LITERARY BOSTON
My friends in New York had given me letters to people in Boston, so I
went there with every opportunity for an enjoyable visit. But,
naturally, I was much more absorbed in my own _debut_ and in what the
public would think of me than I was in meeting new acquaintances and
receiving invitations. Now I wish that I had then more clearly realised
possibilities, for Boston was at the height of its literary reputation.
All my impressions of that Boston season, however, sink into
insignificance compared to that of my first public appearance. I sang
Linda; and there were only three hundred people in the house!
If anything in the world could have discouraged me that would have, but,
as a matter of fact, I do not believe anything could. At any rate, I
worked all the harder just because the conditions were so adverse; and I
won my public (such as it was) that night. I may add that I kept it for
the remainder of my stay in Boston.
At that period of my life I was very fragile and one big performance
would wear me out. Literally, I used myself up in singing, for I put
into it every ounce of my strength. I could not save myself when I was
actually working, but my way of economising my vitality was to sing only
twice a week.
It was after that first performance of _Linda_, some time about
midnight, and my mother and I had just returned to our apartment in the
Tremont House and had hardly taken off our wraps, when a knock came at
the door. Our sitting-room was near a side entrance for the sake of
quietness and privacy, but we paid a penalty in the ease with which we
could be reached by anyone who knew the way. My mother opened the door;
and there stood two ladies who overwhelmed us with gracious speeches.
"They had heard my Linda! They had come because they simply could not
help it; because I had moved them so deeply! Now, _would_ we both come
the following evening to a little _musicale_; and they would ask that
delightful Signor Brignoli too! It would be _such_ a pleasure! etc."
Although I was not singing the following night, I objected to going to
the _musicale_ because certain experiences in New York had already bred
caution. I said, however, with perfect frankness, that I would go on one
condition.
"On _any_ condition, dear Miss Kellogg!"
"You wouldn't expect me to sing?"
"Oh no; no, no!"
Accordingly, the next night my mother and I presented ourselves at the
house of the older of the two ladies. The first words our hostess
uttered when I entered the room were:
"Why! where's your music?"
"I thought it was understood that I was not to sing," said I.
But, in spite of their previous earnest disclaimers on this point, they
became so insistent that, after resisting their importunities for a few
moments, I finally consented to satisfy them. I asked Brignoli to play
for me, and I sang the Cavatina from _Linda_. Then I turned on my heel
and went back to my hotel; and I never again entered that woman's house.
After so many years there is no harm in saying that the hostess who was
guilty of this breach of tact, good taste, and consideration, was Mrs.
Paran Stevens, and the other lady was her sister, Miss Fanny Reed, one
of the talented amateurs of the day. They were struggling hard for
social recognition in Boston and every drawing card was of value, even a
new, young singer who might become famous. Later, of course, Mrs.
Stevens did "arrive" in New York; but she travelled some difficult roads
first.
This was by no means the first time that I had contended with a lack of
consideration in the American hostess, especially toward artists. Her
sisters across the Atlantic have better taste and breeding, never
subjecting an artist who is their guest to the annoyance and indignity
of having to "sing for her supper." But whenever I was invited anywhere
by an American woman, I always knew that I would be expected to bring my
music and to contribute toward the entertainment of the other guests. An
Englishwoman I once met when travelling on the Continent hit the nail on
the head, although in quite another connection.
"You Americans are so queer," she remarked. "I heard a woman from the
States ask a perfectly strange man recently to stop in at a shop and
match her some silk while he was out! I imagine it is because you don't
mind putting yourselves under obligations, isn't it?"
Literary Boston of that day revolved around Mr. and Mrs. James T.
Fields, at whose house often assembled such distinguished men and women
as Emerson, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lowell, Anthony
Trollope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Julia Ward Howe. Mr. Fields was the
editor of _The Atlantic Monthly_, and his sense of humour was always a
delight.
"A lady came in from the suburbs to see me this morning," he once
remarked to me. "'Well, Mr. Fields,' she said, with great
impressiveness, 'what have you new in literature to-day? I'm just
_thusty_ for knowledge!'"
