Part 17

You must not laugh at me for proceeding to business the first thing, and informing you in some sort as an argument, that, if I have been unreasonable in prolonging my stay here, I have at least passed my time not wholly to disadvantage,—that I received this morning my diploma as Doctor of Philosophy of this University, the first American, and as far as I know, Englishman, on whom it has ever been conferred. You will perhaps have heard that it was my intention to have passed from this University to that of Oxford, and to have spent this winter there. I have altered this determination for the sake of joining forces with Theodore Lyman at Paris this winter; and as he proposes to pass the ensuing summer in traveling in the South of France, I shall take that opportunity of going to England. It is true I should have liked to have gone directly from Göttingen to Oxford, to have kept the thread as it were unbroken, and gone on with my studies without any interruption. But I find, even at Paris, that I have no object there but study; and Professor Gaisford, at Oxford, writes me that it is every way better that I should be there in summer, as the Library is open a greater part of the day. Meanwhile, I try to feel duly grateful to Providence and my friends at home to whom I owe the opportunity of resorting to the famous fountains of European wisdom. The only painful feeling I carry with me is that I may not have health, or strength, or ability to fulfill the demands which such an opportunity will create and justify. More is apt to be expected in such cases than it is possible to perform; besides that, after the schoolmaster is prepared for his duty, all depends upon whether the schoolboy is also prepared for his. You must not allow any report to the contrary to shake your faith in my good-will in the cause. Some remarks which I committed to paper at the request of my brother upon the subject of a National University,—an institution which by exciting an emulation in our quarter would be the best thing that could happen to Cambridge,—have, I hear, led some good men to believe that I was for deserting the service at Cambridge still more promptly than I had done at Boston,—a suggestion certainly too absurd to have been made, or to need to have been contradicted. However, still more important than all which national or state universities can do themselves immediately, is the necessity we must impose on the schools of reforming and improving themselves, or, rather, are the steps we must take to create good schools. All we have are bad, the common reading and writing ones not excepted; but of schools which we have to fit boys for college, I think the Boston Latin School and the Andover Academy are the only ones that deserve the name, and much I doubt if they deserve it. There is much truth in the remark so constantly made that we are not old enough for European perfection, but we are old enough to do well all it is worth while to do at all; and if a child here in eight years can read and speak Latin fluently, there is no reason why our youth, after spending the same time on it, should know little or nothing about it. Professional education with us commences little or no earlier than it does here, and yet we approach it in all departments with a quarter part of the previous qualification which is here possessed. But also it is the weakness of mankind to do more than he is obliged to. The sort of obligation, to be sure, which is felt, differs with different spirits, and one is content to be the first man in his ward, one in his town, one in his county, another in his state. To all these degrees of dignity the present education is adequate; and we turn out reputable ministers, doctors, lawyers, professors, and schoolmasters,—men who get to be as wise at ye (_sic_) age of threescore as their fathers were at sixty, and who transmit the concern of life to their children in as good condition as they took it themselves. Meanwhile, the physical and commercial progress of ye (_sic_) country goes on, and more numerous doctors and more ministers are turned out, not more learned ones, to meet it. I blushed burning red to the ears the other day as a friend here laid his hand upon a newspaper containing the address of the students at Baltimore to Mr. Monroe, with the translation of it. It was less matter that the translation was not English; my German friend could not detect that. But that the original was not Latin I could not, alas! conceal. It was, unfortunately, just like enough to very bad Latin to make it impossible to pass it off for Kickapoo or Pottawattamy, which I was at first inclined to attempt. My German persisted in it that it was meant for Latin, and I wished in my heart that the Baltimore lads would stick to the example of their fathers and mob the Federalists, so they would give over this inhuman violence on the poor old Romans. I say nothing of ye (_sic_) address, for like all [illegible] it seems to have been ye (_sic_) object, in the majority of those productions, for those who made them to compliment, not the President, but themselves. It is a pity Dr. Kirkland’s could not have been published first, to serve as a model how they might speak to the President without coldness on one side and adulation on the other, and of themselves without intrusion or forwardness.

The following letter transfers Edward Everett to Oxford, and gives in a somewhat trenchant way his unfavorable criticisms on the English universities of that day. He subsequently sent his son to Cambridge, England, but it was forty years later:—

OXFORD, June 6, 1818.

