BOSTON IN THE FORTIES
I despair of making any person appreciate the ferment in which any
young person moved who came into the daily life of Boston in the days
when Lowell left college. I have tried more than once, and without the
slightest success. But this reader must believe me that nobody was
“indifferent” then, even if he do not understand why.
Here was a little community, even quaint in some of its customs, sure
of itself, and confident in its future. Generally speaking, the men and
women who lived in it were of the old Puritan stock. This means that
they lived to the glory of God, with the definite public spirit which
belongs to such life. They had, therefore, absolute confidence that
God’s kingdom was to come, and they saw no reason why it should not
come soon. There were still some people, and one or two teachers in the
pulpit and in what is technically called the religious press, who
believed, or said they believed, that all men are born in sin and are
incapable of good. But practically, and in general, the people of
Boston believed in the infinite capacity of human nature, and they knew
“salvation’s free,” and “free for you and me.”
As a direct result of this belief, and of the cos mopolitan habit which
comes to people who send their ships all over the world, the leaders of
this little community attempted everything on a generous scale. If they
made a school for the blind, they made it for all the blind people in
Massachusetts. They expected to succeed. They always had succeeded. Why
should they not succeed? If, then, they opened a “House of
Reformation,” they really supposed that they should reform the boys and
girls who were sent to it. Observe that here was a man who had bought
skins in Nootka Sound and sold them in China, and brought home silks
and teas where he carried away tin pans and jackknives. There was a man
who had fastened his schooner to an iceberg off Labrador, and had sold
the ice he cut in Calcutta or Havana. Now, that sort of men look at
life in its possibilities with a different habit from that of the man
who reads in the newspaper that stocks have fallen, who buys them
promptly, and sells them the next week because the newspaper tells him
that they have risen.
With this sense that all things are possible to him who believes, the
little town became the headquarters for New England, and in a measure
for the country, of every sort of enthusiasm, not to say of every sort
of fanaticism. Thus, Boston, as Boston, hated abolitionism. The
stevedores and longshoremen on the wharves hated a “nigger” as much as
their ancestors in 1770 hated a “lobster.” But, all the same, Garrison
came to Boston to publish the “Liberator.” There was not an “ism” but
had its shrine, nor a cause but had its prophet. And, as in the rest of
the world at that time, the madness was at its height which forms a
“society” to do the work of an individual. People really supposed that
if you could make a hundred men give each the hundredth part of his
life to do something, the loose combination would do more work than one
stalwart man would do who was ready to give one whole life in devotion
to the “cause.”
The town was so small that practically everybody knew everybody. “A
town,” as a bright man used to say, “where you could go anywhere in ten
minutes.”
Cambridge was within forty-five minutes’ walk of this little
self-poised metropolis, and was really a part of it, in all “its busy
life, its fluctuations, and its vast concerns”—and in its pettiest
concerns as well.
Lowell could talk with Wendell Phillips, or applaud him when he spoke.
He could go into Garrison’s printing-office with a communication. He
could discuss metaphysics or ethics with Brownson. He could hear a
Latter-Day Church preacher on Sunday. He could listen while Miller, the
prophet of the day, explained from Rollin’s history and the Book of
Daniel that the world would come to an end on the twenty-first of
March, 1842. He could lounge into the “Corner Bookstore,” where James
T. Fields would show him the new Tennyson, or where the Mutual
Admiration Society would leave an epigram or two behind. Or he could
hear Everett or Holmes or Parsons or Webster or Silliman or Walker read
poem or lecture at the “Odeon.” He could discuss with a partner in a
dance the moral significance of the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven in
comparison with the lessons of the Second or the Seventh. Another
partner in the next quadrille would reconcile for him the conflict of
free will and foreknowledge. In saying such things, I am not inventing
the instances. I could almost tell where the conversations were held.
At Miss Peabody’s foreign bookstore he could take out for a week
Strauss’s “Leben Jesu,” if he had not the shekels for its purchase, as
probably he had not. Or, under the same hospitable roof, he could in
the evening hear Hawthorne tell the story of Parson Moody’s veil, or
discuss the origin of the Myth of Ceres with Margaret Fuller.[2] Or,
when he danced “the pastorale” at Judge Jackson’s, was he renewing the
memories of an Aryan tradition, or did the figure suggest, more likely,
the social arrangements of the followers of Hermann? Mr. Emerson
lectured for him; Allston’s pictures were hung in galleries for him;
Mr. Tudor imported ice for him; Fanny Elssler danced for him, and
Braham sang for him. The world worked for him—or labored for him. And
he entered into the labors of all sorts and conditions of men.
