some book to which he referred in
his history. Whereat Carlyle sent down to him all his books,
and Dickens read them faithfully; but the more he read the
more he was astounded to find how the facts but passed through
the alembic of Carlyle’s brain and had come out and fitted
themselves each as a part of the one great whole, making a
compact result, indestructible and unrivalled, and he always
found himself turning away from the books of reference and
rereading this marvellous new growth from those dry bones with
renewed wonder.
The note from Dickens read:—
GAD’S HILL PLACE
HIGHAM BY ROCHESTER, KENT
_Wednesday Sixth October, 1869_
MY DEAR FIELDS:—
Delighted to enjoy the prospect of seeing you and yours on
Saturday. Wish you had been at Birmingham. Wish you were not
going home. Wish you had had nothing to do with the Byron
matter.[28] Wish Mrs. Stowe was in the pillory. Wish Fechter
had gone over when he ought. Wish he may not go under when he
oughtn’t.
With love,
Ever affectionately yours,
CHARLES DICKENS
[Illustration: _Facsimile note from Dickens to Fields_]
Among the papers preserved by Mrs. Fields there are, besides the
manuscript letters of Dickens himself, many letters written after his
death by his sister-in-law, Miss Georgina Hogarth. From bits of these,
and especially from a letter written by Dickens’s daughter, while his
death was still a poignant grief, the affection in which he was held in
his own household is touchingly imaged forth.
“All the Old World,” wrote Miss Dickens, “all the New World loved him.
He never had anything to do with a living soul without attaching them to
him. If strangers could so love him, you can tell a little what he must
have been to his own flesh and blood. It is a glorious inheritance to
have such blood flowing in one’s veins. I’m so glad I have never changed
my name.”
From one of Miss Hogarth’s letters a single passage may be taken, since
it adds something of first-hand knowledge to the accessible facts about
one piece of Dickens’s writing which—in so far as the editor of these
pages is aware—has never seen the light of print. This letter was written
in the September after Dickens’s death:
“I must now tell you about the beautiful little New Testament which he
wrote for his children. I am sorry to say it is _never to be published_.
It happens that he expressed that decided determination only last autumn
to me, so we have no alternative. He wrote it years ago when his elder
children were quite little. It is about sixteen short chapters, chiefly
adapted from St. Luke’s Gospel, most beautiful, most touching, most
simple, as such a narrative should be. He never would have it printed
and I used to read it to the little boys in MS. before they were old
enough to read _writing_ themselves. When Charley’s children became old
enough to have this kind of teaching, I promised Bessy (his wife) that
I would make her a copy of this History, and I determined to do it as
a Christmas Gift for her last year, but before I began my copy I asked
Charles if he did not think it would be well for him to have it printed,
at all events for _private_ circulation, if he would not publish it
(though I think it is a pity he would never do that!). He said he would
look over the MS. and take a week or two to consider. At the end of the
time he gave it back to me and said he had decided _never to publish
it—or even have it privately printed_. He said I might make a copy for
Bessy, or for any one of his children, _but for no one else_, and that
he also begged that we would never even lend the MS., or a copy of it,
to any one to take out of the house; so there is no doubt about his
_strong feeling_ on the subject, and we must obey it. I made my copy for
Bessy and gave it to her last Christmas. After his death the original
MS. became _mine_. As it was never published, of course it did not count
as one of Mr. Forster’s MSS., and therefore it was one of his private
papers, which were left to me. So I gave it at once to Mamie, who was, I
thought, the most natural and proper possessor of it, as being his eldest
daughter. You must come to England and read it, dear Friend! as we must
not send it to you! We should be glad to see you and to show it to you
and Mr. Fields in our own house.”
Miss Hogarth must have known full well that, if this manuscript Gospel
according to Charles Dickens was to be shown to anybody outside his
immediate circle, he himself would have chosen the Charles Street friends
from what he called—to them—his “native Boston.”
VI
STAGE FOLK AND OTHERS
Had anyone crossed the Charles Street threshold of the Fieldses with the
expectation of encountering within none but the New England Augustans, he
would soon have found himself happily disillusioned, even at a time when
there was no Dickens in Boston. As it was in reality, so must it be in
these pages, if they are to fulfill their purpose of restoring a vanished
scene, the variety of which must indeed be counted among its most
distinctive characteristics. The pages that follow will accordingly serve
to illustrate the familiar fact that the pudding of a “family party” is
often rendered the more acceptable by the introduction of a few plums not
plucked from the domestic tree.
Mrs. Fields once noted in her diary the circumstance that, when her
husband came to Boston from Portsmouth at the age of fourteen, and began
to work as a “boy” in the bookshop of Carter & Hendee, the second of
these employers had a box at the theatre and, to keep his young employees
happy, used constantly to ask one or more of them to see a play in his
company. Thus enabled in his youth to see such actors as the elder Booth,
Fanny Kemble and her father, and many others of the best players to
be seen in America at the time, Fields acquired a love of the theatre
and of stage folk which stood him in good stead throughout his life.
