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CARLYLE’S LAUGH

AND OTHER SURPRISES




                             CARLYLE’S LAUGH
                           AND OTHER SURPRISES

                                   BY
                       THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

                             [Illustration]

                           BOSTON AND NEW YORK
                        HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
                      The Riverside Press Cambridge
                                MDCCCCIX

             COPYRIGHT, 1909, BY THOMAS WENTWORTH HIGGINSON

                           ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

                        _Published October 1909_




NOTE


The two papers in this volume which bear the titles “A Keats Manuscript”
and “A Shelley Manuscript” are reprinted by permission from a work
called “Book and Heart,” by Thomas Wentworth Higginson, copyright, 1897,
by Harper and Brothers, with whose consent the essay entitled “One of
Thackeray’s Women” also is published. Leave has been obtained to reprint
the papers on Brown, Cooper, and Thoreau, from Carpenter’s “American
Prose,” copyrighted by the Macmillan Company, 1898. My thanks are also
due to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences for permission to
reprint the papers on Scudder, Atkinson, and Cabot; to the proprietors of
“Putnam’s Magazine” for the paper entitled “Emerson’s Foot-Note Person”;
to the proprietors of the New York “Evening Post” for the article
on George Bancroft from “The Nation”; to the editor of the “Harvard
Graduates’ Magazine” for the paper on “Göttingen and Harvard”; and to the
editors of the “Outlook” for the papers on Charles Eliot Norton, Julia
Ward Howe, Edward Everett Hale, William J. Rolfe, and “Old Newport Days.”
Most of the remaining sketches appeared originally in the “Atlantic
Monthly.”

                                                                 T. W. H.




CONTENTS


        I. CARLYLE’S LAUGH                                 1

       II. A SHELLEY MANUSCRIPT                           13

      III. A KEATS MANUSCRIPT                             21

       IV. MASSASOIT, INDIAN CHIEF                        31

        V. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER                          45

       VI. CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN                         55

      VII. HENRY DAVID THOREAU                            65

     VIII. EMERSON’S “FOOT-NOTE PERSON,”—ALCOTT           75

       IX. GEORGE BANCROFT                                93

        X. CHARLES ELIOT NORTON                          119

       XI. EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN                       137

      XII. EDWARD EVERETT HALE                           157

     XIII. A MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL, RUFUS SAXTON         173

      XIV. ONE OF THACKERAY’S WOMEN                      183

       XV. JOHN BARTLETT                                 191

      XVI. HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER                         201

     XVII. EDWARD ATKINSON                               213

    XVIII. JAMES ELLIOT CABOT                            231

      XIX. EMILY DICKINSON                               247

       XX. JULIA WARD HOWE                               285

      XXI. WILLIAM JAMES ROLFE                           313

     XXII. GÖTTINGEN AND HARVARD A CENTURY AGO           325

    XXIII. OLD NEWPORT DAYS                              349

     XXIV. A HALF-CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE         367




I

CARLYLE’S LAUGH




CARLYLE’S LAUGH


None of the many sketches of Carlyle that have been published since
his death have brought out quite distinctly enough the thing which
struck me more forcibly than all else, when in the actual presence of
the man; namely, the peculiar quality and expression of his laugh. It
need hardly be said that there is a great deal in a laugh. One of the
most telling pieces of oratory that ever reached my ears was Victor
Hugo’s vindication, at the Voltaire Centenary in Paris, of that author’s
smile. To be sure, Carlyle’s laugh was not like that smile, but it was
something as inseparable from his personality, and as essential to the
account, when making up one’s estimate of him. It was as individually
characteristic as his face or his dress, or his way of talking or of
writing. Indeed, it seemed indispensable for the explanation of all of
these. I found in looking back upon my first interview with him, that
all I had known of Carlyle through others, or through his own books, for
twenty-five years, had been utterly defective,—had left out, in fact, the
key to his whole nature,—inasmuch as nobody had ever described to me his
laugh.

It is impossible to follow the matter further without a little bit of
personal narration. On visiting England for the first time, in 1872, I
was offered a letter to Carlyle, and declined it. Like all of my own
generation, I had been under some personal obligations to him for his
early writings,—though in my case this debt was trifling compared with
that due to Emerson,—but his “Latter-Day Pamphlets” and his reported
utterances on American affairs had taken away all special desire to meet
him, besides the ungraciousness said to mark his demeanor toward visitors
from the United States. Yet, when I was once fairly launched in that
fascinating world of London society, where the American sees, as Willis
used to say, whole shelves of his library walking about in coats and
gowns, this disinclination rapidly softened. And when Mr. Froude kindly
offered to take me with him for one of his afternoon calls on Carlyle,
and further proposed that I should join them in their habitual walk
through the parks, it was not in human nature—or at least in American
nature—to resist.

We accordingly went after lunch, one day in May, to Carlyle’s modest
house in Chelsea, and found him in his study, reading—by a chance very
appropriate for me—in Weiss’s “Life of Parker.” He received us kindly,
but at once began inveighing against the want of arrangement in the
book he was reading, the defective grouping of the different parts, and
the impossibility of finding anything in it, even by aid of the index.
He then went on to speak of Parker himself, and of other Americans
whom he had met. I do not recall the details of the conversation, but
to my surprise he did not say a single really offensive or ungracious
thing. If he did, it related less to my countrymen than to his own, for
I remember his saying some rather stern things about Scotchmen. But
that which saved these and all his sharpest words from being actually
offensive was this, that, after the most vehement tirade, he would
suddenly pause, throw his head back, and give as genuine and kindly a
laugh as I ever heard from a human being. It was not the bitter laugh
of the cynic, nor yet the big-bodied laugh of the burly joker; least of
all was it the thin and rasping cackle of the dyspeptic satirist. It was
a broad, honest, human laugh, which, beginning in the brain, took into
its action the whole heart and diaphragm, and instantly changed the worn
face into something frank and even winning, giving to it an expression
that would have won the confidence of any child. Nor did it convey the
impression of an exceptional thing that had occurred for the first time
that day, and might never happen again. Rather, it produced the effect
of something habitual; of being the channel, well worn for years, by
which the overflow of a strong nature was discharged. It cleared the
air like thunder, and left the atmosphere sweet. It seemed to say to
himself, if not to us, “Do not let us take this too seriously; it is my
way of putting things. What refuge is there for a man who looks below the
surface in a world like this, except to laugh now and then?” The laugh,
in short, revealed the humorist; if I said the genial humorist, wearing a
mask of grimness, I should hardly go too far for the impression it left.
At any rate, it shifted the ground, and transferred the whole matter to
that realm of thought where men play with things. The instant Carlyle
laughed, he seemed to take the counsel of his old friend Emerson, and to
write upon the lintels of his doorway, “Whim.”

Whether this interpretation be right or wrong, it is certain that the
effect of this new point of view upon one of his visitors was wholly
disarming. The bitter and unlovely vision vanished; my armed neutrality
went with it, and there I sat talking with Carlyle as fearlessly as if
he were an old friend. The talk soon fell on the most dangerous of all
ground, our Civil War, which was then near enough to inspire curiosity;
and he put questions showing that he had, after all, considered the
matter in a sane and reasonable way. He was especially interested in the
freed slaves and the colored troops; he said but little, yet that was
always to the point, and without one ungenerous word. On the contrary,
he showed more readiness to comprehend the situation, as it existed
after the war, than was to be found in most Englishmen at that time.
The need of giving the ballot to the former slaves he readily admitted,
when it was explained to him; and he at once volunteered the remark that
in a republic they needed this, as the guarantee of their freedom. “You
could do no less,” he said, “for the men who had stood by you.” I could
scarcely convince my senses that this manly and reasonable critic was
the terrible Carlyle, the hater of “Cuffee” and “Quashee” and of all
republican government. If at times a trace of angry exaggeration showed
itself, the good, sunny laugh came in and cleared the air.

We walked beneath the lovely trees of Kensington Gardens, then in
the glory of an English May; and I had my first sight of the endless
procession of riders and equipages in Rotten Row. My two companions
received numerous greetings, and as I walked in safe obscurity by their
side, I could cast sly glances of keen enjoyment at the odd combination
visible in their looks. Froude’s fine face and bearing became familiar
afterwards to Americans, and he was irreproachably dressed; while
probably no salutation was ever bestowed from an elegant passing carriage
on an odder figure than Carlyle. Tall, very thin, and slightly stooping;
with unkempt, grizzly whiskers pushed up by a high collar, and kept
down by an ancient felt hat; wearing an old faded frock coat, checked
waistcoat, coarse gray trousers, and russet shoes; holding a stout
stick, with his hands encased in very large gray woolen gloves,—this
was Carlyle. I noticed that, when we first left his house, his aspect
attracted no notice in the streets, being doubtless familiar in his own
neighborhood; but as we went farther and farther on, many eyes were
turned in his direction, and men sometimes stopped to gaze at him. Little
he noticed it, however, as he plodded along with his eyes cast down or
looking straight before him, while his lips poured forth an endless
stream of talk. Once and once only he was accosted, and forced to answer;
and I recall it with delight as showing how the unerring instinct of
childhood coincided with mine, and pronounced him not a man to be feared.

We passed a spot where some nobleman’s grounds were being appropriated
for a public park; it was only lately that people had been allowed to
cross them, and all was in the rough, preparations for the change having
been begun. Part of the turf had been torn up for a road-way, but there
was a little emerald strip where three or four ragged children, the
oldest not over ten, were turning somersaults in great delight. As we
approached, they paused and looked shyly at us, as if uncertain of their
right on these premises; and I could see the oldest, a sharp-eyed little
London boy, reviewing us with one keen glance, as if selecting him in
whom confidence might best be placed. Now I am myself a child-loving
person; and I had seen with pleasure Mr. Froude’s kindly ways with
his own youthful household: yet the little _gamin_ dismissed us with
a glance and fastened on Carlyle. Pausing on one foot, as if ready
to take to his heels on the least discouragement, he called out the
daring question, “I say, mister, may we roll on this here grass?” The
philosopher faced round, leaning on his staff, and replied in a homelier
Scotch accent than I had yet heard him use, “Yes, my little fellow,
r-r-roll at discraytion!” Instantly the children resumed their antics,
while one little girl repeated meditatively, “He says we may roll at
discraytion!”—as if it were some new kind of ninepin-ball.

Six years later, I went with my friend Conway to call on Mr. Carlyle once
more, and found the kindly laugh still there, though changed, like all
else in him, by the advance of years and the solitude of existence. It
could not be said of him that he grew old happily, but he did not grow
old unkindly, I should say; it was painful to see him, but it was because
one pitied him, not by reason of resentment suggested by anything on his
part. He announced himself to be, and he visibly was, a man left behind
by time and waiting for death. He seemed in a manner sunk within himself;
but I remember well the affectionate way in which he spoke of Emerson,
who had just sent him the address entitled “The Future of the Republic.”
Carlyle remarked, “I’ve just noo been reading it; the dear Emerson, he
thinks the whole warrld’s like himself; and if he can just get a million
people together and let them all vote, they’ll be sure to vote right and
all will go vara weel”; and then came in the brave laugh of old, but
briefer and less hearty by reason of years and sorrows.

One may well hesitate before obtruding upon the public any such private
impressions of an eminent man. They will always appear either too
personal or too trivial. But I have waited in vain to see some justice
done to the side of Carlyle here portrayed; and since it has been very
commonly asserted that the effect he produced on strangers was that of
a rude and offensive person, it seems almost a duty to testify to the
very different way in which one American visitor saw him. An impression
produced at two interviews, six years apart, may be worth recording,
especially if it proved strong enough to outweigh all previous prejudice
and antagonism.

In fine, I should be inclined to appeal from all Carlyle’s apparent
bitterness and injustice to the mere quality of his laugh, as giving
sufficient proof that the gift of humor underlay all else in him. All
his critics, I now think, treat him a little too seriously. No matter
what his labors or his purposes, the attitude of the humorist was always
behind. As I write, there lies before me a scrap from the original
manuscript of his “French Revolution,”—the page being written, after
the custom of English authors of half a century ago, on both sides of
the paper; and as I study it, every curl and twist of the handwriting,
every backstroke of the pen, every substitution of a more piquant word
for a plainer one, bespeaks the man of whim. Perhaps this quality came
by nature through a Scotch ancestry; perhaps it was strengthened by the
accidental course of his early reading. It may be that it was Richter
who moulded him, after all, rather than Goethe; and we know that Richter
was defined by Carlyle, in his very first literary essay, as “a humorist
and a philosopher,” putting the humorist first. The German author’s
favorite type of character—seen to best advantage in his Siebenkäs
of the “Blumen, Frucht, und Dornenstücke”—came nearer to the actual
Carlyle than most of the grave portraitures yet executed. He, as is
said of Siebenkäs, disguised his heart beneath a grotesque mask, partly
for greater freedom, and partly because he preferred whimsically to
exaggerate human folly rather than to share it (_dass er die menschliche
Thorheit mehr travestiere als nachahme_). Both characters might be
well summed up in the brief sentence which follows: “A humorist in
action is but a satirical improvisatore” (_Ein handelnder Humorist ist
blos ein satirischer Improvisatore_). This last phrase, “a satirical
improvisatore,” seems to me better than any other to describe Carlyle.




II

A SHELLEY MANUSCRIPT




A SHELLEY MANUSCRIPT


Were I to hear to-morrow that the main library of Harvard University,
with every one of its 496,200 volumes, had been reduced to ashes, there
is in my mind no question what book I should most regret. It is that
unique, battered, dingy little quarto volume of Shelley’s manuscript
poems, in his own handwriting and that of his wife, first given by Miss
Jane Clairmont (Shelley’s “Constantia”) to Mr. Edward A. Silsbee, and
then presented by him to the library. Not only is it full of that aroma
of fascination which belongs to the actual handiwork of a master, but
its numerous corrections and interlineations make the reader feel that
he is actually traveling in the pathway of that delicate mind. Professor
George E. Woodberry had the use of it; he printed in the “Harvard
University Calendar” a facsimile of the “Ode to a Skylark” as given in
the manuscript, and has cited many of its various readings in his edition
of Shelley’s poems. But he has passed by a good many others; and some of
these need, I think, for the sake of all students of Shelley, to be put
in print, so that in case of the loss or destruction of the precious
volume, these fragments at least may be preserved.

There occur in this manuscript the following variations from Professor
Woodberry’s text of “The Sensitive Plant”—variations not mentioned by
him, for some reason or other, in his footnotes or supplemental notes,
and yet not canceled by Shelley:—

    “Three days the flowers of the garden fair
    Like stars when the moon is awakened, were.”

                                      III, 1-2.

    [_Moon_ is clearly _morn_ in the Harvard MS.]

    “And under the roots of the Sensitive Plant.”

                                       III, 100.

    [The prefatory _And_ is not in the Harvard MS.]

    “But the mandrakes and toadstools and docks and darnels
    Rose like the dead from their ruined charnels.”

                                         III, 112.

    [The word _brambles_ appears for _mandrakes_ in the Harvard MS.]

These three variations, all of which are interesting, are the only ones I
have noted as uncanceled in this particular poem, beyond those recorded
by Professor Woodberry. But there are many cases where the manuscript
shows, in Shelley’s own handwriting, variations subsequently canceled
by him; and these deserve study by all students of the poetic art.
His ear was so exquisite and his sense of the _balance_ of a phrase so
remarkable, that it is always interesting to see the path by which he
came to the final utterance, whatever that was. I have, therefore, copied
a number of these modified lines, giving, first, Professor Woodberry’s
text, and then the original form of language, as it appears in Shelley’s
handwriting, italicizing the words which vary, and giving the pages of
Professor Woodberry’s edition. The cancelation or change is sometimes
made in pen, sometimes in pencil; and it is possible that, in a few
cases, it may have been made by Mrs. Shelley.

    “Gazed through clear dew on the tender sky.”

    “Gazed through _its tears_ on the tender sky.”

                                           I, 36.

    “The beams which dart from many a star
    Of the flowers whose hues they bear afar.”

    “The beams which dart from many a _sphere_
    Of the _starry_ flowers whose hues they bear.”

                                        I, 81-82.

    “The unseen clouds of the dew, which lie
    Like fire in the flowers till the sun rides high,
    Then wander like spirits among the spheres
    Each cloud faint with the fragrance it bears.”

    “The unseen clouds of the dew, which _lay_
    Like fire in the flowers till _dawning day_,
    Then _walk_ like spirits among the spheres
    Each _one_ faint with the _odor_ it bears.”

                                     I, 86-89.

    “Like windless clouds o’er a tender sky.”

    “Like windless clouds _in_ a tender sky.”

                                      I, 98.

    “Whose waves never mark, though they ever impress.”

    “Whose waves never _wrinkle_, though they impress.”

                                               I, 106.

    “Was as God is to the starry scheme,”

    “Was as _is God_ to the starry scheme.”

                                     I, 4.

    “As if some bright spirit for her sweet sake
    Had deserted heaven while the stars were awake.”

    “As some bright spirit for her sweet sake
    Had deserted _the_ heaven while the stars were awake.”

                                               II, 17-18.

    “The freshest her gentle hands could pull.”

    “The freshest her gentle hands could _cull_.”

                                         II, 46.

    “The sweet lips of the flowers and harm not, did she.”

    “The sweet lips of flowers,” etc.

                                                  II, 51.

    “Edge of the odorous cedar bark.”

    “Edge of the odorous _cypress_ bark.”

                                 II, 56.

    “Sent through the pores of the coffin plank.”

    “_Ran_ through,” etc.

                                        III, 12.

    “Between the time of the wind and the snow.”

    “Between the _term_,” etc. [probably accidental].

                                             III, 50.

    “Dammed it up with roots knotted like water-snakes.”

    “Dammed it with,” etc.

                                               III, 69.

    “At noon they were seen, at noon they were felt.”

    “At noon they were seen & noon they were felt.”

                                          III, 73.

    [“&” perhaps written carelessly for “at.”]

    “Their decay and sudden flight from frost.”

    “Their decay and sudden flight from _the_ frost.”

                                            III, 98.

    “To own that death itself must be.”

    “To _think_ that,” etc.

                             III, 128.

These comparisons are here carried no further than “The Sensitive Plant,”
except that there is a canceled verse of Shelley’s “Curse” against Lord
Eldon for depriving him of his children,—a verse so touching that I think
it should be preserved. The verse beginning—

    “By those unpractised accents of young speech,”

opened originally as follows:—

    “By that sweet voice which who could understand
    To frame to sounds of love and lore divine,
    Not thou.”

This was abandoned and the following substituted:—

    “By those pure accents which at my command
    Should have been framed to love and lore divine,
    Now like a lute, fretted by some rude hand,
    Uttering harsh discords, they must echo thine.”

This also was erased, and the present form substituted, although I
confess it seems to me both less vigorous and less tender. Professor
Woodberry mentions the change, but does not give the canceled verse. In
this and other cases I do not venture to blame him for the omission,
since an editor must, after all, exercise his own judgment. Yet I cannot
but wish that he had carried his citation, even of canceled variations, a
little further; and it is evident that some future student of poetic art
will yet find rich gleanings in the Harvard Shelley manuscript.




III

A KEATS MANUSCRIPT




A KEATS MANUSCRIPT


“Touch it,” said Leigh Hunt, when he showed Bayard Taylor a lock of
brown silky hair, “and you will have touched Milton’s self.” The magic
of the lock of hair is akin to that recognized by nomadic and untamed
races in anything that has been worn close to the person of a great
or fortunate being. Mr. Leland, much reverenced by the gypsies, whose
language he spoke and whose lore he knew better than they know it, had a
knife about his person which was supposed by them to secure the granting
of any request if held in the hand. When he gave it away, it was like
the transfer of fairy power to the happy recipient. The same lucky spell
is attributed to a piece of the bride’s garter, in Normandy, or to pins
filched from her dress, in Sussex. For those more cultivated, the charm
of this transmitted personality is best embodied in autographs, and the
more unstudied and unpremeditated the better. In the case of a poet,
nothing can be compared with the interest inspired by the first draft
of a poem, with its successive amendments—the path by which his thought
attained its final and perfect utterance. Tennyson, for instance, was
said to be very indignant with those who bore away from his study certain
rough drafts of poems, justly holding that the world had no right to
any but the completed form. Yet this is what, as students of poetry,
we all instinctively wish to do. Rightly or wrongly, we long to trace
the successive steps. To some extent, the same opportunity is given
in successive editions of the printed work; but here the study is not
so much of changes in the poet’s own mind as of those produced by the
criticisms, often dull or ignorant, of his readers,—those especially who
fail to catch a poet’s very finest thought, and persuade him to dilute
it a little for their satisfaction. When I pointed out to Browning some
rather unfortunate alterations in his later editions, and charged him
with having made them to accommodate stupid people, he admitted the
offense and promised to alter them back again, although, of course,
he never did. But the changes in an author’s manuscript almost always
come either from his own finer perception and steady advance toward the
precise conveyance of his own thought, or else from the aid he receives
in this from some immediate friend or adviser—most likely a woman—who is
in close sympathy with his own mood. The charm is greatest, of course, in
seeing and studying and touching the original page, just as it is. For
this a photograph is the best substitute, since it preserves the original
for the eye, as does the phonograph for the ear. Even with the aid of
photography only, there is as much difference between the final corrected
shape and the page showing the gradual changes, as between the graceful
yacht lying in harbor, anchored, motionless, with sails furled, and the
same yacht as a winged creature, gliding into port. Let us now see, by
actual comparison, how one of Keats’s yachts came in.

There lies before me a photograph of the first two stanzas of Keats’s
“Ode on Melancholy,” as they stood when just written. The manuscript
page containing them was given to John Howard Payne by George Keats, the
poet’s brother, who lived for many years at Louisville, Kentucky, and
died there; but it now belongs to Mr. R. S. Chilton, United States Consul
at Goderich, Ontario, who has kindly given me a photograph of it. The
verses are in Keats’s well-known and delicate handwriting, and exhibit
a series of erasures and substitutions which are now most interesting,
inasmuch as the changes in each instance enrich greatly the value of the
word-painting.

To begin with, the title varies slightly from that first adopted,
and reads simply “On Melancholy,” to which the word “Ode” was later
prefixed by the printers. In the second line, where he had half written
“Henbane” for the material of his incantation, he blots it out and puts
“Wolfsbane,” instantly abandoning the tamer suggestion and bringing in
all the wildness and the superstition that have gathered for years around
the Loup-garou and the Wehr-wolf. This is plainly no amendment suggested
afterward by another person, but is due unmistakably to the quick action
of his own mind. There is no other change until the end of the first
stanza, where the last two lines were originally written thus:—

    “For shade to shade will come too heavily
    And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.”

