GREEN PEACE
“This is green peace!” Mama exclaimed that July day she took possession
of our South Boston home. The title clung, like many of her nicknames,
snapped out on the spur of the moment.
What other six acres ever held such wonders as Green Peace? The house,
full of odd turns and stairways, was “built on” piecemeal to the
original cottage, as the family increased. The big living room, with the
conservatory on the south side, had a mighty fireplace on the north,
where for nine months of the year cannel coal sputtered or pine knots
flared. Papa was a fire worshiper; the flame on our hearthstone was
rarely quenched. The floor was covered by the Gobelin carpet from the
old Joseph Bonaparte house at Bordentown. The central medallion inclosed
a profile portrait of a royal couple of that short-lived dynasty; in the
corners heraldic fishes disported themselves, surrounded by a pale
strawberry ribbon on a ground of soft gold. Near the fireplace stood the
tall sixteenth century cabinet from the Palace of the Popes at Avignon,
purchased by our parents on their wedding journey, together with the
Roman cabinet and the oak and ebony prie-dieu, and brought home from
Europe to set up housekeeping in South Boston; this was in the year
1844, before the craze for old Italian furniture had struck our country.
A few rods from the house, halfway across the garden, gleamed the white
columns of the greenhouse and bowling alley. Here reigned Mr. Arrow,
guardian of Muscat and Black Hamburg grapes, Maréchal Niel and Banksia
roses, starry jasmines, camellias white and red and mottled. At Green
Peace time was not reckoned by weeks or months, but by the successive
blooming of tree, plant, and flower.
“When did we have the first party last year?”
“The day the pink hawthorn came out.”
There were many parties for us, especially in the spring, when city
folks like to go into the country.
The hawthorns, pink and white, were first to blossom, closely followed
by the scarlet pyrus japonica, the snowballs, yellow laburnums--sweet as
honey--acacias, lilacs, syringa, and spiraea. The beds were filled with
old-fashioned flowers,--roses, mignonette, peonies, verbenas,
love-lies-bleeding, mourning bride, and lilies, lilies, lilies, from the
early lily-of-the-valley to the latest hardy variety. What strawberries
grew here! Papa quoted with the opening of each season the bishop’s
saying:
“Doubtless God might have made a better berry; doubtless He never did!”
What cherries he raised for us, black hearts and white hearts. What
peaches, apricots, plums, apples, pears,--especially pears; Green Peace
pears were famous. The fruit room at the top of the house was a pleasant
place in the autumn when the pears were gathered, sorted, and placed on
narrow shelves to ripen. Has my memory kept their sequence aright?
Bartlett, Seckel, Beurré Bosc, Duchesse d’Angoulême, Louise
bonne--prized for its single scarlet cheek--Winter Nelis--they lasted
into spring--and the Vicar of Wakefield; I could not like the Vicar, he
was so ugly!
Mrs. George Sage, a friend of these days, lately said to me:
“Your father gave me the most delicious pear I ever tasted, in the Green
Peace garden. Do you remember the Chinese junk?”
Do I remember!
Listen to the song of the junk, as its great hulk swings faster and
faster, back and forth, back and forth, while the passengers, twoscore
tatterdemalions, sing riotously:
“Here we go up, up, up; now we go down, down, downey!”
The junk creaks and grumbles a minor accompaniment, accentuated by
Friskey’s staccato “Bow, wow, wow!”
Friskey was a short-haired Irish terrier, with an expressive stump of a
tail; Fanny and Lion were big Newfoundlands, and Brownie was the great
St. Bernard, bred at the famous Hospice and educated at a Swiss dog
school. These are the Green Peace dogs I best remember. Brownie was not
of this time, but of many years later; I speak of him now, lest I
forget. He was the handsomest, best, most intelligent dog I ever knew.
Compared to other dogs, he was what a highly polished university man is
to a rough day laborer. Brownie was a hero, too; he saved the life of
Honey-pot--but that’s another story.
In the cow barn lived the red cow and her calf. She was a famous milker,
giving her sixteen quarts regularly. In the stable there were horses.