I have been over two Months in England, and am now visiting Oxford, having passed a Week in Cambridge. There is more teaching and more learning in our American Cambridge than there is in both the English Universities together, tho’ between them they have four times Our number of Students. The misfortune for us is that our subjects are not so hopeful. We are obliged to do at Cambridge [U. S.] that which is done at Eton and Westminster, at Winchester, Rugby, and Harrow, as well as at Oxford and Cambridge. Boys _may_ go to Eton at 6, and do go often at 8, 10, and of Necessity before 12. They stay there under excellent Masters, 6 Years, and then come to the University. Whereas a smart clever boy with us, will learn out, even at Mr. Gould’s, in 4 Years, and it was the boast of a very distinguished Man Named Bird [Samuel Bird, H. C., 1809], who was two Years before me at Cambridge, that he had fitted in 160 days. And I really think that I could, in six months teach a mature lad, who was willing to work hard, all the Latin and Greek requisite for admission.

This letter from Cogswell refers to George Bancroft, who was subsequently sent out by Harvard College, after his graduation in 1817, that he might be trained for the service of the institution.

GÖTTINGEN, May 4th, 1819.

It was truly generous and noble in the corporation to send out young Bancroft in the manner I understand they did; he will reward them for it. I thought very much of him, when I had him under my charge at Cambridge, and now he appears to me to promise a great deal more. I know not at whose suggestion this was done, but from the wisdom of the measure, I should conclude it must be the President’s; it is applying the remedy exactly when it is most wanted, a taste once created for classical learning at the College, and the means furnished for cultivating it, and the long desired reform in education in my opinion is virtually made; knowledge of every other kind may be as well acquired among us, as the purposes to which it is to be applied demand. We are not wanting in good lawyers or good physicians, and if we could but form a body of men of taste and letters, our literary reputation would not long remain at the low stand which it now is.

It appears from a letter of my father’s, fourteen years later (November 21, 1833), that, after four years abroad, Mr. Bancroft’s college career was a disappointment, and he was evidently regarded as a man spoiled by vanity and self-consciousness, and not commanding a strong influence over his pupils. My father wrote of these two teachers:—

CAMBRIDGE, MASS., 21 Nov., 1833.

Cogswell at New York to negotiate. He is much better fitted for a City. He loves society, bustle, fashion, polish, and good living. He would do best in some Mercantile House as a partner, say to Bankers like Prime, Ward, and King. He was at first a Scholar, a Lawyer in Maine. His wife dying,—sister to Dr. Nichols’ wife (Gilman),—Mr. C. went abroad. Was supercargo, then a residing agent of Wm. Gray’s in Europe, Holland, France, and Italy; was a good Merchant; expensive in his habits, he did not accumulate; tired of roving, he accepted the office of Librarian here. He would not manage things under control of others, and so left College and sat up Round Hill School. His partner, Bancroft,—an unsuccessful scholar, pet of Dr. Kirkland’s, who like Everett had four years abroad, mostly Germany, and at expense of College,—came here unfit for anything. His manners, style of writing, Theology, etc., bad, and as a Tutor only the laughing butt of all College. Such an one was easily marked as unfit for a School.

From whatever cause, he remained as tutor for one year only (1822-23), leaving Cambridge for the Round Hill School.

It would be curious to dwell on the later influence upon the college of the other men from whom so much was reasonably expected. Ticknor, the only one who was not a Harvard graduate, probably did most for Harvard of them all, for he became professor of Modern Languages, and introduced in that department the elective system, which there became really the nucleus of the expanded system of later days. Everett, when President, actually set himself against that method when the attempt had been made to enlarge it under Quincy. Cogswell was librarian from 1821 to 1823; left Harvard for the Round Hill School, and became ultimately the organizer of the Astor Library. Frederic Henry Hedge, who had studied in Göttingen as a schoolboy and belonged to a younger circle, did not become professor until many years later.

But while the immediate results of personal service to the college on the part of this group of remarkable men may have been inadequate,—since even Ticknor, ere parting, had with the institution a disagreement never yet fully elucidated,—yet their collective influence both on Harvard University and on American education was enormous. They helped to break up that intellectual sterility which had begun to show itself during the isolation of a merely colonial life; they prepared the way for the vast modern growth of colleges, schools, and libraries in this country, and indirectly helped that birth of a literature which gave us Irving, Cooper, Bryant, and the “North American Review”; and culminated later in the brilliant Boston circle of authors, almost all of whom were Harvard men, and all of whom had felt the Harvard influence.

