Part 18

Jamie returned about 12 o’clock. There had been a gorgeous dinner. The guests were Caleb Cushing, Carl Schurz, Perley Poore, Mr. Hill, J. T. F. The service was worthy of the house of an English nobleman, the feast worthy of Lucullus. It fairly astonished J. to see Sumner eat. He of course sat at S.’s right. Not a wine, nor a dish, was left untasted and even the richest puddings were taken in large quantities. I thought of poor Mrs. Child and other devout admirers of this their Republican (!) leader, then of Charlotte Brontë’s story of Thackeray at dinner. Some day, said J., we shall take up the paper and find Sumner is no more, and it will be after one of these dinners.

The talk astonished J., utterly unused as he is to look behind the scenes of government. Caleb Cushing, a man over 70, who appears to have the vigor of 50, called Stanton “a master of duplicity.” Caleb Cushing said Seward was the first man who introduced ungentlemanly bearing into the Cabinet. Until he came there, there was no smoking, no putting up of the feet, but always a fine courtesy and dignity of behavior was preserved.

Before leaving the diaries from which so many pages have already been drawn, before letting the last of the familiar faces which look out from them fade again from sight, it would be a pity not to assemble a few entries recalling notable persons of whom Mrs. Fields made fragmentary but significant record. Here, for instance, are glimpses of Henry Ward Beecher, fresh from the great service he rendered to the Union cause in the Civil War by his speeches in England.

_Tuesday, November 17, 1863._—J. T. F. saw Mr. Kennard today and we heard from him the particulars of Mr. Beecher’s landing. He came on shore in the warm fog which was the precursor of the heavy rain we have today, at 3 o’clock A.M. of Sunday. He went to the Parker House until day should break and Mr. Kennard could come and take him to the retirement of Brookline, to pass the day until the train should leave for New York. News of his arrival getting abroad, a company of orthodox deacons waited upon him very early to invite him to preach. “Gentlemen, do you take me for a fool,” he said, “to jump so readily into the harness of the pulpit even before the fatigue of the voyage has worn away?” He heard of the illness of one of his younger children and therefore hastened as quickly as possible toward home.

The day before the one upon which he was to speak at Exeter Hall he awoke in the morning with a heavy headache; his voice, too, was seriously impaired by over-use. He wanted to speak, his whole heart was in it, yet how in this condition? He shut himself up in the house all that day and hoped for better things and went early to bed that night. The next morning at dawn he awoke, he opened his eyes quickly. “Is God to suffer me to do this work?” He leaped from the bed with a bound. His head was clear and fresh, but his voice—he hardly dared to try that. “I will speak to my sister three thousand miles away,” he said, and cried, “Harriet.” The tones were clear and strong. “Thank God!” he said—then speedily dressed—trying his voice again and again—then he sat down and wrote off the heads of his address. All he needed to say came freshly and purely to his mind just in the form he wished. The day ebbed away and the carriage came to take him to the hall. When he descended to the street, to his surprise there was a long file of policemen, through whom he was conducted because of the crowds waiting about his door. He was obliged to descend also at some distance from Exeter Hall, and he was again conducted through another line of police before he reached the door. The people pushed and cried out so that he ran from the carriage towards the hall; and one of the staid policemen, observing a man running, cried out and caught him by the coat-tail saying he mustn’t run there, that line was preserved for the great speaker. “Well, my friend,” said Mr. Beecher, “I can tell you one thing. There won’t be much speaking till I get there.” While he hurried on, he felt a woman lay hold of the skirts of his coat. The police, seeing her, tried to push her away, but she said to one of them, “I belong to his party.” Mr. B. said, “I overheard the poor thing, but I thought if she chose to tell a lie I would not push her away; but as I neared the door she crept up and whispered to me, ‘I am one of your people. Don’t you remember ——, a Scotch woman who used to live in Brooklyn and go to the Plymouth Church? I have thought of this for weeks and longed and dreamt of being with you again. Now my desire is heard.’”

The rest of this wonderful night the public journals and his own letters can tell us of—have told us. He has been as it were a man raised up for this dark hour of our dear Country. May he live to see the promised land, and not only from the top of Pisgah.

_December 10, 1863._—Visit from H. W. Beecher.... Mr. Beecher did not like Mr. Browning. He found him flippant and worldly. To be sure he had but one interview and could scarcely judge, but had he met the man by chance in a company he should never have sought him a second time. He said of Charles Lamb that he always reminded him of a honeysuckle growing between and over a rough trellis; it would cover the stakes, it would throw out blossoms and tendrils, it would attract hummingbirds and make corners for their nests and fill the wide air with its fragrance. Such was C. Lamb to him.

He was sure he could have liked Mrs. Browning—so credulous, generous, outspoken. He liked strong outspoken people, yet he liked serene people too; but then, he loved the world in its wide variety.

