where some household necessity must be bought, or some visit is to be
paid. If a stroll is the order of the day, it will be either across
the fields to a hill-top near by, from which a wonderful view of the
island and the bay is to be had, or along the country road, past the
schoolhouse, and towards Mrs. Howe’s old home, Lawton’s Valley. In
these sunset rambles, Mrs. Howe is very sure to be accompanied by one
or more of her grandchildren, four of whom, with their mother, Mrs.
Hall, pass the summers at Oak Glen. She finds the children excellent
company, and they look forward to the romp which follows the twilight
stroll as the greatest delight of the day. The romp takes place in the
drawing-room, where the rugs are rolled up, and the furniture moved
back against the wall, leaving the wooden floor bare for the dancing
and prancing of the little feet. Mrs. Howe takes her place at the
piano, strikes the chords of an exhilarating Irish jig, and the little
company, sometimes enlarged by a contingent of the Richards cousins
from Maine, dance and jig about with all the grace and _abandon_ of
childhood. After supper, when the children are at last quiet and tucked
up in their little beds, there is more music--either with the piano, in
the drawing-room, or, if it is a warm night, on the piazza, with the
guitar. As the evenings grow longer, in the late summer and autumn,
there is much reading aloud, but only from novels of the most amusing,
sensational or romantic description. None others are admitted; after
the long day of work and study, relaxation and diversion are the two
things needed. I have observed that with most hard literary workers and
speculative thinkers, this class of novel is most in demand. The more
intellectual romances are greedily devoured by people whose customary
occupations lead them into the realm of actualities, and whose working
hours are devoted to some practical business.
Last year Mrs. Howe had at heart the revival of the Town and Country
Club, of which she is the originator and President, and which in 1886
had omitted its meetings. These meetings, which take place fortnightly
during the season, are held at the houses of different members, and
are both social and intellectual in character. The substantial part
of the feast is served first, in the form of a lecture or paper from
some distinguished person, after which there are refreshments, and talk
of an informal character. Among others who in past seasons have read
before the Club are Bret Harte, Prof. Agassiz, the Rev. Edward Everett
Hale, the late Wm. B. Rogers, Mark Twain, Charles Godfrey Leland (“Hans
Breitmann”), and the Rev. Drs. James Freeman Clarke, Frederic H. Hedge
and George Ellis.
Mrs. Howe’s work for the summer of 1887 included a paper on a subject
connected with the Greek drama, to be read at the Concord School of
Philosophy, and an essay for the Woman’s Congress which was held in the
early fall. She is much interested in the arts and industries of women,
and in connection with these maintains a wide correspondence. But it is
not all work and no play, even at such a busy place as Oak Glen. There
are whole days of delightful leisure. Sometimes these are spent on the
water on board of some friend’s yacht; or a less pretentious catboat
is chartered, which conveys Mrs. Howe and her guests to Conanicut, or
to Jamestown, where the day is spent beside the waves. Last summer a
beautiful schooner yacht was lent to Mrs. Howe for ten days, and a
glorious cruise was made, under the most smiling of summer skies. A day
on the water is the thing that is most highly enjoyed by the denizens
of Oak Glen; but there are other days hardly less delightful, spent in
some out-of-the-way rural spot, where picnics are not forbidden, though
these, alas! are becoming rare, since the churlish notice was posted
up at Glen Anna, forbidding all trespassing on these grounds, which,
time out of mind, have been free to all who loved them. There are still
the Paradise Rocks, near the house of Edwin Booth, and thither an
expedition is occasionally made.
Country life is not without its drawbacks and troubles; but these are
not so very heavy after all, compared with some of the tribulations of
the city, or of those who place themselves at the mercy of summer hotel
keepers and boarding-house ladies. The old white pony, Mingo, _will_
get into the vegetable garden occasionally, and eat off the heads of
the asparagus, and trample down the young corn; the neighbor’s pig
sometimes gets through the weak place in the wall, with all her pinky
progeny behind her, and takes possession of the very best flower-bed;
the honeysuckle vine does need training; and the grapes will not ripen
as well as they would have done, if the new trellis projected recently
had been set up. But after all, taking into consideration the fact
that Io, the Jersey cow, is giving ten quarts of rich milk a day, and
that the new cook has mastered the simplest and most delightful of
dishes--Newport corn-meal flap-jacks,--Mrs. Howe’s life at Oak Glen
is as peaceful and happy an existence as one is apt to find in these
nihilistic days of striking hotel waiters and crowded summer resorts.
