Part 6

_October 6, 1867._—Mr. Henry James and his daughter came to call. We chanced to ask him about Dr. G—— of New York, a physician of wide reputation in the diagnosis of disease. He is an old man now, but with so large a practice that he will see no new patients. Mr. James says, however, that he is a humbug, that is, as I understood. He is a man of discernment which he turns to the best account, but not a man of deep insight or unwonted development. Suddenly J. remembered that there was once a Dr. —— of New York who was also famous. The moment his name was mentioned Mr. James became quite a new man. His enthusiasm flamed. Dr. —— died at the early age of 38, and, according to the saying of the world, insane. “Yet he was no more insane than I am at this moment as far as the action of his mind was concerned, which was always perfectly clear. Several years before his death he was pursued by spirits which often kept him awake all night. His wife was a heavenly woman and a Swedenborgian. The spirits did not come to her, but she was persuaded that they did come to him. They so disturbed his life that he used to say he was ready to die, in order to pursue his tormentors and ferret out the occasion of his trouble. At one time they told him that in every age a man had been selected to do the bidding of the Lord God, to be the Lord Christ of the time, and he must fit himself to be that man. They prescribed for him therefore certain fasts and austerities which he religiously fulfilled, only asking in return an interview in which some sign should be given him. They promised faithfully, but when the time arrived it was postponed; and this occurred repeatedly, until he felt sure of the deceit of the parties concerned.”

Through the medium of these spirits Dr. —— became at length estranged from his wife. He went West to obtain a divorce, and while on this strange errand occurred a breach between himself and Mr. James. The latter wrote him a letter urging him away from the dead, which the doctor took as interference. The poor man returned to New York and at length shot himself. His wife never harbored the least animosity against him for his undeserved treatment. (Mr. J. looked like an invalid, but was full of spirit and kindness. He not infrequently speaks severely of men and things. Analysis is his second nature.)

_March 5, 1869._—Jamie had an unusually turbulent and exciting day, and was thoroughly weary when night came. Henry James came first, and had gone so far as to abuse Emerson pretty well when the latter came in. “How do you do, Emer-son,” he said, with his peculiar intonation and voice, as if he had expected him on the heels of what had gone before. Mr. James calls his new book, “The Secret of Swedenborg.” Jamie thinks his article on Carlyle too abusive, especially as he stayed in his house, or was there long and familiarly. But his love of country was bitterly stung by Carlyle in “Shooting Niagara and After.”

_Saturday, March 13, 1869._—Mr. Emerson read in the afternoon. The subject was Wordsworth in chief, but the time was far too short to do justice to the notes he had made. In the evening we went to Cambridge to hear Mr. James read his paper on “Woman.” We took tea first with the family and afterward listened to the lecture. He took the highest, the most natural, and the most religious point of view from which I have heard the subject discussed. He dealt metaphysically with it, after his own fashion, showing the subtle inherent counterparts of man to woman, showing to what extremes either would be led without the other. He spoke with unmingled disgust of the idea of woman, except for union in behalf of some charity for the time, forsaking the sanctity and privacy of her home to battle and unsex herself in the hot and dusty arena of the world.

(The members of the Woman’s Club asked him to write this lecture for them. He did not wish to spare the time, but promised to do so if they would invite him afterward to deliver it in public. They disliked the lecture so much that, although they _did_ send him a public invitation, there were but twenty people present.)

Nothing could be holier or more inspiring than his ideal of womanhood. She is the embodied social idea, the genius of home, the light of life—“ever desiring novelty her life without man would be a long chase from one field to another, accompanied by _soft gospel truth_.”

He didn’t fail to whip the “pusillanimous” clergy, and as the room was overstocked with them, it was odd to watch the effect. Mr. James is perfectly brave, almost inapprehensive, of the storm of opinion he raises, and he is quite right. Nothing could be more clearly his own and inherent, than his views in this lecture, nothing which the times need more. He helps to lay that dreadful phantom of yourself which appears now and then conjured up by the right people, haranguing the crowd and endeavoring to be something for which you were clearly never intended by Heaven. I think I shall never forget a pretty little niece of Mrs. Dale Owen, who was with her at the first Club meeting in New York. Her face was full of softness and Madonna-like beauty, but she was learning to contract her brow over ideas and become “strong” in her manner of expressing them. It was a kind of nightmare.