He said his boy wished to be either a stage-driver or a missionary. His fancy was for stage-driving; he thought perhaps his duty might make him a missionary....

It was such a privilege to see him back and such a privilege to grasp his hand, I could say nothing but be happy and thankful.

A few years later a passing shape from still an earlier generation casts its shadow of tragic outline across the pages of the diary.

_Sunday, January 6, 1867._—A driving snow-storm. Last night Jamie went to the Club; met W. Everett, who said that while his father was member of Congress and was at one time returning from Washington to Boston he was stopped in the street as he passed through Philadelphia by a haggard man wrapped in a cloak. “I am Aaron Burr,” said the figure, “and I pray you to ask Congress for an appropriation to aid me in my misery.” Mr. E. replied that the member from his own district was the person to whom to apply. “I know that,” was the sad rejoinder, “but the others are all strangers to me and I pray you to help me.” After some reflection Mr. Everett promised to try to do something in his behalf; fortunately, however, he was released by death before Congress was again in session.

Then soon appears a more cheerful figure, in the person of the Rev. Elijah Kellogg whose lines of “Spartacus to the Gladiators” have resounded in many a schoolhouse. His tales of the Stowes and the family Bible may still divert a generation that knows not Spartacus.

_Thursday, January 10, 1867._—Yesterday J. fell in with a Mr. Kellogg, a clergyman from Harpswell, Maine, the author of many noble things, among the rest, of the “Speech of Spartacus” which is in Sargent’s “School Speaker,” a piece of which the boys are very fond, but the masters are obliged to forbid their speaking it because it always takes the prize. He wrote it while in college, to speak himself. He went to school with Longfellow, though he is younger than the poet, and the latter calls him a man of genius. He is a preacher of the gospel and for the past ten months has been speaking every Sunday at the Sailor’s Bethel with great effect. He called to see J. and told him some queer anecdotes regarding his sea-life. He dresses like a fisherman, red shirt, etc., while at home. He remembers Professor Stowe and his wife well. He says their arrival at Brunswick was looked for with eagerness by many, with some natural curiosity by himself. One day about the time they were expected he was in his boat floating near the pier and preparing to return to his island where he lives, as the tide was going down and if he delayed much longer he would be ashore; but he observed a woman sitting on a cask upon the wharf swinging her heels, with two large holes the size of a dollar each in the back of her stockings, a man standing by her side, and several children playing about. At once he believed it must be the new professor, so he dallied about in his boat observing them. Presently the man cried out, “Hallo there, will you give my wife a sail?” “I can’t,” he replied, “there’s no wind.” “Will you give her a row then?” “The tide’s too low and I shan’t get home.” “Oh,” said the woman, “we will pay you; you’d better take me out a little way.” “No, I can’t,” he said. Presently he heard somebody say something about that’s being the minister and not a fisherman at all. “Do you think so?” said Mrs. Stowe. With that he dropped down into the bottom of his boat and was off before another word.

He told Mr. Fields also of the professor who preceded Professor Stowe. He was an unmarried man with three sisters, all of whom were insane at times and frequently one of them was away from home in an asylum. One day the brother was away, the eldest sister being at home in apparently good health, when another professor came to visit them to whom she wished to be particularly polite. “What will you have for dinner,” said she, “today?” “Oh! the best thing you’ve got,” he replied. So when dinner came she had stewed the family Bible with cabbage for his repast. He speaks with the greatest enthusiasm of the beauty of that Maine coast. We must go there.

Out of what seems a past almost pre-Augustan come these memories of N. P. Willis, a poet who suffered the misfortune of outliving much of his own fame.

_Thursday, January 31, 1867._—The papers of last night brought the news of N. P. Willis’s death and that he was to be buried in Boston from St. Paul’s Church today. Early this morning a note came from Mrs. Willis asking Mr. Fields to see Dr. Howe and Edmund Quincy, to ask them to be pall-bearers with himself and Colonel Trimble. Fortunately last night J. had seen the announcement, and before going to Longfellow’s made up his mind to ask Longfellow and Lowell to come in to assist at the ceremony of their brother-author; he had also sent to Professor Holmes before the note came from Mrs. Willis. He then sent immediately for the others whom she mentioned and for a quantity of exquisite flowers. All his plans turned out as he had arranged and hoped and the poet’s grave was attended by the noblest America had to offer. The dead face was not exposed, but the people pressed forward to take a sprig from the coffin in memory of one who had strewn many a flower of thought on the hard way of their lives. There are some to speak hardly of Willis, but usually the awe of death ennobles his memory to the grateful world of his appreciators. “Refrain! refrain!” we long to say to the others who would carp. “If you have tears, shed them on the poet’s grave.”