A certain exuberance in his own nature must have sought a response
in social contacts other than those of the straiter sect of his local
contemporaries. In men and women of the stage, in authors from beyond
the compass of the local horizon, writers with whom he formed relations
in his double capacity of editor and publisher, in artists and public
men outside the immediate “literary” circle of Boston, Fields took an
unceasing delight, shared by his wife, and still communicable through her
journals.
[Illustration: JAMES T. FIELDS AT FIFTEEN
_From a drawing by a French painter_]
From their pages, then, I propose to assemble here a group of passages
relating first to stage folk, and then to others, and, since these
records so largely explain themselves, to burden them as lightly as
possible with explanations. Slender as certain of the entries are, each
contributes something to a recovery of the time and of the persons that
graced it.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, says his biographer, used to declare in his later
years, “Though I am not genuine Boston, I am Boston-plated.” His intimate
relation with Boston began in 1865, through the publication of a “Blue
and Gold” edition of his poems by the firm of which Fields was a member,
and the beginning of his editorship of “Every Saturday,” an illustrated
journal issued under the same auspices. His range of acquaintance
before that time was such that when the “plating” process began,—it was
really more like a transmutation of metals,—he sometimes served as a
sympathetic link between his new Boston and his old New York. It was
in New York, only a few weeks after the assassination of Lincoln, that
Aldrich appears in the diary, fresh from seeing his friend, Edwin Booth.
_May 3, 1865._—An hour before we went to tea, Aldrich came to
see us. He said he and Launt Thompson were staying with Edwin
Booth alternate nights during this season of sorrow; that it
was “all right between himself and the lady he was about to
marry.” Then he described to us the first night while Booth
was plunged in agony. He said the gas was left burning low
and the bed stood in the corner, just where he lay sleepless,
looking at a fearfully good crayon portrait of Wilkes Booth
which glared at him over the gas. Launt Thompson started with
the mother from New York for Philadelphia, where she was going
to join her daughter the day that John Wilkes was shot, and an
extra containing the news was brought them by a newsboy as they
stepped on the ferry-boat. The old woman would have the paper.
“He was her ‘Johnny’ after all,” said T. B. A.
_Friday._—Have seen a lady who knows the person to whom Booth
is engaged—said that her letter telling him she was true passed
his letter of relinquishment on its way to Philadelphia. She
thinks these two women have saved Booth. “I have been loved too
well,” he said once....
Aldrich said we should not have been more astonished to hear he
himself had done the terrible deed than he was to know Wilkes
Booth had done it. “He was so gentle, gentler than I, and very
handsome—a slight, beautiful figure,” and (as he described the
face, it was the Greek Antinous kind of beauty there) I could
not but reflect how the deed may deform the man. Nobody said he
was beautiful after he was dead, but they laid a cloth upon the
face and said how dreadful. It has been a strange experience to
come among the people who know the family. I hoped I should be
spared this, but the soul of good in things evil God means we
should all see.
_Sunday, May 7._—A radiant day. Went to hear Dr. Bellows—a
grand discourse. After service sat in his drawing-room and
talked and then walked together.... He too has been to see
Edwin Booth. The poor fellow said to him, “Ah! if it had been a
fellow like myself who had done this dreadful deed, the world
would not have wondered—but Johnny!!”
_Wednesday, January 3, 1866._—Dined with the Grahams and went
to see Booth upon the occasion of his reappearance. The unmoved
sadness of the young man and the unceasing plaudits of the
house, half filled with his friends, were impressive and made
it an occasion not to be forgotten.
[Illustration: _Facsimile note from Booth to Mrs. Fields_]
_September 23, 1866._—Edwin Booth and the Aldriches came to
tea; also Tom Beal and Professor Sterry Hunt of Montreal, the
latter late. Booth came in the twilight while a magnificent red
and purple and gold sunset was staining the bay. The schooners
anchored just off shore had already lighted their lanterns
and swung them in the rigging, and the full moon cast a silver
sheen over the scene. I hear he passes every Sunday morning
while here at the grave of his wife in Mt. Auburn. He seems
deeply saddened. He was very pleasant, however, and ready to
talk, and gave amusing imitations—in particular of his black
boy, Jan, who possesses, he says, the one accomplishment of
forgetting everything he ought to remember. One day a man
with a deep tragic voice, “Forrestian,” he said, came to him
with letters of introduction asking Mr. Booth to assist him
as he was about to go to England. Mr. B. told him he knew no
one in England and could do nothing for him, he was sorry. If
he ever found it possible to do him a service he would with
pleasure. With that Mr. B. turned,—they were in the vestibule
of the theatre—and entered the box-office to speak to someone
there; immediately he heard the deep voice addressing Jan
with “You are with Mr. Booth.” “Yes,” responded Jan with real
negro accent, “I’m wid Mr. Booth.” “In what capacity—are
you studying?” “Yaas,” returned Jan, unblushingly, “I’se
studyin’.” “What are you upon now?” “Oh, Richelieu, Hamlet,
an’ a few of dese yer.” “Ah, I should be pleased to enter into
correspondence with you while I am abroad. Would you have any
objections?” “Oh, no, no objection, no objection at all.”