It is noticeable that he originally wrote “down” for “drown,” and, in
afterward inserting the _r_, put it in the wrong place—after the _o_,
instead of before it. This was a slip of the pen only; but it was that
word “heavily” which cost him a struggle. The words “too heavily” were
next crossed out, and under them were written “too sleepily”; then
this last word was again erased, and the word “drowsily” was finally
substituted—the only expression in the English language, perhaps, which
could have precisely indicated the exact shade of debilitating languor he
meant.

[Illustration]

In the other stanza, it is noticeable that he spells “melancholy,”
through heedlessness, “melanancholy,” which gives a curious effect of
prolonging and deepening the incantation; and this error he does not
discover or correct. In the same way he spells “fit,” “fitt,” having
perhaps in mind the “fytte” of the earlier poets. These are trifles, but
when he alters the line, which originally stood,—

    “But when the melancholy fit shall come,”

and for “come” substitutes “fall,” we see at once, besides the merit
of the soft alliteration, that he gives more of the effect of doom and
suddenness. “Come” was clearly too business like. Afterwards, instead of—

    “Then feed thy sorrow on a morning rose,”

he substitutes for “feed” the inexpressibly more effective word “glut,”
which gives at once the exhaustive sense of wealth belonging so often to
Keats’s poetry, and seems to match the full ecstasy of color and shape
and fragrance that a morning rose may hold. Finally, in the line which
originally stood,—

    “Or on the rainbow of the dashing wave,”

he strikes out the rather trite epithet “dashing,” and substitutes the
stronger phrase “salt-sand wave,” which is peculiar to him.

All these changes are happily accepted in the common editions of Keats;
but these editions make two errors that are corrected by this manuscript,
and should henceforth be abandoned. In the line usually printed,—

    “Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be,”

the autograph text gives “or” in the place of the second “nor,” a change
consonant with the best usage; and in the line,—

    “And hides the green hill in an April shroud,”

the middle word is clearly not “hill,” but “hills.” This is a distinct
improvement, both because it broadens the landscape and because it averts
the jangle of the closing _ll_ with the final words “fall” and “all” in
previous lines.

It is a fortunate thing that, in the uncertain destiny of all literary
manuscripts, this characteristic document should have been preserved for
us. It will be remembered that Keats himself once wrote in a letter that
his fondest prayer, next to that for the health of his brother Tom, would
be that some child of his brother George “should be the first American
poet.” This letter, printed by Milnes, was written October 29, 1818.
George Keats died about 1851, and his youngest daughter, Isabel, who was
thought greatly to resemble her uncle John, both in looks and genius,
died sadly at the age of seventeen. It is pleasant to think that we have,
through the care exercised by this American brother, an opportunity of
coming into close touch with the mental processes of that rare genius
which first imparted something like actual color to English words. To be
brought thus near to Keats suggests that poem by Browning where he speaks
of a moment’s interview with one who had seen Shelley, and compares it to
picking up an eagle’s feather on a lonely heath.




IV

MASSASOIT, INDIAN CHIEF




MASSASOIT, INDIAN CHIEF

    There was paid on October 19, 1907, one of the few tributes
    ever openly rendered by the white races to the higher type of
    native Indian leaders. Such was that given by a large company
    at Warren, Rhode Island, to Massasoit, the friendly Indian
    Sachem who had first greeted the early Pilgrims, on their
    arrival at Plymouth in 1620. The leading address was made by
    the author of this volume.


The newspaper correspondents tell us that, when an inquiry was one day
made among visitors returning from the recent Jamestown Exposition, as to
the things seen by each of them which he or she would remember longest,
one man replied, “That life-size group in the Smithsonian building
which shows John Smith in his old cock-boat trading with the Indians.
He is giving them beads or something and getting baskets of corn in
exchange.”[1] This seemed to the speaker, and quite reasonably, the very
first contact with civilization on the part of the American Indians.
Precisely parallel to this is the memorial which we meet to dedicate, and
which records the first interview in 1620 between the little group of
Plymouth Pilgrims and Massasoit, known as the “greatest commander of the
country,” and “Sachem of the whole region north of Narragansett Bay.”[2]

“Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate,” says the poet
Pope; and nothing is more remarkable in human history than the way in
which great events sometimes reach their climax at once, instead of
gradually working up to it. Never was this better illustrated than when
the Plymouth Pilgrims first met the one man of this region who could
guarantee them peace for fifty years, and did so. The circumstances seem
the simplest of the simple.

The first hasty glance between the Plymouth Puritans and the Indians
did not take place, as you will recall, until the newcomers had been
four days on shore, when, in the words of the old chronicler, “they
espied five or sixe people with a Dogge coming towards them, who were
savages: who when they saw them ran into the Woods and whistled the
Dogge after them.” (This quadruped, whether large or small, had always
a capital letter in his name, while human savages had none, in these
early narratives.) When the English pursued the Indians, “they ran away
might and main.”[3] The next interview was a stormier one; four days
later, those same Pilgrims were asleep on board the “shallope” on the
morning of December 8, 1620 (now December 19), when they heard “a great
and strange cry,” and arrow-shots came flying amongst them which they
returned and one Indian “gave an extraordinary cry” and away they went.
After all was quiet, the Pilgrims picked up eighteen arrows, some “headed
with brass, some with hart’s horn” (deer’s horn), “and others with
eagles’ claws,”[4] the brass heads at least showing that those Indians
had met Englishmen before.

Three days after this encounter at Namskeket,—namely, on December 22,
1620 (a date now computed as December 23),—the English landed at Patuxet,
now Plymouth. (I know these particulars as to dates, because I was
myself born on the anniversary of this first date, the 22d, and regarded
myself as a sort of brevet Pilgrim, until men, alleged to be scientific,
robbed me of one point of eminence in my life by landing the Pilgrims
on the 23d). Three months passed before the sight of any more Indians,
when Samoset came, all alone, with his delightful salutation, “Welcome,
Englishmen,” and a few days later (March 22, 1621), the great chief of
all that region, Massasoit, appeared on the scene.

When he first made himself visible, with sixty men, on that day, upon
what is still known as Strawberry Hill, he asked that somebody be sent
to hold a parley with him. Edmund Winslow was appointed to this office,
and went forward protected only by his sword and armor, and carrying
presents to the Sachem. Winslow also made a speech of some length,
bringing messages (quite imaginary, perhaps, and probably not at all
comprehended) from King James, whose representative, the governor, wished
particularly to see Massasoit. It appears from the record, written
apparently by Winslow himself, that Massasoit made no particular reply
to this harangue, but paid very particular attention to Winslow’s sword
and armor, and proposed at once to begin business by buying them. This,
however, was refused, but Winslow induced Massasoit to cross a brook
between the English and himself, taking with him twenty of his Indians,
who were bidden to leave their bows and arrows behind them. Beyond the
brook, he was met by Captain Standish, with an escort of six armed men,
who exchanged salutations and attended him to one of the best, but
unfinished, houses in the village. Here a green rug was spread on the
floor and three or four cushions. The governor, Bradford, then entered
the house, followed by three or four soldiers and preceded by a flourish
from a drum and trumpet, which quite delighted and astonished the
Indians. It was a deference paid to their Sachem. He and the governor
then kissed each other, as it is recorded, sat down together, and regaled
themselves with an entertainment. The feast is recorded by the early
narrator as consisting chiefly of strong waters, a “thing the savages
love very well,” it is said; “and the Sachem took such a large draught of
it at once as made him sweat all the time he staied.”[5]

A substantial treaty of peace was made on this occasion, one immortalized
by the fact that it was the first made with the Indians of New England.
It is the unquestioned testimony of history that the negotiation was
remembered and followed by both sides for half a century: nor was
Massasoit, or any of the Wampanoags during his lifetime, convicted of
having violated or having attempted to violate any of its provisions.
This was a great achievement! Do you ask what price bought all this?
The price practically paid for all the vast domain and power granted to
the white man consisted of the following items: “a pair of knives and
a copper chain with a jewel in it, for the grand Sachem; and for his
brother Quadequina, a knife, a jewel to hang in his ear, a pot of strong
waters, a good quantity of biscuit and a piece of butter.”[6]

Fair words, the proverb says, butter no parsnips, but the fair words of
the white men had provided the opportunity for performing that process.
The description preserved of the Indian chief by an eye-witness is as
follows: “In his person he is a very lusty man in his best years, an able
body, grave of countenance and spare of speech; in his attire little or
nothing differing from the rest of his followers, only in a great chain
of white bone beads about his neck; and at it, behind his neck, hangs a
little bag of tobacco, which he drank, and gave us to drink (this being
the phrase for that indulgence in those days, as is found in Ben Jonson
and other authors). His face was painted with a sad red, like murrey (so
called from the color of the Moors) and oiled, both head and face, that
he looked greasily. All his followers likewise were in their faces, in
part or in whole painted, some black, some red, some yellow, and some
white, some with crosses and other antic works; some had skins on them
and some naked: all strong, tall men in appearance.”[7]

All this which Dr. Young tells us would have been a good description of
an Indian party under Black Hawk, which was presented to the President
at Washington as late as 1837; and also, I can say the same of such a
party seen by myself, coming from a prairie in Kansas, then unexplored,
in 1856.

The interchange of eatables was evidently at that period a pledge of good
feeling, as it is to-day. On a later occasion, Captain Standish, with
Isaac Alderton, went to visit the Indians, who gave them three or four
groundnuts and some tobacco. The writer afterwards says: “Our governor
bid them send the king’s kettle and filled it full of pease which pleased
them well, and so they went their way.” It strikes the modern reader as
if this were to make pease and peace practically equivalent, and as if
the parties needed only a pun to make friends. It is doubtful whether the
arrival of a conquering race was ever in the history of the world marked
by a treaty so simple and therefore noble.

“This treaty with Massasoit,” says Belknap, “was the work of one day,”
and being honestly intended on both sides, was kept with fidelity as long
as Massasoit lived.[8] In September, 1639, Massasoit and his oldest son,
Mooanam, afterwards called Wamsutta, came into the court at Plymouth and
desired that this ancient league should remain inviolable, which was
accordingly ratified and confirmed by the government,[9] and lasted
until it was broken by Philip, the successor of Wamsutta, in 1675. It is
not my affair to discuss the later career of Philip, whose insurrection
is now viewed more leniently than in its own day; but the spirit of
it was surely quite mercilessly characterized by a Puritan minister,
Increase Mather, who, when describing a battle in which old Indian men
and women, the wounded and the helpless, were burned alive, said proudly,
“This day we brought five hundred Indian souls to hell.”[10]

But the end of all was approaching. In 1623, Massasoit sent a messenger
to Plymouth to say that he was ill, and Governor Bradford sent Mr.
Winslow to him with medicines and cordials. When they reached a certain
ferry, upon Winslow’s discharging his gun, Indians came to him from a
house not far off who told him that Massasoit was dead and that day
buried. As they came nearer, at about half an hour before the setting
of the sun, another messenger came and told them that he was not dead,
though there was no hope that they would find him living. Hastening on,
they arrived late at night.

“When we came thither,” Winslow writes, “we found the house so full of
men as we could scarce get in, though they used their best diligence to
make way for us. There were they in the midst of their charms for him,
making such a hellish noise as it distempered us that were well, and
therefore unlike to ease him that was sick. About him were six or eight
women, who chafed his arms, legs and thighs to keep heat in him. When
they had made an end of their charming, one told him that his friends,
the English, were come to see him. Having understanding left, but his
sight was wholly gone, he asked who was come. They told him Winsnow,
for they cannot pronounce the letter _l_, but ordinarily _n_ in place
thereof. He desired to speak with me. When I came to him and they told
him of it, he put forth his hand to me, which I took. When he said twice,
though very inwardly: ‘Keen Winsnow?’ which is to say ‘Art thou Winslow?’
I answered: ‘Ahhe’; that is, ‘Yes.’ Then he doubled these words: ‘Matta
neen wonckanet nanem, Winsnow!’ That is to say: ‘Oh, Winslow, I shall
never see thee again!’ Then I called Hobbamock and desired him to tell
Massasowat that the governor, hearing of his sickness, was sorry for the
same; and though by many businesses he could not come himself, yet he
sent me with such things for him as he thought most likely to do good in
this extremity; and whereof if he pleased to take, I would presently
give him; which he desired, and having a confection of many comfortable
conserves on the point of my knife, I gave him some, which I could scarce
get through his teeth. When it was dissolved in his mouth, he swallowed
the juice of it; whereat those that were about him much rejoiced, saying
that he had not swallowed anything in two days before.”[11]

Then Winslow tells how he nursed the sick chief, sending messengers
back to the governor for a bottle of drink, and some chickens from
which to make a broth for his patient. Meanwhile he dissolved some of
the confection in water and gave it to Massasoit to drink; within half
an hour the Indian improved. Before the messengers could return with
the chickens, Winslow made a broth of meal and strawberry-leaves and
sassafras-root, which he strained through his handkerchief and gave the
chief, who drank at least a pint of it. After this his sight mended more
and more, and all rejoiced that the Englishman had been the means of
preserving the life of Massasoit. At length the messengers returned with
the chickens, but Massasoit, “finding his stomach come to him, ... would
not have the chickens killed, but kept them for breed.”

From far and near his followers came to see their restored chief, who
feelingly said: “Now I see the English are my friends and love me; and
whilst I live I will never forget this kindness they have showed me.”

It would be interesting, were I to take the time, to look into the
relations of Massasoit with others, especially with Roger Williams; but
this has been done by others, particularly in the somewhat imaginative
chapter of my old friend, Mr. Butterworth, and I have already said
enough. Nor can I paint the background of that strange early society of
Rhode Island, its reaction from the stern Massachusetts rigor, and its
quaint and varied materials. In that new state, as Bancroft keenly said,
there were settlements “filled with the strangest and most incongruous
elements ... so that if a man had lost his religious opinions, he might
have been sure to find them again in some village in Rhode Island.”

Meanwhile “the old benevolent sachem, Massasoit,” says Drake’s “Book
of the Indians,” “having died in the winter of 1661-2,” so died, a few
months after, his oldest son, Alexander. Then came by regular succession,
Philip, the next brother, of whom the historian Hubbard says that for his
“ambitious and haughty spirit he was nicknamed ‘King Philip.’” From this
time followed warlike dismay in the colonies, ending in Philip’s piteous
death.

As a long-deferred memorial to Massasoit with all his simple and modest
virtues, a tablet has now been reverently dedicated, in the presence
of two of the three surviving descendants of the Indian chief, one of
these wearing his ancestral robes. The dedication might well close as it
did with the noble words of Young’s “Night Thoughts,” suited to such an
occasion:—

    “Each man makes his own stature, builds himself:
    Virtue alone outbuilds the Pyramids;
    Her monuments shall last when Egypt’s fall.”




V

JAMES FENIMORE COOPER




JAMES FENIMORE COOPER

    “Cooper, whose name is with his country’s woven
    First in her ranks; her Pioneer of mind.”


These were the words in which Fitz-Greene Halleck designated Cooper’s
substantial precedence in American novel-writing. Apart from this mere
priority in time,—he was born at Burlington, New Jersey, September 15,
1789, and died at Cooperstown, New York, September 14, 1851,—he rendered
the unique service of inaugurating three especial classes of fiction,—the
novel of the American Revolution, the Indian novel, and the sea novel. In
each case he wrote primarily for his own fellow countrymen, and achieved
fame first at their hands; and in each he produced a class of works
which, in spite of their own faults and of the somewhat unconciliatory
spirit of their writer, have secured a permanence and a breadth of range
unequaled in English prose fiction, save by Scott alone. To-day the sale
of his works in his own language remains unabated; and one has only to
look over the catalogues of European booksellers in order to satisfy
himself that this popularity continues, undiminished, through the medium
of translation. It may be safely said of him that no author of fiction
in the English language, except Scott, has held his own so well for half
a century after death. Indeed, the list of various editions and versions
of his writings in the catalogues of German booksellers often exceeds
that of Scott. This is not in the slightest degree due to his personal
qualities, for these made him unpopular, nor to personal manœuvring, for
this he disdained. He was known to refuse to have his works even noticed
in a newspaper for which he wrote, the “New York Patriot.” He never would
have consented to review his own books, as both Scott and Irving did,
or to write direct or indirect puffs of himself, as was done by Poe and
Whitman. He was foolishly sensitive to criticism, and unable to conceal
it; he was easily provoked to a quarrel; he was dissatisfied with either
praise or blame, and speaks evidently of himself in the words of the hero
of “Miles Wallingford,” when he says: “In scarce a circumstance of my
life that has brought me in the least under the cognizance of the public
have I ever been judged justly.” There is no doubt that he himself—or
rather the temperament given him by nature—was to blame for this, but the
fact is unquestionable.

Add to this that he was, in his way and in what was unfortunately the
most obnoxious way, a reformer. That is, he was what may be called a
reformer in the conservative direction,—he belabored his fellow citizens
for changing many English ways and usages, and he wished them to change
these things back again, immediately. In all this he was absolutely
unselfish, but utterly tactless; and inasmuch as the point of view he
took was one requiring the very greatest tact, the defect was hopeless.
As a rule, no man criticises American ways so unsuccessfully as an
American who has lived many years in Europe. The mere European critic
is ignorant of our ways and frankly owns it, even if thinking the fact
but a small disqualification; while the American absentee, having
remained away long enough to have forgotten many things and never to
have seen many others, may have dropped hopelessly behindhand as to
the facts, yet claims to speak with authority. Cooper went even beyond
these professional absentees, because, while they are usually ready to
praise other countries at the expense of America, Cooper, with heroic
impartiality, dispraised all countries, or at least all that spoke
English. A thoroughly patriotic and high-minded man, he yet had no mental
perspective, and made small matters as important as great. Constantly
reproaching America for not being Europe, he also satirized Europe for
being what it was.

As a result, he was for a time equally detested by the press of both
countries. The English, he thought, had “a national propensity to
blackguardism,” and certainly the remarks he drew from them did something
to vindicate the charge. When the London “Times” called him “affected,
offensive, curious, and ill-conditioned,” and “Fraser’s Magazine,” “a
liar, a bilious braggart, a full jackass, an insect, a grub, and a
reptile,” they clearly left little for America to say in that direction.
Yet Park Benjamin did his best, or his worst, when he called Cooper (in
Greeley’s “New Yorker”) “a superlative dolt and the common mark of scorn
and contempt of every well-informed American”; and so did Webb, when
he pronounced the novelist “a base-minded caitiff who had traduced his
country.” Not being able to reach his English opponents, Cooper turned
on these Americans, and spent years in attacking Webb and others through
the courts, gaining little and losing much through the long vicissitudes
of petty local lawsuits. The fact has kept alive their memory; but for
Lowell’s keener shaft, “Cooper has written six volumes to show he’s as
good as a lord,” there was no redress. The arrow lodged and split the
target.

Like Scott and most other novelists, Cooper was rarely successful with
his main characters, but was saved by his subordinate ones. These were
strong, fresh, characteristic, human; and they lay, as I have already
said, in several different directions, all equally marked. If he did not
create permanent types in Harvey Birch the spy, Leather-Stocking the
woodsman, Long Tom Coffin the sailor, Chingachgook the Indian, then there
is no such thing as the creation of characters in literature. Scott was
far more profuse and varied, but he gave no more of life to individual
personages, and perhaps created no types so universally recognized. What
is most remarkable is that, in the case of the Indian especially, Cooper
was not only in advance of the knowledge of his own time, but of that of
the authors who immediately followed him. In Parkman and Palfrey, for
instance, the Indian of Cooper vanishes and seems wholly extinguished;
but under the closer inspection of Alice Fletcher and Horatio Hale, the
lost figure reappears, and becomes more picturesque, more poetic, more
thoughtful, than even Cooper dared to make him. The instinct of the
novelist turned out more authoritative than the premature conclusions of
a generation of historians.

It is only women who can draw the commonplace, at least in English, and
make it fascinating. Perhaps only two English women have done this, Jane
Austen and George Eliot; while in France George Sand has certainly done
it far less well than it has been achieved by Balzac and Daudet. Cooper
never succeeded in it for a single instant, and even when he has an
admiral of this type to write about, he puts into him less of life than
Marryat imparts to the most ordinary midshipman. The talk of Cooper’s
civilian worthies is, as Professor Lounsbury has well said,—in what is
perhaps the best biography yet written of any American author,—“of a kind
not known to human society.” This is doubtless aggravated by the frequent
use of _thee_ and _thou_, yet this, which Professor Lounsbury attributes
to Cooper’s Quaker ancestry, was in truth a part of the formality
of the old period, and is found also in Brockden Brown. And as his
writings conform to their period in this, so they did in other respects:
describing every woman, for instance, as a “female,” and making her to
be such as Cooper himself describes the heroine of “Mercedes of Castile”
to be when he says, “Her very nature is made up of religion and female
decorum.” Scott himself could also draw such inane figures, yet in Jeanie
Deans he makes an average Scotch woman heroic, and in Meg Merrilies
and Madge Wildfire he paints the extreme of daring self-will. There is
scarcely a novel of Scott’s where some woman does not show qualities
which approach the heroic; while Cooper scarcely produced one where a
woman rises even to the level of an interesting commonplaceness. She may
be threatened, endangered, tormented, besieged in forts, captured by
Indians, but the same monotony prevails. So far as the real interest of
Cooper’s story goes, it might usually be destitute of a single “female,”
that sex appearing chiefly as a bundle of dry goods to be transported, or
as a fainting appendage to the skirmish. The author might as well have
written the romance of an express parcel.