Your true New Englander always says "thust" and "fust" and "wust," and
Mr. Fields had just the intonation--which reminds me somehow--in a
roundabout fashion--of a strange woman who battered on my door once
after I had appeared in _Faust_, in Boston, to tell me that "that man
Mephisto-fleas was just great!"
It was a wonderful privilege to meet Longfellow. He was never gay, never
effusive, leaving these attributes to his talkative brother-in-law, Tom
Appleton, who was a wit and a humourist. Indeed, Longfellow was rather
noted for his cold exterior, and it took a little time and trouble to
break the ice, but, though so unexpressive outwardly, his nature was
most winning when one was once in touch with it. His first wife was
burned to death and the tragedy affected him permanently, although he
made a second and a very successful marriage with Tom Appleton's sister.
The brothers-in-law were often together and formed the oddest possible
contrast to each other.
[Illustration: =James Russell Lowell in 1861=
From a photograph by Brady]
Longfellow and I became good friends. I saw him many times and often
went to his house to sing to him. He greatly enjoyed my singing of his
own _Beware_. It was always one of my successful _encore_ songs,
although it certainly is not Longfellow at his best. But he liked me
to sit at the piano and wander from one song to another. The older the
melodies, the sweeter he found them. Longfellow's verses have much in
common with simple, old-fashioned songs. They always touched the common
people, particularly the common people of England. They were so simple
and so true that those folk who lived and laboured close to the earth
found much that moved them in the American writer's unaffected and
elemental poetry. Yet it seems a bit strange that his poems are more
loved and appreciated in England than in America, much as Tennyson's are
more familiar to us than to his own people. Some years later, when I was
singing in London, I heard that Longfellow was in town and sent him a
box. He and Tom Appleton, who was with him, came behind the scenes
between the acts to see me and, my mother being with me, both were
invited into my dressing-room. In the London theatres there are women,
generally advanced in years, who assist the _prima donna_ or actress to
dress. These do not exist in American theatres. I had a maid, of course,
but there was this woman of the theatre, also, a particularly ordinary
creature who contributed nothing to the gaiety of nations and who,
indeed, rarely showed feeling of any sort. I happened to say to her:
"Perkins, I am going to see Mr. Longfellow."
Her face became absolutely transfigured.
"Oh, Miss," she cried in a tone of awe and curtseying to his name, "you
don't mean 'im that wrote _Tell me not in mournful numbers_? Oh, Miss!
_'im!_"
Lowell I knew only slightly, yet his distinguished and distinctive
personality made a great impression on me. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a
blond, curly-headed young man, whose later prosperity greatly
interfered with his ability, I first met about this same time. He was
too successful too young, and it stultified his gifts, as being
successful too young usually does stultify the natural gifts of anybody.
On one occasion I met Anthony Trollope at the Fields', the English
novelist whose works were then more or less in vogue. He had just come
from England and was filled with conceit. English people of that time
were incredibly insular and uninformed about us, and Mr. Trollope knew
nothing of America, and did not seem to want to know anything.
Certainly, English people when they are not thoroughbred can be very
common! Trollope was full of himself and wrote only for what he could
get out of it. I never, before or since, met a literary person who was
so frankly "on the make." The discussion that afternoon was about the
recompense of authors, and Trollope said that he had reduced his
literary efforts to a working basis and wrote so many words to a page
and so many pages to a chapter. He refrained from using the actual word
"money"--the English shrink from the word "money"--but he managed to
convey to his hearers the fact that a considerable consideration was the
main incentive to his literary labour, and put the matter more
specifically later, to my mother, by telling her that he always _chose
the words that would fill up the pages quickest_.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, though he was one of the Fields' circle, I never
met at all. He was tragically shy, and more than once escaped from the
house when we went in rather than meet two strange women.
"Hawthorne has just gone out the other way," Mrs. Fields would whisper,
smiling. "He's too frightened to meet you!"