“Thank you, sir; good-day, sir.” With that they parted and
Jan came with his mouth stretched wide with laughter. “Massa,
what is ‘correspond’? I told him I’d correspond, what’d he
mean, correspond?” Then Jan, convulsed with his joke, roared
and roared again. They are surely a merry race, but provoking
enough sometimes. They are capable of real attachments,
however; this man has been several times dismissed but will
not go. Booth told everything very dramatically, but I was
especially struck with his description of a man travelling with
two shaggy terrier pups in the cars. He had them in a basket
and hung them up over his head and then composed himself to
sleep. Waking up half an hour later, he observed a man on the
opposite side of the car, his eyes starting from his head and
the very picture of dismay, as if a demon were looking at him.
The owner of the pups, following the direction of the man’s
eyes, looked up and saw the two pups had their heads out of
the basket. He quietly made a sign for them to go back and
they disappeared. The man’s gaze did not apparently slacken,
however, but in a moment became still more horrified when the
pups again looked out. “What’s the matter?” said the owner.
“What are those?” said the man, pointing with trembling finger;
“pray excuse me, but I have been on a spree and I thought they
were demons.” He introduced the subject of the stage and talked
of points in “Hamlet,” which he had made for the first time,
but occasionally through accident had omitted. The next day he
will be sure to be asked by letter or newspaper why he omits
certain points which would be so excellent to make, _the writer
thinks_. He has had a life of strange vicissitudes, as almost
all actors. He referred last night to his frequent travels
during childhood over the Alleghanies with his father, of long
nights spent in this kind of travel; and once in Nevada he
walked fifty miles chiefly through snow. “Why?” said Lilian.
“Because I was hard up, Lily,” he continued; “I walked it too
in stage boots which were too tight—it was misery.” ...
They had all gone by half-past ten, but we lay long awake
thinking over poor Booth and his strange sad fortune. Hamlet,
indeed!—although Forceythe Willson says, “I have been to see
Mr. Hamlet play Booth.” Yes, perhaps when he is playing it for
the 400th time with a bad cold, it may seem so; indeed I found
it dullish myself, or his part, I mean, the other night; but he
_did_ play it once—the night of his reappearance in New York.
[Illustration: BOOTH AS HAMLET]
_May 18, 1869._—Last Sunday evening Booth, Aldrich and his wife
and sister, Dr. Holmes and Amelia and Launt Thompson, Leslie
and ourselves took tea here together. In the evening came Mr.
and Mrs. Emerson. We did have a rare and delightful symposium.
Booth talked little as usual, and the next night went round
to Aldrich’s and took himself off as he behaves in company!!
Nevertheless he was glad to see Holmes, though every time Dr.
H. addressed him across the table he seemed to receive an
electric shock.
A chance meeting between William Warren and Fields in a lane at the
seaside Manchester is recorded, with their talk, in the diary as early
as 1865. Two entries in 1872 have to do with Jefferson, first alone and
then with Warren. The friendship with Jefferson, begun so long ago, was
continued until his death.
_Tuesday, March 18, 1872._—Left Boston for a short trip to New
York. Jefferson the actor, famous throughout the world for
his impersonation of “Rip Van Winkle,” was on the train and
finding us out (or J. him), came to our compartment car to
pass the day. He talked without cessation and without effort.
He described his sudden disease of the eyes quite bravely
and simply, from the use of too much whiskey. He said the
newspapers had said it was the gas, and many other reasons had
been assigned first and last; but he firmly believed there
was no other reason than too much whiskey. He had taken the
habit—when he was somewhat below his ordinary physical and
mental condition in the evening and wished to rise to the
proper point and “carry the audience”—of taking a small glass
of whiskey. This glass was after a time made two, and even
three or four. Finally he was stricken down by a trouble of
the eyes which threatened the entire extinction of sight. His
physician at once suggested that unnatural use of stimulants
was the cause, of which he himself is now entirely convinced
and no longer touches anything stronger than claret. He has
played to a larger variety of audiences probably than almost
any other great actor. The immense applause he received in
England, where he played 170 consecutive nights at the Adelphi
in London, always as “Rip,” has only served to make him
more modest, it would seem, more desirous to uphold himself
artistically. He gave us a hint of his taste for fishing and
described his trout-raising establishment in Jersey; very
curious and wonderful it was. Nature preserves only one in a
hundred of the eggs of trout to come to maturity. Mr. Jefferson
in his pond is able to raise 85 out of 100. There seems no
delight to him so great as that of sitting beside a stream on a
sunny day, line in hand.