His long introductions he shared with the other novelists of the day,
or at least with Scott, for both Miss Austen and Miss Edgeworth are
more modern in this respect and strike more promptly into the tale.
His loose-jointed plots are also shared with Scott, but Cooper knows
as surely as his rival how to hold the reader’s attention when once
grasped. Like Scott’s, too, is his fearlessness in giving details,
instead of the vague generalizations which were then in fashion, and
to which his academical critics would have confined him. He is indeed
already vindicated in some respects by the advance of the art he
pursued; where he led the way, the best literary practice has followed.
The “Edinburgh Review” exhausted its heavy artillery upon him for his
accurate descriptions of costume and localities, and declared that they
were “an epilepsy of the fancy,” and that a vague general account would
have been far better. “Why describe the dress and appearance of an Indian
chief, down to his tobacco-stopper and button-holes?” We now see that it
is this very habit which has made Cooper’s Indian a permanent figure in
literature, while the Indians of his predecessor, Charles Brockden Brown,
were merely dusky spectres. “Poetry or romance,” continued the “Edinburgh
Review,” “does not descend into the particulars,” this being the same
fallacy satirized by Ruskin, whose imaginary painter produced a quadruped
which was a generalization between a pony and a pig. Balzac, who risked
the details of buttons and tobacco pipes as fearlessly as Cooper, said
of “The Pathfinder,” “Never did the art of writing tread closer upon the
art of the pencil. This is the school of study for literary landscape
painters.” He says elsewhere: “If Cooper had succeeded in the painting of
character to the same extent that he did in the painting of the phenomena
of nature, he would have uttered the last word of our art.” Upon such
praise as this the reputation of James Fenimore Cooper may well rest.




VI

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN




CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN


When, in 1834, the historian Jared Sparks undertook the publication
of a “Library of American Biography,” he included in the very first
volume—with a literary instinct most creditable to one so absorbed in
the severer paths of history—a memoir of Charles Brockden Brown by W.
H. Prescott. It was an appropriate tribute to the first imaginative
writer worth mentioning in America,—he having been born in Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania, on January 17, 1771, and died there of consumption on
February 22, 1810,—and to one who was our first professional author. He
was also the first to exert a positive influence, across the Atlantic,
upon British literature, laying thus early a few modest strands towards
an ocean-cable of thought. As a result of this influence, concealed
doors opened in lonely houses, fatal epidemics laid cities desolate,
secret plots were organized, unknown persons from foreign lands died
in garrets, usually leaving large sums of money; the honor of innocent
women was constantly endangered, though usually saved in time; people
were subject to somnambulism and general frenzy; vast conspiracies were
organized with small aims and smaller results. His books, published
between 1798 and 1801, made their way across the ocean with a promptness
that now seems inexplicable; and Mrs. Shelley, in her novel of “The Last
Man,” founds her whole description of an epidemic which nearly destroyed
the human race, on “the masterly delineations of the author of ‘Arthur
Mervyn.’”

Shelley himself recognized his obligations to Brown; and it is to be
remembered that Brown himself was evidently familiar with Godwin’s
philosophical writings, and that he may have drawn from those of Mary
Wollstonecraft his advanced views as to the rights and education of
women, a subject on which his first book, “Alcuin,” offered the earliest
American protest. Undoubtedly his books furnished a point of transition
from Mrs. Radcliffe, of whom he disapproved, to the modern novel of
realism, although his immediate influence and, so to speak, his stage
properties, can hardly be traced later than the remarkable tale, also
by a Philadelphian, called “Stanley; or the Man of the World,” first
published in 1839 in London, though the scene was laid in America. This
book was attributed, from its profuse literary quotations, to Edward
Everett, but was soon understood to be the work of a very young man
of twenty-one, Horace Binney Wallace. In this book the influence of
Bulwer and Disraeli is palpable, but Brown’s concealed chambers and
aimless conspiracies and sudden mysterious deaths also reappear in full
force, not without some lingering power, and then vanish from American
literature forever.

Brown’s style, and especially the language put by him into the mouths of
his characters, is perhaps unduly characterized by Professor Woodberry
as being “something never heard off the stage of melodrama.” What this
able critic does not sufficiently recognize is that the general style
of the period at which they were written was itself melodramatic; and
that to substitute what we should call simplicity would then have made
the picture unfaithful. One has only to read over the private letters
of any educated family of that period to see that people did not then
express themselves as they now do; that they were far more ornate in
utterance, more involved in statement, more impassioned in speech. Even a
comparatively terse writer like Prescott, in composing Brown’s biography
only sixty years ago, shows traces of the earlier period. Instead of
stating simply that his hero was a born Quaker, he says of him: “He was
descended from a highly respectable family, whose parents were of that
estimable sect who came over with William Penn, to seek an asylum where
they might worship their Creator unmolested, in the meek and humble
spirit of their own faith.” Prescott justly criticises Brown for saying,
“I was _fraught with the apprehension_ that my life was endangered”; or
“his brain seemed to swell beyond its _continent_”; or “I drew every bolt
that _appended_ to it”; or “on recovering from _deliquium_, you found it
where it had been dropped”; or for resorting to the circumlocution of
saying, “by a common apparatus that lay beside my head I could produce
a light,” when he really meant that he had a tinder-box. The criticism
on Brown is fair enough, yet Prescott himself presently takes us halfway
back to the florid vocabulary of that period, when, instead of merely
saying that his hero was fond of reading, he tells us that “from his
earliest childhood Brown gave evidence of studious propensities, being
frequently noticed by his father on his return from school poring over
some heavy tome.” If the tome in question was Johnson’s dictionary, as
it may have been, it would explain both Brown’s style of writing and the
milder amplifications of his biographer. Nothing is more difficult to
tell, in the fictitious literature of even a generation or two ago, where
a faithful delineation ends and where caricature begins. The four-story
signatures of Micawber’s letters, as represented by Dickens, go but
little beyond the similar courtesies employed in a gentlewoman’s letters
in the days of Anna Seward. All we can say is that within a century, for
some cause or other, English speech has grown very much simpler, and
human happiness has increased in proportion.

In the preface to his second novel, “Edgar Huntley,” Brown announces it
as his primary purpose to be American in theme, “to exhibit a series of
adventures growing out of our own country,” adding, “That the field of
investigation opened to us by our own country should differ essentially
from those which exist in Europe may be readily conceived.” He protests
against “puerile superstition and exploded manners, Gothic castles and
chimeras,” and adds: “The incidents of Indian hostility and the perils of
the western wilderness are far more suitable.” All this is admirable, but
unfortunately the inherited thoughts and methods of the period hung round
him to cloy his style, even after his aim was emancipated. It is to be
remembered that almost all his imaginative work was done in early life,
before the age of thirty, and before his powers became mature. Yet with
all his drawbacks he had achieved his end, and had laid the foundation
for American fiction.

With all his inflation of style, he was undoubtedly, in his way, a
careful observer. The proof of this is that he has preserved for us many
minor points of life and manners which make the Philadelphia of a century
ago now more familiar to us than is any other American city of that
period. He gives us the roving Indian; the newly arrived French musician
with violin and monkey; the one-story farmhouses, where boarders are
entertained at a dollar a week; the gray cougar amid caves of limestone.
We learn from him “the dangers and toils of a midnight journey in a
stage coach in America. The roads are knee deep in mire, winding through
crags and pits, while the wheels groan and totter and the curtain and
roof admit the wet at a thousand seams.” We learn the proper costume for
a youth of good fortune and family,—“nankeen coat striped with green,
a white silk waistcoat elegantly needle-wrought, cassimere pantaloons,
stockings of variegated silk, and shoes that in their softness vie with
satin.” When dressing himself, this favored youth ties his flowing locks
with a black ribbon. We find from him that “stage boats” then crossed
twice a day from New York to Staten Island, and we discover also with
some surprise that negroes were freely admitted to ride in stages in
Pennsylvania, although they were liable, half a century later, to be
ejected from street-cars. We learn also that there were negro free
schools in Philadelphia. All this was before 1801.

It has been common to say that Brown had no literary skill, but it would
be truer to say that he had no sense of literary construction. So far
as skill is tested by the power to pique curiosity, Brown had it; his
chapters almost always end at a point of especial interest, and the next
chapter, postponing the solution, often diverts the interest in a wholly
new direction. But literary structure there is none: the plots are always
cumulative and even oppressive; narrative is inclosed in narrative; new
characters and complications come and go, while important personages
disappear altogether, and are perhaps fished up with difficulty, as with
a hook and line, on the very last page. There is also a total lack of
humor, and only such efforts at vivacity as this: “Move on, my quill!
wait not for my guidance. Reanimated with thy master’s spirit, all airy
light. A heyday rapture! A mounting impulse sways him; lifts him from
the earth.” There is so much of monotony in the general method, that one
novel seems to stand for all; and the same modes of solution reappear
so often,—somnambulism, ventriloquism, yellow fever, forged letters,
concealed money, secret closets,—that it not only gives a sense of
puerility, but makes it very difficult to recall, as to any particular
passage, from which book it came.




VII

HENRY DAVID THOREAU




HENRY DAVID THOREAU


There has been in America no such instance of posthumous reputation as
in the case of Thoreau. Poe and Whitman may be claimed as parallels, but
not justly. Poe, even during his life, rode often on the very wave of
success, until it subsided presently beneath him, always to rise again,
had he but made it possible. Whitman gathered almost immediately a small
but stanch band of followers, who have held by him with such vehemence
and such flagrant imitation as to keep his name defiantly in evidence,
while perhaps enhancing the antagonism of his critics. Thoreau could
be egotistical enough, but was always high-minded; all was open and
aboveboard; one could as soon conceive of self-advertising by a deer
in the woods or an otter of the brook. He had no organized clique of
admirers, nor did he possess even what is called personal charm,—or at
least only that piquant attraction which he himself found in wild apples.
As a rule, he kept men at a distance, being busy with his own affairs. He
left neither wife nor children to attend to his memory; and his sister
seemed for a time to repress the publication of his manuscripts. Yet
this plain, shy, retired student, who when thirty-two years old carried
the unsold edition of his first book upon his back to his attic chamber;
who died at forty-four still unknown to the general public; this child of
obscurity, who printed but two volumes during his lifetime, has had ten
volumes of his writings published by others since his death, while four
biographies of him have been issued in America (by Emerson, Channing,
Sanborn, and Jones), besides two in England (by Page and Salt).

Thoreau was born in Boston on July 12, 1817, but spent most of his life
in Concord, Massachusetts, where he taught school and was for three years
an inmate of the family of Ralph Waldo Emerson, practicing at various
times the art of pencil-making—his father’s occupation—and also of
surveying, carpentering, and housekeeping. So identified was he with the
place that Emerson speaks of it in one case as Thoreau’s “native town.”
Yet from that very familiarity, perhaps, the latter was underestimated
by many of his neighbors, as was the case in Edinburgh with Sir Walter
Scott, as Mrs. Grant of Laggan describes.

When I was endeavoring, about 1870, to persuade Thoreau’s sister to let
some one edit his journals, I invoked the aid of Judge Hoar, then lord
of the manor in Concord, who heard me patiently through, and then said:
“Whereunto? You have not established the preliminary point. Why should
any one wish to have Thoreau’s journals printed?” Ten years later, four
successive volumes were made out of these journals by the late H. G. O.
Blake, and it became a question if the whole might not be published.
I hear from a local photograph dealer in Concord that the demand for
Thoreau’s pictures now exceeds that for any other local celebrity. In
the last sale catalogue of autographs which I have encountered, I find
a letter from Thoreau priced at $17.50, one from Hawthorne valued at
the same, one from Longfellow at $4.50 only, and one from Holmes at $3,
each of these being guaranteed as an especially good autograph letter.
Now the value of such memorials during a man’s life affords but a slight
test of his permanent standing,—since almost any man’s autograph can be
obtained for two postage-stamps if the request be put with sufficient
ingenuity;—but when this financial standard can be safely applied
more than thirty years after a man’s death, it comes pretty near to a
permanent fame.

It is true that Thoreau had Emerson as the editor of four of his
posthumous volumes; but it is also true that he had against him the
vehement voice of Lowell, whose influence as a critic was at that
time greater than Emerson’s. It will always remain a puzzle why it was
that Lowell, who had reviewed Thoreau’s first book with cordiality in
the “Massachusetts Quarterly Review,” and had said to me afterwards,
on hearing him compared to Izaak Walton, “There is room for three or
four Waltons in Thoreau,” should have written the really harsh attack
on the latter which afterwards appeared, and in which the plain facts
were unquestionably perverted. To transform Thoreau’s two brief years
of study and observation at Walden, within two miles of his mother’s
door, into a life-long renunciation of his fellow men; to complain of
him as waiving all interest in public affairs when the great crisis of
John Brown’s execution had found him far more awake to it than Lowell
was,—this was only explainable by the lingering tradition of that savage
period of criticism, initiated by Poe, in whose hands the thing became
a tomahawk. As a matter of fact, the tomahawk had in this case its
immediate effect; and the English editor and biographer of Thoreau has
stated that Lowell’s criticism is to this day the great obstacle to the
acceptance of Thoreau’s writings in England. It is to be remembered,
however, that Thoreau was not wholly of English but partly of French
origin, and was, it might be added, of a sort of moral-Oriental, or
Puritan Pagan temperament. With a literary feeling even stronger than
his feeling for nature,—the proof of this being that he could not, like
many men, enjoy nature in silence,—he put his observations always on the
level of literature, while Mr. Burroughs, for instance, remains more upon
the level of journalism. It is to be doubted whether any author under
such circumstances would have been received favorably in England; just
as the poems of Emily Dickinson, which have shafts of profound scrutiny
that often suggest Thoreau, had an extraordinary success at home, but
fell hopelessly dead in England, so that the second volume was never even
published.

Lowell speaks of Thoreau as “indolent”; but this is, as has been said,
like speaking of the indolence of a self-registering thermometer. Lowell
objects to him as pursuing “a seclusion that keeps him in the public
eye”; whereas it was the public eye which sought him; it was almost as
hard to persuade him to lecture (_crede experto_) as it was to get an
audience for him when he had consented. He never proclaimed the intrinsic
superiority of the wilderness, as has been charged, but pointed out
better than any one else has done its undesirableness as a residence,
ranking it only as “a resource and a background.” “The partially
cultivated country it is,” he says, “which has chiefly inspired, and
will continue to inspire, the strains of poets such as compose the mass
of any literature.” “What is nature,” he elsewhere says, “unless there
is a human life passing within it? Many joys and many sorrows are the
lights and shadows in which she shines most beautiful.” This is the real
and human Thoreau, who often whimsically veiled himself, but was plainly
enough seen by any careful observer. That he was abrupt and repressive
to bores and pedants, that he grudged his time to them and frequently
withdrew himself, was as true of him as of Wordsworth or Tennyson. If
they were allowed their privacy, though in the heart of England, an
American who never left his own broad continent might at least be allowed
his privilege of stepping out of doors. The Concord school-children never
quarreled with this habit, for he took them out of doors with him and
taught them where the best whortleberries grew.

His scholarship, like his observation of nature, was secondary to his
function as poet and writer. Into both he carried the element of whim;
but his version of the “Prometheus Bound” shows accuracy, and his
study of birds and plants shows care. It must be remembered that he
antedated the modern school, classed plants by the Linnæan system, and
had necessarily Nuttall for his elementary manual of birds. Like all
observers, he left whole realms uncultivated; thus he puzzles in his
journal over the great brown paper cocoon of the _Attacus Cecropia_,
which every village boy brings home from the winter meadows. If he
has not the specialized habit of the naturalist of to-day, neither
has he the polemic habit; firm beyond yielding, as to the local facts
of his own Concord, he never quarrels with those who have made other
observations elsewhere; he is involved in none of those contests in which
palæontologists, biologists, astronomers, have wasted so much of their
lives.

His especial greatness is that he gives us standing-ground below the
surface, a basis not to be washed away. A hundred sentences might
be quoted from him which make common observers seem superficial and
professed philosophers trivial, but which, if accepted, place the
realities of life beyond the reach of danger. He was a spiritual ascetic,
to whom the simplicity of nature was luxury enough; and this, in an age
of growing expenditure, gave him an unspeakable value. To him, life
itself was a source of joy so great that it was only weakened by diluting
it with meaner joys. This was the standard to which he constantly held
his contemporaries. “There is nowhere recorded,” he complains, “a simple
and irrepressible satisfaction with the gift of life, any memorable
praise of God.... If the day and the night are such that you greet them
with joy, and life emits a fragrance, like flowers and sweet-scented
herbs,—is more elastic, starry, and immortal,—that is your success.” This
was Thoreau, who died unmarried at Concord, Massachusetts, May 6, 1862.




VIII

EMERSON’S “FOOT-NOTE PERSON,”—ALCOTT




EMERSON’S “FOOT-NOTE PERSON,”—ALCOTT


The phrase “foot-note person” was first introduced into our literature
by one of the most acute and original of the anonymous writers in the
“Atlantic Monthly” (July, 1906), one by whose consent I am permitted to
borrow it for my present purpose. Its originator himself suggests, as an
illustration of what he means, the close relation which existed through
life between Ralph Waldo Emerson and his less famous Concord neighbor,
Amos Bronson Alcott. The latter was doubtless regarded by the world
at large as a mere “foot-note” to his famous friend, while he yet was
doubtless the only literary contemporary to whom Emerson invariably and
candidly deferred, regarding him, indeed, as unequivocally the leading
philosophic or inspirational mind of his day. Let this “foot-note,”
then, be employed as the text for frank discussion of what was, perhaps,
the most unique and picturesque personality developed during the
Transcendental period of our American literature. Let us consider the
career of one who was born with as little that seemed advantageous in
his surroundings as was the case with Abraham Lincoln, or John Brown of
Ossawatomie, and who yet developed in the end an individuality as marked
as that of Poe or Walt Whitman.

In looking back on the intellectual group of New England, eighty years
ago, nothing is more noticeable than its birth in a circle already
cultivated, at least according to the standard of its period. Emerson,
Channing, Bryant, Longfellow, Hawthorne, Holmes, Lowell, even Whittier,
were born into what were, for the time and after their own standard,
cultivated families. They grew up with the protection and stimulus of
parents and teachers; their early biographies offer nothing startling.
Among them appeared, one day, this student and teacher, more serene,
more absolutely individual, than any one of them. He had indeed, like
every boy born in New England, some drop of academic blood within
his traditions, but he was born in the house of his grandfather, a
poor farmer in Wolcott, Connecticut, on November 29, 1799. He went to
the most primitive of wayside schools, and was placed at fourteen as
apprentice in a clock factory; was for a few years a traveling peddler,
selling almanacs and trinkets; then wandered as far as North Carolina
and Virginia in a similar traffic; then became a half-proselyte among
Quakers in North Carolina; then a school-teacher in Connecticut; always
poor, but always thoughtful, ever gravitating towards refined society,
and finally coming under the influence of that rare and high-minded
man, the Rev. Samuel J. May, and placing himself at last in the still
more favored position of Emerson’s foot-note. When that took place, it
suddenly made itself clear to the whole Concord circle that there was not
one among them so serene, so equable, so dreamy, yet so constitutionally
a leader, as this wandering child of the desert. Of all the men known
in New England, he seemed the one least likely to have been a country
peddler.

Mr. Alcott first visited Concord, as Mr. Cabot’s memoir of Emerson tells
us, in 1835, and in 1840 came there to live. But it was as early as May
19, 1837, that Emerson wrote to Margaret Fuller: “Mr. Alcott is the great
man. His book [‘Conversations on the Gospels’] does him no justice, and
I do not like to see it.... But he has more of the Godlike than any man
I have ever seen and his presence rebukes and threatens and raises. He
_is_ a teacher.... If he cannot make intelligent men feel the presence
of a superior nature, the worse for them; I can never doubt him.”[12]
It is suggested by Dr. W. T. Harris, one of the two joint biographers
of Alcott, that the description in the last chapter of Emerson’s book
styled “Nature,” finished in August, 1836, was derived from a study of
Mr. Alcott, and it is certain that there was no man among Emerson’s
contemporaries of whom thenceforward he spoke with such habitual
deference. Courteous to all, it was to Alcott alone that he seemed to
look up. Not merely Alcott’s abstract statements, but his personal
judgments, made an absolutely unique impression upon his more famous
fellow townsman. It is interesting to notice that Alcott, while staying
first in Concord, “complained of lack of simplicity in A⸺, B⸺, C⸺, and
D⸺ (late visitors from the city).” Emerson said approvingly to his son:
“Alcott is right touchstone to test them, litmus to detect the acid.”[13]
We cannot doubt that such a man’s own judgment was absolutely simple; and
such was clearly the opinion held by Emerson, who, indeed, always felt
somewhat easier when he could keep Alcott at his elbow in Concord. Their
mutual confidence reminds one of what was said long since by Dr. Samuel
Johnson, that poetry was like brown bread: those who made it in their own
houses never quite liked the taste of what they got elsewhere.

And from the very beginning, this attitude was reciprocated. At another
time during that same early period (1837), Alcott, after criticising
Emerson a little for “the picture of vulgar life that he draws with a
Shakespearian boldness,” closes with this fine tribute to the intrinsic
qualities of his newly won friend: “Observe his style; it is full of
genuine phrases from the Saxon. He loves the simple, the natural; the
thing is sharply presented, yet graced by beauty and elegance. Our
language is a fit organ, as used by him; and we hear classic English once
more from northern lips. Shakespeare, Sidney, Browne, speak again to
us, and we recognize our affinity with the fathers of English diction.
Emerson is the only instance of original style among Americans. Who
writes like him? Who can? None of his imitators, surely. The day shall
come when this man’s genius shall shine beyond the circle of his own city
and nation. Emerson’s is destined to be the high literary name of this
age.”[14]

No one up to that time, probably, had uttered an opinion of Emerson
quite so prophetic as this; it was not until four years later, in 1841,
that even Carlyle received the first volume of Emerson’s “Essays” and
said, “It is once more the voice of a man.” Yet from that moment Alcott
and Emerson became united, however inadequate their twinship might
have seemed to others. Literature sometimes, doubtless, makes strange
friendships. There is a tradition that when Browning was once introduced
to a new Chinese ambassador in London, the interpreter called attention
to the fact that they were both poets. Upon Browning’s courteously
asking how much poetry His Excellency had thus far written, he replied,
“Four volumes,” and when asked what style of poetic art he cultivated,
the answer was, “Chiefly the enigmatical.” It is reported that Browning
afterwards charitably or modestly added, “We felt doubly brothers
after that.” It may have been in a similar spirit that Emerson and his
foot-note might seem at first to have united their destinies.