_Summer, 1871._—Mr. Alcott, Mr. Howison, Mr. Harris, the latter two lovers of philosophy, have been here this week. Channing is still writing poems in Concord, says Alcott. The latter smiles blandly at his own former absurdities, but he does not eat meat, and continues his ancient manner of living among books. The old gentleman gave me this wild rose as he went away. He quoted Vaughan, talked of a book of selections he would wish to see made, “a honey-pot into which one might dip at leisure,” also an almanac suitable for a lady, of the choicest things among the ancient writers. He was full of good sayings and most witty and attractive. He is somewhat deaf, but he bears this infirmity as he has borne all the ills of life with a mild sweet heroism most marked and worthy of love and to be copied.

_Sunday, April 20, 1873._—Last night Mr. and Mrs. Henry James, Alice, and Mr. DeNormandie dined here. Mr. James looked very venerable, but was at heart very young and amused us much. He gave a description of Mr. George Bradford being run over by the horse-car, because of his own inadvertence in part, and of the good-natured crowd who insisted upon his having restitution for what he considered, in part, at least, his own fault. “Ain’t you dead?” said one. “267 Highland Ave. is the number, don’t forget,” said another; “you can prosecute.” “Where’s my hat?” he asked meekly. “Better ask if ye’re not dead, and not be looking for your hat,” said another.

He also told us of a visit of Elizabeth Peabody to the Alcotts. He said: “In Mr. A. the moral sense was wholly dead, and the æsthetic sense had never yet been born!”

It may well have been after a visit to the Fieldses at the seashore town of Manchester that Henry James wrote this undated characteristic note which embodies the feeling of many another guest:—

MY DEAR FIELDS:—

Pride ever goes before a fall. I scorned my wife’s solicitude about her umbrella as unworthy of an immortal mind, and now I am reduced to pleading with you to preserve my lost implement in that line, and when you next come to town to bring it with you and leave it for me at Williams’ book store, corner of School Street, where I will reclaim it.

Alas! The difference between now and then! Such an atmosphere as we are having this morning! And yet we did not need the contrast to impress us with a lively sense of the lovely house, the lovely scenes, and the lovely people we had left. We came home fragrant with the sweetest memories, and the way we have been making the house resound with the fame of our enjoyment would amuse you. Alice and her aunt came home just after us, and we have done nothing but talk since we arrived. Good bye; give my love to that angelic woman, whom I shall remember in my last visions, and believe me, faithfully,

Yours also,

H. J.

Henry James’s letters to Mr. and Mrs. Fields, of which a number are preserved by the present generation of the James family, abound in characteristic felicities. In one of them—they are nearly all undated—he regrets his inability to read a lecture of his own at Mrs. Fields’s invitation, on the ground that his unpublished writings are “all too grave and serious, not for you individually indeed, but for those ‘slumberers in Zion’ who are apt, you know, to constitute the bulk of a parlour audience.” In another he is evidently declining an invitation to hear a reading of Emerson’s in Charles Street:—

SWAMPSCOTT, _May 11_

MY DEAR MRS. FIELDS:—

My wife—who has just received your kind note in rapid route to the Dedham Profane Asylum, or something of that sort—begs leave to say, through me as a willing and sensitive medium, that you are one of those _arva beata_, renowned in poetry, which, visit them never so often, one is always glad to revisit, which are attractive in all seasons by their own absolute light, and without any Emersonian pansies and buttercups to make them so. This enthusiastic Dedhamite says further, in effect, that while one is deeply grateful for your courteous offer of a seat upon your sofa to hear the Concord sage, she yet prefers the material banquet you summon us to in your dining-room, since there we should be out of the mist and able to discern between nature and cookery, between what eats and what is eaten at all events, and feel a thankful mind that we were in solid comfortable Charles Street, instead of the vague, wide, weltering galaxy, and should be sure to deem Annie and Jamie (_I_ am sure of Annie, I think my wife feels equally sure of Jamie) lovelier fireflies than ever sparkled in the cold empyrean. But alas, who shall control his destiny? Not my wife, whom multitudinous cares enthrall; nor yet myself, whom a couple of months’ enforced illness now constrains to a preternatural activity, lest the world fail of salvation....

P. S. Who _did_ contrive the comical title for his lecture—“Philosophy of the People”? I suspect it was a joke of J. T. F. It would be no less absurd for Emerson himself to think of philosophizing than it would be for the rose to think of botanizing. Emerson is the Divinely pompous rose of the philosophic garden, gorgeous with colour and fragrance. What a sad lookout there would be for tulip and violet and lily and the humble grape, if the rose should turn out philosophic gardener as well! Philosophy _of the people_, too! But that was Fields, or else it was only R. W. E. after dining with F. at the Union Club and becoming demoralized.

