Part 1
MEMORIES OF A HOSTESS
_By the Same Author_
BIOGRAPHICAL
American Bookmen (1898) Phillips Brooks (in “Beacon Biographies,” 1899) Life and Letters of George Bancroft (1908) Life and Labors of Bishop Hare (1911) Letters of Charles Eliot Norton (with Sara Norton, 1913) George von Lengerke Meyer: His Life and Public Services (1919) Memoirs of the Harvard Dead (1920, 1921, ——)
HISTORICAL
Boston, the Place and the People (1903) Boston Common: Scenes from Four Centuries (1910) The Boston Symphony Orchestra (1914) The Humane Society of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (1918) The Atlantic Monthly and Its Makers (1919)
VERSE
Shadows (1897) Harmonies (1909)
EDITED
The Beacon Biographies (31 volumes, 1899-1910) The Memory of Lincoln (1899) Home Letters of General Sherman (1909) Lines of Battle, by Henry Howard Brownell (1912) The Harvard Volunteers in Europe (1916) A Scholar’s Letters to a Young Lady (1920)
MEMORIES OF A HOSTESS
A CHRONICLE OF EMINENT FRIENDSHIPS
DRAWN CHIEFLY FROM THE DIARIES OF MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS
BY M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE
“_I stay a little longer, as one stays_ _To cover up the embers that still burn_”
_WITH ILLUSTRATIONS_
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY PRESS BOSTON
COPYRIGHT, 1922, BY M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE
First Impression, October, 1922 Second Impression, December, 1922
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
CONTENTS
I. PRELIMINARY 3
II. THE HOUSE AND THE HOSTESS 6
III. DR. HOLMES, THE FRIEND AND NEIGHBOR 17
IV. CONCORD AND CAMBRIDGE VISITORS 53
V. WITH DICKENS IN AMERICA 135
VI. STAGE FOLK AND OTHERS 196
VII. SARAH ORNE JEWETT 281
ILLUSTRATIONS
MRS. FIELDS _Frontispiece_ From an early photograph
A NOTE OF ACCEPTANCE 9 Autograph of Julia Ward Howe
THE OFFENDING DEDICATION 15 From First Edition of Hawthorne’s “Our Old Home”
AN EARLY PHOTOGRAPH OF DR. HOLMES 18
REDUCED FACSIMILE OF DR. HOLMES’S 1863 ADDRESS TO THE ALUMNI OF HARVARD 23
FROM THE PLAY-BILL OF THE NIGHT OF DR. HOLMES’S “GREAT ROUND FAT TEAR” 24 (Shaw Theatre Collection, Harvard College Library)
FACSIMILE OF THE CONCLUSION OF ULTIMUS SMITH’S DECLARATION 26
MRS. FIELDS 32 From a crayon portrait made by Rowse in 1863
FIELDS, THE MAN OF BOOKS AND FRIENDSHIPS 34
LOUIS AGASSIZ 48
HAWTHORNE IN 1857 54
FROM A LETTER OF HAWTHORNE’S AFTER A VISIT TO CHARLES STREET 61
EMERSON 86 From the Marble Statue by Daniel Chester French in the Concord Public Library
A CORNER OF THE CHARLES STREET LIBRARY 98
FROM A NOTE OF EMERSON’S TO MRS. FIELDS 100
FACSIMILE OF AUTOGRAPH INSCRIPTION ON A PHOTOGRAPH OF ROWSE’S CRAYON PORTRAIT OF LOWELL GIVEN TO FIELDS 106
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL 106 From the Crayon Portrait by Rowse in the Harvard College Library
FACSIMILE OF LOWELL’S “BULLDOG AND TERRIER” SONNET 121
HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW 124 From a Photograph taken in middle life
FROM A NOTE OF “DEAR WHITTIER” TO MRS. FIELDS 130
PROPOSED DEDICATION OF WHITTIER’S “AMONG THE HILLS” TO MRS. FIELDS 132
CHARLES DICKENS 136 From a portrait by Francis Alexander, for many years in the Fields house, and now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts
“THE TWO CHARLES’S,” DICKENS AND FECHTER 140 (Shaw Theatre Collection, Harvard College Library)
REDUCED FACSIMILE OF DICKENS’S DIRECTIONS, PRESERVED AMONG THE FIELDS PAPERS, FOR THE BREWING OF PLEASANT BEVERAGES 147