I met his boy Julian, however, who was about twelve years old. He was a
nice lad and I kissed him--to his great annoyance, for he was shy too,
although not so much so as his father. Not so very long ago Julian
Hawthorne reminded me of this episode.
"Do you remember," he said, laughing, "how embarrassed I was when you
kissed me? 'Never you mind' you said to me then, 'the time will come, my
boy, when you'll be glad to remember that I kissed you!' And it
certainly did come!"
All Boston that winter was stirred by the approaching agitations of war;
and those two remarkable women, Mrs. Stowe and Mrs. Howe were using
their pens to excite the community into a species of splendid rage. I
first met them both at the Fields' and always admired Julia Ward Howe as
a representative type of the highest Boston culture. Harriet Beecher
Stowe had just finished _Uncle Tom's Cabin_. Many people believed that
it and the disturbance it made were partly responsible for the war
itself. Mr. Fields told me that her "copy" was the most remarkable
"stuff" that the publishers had ever encountered. It was written quite
roughly and disconnectedly on whatever scraps of paper she had at hand.
I suppose she wrote it when the spirit moved her. At any rate, Mr.
Fields said it was the most difficult task imaginable to fit it into any
form that the printers could understand. Mrs. Stowe was a quiet, elderly
woman, and talked very little. I had an odd sort of feeling that she had
put so much of herself into her book that she had nothing left to offer
socially.
I did not realise until years afterwards what a precious privilege it
was to meet in such a charming _intime_ way the men and women who really
"made" American literature. The Fields literally kept open house. They
were the most hospitable of people, and I loved them and spent some
happy hours with them. I cannot begin to enumerate or even to remember
all the literary lights I met in their drawing-room. Of that number
there were James Freeman Clarke, Harriet Prescott Spofford, whom I knew
later in Washington, and Gail Hamilton who was just budding into
literary prominence; and Sidney Lanier. But, as I look back on that
first Boston engagement, I see plainly that the most striking impression
made upon my youthful mind during the entire season was the opening
night of _Linda di Chamounix_ and the three hundred auditors!
It was long, long after that first season that I had some of my
pleasantest times in Boston with Sidney Lanier. This may not be the
right place to mention them, but they certainly belong under the heading
of this chapter.
The evening that stands out most clearly in my memory was one, in the
'seventies, that I spent at the house of dear Charlotte Cushman who was
then very ill and who died almost immediately after. Sidney Lanier was
there with his flute, which he played charmingly. Indeed, he was as much
musician as poet, as anyone who knows his verse must realise. He was
poor then, and Miss Cushman was interested in him and anxious to help
him in every way she could. There were two dried-up, little, Boston old
maids there too--queer creatures--who were much impressed with High Art
without knowing anything about it. One composition that Lanier played
somewhat puzzled me--my impertinent absolute pitch was, as usual, hard
at work--and at the end I exclaimed:
"That piece doesn't end in the same key in which it begins!"
Lanier looked surprised and said:
"No, it doesn't. It is one of my own compositions."
He thought it remarkable that I could catch the change of key in such a
long and intricately modulated piece of music. The little old maids of
Boston were somewhat scandalised by my effrontery; but there was even
more to come. After another lovely thing which he played for us, I was
so impressed by the rare tone of his instrument that I asked:
"Is that a Boehm flute?"
He, being a musician, was delighted with the implied compliment; but the
old ladies saw in my question only a shocking slight upon his execution.
Turning to one another they ejaculated with one voice, and that one
filled with scorn and pity:
"She thinks it's the _flute_!"
This difference between professionals and the laity is odd. The more
enchanted a professional is with another artist's performance, the more
technical interest and curiosity he feels. The amateur only knows how to
rhapsodise. This seems to be so in everything. When someone rides in an
automobile for the first time he only thinks how exciting it is and how
fast he is going. The experienced motorist immediately wants to know
what sort of engine the machine has, and how many cylinders.
I have always loved a flute. It is a difficult instrument to play with
colour and variety. It is not like the violin, on which one can get
thirds, and sixths, and sevenths, by using the arpeggio: it is a single,
thin tone and can easily become monotonous if not played skilfully.