Talking of the everlasting repetition of “Rip,” he says he
should be thankful to rest himself with another play, but this
has been a growth and it would be a daring thing for him to
attempt anything new with a public who would always compare
him with himself in this play which is the result of years
of his best thought and strength. I think myself, if he were
quite well he would be almost sure to attempt something else.
He told us several stories very dramatically. He is an odd,
carelessly dressed little mortal, a cross between Charles Lamb
and Grimaldi, but we have seldom passed a more delightful day
of talk than with him. The hours absolutely fled away.
_Wednesday, May 22, 1872._—Mr. Longfellow, Dr. Holmes, and
Jefferson and Warren, the two first comedians of our time,
dined here. The hour was three o’clock, to accommodate the
two professional gentlemen. The hours until three, with the
exception of two visits (Miss Sara Clarke and Miss Wainwright
in spite of saying “engaged”), were occupied in making
preparations for the little feast. I mean the hours after
breakfast until time to dress. (Of hours before breakfast I
have now-a-days nothing to say. I am not strong enough to do
anything early, but country life this summer is to change all
that.) Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Warren arrived first. Finding
much to interest them in the pictures of our lower room, they
lingered there a few moments before coming to the library,
when we talked of Marney’s pictures (Mr. J. owns some of his
water-colors) and looked about at others. Soon Longfellow came
with Jamie. He said he felt like one on a journey. He left home
early in the morning, had been sight-seeing in Boston all day,
was to dine and go to the theatre with us afterward.
He asked Mr. Warren why a Mr. Inglis was selling his fine
library and pictures—a question nobody had been able to solve.
Mr. Inglis is, however, in some way connected with the stage,
and Warren told us it was because he had been arrested with
Mr. Harvey Parker and others and condemned to be thrown in the
House of Correction, for selling liquor. His money protected
him from the rigor of the law, but the disgrace remained. His
children felt it much and he was going to Europe at least for
a season. We could not help feeling the injustice of this when
we remembered the myriad liquor shops for the poor all over the
town, with which no one interferes.
Mr. Jefferson was deeply interested in our pictures of the
players by Zanaçois. Dr. Holmes came in, talked a little at my
suggestion about Anne Whitney’s bust of Keats, which he appears
to know nothing about artistically (I observed the same lack
of knowledge in Emerson), but he criticised the hair. He said
he supposed nothing was known about Keats’s hair, so it might
as well be one way as another. I told him on the contrary I
owned some of it; whereat I got it out, and he went off in a
little episode about an essay which he had sometimes thought
of writing about hair. He has a machine by which the size of a
hair can be measured and recorded. This he would like to use,
and make a note of comparison between the hairs of “G. W.” (as
he laughingly called Washington), Jefferson, Milton, and other
celebrities of the earth. He thought it might be very curious
to discover the difference in quality.
We were soon seated at the table (only six all told) where the
conversation never flagged. Longfellow properly began it by
saying he thought Mr. Charles Mathews was entirely unjust to
Mr. Forrest as King Lear. He considered Mr. Forrest’s rendering
of the part, and he sat through the whole, as fine and close to
nature. He could not understand Mr. Mathews’s underrating it
as he did. Of course the other two gentlemen could say nothing
more than the difficulty Mr. Mathews from his nature would
have in estimating at its proper worth anything Mr. Forrest
might do, their idea of Art being so dissimilar. Here arose the
question if one actor was a good judge of another. Jefferson
said he sometimes thought actors very bad judges—indeed he
preferred to be judged by an audience inspired by feeling
rather than by one intellectually critical.
Jefferson has a clear blue eye, very fine and bright and sweet.
Longfellow thinks his mouth a very weak one, and certainly his
face is not impressive. Warren appears a man of finer intellect
and more wit. He had many witty things to say and his little
tales were always dramatically given. Dr. Holmes could not seem
to recover from the idea that Jefferson had made a fortune out
of one play and that he _never_ played but one. “I hear, Mr.
Jefferson,” he said, when he first came in, “that you have been
playing the same play ever since you came here.” (He has been
playing the same for a dozen years, I believe, nearly—and has
been here _three weeks_!) Jefferson could hardly help laughing
as he assured him that for the space of three weeks he had
given the same every night. Dr. Holmes had a way at the table
of talking of “you actors,” “you gentlemen of the stage,” until
I saw Longfellow was quite disturbed at the unsympathetic
unmannerliness of it, in appearance, and tried to talk more
than ever in a different strain.