Part 22

It was rather singular that in our several meetings neither of us spoke of Adeline D. T. Whitney. She had not then written the books that brought for her love and fame in equal portions. But she was Maria Cummins’s dear friend, and a near neighbor of the Pierces. When we, at last, formed an intimacy that ceased only with her life, we wondered why this should have been delayed for a score of years, when we had so nearly touched, during that and other visits to my ancestral home.

At our earliest meeting in her Milton cottage, whither I had gone by special invitation, she hurried down the stairs with outstretched hands and—“I cannot meet you as a stranger. My dear friend, Maria Cummins, has often talked to me of you!”

In the hasty sketch of a few representative members of the Literary Guild of America, as it existed a half-century ago, I have made good what I intimated a few chapters back, in alluding to my introductory experience of professional jealousies, which, if cynics are to be credited, pervade the ranks of authors, as the mysterious, fretting leprosy ate into the condemned garment of the ancient Israelite. In all frankness, and with a swelling of heart that is both proud and thankful, I aver that no other order, or class, of men and women is so informed and permeated and colored with generous and loyal appreciation of whatever is worthy in the work of a fellow-craftsman; so little jealous of his reputation; so ready to make his wrongs common property, and to assist the lowliest member of the Guild in the hour of need.

I make no exception in favor of any profession or calling, in offering this humble passing tribute to the Fraternity of American Authors. I could substantiate my assertion by countless illustrations drawn from personal observation, had I space and time to devote to the task. In my sixty years of literary life, I have known nearly every writer of note in our country. In reviewing the list, I bow in spirit, as the seer of Patmos bent the knee in the presence of the shining ones.

XXIX

ANNA CORA (MOWATT) RITCHIE—EDWARD EVERETT—GOVERNOR WISE—A MEMORABLE DINNER-PARTY

IN 1854, Anna Cora Mowatt, “American actress, novelist, dramatist, and poet,” as the cyclopædias catalogue her, left the stage to become the wife of William Foushee Ritchie, of Richmond, Virginia.

Mrs. Mowatt, _née_ Ogden, was the daughter of a prominent citizen of New York. She was born in France, and partially educated there. Returning to America, she married, in her sixteenth year, James Mowatt, a scholarly and wealthy man, but much the senior of the child-wife. By a sudden reverse of fortune he was compelled to relinquish the beautiful country home on Long Island, to which he had taken his wife soon after their marriage. With the romantic design of saving the home she loved, Mrs. Mowatt began a series of public readings. Her dramatic talent was already well known in fashionable private circles. At the conclusion of the round of readings given in New York and vicinity, she received a proposal from a theatrical manager to go upon the stage. For nine years she was a prime favorite with the American theatre-going public, and almost as popular abroad. She never redeemed “Ravenswood,” and her husband died while she was in the zenith of her brilliant success.

Her union with William Ritchie, who had admired her for a long time, was a love-match on both sides. He brought her to quiet Richmond, and installed her in a modest cottage on our side of the town, but three blocks from my father’s house. The Ritchies were one of the best of our oldest families; Mrs. Mowatt belonged to one as excellent; her character was irreproachable. I recollect Doctor Haxall insisting upon this when a very conservative Mrs. Grundy “wondered if we ought to visit her.”

“You will see, madam, that she will speedily be as popular here as she has been elsewhere. She is a lovely woman, and as to reputation—hers is irreproachable—absolutely! No tongue has ever wagged against her.”

I listened with curiosity that had not a tinge of personal concern in it. It went without saying that an ex-actress was out of my sphere. The church that condemned dancing was yet more severe upon the theatre. True, Mrs. Ritchie had left the stage, and, it was soon bruited abroad, never recited except in her own home and in the fine old colonial homestead of Brandon, where lived Mr. Ritchie’s sister, Mrs. George Harrison. But she had trodden the boards for eight or nine years, and that stamped her as a personage quite unlike the rest of “us.”

So when William Ritchie stopped my father on the street and expressed a wish that his wife and I should know each other, he had a civil, non-committal reply, embodying the fact that I was expecting to go North soon, and would not be at home again before the autumn.