Beautiful as Newport is in these soft days of early summer, it is even
lovelier in the autumn, and every year it is harder to leave Oak Glen,
to give up the wide arc of the heavens, and to look up into God’s sky,
between the two lines of brick houses of a city street. Each winter
the place at Newport is kept open a little longer, and it is only the
closing days of November that find Mrs. Howe established in her house
in Boston. Beacon Street, with its smooth macadamized roadway, whereon
there is much pleasure driving, and in the winter a perfect sleighing
carnival, is as pleasant a street as it is possible to live on, but a
country road is always a better situation than a city street, and a
forest path perhaps is best of all. When she is once settled in her
Boston home, the manifold interests of the complex city life claim
every hour in the day. Her remarkable powers of endurance, her splendid
enjoyment of life and health make her winters as full of pleasure
as the more peaceful summer-tide. It is a very different life from
that led at Oak Glen; it has an endless variety of interests, social,
private, public, charitable, philanthropic, musical, artistic, and
intellectual. A half-dozen clubs and associations of women in the city
and its near vicinity, which owe their existence in large part to Mrs.
Howe’s efforts, claim her presence in their midst at least once in
every year.
Among the public occasions which have held the greatest interest for
Mrs. Howe of late years was the dedication of the new Kindergarten for
the Blind in 1887, at which she read one of her happiest “occasional
poems.” The authors’ reading in aid of the Longfellow memorial fund,
at the Boston Museum, where, before an audience the like of which had
never before been seen in the theatre, she read a poem in memory of
Longfellow, was an occasion which will not soon be forgotten by those
who were present. Mrs. Howe was the only woman who took part in the
proceedings, the other authors who read from their own works being Dr.
Holmes, Mr. Lowell, Mark Twain, Colonel Higginson, Prof. Norton, Mr.
E. E. Hale, Mr. Aldrich and Mr. Howells. Mrs. Howe has spoken several
times at the Nineteenth Century Club, and she is always glad to revisit
New York, for though she is often thought to be a Bostonian, she never
forgets that the first twenty years of her life were passed in New
York, the city of her birth.
MAUD HOWE.
[Illustration]
MR. HOWELLS
MR. HOWELLS
IN BEACON STREET, BOSTON
If any one wants to live in a city street, I do not see how he can well
find a pleasanter one than Beacon Street, Boston. Its older houses come
down Beacon Hill, past the Common and the Public Garden, in single
file, like quaint Continentals on parade, who, being few, have to make
the most of themselves. Then it forms in double file again and goes
on a long way, out toward the distant Brookline hills, which close
in the view. Howells’s number is 302. In this Back Bay district of
made ground, the favored West End of the newer city, you cannot help
wondering how it is that all about you is in so much better taste than
in New York--so much handsomer, neater, more homelike and engaging than
our shabby Fifth Avenue. Beacon Street is stately; so is Marlborough
Street, that runs next parallel to it; and even more so is Commonwealth
Avenue--with its lines of trees down the centre, like a Paris
boulevard,--next beyond it. The eye traverses long fretworks of good
architectural design, and there is no feature to jar upon the quiet
elegance and respectability. The houses seem like those of people in
some such prosperous foreign towns as the newer Liverpool, Düsseldorf
or Louvain. The comfortable horizontal line prevails. There are green
front doors, and red brick, and brass knockers. A common pattern of
approach is to have a step or two outside, and a few more within the
vestibule. That abomination, the ladder-like “high stoop” of New York,
seems unknown.
These are the scenes amid which Mr. Howells takes his walks abroad.
From his front windows he may see the upper-class types about which he
has written--the Boston girl, “with something of the nice young fellow
about her,” the Chance Acquaintance, with his eye-glass, the thin,
elderly, patrician Coreys, the blooming, philanthropic Miss Kingsbury.
