BOSTON IN THE EIGHTIES
A notebook of anatomical drawings recalls my adventure as a student at
the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Frederick Crowninshield taught us
anatomy and much besides; I remember with gratitude his excellent
teaching.
After a year or two, I realized that art was not my affair. Beside my
studies in Rome with Costa, I had worked a season in Paris. All I had to
show for this were some passable paintings of flowers. I lacked the
artist hand. While I have continued to study art from that day to this,
I then definitely renounced the idea of becoming a painter, yielding to
the inevitable family calling of literature. I had learned that it is
not enough to feel the love of beauty, the yearning for artistic
expression; an artist must have art in his fingers as well as in his
soul.
Among our neighbors at this time were the Q.’s, parlous dull people.
Meeting my mother one day, Mrs. Q. told a story of her daughter, ending
with:
“I said then, ‘Charlotte is the most wonderful of us all!’”
As no one had ever thought any of the Q.’s wonderful, the phrase amused
my mother so much that she used it all her life.
When I brought her a check for nine dollars from _Godey’s Magazine_ for
my first story, “May Blossom”, she exclaimed, “Well, Miss, it appears
that you are the most wonderful of us all!” I spent this, the first
money I ever earned, on a plaster cast of the Venus of Milo.
I now began to write regularly for the _Boston Transcript_: occasionally
for the _New York Tribune_, the _World_, and the current magazines. Much
of my _Transcript_ work was art reviewing. Among other artists, this
brought me in touch with John LaFarge, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Albert
Ryder, and Charles Walter Stetson. I was one of the first writers to cry
aloud the excellence of the work of these and many another American
artist, and was, in consequence, _persona grata_ at the studios.
I first saw Saint-Gaudens shortly after he began the Shaw Memorial.
Returning a year later, I showed surprise that the work had not gone
faster. The sculptor, in gray linen blouse and white cap, laid a long
nervous hand caressingly upon the clay:
“This is a labor of love,” he said; “I only dare work on it in certain
moods! I do this for you, and a few others.”
The first winter after our return to Boston from Europe my mother and I
lived in a small apartment on Spruce Street. The experiment was never
repeated: wherever my mother was, she immediately became the center of a
large circle. Not only did children and grandchildren and relatives to
the last degree of cousinship knock at her door and demand hospitality,
but many travelers and strangers visiting Boston were brought to her.
During the winter of 1880-1881 we took a furnished house, Number 129 Mt.
Vernon Street. Here our Roman relations, Aunt Louisa Terry and her
daughter Margaret, visited us. Marion Crawford had rooms in Charles
Street close by, spending his waking hours at our house. This was a
happy winter, though my mother was lame from a severe fall, and was
perforce much at home.
I remember a dinner she allowed me to arrange for Crawford, who was
anxious to meet the literary lights. The company included Mr.
Longfellow, Doctor Holmes, and Mr. Tom Appleton. We lingered at table,
listening to Marion’s vivid stories of Indian life. He was a born
romancer; if he had lived in the East he would have become a
professional story-teller and sat in the market place telling tales.
Nothing he ever wrote compared with his brilliant talk; friends of
Robert Louis Stevenson have told me the same thing of him.
Crawford had made quaint archaic dinner cards, with a verse for each
guest. My mother’s card had an absurd drawing of an owl and some lines
to Minerva. The evening went off well, but the next day my mother gave
me this advice:
“Do not again invite Doctor Holmes and Mr. Appleton together. It is like
asking two prima donnas to sing at the same entertainment!”
Though my aunt was overjoyed at having her boy with her again, she was
very anxious about his future and disappointed that his work in India
had not carried him a stage farther on the road to fortune.
“My brilliant boy will do nothing with all his gifts,” she said to me.
“He is a rolling stone.”
“He will make a name for himself and a fortune for you!” I told her more
than once. I never felt any doubt about his success; in those days he
looked and moved like a conquering hero.
I have forgotten, if I ever knew, why Crawford gave up India for
America.
My mother introduced Crawford to all the editors she knew, and very soon
he was hard at work writing book notices for the _Critic_ and articles
for all the magazines that would give him a chance. Meanwhile he was
studying with Georg Henschel for the operatic stage. He had a fine voice
and a magnificent stage presence, but his ear was not quite true. He
would sing perfectly in tune four nights running; on the fifth he would
sing false and never know it. Henschel at first thought that this
defective ear could be overcome by training. The old music my uncle and
my brother had sung was brought out, and every evening my mother and
Marion gave us delightful concerts. Crawford went that spring to visit
Uncle Sam in New York and there he got the clew to his real calling. He
talked a great deal to my uncle about his experience in India and about
one man in especial, who had deeply interested him. Uncle Sam said:
“You must write a novel about that man.”