Papa rode like a centaur. To see him mounted on his black mare Breeze,
cantering along Bird Lane, was a revelation of grace and skill I have
yet to see surpassed by Bedouin of the desert or Hyde Park dandy.
My little brother is closely linked with these memories of Green Peace.
Can I remember it, or do I remember my mother’s telling me of this
conversation between her and me?
“Mama, I am sorry you are so old!”
“Why, darling?”
“Because you cannot play with me!”
This was just before little Sam’s birth, when she, nimblest of
playfellows, was weary with carrying her precious burthen:
“The hyacinthine boy, for whom Morn well might break and April bloom.”
His little life, four short years, has been told by his mother in what I
believe to be a unique biography. He was a large handsome boy, full of
vitality and charm. His death of diphtheritic croup, at the age of four,
brought a desolation to our house, which, after all these years, I
recall as if it had lately happened. My clearest memory of him is lying
surrounded by flowers, a beautiful little marble figure, with lovely,
half-closed violet eyes. A portrait preserves this last look. It always
hung, framed by a wreath of thorns, in his mother’s room. There is
frequent mention of him in her diary; until the end of her long life,
she saw him in her dreams. Her poems show the closeness of the bond
between her and--
The love that never leaves me,
The child that never grieves me.
We had been three pairs; Julia and Flossie, Harry and Laura, Maud and
Sam. I was now left an odd number. The elder children seemed much older;
later the dividing years shrank to nothing. They were all precocious; I
was the reverse. My mother used to comfort me by saying, “The oak is a
tree of slow growth!”
They all talked glibly together in Sdrawkcab (“Backwards”) a language I
could not understand. The compensation for all this was that I was a
great deal with both parents and their friends, though I remember Mama’s
sometimes “borrowing a child” to play with me. The earliest letter I
have from my father is written in sdrawkcab. To this day I am unable to
understand the words, but the thought is plain: he was trying to help
his youngest to enter into the elder children’s play. A letter from him
to my Aunt Annie Mailliard written in 1864, describes us at this time.
“Julia does not grow older.
“Dudekins (Julia Romana) is in perfect and brilliant health and has
grown so affectionate and loving to me that she seems more angel than
human. Flossie grows in grace and good sense, and is as ever an upright
and downright honest soul. Harry is a hobbledehoy--_que voulez vous_--of
one who is neither man nor boy? Laura is not so robust as the others,
but she is very handsome, graceful, intelligent, and good. Maud the
Flibberty-gibbet is a nugget--solid, heavy, elastic, indefatigable. She
promises to be the brightest, handsomest, and wildest of all. There,
dear Annie, I have mentioned all--all but the one who has gone before
us, the best beloved; of whom I never think without suffering anguish:
you and those who know the same mystery of sorrow understand--but which
to all others is inexplicable.”
In these early years I knew nothing of my mother’s people, but was on
good terms with my father’s. His sister, my aunt Jeannette, and her
husband, Thomas B. Wales, lived at the time I am writing of at the
Tremont House, a sober granite building, on the corner of Tremont and
Beacon streets, whose windows looked out on the Old Granary Burying
Ground on one side, and the King’s Chapel graveyard on the other. Aunt
Jeannette was a large handsome woman, with blue eyes like Papa’s, thick,
classically waved, gray hair, and a closely corsetted figure. She was a
shy and silent person. When Papa took me to see her on Sunday
afternoons, there was little conversation between them. She kept a
supply of brittle molasses and pink cinnamon candies for visiting nieces
and nephews. If I were left alone with her, she would startle me with
the question:
“Do you love your father?”
I adored my father; the question was nettling as implying doubts, I
could not be made to answer it.
