THE OWLS
Among my mother’s welcome visitors was Henry James the elder, father of
Henry, the novelist, and of William, the philosopher. She thought Mr.
James Senior a greater man than either of his more famous sons and was a
little jealous for her old friend’s reputation. Henry, Junior,
understood this and loved her for it.
Mr. James ranked among us as chief of Owls. He was very lame and used a
great cane with a yellow ivory handle. He had a long gray beard,
piercing eyes that looked you through and through, and a laugh so
hearty, so contagious that it healed the stab of the too bright eyes. I
was at once fascinated and frightened by him. My mother was in terror
lest I should find out that he had a wooden leg, for he often took me on
his knee and quizzed me. Once when I had been haled in from a romp in
the garden with a torn pinafore and a general devil-may-care look about
me, Mr. James said quite seriously:
“Maud, you are the wickedest-looking thing I have seen for a long time.”
I took this literally, brooded over the affront, and gave him a Roland
for his Oliver:
“You are the ugliest man I have ever seen!”
Mr. James was hurt; this troubled my mother; but my own feelings had
been outraged. Wounded in my self-esteem, I had instinctively “struck
back”, as a child or savage does. He was so wise, so tender, that I
believe he forgave me, though I have never forgiven myself.
In these early memories, the “James boys” figure as the friends of my
older sisters. I have no recollection of them in connection with myself
till much later. I have, however, a clear impression of their cousin,
Minnie Temple, with whom Henry James, the younger, was said to be in
love. I think of her delicate face, luminous eyes, and expression of
haunting melancholy, as of things seen in a dream. Willie and Wilkie;
Henry and Bobby; their names fit into the picture of this time, because
my elders talked so much of them. Two went to the war, Wilkie and Bobby;
one was wounded.
It probably was about this time that Henry and Willie were studying art
in the Newport studio of William Hunt, with John La Farge and Theodora
Sedgwick for fellow pupils. This studio still survives. It stands back
from Church Street, just behind what is now the Hill Top Inn, then the
home of the William, and later of the Richard, Hunts. Until quite
lately, I should have said I had no recollection of Mrs. James, wife of
the first Henry and mother of the second, but I happened to pass a night
at Concord, in the house of Mrs. Robertson James, and there I recognized
a portrait of Mrs. James. The face is calm, motherly, and, above all,
aristocratic.
The Radical Club, which met on the first Monday of every month, was one
of the chief gathering places of the Owls. I remember my mother’s
interest in these meetings, and little bits of her talk about them:
“To-day Mr. Emerson read a paper on Religion. He told this anecdote:
‘Somebody said to the Reverend Dr. Payson of Portland, “How much you
must enjoy religion, since you live always administering it,” he
replied that nobody enjoyed religion less than ministers, as nobody
enjoyed food less than cooks.’”
William Rounseville Alger, prince of Owls, was tolerated by me as the
father of my dear friend, Kitty Alger, a handsome girl, with fine black
hair which she wore “down her back” in three thick braids. She was like
her mother, gentle and domestic. The elder daughter, Abbie, was more
like her father. She was intelligent, with a gift for languages, which
she put to good account in translating foreign books for the Boston
publishers.
Children take grown people for granted, accept them as fixed facts like
the earth, the heaven, and the stars. They do not analyze them as they
do their contemporaries. It was only in later years that I gained a
sense of the incongruity of the union between Mr. and Mrs. Alger. They
had a large family, and their marriage was, I believe, a happy one in
spite of--perhaps on account of--the strong contrasts of tastes and
character.
Mr. Alger was a pedantic Unitarian clergyman, and a student of
metaphysics. He never, if he could avoid it, used a word of less than
five syllables. I remember him at his own house, silent and abstracted;
when he was at our house, consorting with other Owls, his language was
splendid and free, if a thought paradoxical. A favorite word of his was
ratiocination, which Mother once caricatured, exclaiming:
“Ours is indeed a ratty ’orssy nation!”
I was once at the Algers’ when a company of the elect gathered to hear
him read from his latest work, “The Poetry of the Orient.” A few of us
juveniles sat on the stairs, waiting till the reading should be over and
the vanilla ice cream and escalloped oysters appear. Among the grown-up
guests were the brilliant Choate sisters, Mrs. Bell, and Mrs. Pratt,
cousins of Mrs. Alger’s. In discussing the reading with Mama, Mrs. Pratt
exclaimed:
“Brother Alger has his _limités_ and his _extensés_!” A phrase my mother
quoted all her life.
I learned one lesson from “Brother Alger” that I never forgot. I was
dining with them one Sunday and, as Mr. Alger plunged the carving fork
into the breast of a prodigious turkey, he asked me what part of the
bird I preferred. Meaning to be polite, I said I had no choice.
“Then you shall have the drumstick,” was the carver’s answer.
At one time Mr. Alger preached on Sunday mornings at the Music Hall, as
years before Theodore Parker had done. He had large audiences--there was
too little of ritual to warrant the term “congregation”--chiefly of men.
I often went with Kitty to these services; though I did not understand
much of what the speaker said, there was something democratic in the
large Sunday gathering that appealed to me.
Mr. Edwin Whipple, the brilliant essayist and lecturer, was held to be a
very important Owl; because he looked more like Minerva’s bird than any
of the others, his solemn expression and round eyes gave him, above all,
a claim to the title. There was nothing derogatory in being an Owl;
indeed, it was rather “swell” than otherwise. Not all of Mama’s
companions were Owls; some of the most learned of them were quite
outside the group. The jovial Louis Agassiz, for instance, genial James
T. Fields, our dear minister, James Freeman Clarke: these were all
intimates and intellectuals, but they lacked _something_ that Frederick
Hedge, for example, possessed to a very high degree; just what this
essential quality was, I despair of making any grown-up person
understand. Though I have mentioned Mr. Emerson as being present at a
meeting of that resort of Owls, the Radical Club, he too lacked the
subtle characteristic and, though he might at times consort with Owls,
he was not of them.
