overpraised him. The delicate quality of humor, the exquisite
fineness in the choice of words, the breadth and sweetness of
his nature were something he could hardly help worshipping. One
day after a dinner at Mr. Lowell’s he said, “I think I will
not have a carriage to return to town. I will walk down to the
Square.” “I will walk with you,” said Longfellow. When they
arrived at his gate, he said, he was so beautiful that he could
only think of the light and whiteness of the moon, and if he
had stayed a moment longer he should have put his arms around
him and made a fool of himself then and there. Whereat he said
good night abruptly and turned away.
He brought his novel and play[34] with him which are just now
finished, for us to read. He has evidently enjoyed the play,
and he enjoys the fame and the money they both bring him.
He is a dramatic, lovable creature with his blue silk
pocket-handkerchief and red dressing slippers and his quick
feelings. I could hate the man who could help loving him—or the
woman either.
In the passages touching upon Mark Twain now to be copied from the
journals, he is seen, not in Boston, but in Hartford. If Mrs. Fields
had continued her diary until 1879, there would doubtless have been a
faithful contemporaneous account of the humorist’s unhappy attempt to
be funny both in the presence and at the expense of the “Augustans”
assembled in honor of Whittier’s seventieth birthday.[35] But Mrs.
Fields’s reports of talk and observations under his own roof, in the days
when his fame rested entirely upon a handful of his earlier books, should
take their place in the authentic annals of an extraordinary personality.
On the first of the two occasions recorded, Fields went alone to deliver
a lecture in Hartford, and in answer to a post-card invitation signed
“Mark,” stayed in the new house of the Clemenses. On the second occasion,
three weeks later, Mrs. Fields accompanied him. After her husband’s
return from the first visit she wrote:—
_April 6, 1876._—He found Mrs. Clemens quite ill. They had been
in New York where he had given four lectures hoping to get
money for Dr. Brown. He had never lectured there before without
making a great deal of money. This time he barely covered
his expenses. He was very interesting and told J. the whole
story of his life. They sat until midnight after the lecture,
Mark drinking ale to make him sleepy. He says he can’t sleep
as other people do; his kind of sleep is the only sort for
him—three or four hours of good solid comfort—more than that
makes him ill; he can’t afford to sleep all his thoughts away.
He described the hunger of his childhood for books, how the
“Fortunes of Nigel” was one of the first stories which came to
him while he was learning to be a pilot on a Mississippi boat.
He hid himself with it behind a barrel where he was found by
the master, who read him a lecture upon the ruinous effects
of reading. “I’ve seen it over and over agin,” he said. “You
needn’t tell me anythin’ about it; if ye’re going to be a pilot
on this river yer needn’t ever think of reading, for it just
spiles all. Yer can’t remember how high the tides was in Can’s
Gut three trips before the last now, I’ll wager.” “Why no,”
said Mark, “that was six months ago.” “I don’t care if’t was,”
said the man. “If you hadn’t been spiling yer mind by readin’
ye’d have remembered.” So he was never allowed to read any
more after that. “And now,” says Mark, “not being able to have
it when I was hungry for it, I can only read the Encyclopedia
nowadays.” Which is not true—he reads everything.
The story of his courtship and marriage, too, was very strange
and interesting. A portion of this has, however, leaked into
the daily papers, so I will not repeat it here. One point
interested me greatly, however, as showing the strength of
character and rightness of vision in the man. He said he had
not been married many months when his wife’s father came to
him one evening and said, “My son, wouldn’t you like to go to
Europe with your wife?” “Why yes, sir,” he said, “if I could
afford it.” “Well then,” said he, “if you will leave off
smoking and drinking ale you shall have ten thousand dollars
this next year and go to Europe beside.” “Thank you, sir,”
said Mark, “this is very good of you, and I appreciate it,
but I can’t sell myself. I will do anything I can for you or
any of your family, but I can’t sell myself.” The result was,
said Mark, “I never smoked a cigar all that year nor drank a
glass of ale; but when the next year came I found I must write
a book, and when I sat down to write I found it wasn’t worth
anything. I must have a cigar to steady my nerves. I began
to smoke, and I wrote my book; but then I couldn’t sleep and
I had to drink ale to go to sleep. Now if I had sold myself,
I couldn’t have written my book, or I couldn’t have gone to
sleep, but now everything works perfectly well.”
