and with painstaking. After that he devotes himself to his family, to
whom he is greatly attached, and of whom he is justly proud. Besides
a son, who is to be an architect, there is a daughter, who inclines
to the literary taste; and another, a sweet-faced little maid, known
to fame through the publication of a series of her remarkable, naïve,
childish drawings, in the volume entitled “A Little Girl Among the Old
Masters.” Their father is not a voluble talker; he does not aspire to
shine; there is little that is Macaulayish, there are few _tours de
force_ in his conversation. On the other hand, he has what some one
has described as the dangerous trait of being an excellent listener.
It might be said of him, as it was of Mme. Récamier, that he listens
with _séduction_. He is not bent upon displaying his own resources,
but possibly upon penetrating the mind and heart before him. Perhaps
this is the natural, receptive mood of the true student of character.
And then it is all so gracefully done, with such a sympathy and tact,
that when, afterwards, you come to reflect that you have been talking
a great deal too much for your own good, there comes, too, with the
flush, the reassuring fancy that perhaps, after all, you have done it
pretty well. His own conversation I should call marked by sincerity of
statement and earnestness in speculation, at the same time that it is
brightened by the most genial play of humor. His humor warms like the
sunshine; we all know how steely cold may be the brilliancy of mere
wit. He is a humorist, I sometimes think, almost before everything
else. He takes to the humorists (even those of the broader kind) with
a kindred feeling. Both Mark Twain and Warner have been his intimate
friends. He wanted to know Stockton and Gilbert before he had met
them. In this connection, I may close, apropos of him, with one of the
slighter _bons mots_ of Gilbert. On the first visit of that celebrity
to this country, in company with his collaborator, Sullivan, he chanced
to ask me something about the works of Howells. In reply, I mentioned
among others “Their Wedding Journey”--a book that every young couple
put into their baggage when starting off on the tour. “Sullivan and I
are not such a very young couple,” returned Gilbert, “but I think we’ll
have to put one into our baggage, too.”
WILLIAM HENRY BISHOP.
[Mr. Howells now lives in apartments in New York, where he is editor
of “The Easy Chair” in _Harper’s Monthly_ and a contributor to various
magazines.--EDITORS.]
CHARLES GODFREY LELAND
CHARLES GODFREY LELAND
IN PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON
To describe the home of a homeless man is not over easy. For the last
sixteen or eighteen years Mr. Leland has been as great a wanderer as
the gypsies of whom he loves to write. During this time he has pitched
his tent, so to speak, in many parts of America and Europe and even of
the East. He has gone from town to town and from country to country,
staying here a month and there a year, and again in some places, as
in London and Philadelphia, he has remained several years. But, as he
himself graphically says, it is long since he has not had trunks in his
bedroom.
However, if to possess a house is to have a home, then Mr.
Leland must not be said to be homeless. He owns a three-storied,
white-and-green-shuttered, red-brick house with marble steps, of that
conventional type which is so peculiarly a feature of Philadelphia--his
native town. It is in Locust Street above Fifteenth--one of the
eminently respectable and convenient neighborhoods for which
Philadelphia is famous, with St. Mark’s Church near at hand and a
public school not far off. But besides this respectability which
Philadelphians in general hold so dear, Locust Street boasts of another
advantage of far more importance to Mr. Leland in particular. Just
here it is without the horse-car track which stretches from one end
to the other of almost all Philadelphia streets, and hence it is a
pleasant, quiet quarter for a literary man. Here Mr. Leland lived
for just six months, surrounded by all sorts of quaint ornaments and
oddities (though it was then years before the mania for bric-à-brac had
set in), and by his books, these including numbers of rare and racy
volumes from which he has borrowed so many of the quotations which
give an Old World color and piquancy to his writings. It was while he
was living in his Locust Street home that his health broke down. His
illness was the result of long, almost uninterrupted newspaper work.