The only female Owl I remember was Miss Elizabeth Peabody, called the
grandmother of Boston, one of the most guileless human beings that ever
lived. Everybody loved Miss Peabody and, loving her so much, everybody
talked about her. Some of the things they said were tender, some were
funny, but none were slighting, none bitter.
There was the tradition that Miss Peabody had been affianced to the
great romancer, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who soon after their engagement
discovered that her younger sister, Sophia, was his true affinity. With
perfect sweetness and generosity, Elizabeth yielded her lover to her
sister and, as long as they lived, devoted herself to the Hawthornes and
their children.
It takes a pretty big woman to do that!
A friend of Miss Peabody’s once dreamed that she had a baby, which she
soon mislaid, finding it long after shut up between the pages of a big
volume, where she had put it for a bookmark. In her later years, she
looked like a female Pickwick; you could read the record of her
blameless life in her benign face. Though she was a hard worker, she was
never able “to put anything by”, probably because so much of her work
was for the causes and reforms she served so whole-heartedly. In her
last years, when she was too feeble to work, my mother was very anxious
about her future. Miss Peabody reassured her, however.
“My dear friend,” she began, “I have been thinking to-day how much
better off I am than Croesus (a well-known millionaire). He and I left
the country town where we were both born, on the same day, and came to
Boston to seek our fortunes. Croesus made a great deal of money, but in
such a questionable manner that he no longer finds it pleasant to live
in Boston and has moved to a distant state where public opinion doesn’t
trouble itself about the origin of his fortune. I, on the other hand,
live on happily in Boston, supported by an income provided by my old
scholars.”
Croesus probably would not have agreed with her summing up of the case,
but, as their two faces rise out of the limbo of these early memories,
old Elizabeth’s, all alight with innocence and enthusiasm, smiles at me,
while Croesus looks coolly and cannily at me, with the hard eyes and
tight mouth of a miser.
The Hawthornes were very poor in their early married life at Concord.
They could not afford to keep a servant, and divided the housework
between them. One day Mrs. Hawthorne, happening to be near the pantry,
where her husband was doing his share of the morning’s work, heard him
exclaim, as he threw down the knife he had been cleaning:
“Thank God, that’s the last of those damned knives!”
This impressed the young wife so much that she managed soon after to
employ a domestic. Shortly after, Pegasus, released from the butcher’s
cart, spread his wings and carried Hawthorne far above household
drudgery, for not long after this “The Scarlet Letter” was written.
I do not remember ever having seen Hawthorne, but I have a strong
impression of how he looked, from my mother’s description of him. She
spoke of his great reserve and shyness, of his beauty and especially of
his eyes, “like blue-gray sapphires.”
The spell he cast over my childhood is strong as ever. He first
introduced me to the friends from Hellas and made me free of the
enchanted circle of Greek mythology. For many years I held the absurd
belief that his genius created the characters in Tanglewood Tales, where
I first read of Midas and the Golden Touch, of Perseus, Medusa, the
Graiae, and Bellerophon. Nowhere, I still believe, is the story of
Baucis and Philemon and their immortal guests more beautifully told than
in Tanglewood Tales. These two volumes, in Ticknor and Field’s familiar
brown bindings, were in the nursery bookcase, and made me early familiar
with Hawthorne’s name. Chancing upon “The Scarlet Letter” one day in my
father’s library, I read the great romance with the same avidity with
which I had devoured the children’s stories. I was too young to
understand the significance of the Letter itself; the story held me no
less entranced because I missed the inner meaning. It is a great mistake
to think that children must understand things to enjoy them; mystery,
above all else, appeals to them.
Una Hawthorne, the eldest daughter, once made us a visit at Lawton’s
Valley. She was tall and handsome, with a skin like alabaster and masses
of red-gold hair. Julian, the only son, was of the same type. He was one
of the handsomest young men I ever saw,--tall, athletic,
romantic-looking, with a touch of unconventionality in his dress that
was very becoming. Later in life, I met Julian Hawthorne, when I visited
my sister Florence in Plainfield, where he lived for some years. One
remark of his I have always remembered. We had been speaking of the
elder Hawthorne, and Julian said, with a sigh: “My father is the worst
enemy I have. It would not be so bad if I had chosen a different
calling, but whatever I write must always be compared with what he
wrote!”
I felt a certain sympathy with him; a great name is very hard to “live
up to.”
The mention of the nursery bookcase recalls certain priceless volumes I
do not often find to-day in the nurseries I visit. As our books were
chosen by my mother with greatest care, I hope by mentioning some of my
earliest book friends to hand on a good tradition:
“The King of the Golden River” by Ruskin; Hans Andersen’s “Little Rudy”;
“The Huggermuggers and Kobbletozo” by Christopher Cranch; Grimm’s Tales;
Mrs. Barbauld’s Poems; Bulfinch’s “Age of Fable”; Edward Lear’s immortal
“Book of Nonsense”; “Alice in Wonderland”, “The Bab Ballads”, the
Franconia Stories, and Kingsley’s “Water Babies”; to the authors of
every one of these books I owe an imperishable debt. If you have never
read them there is still time, for they are for every age and
condition!