Emerson at that early period saw many defects in Alcott’s style, even so
far as to say that it often reminded him of that vulgar saying, “All stir
and no go”; but twenty years later, in 1855, he magnificently vindicated
the same style, then grown more cultivated and powerful, and, indeed,
wrote thus of it: “I have been struck with the late superiority Alcott
showed. His interlocutors were all better than he: he seemed childish and
helpless, not apprehending or answering their remarks aright, and they
masters of their weapons. But by and by, when he got upon a thought,
like an Indian seizing by the mane and mounting a wild horse of the
desert, he overrode them all, and showed such mastery, and took up Time
and Nature like a boy’s marble in his hand, as to vindicate himself.”[15]

A severe test of a man’s depth of observation lies always in the analysis
he gives of his neighbor’s temperament; even granting this appreciation
to be, as is sometimes fairly claimed, a woman’s especial gift. It is a
quality which certainly marked Alcott, who once said, for instance, of
Emerson’s combination of a clear voice with a slender chest, that “some
of his organs were free, some fated.” Indeed, his power in the graphic
personal delineations of those about him was almost always visible, as
where he called Garrison “a phrenological head illuminated,” or said
of Wendell Phillips, “Many are the friends of his golden tongue.” This
quality I never felt more, perhaps, than when he once said, when dining
with me at the house of James T. Fields, in 1862, and speaking of a
writer whom I thought I had reason to know pretty well: “He has a love of
_wholeness_; in this respect far surpassing Emerson.”

It is scarcely possible, for any one who recalls from his youth the
antagonism and satire called forth by Alcott’s “sayings” in the
early “Dial,” to avoid astonishment at their more than contemptuous
reception. Take, for example, in the very first number the fine saying on
“Enthusiasm,” thus:—

    “Believe, youth, that your heart is an oracle; trust her
    instinctive auguries; obey her divine leadings; nor listen too
    fondly to the uncertain echoes of your head. The heart is the
    prophet of your soul, and ever fulfils her prophecies; reason
    is her historian; but for the prophecy, the history would not
    be.... Enthusiasm is the glory and hope of the world. It is the
    life of sanctity and genius; it has wrought all miracles since
    the beginning of time.”

Or turn to the following (entitled: “IV. Immortality”):—

    “The grander my conception of being, the nobler my future.
    There can be no sublimity of life without faith in the soul’s
    eternity. Let me live superior to sense and custom, vigilant
    alway, and I shall experience my divinity; my hope will be
    infinite, nor shall the universe contain, or content me.”

Or read this (“XII. Temptation”):—

    “Greater is he who is above temptation, than he who, being
    tempted, overcomes. The latter but regains the state from
    which the former has not fallen. He who is tempted has sinned.
    Temptation is impossible to the holy.”

Or this (“LXXXVIII. Renunciation”):—

    “Renounce the world, yourself; and you shall possess the world,
    yourself, and God.”

These are but fragments, here and there. For myself, I would gladly see
these “Orphic Sayings” reprinted to-morrow, and watch the astonishment of
men and women who vaguely recall the derision with which they were first
greeted more than sixty years ago.

When it came to putting into action these high qualities, the stories
relating to Mr. Alcott which seem most improbable are those which are
unquestionably true, as is that of his way of dealing with a man in
distress who came to beg of him the loan of five dollars. To this Alcott
replied, after searching his pockets, that he had no such bank-note
about him, but could lend him ten dollars. This offer was accepted, and
Alcott did not even ask the borrower’s name, and could merely endure
the reproach or ridicule of his friends for six months; after which the
same man appeared and paid back the money, offering interest, which was
refused. The debtor turned out to be a well-known swindler, to whom this
trusting generosity had made a novel and manly appeal.

Truth and honesty are apt to be classed in men’s minds together, but
the power of making money, or even of returning it when loaned, is
sometimes developed imperfectly among those who are in other respects
wise and good. A curious illustration of this may be found in the
published memoirs of Mr. Alcott (i, 349), but it is quite surpassed by
the following narrative, hitherto unpublished, of a subsequent interview,
even more picturesque, and apparently with the self-same creditor. I take
it from his MS. Diary, where it appears with the formality of arrangement
and beauty of handwriting which mark that extraordinary work.

                                (MAMMON)

                     _April, 1839._ Thursday, 18th.—

    Things seem strange to me out there in Time and Space. I am not
    familiar with the order and usages of this realm. I am at home
    in the kingdom of the Soul alone.

    This day, I passed along our great thoroughfare, gliding with
    Emerson’s check in my pocket, into State Street; and stepped
    into one of Mammon’s temples, for some of the world’s coin,
    wherewith to supply bread for this body of mine, and those who
    depend upon me. But I felt dishonored by resorting to these
    haunts of Idolaters. I went not among them to dig in the mines
    of Lucre, nor to beg at the doors of the God. It was the hour
    for business on ’Change, which was swarming with worshippers.
    Bevies of devotees were consulting on appropriate rites whereby
    to honor their divinity.

    One of these devotees (cousin-german of my wife) accosted me,
    as I was returning, and asked me to bring my oblation with
    the others. Now I owed the publican a round thousand, which
    he proffered me in days when his God prospered his wits; but
    I had nothing for him. That small pittance which I had just
    got snugly into my fob (thanks to my friend E⸺) was not for
    him, but for my wife’s nurse, and came just in time to save
    my wife from distrusting utterly the succors of Providence. I
    told my man, that I had no money; but he might have me, if he
    wanted me. No: I was bad stock in the market; and so he bid
    me good-day. I left the buzz and hum of these devotees, who
    represent old Nature’s relation to the Appetites and Senses,
    and returned, with a sense of grateful relief, from this sally
    into the Kingdom of Mammon, back to my domicile in the Soul.

There was, however, strangely developed in Alcott’s later life an epoch
of positively earning money. His first efforts at Western lectures began
in the winter of 1853-54, and he returned in February, 1854. He was to
give a series of talks on the representative minds of New England, with
the circle of followers surrounding each; the subjects of his discourse
being Webster, Greeley, Garrison, Margaret Fuller, Theodore Parker,
Greenough, and Emerson; the separate themes being thus stated as seven,
and the number of conversations as only six. Terms for the course were
three dollars. By his daughter Louisa’s testimony he returned late at
night with a single dollar in his pocket, this fact being thus explained
in his own language: “Many promises were not kept and travelling is
costly; but I have opened the way, and another year shall do better.”[16]
At any rate, his daughter thus pathetically described his appearance at
this interview, as her mother wrote to a friend: “He looked as cold and
thin as an icicle; but as serene as God.”[17]

There is an almost dramatic interest in transferring our imaginations
to the later visit he made westward, when he was eighty-one years old,
between October, 1880, and May, 1881. He then traveled more than five
thousand miles, lectured or held conversations at the rate of more than
one a day, Sundays included, and came back with a thousand dollars,
although more than half of his addresses had been gratuitous. For seven
years after this he was the nominal dean of the so-called “School of
Philosophy” in Concord, and for four years took an active part in its
lectures and discussions. His last written works were most appropriately
two sonnets on “Immortality,” this being the only theme remaining
inexhaustibly open.

Perhaps no two persons in the world were in their intellectual method
more antipodal—to use one of Alcott’s favorite phrases—than himself and
Parker, though each stood near to Emerson and ostensibly belonged to
the same body of thinkers. In debate, the mere presence of Parker made
Alcott seem uneasy, as if yielding just cause for Emerson’s searching
inquiry, “Of what use is genius, if its focus be a little too short or
too long?” No doubt, Mr. Alcott might well be one of those to whom such
criticism could fitly be applied, just as it has been used to discourage
the printing of Thoreau’s whole journal. Is it not possible that Alcott’s
fame may yet be brought up gradually and securely, like Thoreau’s, from
those ample and beautifully written volumes which Alcott left behind him?

Alcott doubtless often erred, at first, in the direction of inflation in
language. When the Town and Country Club was organized in Boston, and had
been, indeed, established “largely to afford a dignified occupation for
Alcott,” as Emerson said, Alcott wished to have it christened either the
Olympian Club or the Pan Club. Lowell, always quick at a joke, suggested
the substitution of “Club of Hercules” instead of “Olympian”; or else
that, inasmuch as the question of admitting women was yet undecided, “The
Patty-Pan” would be a better name. But if Alcott’s words were large,
he acted up to them. When the small assaulting party was driven back at
the last moment from the Court House doors in Boston, during the Anthony
Burns excitement, and the steps were left bare, the crowd standing back,
it was Alcott who came forward and placidly said to the ring-leader,
“Why are we not within?” On being told that the mob would not follow,
he walked calmly up the steps, alone, cane in hand. When a revolver
was fired from within, just as he had reached the highest step, and he
discovered himself to be still unsupported, he as calmly turned and
walked down without hastening a footstep. It was hard to see how Plato
or Pythagoras could have done the thing better. Again, at the outbreak
of the Civil War, when a project was formed for securing the defense of
Washington by a sudden foray into Virginia, it appears from his Diary
that he had been at the point of joining it, when it was superseded by
the swift progress of events, and so abandoned.

The power of early sectarian training is apt to tell upon the later
years even of an independent thinker, and so it was with Alcott. In
his case a life-long ideal attitude passed back into something hard to
distinguish from old-fashioned Calvinism. This was especially noticeable
at the evening receptions of the Rev. Joseph Cook, who flattered Alcott
to the highest degree and was met at least halfway by the seer himself.
Having been present at one or two of these receptions, I can testify to
the disappointment inspired in Alcott’s early friends at his seeming
willingness to be made a hero in an attitude quite alien to that of his
former self. The “New International,” for instance, recognizes that
“in later years his manner became more formal and his always nebulous
teaching apparently more orthodox.” Be this as it may, the man whom
Emerson called “the most extraordinary man and highest genius of the
time,” and of whom he says, “As pure intellect I have never seen his
equal,” such a man needed only the fact of his unprotected footsteps
under fire up the stairs of the Boston Court House to establish him in
history as a truly all-round man,—unsurpassed among those of his own
generation even in physical pluck.




IX

GEORGE BANCROFT




GEORGE BANCROFT


George Bancroft, who died in Washington, D. C., on January 17, 1891,
was born at Worcester, Massachusetts, October 3, 1800, being the son of
Aaron and Lucretia (Chandler) Bancroft. His first American ancestor in
the male line was John Bancroft, who came to this country from England,
arriving on June 12, 1632, and settling at Lynn, Massachusetts. There
is no evidence of any especial literary or scholarly tastes in his
early ancestors, although one at least among them became a subject for
literature, being the hero of one of Cotton Mather’s wonderful tales
of recovery from smallpox. Samuel Bancroft, grandfather of the great
historian, was a man in public station, and is described by Savage
as “possessing the gift of utterance in an eminent degree”; and the
historian’s father, Rev. Aaron Bancroft, D. D., was a man of mark. He was
born in 1755, fought at Lexington and Bunker Hill when almost a boy, was
graduated at Harvard College in 1778, studied for the ministry, preached
for a time in Nova Scotia, was settled at Worcester in 1788, and died
there in 1839. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences, was an Arminian in theology, and in later life was President
of the American Unitarian Association. He published various occasional
sermons, a volume of doctrinal discourses, and (in 1807) a “Life of
Washington,” which was reprinted in England, and rivaled in circulation
the larger work of Marshall, which appeared at about the same time. He
thus bequeathed literary tastes to his thirteen children; and though
only one of these reached public eminence, yet three of the daughters
were prominent for many years in Worcester, being in charge of a school
for girls, and highly esteemed; while another sister was well known in
Massachusetts and at Washington as the wife of Governor (afterwards
Senator) John Davis.

George Bancroft was fitted for college at Exeter Academy, where he was
especially noted for his fine declamation. He entered Harvard College
in 1813, taking his degree in 1817. He was the classmate of four men
destined to be actively prominent in the great anti-slavery agitation a
few years later,—Samuel J. May, Samuel E. Sewall, David Lee Child, and
Robert F. Wallcut,—and of one prospective opponent of it, Caleb Cushing.
Other men of note in the class were the Rev. Stephen H. Tyng, D. D., the
Rev. Alva Woods, D. D., and Samuel A. Eliot, afterwards Treasurer of the
College and father of its recent President. Mr. Bancroft was younger than
any of these, and very probably the youngest in his class, being less
than seventeen at graduation. He was, however, second in rank, and it
happened that Edward Everett, then recently appointed Professor of Greek
Literature in that institution, had proposed that some young graduate of
promise should be sent to Germany for purposes of study, that he might
afterwards become one of the corps of Harvard instructors. Accordingly,
Bancroft was selected, and went, in the early summer of 1818, to
Göttingen. At that time the University had among its professors Eichhorn,
Heeren, and Blumenbach. He also studied at Berlin, where he knew
Schleiermacher, Savigny, and Wilhelm von Humboldt. At Jena he saw Goethe,
and at Heidelberg studied under Schlosser. This last was in the spring
of 1821, when he had already received his degree of Ph. D. at Göttingen
and was making the tour of Europe. At Paris he met Cousin, Constant, and
Alexander von Humboldt; he knew Manzoni at Milan, and Bunsen and Niebuhr
at Rome. The very mention of these names seems to throw his early career
far back into the past. Such experiences were far rarer then than now,
and the return from them into what was the village-like life of Harvard
College was a far greater change. Yet he came back at last and discharged
his obligations, in a degree, by a year’s service as Greek tutor.

It was not, apparently, a satisfactory position, for although he
dedicated a volume of poems to President Kirkland, “with respect and
affection,” as to his “early benefactor and friend,” yet we have the
testimony of George Ticknor (in Miss Ticknor’s Life of J. G. Cogswell)
that Bancroft was “thwarted in every movement by the President.” Mr.
Ticknor was himself a professor in the college, and though his view
may not have been dispassionate, he must have had the opportunity of
knowledge. His statement is rendered more probable by the fact that he
records a similar discontent in the case of Professor J. G. Cogswell, who
was certainly a man of conciliatory temperament. By Ticknor’s account,
Mr. Cogswell, who had been arranging the Harvard College Library and
preparing the catalogue, was quite unappreciated by the Corporation, and
though Ticknor urged both him and Bancroft to stay, they were resolved
to leave, even if their proposed school came to nothing. The school
in question was the once famous “Round Hill” at Northampton, in which
enterprise Cogswell, then thirty-six, and Bancroft, then twenty-three,
embarked in 1823. The latter had already preached several sermons, and
seemed to be feeling about for his career; but it now appeared as if he
had found it.

In embarking, however, he warbled a sort of swan-song at the close of
his academical life, and published in September, 1823, a small volume of
eighty pages, printed at the University Press, Cambridge, and entitled
“Poems by George Bancroft. Cambridge: Hilliard & Metcalf.” Some of these
were written in Switzerland, some in Italy, some, after his return home,
at Worcester; but almost all were European in theme, and neither better
nor worse than the average of such poems by young men of twenty or
thereabouts. The first, called “Expectation,” is the most noticeable, for
it contains an autobiographical glimpse of this young academical Childe
Harold setting forth on his pilgrimage:—

    “’Twas in the season when the sun
      More darkly tinges spring’s fair brow,
    And laughing fields had just begun
      The summer’s golden hues to show.
    Earth still with flowers was richly dight,
      And the last rose in gardens glowed;
    In heaven’s blue tent the sun was bright,
      And western winds with fragrance flowed;
        ’Twas then a youth bade home adieu;
          And hope was young and life was new,
        When first he seized the pilgrim’s wand
          To roam the far, the foreign land.

    “There lives the marble, wrought by art.
      That clime the youth would gain; he braves
    The ocean’s fury, and his heart
      Leaps in him, like the sunny waves
    That bear him onward; and the light
      Of hope within his bosom beams,
    Like the phosphoric ray at night
      That round the prow so cheerly gleams.
        But still his eye would backward turn,
          And still his bosom warmly burn,
        As towards new worlds he ’gan to roam,
          With love for Freedom’s Western home.”

This is the opening poem; the closing words of the book, at the end of
the final “Pictures of Rome,” are in a distinctly patriotic strain:—

    “Farewell to Rome; how lovely in distress;
    How sweet her gloom; how proud her wilderness!
    Farewell to all that won my youthful heart,
    And waked fond longings after fame. We part.
    The weary pilgrim to his home returns;
    For Freedom’s air, for Western climes he burns;
    Where dwell the brave, the generous, and the free,
    O! there is Rome; no other Rome for me.”

It was in order to train these young children of the Republic—“the brave,
the generous, and the free”—that Bancroft entered upon the “Round Hill”
enterprise.

This celebrated school belonged to that class of undertakings which are
so successful as to ruin their projectors. It began in a modest way;
nothing could be more sensible than the “Prospectus,”—a pamphlet of
twenty pages, issued at Cambridge, June 20, 1823. In this there is a
clear delineation of the defects then existing in American schools; and
a modest promise is given that, aided by the European experience of the
two founders, something like a French _collège_ or a German _gymnasium_
might be created. There were to be not more than twenty pupils, who were
to be from nine to twelve on entering. A fine estate was secured at
Northampton, and pupils soon came in.

Then followed for several years what was at least a very happy family.
The school was to be in many respects on the German plan: farm life,
friendly companionship, ten-mile rambles through the woods with the
teachers, and an annual walking tour in the same company. All instruction
was to be thorough; there was to be no direct emulation, and no flogging.
There remain good delineations of the school in the memoirs of Dr.
Cogswell, and in a paper by the late T. G. Appleton, one of the pupils.
It is also described by Duke Bernard of Saxe-Weimar in his “Travels.”
The material of the school was certainly fortunate. Many men afterwards
noted in various ways had their early training there: J. L. Motley,
H. W. Bellows, R. T. S. Lowell, F. Schroeder, Ellery Channing, G. E.
Ellis, Theodore Sedgwick, George C. Shattuck, S. G. Ward, R. G. Shaw, N.
B. Shurtleff, George Gibbs, Philip Kearney, R. G. Harper. At a dinner
given to Dr. Cogswell in 1864, the most profuse expressions of grateful
reminiscence were showered upon Mr. Bancroft, though he was then in
Europe. The prime object of the school, as stated by Mr. Ticknor, was
“to teach _more thoroughly_ than has ever been taught among us.” How far
this was accomplished can only be surmised; what is certain is that the
boys enjoyed themselves. They were admirably healthy, not having a case
of illness for sixteen months, and they were happy. When we say that,
among other delights, the boys had a large piece of land where they had a
boy-village of their own, a village known as Cronyville, a village where
each boy erected his own shanty and built his own chimney, where he could
roast apples and potatoes on a winter evening and call the neighbors
in,—when each boy had such absolute felicity as this, with none to molest
him or make him afraid, there is no wonder that the “old boys” were ready
to feast their kindly pedagogues forty years later.

But to spread barracks for boys and crony villages over the delightful
hills of Northampton demanded something more than kindliness; it needed
much administrative skill and some money. Neither Cogswell nor Bancroft
was a man of fortune. Instead of twenty boys, they had at one time one
hundred and twenty-seven, nearly fifty of whom had to be kept through
the summer vacation. They had many Southern pupils and, as an apparent
consequence, many bad debts, Mr. Cogswell estimating a loss of two
thousand dollars from this cause in a single year; and sometimes they had
to travel southward to dun delinquent parents. The result of it all was
that Bancroft abandoned the enterprise after seven years, in the summer
of 1830; while Cogswell, who held on two years longer, retired with
health greatly impaired and a financial loss of twenty thousand dollars.
Thus ended the Round Hill School.

While at Round Hill, Mr. Bancroft prepared some text-books for his
pupils, translating Heeren’s “Politics of Ancient Greece” (1824) and
Jacobs’s Latin Reader (1825),—the latter going through several editions.
His first article in the “North American Review,” then the leading
literary journal in the United States, appeared in October, 1823, and
was a notice of Schiller’s “Minor Poems,” with many translations.
From this time forward he wrote in almost every volume, but always on
classical or German themes, until in January, 1831, he took up “The
Bank of the United States,” and a few years later (October, 1835), “The
Documentary History of the Revolution.” These indicated the progress
of his historical studies, which had also begun at Round Hill, and
took form at last in his great history. The design of this monumental
work was as deliberate as Gibbon’s, and almost as vast; and the author
lived, like Gibbon, to see it accomplished. The first volume appeared in
1834, the second in 1837, the third in 1840, the fourth in 1852, and so
onward. Between these volumes was interspersed a variety of minor essays,
some of which were collected in a volume of “Literary and Historical
Miscellanies,” published in 1855. Bancroft also published, as a separate
work, a “History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United
States” (1882).

While at Northampton, he was an ardent Democrat of the most theoretic
and philosophic type, and he very wisely sought to acquaint himself
with the practical side of public affairs. In 1826 he gave an address
at Northampton, defining his position and sympathies; in 1830 he was
elected to the Legislature, but declined to take his seat, and the next
year refused a nomination to the Senate. In 1835 he drew up an address
to the people of Massachusetts, made many speeches and prepared various
sets of resolutions, was flattered, traduced, caricatured. From 1838 to
1841 he was Collector of the Port of Boston; in 1844 he was Democratic
candidate for Governor of Massachusetts, but was defeated,—George N.
Briggs being his successful antagonist,—although he received more votes
than any Democratic candidate before him. In 1845 he was Secretary of
the Navy under President Polk. In all these executive positions he may
be said to have achieved success. It was, for instance, during his term
of office that the Naval Academy was established at Annapolis; it was he
who gave the first order to take possession of California; and he who,
while acting for a month as Secretary of War, gave the order to General
Taylor to march into Texas, thus ultimately leading to the annexation
of that state. This, however, identified him with a transaction justly
censurable, and indeed his whole political career occurred during the
most questionable period of Democratic subserviency to the slave power,
and that weakness was never openly—perhaps never sincerely—resisted by
him. This left a reproach upon his earlier political career which has,
however, been effaced by his literary life and his honorable career as a
diplomatist. In 1846 he was transferred from the Cabinet to the post of
Minister Plenipotentiary to Great Britain, where he contrived to combine
historical researches with public functions. In 1849 he returned to
this country—a Whig administration having been elected—and took up his
residence in New York. In February, 1866, he was selected by Congress to
pronounce a eulogy on President Lincoln, and in the following year he was
appointed Minister to Prussia, being afterwards successively accredited
to the North German Confederation and the German Empire. In these
positions he succeeded in effecting some important treaty provisions in
respect to the rights of naturalized German citizens residing in Germany.
He was recalled at his own request in 1874, and thenceforward resided in
Washington in the winter, and at Newport, Rhode Island, in summer.