During my absence my father sent me a copy of the _Enquirer_ containing a review of _The Hidden Path_, written by Mrs. Ritchie, so complimentary, and so replete with frank, cordial interest in the author, that I could not do less than to call on my return and thank her.

She was not at home. I recall, with a flush of shame, how relieved I was that a card should represent me, and that I had “done the decent thing.” The “decent thing,” in her opinion, was that the call should be repaid within the week.

No picture of her that I have seen does her even partial justice. In her youth she was extremely pretty. At thirty-eight, she was more than handsome. Time had not dimmed her exquisite complexion; her hair had been cut off during an attack of brain-fever, and grew out again in short, fair curls; her eyes were soft blue; her teeth dazzlingly white. Of her smile Edgar Allan Poe had written: “A more radiant gleam could not be imagined.” In manner, she was as simple as a child. Not with studied simplicity, but out of genuine self-forgetfulness.

She struck what I was to learn was the keynote to character and motive, before I had known her ten minutes. I essayed to thank her for what she had said of my book. She listened in mild surprise:

“Don’t thank me for an act of mere justice. I liked the book. I write book-reviews for my husband’s paper. I could not do less than say what I thought.”

And—at my suggestion that adverse criticism was wholesome for the tyro—“Why should I look for faults when there is so much good to be seen without searching?”

A woman of an utterly different type sounded the same note a score of years afterward.

I said to Frances Willard, whose neighbor I was at a luncheon given in her honor by the wife of the Commandant at Fort Mackinac:

“You know, Miss Willard, that, as General Howard said just now of us, you and I ‘don’t train in the same band.’”

“No?” The accent and the sweet candor, the ineffable womanliness of the eyes that sought mine, touched the spring of memory. “Suppose, then, we talk only of the many points upon which we do agree? Why seek for opposition when there are so many harmonies close at hand?”

Of such peacelovers and peacemakers is the kingdom of heaven, by whatsoever name they are called on earth.

Mrs. Ritchie was a Swedenborgian. I had learned that in her _Autobiography of an Actress_. All denominations—including some whose adherents would not sit down to the Lord’s Supper with certain others, and those who would not partake of the consecrated “elements” if administered by non-prelatic hands—united in shutting and bolting the door of heaven in her face.

In the intimate companionship, unbroken by these and other admonitions, I never heard from Mrs. Ritchie’s lips a syllable that was not redolent with the law of kindness. I learned to love her fondly and to revere her with fervor I would not have believed possible, six months earlier. It was not her fascination of manner alone that attracted me, or the unceasing acts of sisterly kindness she poured upon me, that deepened my devotion. She opened to me the doors of a new world: broadened and deepened and sweetened my whole nature. We never spoke of doctrines. We rarely had a talk—and henceforward our meetings were almost daily—in which she did not drop into my mind some precious grain of faith in the All-Father; of love for the good and noble in my fellow-man and of compassion, rather than blame, for the erring. Of her own church she did not talk. She assumed, rather, that we were “one family, above, beneath,” and bound by the sacred tie of kinship, to “do good and to communicate.” She had a helpful hand, as well as a comforting word, for the sorrowing and the needy. As to her benefactions, I heard of them, now and again, from others. Now it was an aged gentlewoman, worn down to the verge of nervous prostration, and too poor to seek the change of air she ought to have, who was sent at the Ritchies’ expense to Old Point Comfort for a month; or a struggling music-mistress, for whom Mrs. Ritchie exerted herself quietly to secure pupils; or a girl whose talent for elocution was developed by private lessons from the ex-actress; or a bedridden matron, who had quieter nights after Mrs. Ritchie ran in, two or three evenings in a week, to read to her for half an hour in the rich, thrilling voice that had held hundreds enchanted in bygone days.

To me she was a revelation of good-will to men. She lectured me sometimes, as a mother might and ought, always in infinite tenderness.