He had worked on the _Bulletin_ and on New York and Boston papers,
and he had edited _Vanity Fair_, _The Continental Monthly_, _Grahams
Magazine_ and Forney’s _Press_. In addition to this regular work, he
had found time to translate Heine, to write his “Sunshine in Thought,”
his “Meister Karl’s Sketch-book,” and his “Breitmann Ballads,” which
had made him known throughout the English-speaking world as one of the
first living English humorists. But now he was obliged to give up all
literary employments, and, having inherited an independent fortune from
his father, he was able to shut up his house and go on a pleasure-trip
to Europe, where he began the wanderings which have not yet ceased.
Nowadays, therefore, one might well ask, “Where is his home?--in a
Philadelphia hotel or lodgings, or at the Langham, in London--in a
gypsy tent, or in an Indian wigwam?--on the road, or in the town?” But,
_ubi bene, ibi patria_; where a man is happy, there is his country; and
his home too, for that matter; and Mr. Leland, if he has his work, is
happy in all places and at all times; and furthermore, ever since his
health was re-established, he has found or made work where-ever he has
been. He is a man who is never idle for a minute, and he counts as the
best and most important work of his life that which has occupied him
during the last few years. Consequently, paradoxical as it may sound,
even in his wanderings he has always been at home. During the eleven
years he remained abroad he lived in so many different places it would
be impossible to enumerate them all. He spent a winter in Russia;
another in Egypt; he summered on the Continent, and in the pretty
villages or gay seashore towns of England. At times his principal
headquarters were in London, now at the Langham and now at Park Square.
It was at this latter residence that he gave Saturday afternoon
receptions, at which one was sure to meet the most eminent men and
women of the literary and artistic world of London, and which will not
soon be forgotten by those who had the pleasure to be bidden to them.
The first part of his last book about the gypsies is a pleasant, but
still imperfect, guide to his wanderings of this period. There, in one
paper, we find him spending charming evenings with the fair Russian
gypsies in St. Petersburg; in another, giving greeting to the Hungarian
Romanies who played their wild _czardas_ at the Paris Exposition. Or we
can follow his peaceful strolls through the English meadows and lanes
near Oatlands Park, or his adventures with his not over-respectable but
very attractive friends at the Hampton races. One gypsy episode carries
him to Aberistwyth, a second to Brighton, a third to London streets or
his London study. Thus he tells the tale, as no one else could, of his
life on the road.
In December, 1878, he returned to Philadelphia, where he established
himself in large and pleasant rooms in Broad Street, not knowing
how long he might stay in America, and unwilling, because of this
uncertainty, to settle down in his own house. He lived there, however,
for four years and a half, travelling but little save in the summer,
when, to escape from the burning brick-oven which Philadelphia becomes
at that season, he fled to Rye Beach or to the White Mountains, to
Mount Desert or to far Campobello, in New Brunswick, where, in the
tents almost hidden by the sweet pine woods, he listened to the
Algonkin legends which he published in book form three or four years
ago. The house in which he made his home for the time being is a large
red brick mansion on the left side of Broad Street, between Locust
and Walnut streets. His apartments were on the ground floor, and the
table at which he worked, writing his Indian book or making the designs
for the series of art manuals he was then editing, was drawn close to
one of the windows looking out upon the street. There, between the
hours of nine and one in the morning, he was usually to be found. From
the street one could in passing catch a glimpse of the fine strong
head which so many artists have cared to draw, and which Le Gros has
etched; of the long gray beard, and of the brown velveteen coat--not
that famous coat to which Mr. Leland bade so tender a farewell in his
gypsy book, but another, already endeared to him by many a lively
recollection of gypsy camps and country fairs. Here there was little
quiet to be had. Broad Street is at all times noisy, and it is moreover
the favorite route for all the processions, military or political,
by torchlight or by daylight, that ever rejoice the hearts of
Philadelphia’s children. It is a haunt, too, of pitiless organ-grinders
and importunate beggars. Well I remember the wretched woman who set
up her stand, and her tuneless organ, but a few steps beyond Mr.