He and his wife have wretched health, poor things! And in spite
of their beautiful home must often have rather a hard time. He
is very eccentric, disturbed by every noise, and it cannot be
altogether easy to have care of such a man. It is a very loving
household though Mrs. Clemens’s mother, Mrs. Langdon, hardly
knows what to make of him sometimes, it is quite evident.
_Thursday, April 27, 1876_.—We lunched and at 3 P.M. were
en route for Hartford. I slept, and read Mr. Tom Appleton’s
journal on the Nile, and looked out at the sunset and the
torches of spring in the hollows, each in turn, doing more
sleeping than either of the others, I fear, because I seem for
some unexplained reason to be tired, as Mrs. Hawthorne used
to say, far into the future. By giving up to it, however, I
felt quite fresh when we arrived, at half-past seven o’clock,
Mr. Clemens’ (Mark Twain’s) carriage waiting for us to take
us to the hall where he was to perform for the second night
in succession Peter Spyle in the “Loan of a Lover.” It is a
pretty play, and the girl’s part, Gertrude, was well done by
Miss Helen Smith; but Mr. Clemens’ part was a creation. I see
no reason why, if he chose to adopt the profession of actor,
he should not be as successful as Jefferson in whatever he
might conclude to undertake. It is really amazing to see what
a man of genius can do beside what is usually considered his
legitimate sphere.
[Illustration: _Facsimile verses and letter from Mark Twain to Fields_]
Afterward we went with Mr. Hammersley to the Club for a bit
of supper—this I did not wish to do, but I was overruled of
course by the decision of our host. We met at supper one of
the clever actors who played in a little operetta called “The
Artful Mendicants.” It was after twelve o’clock when we finally
reached Mr. Clemens’ house. He believed his wife would have
retired, as she is very delicate in health; but there she was
expecting us, with a pretty supper table laid. When her husband
discovered this, he fell down on his knees in mock desire for
forgiveness. His mind was so full of the play, and with the
poor figure he felt he had made in it, that he had entirely
forgotten all her directions and injunctions. She is a very
small, sweet-looking, simple, finished creature, charming in
her ways and evidently deeply beloved by him. The house is a
brick villa, designed by one of the first New York architects,
standing in a lovely lawn which slopes down to a small stream
or river at the side. In this spring season the blackbirds are
busy in the trees and the air is sweet and vocal. Inside there
is great luxury. Especially I delight in a lovely conservatory
opening out of the drawing-room.
Although we had already eaten supper, the gentlemen took a
glass of lager beer to keep Mrs. Clemens company while she ate
a bit of bread after her long anxiety and waiting. Meantime Mr.
Clemens talked. The quiet earnest manner of his speech would
be impossible to reproduce, but there is a drawl in his tone
peculiar to himself. Also he is much interested in actors and
the art of acting just now, and seriously talks of going to
Boston next week to the début of Anna Dickinson.
We were a tired company and went soon to bed and to sleep. I
slept late, but I found Mr. Clemens had been re-reading Dana’s
“Two Years before the Mast” in bed early and revolving subjects
for his “Autobiography.” Their two beautiful baby girls came
to pass an hour with us after breakfast—exquisite affectionate
children, the very fountain of joy to their interesting
parents....
Returning to lunch, I found our host and hostess and eldest
little girl in the drawing-room. We fell into talk of the
mishaps of the stage and the disadvantage of an amateur under
such circumstances. “For instance, on the first night of our
little play,” said Mr. Clemens, “the trousers of one of the
actors suddenly gave way entirely behind, which was very
distressing to him, though we did not observe it at all.”
I want to stop here to give a little idea of the appearance of
our host. He is forty years old, with some color in his cheeks
and a heavy light-colored moustache, and overhanging light
eyebrows. His eyes are grey and piercing, yet soft, and his
whole face expresses great sensitiveness. He is exquisitely
neat also, though careless, and his hands are small, not
without delicacy. He is a small man, but his mass of hair seems
the one rugged-looking thing about him. I thought in the play
last night that it was a wig.