The fictitious Silas Lapham built in this same quarter the mansion
with which he was to consolidate his social aspirations. Perhaps some
may have thought it identical with that of Howells, so close are the
sites, and so feelingly does the author speak--as if from personal
experience--of dealings with an architect, and the like. But Howells’s
abode does not savor of the architect, nor of the mansion. It is a
builder’s house, though even the builder, in Boston, does not rid
himself of the general tradition of comfort and solidity. Dr. Oliver
Wendell Holmes lived in a house but little different, two doors above.
That of Howells is plain and wide, of red brick, three stories and
mansard roof, with a long iron balcony under the parlor windows. Its
chief adornment is a vine of Japanese ivy, which climbs half the entire
height of the façade. The singular thing about this vine is, that it is
not planted in his own ground, but a section in that of his neighbor
on each side. It charmingly drapes his wall, while growing but thinly
on theirs, and forms a clear case of “natural selection” which might
properly almost render its owners discontented enough to cut it down.
The leaves, as I saw them, touched by the autumn, glowed with crimson
like sumac. The house is approached by steps of easy grade. There is
a little reception-room at the left of the hall, and the dining-room
is on the same floor. You mount a flight of stairs, and come to the
library and study, at the back, and the parlor in front.
_Vlan!_ as the French have it--what a flood of light in this study! The
shades of the three wide windows are drawn up to the very top; it is
like being at the seaside; there are no owlish habits about a writer
who can stand this. It is, in fact, the seaside, so why should it not
seem like it? The bold waters of the Back Bay, a wide basin of the
Charles River, dash up to the very verge of the small dooryard, in
which the clothes hang out to dry. It looks as if they might some day
take a notion to come in and call on the cook in the kitchen, or even
lift up the whole establishment bodily, and land it on some new Ararat.
This stretch of water is thought to resemble the canal of the Guidecca,
at Venice; Henry James, with others, has certified to the view as
Venetian. You take the Cambridge gas-works for Palladio’s domes, and
Bunker Hill Monument, which is really more like a shot-tower, for a
_campanile_; and then, at sunset, when the distant buildings are black
upon the glowing, ruddy sky, the analogy is not so very remote. All
the buildings on this new-made land are set upon piles, and the tides,
in a measure, flow under them twice a day. It was a serious question
at the beginning, whether there should not be canals here instead of
streets; but, considering that the canals would be frozen up a large
part of the year, the verdict was against them. I am rather sorry for
this: it would have been interesting to see what kind of gondoliers the
Boston hackmen and car-drivers would have made. Would they have worn
uniforms? Would they have sung, to avoid collisions, in rounding the
corners of Exeter and Fairfield streets? Ah me! for those plaintive
ballads that might have been? It would have been interesting to
see the congregation of Phillips Brooks’s church--the much-vaunted
Trinity--going to service by water, and the visitors to the Art Museum,
and the students to the Institute of Technology. All these are but
a stone’s-throw from Howells. Howells may congratulate himself on a
greater solidity for his share of the land than most, for fifty years
ago, when there were tide-mills in this neighborhood, it was the site
of a toll-house. _Terra firma_, all about him, has an antiquity of but
from twelve to twenty years. His house is perhaps a dozen years old,
and he has owned it but four.