Dividing his life between these two abodes, he passed his later years
in a sort of existence more common in Europe than here,—the well-earned
dignity of the scholar who has also been, in his day, a man of affairs,
and who is yet too energetic to repose upon his laurels or waste much
time upon merely enjoying the meed of fame he has won. In both his winter
and summer abodes he had something of the flattering position of First
Citizen; he was free of all sets, an honored member of all circles. His
manners were often mentioned as “courtly,” but they never quite rose to
the level of either of the two classes of manner described by Tennyson:—

    “Kind nature is the best, those manners next
    That fit us like a nature second-hand;
    Which are indeed the manners of the great.”

Neither of these descriptions exactly fitted Mr. Bancroft; his manners
were really of the composite sort, and curiously suggestive of the
different phases of his life. They were like that wonderful Japanese
lacquer-work, made up of twenty or thirty different coats or films,
usually laid on by several different workmen. There was at the foundation
the somewhat formal and literal manner of the scholar, almost of the
pedagogue: then one caught a glimpse of an executive, official style,
that seemed to date from the period when he ordered California to be
occupied; and over all there was a varnish of worldly courtesy, enhanced
by an evident pleasure in being admired, and broken by an occasional
outburst of rather blunt sincerity.

But he matured and mellowed well; his social life at Washington was
more satisfactory to himself and others than that he led in New York;
he had voluntarily transplanted himself to a community which, with all
its faults and crudities, sets intellect above wealth, and readily
conceded the highest place to a man like Bancroft. Foreign ministers
came accredited to him as well as to the government; he was the friend
of every successive administration, and had as many guests as he cared
to see at his modest Sunday evening receptions. There he greeted every
one cordially, aided by a wife amply gifted in the amenities. He was kind
to everybody, and remembered the father or grandfather of anybody who
had any such ancestors whom it was desirable to mention. In summer, at
Newport, it was the same; his residence was like that described by his
imagination in one of his own early poems—

    “Where heaven lends her loveliest scene,
    A softened air, a sky serene,
    Along the shore where smiles the sea.”

Unlike most Newport “cottages,” his house was within sight of the ocean;
between it and the sea lay the garden, and the “rose in Kenmure’s cap”
in the Scottish ballad was not a characteristic more invariable than the
same flower in Mr. Bancroft’s hand or buttonhole. His form was familiar,
too, on Bellevue Avenue, taking as regularly as any old-fashioned
Englishman his daily horseback exercise. At the same time he was one of
the few men who were capable, even in Newport, of doing daily the day’s
work; he rose fabulously early in the morning, and kept a secretary or
two always employed. Since John Quincy Adams, there has not been among us
such an example of laborious, self-exacting, seemingly inexhaustible old
age; and, unlike Adams, Mr. Bancroft kept his social side always fresh
and active, and did not have, like the venerable ex-President, to force
himself out in the evening in order “to learn the art of conversation.”
This combination, with his monumental literary work, will keep his memory
secure. It will possibly outlive that of many men of greater inspiration,
loftier aims, and sublimer qualities.

Mr. Bancroft, as an historian, combined some of the greatest merits and
some of the profoundest defects ever united in a single author. His
merits are obvious enough. He had great enthusiasm for his subject. He
was profoundly imbued with that democratic spirit without which the
history of the United States cannot be justly written. He has the graphic
quality so wanting in Hildreth, and the piquancy whose absence makes
Prescott too smooth. He has a style essentially picturesque, whatever
may be its faults. The reader is compelled to admit that his resources
in the way of preparation are inexhaustible, and that his command
of them is astounding. One must follow him minutely, for instance,
through the history of the War for Independence, to appreciate in full
the consummate grasp of a mind which can deploy military events in a
narrative as a general deploys brigades in a field. Add to this the
capacity for occasional maxims to the highest degree profound and lucid,
in the way of political philosophy, and you certainly combine in one man
some of the greatest qualities of the historian.

Against this are to be set very grave faults. In his earlier editions
there was an habitual pomposity and inflation of style which the sterner
taste of his later years has so modified that we must now condone it.
The same heroic revision has cut off many tame and commonplace remarks
as trite as those virtuous truisms by which second-rate actors bring
down the applause of the galleries at cheap theatres. Many needless
philosophical digressions have shared the same fate. But many faults
remain. There is, in the first place, that error so common with the
graphic school of historians,—the exaggerated estimate of manuscript or
fragmentary material at the expense of what is printed and permanent.
In many departments of history this dependence is inevitable; but,
unfortunately, Mr. Bancroft was not, except in the very earliest volumes
of his history, dealing with such departments. The loose and mythical
period of our history really ends with Captain John Smith. From the
moment when the Pilgrims landed, the main facts of American history are
to be found recorded in a series of carefully prepared documents, made
by men to whom the pen was familiar, and who were exceedingly methodical
in all their ways. The same is true of all the struggles which led to
the Revolution, and of all those which followed. They were the work of
honest-minded Anglo-Saxon men who, if they issued so much as a street
hand-bill, said just what they meant, and meant precisely what they
said. To fill the gaps in this solid documentary chain is, no doubt,
desirable,—to fill them by every passing rumor, every suggestion of a
French agent’s busy brain; but to substitute this inferior matter for
the firmer basis is wrong. Much of the graphic quality of Mr. Bancroft’s
writing is obtained by this means, and this portends, in certain
directions, a future shrinkage and diminution in his fame.

A fault far more serious than this is one which Mr. Bancroft shared
with his historical contemporaries, but in which he far exceeded any
of them,—an utter ignoring of the very meaning and significance of a
quotation-mark. Others of that day sinned. The long controversy between
Jared Sparks and Lord Mahon grew out of this,—from the liberties taken
by Sparks in editing Washington’s letters. Professor Edward T. Channing
did the same thing in quoting the racy diaries of his grandfather,
William Ellery, and substituting, for instance, in a passage cited as
original, “We refreshed ourselves with meat and drink,” for the far
racier “We refreshed our Stomachs with Beefsteaks and Grogg.” Hildreth,
in quoting from the “Madison Papers,” did the same, for the sake not of
propriety, but of convenience; even Frothingham made important omissions
and variations, without indicating them, in quoting Hooke’s remarkable
sermon, “New England’s Teares.” But Bancroft is the chief of sinners in
this respect; when he quotes a contemporary document or letter, it is
absolutely impossible to tell, without careful verifying, whether what
he gives us between the quotation-marks is precisely what should be
there, or whether it is a compilation, rearrangement, selection, or even
a series of mere paraphrases of his own. It would be easy to illustrate
this abundantly, especially from the Stamp Act volume; but a single
instance will suffice.

When, in 1684, an English fleet sailed into Boston harbor, ostensibly on
its way to attack the Dutch settlements on the Hudson, it left behind
a royal commission, against whose mission of interference the colonial
authorities at once protested, and they issued a paper, as one historian
has said, “in words so clear and dignified as to give a foretaste of
the Revolutionary state papers that were to follow a century later.” If
ever there was a document in our pre-Revolutionary history that ought
to be quoted precisely as it was written, or not at all, it was this
remonstrance. It thus begins in Bancroft’s version, and the words have
often been cited by others. He says of the colony of Massachusetts:
“Preparing a remonstrance, not against deeds of tyranny, but the
menace of tyranny, not against actual wrong, but against a principle
of wrong, on the 25th of October, it thus addressed King Charles II.”
The alleged address is then given, apparently in full, and then follows
the remark, “The spirit of the people corresponded with this address.”
It will hardly be believed that there never was any such address, and
that no such document was ever in existence as that so formally cited
here. Yet any one who will compare Bancroft’s draft with the original
in the Records of Massachusetts (volume iv, part 2, pages 168-169) will
be instantly convinced of this. Bancroft has simply taken phrases and
sentences here and there from a long document and rearranged, combined,
and, in some cases, actually paraphrased them in his own way. Logically
and rhetorically the work is his own. The colonial authorities adopted
their own way of composition, and he adopted his. In some sentences we
have Bancroft, not Endicott; the nineteenth century, not the seventeenth.
Whether the transformation is an improvement or not is not the question;
the thing cited is not the original. An accurate historian would no more
have issued such a restatement under the shelter of quotation-marks than
an accurate theologian would have rewritten the Ten Commandments and read
his improved edition from the pulpit. And it is a curious fact that while
Mr. Bancroft has amended so much else in his later editions, he has left
this passage untouched, and still implies an adherence to the tradition
that this is the way to write history.

It is also to be noted that the evil is doubled when this practice is
combined with the other habit, already mentioned, of relying largely
upon manuscript authorities. If an historian garbles, paraphrases,
and rearranges when he is dealing with matter accessible to all, how
much greater the peril when he is dealing with what is in written
documents held under his own lock and key. It is not necessary to allege
intentional perversion, but we are, at the very least, absolutely at
the mercy of an inaccurate habit of mind. The importance of this point
is directly manifested on opening the leaves of Mr. Bancroft’s last
and perhaps most valuable book, “The History of the Constitution.” The
most important part of this book consists, by concession of all, in the
vast mass of selections from the private correspondence of the period:
for instance, of M. Otto, the French Ambassador. We do not hesitate to
say that, if tried by the standard of Mr. Bancroft’s previous literary
methods, this mass of correspondence, though valuable as suggestion, is
worthless as authority. Until it has been carefully collated and compared
with the originals, we do not know that a paragraph or a sentence of
it is left as the author wrote it; the system of paraphrase previously
exhibited throws the shadow of doubt over all. No person can safely cite
one of these letters in testimony; no person knows whether any particular
statement contained in it comes to us in the words of its supposed author
or of Mr. Bancroft. It is no answer to say that this loose method was the
method of certain Greek historians; if Thucydides composed speeches for
his heroes, it was at least known that he prepared them, and there was
not the standing falsehood of a quotation-mark.

A drawback quite as serious is to be found in this, that Mr. Bancroft’s
extraordinary labors in old age were not usually devoted to revising
the grounds of his own earlier judgments, but to perfecting his own
style of expression, and to weaving in additional facts at those points
which especially interested him. Professor Agassiz used to say that
the greatest labor of the student of biology came from the enormous
difficulty of keeping up with current publications and the proceedings of
societies; a man could carry on his own observations, but he could not
venture to publish them without knowing all the latest statements made
by other observers. Mr. Bancroft had to encounter the same obstacle in
his historical work, and it must be owned that he sometimes ignored it.
Absorbed in his own great stores of material, he often let the work of
others go unobserved. It would be easy to multiply instances. Thus, the
controversies about Verrazzano’s explorations were conveniently settled
by omitting his name altogether; there was no revision of the brief early
statement that the Norse sagas were “mythological,” certainly one of the
least appropriate adjectives that could have been selected; Mr. Bancroft
never even read—up to within a few years of his death, at any rate—the
important monographs of Varnhagen in respect to Amerigo Vespucci; he
did not keep up with the publications of the historical societies.
Laboriously revising his whole history in 1876, and almost rewriting it
for the edition of 1884, he allowed the labors of younger investigators
to go on around him unobserved. The consequence is that much light has
been let in upon American history in directions where he has not so much
as a window; and there are points where his knowledge, vast as it is,
will be found to have been already superseded. In this view, that cannot
be asserted of him which the late English historian, Mr. J. R. Green,
proudly and justly claimed for himself: “I know what men will say of
me—he died learning.” But Mr. Bancroft at least died laboring, and in the
harness.

Mr. Bancroft was twice married, first to Miss Sarah H. Dwight, who died
June 26, 1837, and in the following year to Mrs. Elizabeth (Davis) Bliss.
By the first marriage he had several children, of whom John Chandler
(Harvard, 1854) died in Europe, and George (Harvard, 1856) has spent most
of his life in foreign countries.




X

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON




CHARLES ELIOT NORTON


It is a tradition in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, that Howells
used to exult, on arriving from his Western birthplace, in having at
length met for the first time, in Charles Eliot Norton, the only man he
had ever seen who had been cultivated up to the highest point of which
he was capable. To this the verdict of all Cambridge readily assented.
What the neighbors could not at that time foresee was that the man thus
praised would ever live to be an octogenarian, or that in doing so he
would share those attractions of constantly increasing mildness and
courtesy which are so often justly claimed for advancing years. There
was in him, at an earlier period, a certain amount of visible self-will,
and a certain impatience with those who dissented from him,—he would not
have been his father’s son had it been otherwise. But these qualities
diminished, and he grew serener and more patient with others as the years
went on. Happy is he who has lived long enough to say with Goethe, “It
is only necessary to grow old to become more indulgent. I see no fault
committed which I have not committed myself.” This milder and more
genial spirit increased constantly as Norton grew older, until it served
at last only to make his high-bred nature more attractive.

He was born in Cambridge, November 16, 1827, and died in the very house
where he was born, October 21, 1908. He was descended, like several other
New England authors, from a line of Puritan clergymen. He was the son
of Professor Andrews Norton, of Harvard University, who was descended
from the Rev. John Norton, born in Ipswich, Massachusetts, in 1651.
The mother of the latter was the daughter of Emanuel Downing, and the
niece of Governor John Winthrop. Mrs. Bradstreet, the well-known Puritan
poetess, was also an ancestress of Charles Norton. His mother, Mrs.
Caroline (Eliot) Norton, had also her ancestry among the most cultivated
families in New England, the name of Eliot having been prominent for
successive generations in connection with Harvard College. His parents
had a large and beautiful estate in Cambridge, and were (if my memory
serves me right) the one family in Cambridge that kept a carriage,—a fact
the more impressed upon remembrance because it bore the initials “A.
& C. N.” upon the panels, the only instance I have ever seen in which
the two joint proprietorships were thus expressed. This, and the fact
that I learned by heart in childhood Wordsworth’s poem, “The White Doe
of Rylstone, or The Fate of the Nortons,” imparted to my youthful mind
a slight feeling of romance about the Cambridge household of that name,
which was not impaired by the fact that our parents on both sides were
intimate friends, that we lived in the same street (now called Kirkland
Street), and that I went to dancing-school at the Norton house. It is
perhaps humiliating to add that I disgraced myself on the very first
day by cutting off little Charlie’s front hair as a preliminary to the
dancing lesson.

The elder Professor Norton was one of the most marked characters in
Cambridge, and, although never a clergyman, was professor in the
Theological School. It was said of him by George Ripley, with whom he had
a bitter contest, that “He often expressed rash and hasty judgments in
regard to the labors of recent or contemporary scholars, consulting his
prejudices, as it would seem, rather than competent authority. But in his
own immediate department of sacred learning he is entitled to the praise
of sobriety of thought and profoundness of investigation” (Frothingham’s
“Ripley,” 105). He was also a man of unusual literary tastes, and his
“Select Journal of Foreign Periodical Literature,” although too early
discontinued, took distinctly the lead of all American literary journals
up to that time.

The very beginning of Charles Norton’s career would seem at first sight
singularly in contrast with his later pursuits, and yet doubtless had
formed, in some respects, an excellent preparation for them. Graduating
at Harvard in 1846, and taking a fair rank at graduation, he was soon
after sent into a Boston counting-house to gain a knowledge of the
East India trade. In 1849 he went as supercargo on a merchant ship
bound for India, in which country he traveled extensively, and returned
home through Europe in 1851. There are few more interesting studies in
the development of literary individuality than are to be found in the
successive works bearing Norton’s name, as one looks through the list
of them in the Harvard Library. The youth who entered upon literature
anonymously, at the age of twenty-five, as a compiler of hymns under
the title of “Five Christmas Hymns” in 1852, and followed this by “A
Book of Hymns for Young Persons” in 1854, did not even flinch from
printing the tragically Calvinistic verse which closes Addison’s famous
hymn, beginning “The Lord my pasture shall prepare,” with a conclusion
so formidable as death’s “gloomy horrors” and “dreadful shade.” In
1855 he edited, with Dr. Ezra Abbot, his father’s translations of the
Gospels with notes (2 vols.), and his “Evidences of the Genuineness of
the Gospels” (3 vols.). Charles Norton made further visits to Europe in
1855-57, and again resided there from 1868 until 1873; during which time
his rapidly expanding literary acquaintanceships quite weaned his mind
from the early atmosphere of theology.

Although one of the writers in the very first number of the “Atlantic
Monthly,” he had no direct part in its planning. He wrote to me (January
9, 1899), “I am sorry that I can tell you nothing about the _primordia_
of the ‘Atlantic.’ I was in Europe in 1856-57, whence I brought home
some MSS. for the new magazine.” It appears from his later statement in
the Anniversary Number that he had put all these manuscripts by English
authors in a trunk together, but that this trunk and all the manuscripts
were lost, except one accidentally left unpacked, which was a prose paper
by James Hannay on Douglas Jerrold, “who is hardly,” as Norton justly
says, “to be reckoned among the immortals.” Hannay is yet more thoroughly
forgotten. But this inadequate service in respect to foreign material
was soon more than balanced, as one sees on tracing the list of papers
catalogued under Norton’s name in the Atlantic Index.

To appreciate the great variety and thorough preliminary preparation
of Norton’s mind, a student must take one of the early volumes of the
“Atlantic Monthly” and see how largely he was relied upon for literary
notices. If we examine, for instance, the fifth volume (1860), we find
in the first number a paper on Clough’s “Plutarch’s Lives,” comprising
ten pages of small print in double columns. There then follow in the same
volume papers on Hodson’s “Twelve Years of a Soldier’s Life in India,” on
“Friends in Council,” on Brooks’s “Sermons,” on Trollope’s “West Indies
and the Spanish Main,” on “Captain John Brown,” on Vernon’s “Dante,”
and one on “Model Lodging-Houses in Boston.” When we remember that his
“Notes of Travel and Study in Italy” was also published in Boston that
same year, being reviewed by some one in a notice of two pages in this
same volume of the “Atlantic,” we may well ask who ever did more of
genuine literary work in the same amount of time. This was, of course,
before he became Professor in the college (1874), and his preoccupation
in that way, together with his continuous labor on his translations of
Dante, explains why there are comparatively few entries under his name
in Atlantic Indexes for later years. Again, he and Lowell took charge of
the “North American Review” in 1864, and retained it until 1868, during
which period Norton unquestionably worked quite as hard as before, if we
may judge by the collective index to that periodical.

It is to be noticed, however, that his papers in the “North American” are
not merely graver and more prolonged, but less terse and highly finished,
than those in the “Atlantic”; while in the development of his mind they
show even greater freedom of statement. He fearlessly lays down, for
instance, the following assertion, a very bold one for that period:
“So far as the most intelligent portion of society at the present day
is concerned, the Church in its actual constitution is an anachronism.
Much of the deepest and most religious life is led outside its wall, and
there is a constant and steady increase in those who not only find the
claims of the Church inconsistent with spiritual liberty, but also find
its services ill adapted to their wants.... It becomes more and more a
simple assemblage of persons gathered to go through with certain formal
ceremonies, the chief of which consists in listening to a man who is
seldom competent to teach.” It must be remembered that the expression
of such opinions to-day, when all his charges against the actual Church
may be found similarly stated by bishops and doctors of divinity, must
have produced a very different impression when made forty years ago by a
man of forty or thereabouts, who occupied twenty pages in saying it, and
rested in closing upon the calm basis, “The true worship of God consists
in the service of his children and devotion to the common interests of
men.” It may be that he who wrote these words never held a regular pew
in any church or identified himself, on the other hand, with any public
heretical organization, even one so moderate as the Free Religious
Association. Yet the fact that he devoted his Sunday afternoons for many
years to talking and Scripture reading in a Hospital for Incurables
conducted by Roman Catholics perhaps showed that it was safer to leave
such a man to go on his own course and reach the kingdom of heaven in his
own way.

Norton never wrote about himself, if it could be avoided, unless his
recollections of early years, as read before the Cambridge Historical
Society, and reported in the second number of its proceedings, may
be regarded as an exception. Something nearest to this in literary
self-revelation is to be found, perhaps, in his work entitled “Letters of
John Ruskin,” published in 1904, and going back to his first invitation
from the elder Ruskin in 1855. This was on Norton’s first direct trip
to Europe, followed by a correspondence in which Ruskin writes to him,
February 25, 1861, “You have also done me no little good,” and other
phrases which show how this American, nine years younger than himself,
had already begun to influence that wayward mind. Their correspondence
was suspended, to be sure, by their difference of attitude on the
American Civil War; but it is pleasant to find that after ten months
of silence Ruskin wrote to Norton again, if bitterly. Later still, we
find successive letters addressed to Norton—now in England again—in this
loving gradation, “Dear Norton,” “My dearest Norton,” “My dear Charles,”
and “My dearest Charles,” and thenceforth the contest is won. Not all
completed, however, for in the last years of life Ruskin addressed
“Darling Charles,” and the last words of his own writing traced in pencil
“From your loving J. R.”

I have related especially this one touching tale of friendship, because
it was the climax of them all, and the best illustration of the essential
Americanism of Norton’s career.

He indeed afforded a peculiar and almost unique instance in New England,
not merely of a cultivated man who makes his home for life in the house
where he was born, but of one who has recognized for life the peculiar
associations of his boyhood and has found them still the best. While
Ruskin was pitying him for being doomed to wear out his life in America,
Norton with pleasure made his birthplace his permanent abode, and fully
recognized the attractions of the spot where he was born. “What a fine
microcosm,” he wrote to me (January 9, 1899), “Cambridge and Boston
and Concord made in the 40’s.” Norton affords in this respect a great
contrast to his early comrade, William Story, who shows himself in his
letters wholly detached from his native land, and finds nothing whatever
in his boyhood abode to attract him, although it was always found
attractive, not merely by Norton, but by Agassiz and Longfellow, neither
of whom was a native of Cambridge.

The only safeguard for a solitary literary workman lies in the
sequestered house without a telephone. This security belonged for many
years to Norton, until the needs of a growing family made him a seller
of land, a builder of a high-railed fence, and at last, but reluctantly,
a subscriber to the telephone. It needs but little study of the cards
bearing his name in the catalogue of the Harvard Library to see on
how enormous a scale his work has been done in this seclusion. It is
then only that one remembers his eight volumes of delicately arranged
scrap-books extending from 1861 to 1866, and his six volumes of “Heart
of Oak” selections for childhood. There were comparatively few years of
his maturer life during which he was not editor of something, and there
was also needed much continuous labor in taking care of his personal
library. When we consider that he had the further responsibility of being
practically the literary executor or editor of several important men of
letters, as of Carlyle, Ruskin, Lowell, Curtis, and Clough; and that in
each case the work was done with absolute thoroughness; and that even in
summer he became the leading citizen of a country home and personally
engaged the public speakers who made his rural festals famous, it is
impossible not to draw the conclusion that no public man in America
surpassed the sequestered Norton in steadfastness of labor.