In one of his letters to his friend Loring, written in October, 1838,
he expresses a doubt whether he would continue his studies of law. “I
have been thinking seriously of the ministry,” he writes; “I have also
thought of medicine—but there—still worse!” But on the 9th of November
“I went into town to look out for a place”—this means to see some of
his friends “in business,” and to try mercantile life—“and was induced
_en passant_ to step into the United States District Court, where there
was a case pending, in which Webster was one of the counsel retained. I
had not been there an hour before I determined to continue in my
profession and study as well as I could.” Observe that he is now
nineteen years old, going on to twenty.
I will not include Mr. Webster among the company of Mr. Lowell’s early
friends, though the hour spent in the United States Court seems to have
been a very important hour in his life. Who shall say what would have
come had he “found a place,” and begun on life by rising early,
“sweeping out the store,” filling and trimming the oil lamps, and then
running the errands for some treasurer of a woolen factory or dealer in
teas or spices? Such was the precise experience of many of his young
companions in college, who “elected,” on graduation, to “go into
business.”
Of the literary circles into which he was naturally introduced I will
say something. First, of some of the men who, in practice, wrote the
“North American Review” in those days—say for the ten years after he
left college. Dr. John Gorham Palfrey was the editor, and Lowell would
have called the men themselves the “Mutual Admiration Society.” Most of
them, I think, have recognized this name in their own correspondence.
It was a club of five men, who liked to call themselves “The Five of
Clubs.” But they very soon earned this name of the Mutual Admiration
Society, which I think was invented for them.
Dr. Palfrey was living at Cambridge all through the period of Lowell’s
college and law-school life. He had been a member of the divinity
Faculty until 1839, and he assumed the charge of the “Review” in 1835.
He had written for it as early as the fifth volume. A gentleman through
and through, of very wide information, hospitable and courteous, he and
the ladies of his family made his house in Divinity Avenue one of the
few places where students of whatever school of the college liked to
visit. I remember that one of my own classmates said, after making a
Sunday evening call there, “Palfrey makes you think that you are the
best fellow in the world—and, by Jove, he makes you think that he is
the next best!” He resigned his professorship about the time when he
made the romantic voyage by which he emancipated more than forty slaves
whom he had “inherited.” Like most men with whom he lived, he had
opposed the “abolitionists” with all his might, with pen and with
voice. But he knew how to do the duty next his hand better than some
men who had talked more about theirs.
He was most kind to me, boy and man, and gave me instance on instance
which showed that his unflinching firmness in duty was accompanied with
entire readiness to recognize the truth wherever he found it. All of us
youngsters were enthusiastic about Carlyle. All of the “oldsters”
turned up their noses—“such affectation of style,” “Germanisms picked
up cheaply,” and so on. But he said he knew that the editor of the
“North American” must read the “French Revolution,” and he said that if
you had to read a book, a good way was to take it as your only reading
when you had a long journey. Mark that you could not then write books
on the way, as I am writing this.
So he took his two volumes with him on this voyage of emancipation.
And, before he came to Cincinnati, he had forgotten the eccentricities
and was as eager as the youngest of us to praise the historian. I
remember as well how, as he explained to my father his plans for the
“North American Review,” he said he had secured Emerson to write, and
that Emerson would let him have some of his lectures. He had taken care
to provide, however, that these were to be from the historical lectures
and not the speculative ones. If he had been pressed, I am afraid he
would have been found to be of the large circle of those who in those
days thought Emerson “a little crazy.”
Under this chief worked the Mutual Admiration Society—all older than
Lowell. But with all of them, sooner or later, he became intimate. All
of them are still remembered: Charles Sumner; George Stillman Hillard,
Sumner’s law partner and, in earlier days, intimate friend; H.W.
Longfellow; Cornelius Conway Felton, Greek professor at Cambridge, and
afterwards president of the college; and Henry Russell Cleveland.
Longfellow knew that there were worlds outside of London and Edinburgh,
Boston and Cambridge, and their environs. We youngsters, from the proud
advantage of the age of twenty or less, would have said that the rest
of the Mutual Admiration Society, in the year 1840, did not suspect
this.
The “North American” had been founded after the “Monthly Anthology” had
led the way, twelve years before. It was confessedly in imitation of
the Edinburgh and London quarterlies, as the London Quarterly had
confessedly imitated the Edinburgh. The original plan was a good one,
and any youngsters of to-day who will revive the old quarterly may find
that it meets a “felt want” again. Look at an old “Edinburgh” of
Brougham’s time and you will find an intelligent account of some forty
books, which you will never read yourself, but which you want to know
about. To tell the whole abject and bottom truth, you do not find
exactly this thing in any English or American “Review” published in
1898.