There had been previously an exquisite and touching service at Idlewild where Octavius Frothingham did all a man could do, inspired by the occasion and the loveliness of the day and scene. The service here would have seemed cold as stone except for the gracious poets who surrounded the body and prevented one thought of chill lack of sympathy from penetrating the flowers with which it was covered. I could not restrain my tears when I remembered a few years, only two, and the same company had borne Hawthorne’s body to its burial. Which, which, of that beloved and worshipped few was next to be borne by the weeping remnant!!

_Wednesday, July 1, 1868._—In our walk yesterday J. delighted himself and me by rehearsing his memories of Willis. J. was at the Astor House when Willis returned first from Europe with his young bride. He was then the observed of all observers. As in those days travellers crossed in sailing vessels, his coming was not heralded; the first that was known of their arrival was when he walked into the Astor with his beautiful young wife upon his arm. He wore a brown cloak thrown gracefully about his shoulders and was a man to remind one of Lady Blessington’s saying, “If Willis had been born to £10,000 a year he would have been a perfect man.” He was then at the head of the world of literature in America; his influence could do anything and his heart and purse were both at the service of the needy asker. Unfortunately from the first he never paid his debts. J. said he never believed the tales of Willis’s dissipation. He spent money freely even when he had it not. All the English folk, lords and ladies, who then came to see America were the guests of Willis.

I asked what his wife was like! “Like a seraph. She was lovely with all womanly attractions.”

Of the various “causes” to which Mrs. Fields and her husband paid allegiance, the cause of equal opportunity for men and women cannot justly be left unmentioned. They espoused it before its friends were taken with the seriousness they have long commanded, and, as the following passage will suggest, were full of sympathy with those who fought its early battles. The impact of one of these combatants, Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, a reformer in sundry fields, against the rock of conservatism represented by the President of Harvard College, is the subject of a lively bit of record.

_September 22, 1876._—At four came Miss Phelps, at six came Mrs. Livermore. Ah! She is indeed a great woman—a strong arm to those who are weak, a new faith in time of trouble. She came to tea as fresh as if she had been calmly sunning herself all the week instead of speaking at a great meeting at Faneuil Hall the previous evening and taking cold in the process. She talked most wittily and brilliantly, beside laughing most heartily and merrily over all dear J.’s absurd stories and illustrations. He told her of a woman who came to speak to him after one of his lectures, to thank him for what he was trying to do for the education of women. She said, “I was educated at home with my brothers and taught all they were taught, learning my lessons by their side and reciting with them until the time came for them to go to college. Nobody ever told me I was not to go to college! And when the moment arrived and it dawned upon me that I was to be left behind to do nothing, to learn nothing more, I was terribly unhappy.”

“I know just how she felt,” said Mrs. Livermore; “there was a party of six of us girls, sisters and cousins, who had studied with our brothers up to the time for going to college. We were all ready, but what was to be done? We were told that no girls had entered Harvard thus far. We said to each other, we six girls will go to Cambridge and call upon President Quincy, show him where we stand in our lessons, and ask him to admit us. I was the youngest of the party. I was noted for being rather hot and intemperate in speech in those days, and the girls made me promise before we left the house [not to speak]—‘For as sure as you do,’ they said, ‘you will spoil all.’ So I promised, and we went to Cambridge and found Mr. Quincy. The girls laid their proposition before him as clearly as they dared, by showing him what they had done in their lessons. ‘Very smart girls, unusually capable girls,’ he said encouragingly; ‘but can you cook?’ ‘Oh, yes, sir,’ said one, ‘we have kept house for some time.’ ‘Highly important,’ he said; and so on during the space of an hour.”

Mrs. Livermore said she found he was toying with them and they were as far away from the subject in their minds as the moment they arrived, and, forgetting her promise of silence, she said: “‘But, Mr. Quincy, what we came to ask is, will you allow us to come to college when our brothers do? You say we are sufficiently prepared; is there anything to prevent our admission?’ ‘Oh, yes, my dear, we never allow girls at Harvard; you know, the place for girls is at home.’ ‘Yes, but, Mr. Quincy, if we are prepared, we would not ask to recite, but may we not attend the recitations and sit silent in the classes?’ ‘No, my dear, you may not.’ ‘Then I wish—’ ‘What do you wish?’ he said. ‘I wish I were God for one instant, that I might kill every woman from Eve down and let you have a masculine world all to yourselves and see how you would like that.’ Up to this point the girls had been kept up by excitement, but there we broke down. I tried the best I could not to cry, but I found my eyes were getting full, and the only thing for us to do was to leave as soon as we could for home. We lived in the vicinity of Copp’s Hill and I can see, as distinctly as if it were yesterday, the room looking out on the burial-ground in which we all sat down together and cried ourselves half-blind. ‘I wish I was dead,’ said one. ‘I wish I had never been born,’ said another. ‘Martha, get up from that stone seat,’ said a third; ‘you’ll get cold.’ ‘I don’t care if I do,’ said Martha; ‘I shall perhaps die the sooner.’ We were all terribly indignant.”