Ste. Beuve, the most felicitous of critics, wishes to know a man in
order to understand his work. I hardly think the demand a fair one;
there ought to be enough in every piece of good work to stand for
itself, and its maker ought to have the right to be judged at the level
that the work represents, rather than in his personal situation, which
may often be even mean or ridiculous. Nevertheless, if it be desired,
I know of no one more capable of standing the test than William Dean
Howells. Perhaps I incline to a certain friendly bias--though possibly
even a little extreme in this may be pardoned, for surely no one is
more unreasonably carped at than he nowadays,--but he impresses me as
corresponding to the ideal of what greatness ought to be; how it ought
to look and act. He not only is, but appears, really great. In the
personal conduct of his life, too, he confirms what is best in his
books. Thus, there are no obscurities to be cleared up; no stories to
be heard of egotism, selfishness or greed towards his contemporaries;
there is nothing to be passed over in discreet silence. He has an
open and generous nature, the most polished yet unassuming manners,
and an impressive presence, which is deprived of anything formidable
by a rare geniality. In looks, he is about the middle height, rather
square built, with a fine, Napoleonic head, which seems capable of
containing any thing. I have seen none of his many portraits that does
him justice. Few men with his opportunities have done so much, or been
so quick to recognize original merit and struggling aspiration. There
is no trace in him of uneasiness at the success of others, of envy
towards rivals--though, indeed, it would be hard to say, from the very
beginning of his career, where any rivals in his own peculiar vein
were to be found. Such a largeness of conduct is surely one of the
indications of genius, a part of the serene calm which is content to
wait for its own triumph and forbear push or artifice to hasten it.
To write of Howells “at home” seems to write particularly of Howells.
There is a great deal of the homely and the home-keeping feeling in
his books, which has had to do with making him the chosen novelist of
the intelligent masses. To one who knows this and his personal habits,
it would not seem most proper to look for him in courts or camps, in
lively clubs, at dinners, on the rostrum, or in any of the noisier
assemblages of men. (Even in his journeyings, in those charming books,
“Venetian Life” and “Florentine Mosaics,” he is a saunterer and gentle
satirist, without the fire and zeal of the genuine traveler.) All these
he enjoys, no one more so, at the proper time and occasion, but one
would seek him most naturally in the quiet of his domestic circle. And
even there the most fitting place seems yonder desk, where the work
awaits him over which but now his thoughtful brow was bending. He is a
novelist for the genuine love of it, and not in the way of arrogance
or parade, nor even for its rewards, substantial for him though they
are. One would say that the greatest of his pleasures was to follow,
through all their ramifications, the problems of life and character he
sets himself to study. In a talk I had with him some time ago, he said,
incidentally: “Supposing there were a fire in the street, the people in
the houses would run out in terror or amazement. All finer shades of
character would be lost; they would be merged, for the nonce, in the
common animal impulse. No; to truly study character, you must study
men in the lesser and more ordinary circumstances of their lives; then
it is displayed untrammeled.”
This may almost serve as a brief statement of his theory in literature,
which has been the cause, of late, of such heated discussion in two
hemispheres. And if a man is to be judged by the circumstances of his
daily life, surely it is no more than fair to apply the method to its
advocate himself. There is nothing cobwebby, no dust of antiquity,
nor medievalism, in this study and library; it is almost as modern in
effect as Silas Lapham’s famous warehouse of mineral paints. Howells
has “let the dead past bury its dead”; he is intensely concerned with
the present and the future. The strong light from the windows shows in
the cases only a random series of books in ephemeral-looking bindings.
There are Baedecker’s guides, dictionaries, pamphlets, and current
fiction. The only semblance of a “collection” in which he indulges is
some literature of foreign languages, which he uses as his tools. He
has done lately the great service of introducing to us many of the
masterpieces of modern Italian and Spanish fiction, in his Editor’s
Study in _Harper’s Magazine_ also. He was long preparing, and has
lately published, a series of papers on the modern Italian poets.
He cares nothing for bindings, or the rarities of the bibliophile’s
art. The only feeling he is heard to express toward books, as such,
is that he does not like to see even the humblest of them abused. In
his house you find no noticeable blue china or Chippendale, no trace
of the bric-à-brac enthusiasm, of which we had occasion to speak at
the home of Aldrich. In his parlor are tables and chairs, perfectly
proper and comfortable, but worthy of no attention in themselves.
On the walls are some few old paintings from Florence, a pleasing
photograph or two, an original water-color by Fortuny, which has a
little history, and an engraving after Alma Tadema, presented by the
painter to the author. These are a concession to the fine arts, not a
surrender to them. Perhaps we may connect this as an indication with
the strong moral purpose of his books, his resolute refusal to postpone
the essential and earnest in conduct to the soft and decorative. He
proposes, at times, as the worldly will have it, ideals that seem
almost fantastically impracticable.