The “North American” had been under the charge of both Everetts—Edward
and Alexander. Alexander Everett assumed the editorial direction on his
return from Europe in 1830, and from him it passed into Dr. Palfrey’s
hands. I may say in passing that if I had at my bank the money which
the Everetts and their family connections paid for establishing this
national journal, with compound interest on the same, I could be living
to-day in my palace at Newport, and entertaining the Duke of Edinburgh,
the Bishop of London, and the Vicar-General of North America. Probably
I am better off as I write in the somewhat dingy Albany station of the
Delaware and Hudson Railroad. This is a parenthesis, with the
indulgence of my readers.
We all read the “North American” regularly. As I have implied, we who
were ten years younger than the Mutual Admiration Society made fun of
it. We said that they could not review a book of poems without a
prefatory essay on poetry. We said that Horace Walpole made their
fortune; that they would not publish a number without an article on
Walpole. But I cannot now find more than three or four articles on
Walpole or even his times in those years.
The truth was that literature was not yet a profession. The men who
wrote for the “North American” were earning their bread and butter,
their sheets, blankets, fuel, broadcloth, shingles, and slates, in
other enterprises. Emerson was an exception; and perhaps the impression
as to his being crazy was helped by the observation that these “things
which perish in the using” came to him in the uncanny and unusual
channel of literary workmanship. Even Emerson printed in the “North
American Review” lectures which had been delivered elsewhere. He told
me in 1849, after he had returned from England, that he had then never
received a dollar from the sale of any of his own published works. He
said he owned a great many copies of his own books, but that these were
all the returns which he had received from his publishers. And Mr.
Phillips told me that when, after “English Traits,” published by him,
had in the first six months’ sales paid for its plates and earned a
balance besides in Emerson’s favor, Emerson could not believe this. He
came to the office to explain to Mr. Phillips that he wanted and meant
to hold the property in his own stereotype plates. And Mr. Phillips had
difficulty in persuading him that he had already paid for them and did
own them. Emerson was then so unused to the methods of business that
Mr. Phillips had also to explain to him how to indorse this virgin
check, so that he could place it to his own bank account.
Mr. Phillips, then of the firm of Phillips & Sampson, was Emerson’s
near connection by marriage; Mrs. Phillips, a charming and accomplished
lady, being Emerson’s cousin on the Haskins side.
To return to the “North American Review.” The five young gentlemen whom
I have named were all favorites in the best circles of the charming
social life of that little Boston. I cannot see that their fondness for
each other can have much affected their work for the “North American,”
for whatever they published appeared long after they had won their name.
They were in the habit of looking in at what began to be called the
“Old Corner Bookstore,” which is still, as it was then, an excellent
shop, where you find all the last books, the foreign magazines, and are
sure of intelligent attention. The memory of modern man does not run
back to the time when there was not a “bookstore” in this old building,
which bears on its rough-cast wall the date of 1713. The antiquarians
would tell us that on the same spot as early as 1634 there was the
first “ordinary” in Boston. And it was just above here, under the sign
of Cromwell’s Head, that Colonel George Washington and his elegant
little troop made their home when that young Virginian visited Governor
Shirley in 1756.
The Corner Bookstore in that generation was the shop of Allen &
Ticknor, and not long before there had appeared in the shop, as the
youngest boy, James T. Fields, from Portsmouth, who was destined to be
the friend of so many men of letters, and who has left behind him such
charming memorials of his own literary life. It must be to Fields, I
think, that we owe the preservation of the epigram which the Club made
upon “In Memoriam.” I will not say that the story did not improve as it
grew older, but here it is in the last edition:—
The firm, then Ticknor & Fields, were Tennyson’s American publishers.
They had just brought out “In Memoriam.” One of the five gentlemen
looked in as he went down town, took up the book, and said, “Tennyson
has done for friendship what Petrarch did for love, Mr. Fields,” to
which Mr. Fields assented; and his friend—say Mr. Hillard—went his way.
Not displeased with his own remark, when he came to his office—if it
were Hillard—he repeated it to Sumner, who in turn repeated it to
Cleveland, perhaps, when he looked in. Going home to lunch, Sumner goes
in at the shop, takes up the new book, and says, “Your Tennyson is out,
Mr. Fields. What Petrarch did for love, Tennyson has done for
friendship.” Mr. Fields again assents, and it is half an hour before
Mr. Cleveland enters. He also is led to say that Tennyson has done for
friendship what Petrarch has done for love; and before the sun sets Mr.