The final paragraph of a single other note suggests in sum the relation between James and his Charles Street friends:—

Speaking of Mr. Fields always reminds me of various things so richly endowed in the creature in all good gifts; but the dominant consideration in my mind associated with him is his beautiful home and there chiefly that atmosphere and faultless womanly worth and dignity which fills it with light and warmth and makes it a real blessing to one’s heart every time he falls within its precincts. Please felicitate the wretch for me, and believe me, my dear Mrs. Fields,

Your true friend and servant,

H. J.

_July 8._

Though not related either to Alcott or to Henry James, the following entry, on October 16, 1863, should be preserved—and as well in this place as in another. It refers to the second of the three Josiah Quincys who were mayors of Boston in the course of the nineteenth century.

Mr. Josiah Quincy dropped in to see J. T. F. He had lately been traveling in the West, he said. People complimented him upon his youthful appearance and his last letter to the President. “I am glad you liked the letter,” he said, “but my father wrote it.” At the next town people pressed his hand, and thanked him for his staunch adherence to the Anti-slavery cause as expressed in the “Liberator.” “Oh,” his reply was, “that was my brother Edmund Quincy”; a little farther on a friend complimented his brilliant story in the last “Atlantic” magazine. “That was by my son J. P. Quincy,” he was obliged to answer. Finally, when his exploits in the late wars at the head of the 20th Regiment were recounted, he grew impatient, said it was his son Colonel Quincy, but he thought it high time he came home, instead of travelling about to receive the compliments of others.

In giving the title, “Glimpses of Emerson,” to one of the chapters in her “Authors and Friends,” Mrs. Fields described accurately the use she made of her records and remembrances of that serene Olympian who glided in and out of Boston to the awe and delight of those with whom he came into personal contact. “Olympian” must be the word, since “Augustan” connotes something quite too mundane to suggest the effect produced by Emerson upon his sympathetic contemporaries. Did they realize, I wonder, how fitting it was that this prophet of the harmonies of life should live in a place the name of which is spoken by all but New Englanders as if it signified not a despairing _Væ victis_, but the very bond of peace? All the adjectives of benignity have been bestowed upon Emerson. Mrs. Fields’s “Glimpses” of him suggest that atmosphere, as of mountain solitudes, in which he moved; that air of the heights which those who moved beside him were fain to breathe. His “Conversations” in public and private places, a form of intellectual refreshment suggested by Mrs. Fields and conducted, to Emerson’s large material advantage, by her husband, appear to-day as highly characteristic of their time,—the sixties and seventies,—and the light thrown upon them by her journal illuminates not only him and her, but the whole society of “superior persons” in which Emerson was so dominating a figure. By no means all of that light escaped from her manuscript journals to the printed page of “Authors and Friends.” In the hitherto unprinted passages now given there are further shafts of it, sometimes slender in themselves, but joining to show the very Emerson that came and went in Charles Street.

There was a furtive humor in Emerson, which expressed itself more accurately in his own words than in anything written about him. A pleasant trace of it is found in a note to Fields addressed, “My dear Editor,” dated “Concord, October 5, 1866,” and containing these words: “I have the more delight in your marked overestimate of my poem, that I had been vexed with a belief that what skill I had in whistling was nearly or quite gone, and that I must henceforth content myself with guttural consonants or dissonants, and not attempt warbling.”

There is a clear application of the Emersonian philosophy to domestic matters in a letter written by Mrs. Emerson to Mrs. Fields, a week after the fire which drove the poet’s family from his house at Concord, in the summer of 1872. Mrs. Fields—as if in fulfillment of Emerson’s words on the proffer of some previous hospitality: “Indeed we think that your house should have that name inscribed upon it—‘Hospitality’”—had invited the dislodged Emersons to take refuge under her roof. Mrs. Emerson, replying, wrote:—

We are most happily settled in the “Old Manse,” where our cousin, Miss Ripley, assures us we can be accommodated—to her satisfaction as well as our own—until our house is rebuilt. Only the upper half is destroyed and we shall, I trust, so well restore it that you will not know—when we shall have the pleasure of welcoming you there—except for its fresh appearance, that anything has happened. I should not use such a word as “calamity,” for truly the whole event is a blessing rather than a misfortune. We have received such warm expressions of kindness from our friends, and have witnessed such disinterested action and brave daring in our town’s people, that we feel—in addition to our happiness in the sympathy of friends in other places—as if Concord was a large family of personal friends and well-wishers. They command not only our gratitude but our deep respect, for their loving and personal self-forgetfulness.

Mr. Emerson and Ellen join me in affectionate and grateful acknowledgments to yourself and to Mr. Fields.

Ever your friend,

LILIAN EMERSON

CONCORD, _July 31, 1872_.