To return to our lunch table—he proceeded to speak of his
“Autobiography,” which he intends to write as fully and simply
as possible to leave behind him. His wife laughingly said she
should look it over and leave out objectionable passages. “No,”
he said, very earnestly, almost sternly, “_you_ are not to edit
it—it is to appear as it is written, with the whole tale told
as truly as I can tell it. I shall take out passages from it,
and publish as I go along in the ‘Atlantic’ and elsewhere, but
I shall not limit myself as to space, and at whatever age I am
writing about, even if I am an infant, and an idea comes to me
about myself when I am forty, I shall put that in. Every man
feels that his experience is unlike that of anybody else, and
therefore he should write it down. He finds also that everybody
else has thought and felt on some points precisely as he has
done, and therefore he should write it down.”
The talk naturally branched to education, and thence to the
country. He has lost all faith in our government. This wicked
ungodly suffrage, he said, where the vote of a man who knew
nothing was as good as the vote of a man of education and
industry; this endeavor to equalize what God had made unequal
was a wrong and a shame. He only hoped to live long enough to
see such a wrong and such a government overthrown. Last summer
he wrote an article for the “Atlantic,” printed without any
signature, proposing the only solution of such evil of which
he could conceive. “It is too late now,” he continued, “to
restrict the suffrage; we must increase it—for this let us give
every university man, let us say, ten votes, and every man with
common-school education two votes, and a man of superior power
and position a hundred votes, if we choose. This is the only
way I see to get out of the false position into which we have
fallen.”
At five, the hour appointed for dinner, I returned to the
drawing-room where our host lay at full length on the floor
with his head on cushions in the bay-window, reading, and
taking what he called “delicious comfort.” Mrs. Perkins came in
to dinner, and we had a cosy good time. Mr. Clemens described
the preaching of a Western clergyman, a great favorite, with
the smallest possible allowance of idea to the largest possible
amount of words. It was so truthfully and vividly portrayed
that we all concluded, perhaps, since the man was in such
earnest, he moved his audience more than if he had troubled
them with too many ideas. This truthfulness of Mr. Clemens,
which will hardly allow him to portray anything in a way to
make out a case by exaggerating or distorting a truth, is a
wondrous and noble quality. This makes art and makes life, and
will continue to make him a daily increasing power among us.
He is so unhappy and discontented with our government that he
says he is not conscious of the least emotion of patriotism
in himself. He is overwhelmed with shame and confusion and
wishes he were not an American. He thinks seriously of going
to England to live for a while, at least, and I think it not
unlikely he may discover away from home a love of his country
which is still waiting to be unfolded. I believe hope must
dawn for us, that so much earnest endeavor of our statesmen
and patriots cannot come to naught; and perhaps the very idea
he has dropped, never believing that it can bring forth fruit,
will be adopted in the end for our salvation. Certainly women’s
suffrage and such a change as he proposes should be tried,
since we cannot keep the untenable ground of the present....
It is most curious and interesting to watch this growing man
of forty—to see how he studies and how high his aims are. His
conversation is always earnest and careful, though full of
fun. He is just now pondering much upon actors and their ways.
Raymond, who is doing the “Gilded Age,” is so hopelessly given
“to saving at the spigot and losing at the bung-hole” that he
is evidently not over-satisfied nor does he count the acting
everything it might be.
We sat talking, chiefly we women, after dinner and looking at
the sunset. Mr. Clemens lay down with a book and J. went to
look over his lecture. I did not go to lecture, but after all
were gone I scribbled away at these pages and nearly finished
Mr. Appleton’s “Nile Journal.” They returned rather late,
it was after ten, bearing a box of delicious strawberries,
Mrs. Colt’s gift from her endless greenhouses. They were
a sensation; the whole of summer was foreshadowed by their
scarlet globes. Some beer was brought for Mr. Clemens (who
drinks nothing else, and as he eats but little this seems to
answer the double end of nourishment and soothing for the
nerves) and he began again to talk. He said it was astonishing
what subjects were missed by the Poet Laureate. He thought
the finest incident of the Crimean War had been certainly
overlooked. That was the going down at sea of the man of
war, Berkeley Castle. The ship with a whole regiment, one of
the finest of the English army, on board, struck a rock near
the Bosphorus. There was no help—the bottom was out and the
boats would only hold the crew and the other helpless ones;
there was no chance for the soldiers. The Colonel summoned
them on deck; he told them the duty of soldiers was to die;
they would do their duty as bravely there as if they were on
the battle-field. He bade them shoulder arms and prepare for
action. The drums beat, flags were flying, the service playing,
as they all went down to silent death in the great deep.