The Howes are reserved and silent people, little given to talking of
themselves or their concerns. How sorry I am that I did not learn more
about my father’s youth and ancestry from Aunt Jeannette. When my sister
Laura came to write my father’s life, she gathered some interesting
facts concerning his descent:
“His grandfather, Edward Compton Howe, was one of the ‘Indians’ of the
Boston Tea Party. His father, Joseph Neals Howe, was a maker of ropes
and cordage, and had a large ropewalk near the site of the present
Public Garden. This business was, at one time, extremely profitable, and
my grandfather prospered in it; but in the War of 1812 he had the
misfortune to supply the United States Government with large quantities
of ropes and cordage, for which he was never paid.... His mother was of
the family of Jeremy and Richard Gridley, the former attorney-general of
the royal province of Massachusetts Bay, who served at the taking of
Louisburg, fortified Bunker Hill the night before the battle, and, under
Washington’s orders, aided in preparing the siegeworks which finally
drove the British from Boston.”[1]
My father’s only living brother was Joseph Howe, spoken of as Uncle
Hpesoj (the h mute as in hour) according to the rules of Sdrawkcab. He
was a tall fair man who wore a high collar, an imposing stock, ruffled
shirts, elaborate waistcoats, a handsome fob and seals attached to a
great gold warming-pan of a repeater, which rang the hours with a
delicate chime. He was a successful merchant, and at this time president
of the Sandwich Glass Company. He lived in a fine house, Number 4
Ashburton Place, where he reigned supreme over Aunt Eliza and “the
girls”, my three Howe cousins, Anjie, Eliza, and Maria. Martha, his
eldest daughter, by a former marriage, was the wife of the genial Austin
Parks and the mother of the dear Parks cousins: William, known as Mungo;
Maud, my particular crony; and Lilian, then a baby. Uncle Hpesoj lived
in far greater state than the rest of the family. His house, his dress,
everything that was his had the stamp of sober wealth. He owned a pew in
King’s Chapel; his wife and daughters took their exercise in a fine
barouche, drawn by two stout horses. The atmosphere of the house at
Ashburton Place was as different as possible from our own _ambiente_.
The storeroom was an impressive cave; the upper shelves laden with
neatly labeled jars of jams, syrups, and preserves. On the lower shelves
stood japanned boxes containing stores, and large blue paper cones
called sugar loaves. Saturday morning the week’s supply of loaf sugar
was cut up with a sharp little saw and the house was filled with the
aroma of roasting coffee.
This was a perfectly kept house, where the domestic arts were carried to
a high degree of perfection. My father coveted for his daughters all
these niceties of housewifery and tried--oh, how he tried--to have us
learn them! Julia Romana, our eldest, would have learned these things,
had it been possible for her to do so; there was no sacrifice she would
not have made for her father. Her nature was a straight blend of her
parents; poet and philanthropist. Like Mama, she was a passionate
student, wrote verses, plays, romances, because she could not help it.
Like Papa, she devoted her life to the education of the blind. Watch a
mother duck with her brood, and you will see how the young get their
education, by imitation. The children of eagles are eaglets; eagle
parents cannot hope to raise a brood of doves!
On Thanksgiving we dined at Ashburton Place. The extension mahogany
table filled the great room, for the family gathering was a large one.
After the opening course of oyster soup, an immense roast turkey was
placed at one end of the table before Uncle Hpesoj, a twin bird, boiled,
with white sauce before Aunt Eliza. The third course, like the third act
in a play, brought the psychological moment; a lighted silver blazer was
placed before each guest, who proceeded to cook his own venison, with
currant jelly and other condiments to taste.
The table was decorated with glass flagons and goblets, rose, ruby, pale
and dark green, some covered with gold arabesques, triumphs of the
Sandwich Glass Factory. With dessert came the thin pink finger bowls;
the children dipped their fingers and rubbed them round and round the
rims, producing a faint elfin music I never hear without a vision of
the Ashburton Place dining room, my tall dignified uncle, his little
silver-haired mate, and Eliza, the beauty of the family.
A few years ago, motoring from Newport to Buzzard’s Bay, the way led
through a fine old town, full of colonial houses and wide streets lined
by magnificent elms.
“What’s this place?” I asked.