FACSIMILE PLAY-BILL OF “THE FROZEN DEEP,” WITH DICKENS AS ACTOR-MANAGER 188 (Shaw Theatre Collection, Harvard College Library)
FACSIMILE NOTE FROM DICKENS TO FIELDS 192
JAMES T. FIELDS AT FIFTEEN 196 From a drawing by a French Painter
FACSIMILE NOTE FROM BOOTH TO MRS. FIELDS 201
BOOTH AS HAMLET 202
JEFFERSON IN THE BETROTHAL SCENE OF “RIP VAN WINKLE” 208
A NAST CARTOON OF DICKENS AND FECHTER 210 (Shaw Theatre Collection, Harvard College Library)
JAMES E. MURDOCK AND WILLIAM WARREN 218
CHARLOTTE CUSHMAN: FROM A CRAYON PORTRAIT 220 (Shaw Theatre Collection, Harvard College Library)
RISTORI AND FANNY KEMBLE 222 The photograph of Fanny Kemble was taken in Philadelphia in 1863
CHRISTINE NILSSON AS OPHELIA 226
FACSIMILE LETTER FROM WILLIAM MORRIS HUNT TO FIELDS 231
FACSIMILE PAGE FROM AN EARLY LETTER OF BRET HARTE’S 235
BRET HARTE AND MARK TWAIN 242 From early photographs
FACSIMILE VERSES AND LETTER FROM MARK TWAIN TO FIELDS 248-9
CHARLES SUMNER 258
FROM A LETTER OF EDWARD LEAR’S TO FIELDS 279
SARAH ORNE JEWETT 282
THE LIBRARY IN CHARLES STREET 284 Mrs. Fields at the Window, Miss Jewett at the right
AN AUTOGRAPH COPY OF MRS. FIELDS’S “FLAMMANTIS MŒNIA MUNDI” BEFORE ITS FINAL REVISION 287
MRS. FIELDS ON HER MANCHESTER PIAZZA 288
MISTRAL, MASTER OF “BOUFFLO BEEL” 294
REDUCED FACSIMILE FROM LETTER OF HENRY JAMES 299
(_Most of the photographs reproduced are in the collections of the Boston Athenæum and the Harvard College Library, to which grateful acknowledgments are made._)
MEMORIES OF A HOSTESS
I
PRELIMINARY
In the years immediately before the death of Mrs. James T. Fields, on January 5, 1915, she spoke to me more than once of her intention to place in my possession a cabinet of old papers—journals of her own, letters from a host of correspondents, odds and ends of manuscript and print—which stood in a dark corner of a small reception-room near the front door of her house in Charles Street, Boston. On her death this intention was found to have been confirmed in writing. It was also made clear that Mrs. Fields had no desire that her own life should be made a subject of record—“unless,” she wrote, “for some reason not altogether connected with myself.” Such a reason is abundantly suggested in her records of the friends she was constantly seeing through the years covered by the journals. These friends were men and women whose books have made them the friends of the English-speaking world, and a better knowledge of them would justify any amplification of the records of their lives. In this process the figure of their friend and hostess in Charles Street must inevitably reveal itself—not as the subject of a biography, but as a central animating presence, a focus of sympathy and understanding, which seemed to make a single phenomenon out of a long series and wide variety of friendships and hospitalities.
The “blue books”—more than fifty in number—which Mrs. Fields used for the journals have already yielded many pages of valuable record to her own books, especially “James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches” (1881), and “Authors and Friends” (1896); also even, here and there, to Mr. Fields’s “Yesterdays with Authors” (1871). Yet she left unprinted much that is both picturesque and illuminating: so many of the persons mentioned in the journal were still living or had but recently died when her books were written. There are, besides, many passages used in a fragmentary way, which may now with propriety be given complete.