Fields receives the same suggestion from Longfellow, and then from
Felton, who have fallen in with their accustomed friends, and look in
to see the new books, on their way out to Cambridge.
This story belongs, of course, to the year 1850. In 1841, when Lowell
begins to be counted as a Bostonian, the Corner Bookstore was already
the centre of a younger group of men who were earning for themselves an
honorable place in American letters. I believe they were first brought
together in the government of the Mercantile Library Association. This
association started in a modest way to provide books and a reading-room
for merchants’ clerks. To a beginning so simple this group of young
fellows, when hardly of age, gave dignity and importance. Under their
lead the association established a large and valuable lending library,
set on foot what were the most popular lectures in Boston, and kept up
a well-arranged reading-room. It was virtually a large literary club,
which occupied a building, the whole of which was devoted to books or
to education. With the passage of two generations much of the work
which the association thus took in hand has devolved upon the Public
Library and its branches and upon the Lowell Institute. The Mercantile
Library has been transferred to the city and is administered as its
South End Branch. The winter courses under the Lowell foundation take
the place of the Mercantile courses, so that this association now shows
its existence in a comfortable club-house in Tremont Street.
In the ten years between 1840 and 1850 it was an important factor in
Boston life. The initiative in its work was given by James T. Fields,
Edwin Percy Whipple, Daniel N. Haskell, Warren Sawyer, Thomas J. Allen,
George O. Carpenter, Edward Stearns, and George Warren, who had at
command the ready service of younger fellows among their companions,
loyal to the interests of the club, and keeping up the best interests
of society better than they knew. The club engaged Webster, Everett,
Choate, Sumner, Channing, Emerson, Holmes, and Winthrop to lecture to
them, arranging for “honorariums” such as had never been heard of
before.
The group of officers whom I have named was in itself a little coterie
of young fellows who were reading and talking with one another on the
best lines of English literature. Fields and Whipple soon became known
to the public by their own printed work. All the group were well read
in the best English books of the time, and I think I am right in saying
that the existence of such a group around him strengthened Fields’s
hands, as he compelled the firm to which he belonged to introduce in
America some of the lesser known English authors. In 1845 Thomas Starr
King removed to Boston. His rare genius, insight, and marvelous power
of expression gave him a welcome everywhere. In this little circle of
the Mercantile Library managers he was the intimate friend of all.
Older than either of these groups of men, there was a set of careful
scholars in Boston whom I may distinguish as the historians. Dr.
Palfrey once said to me that it was a sort of accident, as he thought,
which turned the young literary men of Boston so much in the direction
of history. The accident was that the two principal public libraries
before 1850 were the Library of the Historical Society, and that of the
Boston Athenæum, which was much larger. It so happened that in its
earlier years the Athenæum collection was much strongest on the side of
history. It also happened that in 1818 Mr. Israel Thorndike bought for
Harvard College in one purchase the collection of early American
authorities which had been made by Ebeling, a German collector in the
first quarter of the century. This collection is still unrivaled. There
was thus, so Dr. Palfrey said, a sort of temptation to young Bostonians
to read and study American history. And it is almost fair to speak of
the Boston “school of history” which was thus formed.
I was a boy of eleven, reading to my mother on a summer afternoon, when
my father brought into the room a black-haired, olive-complexioned,
handsome young man, and said: “Here is Mr. Bancroft, my dear! The first
volume of the History is finished, and he has come in to talk about
printing and publishers.” This was the beginning of my acquaintance, I
believe I may say friendship, with Mr. Bancroft, which lasted until he
died in 1891.[3]
It is convenient to remember that he was as old as the century. In
1833, the time of which I speak, Prescott was already at work on
“Ferdinand and Isabella.” Sparks had edited the “Diplomatic
Correspondence,” and was collecting the materials for his “Washington.”
Richard Hildreth, who edited the Boston “Atlas,” was preparing for his
history of the United States. Palfrey in 1839 gave up his professorship
at Cambridge that he might devote himself to the history of New
England. Lothrop Motley is younger, but he published “Merrymount” as
early as 1848. I may add that the patriotic anniversary orations of
both the Everetts are historical studies. Edward Everett, in
particular, had the historic sense and tact very delicately developed.
Mr. Emerson once said of him that “for a man who threw out so many
facts he was seldom convicted of a blunder.” To which remark I will add
that Mr. Emerson also is always accurate in his frequent references to
American history.
It seems best to attempt this sketch of the literary surroundings of
the life on which the young law student is now to enter. With every
person who has been named, and, indeed, with almost everybody who had
anything to do with letters in Boston, Lowell was personally
acquainted; with many of them he was intimately acquainted.
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