Leland’s window, grinding away there day after day, indifferent to
expostulations and threats, until at last the civil authorities had
to be appealed to. For how much unwritten humor, for how many undrawn
designs, she is responsible, who can say? But then, on the other hand,
the window had its advantages. Stray gypsies could not pass unseen, and
from it friendly tinkers could be easily summoned within. But for this
post of observation I doubt if Owen Macdonald, the tinker, would have
paid so many visits to Mr. Leland’s rooms, and hence if he would have
proved so valuable an assistant in the preparation of the dictionary
of _shelta_, or tinker’s talk, a Celtic language lately discovered by
Mr. Leland. “Pat” (or Owen) was a genuine tinker, and “no tinker was
ever yet astonished at anything.” He never made remarks about the room
into which he was invited, but I often wondered what he thought of it,
with its piles of books and drawings and papers, and its walls covered
with grotesquely decorated placques and strange musical instruments,
from a lute of Mr. Leland’s own fashioning to a Chinese mandolin,
its mantel-shelf and low book-cases crowded with Chinese and Hindu
deities, Venetian glass, Etruscan vases, Indian birch-bark boxes, and
Philadelphia pottery of striking form and ornament. It had been but an
ordinary though large parlor when Mr. Leland first moved into it, but
he soon gave it a character all its own, surrounding himself with a
few of his pet household gods, the others with his books being packed
away in London and Philadelphia warehouses waiting the day when he will
collect them together and set them up in a permanent home.
The reason Mr. Leland remained so long in the Broad Street house was
because he was interested in a good work which detained him year
after year in Philadelphia. While abroad he had seen and studied many
things besides gypsies, and he had come home with new ideas on the
subject of education, to which he immediately endeavored to give active
expression. His theory was that industrial pursuits could be made a
part of every child’s education, and that they must be comparatively
easy. The necessity of introducing some sort of hand-work into public
school education had long been felt by the Philadelphia School Board,
and indeed by many others throughout the country. It had been proved
that to teach trades was an impossibility. It remained for Mr. Leland
to suggest that the principles of industrial or decorative art could
be readily learned by even very young children at the same time that
they pursued their regular studies. He laid his scheme before the
school directors, and they, be it said to their credit, furnished him
with ample means for the necessary experiment. This was so successful,
that before the end of the first year the number of children sent to
him increased from a mere handful to one hundred and fifty. Before he
left America there were more than three hundred attending his classes.
It is true that Pestalozzi and Fröbel had already arrived at the same
theory of education. But, as Carl Werner has said, Mr. Leland was the
first person in Europe or America who seriously demonstrated and proved
it by practical experiment.
These classes were held at the Hollingsworth schoolhouse in Locust
Street above Broad, but a few steps from where he lived. It is simply
impossible not to say a few words here about it, since Mr. Leland was
as much at home in the schoolhouse as in his own rooms. Four afternoons
every week were spent there. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he himself gave
lessons in design to the school children, going from one to the other
with an interest and an attention not common even among professional
masters. When, after the rounds were made, there were a few minutes to
spare--which did not often happen--he went into the next room, where
other children were busy under teachers, working out their own designs
in wood or clay or leather. I think in many of the grotesques that were
turned out from that modeling table--in the frogs and the serpents and
sea-monsters twining about vases, and the lizards serving as handles to
jars--Mr. Leland’s influence could be easily recognized. On Saturdays
he was again there, superintending a smaller class of _repoussé_
workers. In England he had found what could really be done by cold
hammering brass on wood, and in America he popularized this discovery.
When he first began to teach the children, this sort of work being as
yet little known, I remember there was one boy, rather more careless
but more businesslike than his fellow-hammerers, who during his summer
holidays made over two hundred and eighteen dollars by beating out on
placque after placque a few designs (one an Arabic inscription), which
he had borrowed from Mr. Leland. But after the children’s class was
enlarged and a class was started at the Ladies’ Decorative Art Club
established by Mr. Leland, work had to be more careful and original to
be profitable. On Mondays the Decorative Art Club engaged Mr. Leland’s
time, many of its members meeting to learn design in the Hollingsworth
school-rooms, which were larger and better lighted than those in their
club-house. This club, which in its second year had no less than
two hundred members, also owes its existence entirely to Mr. Leland,
who is still its president. When it is remembered that both in the
school and in the club he worked from pure motives of interest in his
theory and its practical results, and with no other object in view but
its ultimate success, the extent of his earnestness and zeal may be
measured.