When we moved to Oak Glen that summer, Crawford went with us. Outside
the door of the house was the “green parlor”, an open space shut in from
the road by a high arbor-vitae hedge. In the green parlor stood a long
wooden table, where morning and afternoon Crawford sat writing steadily
for hours at a time on the novel Uncle Sam had suggested. In the evening
he would read us what he had written. The manuscript showed few changes
and hardly an erasure. His work as editor of the _Indian Herald_ in
Allahabad gave him a sureness of touch I have never known equaled in any
literary man. So “Mr. Isaacs”, the book that made him famous overnight,
was written. At the other end of the wooden table I sat writing my first
story, destined for a brilliant if brief career, “The Newport
Aquarelle.”
Work over, we gathered round the piano, or under the oaks with our
guitars. Our repertory of Italian folksong included several that old
Father Corné brought to Newport when the century was young; others
Marion had picked up while roaming about Italy, helping the peasants
with the vintage, a part of the “rolling stone” process his mother
deplored. The moss he then gathered lined his nest comfortably when
building time came, for it is his intimacy with the life of the people
that gives the charm to his Italian novels.
In September, 1881, the telephone was installed at Oak Glen. The first
message came at midnight, when the house was roused by the strange alarm
bell, ringing in the dark.
“Are you there?” It was the voice of my cousin Sam Francis, speaking
from the club.
“President Garfield is dead.”
In my mother’s poem to Garfield, written the next day, there is a
reference to this new miracle of electricity.
Our sorrow sends its shadow round the earth.
The lightning’s message by our tears is shaped.
The telephone was then what the automobile has been for so long, and the
flying machine bids fair to become,--one of the popular themes of
current literature. Plays were constructed and novels written with the
telephone as the chief _motif_. Our own family “Telephone Song”,
composed by Laura Richards, enjoyed a brief but brilliant fame.
In the autumn of 1882 we left Oak Glen for a winter home of our own,
Uncle Sam having given my mother Number 241 Beacon Street, a house where
she lived for thirty years. The old furniture from Green Peace was
furbished up. Uncle Sam, who never did things by halves, wrote several
times a week, giving advice and announcing the shipment of some
additional household effect, such as a rug for the library, or a set of
afterdinner
[Illustration: THE DRAWING ROOM AT 241 BEACON STREET]
coffee cups. My mother never saw the house till the day she drove up to
the door and took possession, leaving every detail of installation to
“Puss in Boots”, as she now called me. The next two years are among the
happiest I remember. Part of the time my brother Harry and his wife were
with us. The reception room on the ground floor was fitted up for
Marion; here he wrote in rapid succession “Dr. Claudius” and “A Roman
Singer.”
Crawford was by now in the full limelight. The success of his book
brought him into great prominence: he had to defend his time from the
lion hunters and interviewers. He enjoyed his sudden reputation simply
and sweetly, and the family at Number 241 enjoyed it with him. Meanwhile
“Big Man” Howe, who had chosen Science for his Mistress, was working
quietly and steadily at his high calling. Everybody talked of Crawford.
You saw his name constantly in the papers, heard it called by the
newsboys on every train. My brother was unknown to the multitude who
were familiar with my cousin’s name. The elect among his fellow workers
spoke of him, and his mother, though always reticent about her children,
knew him for what he was, but to the rest of the world his position was
obscure compared to his cousin’s: there were few, beside his devoted
wife, who foresaw the world-wide reputation, as one of the leading
scientists of his time, that awaited him.
Uncle Sam made us flying visits, arriving by the night train, and
carrying either Crawford or me off to Craigie House, to see Mr.
Longfellow. One day we were so early that we found the poet in his
library, making his coffee in one of those porcelain and glass machines
then in fashion. Every morning, while the water was boiling--it took
some minutes--Mr. Longfellow wrote out a verse of his translation of
the “Divina Commedia.” That day he was dressed in a handsome flowered
dressing gown; when we entered he was writing, standing at a high desk.
The greeting between the two old college mates was characteristic. Uncle
Sam, who never came empty-handed, produced from each of his coat pockets
a long bottle of Hochheimer, the vintage they had preferred all those
years ago, when boys together at Heidelberg.
“Sam, the ancients held that ‘whom the Gods love die young’, because,
like you, they never grow old!” Longfellow exclaimed.
Throughout their lives, these two friends maintained a more or less
desultory correspondence.
On the desk beside me lies a neatly folded and wafered letter in
Longfellow’s exquisite hand, addressed to Samuel Ward, Jr.
My first book, published anonymously, made a good enough success to
warrant my writing a novel. Uncle Sam, as usual the _deus ex machina_,
decided where the scene of the future novel should be laid, by sending
me to California to pass the summer with my Aunt Annie Mailliard.