“I cannot have you say that, my child!” she said once, when I broke into a tirade against the hypocrisy and general selfishness of humankind at large, and certain offenders in particular. “Nobody is all-wicked. There is more unconquered evil in some natures than in others. There is good—a spark of divine fire—in every soul God has made. Look for it, and you will find it. Encourage it, and it will shine.”

And in reply to a murmur during the trial-experiences of parish work, when I “deplored the effect of these belittling cares and petty commonplaces upon my intellectual growth,” the caressing hand was laid against my hot cheek.

“Dear! you are the wife of the man of God! It is a sacred trust committed to you as his helpmate. To shirk anything that helps him would be a sin. And we climb one step at a time, you know—not by bold leaps. Nothing is belittling that God sets for us to do.”

She, and some other things, gave me a royal winter.

Another good friend, Mrs. Stanard, had notified me that Edward Everett, then lecturing in behalf of the Mount Vernon Association, was to be her guest while in Richmond, and raised me to the seventh heaven of delighted anticipation by inviting me to meet him at a dinner-party she would give him. Mrs. Ritchie forestalled the introduction to the great man by writing a wee note to me on the morning of the day on which the dinner was to be.

The Mount Vernon Association had for its express object the purchase of Washington’s home and burial-place, to be held by the Nation, and not by the remote descendant of Mary and Augustine Washington, who had inherited it. Mrs. Ritchie was the secretary of the organization.

Her note said:

“A committee of our Association will wait upon Mr. Everett at the Governor’s house this forenoon. I will smuggle you in, if you will go with us. I shall call for you at eleven.”

When we four who had come together were ushered into the spacious drawing-room of the gubernatorial mansion, we had it to ourselves. Mrs. Ritchie, with a pretty gesture that reminded one of her French birth, fell to arranging five or six chairs near the middle of the room, into a seemingly careless group. One faced the rest at a conversational angle.

“Now!” she uttered, with a playful pretence of secrecy; “you will see Mr. Everett seat himself just there! He can do nothing else. Call it a stage trick, if you like. But he _must_ sit there!”

The words had hardly left her lips when Mr. Everett entered, accompanied by a younger man, erect in carriage and bronzed in complexion, whom he presented to us as “My son-in-law, Lieutenant Wise.”

To our secret amusement, Mr. Everett took the chair set for him, and this, when three remained vacant after the ladies were all seated.

Lieutenant Wise and I, as the non-attached personages present, drifted to the other side of the room while official talk went on between the orator-statesman and the committee.

The retentive memory, which has, from my babyhood, been both bane and blessing, speedily identified my companion with the author of _Los Gringos_ (The Yankees), a satirical and very clever work that had fallen in my way a couple of years before. He was a cousin of the Governor. I learned to-day of his connection with the Everetts.

He was social, and a witty talker. I had time to discover this before the Governor appeared with his daughter, a charming girl of seventeen, who did the honors of the house with unaffected grace and ease.

I had met her before, and I knew her father quite well. Mrs. Ritchie had taken herself severely to task that very week for speaking of him as “our warm-hearted, hot-headed Governor.”

The characterization was just. We all knew him to be both, and loved him none the less for the warm temper that had hurried him into many a scrape, political and personal. We were rather proud of his belligerency, and took real pride in wondering what “he would do next.” He was eloquent in debate, a bitter partisan, a warrior who would fight to the death for friend, country or principle. Virginia never had a Governor whom she loved more, and of whom she was more justly proud.

This was early in the year 1856. I do not recollect that I ever visited the state drawing-room of the mansion again, until I stood upon a dais erected on the very spot where Lieutenant Wise and I had chatted together that brilliant winter day, and I lectured to crowded parlors in behalf of the Mary Washington Monument Association. Another Governor reigned in the stead of our warm-hearted and hot-headed soldier. Another generation of women than that which had saved the son’s tomb to the Nation was now working to erect a monument over the neglected grave of the mother.

When the throng had dispersed, “Annie” Wise, now Mrs. Hobson—and still of a most winsome presence—and I withdrew into a corner to speak of that five-and-forty-year-old episode, and said: “The fathers, where are they? And the prophets—they do live forever!”