Afterward Mr. Clemens described to us the reappearance before
his congregation of an old clergyman who had been incapacitated
for work during twelve years—coming suddenly into the pulpit
just as the first hymn was ended. The younger pastor proposed
they should sing the old man’s favorite, “Coronation,”
_omitting_ the first verse. He heard nothing of the omission,
but beginning at the first verse he sang in a cracked treble
the remaining stanza after all the people were still. There
was a mingling of the comic and pathetic in this incident which
made it consonant with the genius of our host. Our dear little
hostess complained of want of air, and I saw she was very
tired, so we all went to bed about eleven.
_Saturday morning._—Dear J. was up early and out in the
beautiful sunshine. I read and scribbled until breakfast at
half-past nine. It was a lovely morning, and I had already
ventured out of my window and round the house to hear the
birds sing and see the face of spring before the hour came for
breakfast. When I did go to the drawing-room, however, I found
Mr. Clemens alone. He greeted me apparently as cheerfully as
ever, and it was not until some moments had passed that he told
me they had a very sick child upstairs. From that instant I
saw, especially after his wife came in, that they could think
of nothing else. They were half-distracted with anxiety. Their
messenger could not find the doctor, which made matters worse.
However, the little girl did not really seem very sick, so I
could not help thinking they were unnecessarily excited. The
effect on them, however, was just as bad as if the child were
really very ill. The messenger was hardly despatched the second
time before Jamie and Mr. Clemens began to talk of our getting
away in the next train, whereat he (Mr. C.) said to his wife,
“Why didn’t you tell me of that,” etc., etc. It was all over
in a moment, but in his excitement he spoke more quickly than
he knew, and his wife felt it. Nothing was said at the time,
indeed we hardly observed it, but we were intensely amused and
could not help finding it pathetic too afterward, when he came
to us and said he spent the larger part of his life on his
knees making apologies and now he had got to make an apology
to us about the carriage. He was always bringing the blood to
his wife’s face by his bad behavior, and here this very morning
he had said such things about that carriage! His whole life
was one long apology. His wife had told him to see how well we
behaved (poor we!) and he knew he had everything to learn.
He was so amusing about it that he left us in a storm of
laughter, yet at bottom I could see it was no laughing matter
to him. He is in dead earnest, with a desire for growth
and truth in life, and with such a sincere admiration for
his wife’s sweetness and beauty of character that the most
prejudiced and hardest heart could not fail to fall in love
with him. She looked like an exquisite lily as we left her.
So white and delicate and tender. Such sensitiveness and
self-control as she possesses are very, very rare.
_May Day._—Longfellow, Greene, Alexander Agassiz and Dr. Holmes
dined with us. This made summer, Longfellow said at table—that
this was May Day enough, it was no matter how cold it was
outside. (The wind outside had been raging all day and winter
seemed to be giving us a last fling.) Jamie recalled one or
two things “Mark Twain” had said which I have omitted. When
he lectured a few weeks ago in New York, he said he had just
reached the middle of his lecture and was going on with flying
colors when he saw in the audience just in front of him a noble
gray head and beard. “Nobody told me that William Cullen
Bryant was there, but I had seen his picture and I knew that
was the old man. I was sure he saw the failure I was making,
and all the weak points in what I was saying, and I couldn’t do
anything more—that old man just spoiled my work. Then they told
me afterward that my lecture was good and all that; I could
only say, ‘no, no, that fine old head spoiled all I had to say
_that_ night.’”
Longfellow was quite like himself again, but the talk was
mainly sustained by Dr. Holmes and Mr. Agassiz. When Dr. Holmes
first came in he looked earnestly at the portrait of Sydney
Smith. “It reminds me of our famous story-teller, Sullivan,”
he said; “it is full of epicureanism. _The mouth is made for
kisses and canvas-backs._” Later on in the dinner, when Mr.
Agassiz was describing the fatigue he suffered after talking
Spanish all day while he still understood the language very
imperfectly, “Why,” said Holmes, “it’s like playing the piano
with mittens on.”
There was something pathetic in the fact of this young man
sitting here among his father’s friends, almost in the very
place his father had filled so many times—but his speech
was manly and wise, from a full brain. They talked of the
spectroscope as on the whole the most important discovery
the world had known. “Well, what is it?” said Longfellow.
