Part 8

_July 25, 1868._—J. went out to see Lowell last night. As he passed Longfellow’s door, “Trap,” the dog, was half-asleep apparently on the lawn, but hearing a foot-step he leaped up and, seeing who it was, became overjoyed, leaped upon him and covered his hands with caresses. He stayed some time playing with him. Lowell was alone in his library, looking into an empty fire-place and smoking a pipe. He has been in Newport for a week, but was delighted to return to find his “own sponge hanging on its nail” and to his books. He had become quite morbid because, while J. was away, a smaller sum than usual was sent him for his last poem. He thought it a delicate way of saying they wished to drop him. He was annoyed at the thought of having left out of his article on Dryden one of the finest points, he thought, that was making Dryden to appear the “Rubens” of literature, which he appears to him to be.

Lowell is a man deeply pervaded with fine discontents. I do not believe the most favorable circumstances would improve him. Success, of which he has a very small share considering his deserts (for his books have a narrow circulation), would make him gayer and happier; whether so wise a man, I cannot but doubt.

He wears a chivalric, tender manner to his wife.

In the following autumn, Bayard Taylor and his wife were paying a visit in Charles Street, and Lowell appears in Mrs. Fields’s journal as one of the friends summoned in their honor.

_Thursday morning, November 19, 1868._—Mr. Parton came to breakfast and Dr. Holmes came in before we had quite done. O. W. H. was delighted to see Mr. P., because of his papers on “Smoking and Drinking.” He believes smoking paralyzes the will. Taylor, on the contrary, feels himself better for smoking; it subdues his physical energy so he can write; otherwise he is nervous to be up and away and his mind will not work.

At dinner we had Lowell, Parton, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, Mr. and Mrs. Scott-Siddons and, later, Aldrich. Lowell talked most interestingly, head and shoulders beyond everybody else. The Siddonses left early, the gentlemen all smitten by her beauty and loveliness. A kind of childish grace pervaded her and she was beautiful as a picture. I could not wonder at their delight. Lowell’s talk after their departure was of literature, of course. He has been reading Calderon for the last six months, in the original. He finds him inexhaustible almost. Speaking of novels, he said Fielding was the master, although he considers there are but two perfect creations of individual character in all literature; these are Falstaff and Don Quixote; all the rest fell infinitely below—are imperfect and unworthy to stand by their side. Tom Jones he thought might come in, in the second rank, with many others, but far below. He said he could not tell his boys at Cambridge to read Tom Jones, for it might do them harm; but Fielding painted his own experience and the result was unrivalled. Thackeray and the rest were pleasant reading, very pleasant, and yet how could he tell his class that he read Tom Jones once a year![18] He scouted the idea of Pickwick or anybody else approaching his two great characters. They stood alone for all time. Rip Van Winkle was suggested, but he said in the first place that was not original. Few persons knew the story perhaps in the old Latin (he gave the name, but unhappily I have forgotten it) but it was only a remade dish after all.

_Friday._—Bayard Taylor and his wife left for New York. Mr. Parton dined out and we had a quiet evening at home and went to bed early. (Parton thinks it would be possible to make the “Atlantic Monthly” far more popular. He suggests a writer named Mark Twain be engaged, and more articles connected with life than with literature.)

It is easy to believe that Lowell’s talk must have sounded much like his letters, which so often sound like talk. Witness the following sentences from a letter of December 21, 1868, in reply, apparently, to an appeal for a new essay for the “Atlantic”:—

Well, well, I am always astonished at the good nature of folks, and how much boring they will stand from authors. As I told Howells once, the day will come when a wiser generation will drive all its literary men into a corner and make a _battue_ of the whole lot. However, “after me, the deluge,” as Nero said, and I suppose they’ll stand another essay or two yet, if I can divine, or rather if I have absorbed enough of the general feeling about something to put a point on it.

It’s a mercy I’m not conceited! I should like to be, and try to be, and have fizzes of it now and then, but they soon go out and leave a _fogo_ behind them I don’t like. But if I only were for a continuance I should be as grand a bore as ever lived—as grand as Wordsworth, by Jove! I would come into town once a week to read you over one of my old poems (selecting the longest, of course), and point out its beauties to you. You would flee to _Tierra del Fuego_ (ominous name!) to escape me. You would give up publishing. You would write an epic and read a book just to _me_ every time I came. But no, it is too bright a dream. Let me [be] satisfied with my class, who have to hear me once a week, and with just enough conceit to read my lectures as if I had not stolen ’em, as I am apt to do now. Look out for an essay that shall [make] Montaigne and Bacon cross as the devil—when they come to read it! It will come ere you think.