Of the group collected about Mr. Everett, on the noon preceding the delivery of his celebrated oration, but we two were left alive upon the earth.

Of the Stanard dinner I retain a lively recollection. Among the guests were Lieutenant Wise; Mr. Corcoran, the Washington banker and philanthropist; his slim, engaging young daughter (afterward Mrs. Eustis), and Mr. Everett’s son, Sidney. Mrs. Stanard was the most judicious and gracious of hostesses. “A fashionable leader of fashionable society!” sneered somebody in my hearing, one day.

Mrs. Ritchie took up the word promptly. Detraction never passed unchallenged in her presence.

“Fashionable, if you will. But sincere. She is a true-hearted woman.”

In subscribing heartily to the truth of the statement, I append what I had abundant reason to know and believe. She was a firm friend to those she loved, steadfast in affection that outlasted youth and prosperity.

She made life smooth for everybody within her reach whenever she could do it. She had the inestimable talent of divining what would best please each of her guests, and ministered to weakness and desire.

On this night, she did not need to be told that a personal talk with the chief guest would be an event to me. She lured me adroitly into a nook adjoining the drawing-room, and as Mr. Everett, who was staying in the house, passed the door, she called him in, and presently left me on his hands for half an hour. He was always my _beau ideal_ of the perfect gentleman. He talked quietly, in refined modulations and chaste English that betokened the scholar. Like all really great men, he bore himself with modest dignity, with never a touch of bluster or self-consciousness. In five minutes I found myself listening and replying, as to an old acquaintance. His voice was low, and so musical as to fasten upon him the sobriquet of the “silver-tongued orator.” I could repeat, almost verbatim, his part of our talk on that occasion. I give the substance of one section that impressed me particularly.

We spoke of _Hiawatha_, then a recent publication. Mr. Everett thought that Longfellow transgressed artistic rules, and was disobedient to literary precedent in translating Indian names in the text of the poem. The repetition of “Minnehaha—Laughing Water,” “The West Wind—Mudjekeewis,” “Ishkooda—the Comet,” etcetera, was affected and tedious.

“Moreover,” he continued, smiling, “I have serious doubts respecting the florid metaphors and highly figurative speech which Cooper and other writers of North American Indian stories have put into the mouths of their dusky heroes.” He went on to say that, when Governor of Massachusetts, he received a deputation of aborigines from the Far West. In anticipation of the visit, he primed himself with an ornate address of welcome, couched in the figurative language he imagined would be familiar and agreeable to the chiefs. This was delivered through an interpreter, and received in blank silence. Then the principal sachem replied in curt platitudes, with never a trope or allegorical allusion. Mr. Everett added that he had learned since that the vocabulary of the modern Indian is meagre and prosaic in the extreme.

The justice of the observation was borne in upon me when I sat in James Redpath’s box at the Indian Exhibition I have spoken of in another chapter, and heard snatches of alleged oratory as transmitted by a fluent interpreter to the Newark audience. Anything more tame and bare it would be hard to imagine.

XXX

A MUSICAL CONVENTION—GEORGE FRANCIS ROOT—WHEN “THE SHINING SHORE” WAS FIRST SUNG—THE HALLELUJAH CHORUS—BETROTHAL—DEMPSTER IN HIS OLD AGE

REVERSING the wheel of Time by a turn or two, we are in the thick of preparations for the Christmas of 1855.

It is less than a year since I read and re-read a letter that had lain among the leaves of my journal for a long term of years. It was never read by any eyes except my own, and those of him who wrote it. In the solemn conviction that for any other—no matter how near of kin and dear of heart—to look upon the lines, would be profanation, I burned the old letter. Life is short and uncertain. I would take no risks. And what need of keeping what I can never lose while memory remains faithful to her trust?

I require no written or printed record to remind me what set that Yule-tide apart from all the anniversaries that had preceded it, and distinguished it from all that were to follow in its train.