It being made my duty in June, 1904, to read a poem before the Harvard
Phi Beta Kappa, I was tempted to include a few verses about individual
graduates, each of which was left, according to its subject, for the
audience to guess. The lines referring to Norton were as follows:—

    “There’s one I’ve watched from childhood, free of guile,
    His man’s firm courage and his woman’s smile.
    His portals open to the needy still,
    He spreads calm sunshine over Shady Hill.”

The reference to the combined manly and womanly qualities of Norton
spoke for itself, and won applause even before the place of residence
was uttered; and I received from Norton this recognition of the little
tribute:—

                                            ASHFIELD, 2 July, 1904.

    MY DEAR HIGGINSON,—Your friendly words about me in your Phi
    Beta poem give me so much pleasure that I cannot refrain from
    thanking you for them. I care for them specially as a memorial
    of our hereditary friendship. They bring to mind my Mother’s
    affection for your Mother, and for Aunt Nancy, who was as
    dear an Aunt to us children at Shady Hill as she was to you
    and your brothers and sisters. What dear and admirable women!
    What simple, happy lives they led! No one’s heart will be more
    deeply touched by your poem than mine.

One most agreeable result of Norton’s Cambridge boyhood has not been
generally recognized by those who have written about him. His inherited
estate was so large that he led a life absolutely free in respect to the
study of nature, and as Lowell, too, had the same advantage, they could
easily compare notes. In answer to a criticism of mine with reference
to Longfellow’s poem, “The Herons of Elmwood,” on my theory that these
herons merely flew over Elmwood and only built their nests in what were
then the dense swamps east of Fresh Pond, he writes to me (January 4,
1899): “I cannot swear that I ever saw a heron’s nest at Elmwood. But
Lowell told me of their nesting there, and only a few weeks ago Mrs.
Burnett told me of the years when they had built in the pines and of
the time of their final desertion of the place.” To this he adds in a
note dated five days later: “As to the night-herons lighting on pines,
for many years they were in the habit of lighting and staying for hours
upon mine and then flying off towards the [Chelsea] beach.” This taste
accounts for the immense zest and satisfaction with which Norton edited a
hitherto unknown manuscript of the poet Gray’s on natural history, with
admirable illustrations taken from the original book, seeming almost
incredibly accurate from any but a professional naturalist, the book
being entitled, “The Poet Gray as a Naturalist with Selections from His
Notes on the Systema Naturæ of Linnæus with Facsimiles of Some of his
Drawings.”

In the Charles Eliot Norton number of the “Harvard Graduates’ Magazine”
commemorating his eightieth birthday, Professor Palmer, with that
singular felicity which characterizes him, says of Norton: “He has been
an epitome of the world’s best thought brought to our own doors and
opened for our daily use.” Edith Wharton with equal felicity writes
from Norton’s well-known dwelling at Ashfield, whose very name, “High
Pasture,” gives a signal for what follows:—

    “Come up—come up; in the dim vale below
    The autumn mist muffles the fading trees,
    But on this keen hill-pasture, though the breeze
    Has stretched the thwart boughs bare to meet the snow,
    Night is not, autumn is not—but the flow
    Of vast, ethereal and irradiate seas,
    Poured from the far world’s flaming boundaries
    In waxing tides of unimagined glow.

    “And to that height illumined of the mind
    He calls us still by the familiar way,
    Leaving the sodden tracks of life behind,
    Befogged in failure, chilled with love’s decay—
    Showing us, as the night-mists upward wind,
    How on the heights is day and still more day.”

But I must draw to a close, and shall do this by reprinting the very
latest words addressed by this old friend to me; these being written very
near his last days. Having been away from Cambridge all summer, I did
not know that he had been at Cambridge or ill, and on my writing to him
received this cheerful and serene answer, wholly illustrative of the man,
although the very fact that it was dictated was sadly ominous:—

                     SHADY HILL, CAMBRIDGE, MASS., 6 October, 1908.

    MY DEAR HIGGINSON,—Your letter the other day from Ipswich gave
    me great pleasure....

    It had never occurred to me that you were associated with
    Ipswich through your Appleton relatives. My association with
    the old town, whose charm has not wholly disappeared under the
    hard hoof of the invader, begins still earlier than yours,
    for the William Norton who landed there in 1636 was my direct
    ancestor; and a considerable part of his pretty love story
    seems to have been transacted there. I did not know the story
    until I came upon it by accident, imbedded in some of the
    volumes of the multifarious publications of our historical
    society. It amused me to find that John Norton, whose
    reputation is not for romance or for soft-heartedness, took an
    active interest in pleading his brother’s cause with Governor
    Winthrop, whose niece, Lucy Downing, had won the susceptible
    heart of W. N.

    My summer was a very peaceful and pleasant one here in my old
    home till about six weeks ago, when I was struck down ... which
    has left me in a condition of extreme muscular feebleness, but
    has not diminished my interest in the world and its affairs.
    Happily my eyes are still good for reading, and I have fallen
    back, as always on similar occasions, on Shakespeare and Scott,
    but I have read one or two new books also, the best of which,
    and a book of highest quality, is the last volume of Morley’s
    essays.

    But I began meaning only to thank you for your pleasant note
    and to send a cheer to you from my slower craft as your gallant
    three-master goes by it with all sails set....

                      Always cordially yours,

                                                      C. E. NORTON.




XI

EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN




EDMUND CLARENCE STEDMAN


The sudden death of Edmund Clarence Stedman at New York on January 18,
1908, came with a strange pathos upon the readers of his many writings,
especially as following so soon upon that of his life-long friend and
compeer, Aldrich. Stedman had been for some years an invalid, and had
received, in his own phrase, his “three calls,” that life would soon be
ended. He was born at Hartford, Connecticut, on October 8, 1833, and was
the second son of Colonel Edmund Burke Stedman and his wife Elizabeth
Clement (Dodge) Stedman. His great-grandfather was the Reverend Aaron
Cleveland, Jr., a Harvard graduate of 1735, and a man of great influence
in his day, who died in middle life under the hospitable roof of Benjamin
Franklin. Stedman’s mother was a woman of much literary talent, and
had great ultimate influence in the training of her son, although she
was early married again to the Honorable William B. Kinney, who was
afterwards the United States Minister to Turin. Her son, being placed in
charge of a great-uncle, spent his childhood in Norwich, Connecticut, and
entered Yale at sixteen, but did not complete his course there, although
in later life he was restored to his class membership and received the
degree of Master of Arts. He went early into newspaper work in Norwich
and then in New York, going to the front for a time as newspaper
correspondent during the Civil War. He abandoned journalism after ten
years or thereabouts, and became a member of the New York Stock Exchange
without giving up his literary life, a combination apt to be of doubtful
success. He married, at twenty, Laura Hyde Woodworth, who died before
him, as did one of his sons, leaving only one son and a granddaughter as
his heirs. His funeral services took place at the Church of the Messiah
on January 21, 1908, conducted by the Reverend Dr. Robert Collyer and the
Reverend Dr. Henry van Dyke.

Those who happen to turn back to the number of the “Atlantic Monthly”
for January, 1898, will read with peculiar interest a remarkable paper
entitled “Our Two Most Honored Poets.” It bears no author’s name, even
in the Index, but is what we may venture to call, after ten years, a
singularly penetrating analysis of both Aldrich and Stedman. Of the
latter it is said: “His rhythmic sense is subtle, and he often attains
an aerial waywardness of melody which is of the very essence of the
lyric gift.” It also remarks most truly and sadly of Stedman that he
“is of those who have suffered the stress of the day.” The critic adds:
“Just now we felt grateful to Mr. Aldrich for putting all this [that is,
life’s tragedies] away in order that the clarity and sweetness of his art
might not suffer; now we feel something like reverence for the man [Mr.
Stedman] who, in conditions which make for contentment and acquiescence,
has not been able to escape these large afflictions.” But these two
gifted men have since passed away, Aldrich from a career of singular
contentment, Stedman after ten years of almost constant business failure
and a series of calamities relating to those nearest and dearest.

One of the most prominent men in the New York literary organizations,
and one who knew Stedman intimately, writes me thus in regard to the
last years of his life: “As you probably know, Stedman died poor. Only
a few days ago he told me that after paying all the debts hanging over
him for years from the business losses caused by ⸺’s mismanagement, he
had not enough to live on, and must keep on with his literary work. For
this he had various plans, of which our conversations developed only a
possible rearrangement of his past writings; an article now and then for
the magazines (one, I am told, he left completed); and reminiscences
of his old friends among men of letters—for which last he had, during
eight months past, been overhauling letters and papers, but had written
nothing. He was ailing, he said—had a serious heart affection which
troubled him for years, and he found it a daily struggle to keep up
with the daily claims on his time. You know what he was, in respect of
letters,—and letters. He could always say ‘No’ with animation; but in
the case of claims on his time by poets and other of the writing class,
he never could do the negative. He both liked the claims and didn’t. The
men who claimed were dear to him, partly because he knew them, partly
because he was glad to know them. He wore himself quite out. His heart
was exhausted by his brain. It was a genuine case of heart-failure to do
what the head required.”

There lies before me a mass of private letters to me from Stedman,
dating back to November 2, 1873, when he greeted me for the first time
in a kinship we had just discovered. We had the same great-grandfather,
though each connection was through the mother, we being alike
great-grandchildren of the Reverend Aaron Cleveland, Jr., from whom
President Grover Cleveland was also descended. At the time of this mutual
discovery Stedman was established in New York, and although I sometimes
met him in person, I can find no letters from him until after a period
of more than ten years, when he was engaged in editing his Library of
American Literature. He wrote to me afterwards, and often with quite
cousinly candor,—revealing frankly his cares, hopes, and sorrows, but
never with anything coarse or unmanly. All his enterprises were confided
to me so far as literature was concerned, and I, being nearly ten years
older, felt free to say what I thought of them. I wished, especially,
however, to see him carry out a project of translations from the Greek
pastoral poetry of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus. The few fragments
given at the end of his volumes had always delighted me and many other
students, while his efforts at the “Agamemnon” of Æschylus dealt with
passages too formidable in their power for any one but Edward FitzGerald
to undertake.

After a few years of occasional correspondence, there came a lull.
Visiting New York rarely, I did not know of Stedman’s business
perplexities till they came upon me in the following letter, which was
apparently called out by one of mine written two months before.

                     71 West 54th Street, NEW YORK, July 12th, ’82.

    MY DEAR COLONEL,—I had gone over with “the majority” [that is,
    to Europe], when your friendly card of May 9th was written,
    and it finally reached me at Venice. In that city of light,
    air, and heavenly noiselessness, my son and myself at last had
    settled ourselves in ideal rooms, overlooking the Grand Canal.
    We had seclusion, the Molo, the Lagoon, and a good café, and
    pure and cheap Capri wine. Our books and papers were unpacked
    for the first time, and I was ready to make an end of the big
    and burdensome book which I ought to have finished a year ago.
    _Dis aliter visum!_ The next morning I was awakened to receive
    news, by wire, of a business loss which brought me home,
    through the new Gothard tunnel and by the first steamer. Here I
    am, patching up other people’s blunders, with the thermometer
    in the nineties. I have lived through worse troubles, but
    am in no very good humor. Let me renew the amenities of
    life, by way of improving my disposition: and I’ll begin by
    thanking you for calling my attention to the error _in re_
    Palfrey—which, of course, I shall correct. Another friend has
    written me to say that Lowell’s father was a Unitarian—not a
    Congregationalist. But Lowell himself told me, the other day,
    that his father never would call himself a Unitarian, and that
    he was old-fashioned in his home tenets and discipline. Mr. L.
    [Lowell] was under pretty heavy pressure, as you know, when I
    saw him, but holding his own with some composure—for a poet.
    Again thanking you, I am,

                        Always truly yrs.,

                                                     E. C. STEDMAN.

This must have been answered by some further expression of solicitude,
for this reply came, two months later,—

                       University Club, 370 Fifth Avenue, NEW YORK,
                                            Sunday, Sept. 16, 1883.

    MY DEAR HIGGINSON,—There _is_ a good deal, say what you will,
    in “moral support.” I have proved it during the last few weeks:
    ’twould have been hard to get through with them, but for just
    such words as yours. And I have had them in such abundance
    that, despite rather poor displays of human nature in a sample
    of my own manufacture, I am less than ever a pessimist.

    As for that which Sophocles pronounced the father of
    meanness—πενία—both my wife and myself have been used to it
    nearly all our lives, and probably shall have, now, to renew
    our old acquaintance with it. Though somewhat demoralized by a
    few years of Philistine comfort—the _Persicos apparatus_, &c.—I
    think we shall get along with sufficient dignity.

    We have suffered more, however, than the money-loss, bad as
    that is. And hence we are doubly grateful to those who, like
    yourself, send a cheery voice to us at just this time.

                       Ever sincerely yrs.,

                                                 EDMUND C. STEDMAN.

During the next few years we had ample correspondence of a wholly
literary and cheerful tone. He became engaged upon his Library of
American Literature with a congenial fellow worker, Miss Ellen
Hutchinson, and I was only one of many who lent a hand or made
suggestions. He was working very hard, and once wrote that he was going
for a week to his boyhood home to rest. During all this period there was,
no doubt, the painful business entanglement in the background, but there
was also in the foreground the literary work whose assuaging influence
only one who has participated in it can understand. Then came another
blow in the death of his mother, announced to me as follows:—

                        44 East 26th St., NEW YORK, Dec. 8th, 1889.

    MY DEAR HIGGINSON,—Yes: I have been through a kind of Holy
    Week, and have come out in so incorporeal a state that I strive
    painfully, though most gratefully, to render thanks to some, at
    least, of my beautiful mother’s friends and mine who have taken
    note of her departure. I have always wished that she and you
    could know more of each other—though nothing of yours escaped
    her eager taste and judgment, for she was not only a natural
    critic, but a very _clanswoman_, with a most loyal faith in
    her blood and yours. Most of all, she was a typical woman, an
    intensely human one, to the last, though made of no common
    clay. She was of an age to die, and I am glad that her fine
    intelligence was spared a season of dimness. Still, _I_ have
    suffered a loss, and doubtless one that will last a lifetime.

                         Sincerely yours,

                                                     E. C. STEDMAN.

The laborious volumes of literary selections having been completed, there
followed, still under the same pressure, another series of books yet
more ambitious. His “Victorian Poets” (1875, thirteenth edition 1887)
was followed by the “Poets of America” (1885), “A Victorian Anthology”
(1895), and “An American Anthology” (1900). These books were what gave
him his fame, the two former being original studies of literature, made
in prose; and the two latter being collections of poetry from the two
nations.

If we consider how vast a labor was represented in all those volumes,
it is interesting to revert to that comparison between Stedman and his
friend Aldrich with which this paper began. Their literary lives led
them apart; that of Aldrich tending always to condensation, that of
Stedman to expansion. As a consequence, Aldrich seemed to grow younger
and younger with years and Stedman older; his work being always valuable,
but often too weighty, “living in thoughts, not breaths,” to adopt the
delicate distinction from Bailey’s “Festus.” There is a certain worth
in all that Stedman wrote, be it longer or shorter, but it needs a good
deal of literary power to retain the attention of readers so long as
some of his chapters demand. Opening at random his “Poets of America,”
one may find the author deep in a discussion of Lowell, for instance,
and complaining of that poet’s prose or verse. “Not compactly moulded,”
Stedman says, even of much of Lowell’s work. “He had a way, moreover,
of ‘dropping’ like his own bobolink, of letting down his fine passages
with odd conceits, mixed metaphors, and licenses which, as a critic, he
would not overlook in another. To all this add a knack of coining uncouth
words for special tints of meaning, when there are good enough counters
in the language for any poet’s need.” These failings, Stedman says, “have
perplexed the poet’s friends and teased his reviewers.” Yet Lowell’s
critic is more chargeable with diffuseness than is Lowell himself in
prose essays, which is saying a good deal. Stedman devotes forty-five
pages to Lowell and thirty-nine even to Bayard Taylor, while he gives to
Thoreau but a few scattered lines and no pretense at a chapter. There
are, unquestionably, many fine passages scattered through the book,
as where he keenly points out that the first European appreciation of
American literature was “almost wholly due to grotesque and humorous
exploits—a welcome such as a prince in his breathing-hour might give
to a new-found jester or clown”; and when he says, in reply to English
criticism, that there is “something worth an estimate in the division of
an ocean gulf, that makes us like the people of a new planet.”

Turning back to Stedman’s earlier book, the “Victorian Poets,” one finds
many a terse passage, as where he describes Landor as a “royal Bohemian
in art,” or compares the same author’s death in Florence at ninety, a
banished man, to “the death of some monarch of the forest, most untamed
when powerless.” Such passages redeem a book from the danger of being
forgotten, but they cannot in the long run save it from the doom which
awaits too great diffuseness in words. During all this period of hard
work, he found room also for magazine articles, always thoroughly done.
Nowhere is there a finer analysis, on the whole, of the sources of
difficulty in Homeric translation than will be found in Stedman’s review
of Bryant’s translation of Homer, and nowhere a better vindication of a
serious and carefully executed book (“Atlantic Monthly,” May, 1872). He
wrote also an admirable volume of lectures on the “Nature and Elements of
Poetry” for delivery at Johns Hopkins University.

As years went on, our correspondence inevitably grew less close. On
March 10, 1893, he wrote, “I am so driven at this season, ‘let alone’
financial worries, that I have to write letters when and where I can.”
Then follows a gap of seven years; in 1900 his granddaughter writes on
October 25, conveying affectionate messages from him; two years after,
April 2, 1903, he writes himself in the same key, then adds, “Owing to
difficulties absolutely beyond my control, I have written scarcely a line
for myself since the Yale bicentennial [1901]”; and concludes, “I am
very warmly your friend and kinsman.” It was a full, easy, and natural
communication, like his old letters; but it was four years later when I
heard from him again as follows, in a letter which I will not withhold,
in spite of what may be well regarded as its over-sensitiveness and
somewhat exaggerated tone.

                                      2643 Broadway, NEW YORK CITY,
                                         Evening, March 20th, 1907.

    MY DEAR KINSMAN,—Although I have given you no reason to be
    assured of it, you are still just the same to me in my honor
    and affection—you are never, and you never have been, otherwise
    in my thoughts than my kinsman (by your first recognition of
    our consanguinity) and my friend; yes, and early teacher, for I
    long ago told you that it was your essays that confirmed me, in
    my youth, in the course I chose for myself.

    I am going on to Aldrich’s funeral, and with a rather lone
    and heavy heart, since I began life here in New York with
    him before the Civil War, and had every expectation that he
    would survive me: not wholly on the score of my seniority,
    but because I have had my “three calls” and more, and because
    he has ever been so strong and young and debonair. Health,
    happiness, ease, travel, all “things _waregan_,” seemed
    his natural right. If I, too, wished for a portion of his
    felicities, I never envied one to whom they came by the very
    fitness of things. And I grieve the more for his death, because
    it seems to violate that fitness.

    Now, I can’t think of meeting you on Friday without first
    making this poor and inadequate attempt to set one thing
    right. Your latest letter—I _was_, at least, moved by it to
    address myself at once to a full reply, but was myself attacked
    that day so sorely by the grippe that I went to bed before
    completing it and was useless for weeks; the letter showed
    me that you thought, as well you might, that I had been hurt
    or vexed by something you had unwittingly done or written. I
    can say little to-night but to confess that no act, word, or
    writing, of yours from first to last has not seemed to contain
    all the friendship, kindness, recognition, that I could ever
    ask for.... Perhaps I have the ancestral infirmity of clinging
    to my fealties for good and all; but, as I say, you are my
    creditor in every way, and I constantly find myself in sympathy
    with your writings, beliefs, causes, judgments.—Now I recall
    it, the very choice you made of a little lyric of mine as
    the one at my “high-water” mark gave me a fine sense of your
    comprehension—it seemed to me a case of _rem acu tetigit_. I
    am thoroughly satisfied to have one man—and that man _you_—so
    quick to see just where I felt that I had been fortunate....

    For some years, I venture to remind you, you have seen scarcely
    anything of mine in print. Since 1900 I have had three long and
    disabling illnesses, from two of which it was not thought I
    could recover. Between these, what desperate failure of efforts
    to “catch up.” Oh, I can’t tell you, the books, the letters,
    the debts, the broken contracts. Then the deaths of my wife and
    my son, and all the sorrows following; the break-up of my home,
    and the labor of winding up so much without aid. But from all
    the rack I have always kept, separated on my table, all your
    letters and remembrances—each one adding more, in my mind, to
    the explanation I had _not_ written you....

                 Your attached kinsman and friend,

                                                 EDMUND C. STEDMAN.

Stedman came from Mount Auburn to my house after the funeral of Aldrich,
with a look of utter exhaustion on his face such as alarmed me. A little
rest and refreshment brought him to a curious revival of strength and
animation; he talked of books, men, and adventures, in what was almost a
monologue, and went away in comparative cheerfulness with his faithful
literary associate, Professor George E. Woodberry. Yet I always associate
him with one of those touching letters which he wrote to me before the
age of the typewriter, more profusely than men now write, and the very
fact that we lived far apart made him franker in utterance. The following
letter came from Keep Rock, New Castle, New Hampshire, September 30,
1887:—

    “You are a ‘noble kinsman’ after all, of the sort from whom
    one is very glad to get good words, and I have taken your
    perception of a bit of verse as infallible, ever since you
    picked out three little ‘Stanzas for Music’ as my one best
    thing. Every one else had overlooked them, but I knew that—as
    Holmes said of his ‘Chambered Nautilus’—they were written
    ‘better than I could.’ By the way, if you will overhaul
    Duyckinck’s ‘Encyclopedia of Literature’ _in re_ Dr. Samuel
    Mitchill, you will see who first wrote crudely the ‘Chambered
    Nautilus.’”

Two years after, he wrote, April 9, 1889:—

    “The newspapers warn me that you are soon to go abroad....
    I must copy for you now the song which you have kindly
    remembered so many years. In sooth, I have always thought well
    of your judgment as to poetry, since you intimated (in ‘The
    Commonwealth,’ was it not?) that these three stanzas of mine
    were the thing worth having of my seldom-written verse. I
    will write on the next page a passage which I lately found in
    Hartmann (a wonderful man for a pessimist), and which conveys
    precisely the idea of my song.”