“East Sandwich”, the name blew back from the lips of our host, who drove
the machine. Soon we passed a huge brick factory, with broken windows,
smokeless chimneys, deserted, forlorn, yet with something that spoke of
past greatness.
“Uncle Hpesoj’s glass factory!”
Whirling along the sand dunes, I have no eyes for the scenery; I see the
old factory alive again, with smoking chimneys, glowing forges, swarms
of swarthy Bohemians. A dark-eyed hairy man dips a blowpipe in a molten
mass, twirls it quickly in both hands till a sort of blob forms at the
end, puts the tube to his mouth and blows a rainbow bubble, to show a
group of wondering children how Bohemian glass is made.
Uncle Hpesoj was a stockholder in the Boston Theater and often allowed
our family the privilege of using his excellent seats. Mama, who as a
child had been forbidden the theater, took great pains that we should
see the best plays and best acting of our time. Wednesday and Saturday
matineés at the Boston are among the most vivid memories of these years.
The splendors of the great theater were still undimmed. The drop
curtain, representing the Lake of Lugano, gave me so high an idea of
Italian scenery that when I saw the real Lake of Lugano I was, somehow,
disappointed.
My first play was “Jocko, the Brazilian”, a pantomime, acted by the
Ravels. Jocko, the hero, a wise brown ape, saves the heroine from
drowning, only to be rewarded by a careless bullet that ends his life.
When dear brown Jocko fell mortally wounded to the ground, his life
blood--a bunch of scarlet cotton wool--ebbing from his side, I fell into
such a paroxysm of weeping that I still remember the pain of it, when
some real sorrows are forgotten. My first opera was “Norma”; all I
remember is my amazement when the stout Italian prima donna, over whose
death I had shed such bitter tears, came before the curtain at the end
of the performance to receive her share of the applause. I have had many
such shocks since and have still to be convinced that anything so
inartistic is pardonable.
My first tragedy was “The Iron Chest”, with Edwin Booth in the part of
Edward Mortimer. I have seen most of the great actors of my time, and I
have never seen one who equaled Booth, in tragedy, comedy, or melodrama.
“I do remember an apothecary--and hereabouts he dwells!”
Orlando Tompkins, the intimate friend of Booth, kept an apothecary shop
at the corner of West and Washington streets, close by the Boston
Theater. Booth was then the matinée idol; and the young ladies, who
wrote him poems and letters, often left them at the apothecary’s, where
he usually dropped in after the play. One day a silly woman sent him a
gold chain in a letter, telling her messenger to wait outside and see
what happened. Booth strolled in at the usual time, found the letter,
broke the seal, read the contents, tossed the letter into the stove;
twirling the chain in his hand for a moment, as if puzzled what to do
with it, he strode across the shop and fastened it round the neck of
the great Maltese cat that lay asleep in the window.
Next to Green Peace and the Boston Theater, I felt more at home at the
Boston Music Hall than in any other place of my small world. To-day
Boston has a fine Symphony Hall, an admirable Opera House; to some
persons of my generation, neither compares in importance to the Music
Hall, built two years before I was born, by that pioneer society, the
Harvard Musical Association. The same year, 1852, Dwight’s Journal of
Music was founded. In both enterprises the leading figure was John
Sullivan Dwight, president of the association, editor of the journal.
There is a certain romance connected with the very inception of Music
Hall. Jenny Lind was coming to Boston; the city had no fitting
auditorium for so great an artist. A few lovers of music got together,
raised the money, and built the hall in what was then “record time.”
Between the ages of six and twenty years, I haunted the Music Hall, in
company with my adopted son, John Dwight. At the time of his adoption I
was seven, and Mr. Dwight was fifty years old. We celebrated the event
by going to the dedication of the great organ at the Music Hall. For me
it is still the greatest of organs, though I have been to Haarlem and
Freiburg. I recognized in the crowd that filled the hall some of the
“founders”; Charles C. Perkins, blue-eyed, golden-haired, seraphic in
temper as well as face; Doctor Baxter Upham, Mr. Robert Apthorp, Mr.