Into these manuscript journals, then, I propose to dip afresh—not with the purpose of passing in a miscellaneous review all the friends who crossed the threshold of the Charles Street house in a fixed period of time, but rather in pursuit of what seems a more promising quest—namely, to consider separate friends and groups of friends in turn; to assemble from the journals passages that have to do with them; to supplement these by drawing now and then upon the old cabinet for a letter from this or that friend to Mr. or Mrs. Fields, and thus to step back across the years into a time and scene of refreshing remembrance. Many a friend, many a friendship, must be left untouched. In the processes of selection, figures of more than local significance will receive the chief consideration. In passages relating to one person, allusions to many others, sometimes treated separately in other passages, will often be found, for the friendships with one and another were constantly overlapping and interlocking. Bits of record of no obviously great importance will be included, not because they or the subjects of them are taken with undue seriousness, but merely that a vanished society, interesting in itself to those who care for the past and doubly interesting as material for a study in contrasts with the present, may have again its “day in court.” When Fields was publishing his reminiscences of Hawthorne, Lowell wrote to him: “Be sure and don’t leave anything out because it seems trifling, for it is out of these trifles only that it is possible to reconstruct character sometimes, if not always”; and he commended especially the hitting of “the true channel between the Charybdis of reticence, and the Scylla of gossip.” Under sailing orders of this nature, self-imposed, I hope to proceed.
“Another added to my cloud of witnesses,” wrote Mrs. Fields in her journal, on hearing, in 1867, that Forceythe Willson had died. Nearly fifty years of life then remained to the diarist, though she continued to keep her diary with regularity for hardly ten. Before her own death the cloud of witnesses was infinitely extended. Yet new friends constantly stood ready to fill, as best they might, the gaps that were left by the old. It is not the new who will appear in the following pages, but those with whom Mrs. Fields herself must now be numbered.
II
THE HOUSE AND THE HOSTESS
The fact that Henry James, in “The American Scene,” published in 1907, and again in an article which appeared in the “Atlantic Monthly” and the “Cornhill Magazine” in July, 1915, has set down in his own ultimate words his memories of Mrs. Fields and her Boston abode would be the despair of anyone attempting a similar task—were it not that quotation remains an unprohibited practice. In “The American Scene” he evokes from the past “the Charles Street ghosts,” and gives them their local habitation: “Here, behind the effaced anonymous door”—a more literal-minded realist might have noted that a vestibule-door contributed the only effacement and anonymity—“was the little ark of the modern deluge, here still the long drawing-room that looks over the water and towards the sunset, with a seat for every visiting shade, from far-away Thackeray down, and relics and tokens so thick on its walls as to make it positively, in all the town, the votive temple to memory.” In his “Atlantic” and “Cornhill” article he refers to the house, in a phrase at which Mrs. Fields would have smiled, as “the waterside museum of the Fieldses,” and to them as “addicted to every hospitality and every benevolence, addicted to the cultivation of talk and wit and to the ingenious multiplication of such ties as could link the upper half of the title-page with the lower”; he pays tribute to “their vivacity, their curiosity, their mobility, the felicity of their instinct for any manner of gathered relic, remnant, or tribute”; and in Mrs. Fields herself, surviving her husband for many years, he notes “the personal beauty of her younger years, long retained and not even at the end of such a stretch of life quite lost; the exquisite native tone and mode of appeal, which anciently we perhaps thought a little ‘precious,’ but from which the distinctive and the preservative were in time to be snatched, a greater extravagance supervening; the signal sweetness of temper and lightness of tact.”