It may be easily understood that this work, together with his literary
occupations, left him little time for recreation. But still there
were leisure hours; and in the fresh springtime it was his favorite
amusement to wander from the city to the Reservoir, with its pretty
adjoining wood beyond Camden, or to certain other well-known, shady,
flowery gypseries in West Philadelphia or far-out Broad Street, where
he knew a friendly _Sarshan?_ (“How are you?”) would be waiting for
him. Or else on cold winter days, when sensible Romanies had taken
flight to the South or were living in houses, he liked nothing better
than to stroll through the streets, looking in at shop-windows;
exchanging a few words in their vernacular with the smiling Italians
selling chestnuts and fruit at street corners, or stray Slavonian
dealers (Slovak or Croat) in mouse- and rat-traps, or with other
“interesting varieties of vagabonds”; stopping in bric-à-brac shops and
meeting their German-Jew owners with a brotherly “_Sholem aleichem!_”
and bargaining with unmistakable familiarity with the ways of the
trade; or else, perhaps, ordering tools and materials, buying brass
and leather for his classes. Indeed, he was scarcely less constant
to Chestnut Street than Walt Whitman or Mr. Boker. But while Walt
Whitman in his daily walks seldom went above Tenth Street, Mr. Leland
seldom went below it, turning there to go to the Mercantile Library,
which he visited quite as often as the Philadelphia Library, of which
he has long been a shareholder; while Mr. Boker seemed to belong
more particularly to the neighborhood of Thirteenth or Broad Street,
where he was near the Union League and the Philadelphia Club. Almost
everybody must have known by sight these three men, all so striking in
personal appearance. Mr. Leland rarely went out in the evenings. Then
he rested and was happy in his large easy chair, with his cigar and his
book. There never was such an insatiable reader, not even excepting
Macaulay. It was then, and is still, his invariable custom to begin a
book immediately after dinner and finish it before going to bed, never
missing a line; and he reads everything, from old black-letter books to
the latest volume of travels or trash, from Gaboriau’s most sensational
novel to the most abstruse philosophical treatise. His reading is as
varied as his knowledge.
I have thus dwelt particularly on his life in Philadelphia, because,
during the four and a half years he spent there--a long period for him
to give to any one place--he had time to fall into regular habits and
to lead what may be called a home life; and also because his way of
living since he has been back in England has changed but slightly. He
now has his headquarters at the Langham. He still devotes his mornings
to literary work and many of his afternoons to teaching decorative art.
He is one of the directors of the Home Arts Society, which but for him
would never have been; Mrs. Jebb, one of its most zealous upholders,
having modeled the classes which led to its organization wholly upon
his system of instruction, and in coöperation with him. The society
has its chief office in the Langham chambers, close to the hotel;
there Mr. Leland teaches and works just as he did in the Hollingsworth
school-rooms. Lord Brownlow is the president of this association, Lady
Brownlow, his wife, taking an active interest in it; and Mr. Walter
Besant is the treasurer. Mr. Leland is also the father or founder of
the famous Rabelais Club, in which the chair was generally taken by
the late Lord Houghton. For amusement, the Philadelphian now has all
London, of which he is as true a lover as either Charles Lamb or Leigh
Hunt was of old; and for reading purposes he has the British Museum
and Mudie’s at his disposal; so in these respects it must be admitted
he is better off than he was in Philadelphia. He knows, too, all the
near and far gypsy haunts by English wood and wold, and he is certain
he will be heartily welcomed to the Derby or any country fair. But
he has many friends and admirers in England outside of select gypsy
circles. Unfortunately he has lost the two friends with whom he was
once most intimate, Prof. E. H. Palmer, the Arabic scholar, having been
killed by the Arabs, and Mr. Trubner, the publisher, having died while
Mr. Leland was in America. Of his other numerous English acquaintances,
he is most frequently with Mr. Walter Besant, the novelist, and Mr.
Walter Pollock, the editor of _The Saturday Review_, for whom he
occasionally writes a criticism or a special paper. However, despite
the many inducements that can be offered him, he goes seldom into
society. He prefers to give all his energies to the writing by which he
amuses so many readers, and to his good work in the cause of education.
ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
AT “ELMWOOD”
Unfortunately, Mr. Lowell is not at home. He is in his own country
and among his own people; but he is not at Elmwood. For nearly a
decade now his friends have ceased to pass under the portal of those
great English trees and find him by the chimney-fire, “toasting his
toes,” or engaged in less meditative tasks amid the light and shadow
of his books. Loss to them has been gain to us; for in the more open
life of a man of the world and of affairs, at Madrid and London, the
public has seemed to see him more intimately, and has been pleased to
feel some share in his honor as a representative American gentleman
of what must be called an ageing, if not the old, school. But for
lovers of the author, as for his neighbors and acquaintances and his
contemporaries in literature, Lowell is indissolubly set in Elmwood,
and is not to be thought of elsewhere except as in absence. There,
sixty-seven years ago, when Elmwood was but a part of the country
landscape of old Cambridge, he was born of an honorable family of the
colonial time, and learned his alphabet and accidence, and imbibed
from the cultivated and solid company that gathered about his father
the simplicity of manners and severe idealism of mind of which he
continues the tradition; there, in college days, he “read everything
except his text-books,” and with his _æquales_ of the class of 1838
won a somewhat reluctant sonship from a displeased _Alma Mater_; being
in his youth, as he once remarked to the rebellious founders of _The
Harvard Advocate_, “something of a revolutionist myself”; and it was
from there he went out as far as Boston, to begin that legal career
which was not to end in the glory of a justice’s wig. And after the
early volume of poems was published and a kindly fire had exhausted
the edition, and when _The Pioneer_--what a name that was to gather
into its frontiersman-stroke Hawthorne, Story, Poe, Very and the brawny
Mrs. Browning!--had gone down in the first financial morass, still
the pleasant upper room at Elmwood, looking off over the sweep of the
Charles and the lines of the horizon-hills, was as far from being the
scene of forensic discussion as it was from taking its conversational
tone from the ancient clergymen who, with their long pipes, looked
down on the poet’s friends from an old panel over the fireplace. The
Bar has lost many a deserter to the Muses, and it was a settled thing
with the birds of Elmwood--and the place is still a woodland city of
them--that although they “half-forgave his being human,” they would not
forgive his being a lawyer. So, Lowell kept to his walks in the country
and confided the knowledge of his haunts to the readers of his verses,
and from the beginning rhymed the nobler human tone with the notes of
nature; and he married, and many reminiscences remain, among the men of
that day of that brief happiness, one bright episode of which was his
Italian journey. The first series of “The Biglow Papers” appeared, and
so his literary life began definitely to share in public affairs and to
take on the _quasi_-civic character which was to become more and more
his distinction, until it should reach its development, on the side of
his genius, in the patriotic odes, and its acknowledgment, on the part
of the people, in his offices of national trust. Seldom, indeed, has
the peculiar privacy of a poet’s life passed by so even and natural a
growth into the publicity and dignity of the great citizen’s.
But, in the narrow space of this sketch, one must not crowd the lines;
and in the way of biography, of which little can be novel to the
reader, it is enough to recall to mind the general course of Lowell’s
life; how he founded _The Atlantic_, which was to prove a diary of
the contemporary literary age; and in the Lowell Institute first
displayed on a true scale the solidity and acuteness of his critical
scholarship, and gave material aid to the national cause and the war on
slavery, as he had always done, by his brilliant satire, his ambushing
humor and more marvelous pathos; and became the Harvard professor,
succeeding Longfellow; and after a residence in Leipsic settled again
at Elmwood to give fresh books to the world, and to be, perhaps, the
most memorable figure in the minds of several generations of Harvard
students. Nor can one leave unmentioned the more familiar features of
the social life in these years of his second marriage--a life somewhat
retired and quiet but filled full of amiability, wit and intellectual
delight, led partly in Longfellow’s study, or in the famous Saturday
Club, or in the weekly whist meetings, and partly in Elmwood itself.
That past lives in tradition and anecdotage, and in it Lowell appears
as the life and spirit of the wine, with a conversational play so rich
in substance and in allusion that, it is said, one must have heard and
seen with his own eyes and ears, before he can realize that what seems
the studied abundance and changeableness of his essays is in fact the
spontaneity of nature, the mother-tongue of the man.