Yours ever,

FABIUS C. LOWELL

A few weeks later Lowell was writing again to Fields, on January 12, 1869, about a fiftieth birthday party at Elmwood:—

I am going to celebrate my golden wedding with Life, on the 22nd of next month, by a dinner or a supper or something of the kind, and I want you to _jine_. I shall get together a dozen or so of old friends, and it will be a great satisfaction for you and me to see how _much grayer_ the rest of ’em are than we. I shall fit my invitations to this end, and the bald and hoary will have the chance of the lame, the halt, and the blind in the parable. If it should be a dinner, it won’t matter, but if a supper, be sure and forget your night-key and then you won’t have any anxiety, nor Mrs. Fields either. Of course, I shall have an account of the affair in the papers with a list of the gifts (especially in money) and the names of all who _donate_. You will understand by what I have said that it is to be one of those delightful things they call a “surprise party,” and I expect to live on it for a year—one friend for every month.

A week later, in the course of a letter accepting the invitation of Mr. and Mrs. Fields for Lowell’s daughter to accompany them to Europe, he wrote: “Do you see that —— is to commence his autobiography in ‘Putnam’s Magazine’? At least, I take it for granted from the title—The Ass in Life and Literature? If sincerely done, it will be interesting.”

For all the transcendentalism of the circle to which Mrs. Fields bore so intimate a relation, there emanated from Lowell and others an atmosphere of sincerity which helped to preserve the equilibrium of the more easily swayed. Mrs. Fields herself was not immune to the appeal of some of the “isms” of the time and place, but an entry in her journal for January 18, 1870, shows her in no great peril of being swept away by them:—

Attended yesterday a meeting of what is called the Radical Club. Mr. Channing spoke, Mr. Higginson, Wendell Phillips, Mrs. Howe, Mrs. Lucy Stone, Mr. Bartol, Wasson, J. F. Clarke, Edna Cheney. Mr. Whittier was present and a room full of “come-outers.” Mr. Channing and Mr. Phillips were reverent, though I think Mr. Phillips more definite, and perhaps consequently more conservative, in what he said. Certainly Mr. Phillips’s speech was highly satisfactory. On the whole there was much vague talk and restless expression of self without any high end being furthered. I thought much of Mr. Higginson’s talk and Mr. Wasson’s irreverent answer were untrue. Perhaps I am wrong in saying no good end is attained by such a meeting. Perhaps a closer understanding of what we do believe is the result. But there is much unpleasant in the unnatural and excited view of the inside ring.[19]

There was, moreover, a constant corrective at hand in the persons of the local wits, among whom Longfellow’s brother-in-law, Thomas Gold (“Tom”) Appleton, was of the most clear-sighted. His definition of Nahant as “cold roast Boston,” and his prescription for tempering the gales on a particularly windy Boston corner by tethering a shorn lamb there, have secured him something more than a local survival. He frequently left his mark on the pages of Mrs. Fields’s diary—once venturing seriously into prophecy on the spiritual future of Boston, in terms which will seem, at least, _in partibus infidelium_, to have received a certain confirmation at the hands of time. In the diary the following entry is found:—

_Sunday, November 6, 1870._—Appleton (Tom, as the world calls him) came in soon after breakfast Sunday morning. He talked very wisely and brilliantly upon Art, its value and purpose to the state, the necessity for the Museum. He said our people were far more literary than artistic. The sensuous side of their nature was undeveloped. The richness of color, the glory of form, was less to them than something which could set the sharp edge of their intellect in motion. “Besides, what is Boston going to do,” he said, “when these fellows die who give it its honor now, Longfellow, Holmes, and the rest? They can’t live forever, and with them its glory will depart without it is sustained by a foundation for art in other directions. Harvard University will do something to keep it up, but not much, and unless a distinct effort be made now, Boston will lose its place and go behind.” He became much excited by the lack of appreciation for William Story in Boston, and the abuse of the Everett statue, which he considers good in its way and as marking the highest point in Everett’s oratorical fame, that is, when he lifted his hand to indicate the stars in his address at Albany, and set his fame some points nearer the luminaries which inspired him, by his fine eloquence.

He said a merchant told him one day that he didn’t like Story’s portrait statues, but his ideal work he was delighted with. “You lie!” I said to him. “The beautiful Shepherd-Boy which I helped to buy and bring to Boston you know nothing of—you can’t tell me now in which corner of the Public Library it is hidden away. I tell you, you lie!”

He spoke of the Saturday Club, and said that, although he sometimes smiled at Holmes’s enthusiasm over it, he believed in the main he was quite right, and it would be remembered in future as Johnson’s Club has been, and recorded and talked of in the same way.