There is one more of Henry James’s remarks about Mrs. Fields that must be quoted, “All her implications,” he says, “were gay, since no one so finely sentimental could be noted as so humorous; just as no feminine humor was perhaps ever so unmistakingly directed, and no state of amusement, amid quantities of reminiscence, perhaps ever so merciful.” Mirth and mercy do not always, like righteousness and peace, kiss each other. In Mrs. Fields the capacity for incapacitating laughter was such that I cannot help recalling one occasion, near the end of her life, when an attempt to tell a certain story—of which I remember nothing but that it had to do with a horse—involved her in such merriment that after repeated efforts to reach its “point,” she was forced to abandon the endeavor. What I cannot recall in a single instance, in the excellent telling of innumerable anecdotes, is unkindness, in word or suggestion, toward the persons involved in them. Mr. James did well to include this item in his enumeration of Mrs. Fields’s qualities.
Through all his lenses of memory and phrase he brought so vividly to one’s own vision the Mrs. Fields a younger generation had known that, on reading what he had written, I wrote to him in England, then nearly ending its first year in the war, and must have said that his pages would help me, at some future day, to deal with these of my own, now at last taking form. Thus, in part, he replied:—
_July 20th, 1915_
Your appreciation reached me, alas, but through the most muffling and deadening thickness of our unspeakable actuality here. It was to try and get out of that a little that I wrote my paper—in the most difficult and defeating conditions, which seemed to me to make it, with my heart so utterly elsewhere, a deplorably make-believe attempt. Therefore if it _had_ any virtue, there must still be some in my poor old stump of a pen. Yes, the pipe of peace is a thing one has, amid our storm and stress, to listen very hard for when it twitters, from afar, outside; and when you shall pipe it over your exhibition of dear Mrs. Fields’s relics and documents I shall respond to your doing so with whatever attention may then be possible to me. We are not detached here, in your enviable way—but just exactly so must we therefore make some small effort to escape, even into whatever fatuity of illusion, to keep our heads above water at all. That in short is the history of my “Cornhill” scrap.
The time into which Henry James escaped by “piping” of Mrs. Fields has now grown far more remote than the added span of the last seven years, merely as years, could have made it. Remote enough it seemed to him when, at the end of his reminiscences of the Fieldses, he recalled a small “feast” in the Charles Street dining-room at which Mrs. Julia Ward Howe—it must have been about 1906—rose and declaimed, “a little quaveringly, but ever so gallantly, that ‘Battle Hymn of the Republic’ which she caused to be chanted half a century before and still could accompany with a real breadth of gesture, her great clap of hands and indication of the complementary step, on the triumphant line, ‘Be swift my hands to welcome him, be jubilant my feet!’”
Now it fell to my lot that night, as perhaps the youngest of the party, to convoy Mrs. Howe across two wintry bits of sidewalk into the carriage which bore her to and from the memorable dinner-party, and to accompany her on each of the little journeys. Quite as clear in my memory as her recitation of the “Battle Hymn” was the note of finality in her voice, quite free from unkindness, as she settled down for the return drive to her house in Beacon Street, far from a towering figure, and announced in the darkness: “Annie Fields has shrunk.” The hostess we were leaving and the guest some fifteen years her senior, and nearing ninety with what seemed an immortally youthful spirit, appear, when those words are recalled, as they must have been before either was touched by the diminishing hand of age; and the house whose door had just closed upon us—a house more recently obliterated to make room for a monstrous garage—came back as the scene of many a gathering of which the little feast described by Henry James was but a type.