Furthermore, there are only certain pieces of music that ever ought to
be played on it. Wagner uses the flute wonderfully. He never lets it
bore his audience. The Orientals have brought flute playing and flute
music to a fine art, and it is one of the oldest of instruments, but,
unlike the violin and other instruments, it is more perfectly
manufactured to-day than it was in the past. The modern flutes have a
far more mellow and sympathetic tone than the old ones.
That whole evening at Miss Cushman's was complete in its fulness of
experience, as I recall it, looking back across the years. How many
people know that Miss Cushman had studied singing and had a very fine
_baritone_ contralto voice? Two of her songs were _The Sands o' Dee_ and
_Low I Breathe my Passion_. That night, the last time I ever heard her
sing, I recalled how often before I had seen her seating herself at the
piano to play her own accompaniments, always a difficult thing to do.
Again I can see her, at this late day, turning on the stool to talk to
us between songs, emphasising her points with that odd, inevitable
gesture of the forefinger that was so characteristic of her, and then
wheeling back to the instrument to let that deep voice of hers roll
through the room in
"Will she wake and say good night?"...
During that first Boston season of mine, my mother and I used to give
breakfasts at the Parker House. We were somewhat noted characters there
as we were the first women to stop at it, the Parker House being
originally a man's restaurant exclusively; and breakfast was a meal of
ceremony. The _chef_ of the Parker House used to surpass himself at our
breakfast entertainments for he knew that such an epicure as Oliver
Wendell Holmes might be there at any time. This _chef_, by the way, was
the first man to put up soups in cans and, after he left the Parker
House kitchens, he made name and money for himself in establishing the
canned goods trade.
[Illustration: =Charlotte Cushman, 1861=
From a photograph by Silsbee, Case & Co.]
Dear Dr. Holmes! What a delightful, warm spontaneous nature was his, and
what a fine mind! We were always good friends and I am proud of the
fact. Shall I ever forget the dignity and impressiveness of his bearing
as, after the fourth course of one of my breakfasts, he glanced up, saw
the waiter approaching, arose solemnly as if he were about to make a
speech, went behind his chair,--we all thought he was about to give us
one of his brilliant addresses--shook out one leg and then the other,
all most seriously and without a word, so as to make room for the next
course!
Years later Dr. Holmes and I crossed from England on the same steamer.
He had been feted and made much of in England and we discussed the
relative brilliancy of American and English women. I contended that
Americans were the brighter and more sparkling, while English women had
twice as much real education and mental training. Dr. Holmes agreed, but
with reservations. He professed himself to be still dazzled with British
feminine wit.
"I'm tired to death," he declared. "At every dinner party I went to they
had picked out the cleverest women in London to sit on each side of me.
I'm utterly exhausted trying to keep up with them!"
This was the voyage when the benefit for the sailors was given--for the
English sailors, that is. It was well arranged so that the American
seamen could get nothing out of it. Dr. Holmes was asked to speak and I
was asked to sing; but we declined to perform. We did write our names
on the programmes, however, and as these sold for a considerable price,
we added to the fund in spite of our intentions.
My first season in Boston--from which I have strayed so far so many
times--was destined to be a brief one, but also very strenuous, due to
the fact that in the beginning I had only two operas in my _repertoire_,
one of which Boston did not approve. After _Linda_, I was rushed on in
Bellini's _I Puritani_ and had to "get up in it" in three days. It went
very well, and was followed with _La Sonnambula_ by the same composer
and after only one week's rehearsal. I was a busy girl in those weeks;
and I should have been still busier if opera in America had not received
a sudden and tragic blow.
The "vacillating" Buchanan's reign was over. On March 4th Lincoln was
inaugurated. A hush of suspense was in the air:--a hush broken on April
12th by the shot fired by South Carolina upon Fort Sumter. On April 14th
Sumter capitulated and Abraham Lincoln called for volunteers. The Civil
War had begun.