George Derby, and the architect, our friend, George Snell, an Englishman
who lived many years in Boston.
For months we had watched the slow upbuilding of the organ, seen the
golden pipes unpacked, tested, and laid
[Illustration: EDWIN BOOTH]
in a row on the stage. Now everything was in place, the mouths of the
painted singing women seemed ready to breathe out music. A pair of
mighty colossi bore the weight of the massive front on their bowed heads
and shoulders. Before the organ stood the bronze statue of Beethoven,
now in Symphony Hall.
“Crawford’s statue seems to be listening to the music,” my mother
whispered, as the organist struck the keys and a lovely air of
Palestrina’s rolled from the organ, shaking the souls of the men and
women gathered in this temple of the arts. Music must have its
commercial side, like all other arts; but in those days, if it were
there, it was hidden. The men who built the Music Hall, and who made
Boston the musical center it still remains, were true servants of
Apollo.
Mr. Dwight had access to Music Hall at all times. So devouring was his
thirst for music that it was not enough to hear all the concerts by the
Handel and Hayden, Harvard Musical, Cecilia, and other societies; he
must hear all the rehearsals too. Not finished performances, like the
so-called Friday afternoon rehearsals of the present Boston Symphony
orchestra, but the working rehearsals, when Carl Zerrahn, our favorite
leader, schooled his musicians, scolded his chorus, and made them repeat
difficult passages over and over again. Mr. Dwight’s attitude towards
his fellow man was one of gentle toleration, with one exception,--for
those who set up false gods in the house of music, he had no mercy. He
drove them from the temple with the scourge of his bitter pen. _Dwight’s
Journal_ arrived at our house every Saturday; its contents were
discounted by those who had sat beside the oracle at the week’s concerts
and already knew his opinion of artists and composers. It developed,
even to my intelligence, that the oracle was but yet a man. When he
wrote about a pretty woman, like that bewitching girl pianist, Adelaide
Topp, his style showed a warmth that was lacking when he spoke of the
black-avised Fraulein Osterauer, with nothing but her technique to
recommend her. During intermissions, or at close of concerts, we went to
the greenroom, to meet the artists. In this way, I have shaken hands
with most of the great artists of the time. To see Christine Nilsson
close, and catch the strange glint in those eyes of heavenly blue, was
an unforgettable experience. Her pale gold hair was more beautiful even
than on the stage; her beauty, like her voice, spoke of her own
northland, gleaming ice peaks, frozen fiords, diamond-bright winter
stars, moonlight upon snow.
Madame Essipoff--Russian, I think--though not beautiful, had a
sympathetic personality.
“No woman ever had such a left hand for the piano,” our Nestor said of
her. We highly approved of Camilla Urso, then in her early fame, and
Theresa Carreño, a beautiful young woman, who fingered her instrument
with the grace of a Fra Angelico angel. The oracle set his face sternly
against certain male virtuosi; musical fireworks were not tolerated by
_Dwight’s Journal_. When I hung entranced upon Ole Bull’s playing of
some composition, written expressly to show the amazing dexterity of his
bowing, the oracle frowned and exclaimed, “Claptrap!”
Mr. Dwight was severely classical in his taste and admitted new
composers grudgingly. He lived in a world created by the early composers
and loved, I think, above all others, Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven. To
opera, he was not only indifferent, but hostile; unless it was “Don
Giovanni”, “Fidelio”, the “Magic Flute”, or “Orpheus and Eurydice.” He
spoke of the opera as the “siren.” Ravenously as I devoured the immense
store of musical knowledge he so generously shared with me, I could not
stop my ears to the siren’s voice. He never forgave me for going to
“Ernani”, when he had invited me to Bach’s “Passion Music.” As an
exception to his rule, Mr. Dwight took the keenest interest in a
performance of “Oberon”, at the Music Hall, with Madame Parepa in the
soprano part. We went to all the rehearsals. In the overture, “the horns
of elfland faintly blowing” are heard, first at a great distance, then
nearer, and last, just outside the castle gate. To produce the effect of
distance, the trumpeter was sent to a remote part of the building to
sound his horn. At the first rehearsal there was a pause at this point;
Zerrahn looked up to the part of the balcony where we sat, and asked:
“How was that?”