To this he adds as a quotation the passage itself:—

    “The souls which are near without knowing it, and which can
    approach no nearer by ever so close an embrace than they
    eternally are, pine for a blending which can never be theirs so
    long as they remain distinct individuals.”

The song itself, which he thought, as I did, his high-water mark,
here follows. Its closing verse appears to me unsurpassed in American
literature.

              STANZAS FOR MUSIC

          (From an Unfinished Drama)

    Thou art mine, thou hast given thy word;
      Close, close in my arms thou art clinging;
      Alone for my ear thou art singing
    A song which no stranger hath heard:
    But afar from me yet, like a bird,
    Thy soul, in some region unstirred,
      On its mystical circuit is winging.

    Thou art mine, I have made thee mine own;
      Henceforth we are mingled forever:
      But in vain, all in vain, I endeavor—
    Though round thee my garlands are thrown,
    And thou yieldest thy lips and thy zone—
    To master the spell that alone
      My hold on thy being can sever.

    Thou art mine, thou hast come unto me!
      But thy soul, when I strive to be near it—
      The innermost fold of thy spirit—
    Is as far from my grasp, is as free,
    As the stars from the mountain-tops be,
    As the pearl, in the depths of the sea,
      From the portionless king that would wear it.




XII

EDWARD EVERETT HALE




EDWARD EVERETT HALE


The life of Edward Everett Hale has about it a peculiar interest as a
subject of study. The youngest member of his Harvard class,—that of
1839,—he was also the most distinguished among them and finally outlived
them all. Personal characteristics which marked him when a freshman in
college kept him young to the end of his days. When the Reverend Edward
Cummings came to Dr. Hale’s assistance in the South Congregational
Church, he was surprised to find practically no young people in the
parish, and still more surprised to know that their pastor was ignorant
of the fact. These parishioners were all young when Dr. Hale took them in
charge, and to him they had always remained so, for he had invested them
with his own fresh and undying spirit.

Probably no man in America, except Beecher, aroused and stimulated quite
so many minds as Hale, and his personal popularity was unbounded. He had
strokes of genius, sometimes with unsatisfying results; yet failures
never stood in his way, but seemed to drop from his memory in a few
hours. An unsurpassable model in most respects, there were limitations
which made him in some minor ways a less trustworthy example. Such and
so curiously composed was Edward Everett Hale. He was the second son of
a large family of sons and daughters, his parents being Nathan and Sarah
Preston (Everett) Hale, and he was born in Boston, April 3, 1822. His
father was the editor of the leading newspaper in Boston, the “Daily
Advertiser,” and most of his children developed, in one way or another,
distinct literary tastes. The subject of this sketch had before him, as a
literary example and influence, the celebrated statesman and orator whose
name he bore, and who was his mother’s brother.

My own recollections of him begin quite early. Nearly two years younger
than he, I was, like him, the youngest of my Harvard class, which was
two years later than his. My college remembrances of him are vivid and
characteristic. Living outside of the college yard, I was sometimes very
nearly late for morning prayers; and more than once on such occasions,
as I passed beneath the walls of Massachusetts Hall, then a dormitory,
there would spring from the doorway a tall, slim young student who had,
according to current report among the freshmen, sprung out of bed almost
at the last stroke of the bell, thrown his clothes over the stairway,
and jumped into them on the way down. This was Edward Everett Hale; and
this early vision was brought to my mind not infrequently in later life
by his way of doing maturer things.

The same qualities which marked his personal appearance marked his
career. He was always ready for action, never stopped for trifles, always
lacked but little of being one of the heroes or men of genius of his
time. Nor can any one yet predict which of these will be the form finally
taken by his fame. His capacity for work was unlimited, and he perhaps
belonged to more societies and committees than any man living. In this
field his exhaustless energy had play, but his impetuous temperament
often proved a drawback, and brought upon him the criticism of men of
less talent but more accurate habits of mind. No denominational barriers
existed for him. Ready to officiate in all pulpits and welcome in all, he
left it unknown to the end of his life whether he did or did not believe
in the Bible miracles, for instance. Nor did anybody who talked with him
care much. His peculiar and attractive personality made him acceptable
to all sorts of people and to men of all creeds; for his extraordinary
versatility enabled him in his intercourse with other minds to adapt his
sympathy and his language to the individual modes of thought and belief
of each and all of them.

Some of his finest literary achievements were those which he himself
had forgotten. Up to the last degree prolific, he left more than one
absolutely triumphant stroke behind him in literature. The best bit of
prose that I can possibly associate with him was a sketch in a newspaper
bearing the somewhat meaningless title “The Last Shake,” suggested by
watching the withdrawal of the last man with a hand-cart who was ever
allowed to shake carpets on Boston Common. He was, no doubt, a dusty and
forlorn figure enough. But to Hale’s ready imagination he stood for a
whole epoch of history, for the long procession of carpet-shakers who
were doing their duty there when Percy marched to Lexington, or when
the cannonade from Breed’s Hill was in the air. Summer and winter had
come and gone, sons had succeeded their fathers at their work, and the
beating of the carpets had gone on, undrowned by the rising city’s roar.
At last the more fastidious aldermen rebelled, the last shake was given,
and Edward Everett Hale wrote its elegy. I suppose I kept the little
newspaper cutting on my desk for five years, as a model of what wit and
sympathy could extract from the humblest theme.

Another stroke was of quite a different character. Out of the myriad
translations of Homer, there is in all English literature but one version
known to me of even a single passage which gives in a high degree the
Homeric flavor. That passage is the description of the Descent of Neptune
(Iliad, Book XIII), and was preserved in Hale’s handwriting by his friend
Samuel Longfellow, with whom I edited the book “Thalatta,”—a collection
of sea poems. His classmate, Hale, had given it to him when first
written, and then had forgotten all about it. Had it not been printed by
us there, it might, sooner or later, have found its way into that still
unpublished magazine which Hale and I planned together, when we lived
near each other in Worcester, Massachusetts,—a periodical which was to
have been called the “Unfortunates’ Magazine,” and was to contain all the
prose and verse sent to us by neighbors or strangers with request to get
it published. I remember that we made out a title-page between us, with
a table of contents, all genuine, for the imaginary first number. Such
a book was to some extent made real in “Thalatta,” and the following is
Hale’s brilliant Homeric translation:—

                THE DESCENT OF NEPTUNE

    There sat he high retired from the seas;
    There looked with pity on his Grecians beaten;
    There burned with rage at the God-king who slew them.
    Then rushed he forward from the rugged mountain;
    He beat the forest also as he came downward,
    And the high cliffs shook underneath his footsteps;
    Three times he trod, his fourth step reached his sea-home.

    There was his palace in the deep sea-water,
    Shining with gold and builded firm forever;
    And there he yoked him his swift-footed horses
    (Their hoofs are brazen, and their manes are golden)
    With golden thongs; his golden goad he seizes;
    He mounts upon his chariot and doth fly;
    Yea, drives he forth his steeds into the billows.

    The sea-beasts from the depths rise under him—
    They know their King: and the glad sea is parted,
    That so his wheels may fly along unhinder’d.
    Dry speeds between the waves his brazen axle:—
    So bounding fast they bring him to his Grecians.

Earlier than this, in his racy papers called “My College Days,” we get
another characteristic glimpse of Hale as a student. The Sunday afternoon
before being examined for admission to college, he reports that he read
the first six books of the Æneid (the last six having already been
mastered) at one fell swoop,—seated meantime on the ridge-pole of his
father’s house!

More firmly than on any of these productions Hale’s literary fame now
rests on an anonymous study in the “Atlantic Monthly,” called “The Man
without a Country,” a sketch of such absolutely lifelike vigor that I,
reading it in camp during the Civil War, accepted it as an absolutely
true narrative, until I suddenly came across, in the very midst of it,
a phrase so wholly characteristic of its author that I sprang from my
seat, exclaiming “_Aut Cæsar aut nullus_; Edward Hale or nobody.” This
is the story on which the late eminent critic, Wendell P. Garrison, of
the “Nation,” once wrote (April 17, 1902), “There are some who look upon
it as the primer of Jingoism,” and he wrote to me ten years earlier,
February 19, 1892, “What will last of Hale, I apprehend, will be the
phrase ‘A man without a country,’ and perhaps the immoral doctrine taught
in it which leads to Mexican and Chilean wars—‘My country, right or
wrong.’”

Be this as it may, there is no doubt that on this field Hale’s permanent
literary fame was won. It hangs to that as securely as does the memory
of Dr. Holmes to his “Chambered Nautilus.” It is the exiled hero of this
story who gives that striking bit of advice to boys: “And if you are ever
tempted to say a word or do a thing that shall put a bar between you and
your family, your home and your country, pray God in his mercy to take
you that instant home to his own heaven!”

President James Walker, always the keenest of observers, once said of
Hale that he took sides upon every question while it was being stated.
This doubtless came, in part at least, from his having been reared in
a newspaper office, or, as he said more tersely, having been “cradled
in the sheets of the ‘Advertiser,’” and bred to strike promptly. His
strongest and weakest points seem to have been developed in his father’s
editorial office. Always ready to give unselfish sympathy, he could not
always dispense deliberate justice. One of his favorite sayings was
that his ideal of a committee was one which consisted of three persons,
one of whom should be in bed with chronic illness, another should be in
Europe, and he himself should be the third. It was one of his theories
that clergymen were made to do small duties neglected by others, and he
did them at a formidable sacrifice of time and in his own independent
and quite ungovernable way. Taking active part for the Nation during the
Civil War,—so active that his likeness appears on the Soldiers’ Monument
on Boston Common,—he did not actually go to the war itself as chaplain of
a regiment, as some of his friends desired; for they justly considered
him one of the few men qualified to fill that position heartily, through
his powerful voice, ready sympathy, and boundless willingness to make
himself useful in every direction.

A very characteristic side of the man might always be seen in his
letters. The following was written in his own hurried handwriting in
recognition of his seventy-seventh birthday:—

                                                      April 8, ’99.

    DEAR HIGGINSON,—Thanks for your card. It awaited me on my
    return from North Carolina last night.

    Three score & ten as you know, has many advantages,—and as yet,
    I find no drawbacks.

    Asa Gray said to me “It is great fun to be 70 years old. You do
    not have to know everything!”

    I see that you can write intelligibly.

    I wish I could—But I cannot run a Typewriter more than a
    Sewing-Machine.

    Will the next generation learn to write—any more than learn the
    alphabet?

    With Love to all yours

                          Truly & always

                                                        E. E. HALE.

This next letter was called out by the death of Major-General Rufus
Saxton, distinguished for his first arming of the freed slaves:—

                                  WASHINGTON, D. C., Feb. 29, 1908.

    DEAR HIGGINSON,—I have been reading with the greatest interest
    your article on Gen. Saxton.

    It has reminded me of an incident here—the time of which I
    cannot place. But I think you can;—and if you can I wish you
    would write & tell me when it happened—and perhaps what came of
    it.

    I was coming up in a street [car] when Charles Sumner came in &
    took a seat opposite me—The car was not crowded.

    Every one knew him, and he really addressed the whole
    car—though he affected to speak to me. But he meant to have
    every one hear—& they did. He said substantially this,—

    “The most important order since the war began has been issued
    at the War Department this morning.

    “Directions have been given for the manufacture of a thousand
    pair of Red Breeches. They are to be patterned on the Red
    Trousers of the Zouaves—and are to be the uniform of the First
    Negro Regiment.” He surprised the car—(as he meant to).

    Now, 1. I cannot fix the date, can you?

    2. Were the negro troops or any regiment of them ever clothed
    in the Zouave Uniform?

    I remember there was a “Zouave” Regiment from New York City—

    [I had the pleasure of informing him that my regiment, which
    he mentions, had been the only one disfigured by the scarlet
    trousers, which were fortunately very soon worn out and gladly
    banished. This was in August, 1862.]

It may be well enough to end these extracts from his correspondence
with one of those bits of pure nonsense in which his impetuous nature
delighted. This was on occasion of his joining the Boston Authors’ Club:—

                                    ROXBURY, Mass., April 10, 1903.

    DEAR HIGGINSON,—One sometimes does what there is no need of
    doing. What we call here a Duke of Northumberland day is a day
    when one does what he darn chooses to do, without reference to
    the obligations of the social order. Such is to-day.

    Did you ever hear the story of the graduate who never advanced
    in his studies farther than that Pythagorean man did who never
    could learn more than the first letters of the alphabet? I am
    reminded of it by the elegant monogram of our Club.

    This young fellow’s friends were very eager to get him through
    the university, so they sent him out from Boston in a

                               C A B

    After two days he came

                               B A C

    He then went to Cambridge on a three years’ course by taking
    electives which didn’t require him to repeat the alphabet.

    He learned to smoke

                             B A C C A

    and at the end of the time the College made him

                                A B

    His friends then sent him to the Cuban War, and he came out a
    Field Marshal, so that he was able to become a member of the

                             A B C F M

    This was all I knew about him till this morning I have learned
    that after publishing his military memoirs he became a member
    of the

                               B A C
                      [Boston Authors’ Club]

    I am sorry to say that he already drank the Lager which was
    furnished him by the AMERICAN BOTTLING COMPANY

    So no more at present from your old companion in arms,

                                                      EDWARD E HALE
                                                          A B 1839.

These letters give a glimpse at the more impetuous and sunny aspects
of his life. Turning again to its severer duties, it is interesting to
notice that in conducting the funeral services of Mr. F. A. Hill, the
Secretary of the State Board of Education, Dr. Hale said in warm praise
of that able man: “He lived by the spirit; I do not think he cared for
method.” The same was Hale’s own theory also, or, at any rate, his
familiar practice. He believed, for instance, that the school hours of a
city should be very much shortened, yet never made it clear what pursuits
should take their places; for it was the habit of his fertile brain
to formulate schemes and allow others to work them out. Many of his
suggestions fell to the ground, but others bore rich fruit. Among these
latter are the various “Lend a Hand” clubs which have sprung up all over
the country, not confining themselves to sect or creed, and having as
their motto a brief verse of his writing. He went to no divinity school
to prepare himself for preaching, and at one time did not see clearly the
necessity of preliminary training for those who were to enter the pulpit.
If his friends undertook laboriously to correct any inaccuracies in his
published writings, he took every such correction with imperturbable
and sunny equanimity, and, taxed with error, readily admitted it. His
undeniable habit of rather hasty and inaccurate statement sprang from
his way of using facts simply as illustrations. They served to prove his
point or exemplify the principle for which he was contending. To verify
his statements would often have taken too much time, and from his point
of view was immaterial. It is hard for the academic mind, with its love
of system, to accept this method of working, and his contemporaries
sometimes regretted that he could not act with them in more business-like
ways. They were tempted to compare his aims and methods to those of
Eskimo dogs, each of which has to be harnessed separately to the sledge
which bears the driver, or else they turn and eat each other up. When it
came to the point, all of yesterday’s shortcomings were forgotten next
morning by him and every one else, in his readiness to be the world’s
errand-boy for little kindnesses. But in the presence, we will not say of
death, but of a life lived for others, which is deathless, the critic’s
task seems ungenerous and unmeaning. This man’s busy existence may not
always have run in the accepted grooves, but its prevailing note was
Love. If the rushing stream sometimes broke down the barriers of safety,
it proved more often a fertilizing Nile than a dangerous Mississippi.

Followed and imitated by multitudes, justly beloved for his warmth of
heart and readiness of hand, he had a happy and busy life, sure to win
gratitude and affection when it ended, as it did at Roxbury on June 10,
1909. The children and the aged loved him almost to worshiping, and is
there, after all, a better test?




XIII

A MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL, RUFUS SAXTON




A MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL, RUFUS SAXTON


Complaint has sometimes been made of Massachusetts that the state did not
provide a sufficient number of officers of high grade for the regular
army during the Civil War. Be that as it may, one of the most eminent of
such officers has just died, being indeed one whose actual fame may yet
outlast that of all the others by reason of its rare mingling of civil
and military service.

General Rufus Saxton was born at Greenfield, Massachusetts, on October
19, 1824, graduated at the military academy in 1849, was made brevet
second lieutenant, Third United States Artillery, July 1, 1849, second
lieutenant, Fourth Artillery, September 12, 1850, and captain and
assistant quartermaster, May 13, 1861. He was chief quartermaster on the
staff of General Lyon in Missouri and subsequently on that of General
McClellan in western Virginia, and was on the expeditionary corps to Port
Royal, South Carolina. In May and June, 1862, he was ordered north and
placed in command of the defenses at Harper’s Ferry, where his services
won him a medal of honor; after which he was military governor of the
Department of the South, his headquarters being at Beaufort, South
Carolina; this service extended from July, 1862, to May 18, 1865, when
he rose to be colonel and brevet brigadier-general of volunteers. He was
mustered out of the volunteer service January 15, 1866, but rose finally
to be colonel and assistant quartermaster-general in the regular army,
March 10, 1882. He retired from active service October 19, 1888, having
been made on that date a brigadier-general on the retired list. This is
the brief summary of what was, in reality, a quite unique career.

The portion of this honorable life upon which his personal fame will
doubtless be founded is that from 1862 to 1865, when he was military
governor of the Department of the South. In this capacity he first proved
possible the distribution of the vast body of free or fugitive slaves
over the Sea Islands, which had been almost deserted by their white
predecessors. This feat was accompanied by what was probably in the end
even more important,—the creation of black troops from that centre. The
leadership in this work might have belonged under other circumstances
to Major-General Hunter, of Washington, District of Columbia, who had
undertaken such a task in the same region (May 3, 1862); but General
Hunter, though he had many fine qualities, was a thoroughly impetuous
man; whimsical, changeable, and easily influenced by his staff officers,
few of whom had the slightest faith in the enterprise. He acted,
moreover, without authority from Washington, and his whole enterprise
had been soon disallowed by the United States government. This was the
position of things when General Saxton, availing himself of the fact
that one company of this Hunter regiment had not, like the rest, been
practically disbanded, made that the basis of a reorganization of it
under the same name (First South Carolina Infantry). This was done under
express authority from the War Department, dated August 25, 1862, with
the hope of making it a pioneer of a whole subsequent series of slave
regiments, as it was. The fact that General Saxton was a Massachusetts
man, as was the colonel whom he put in charge of the first regiment,—and
as were, indeed, most of the men prominent from beginning to end in the
enlistment of colored troops,—gave an unquestioned priority in the matter
to that state.

It must be remembered that this was long before Governor Andrew had
received permission to recruit a colored regiment, the Fifty-Fourth
Massachusetts, whose first colonel was Robert Gould Shaw, a young hero
of Boston birth. The fact that this was the first black regiment
enlisted at the North has left a general impression in Massachusetts
that it was the first colored regiment; but this is an error of five
months, General Saxton’s authority having been dated August 25, 1862,
and that of Governor Andrew January 26, 1863. The whole number of black
soldiers enlisted during the war was 178,975 (Heitman’s “Historical
Register,” page 890), whose whole organization may fairly be attributed,
in a general way, to the success of General Saxton’s undertaking. In
making this claim, it must be borne in mind that the enlistments made by
General Butler at almost precisely the same time in New Orleans consisted
mainly of a quite exceptional class, the comparatively educated free
colored men of that region, the darkest of these being, as General Butler
himself once said, “of about the same complexion as the late Daniel
Webster.” Those New Orleans regiments would hardly have led to organizing
similar troops elsewhere, for want of similar material. Be this as
it may, the fact is that these South Carolina regiments, after their
number was increased by other colored regiments from various sources,
were unquestionably those who held the South Carolina coast, making
it possible for Sherman to lead his final march to the sea and thus
practically end the war. As an outcome of all this, General Saxton’s
name is quite sure to be long remembered.

It is fair now to recognize the fact that this combination of civil
and military authority was not always what Saxton himself would have
selected. There were times when he chafed under what seemed to him
a non-military work and longed for the open field. It is perhaps
characteristic of his temperament, however, that at the outset he
preferred to be where the greatest obstacles were to be encountered,
and this he certainly achieved. It must be remembered that the early
organizers and officers of the colored troops fought in a manner with
ropes around their necks, both they and their black recruits having been
expressly denied by the Confederate government the usual privileges of
soldiers. They had also to encounter for a long time the disapproval of
many officers of high rank in the Union army, both regular and volunteer,
this often leading to a grudging bestowal of supplies (especially,
strange to say, of medical ones), and to a disproportionate share of
fatigue duty. This was hard indeed for Saxton to bear, and was increased
in his case by the fact that he had been almost the only cadet in his
time at West Point who was strong in anti-slavery feeling, and who thus
began with antagonisms which lasted into actual service. To these things
he was perhaps oversensitive, and he had to be defended against this
tendency, as he was, by an admirable wife and by an invaluable staff
officer and housemate, Brevet Major Edward W. Hooper, of Massachusetts,
who was his volunteer aide-de-camp and housemate. The latter was, as many
Bostonians will remember, of splendid executive ability, as shown by his
long subsequent service as steward and treasurer of Harvard University; a
man of rare organizing power, and of a cheerfulness which made him only
laugh away dozens of grievances that vexed General Saxton.

As an organizer of troops General Saxton’s standard was very high, and he
assumed, as was proper, that a regiment made out of former slaves should
not merely follow good moral examples, but set them. As all men in that
day knew, there was a formidable variation in this respect in different
regiments, some of the volunteer officers whose military standard was the
highest being the lowest in their personal habits. General Saxton would
issue special orders from time to time to maintain a high tone morally in
the camp, as he did, indeed, in the whole region under his command. He
was never in entire harmony with General Gillmore, the military commander
of the department, whose interest was thought to lie chiefly in the
artillery service; and while very zealous and efficient in organizing
special expeditions for his own particular regiments, Saxton kept up, as
we thought at the time, a caution beyond what was necessary in protecting
the few colored regiments which he had personally organized. When the
Florida expedition was planned, which resulted in the sanguinary defeat
at Olustee, he heartily disapproved of the whole affair. This he carried
so far that when my own regiment was ordered on the expedition, as we all
greatly desired, when we had actually broken camp and marched down to
the wharf for embarkment in high exultation, we were stopped and turned
back by an order, just obtained by General Saxton from headquarters,
countermanding our march and sending us back to pitch our tents again.
It was not until some days later had brought the news of the disastrous
battle, and how defective was the judgment of those who planned it, that
General Saxton found himself vindicated in our eyes. The plain reason for
that defeat was that the Confederates, being on the mainland and having
railway communications, such as they were, could easily double from the
interior any force sent round by water outside. This was just what had
been pointed out beforehand by General Saxton, but his judgment had been
overruled.