I was deeply interested in this history. I was standing over the cradle of woman’s emancipation and seeing it rocked by the hand of sorrow and indignation.

Other passages might be cited merely to illustrate the skill and industry of Mrs. Fields in reducing to narrative form the mass of reported talk of one sort or another which her husband brought home to her. A striking instance of this is found in the full rendering of a story told by R. H. Dana, Jr., to Fields, at a time when they were discussing a new edition of “Two Years before the Mast.” It is a long dramatic account of Dana’s experience on a burning ship in the Pacific, which he told Fields he had “never yet found time to write down.” In Charles Francis Adams’s biography of Dana, the bare bones of the story are preserved in a diary Dana was keeping during the voyage in which this calamity occurred. If Adams could but have turned to the diary of Mrs. Fields for 1868, he would have found a detailed description of an episode in Dana’s life which might well have been included in his biography.

But the _if’s_ of bookmaking are hardly less abundant than those of history. If, for a single instance, this were in any real sense a biography of Mrs. Fields, it would be necessary for the reader to explore with the compiler the journals and letters written during two visits the Fieldses made to Europe in 1859 and 1869. But this would be foreign to the present purpose, which has not been either to produce a biography, or to evoke all the interesting persons known to Mrs. Fields, at home and abroad, but rather to present them and her against her own intimate and distinctive background. She herself has written, in her “Authors and Friends,” of Tennyson and Lady Tennyson, and to the pictures she has drawn of them it would be easily possible to add fresh lines from the unprinted records—as it would be, also, to bring forth passages touching upon many another familiar figure of Victorian England. The roving lover who justified himself by singing that

They were my visits, but thou art my home,

stated, in essence, the principle to which these pages have adhered. The frequenters of the house in Charles Street well knew that something of its color and flavor was derived from the excursions its hostess made into other scenes. Yet her own color and flavor were not those of the visitor, but of the visited. It is a pity that many who would have been welcome visitors—none more than Edward Lear—never came. Even as it is, there is ample ground for laying the emphasis of this book upon the panorama of a picturesque social life chiefly as seen from within the hospitable walls of Mr. and Mrs. Fields. When he died in 1881, a long and happy chapter in her long and happy life came to its close.

VII

SARAH ORNE JEWETT

Such a statement about Mrs. Fields as that she “was to survive her husband many years and was to flourish as a copious second volume—the connection licenses the figure—of the work anciently issued,” almost identifies itself, without remark, as proceeding from the same friend, Henry James, whose words have colored a previous chapter of this book. The many years to which he referred were, indeed, nearly thirty-four in number, about a third of a century, or what is commonly counted a generation. For a longer period than that through which she was the wife of James T. Fields, she was thus his widow. Through nearly all of this period the need of her nature for an absorbing affectionate intimacy was met through her friendship with Sarah Orne Jewett. It was with reference to her that Mrs. Fields, in the preface to a collection of Miss Jewett’s letters, published in 1911, two years after her death, wrote of “the power that lies in friendship to sustain the giver as well as the receiver.” In the friendship of these two women it would have been impossible to define either one, to the exclusion of the other, as the giver or the receiver. They were certainly both sustained by their relation.

Miss Jewett, born in South Berwick, Maine, in 1849, and continuously identified with that place until her death in 1909, first entered the “Atlantic circle” in 1869, when she was but twenty years old, and Fields was still editor of the magazine. In that year a story by her, called “Mr. Bruce” and credited in the index of the magazine—for contributions then appeared unsigned—to “A. C. Eliot,” was printed in the “Atlantic.” Four years later, _Consule Howells_, “The Shore House,” a second story, appeared over her own name, the practice of printing signatures having meanwhile been instituted. In May, 1875, the “Atlantic” contained a poem by Miss Jewett, which may be quoted, not so much to remind the readers of those stories of New England on which her later fame was based, that in her earlier years she was much given to the writing of verse, as to explain in a way the union—there is no truer word for it—that came later to exist between herself and Mrs. Fields.

Thus it read:—

TOGETHER

I wonder if you really send Those dreams of you that come and go! I like to say, “She thought of me, And I have known it.” Is it so?

Though other friends walk by your side, Yet sometimes it must surely be, They wonder where your thoughts have gone, Because I have you here with me.

And when the busy day is done And work is ended, voices cease, When every one has said good night, In fading firelight, then in peace

I idly rest: you come to me,— Your dear love holds me close to you. If I could see you face to face It would not be more sweet and true;