Early in January of 1915 this door, which through a period of sixty years had opened upon extraordinary hospitality, was finally closed. Since 1866 it had borne the number 148. Ten years earlier, in 1856, when the house was first occupied by James T. Fields, afterwards identified with the publishing firms of Ticknor and Fields, and Fields, Osgood and Company, it was numbered 37, Charles Street. This Boston man of books and friendships, who before his death in 1881 was to become widely known as publisher, editor, lecturer, and writer, had married, in 1850, Eliza Josephine Willard, a daughter of Simon Willard, Jr., of the name still honorably associated with the even passage of time. She died within a few months, and in November of 1854 he married her cousin, Annie Adams, not yet twenty years old, the beautiful daughter of Dr. Zabdiel Boylston Adams. For those who knew Mrs. Fields toward the end of her four score and more years, it was far easier to see in her charming face and presence the exquisite, eager young woman of the mid-nineteenth century than to detect in the Charles Street of 1915, of which she was the last inhabitant of her own kind, any resemblance to the delightful street of family dwellings, many of them looking out over the then unfilled “Back Bay,” to which she had come about sixty years before. The Fieldses had lived here but a few years when, in 1859, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes—with the “Autocrat” a year behind him and the “Professor” a year ahead—became their neighbor at 21, subsequently 164, Charles Street. On the other side of them, nearer Beacon Street, John A. Andrew, the great war governor of Massachusetts, was a friend and neighbor. Across the way, for a time, lived Thomas Bailey Aldrich. In hillside streets near by dwelt many persons of congenial tastes, whose work and character contributed greatly to making Boston what it was through the second half of the last century.
The distinctive flavor of the neighborhood derived nothing more from any of its households than from that of Mr. and Mrs. Fields. Their dining—room and drawing-room[1]—that green assembling-place of books, pictures, music, persons, associations, all to be treasured—were the natural resort, not only of the whole notable local company of writers whose publisher was also their true and valued friend, but, besides, of many of the eminent visitors to Boston, of the type represented most conspicuously by Charles Dickens. After the death of Mr. Fields there was far more than a tradition carried on in the Charles Street house. Not merely for what it had meant, but for all that the gracious personality of Mrs. Fields caused it to go on meaning, it continued through her lifetime—extending beyond that of Miss Sarah Orne Jewett, for so many years of Mrs. Fields’s widowhood her delightful sister-hostess—the resort of older and younger friends, whose present thus drew a constant enrichment from the past.
It was not till 1863, nearly ten years after her marriage, that Mrs. Fields, who had kept a diary during a visit to Europe in 1859-60 with her husband, and for other brief periods, applied herself regularly to this practice, maintained through 1876, and thereafter renewed but intermittently. She wrote on the cover of the first slender volume: “No. 1. Journal of Literary Events and Glimpses of Interesting People.” A few of its earliest pages, revealing its general purpose and character, may well precede the passages relating, in accordance with the plan already indicated, to individual friends and groups of friends. In the first pages of all, on which Mrs. Fields built a few sentences for her “Biographical Notes,” I find:—
_July 26, 1863._—What a strange history this literary life in America at the present day would make. An editor and publisher at once, and at this date, stands at a confluence of tides where all humanity seems to surge up in little waves; some larger than the rest (every seventh it may be) dashes up in music to which the others love to listen; or some springing to a great height retire to tell the story of their flight to those who stay below.
Mr. Longfellow is quietly at Nahant. His translation of Dante is finished, but will not be completely published until the Year 1865, that being the 600th anniversary since the death of the great Italian. Dr. Holmes was never in healthier mood than at present. His oration delivered before a large audience upon the Fourth of July this year places him high in the rank of native orators. It is a little doubtful how soon he will feel like writing again. He has contributed much during the last two years to the “Atlantic” magazine. He may well take a temporary rest.
Mr. Lowell is not well. He is now travelling. Mr. Hawthorne is in Concord. He has just completed a volume of English Sketches of which a few have been printed in the “Atlantic Monthly.” He will dedicate the volume to Franklin Pierce, the Democrat—a most unpopular thing just now, but friendship of the purest stimulates him, and the ruin in prospect for his book because of this resolve does not move him from his purpose. Such adherence is indeed noble. Hawthorne requires all that popularity can give him in a pecuniary way for the support of his family.
The “Atlantic Monthly” is at present an interesting feature of America. Purely literary, it has nevertheless a subscription list, daily increasing, of 32,000. Of course the editor’s labors are not slight. We have been waiting for Mr. Emerson to publish his new volume containing his address upon Henry Thoreau; but he is careful of words and finds many to be considered again and again, until it is almost impossible to extort a manuscript from his hands. He has written but little, of late.