XXIII

OLD NEWPORT DAYS

OLD NEWPORT DAYS

It was my good fortune, after discharge from the army during the Civil War, to dwell for a time under the hospitable roof of Mrs. Hannah Dame, in Newport, Rhode Island. Passing out of the front door one day, just as its bell rang, I saw before me one of the very handsomest men I had ever beheld, as I thought. He wore civilian dress, but with an unmistakable military air, and held out to me a card of introduction from a fellow officer. He had been discharged from the army on the expiration of his term of service with the regiment he had commanded in Frémont’s Mountain Department. Being out of employment for a time, and unsettled, as many of us were at that period, he came back to his early training as a market gardener, and, having made the professional discovery that most of the cabbages eaten in Boston were brought from New York, while nearly all the cauliflowers sold in New York were sent thither from Boston, he formed the plan of establishing a market garden midway between the two cities, and supplying each place with its favorite vegetable. This he did successfully for ten years, and then merged the enterprise in successive newer ones. In these he sometimes failed, but in the last one he succeeded where others had failed yet more completely, and astounded the nation by bringing the streets of New York into decent cleanliness and order for the first time on record. This man was Colonel George Edward Waring.

One of his minor achievements was that of organizing, at his house in Newport, the most efficient literary circle I ever knew, at a time when there were habitually more authors grouped in that city than anywhere else in America. But before giving a sketch of these persons, let me describe the house in which he received them. This house had been made internally the most attractive in Newport by the combined taste of himself and his wife, and was for a time the main centre of our simple and cordial group. In his study and elsewhere on the walls he had placed mottoes, taken partly from old English phrases and partly from the original Dutch, remembered almost from the cradle as coming from his Dutch maternal grandfather. Thus above his writing-desk the inscription read, _Misérable à mon gré qui n’a chez soi où estre à soi_ (Alas for him who hath no home which is a home!). Under the mantelpiece and above the fireplace was the Dutch _Eigen haasd iss goud waard_ (One’s own hearth is worth gold). In the dining-room there was inscribed above the fireplace, “Old wood to burn, Old wine to drink, Old friends to trust.” Opposite this was again the Dutch _Praatjes vullen den buik neit_ (Prattle does not fill the box). On two sides of the room there were, “Now good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both,” and also “In every feast there are two guests to be entertained, the body and the soul.” In almost every case the lettering of these mottoes was made into a decoration with peacock’s feathers, and formed a series of charming welcomes quite in harmony with the unfailing cordiality of the host and the fine and hearty voice of the hostess.

It was at this house that there were to be found gathered, more frequently than anywhere else, the literary or artistic people who were then so abundant in Newport,—where no other house was to be compared with it except that of Mrs. Howe, who then lived in the country, and had receptions and a world of her own.

We had, for instance, Dr. J. G. Holland, now best known as the original founder of the “Century Magazine,” then having but a fugitive literary fame based on books written under the name of Timothy Titcomb and entitled “Bitter-Sweet” and “Kathrina, Her Life and Mine.” He was personally attractive because of his melodious voice, which made him of peculiar value for singing on all boating excursions. There was Edwin P. Whipple, a man reared in business, not literature; but with an inexhaustible memory of books and a fertile gift for producing them, especially those requiring personal anecdote and plenty of it. There was Dr. O. W. Holmes, who came to Newport as the guest of the Astor family, parents of the present English author of that name. At their house I spent one evening with Holmes, who was in his most brilliant mood, at the end of which he had talked himself into such an attack of asthma that he had to bid adieu to Newport forever, after an early breakfast the next morning.

There was the Reverend Charles T. Brooks, a man of angelic face and endless German translations, who made even Jean Paul readable and also unbelievable. There was Professor George Lane, from Harvard, a man so full of humor that people bought his new Latin Grammar merely for the fun to be got out of its notes. There was La Farge, just passing through the change which made a great artist out of a book-lover and a student of languages. He alone on this list made Newport his home for years, and reared his gifted and attractive children there, and it was always interesting to see how, one by one, they developed into artists or priests.

There was George Boker, of Philadelphia, a young man of fortune, handsome, indolent, as poetic as a rich young man could spare time to be, and one whose letters now help to make attractive that most amusing book, the “Memoirs of Charles Godfrey Leland.” There was my refined and accomplished schoolmate and chum, Charles Perkins, who trained himself in Italian art and tried rather ineffectually to introduce it into the public schools of Boston and upon the outside of the Art Museum. There was Tom Appleton, the man of two continents, and Clarence King, the explorer of this one, and a charming story-teller, by the way. Let me pause longer over one or two of these many visitors.

One of them was long held the most readable of American biographers, but is now being strangely forgotten,—the most American of all transplanted Englishmen, James Parton, the historian. He has apparently dropped from our current literature and even from popular memory. I can only attribute this to a certain curious combination of strength and weakness which was more conspicuous in him than in most others. He always appeared to me the most absolutely truthful being I had ever encountered; no temptation, no threats, could move him from his position; but when he came in contact with a man of wholly opposite temperament, as, for instance, General Benjamin F. Butler, the other seemed able to wind Parton round his fingers. This would be the harder to believe had not Butler exerted something of the same influence on Wendell Phillips, another man of proud and yet trustful temperament. Furthermore, Parton was absolutely enthralled in a similar way through his chief object of literary interest, perhaps as being the man in the world most unlike him, Voltaire. On the other hand, no one could be more devoted to self-sacrifice than Parton when it became clear and needful. Day after day one would see him driving in the roads around Newport, with his palsy-stricken and helpless wife, ten years older than himself and best known to the world as Fanny Fern,—he sitting upright as a flagstaff and looking forward in deep absorption, settling some Voltairean problem a hundred years older than his own domestic sorrow.