Unfortunately I don’t see their Boswell. I wish I could believe there was a single chiel amang them takin’ notes.[20]

On December 14, 1870, the diary recorded a dinner at which Longfellow, Osgood, Aldrich, Holmes, Dana, Howells, Lowell, and Bayard Taylor were the guests. It celebrated the completion of Taylor’s translation of “Faust.” Of the talk of Lowell and Longfellow, Mrs. Fields wrote:—

Before dinner I found opportunity for a short talk with Lowell upon literature. He thinks the chief value of Bret Harte is his local color and it would be a fatal mistake for him to come East, in spite of Taylor’s representation of the aridity of intellectual life now in California. Taylor finds the same reason for leaving his native place. He regrets his large house, and frankly says he is tired of living there, tired of living alone, there being really no one in the vicinity with whom he can associate as on equal grounds. There is no culture, not even a love for it, in the neighborhood.

But I have not said half enough of Longfellow. He scintillated all the evening, was filled with the spirit of the time and the scene, sweetly reprimanded Taylor for not having time to give him a visit also, darted his _jeux d’esprit_ rapidly right and left, often setting the table in a roar, a most unusual thing with him. Holmes at the other end was talking about the natural philosophers who “invented facts.” Lowell took exception, said it was an impossible juxtaposition of ideas and words. Holmes defended himself by quoting (I think the name was Carius; whoever it was, Lowell said at once and rather warningly, he is a very distinguished name) a series of created facts by which he said a woman was not articulated or not as a man is (perhaps I have not his exact ideas); whereat Longfellow at once held up the _inarticulate_ woman to the amusement of the table. Then they began to talk of the singular persons this world contains, “quite as strange as Dickens,” as they always say; and Taylor, who introduced the subject, proceeded to relate an incident which happened to him in a cheap coffee house in New York. It was near a railway station, so he dropped in, finding it convenient so to do, at an hour not usually popular with the frequenters of such establishments. It was empty save for an extraordinary figure with long arms, short legs and misshapen body, who, hearing a glass of ale ordered, came forward and said if he pleased he would like to have _his_ ale at the same table for the sake of company. There was nothing to do but to comply, which Taylor of course did, whereupon the strange creature, never asking who Taylor was, went on to relate that _he_ was the great man-monkey of the world who could hang from a tree and eat nuts and make the true noise in the throat better than any other; he had no competitor except one of the Ravel brothers, but he (Ravel) was not the real thing; he himself alone could make the noise perfectly....

They all drank the exquisite Ehrbacher Rhine wine from tall green German glasses of antique form, which delighted them greatly. Jamie was much entertained by Holmes’s finding them “good conversational aperient, but ugly. I should always have them on the table, but they are not handsome.” Longfellow was delighted with my Venetian lace bodice; it seemed to have a flavor of Venice about it in his eyes. It was a real pleasure to me to see his appreciation of a thing Jamie and I really enjoy so much.

I have not reported all, by any means, but time fails me now. A thought of Dickens was continually present, as it must be forever at a company dinner-table. How many beautiful feasts have I enjoyed by his side! There is none like him, none.

Taylor wrote a friendly German inscription in his book and presented me after dinner.

There were amusing traits of Elizabeth Peabody given. Longfellow remembered that the first time he met her was in a carriage. She was taken up in the dark. Hearing his name mentioned, she leaned forward and said, “Mr. Longfellow, can you tell me which is the best Chinese Grammar?”

A midsummer entry of the same year suggests the part that an editor’s wife may play in the successful conduct of a magazine, if only through sharing the enthusiasm that attends the first reading of a manuscript of distinguished merit.

_Saturday, July 16, 1870._—A perfect summer day. Jamie did not go to town, but with a bag full of letters and MSS. concluded to remain here. He fell first upon a MS. by Henry James, Jr., a short story called “Compagnons de Voyage,” and after tasting of it in our room and finding the quality good (though the handwriting was execrable), I invited my dear boy to a favorite nook in the pasture where we could hear the sea and catch a distant gleam of its blue face while we were still in shadow and fanned by oak leaves. It was one of those delicious seasons which summer can bring to the dullest heart, I believe and hope. We lay down with our feet plunged into the cool delicious grass, while I read the pleasant tale of Italy to the close. I do not know why success in work should affect us so powerfully, but I could have wept as I finished reading, not from the sweet low pathos of the tale, which was not tearful, but from the knowledge of the writer’s success. It is so difficult to do anything well in this mysterious world.

On the very next day Lowell wrote Fields a letter which must have been read with delight by such friends of Dickens as the Fieldses. The decorated sonnet which filled its third sheet is reproduced herewith in facsimile: the plainness of Lowell’s script renders type superfluous. The mere fact that the death of Dickens could have called forth clerical expressions provoking Lowell to such scorn is in itself a measure of the distance we have travelled since 1870. The verses are not included in Lowell’s “Poetical Works,” nor are they listed in the “Bibliography of James Russell Lowell,” compiled by George Willis Cooke. With two slight changes they may be found, however, over Lowell’s signature, in “Every Saturday,” for August 6, 1870.