“Explain it to us.” (I was glad enough to have him ask.)
Agassiz explained quite clearly that it was an instrument to
discover the elements which compose the sun, and proceeded
to unfold its working in some detail. Two men made the
discovery simultaneously, one in India and one in England.
This spectroscope has been infinitely improved, however, by
every living mind brought to bear upon it, almost, since its
first so-called discovery. It is so difficult, Dr. H. said,
to tell where an invention began; you could go back until it
seemed that no man that ever lived really did it—like some
verses, whereupon one of Gray’s was given as an example. The
talk turned somewhat upon the manner of putting things, the
English manner being so poor and inexpressive compared with the
southern natures—the French being the masters of expression.
Longfellow gave a delightful account of the old artist and
spiritualist, Kirkup, the discoverer of the Dante portrait,
though Greene undertook to say that a certain Wilde was the
man. I never heard anybody else have the credit but Kirkup, and
certainly England believes it was he.
I think they all had “a good time”; I am sure I did.
[Illustration: CHARLES SUMNER]
As Mark Twain, in the preceding pages may be said to have led the reader
back into the Boston and Cambridge circle, so there were constant
excursions of interest from that circle out into the world in which such
a man as Sumner stood as the friend of such another as Longfellow. For
twenty-three years, from 1851 till his death in 1874, Sumner was a member
of the United States Senate, and consequently was much more to be seen
in Washington than in the State he represented. He appears from time to
time in the pages of Mrs. Fields’s diary, and in the two ensuing passages
figures first at her Boston dinner-table and then in Washington:
_Saturday, November 18, 1865._—Last night Miss Kate Field
and Charles Sumner dined with us. Before we went to dinner
Charlotte Foster, the young colored girl whom Elizabeth
Whittier was so fond of and who is now secretary of the
Freedmen’s Bureau, came in to call. She is very pretty
and good. It is difficult nevertheless for her to find a
boarding-place. People do not readily admit a colored woman
into their families. I shall help her to find a good home....
Mr. Sumner opened the conversation at dinner by asking Miss
Field to tell him something of Mr. Landor. She, smiling, said
that was difficult now because she had talked and written so
much of him that she hardly knew what was left unsaid. Mr.
Sumner described his own first introduction then at the house
of his old friend, Mr. Kenyon, in London. He had dropped in
there by accident, but was positively engaged elsewhere at
dinner; before he left, however, he was able to parry skilfully
a remark aimed at the Yankees, which tickled Mr. Landor and
made him try to hold on and induce him to stay. He was obliged
to go then, however, but he returned a few days after to
breakfast, when Landor asked him why the body of Washington
did not rest in the Capitol at Washington. “Because,” said Mr.
Sumner, “his family wished his ashes to remain at Mt. Vernon.”
“Ashes,” said L., “his body was not burned; why do you say
‘ashes,’ sir?” “I quoted, ‘E’en in our ashes live their wonted
fires,’ and he said nothing more at the time, but,” added Mr.
Sumner, “I have never used ‘ashes’ since.”
Kate Field said “his wife was a perfect fiend”; but Mr. Sumner
was inclined to doubt the statement. “These marriages with men
of genius are hard,” he said, “because genius wins the race in
the end.”
Then Kate brought the authority of Mr. Browning and others to
back her statement, but, referring to Mr. Landor’s temper, she
said that while the Storys were at Siena passing the summer one
year, the Brownings took a villa near by and Mr. Landor lived
opposite, while she and Miss Isa Blagden went down to make the
Brownings a visit. During their stay Mr. Landor fancied that
the stock of tea lately purchased for his use was poisoned,
and threw it all out of the window. The Contadine reaped the
benefit of this; they came and gathered it up like a flock of
doves.
Mr. Sumner spoke of the high, very high place he accorded to
Mr. Landor as a writer of prose. He had been a source of great
admiration to him for years, he said. As long ago as when G.
W. Greene was living in Rome and first becoming a writer,
he asked Mr. Sumner what masters of prose he should study.
“Then,” said Mr. S., “you remember his own style was bad; the
sentences apt to be jumbled up together. I told him to read
Bacon, and Hooker, and all the prose of Dryden he could find
in the prefaces and elsewhere, and Walter Savage Landor; and
my reverence for Mr. Landor as a writer of prose has never
diminished.”