I find in my diary (June 25, 1871) only this reference to one of the disappointing visitors at Newport:—

“Bret Harte is always simple and modest. He is terribly tired of ‘The Heathen Chinee,’ and almost annoyed at its popularity when better things of his have been less liked”—the usual experience of authors.

I find again, May 15, 1871: “I went up last Wednesday night to the Grand Army banquet [in Boston] and found it pleasant. The receptions of Hooker and Burnside were especially ardent. At our table we were about to give three cheers for Bret Harte as a man went up to the chief table. It turned out to be Mayor Gaston.” This mistake, however, showed Harte’s ready popularity at first, though some obstacles afterwards tended to diminish it. Among these obstacles was to be included, no doubt, the San Francisco newspapers, which were constantly showered among us from the Pacific shores with all the details of the enormous debts which Bret Harte had left behind him, and which he never in his life, so far as I could hear, made a serious effort to discharge. Through some distrust either of my friendship or of my resources, he never by any chance even offered, I believe, to borrow a dollar of me; but our more generous companion, George Waring, was not so fortunate.

Another person, of nobler type, appears but imperfectly in my letters, namely, Miss Charlotte Cushman. I find, to be sure, the following penetrating touches from a companion who had always that quality, and who says of Miss Cushman, in her diary: “She is very large, looks like an elderly man, with gray hair and very red cheeks—full of action and gesture—acts a dog just as well as a man or woman. She seems large-hearted, kind, and very bright and quick—looks in splendid health. She will be here for this month, but may take a house and return.” This expectation was fulfilled, and I find that the same authority later compared Miss Cushman in appearance to “an old boy given to eating apples and snowballing”; and, again, gave this description after seeing Miss Cushman’s new house: “The wildest turn of an insane kaleidoscope—the petrified antics of a crazy coon—with a dance of intoxicated lightning-rods breaking out over the roof.” This youthful impulsiveness was a part of her, and I remember that once, as we were driving across the first beach at Newport, Miss Cushman looked with delight across the long strip of sand, which the advancing waves were rapidly diminishing, as the little boys were being driven ashore by them, and exclaimed, “How those children have enjoyed running their little risk of danger! I know I did when I was a boy,” and there seemed nothing incongruous in the remark, nor yet when she turned to me afterwards and asked, seriously, whether I thought suicide absolutely unpardonable in a person proved to be hopelessly destined to die of cancer,—a terror with which she was long haunted. Again, I remember at one fashionable reception how Miss Cushman came with John Gilbert, the veteran actor, as her guest, and how much higher seemed their breeding, on the whole, than that of the mere fashionables of a day.

Kate Field, who has been somewhat unwisely canonized by an injudicious annotator, was much in Newport, equally fearless in body and mind, and perhaps rather limited than enlarged by early contact with Italy and Mrs. Browning. She would come in from a manly boating-trip and fling herself on the sofa of the daintiest hostess, where the subsequent arrival of the best-bred guests did not disturb her from her position; but nothing would have amused her more than the deification which she received after death from some later adorers of her own sex.

I find the following sketches of different Newport visitors in a letter dated September 2, 1869:—

“We had an elder poet in Mr. [William Cullen] Bryant, on whom I called, and to my great surprise he returned it. I never saw him before. There is a little hardness about him, and he seems like one who has been habitually bored, but he is refined and gentle—thinner, older, and more sunken than his pictures—eyes not fine, head rather narrow and prominent; delicate in outline. He is quite agreeable, and ⸺ chatted to him quite easily. I saw him several times, but he does not warm one.

“At Governor Morgan’s I went to a reception for the [General] Grants. He is a much more noticeable man than I expected, and I should think his head would attract attention anywhere, and Richard Greenough [the sculptor] thought the same—and so imperturbable—without even a segar! Mrs. Grant I found intelligent and equable.... Sherman was there, too, the antipodes of Grant; nervous and mobile, looking like a country schoolmaster. He said to Bryant, in my hearing, ‘Yes, indeed! I know Mr. Bryant; he’s one of the veterans! When I was a boy at West Point he was a veteran. He used to edit a newspaper then!’