ELMWOOD, _17th July, 1870_

MY DEAR FIELDS:—

I can stand it no longer! If Dickens is to be banned, the rest of us might as well fling up our hands. This hot weather, too, gives a foretaste that raises well-founded apprehension. It is a good primary school for the Institution of which the Rev’ds Fulton and Dunn seem to be ushers. Instead of going to Church today, where I might have heard something not wholly to my advantage, as the advertisements for _lost_ people say, I have written a sermon. It is not a proper sonnet, but a cross between that and epigram—a kind of bull-terrier, in short, with the size of the one and the prick-ears and docked tail of the other, nor without his special talent for rats. Is there any grip in his jaw or no? He is good-natured and scarce shows his teeth.

The thing is an improvisation and the weather awfully hot!

Sweltered your servant sits and sweats and swears: (for alliteration only) but if you would like it for the “Atlantic,” why here it is on the next leaf. Or, if too late, why not “Every Saturday”? I could not even think of it sooner, for I have been wrestling with a bad head and an article on Chaucer, and I fear they have thrown me. I want rest, and a bath of poetry, but where may the wicked hope for either? My sonnet (if Leigh Hunt would let me call it so) hit me like a stray shot from nowhere that I could divine, and five minutes saw it finished. So why may it not be good? It came, anyhow, as a poem comes—though it isn’t just that. But my dog isn’t bad? He is from the life at any rate.

I shall make use of my first leisure to get into Boston. But I have got bedevilled with the text of Chaucer and am working on it with my usual phrenzy—thirteen hours, for example, yesterday, collating texts and writing into margins. I comfort myself that my Chaucer will bring a handsome price at my _vandoo_! I shall be easier in my coffin if it run up handsomely for Fanny and Mabel.

Do you want an essay for your “Almanac” if one should come, which is doubtful? I need one or two more to make a little volume, and I need a little volume for nameless reasons. O, if I could sell my land! I would transmute that gold into poetry. Or if only poems would come when you whistle for ’em!

Give my kindest regards to Mrs Fields.

Yours always,

J. R. L.

From my study, this first day for three weeks without a drowsy pain in my knowledge box, I really feel a little lively, and wonder at myself. But don’t be alarmed—it won’t last, any more than money does, or principle in a politician, or hair, or popular favor—or paper.

Lowell and Longfellow continue to make their appearances in Mrs. Fields’s diary.

_December 7, 1871._—Last Sunday Charlotte Cushman dined here. Our guests asked to meet her were Mr. and Mrs. Lowell and Mr. Longfellow; Miss Stebbins and Miss Chapman, her guests, also came. We had a lovely social time, Lowell making himself especially interesting, as he always does when he can once work himself up to the pitch of going out at all. He talked a while with me about poetry and his own topics after dinner. He said he was one of the few people who believed in absolute truth; that he always looked for certain qualities in writers, which if he could not discover, they no longer interested him and he did not care to read them. He discovered, for instance, in the writers who had survived the centuries the same kindred points, those points he studied until he discovered what the adamant was and where it was founded; then he would look into the writers of our own age to see if he could find the same stuff; there was little enough of it unfortunately. He does not like Reynolds’s portrait of Johnson, thought it untrue, far too handsome, yet highly characteristic in the management of the hands, which portray the man as he was when talking better probably than anything ever did. Mrs. Lowell appeared to enjoy herself. J. says L. is always more himself if Mrs. L. is happy and talkative. They are thinking of Europe. Mabel is to be married in April, and afterward they probably go at once to Europe.

A small party of friends assembled in the evening. Longfellow was the beloved and observed and worshipped among all.

_April 11, 1872._—Last night Jamie dined with Longfellow. John Field of Pennsylvania and Lowell were the two other guests. J. was there twenty minutes before the rest arrived, and Longfellow gave him an account of the wedding of a school-mate of mine, —— ——, an excellent generous-hearted, generously built woman, with a little limping old clergyman who has already had three wives and whose first name is ——. Longfellow said, in memory of what had gone before, the organist, as if driven by some evil spirit, played “Auld Lang Syne,” as the wedding procession came in, consisting of the bride and her brother, two very well-made large persons and the elderly bridegroom limping on behind all alone. The organist suddenly stopped at this point, breaking off with a queer little quirk and shiver as if he only then discovered what he was doing. Indeed the whole wedding appeared to have points to affect the risibles of the poet. He could hardly speak of it without laughter. He said, moreover, that it was, he thought, disgusting and outrageous for old men to get married.