After my return from California I tried to preserve something of all
that I had seen and learned of that wonder country in a novel, the “San
Rosario Ranch.”
It was in these years that I met Margaret and Lorin Deland, to whom I
was drawn from the first, by a strong sympathy. The Delands were then
living at Number 112 Mt. Vernon Street, a small house they had fitted up
picturesquely, whose chief feature was a diminutive living room and an
immense fireplace. Here, whenever there was the slightest excuse, a fire
of enormous birch
[Illustration: HENRY MARION HOWE, SC.D., LL.D.
CHEVALIER DE LA LÉGION D’HONNEUR, KNIGHT OF THE ORDER OF ST. STANISLAS
PROFESSOR OF METALLURGY IN COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
From the portrait by Font]
logs blazed on the hearth. Phillips Brooks, who was one of their
intimates, spent many evenings sitting over the wood fire. As the
Delands’ fortunes improved, owing to Lorin’s original and brilliant work
in what was then the new field of advertising and business counsel, they
bought a more expensive house, Number 76 Mt. Vernon Street. When they
moved, the ashes from the big fireplace at Number 112 were carefully
collected and transported to the new house. The strong resemblance
between Margaret and myself was often noticed. People said she looked
like another of the Howe sisters. The resemblance was far deeper than
this, for from the beginning of our acquaintance, I felt that she was
like one of ourselves. Margaret, who did not remember her own mother,
had a deep sympathy for mine. She often signed her letters, “Your
abandoned Spring-off,” and declared that she was in reality my mother’s
daughter, and had been abandoned in infancy on the doorsteps of her
excellent Aunt and Uncle Campbell, the only parents she ever knew.
I have had for many years the happiness of being one of Margaret’s
literary advisers. This was a new and interesting experience, for it is
the man or woman behind every book that gives its deepest interest; that
is the reason intimate friends are bored by each other’s books. When you
know the answer to the riddle, the riddle no longer exists! In my family
we all wrote books inevitably, and while we tried to be patient with
each other, we were rather tried by each other’s work. I rarely knew
what my sisters, my mother, or Crawford were writing, and more rarely
read their books when they were published. With Margaret the case was
different. Here were deep, unsuspected springs of prejudice and
tradition. Southern and Middle States instincts--her people had been
slave owners--unlike any I had known. So I could not trace the origin of
every character and incident in her writings, as I thought I could in
the family books!
How many times I heard “Helena Ritchie”, “The Iron Woman”, and “The
Rising Tide” I should not like to say, but I know the characters in
these books far better than any of my own drawing. Mrs. Deland wrote all
her books in longhand, scorning the help of typewriter or stenographer.
Dr. Lavender remains for me her most successful character. I have a
theory about him that always amused her.
“When Dr. Lavender speaks, it is your subconscious self,” I maintained.
Though she had not great physical vigor, Mrs. Deland has always been a
hard worker. She had few friends and few relations; the whole force of
her affection was concentrated on her husband, to whom she dedicated
every book. I have never known any human affection quite like that
between Margaret and her husband. He was a genial social man, with many
friends, who liked his club and his business associates. He said to her
one day:
“Really, Margaret, if you had your way, we should pass every day of our
lives alone together. This would not be good for either of us.”
Lorin Deland was one of the few men who did not resent his wife’s
greater reputation. He did not mind being spoken of as “the husband of
Margaret Deland”, and was far prouder of her than she was of herself. He
was a very lovable man, with a certain breadth of sympathy his wife
lacked. He liked men, women, and children, while she preferred flowers
and the “people with the green heads”! If Margaret had not been so
successful as a writer, Lorin Deland would have written far more than he
did. He has left two small volumes, both well worth reading,
“Imagination in Business”, and a book of short stories, “At the Sign of
the Dollar.”
Of these tales, “Concerning X 107” is a true story of a young woman
criminal, with a Jekyll and Hyde personality. Her life has been debased
and vicious, but she is capable of the highest aspiration, as is shown
by her poems. The story is of absorbing interest, beautifully conceived
and written, but its greatest value is as a revelation of Lorin’s own
nature. He had that true knightliness that hears and responds to every
cry for help from the helpless. His work among forsaken women and girls
was incessant and beneficent. This large-hearted man had no child, and
the intense feeling of tenderness in him seemed to find its relief in
helping the weakest of his kind. After his death a group of young girls
to whom he had shown the tenderest care sent his wife a funeral wreath
with this dedication:
“He was the father of thousands of girls.”
“You cannot let that inscription go as it is!” a friend said to
Margaret.
“Why not?” was the answer; then as an afterthought, “How Lorin would
have laughed!”