“Not quite faint enough,” said the oracle. “No, no, not half faint
enough,” murmured his adopted mother, much puffed up with pride.
There were other occasions at Music Hall even more exciting than the
oratorios and symphony concerts,--the prize drills and declamations of
the Boston Latin School. As my father and my brother Harry were both
Latin School boys, we felt bound to uphold this institution and look
down upon its upstart rival, the English High School.
On the floor of the Music Hall, the boys in blue presented arms, carried
arms, shouldered arms, wheeled and marched, and wheeled again. I see
their shining schoolboy faces, set and serious, their slim young bodies
strained and alert, moving in perfect rhythm to the word of command.
The galleries bloomed with schoolgirls in fresh Easter finery, gazing
eagerly down at the marching lads. The battalion had four companies that
drilled regularly during the autumn and winter, in the armory over the
old Boylston Market. In the spring the drilling took place on the
Common. The Prize Drill of the year 1871 was of especial interest on
account of the officers. The Colonel was Lester W. Clark; Adjutant,
George Monks; First Lieutenant, Francis Dumaresq; Second Lieutenant,
Henry Warren. The Colonel had borrowed, for the occasion, a gold-mounted
sword and a crimson sash; I well remember how becoming they were!
Girls who had brothers sometimes attended the monthly Public Saturday at
the old Latin School on Bedford Street. At the end of the hall stood an
allegorical figure by my friend, the sculptor, Mr. Richard Greenough,
commemorating the graduates who fell in the Civil War. The speaker’s
platform was just in front of this memorial. Parents, friends, and girls
occupied the benches, facing the rostrum. I remember one of the Saturday
mornings, when Lester Clark recited Mrs. Norton’s “Bingen on the Rhine”
and Frank Dumaresq gave, with great effect, the Tower Scene from “King
John.”
A program of the Prize Declamation of May 27th, 1871, has been
preserved. The opening number was “Harold the Dauntless”, given in great
style by “Carty” Fenno. My kinsman, Morton Prince, recited William
Everett’s “Themistocles.” The “Daughter of Herodias” was sympathetically
interpreted by Dumaresq; and the “Burial of Dundee” by Colonel Lester
Clark. After the award of prizes, Gilmore’s Band played “Fair Harvard.”
We sometimes condescended to attend the Chauncy Hall School’s
“Declamations”, to hear George Riddle’s fine recitations. Riddle was a
beautiful boy, with a poetic face and fiery brown eyes. I was present
when he won his first prize by his recitation of the Dagger Scene from
“Macbeth.” Riddle became a professional reader later on, and I never
missed an occasion to hear him recite. As an actor he had no success,
with one great exception: his acting in “Oedipus Tyrannus”, at Harvard,
was a notable dramatic achievement.
The chief figure at all public functions of Latin School was the head
master, Francis Gardner, tall, thin, spectacled, with eyes that looked a
boy through and through and an uncanny flair for mischief. It was said
that he ruled “with a rod of iron and a cotton umbrella.” Though the
boys feared, hated, and talked flippantly of him as “Old Gardner”, after
they left school they were apt to confess to a sneaking fondness for
their old master. When they had sons of their own, they have been known
to declare that they loved and honored him. William Hunt’s portrait
shows the man exactly as I remember him,--tall, gaunt, severe, lovable
too, and at the first glance recognizable as a splendid specimen of the
schoolmaster of fifty years ago. The modern educators, I know, have many
qualities that he lacked; but they have lost something that Mr. Gardner
possessed. They rule with the olive branch, where he ruled with the
birch rod. Boston Latin School, under Francis Gardner, was a very
different place from the Happy Valley of Rasselas schools, where to-day
most of my young friends receive their education. These schools are
delightful places for parents and aunts to visit; but are they not a
trifle “soft” to fit a youth for the rough and tumble of the great
world?