We had had a guest in the house for three weeks. A Musical Convention—the first ever held in Richmond—was in session under the conduct of Lowell Mason and George Francis Root. My father, my sister, my brother Herbert, and myself were members of a flourishing Sacred Music Society, composed principally of amateurs, and we had engaged the distinguished leaders in the profession to preside over the Conference, by which it was hoped public taste in the matter of choir and congregational singing might be improved. Classes were formed for the study of methods and for drill in vocalization. The course would be closed by a grand concert, in which no professional artists would take part.

The thought that the imported leaders in the programme should be allowed to put up at a hotel was opposed to the genius of Southern hospitality. Doctor and Mrs. Lowell Mason were the honored guests of Mr. Williams, the President of the Society. My father invited Mr. Root “to make our house his home while he was in our city.”

That was the old-fashioned form of asking strangers to take bit and sup and bed with us. We made good the words, too. The “home” was theirs as truly as it was ours. The Convention was advertised to last ten days. When the time was nearly expired, the extraordinary success of the experiment induced the projectors to extend the time to a month. Mr. Root was for removing to a hotel, but we arose up in arms and forbade it. His bonhomie, intelligence, and general attractiveness of manner and disposition had endeared him to us all. We hailed as a reprieve the postponement of the date of departure. He had never seen a Virginia Christmas, and here was a special providence he must not overlook. Household machinery moved as if he had not been there. He entered jovially into plans, and connived at confidences—the necessary deceits that are to be condoned by agreeable surprises in the fulness of time. When the personage whom Mea had long ago dubbed “The Young Evangelist,” appeared upon the scene a week in advance of the holiday, and spent three-fourths of each day under our hospitable roof—a state of affairs that evidently was no new thing—the Professor took in the situation without the quiver of an eyelash, and asked never a question. He did more to prove how cordially he was one with the family. Discovering, in the course of the first evening after the new arrival had enlarged our circle, that he had an exceptionally fine voice, and knew how to use it, he pressed him eagerly into service as “the basso he had been longing for,” and the two sang themselves into each other’s good graces inside of twenty-four hours.

I had had a cold for a fortnight, and I made the most of my demi-semi-invalidism when there were sessions of the Convention at uncanny hours, and secured, instead, quiet evenings at home. All of which was transparent to our Professor, as I suspected then, and knew subsequently. He did not disturb a tête-à-tête one December afternoon by bringing down into the parlor a freshly written sheet of music he wished to try on the piano. His quartette clustered about the instrument at his summons, and the hymn was sung over and over. I sat by the fire and listened. At the third repetition, I asked:

“The music is yours, but where did you get the words?”

Mr. Root answered that his mother had clipped them from a Western paper, and handed them to him. The music fitted itself to them in his mind at the first reading. He struck the chords boldly in saying it, and the four rendered the whole hymn with spirit.

“I am no prophetess,” I commented, “nor the daughter of a prophet; but I predict that that will be the most popular of your compositions. It has all the elements of life, and a long life, in it. Once more, please!”

They sang it with a will:

“My days are gliding quickly by, And I, a pilgrim stranger, Would not detain them as they fly, Those hours of toil and danger. For, oh, we stand on Jordan’s strand, Our friends are passing over: And just before, The Shining Shore, We may almost discover.”

Millions have sung it since. Millions more will yield heart, soul, and voice to the bound and swing and exultant leap of the melody “thought out” by the composer in the earliest reading of the anonymous verses. “Almost” has been “quite” with him for many a year.

It was during that Christmas week that I attended a full rehearsal of the programme to be given at the grand concert. Near the close of the rehearsal, Mr. Root came down to the back of the house and dropped into a seat by me, among the auditors and lookers-on. He was tired, he explained, “and would loaf for the rest of the affair.” The “affair” wound up with Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus. My “loafing” neighbor pricked up his ears, as the war-horse at sound of the trumpet; sat upright and poured the might of heart and voice into the immortal _opus_. With the precision of a metronome, and the fire of a seraph, he went through it, from the first to the last note, with never a book or score. It was more to us, who had the good fortune to be near him, than all the rest of the performance.