I am speaking too much, perhaps, of this latest home, occupied for
so brief a time. It is not the only one in which he has ever dwelt.
Howells was born in Ohio in 1837. He was the son of a country editor.
He saw many hardships in those days, but there was influence enough to
have him appointed consul to Venice, under Lincoln. He married, while
still consul, a lady of a prominent Vermont Family. The newspapers
will have it from time to time that Mrs. Howells is a great critic
of and assistant in his works. I shall only say of this, that she is
of an agreeable character, and an intelligence and animation that
seem fully capable of it. On returning to this country he took up his
residence for a while in New York, and brightened the columns of _The
Nation_ with some of its earliest literary contributions. He had for
some time written poems. These attracted the attention of Lowell, who
was editor of _The Atlantic_. He became Mr. Field’s assistant in 1866,
when the latter assumed the editorship, and in 1872 succeeded to the
chief place, in which he continued till 1881, when he resigned it to be
followed by Aldrich. During this time of editorship, he lived mainly at
Cambridge, first in a small house he purchased on Sacramento Street,
and later, for some years, in one on Concord Avenue, which he built and
still owns. This latter was a pleasant, serviceable cottage, a good
place to work, but with nothing particularly striking about it. It was
there I first saw him, having brought him, with due fear and awe, my
first novel, “Detmold.” But how little reason for awe it proved there
really was! Nobody was ever more courteous, unaffected and reassuring
than he. I remember we took a short walk afterwards, a part of my way
homeward. He pretended, as we reached Harvard College, that it would
not be safe for me to entertain any opinions differing from his own, on
the mooted question of the heavy roof of the new Memorial Hall, since
the fate of my manuscript was in his dictatorial hands!
From Cambridge he removed to the pretty suburb of Belmont, some five
miles out of Boston, to a house built for him by Mr. Charles Fairchild,
on that gentleman’s own estate. This house, called Red Top, from its
red roof and the red timothy grass in the neighborhood, was described
and pictured some years ago in _Harper’s Magazine_, in Mr. Lathrop’s
article on Literary and Social Boston. As I recollect it, this was the
most elaborate of his several abodes. There were carried out many of
the luxurious decorative features so essential according to the modern
ideal. He had a study done in white in the colonial taste, and a square
entrance-hall with benches and fire-place; but I fancy, even here, he
enjoyed most the wide view from his windows, and his walks in the hilly
country. It was the eye of the imagination rather than of the body that
with him most sought gratification. He lived on the hillside at Belmont
four years. His moving away from there about coincides with the time
of his giving up the editing of _The Atlantic_. He went abroad with
his family, remained a year, and then returned to Boston. It will be
seen that he has not shown much more than the usual American fixity of
residence, and perhaps we need not despair of his finally coming to New
York, to which many of his later interests would seem to call him.
With his retirement from the burden of editing begins, as many think, a
new and larger period in his literary work. I am not to touch upon his
original theories of literary art, or to interpret the much talked-of
_mot_ on Dickens and Thackeray. As to the latter, I know that so
magnanimous and appreciative a nature as his could never have really
intended to cast a slur upon exalted merit. He has an intense delight
in human life, as it is lived, and not as represented by historians or
antiquarians, or colored by conventional or academic tradition of any
kind. He is still so young a man and so powerful a genius that it may
well be a yet grander period is opening before him. For my own part, I
never quite get over the liking for the “Robinson Crusoe” touch, the
“once upon a time,” the poem, as it were, in the fiction I read, and
I think shall continue to like best of his stories “The Undiscovered
Country,” in which the feeling of romance--together with all the
reality of life--most prevails. However this may be, I cannot always
repress a certain impatience that there should be any who fail to see
his extraordinary ability; it seems to me it can only be because there
is some veil before their eyes, because they have not put themselves in
the way of taking the right point of view. Whether we like it best of
all fiction or not, where are we to find another who works with such
power? Where, if we deny him the first place, zealously look up all his
defects, and take issue with him on a dozen minor points, are we to
find another so original and creative a writer?