It is in the atmosphere of the mutual relation revealed in many letters from Emerson and his household to Mr. and Mrs. Fields that the following reports of encounters with him—a few out of many similar passages in her journals—should be read.

_December 3, 1863._—Last Tuesday Mr. Emerson lectured in town. Mrs. E. and Edith came to tea. She was troubled because she was a little late. She is a woman of proud integrity and real sweetness. She has an awe of words. They mean so much to her that her lips do not unlock save for truth or kindliness or beauty or wisdom. The lecture was for today—there was much of Carlyle, chastisement, and soul. After the lecture they came home with us and about 20 friends. Wendell Phillips was in his sweetest mood. He spoke of Beecher and Luther and of the vigorous, healthy hearts of these men who swayed this world. He said Hallam speaks disparagingly of Luther. I could not but think of Sydney Smith’s friend who spoke “disparagingly of the Equator.” Alden too came in wearied after his lecture. Senator Boutwell spoke in praise of life in Washington, the first man. Sunshiny Edith passed the night with us.

_January 5, 1864._—Mr. Emerson came today to see J. T. F. He says Mr. Blake, who holds the letters of Thoreau in his hands, is a terribly conscientious man, “a man who would even return a borrowed umbrella.” He became acquainted with Blake when he was connected with theological matters, “and he believed wholly in me at that time, but one day he met Thoreau and he never came to my house afterwards. His conscientiousness is equalled perhaps by that of George Bradford, who accompanied us once to hear Mr. Webster speak. There was an immense crowd, Mr. Bradford became separated from the party, and was swept into a capital place within the lines. When he found himself well ensconced in front of the speaker, he turned about and saw us, and with a look of great concern said: ‘I have no ticket for this place and I can’t stay.’ We besought him not to be so foolish as to give up the place, but nothing would tempt him to keep it.”

He was in fine mood.

_Wednesday, September 6._—Mr. Emerson went to see Mr. Fields. “There are fine lines in Lowell’s Ode,” he said. “Yes,” answered J. T. F., “it is a fine poem.” “I have found fine lines in it,” replied the seer. “I told Lowell once,” he continued, “that his humorous poems gave me great pleasure; they were worth all his serious poetry. He did not take it very well, but muttered, ‘The Washers of the Shroud,’ and walked away.”

J. T. F. found Emerson sitting by the window in his new office, highly delighted with it.

_September 30, 1865._—Jamie went to dine with the Saturday Club. Professor Nichol was his guest. Sam. Ward (Julia’s brother) was Longfellow’s. Lowell, Holmes, Hoar, Emerson and a few others only were present. Judge Hoar related an amusing anecdote of having sent a beautiful basket of pears to the Concord exhibition this year. He said Mr. Emerson was one of the judges, and he thought he would be pleased with the pears because a few years ago he was in the garden one day and, observing that very tree, which was not then very flourishing, had told Judge Hoar that more iron and more animal matter were needed in the soil. “Forthwith,” said the Judge, “I planted all my old iron kettles and a cat and a dog at the foot of the tree and these pears were the result. I have kept two favorite terriers ready to plant if necessary beside, but the fruit for the present seems well enough without them.”

Judge Hoar said also that he knew a man once with a prodigious memory; before dinner he could recall General Washington, after dinner he remembered Christopher Columbus!

_Saturday, October 7, 1865._—Tuesday, 3, Edith Emerson was married to William Forbes. The old house threw wide its hospitable doors and the stairway and rooms were covered with leaves and flowers and the whole place was as beautiful as earthly radiance and joy can make a home. Poor Mrs. Hawthorne, laden with her many sorrows, threw off her black robe for that day that she might rejoice with others. Edith made her own marriage wreath, and even Mr. Emerson wore white gloves. Old Mrs. Ripley and many aged and many beautiful persons were there.

In 1866 Emerson, long exiled from the good graces of his Alma Mater, was restored to them by the bestowal of an honorary degree. In 1867 the restoration was completed by his election as an Overseer of Harvard College and his appearance, after an interval of thirty years, as the Phi Beta Kappa orator. In this capacity he read his address on the “Progress of Culture” on July 18, 1867. Of the manner in which he did it, and of the effect he produced on his hearers, Lowell wrote immediately to Norton, in a letter often quoted, “He boggled, he lost his place, he had to put on his glasses; but it was as if a creature from some fairer world had lost his way in our fogs, and it was _our_ fault, not his.” “Phi Beta Day” was still a local festival of much brilliance, which was thus reflected in 1867 on the pages of Mrs. Fields’s journal.