General Saxton was a man of fine military bearing and a most kindly and
agreeable face. Social in his habits, he was able to go about freely
for the rest of his life in the pleasant circle of retired military men
and their families in Washington. He and his wife had always the dream
of retiring from the greater gayety of the national metropolis to his
birthplace at Deerfield, Massachusetts. Going there one beautiful day
in early summer, with that thought in mind, they sat, so he told me, on
the peaceful piazza all the morning and looked out down the avenue of
magnificent elms which shade that most picturesque of village streets.
During the whole morning no wheels passed their place, except those
belonging to a single country farmer’s wagon. Finding the solitude to be
somewhat of a change after the vivacity of Washington, they decided to
go down to Greenfield and pass the afternoon. There they sat on a hotel
piazza under somewhat similar circumstances and saw only farmers’ wagons,
two or three. Disappointed in the reconnoissance, they went back to
Washington, and spent the rest of their days amid a happy and congenial
circle of friends. He died there February 23, 1908. To the present
writer, at least, the world seems unquestionably more vacant that Saxton
is gone.




XIV

ONE OF THACKERAY’S WOMEN




ONE OF THACKERAY’S WOMEN


Some years since, there passed away, at Newport, Rhode Island, one who
could justly be classed with Thackeray’s women; one in whom Lady Kew
would have taken delight; one in whom she would have found wit and
memory and audacity rivaling her own; one who was at once old and young,
poor and luxurious, one of the loneliest of human beings, and yet one
of the most sociable. Miss Jane Stuart, the only surviving daughter
of Gilbert Stuart, the painter, had dwelt all her life on the edge of
art without being an artist, and at the brink of fashion without being
fashionable. Living at times in something that approached poverty, she
was usually surrounded by friends who were rich and generous; so that
she often fulfilled Motley’s famous early saying, that one could do
without the necessaries of life, but could not spare the luxuries. She
was an essential part of the atmosphere of Newport; living near the “Old
Stone Mill,” she divided its celebrity and, as all agreed, its doubtful
antiquity; for her most intimate friends could not really guess within
fifteen years how old she was, and strangers placed her anywhere from
sixty to eighty. Her modest cottage, full of old furniture and pictures,
was the resort of much that was fashionable on the days of her weekly
receptions; costly equipages might be seen before the door; and if,
during any particular season, she suspected a falling off in visitors,
she would try some new device,—a beautiful girl sitting in a certain
carved armchair beneath an emblazoned window, like Keats’s Madeline,—or,
when things grew desperate, a bench with a milk-pan and a pumpkin on
the piazza, to give an innocently rural air. “My dear,” she said on
that occasion, “I must try something: rusticity is the dodge for me”;
and so the piazza looked that summer like a transformation scene in
“Cinderella,” with the fairy godmother not far off.

She inherited from her father in full the Bohemian temperament, and
cultivated it so habitually through life that it was in full flower at
a time when almost any other woman would have been repressed by age,
poverty, and loneliness. At seventy or more she was still a born mistress
of the revels, and could not be for five minutes in a house where a
charade or a mask was going on without tapping at the most private door
and plaintively imploring to be taken in as one of the conspirators.
Once in, there was nothing too daring, too grotesque, or too juvenile
for her to accept as her part, and successfully. In the modest winter
sports of the narrowed Newport circle, when wit and ingenuity had to be
invoked to replace the summer resources of wealth and display, she was
an indispensable factor. She had been known to enact a Proud Sister in
“Cinderella,” to be the performer on the penny whistle in the “Children’s
Symphony,” to march as the drum major of the Ku-Klux Klan with a muff for
a shako, and to be the gorilla of a menagerie, with an artificial head.
Nothing could make too great a demand upon her wit and vivacity, and her
very face had a droll plainness more effective for histrionic purposes
than a Grecian profile. She never lost dignity in these performances,
for she never had anything that could exactly be described by that name;
that was not her style. She had in its stead a supply of common sense
and ready adaptation that took the place, when needed, of all starched
decorum, and quite enabled her on serious occasions to hold her own.

But her social resources were not confined to occasions where she was
one of an extemporized troupe: she was a host in herself; she had known
everybody; her memory held the adventures and scandals of a generation,
and these lost nothing on her lips. Then when other resources were
exhausted, and the candles had burned down, and the fire was low, and a
few guests lingered, somebody would be sure to say, “Now, Miss Jane, tell
us a ghost story.” With a little, a very little, of coy reluctance, she
would begin, in a voice at first commonplace, but presently dropping to a
sort of mystic tone; she seemed to undergo a change like the gypsy queen
in Browning’s “Flight of the Duchess”; she was no longer a plain, elderly
woman in an economical gown, but she became a medium, a solemn weaver of
spells so deep that they appeared to enchant herself. Whence came her
stories, I wonder? not ghost stories alone, but blood-curdling murders
and midnight terrors, of which she abated you not an item,—for she was
never squeamish,—tales that all the police records could hardly match.
Then, when she and her auditors were wrought up to the highest pitch, she
began to tell fortunes; and here also she seemed not so much a performer
as one performed upon,—a Delphic priestess, a Cassandra. I never shall
forget how she once made our blood run cold with the visions of coming
danger that she conjured around a young married woman on whom there soon
afterwards broke a wholly unexpected scandal that left her an exile in
a foreign land. No one ever knew, I believe, whether Miss Stuart spoke
at that time with knowledge; perhaps she hardly knew herself; she always
was, or affected to be, carried away beyond herself by these weird
incantations.

She was not so much to be called affectionate or lovable as good-natured
and kindly; and with an undisguised relish for the comfortable things
of this world, and a very frank liking for the society of the rich and
great, she was yet constant, after a fashion, to humbler friends, and
liked to do them good turns. Much of her amiability took the form of
flattery,—a flattery so habitual that it lost all its grossness, and
became almost a form of good deeds. She was sometimes justly accused
of applying this to the wealthy and influential, but it was almost as
freely exercised where she had nothing to gain by it; and it gave to
the humblest the feeling that he was at least worth flattering. Even if
he had a secret fear that what she said of him behind his back might be
less encouraging, no matter: it was something to have been praised to his
face. It must be owned that her resources in the other direction were
considerable, and Lord Steyne himself might have applauded when she was
gradually led into mimicking some rich amateur who had pooh-poohed her
pictures, or some intrusive dame who had patronizingly inspected her
humble cot. It could not quite be said of her that her wit lived to play,
not wound; and yet, after all, what she got out of life was so moderate,
and so many women would have found her way of existence dreary enough,
that it was impossible to grudge her these trifling indulgences.

Inheriting her father’s love of the brush, she had little of his talent;
her portraits of friends were generally transferred by degrees to dark
corners; but there existed an impression that she was a good copyist of
Stuart’s pictures, and she was at one time a familiar figure in Boston,
perched on a high stool, and copying those of his works which were
transferred for safe-keeping from Faneuil Hall to the Art Museum. On one
occasion, it was said, she grew tired of the long process of copying
and took home a canvas or two with the eyes unpainted, putting them in,
colored to please her own fancy, at Newport. Perhaps she invented this
legend for her own amusement, for she never spared herself, and, were she
to read this poor sketch of her, would object to nothing but the tameness
of its outlines.




XV

JOHN BARTLETT




JOHN BARTLETT


In every university town such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is an
outside circle, beyond the institution itself, of cultivated men who
may or may not hold its degrees, but who contribute to the intellectual
atmosphere. One of the most widely known and generally useful of these
at Cambridge—whether in his active youth or in the patient and lonely
seclusion of his later years—was John Bartlett, best known as the author
of the dictionary entitled “Familiar Quotations.”

He was born in Plymouth, June 14, 1820, was educated in the public
schools of that town, and in 1836 entered the bookbinding establishment
connected with the University bookstore in Cambridge, under John Owen,
who was Longfellow’s first publisher. In the next year Bartlett became
a clerk in the bookstore, and soon showed remarkable talent for the
business. In 1846 Mr. Owen failed, and Bartlett remained with his
successor, George Nichols, but became himself the proprietor in 1849.
He had shown himself in this position an uncommonly good publisher
and adviser of authors. He had there published three editions of
his “Familiar Quotations,” gradually enlarging the book from the
beginning. In 1859 he sold out to Sever & Francis. In 1862 he served as
volunteer naval paymaster for nine months with Captain Boutelle, his
brother-in-law, on board Admiral DuPont’s dispatch-boat. In August,
1863, he entered the publishing house of Little, Brown & Co., nominally
as clerk, but with the promise that in eighteen months, when the
existing partnership would end, he should be taken into the firm, which
accordingly took place in 1865. The fourth edition of his “Familiar
Quotations,” always growing larger, had meanwhile been published by
them, as well as an _édition de luxe_ of Walton’s “Complete Angler,”
in the preparation of which he made an especial and exceptionally fine
collection of works on angling, which he afterwards presented to the
Harvard College Library. His activity in the Waltonian sport is also
commemorated in Lowell’s poem, “To Mr. John Bartlett, who had sent me
a seven-pound trout.” He gave to the Library at the same time another
collection of books containing “Proverbs,” and still another on “Emblems.”

After his becoming partner in the firm, the literary, manufacturing, and
advertising departments were assigned to him, and were retained until
he withdrew altogether. The fifth and sixth editions of his “Quotations”
were published by Little, Brown & Co., the seventh and eighth by
Routledge of London, the ninth by Little, Brown & Co. and Macmillan &
Co. of London, jointly; and of all these editions between two and three
hundred thousand copies must have been sold. Of the seventh and eighth
editions, as the author himself tells us, forty thousand copies were
printed apart from the English reprint. The ninth edition, published
in 1891, had three hundred and fifty pages more than its predecessor,
and the index was increased by more than ten thousand lines. In 1881
Mr. Bartlett published his Shakespeare “Phrase-Book,” and in February,
1889, he retired from his firm to complete his indispensable Shakespeare
“Concordance,” which Macmillan & Co. published at their own risk in
London in 1894.

All this immense literary work had the direct support and coöperation of
Mr. Bartlett’s wife, who was the daughter of Sidney Willard, professor
of Hebrew in Harvard University, and granddaughter of Joseph Willard,
President of Harvard from 1781 to 1804. She inherited from such an
ancestry the love of studious labor; and as they had no children, she and
her husband could pursue it with the greatest regularity. Both of them
had also been great readers for many years, and there is still extant a
manuscript book of John Bartlett’s which surpasses most books to be found
in these days, for it contains the life-long record of his reading. What
man or woman now living, for instance, can claim to have read Gibbon’s
“Decline and Fall” faithfully through, four times, from beginning to end?
We must, however, remember that this was accomplished by one who began by
reading a verse of the Bible aloud to his mother when he was but three
years old, and had gone through the whole of it at nine.

There came an event in Bartlett’s life, however, which put an end
to all direct labors, when his wife and co-worker began to lose her
mental clearness, and all this joint task had presently to be laid
aside. For a time he tried to continue his work unaided; and she, with
unwearied patience and gentleness, would sit quietly beside him without
interference. But the malady increased, until she passed into that
melancholy condition described so powerfully by his neighbor and intimate
friend, James Russell Lowell,—though drawing from a different example,—in
his poem of “The Darkened Mind,” one of the most impressive, I think,
of his poems. While Bartlett still continued his habit of reading, the
writing had to be surrendered. His eyesight being erelong affected, the
reading also was abandoned, and after his wife’s death he lived for a
year or two one of the loneliest of lives. He grew physically lame, and
could scarcely cross the room unaided. A nervous trouble in the head
left him able to employ a reader less and less frequently, and finally
not at all. In a large and homelike parlor, containing one of the most
charming private libraries in Cambridge,—the books being beautifully
bound and lighting up the walls instead of darkening them,—he spent most
of the day reclining on the sofa, externally unemployed, simply because
employment was impossible. He had occasional visitors, and four of his
old friends formed what they called a “Bartlett Club,” meeting at his
house one evening in every week. Sometimes days passed, however, without
his receiving a visitor, he living alone in a room once gay with the
whist-parties which he and Lowell had formerly organized and carried on.

His cheerful courage, however, was absolutely unbroken, and he came
forward to meet every guest with a look of sunshine. His voice and
manner, always animated and cheerful, remained the same. He had an
inexhaustible store of anecdotes and reminiscences, and could fill the
hour with talk without showing exhaustion. Seldom going out of the house,
unable to take more than very short drives, he dwelt absolutely in the
past, remembered the ways and deeds of all Cambridge and Boston literary
men, speaking genially of all and with malice of none. He had an endless
fund of good stories of personal experience. Were one to speak to him,
for instance, of Edward Everett, well known for the elaboration with
which he prepared his addresses, Bartlett would instantly recall how
Everett once came into his bookstore in search of a small pocket Bible
to be produced dramatically before a rural audience in a lecture; but in
this case finding none small enough, he chose a copy of Hoyle’s “Games”
instead, which was produced with due impressiveness when the time came.
Then he would describe the same Edward Everett, whom he once called
upon and found busy in drilling a few Revolutionary soldiers who were
to be on the platform during Everett’s famous Concord oration. These he
had drilled first to stand up and be admired at a certain point of the
oration, and then to sit down again, by signal, that the audience might
rather rise in their honor. Unfortunately, one man, who was totally deaf,
forgot the instructions and absolutely refused to sit down, because
the “squire” had told him to stand up. In a similar way, Bartlett’s
unimpaired memory held the whole circle of eminent men among whom he had
grown up from youth, and a casual visitor might infer from his cheery
manner that these comrades had just left the room. During his last
illness, mind and memory seemed equally unclouded until the very end, and
almost the last words he spoke were a caution to his faithful nurse not
to forget to pay the small sum due to a man who had been at work on his
driveway, he naming the precise sum due in dollars and cents.

He died at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the morning of December 3, 1905,
aged eighty-five. Was his career, after all, more to be pitied or envied?
He lived a life of prolonged and happy labor among the very choicest gems
of human thought, and died with patient fortitude after all visible human
joys had long been laid aside.




XVI

HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER




HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER


It has been generally felt, I think, that no disrespect was shown to John
Fiske, when the New York “Nation” headed its very discriminating sketch
of him with the title “John Fiske, Popularizer”; and I should feel that
I showed no discourtesy, but on the contrary, did honor to Horace Elisha
Scudder, in describing him as Literary Workman. I know of no other man
in America, perhaps, who so well deserved that honorable name; no one,
that is, who, if he had a difficult piece of literary work to do, could
be so absolutely relied upon to do it carefully and well. Whatever it
was,—compiling, editing, arranging, translating, indexing,—his work
was uniformly well done. Whether this is the highest form of literary
distinction is not now the question. What other distinction he might have
won if he had shown less of modesty or self-restraint, we can never know.
It is true that his few thoroughly original volumes show something beyond
what is described in the limited term, workmanship. But that he brought
such workmanship up into the realm of art is as certain as that we may
call the cabinet-maker of the Middle Ages an artist.

Mr. Scudder was born in Boston on October 16, 1838, the son of Charles
and Sarah Lathrop (Coit) Scudder, and died at Cambridge, Massachusetts,
on January 11, 1902. He was a graduate of Williams College, and after
graduation went to New York, where he spent three years as a teacher.
It was there that he wrote his first stories for children, entitled
“Seven Little People and their Friends” (New York, 1862). After his
father’s death he returned to Boston, and thenceforward devoted himself
almost wholly to literary pursuits. He prepared the “Life and Letters
of David Coit Scudder,” his brother, a missionary to India (New York,
1864); edited the “Riverside Magazine” for young people during its four
years’ existence (from 1867 to 1870); and published “Dream Children” and
“Stories from My Attic.” Becoming associated with Houghton, Mifflin,
and Company, he edited for them the “Atlantic Monthly” from 1890 to
1898, preparing for it also that invaluable Index, so important to
bibliographers; he also edited the “American Commonwealths” series,
and two detached volumes, “American Poems” (1879) and “American Prose”
(1880). He published also the “Bodley Books” (8 vols., Boston, 1875
to 1887); “The Dwellers in Five Sisters’ Court” (1876); “Boston Town”
(1881); “Life of Noah Webster” (1882); “A History of the United States”
for schools (1884); “Men and Letters” (1887); “Life of George Washington”
(1889); “Literature in School” (1889); “Childhood in Literature and
Art” (1894), besides various books of which he was the editor or
compiler only. He was also for nearly six years (1877-82) a member of
the Cambridge School Committee; for five years (1884-89) of the State
Board of Education; for nine years (1889-98) of the Harvard University
visiting committee in English literature; and was at the time of his
death a trustee of Williams College, Wellesley College, and St. John’s
Theological School, these making all together a quarter of a century of
almost uninterrupted and wholly unpaid public service in the cause of
education. After May 28, 1889, he was a member of the American Academy,
until his death. This is the simple record of a most useful and admirable
life, filled more and more, as it went on, with gratuitous public
services and disinterested acts for others.

As a literary workman, his nicety of method and regularity of life
went beyond those of any man I have known. Working chiefly at home,
he assigned in advance a certain number of hours daily as due to the
firm for which he labored; and he then kept carefully the record of
these hours, and if he took out a half hour for his own private work,
made it up. He had special work assigned by himself for a certain
time before breakfast, an interval which he daily gave largely to the
Greek Testament and at some periods to Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus,
and Xenophon; working always with the original at hand and writing out
translations or commentaries, always in the same exquisite handwriting
and at first contained in small thin note-books, afterwards bound in
substantial volumes, with morocco binding and proper lettering. All his
writings were thus handsomely treated, and the shelves devoted to his own
works, pamphlet or otherwise, were to the eye a very conservatory and
flower garden of literature; or like a chamberful of children to whom
even a frugal parent may allow himself the luxury of pretty clothes.
All his literary arrangements were neat and perfect, and represented
that other extreme from the celebrated collection of De Quincey in Dove
Cottage at Grasmere, where that author had five thousand books, by his
own statement, in a little room ten or twelve feet square; and his old
housekeeper explained it to me as perfectly practicable “because he had
no bookcases,” but simply piled them against the walls, leaving here and
there little gaps in which he put his money.

In the delicate and touching dedication of Scudder’s chief work, “Men and
Letters,” to his friend Henry M. Alden, the well-known New York editor,
he says: “In that former state of existence when we were poets, you wrote
verses which I knew by heart and I read dreamy tales to you which you
speculated over as if they were already classics. Then you bound your
manuscript verses in a full blue calf volume and put it on the shelf,
and I woke to find myself at the desk of a literary workman.” Later, he
says of himself, “Fortunately, I have been able for the most part to
work out of the glare of publicity.” Yet even to this modest phrase he
adds acutely: “But there is always that something in us which whispers
_I_, and after a while the anonymous critic becomes a little tired of
listening to the whisper in his solitary cave, and is disposed to escape
from it by coming out into the light even at the risk of blinking a
little, and by suffering the ghostly voice to become articulate, though
the sound startle him. One craves company for his thought, and is not
quite content always to sit in the dark with his guests.”

The work in which he best achieves the purpose last stated is undoubtedly
the collection of papers called by the inexpressive phrase “Men and
Letters”; a book whose title was perhaps a weight upon it, and which
yet contained some of the very best of American thought and criticism.
It manifests even more than his “Life of Lowell” that faculty of keen
summing up and epigrammatic condensation which became so marked in him
that it was very visible, I am assured, even in the literary councils of
his publishers, two members of which have told me that he often, after
a long discussion, so summed up the whole situation in a sentence or
two that he left them free to pass to something else. We see the same
quality, for instance, in his “Men and Letters,” in his papers on Dr.
Mulford and Longfellow. The first is an analysis of the life and literary
service of a man too little known because of early death, but of the
rarest and most exquisite intellectual qualities, Dr. Elisha Mulford,
author of “The Nation” and then of “The Republic of God.” In this, as
everywhere in the book, Mr. Scudder shows that epigrammatic quality which
amounted, whether applied to books or men, to what may be best described
as a quiet brilliancy. This is seen, for instance, when, in defending
Mulford from the imputation of narrowness, his friend sums up the whole
character of the man and saves a page of more detailed discussion by
saying, “He was narrow as a cañon is narrow, when the depth apparently
contracts the sides” (page 17). So in his criticism called “Longfellow
and his Art,” Scudder repeatedly expresses in a sentence what might well
have occupied a page, as where he says of Longfellow, “He was first
of all a composer, and he saw his subjects in their relations rather
than in their essence” (page 44). He is equally penetrating where he
says that Longfellow “brought to his work in the college no special
love of teaching,” but “a deep love of literature and that unacademic
attitude toward his work which was a liberalizing power” (page 66). He
touches equally well that subtle quality of Longfellow’s temperament,
so difficult to delineate, when he says of him: “He gave of himself
freely to his intimate friends, but he dwelt, nevertheless, in a charmed
circle, beyond the lines of which men could not penetrate” (page 68).
These admirable statements sufficiently indicate the rare quality of Mr.
Scudder’s work.

So far as especial passages go, Mr. Scudder never surpassed the best
chapters of “Men and Letters,” but his one adequate and complete work as
a whole is undoubtedly, apart from his biographies, the volume entitled
“Childhood in Literature and Art” (1894). This book was based on a
course of Lowell lectures given by him in Boston, and is probably that
by which he himself would wish to be judged, at least up to the time of
his excellent biography of Lowell. He deals in successive chapters with
Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Mediæval, English, French, German, and American
literary art with great symmetry and unity throughout, culminating, of
course, in Hawthorne and analyzing the portraits of children drawn in his
productions. In this book one may justly say that he has added himself,
in a degree, to the immediate circle of those very few American writers
whom he commemorates so nobly at the close of his essay on “Longfellow
and his Art,” in “Men and Letters”: “It is too early to make a full
survey of the immense importance to American letters of the work done by
half-a-dozen great men in the middle of this century. The body of prose
and verse created by them is constituting the solid foundation upon which
other structures are to rise; the humanity which it holds is entering
into the life of the country, and no material invention, or scientific
discovery, or institutional prosperity, or accumulation of wealth will so
powerfully affect the spiritual well-being of the nation for generations
to come” (page 69).

If it now be asked what prevented Horace Scudder from showing more fully
this gift of higher literature and led to his acquiescing, through life,
in a comparatively secondary function, I can find but one explanation,
and that a most interesting one to us in New England, as illustrating
the effect of immediate surroundings. His father, so far as I can
ascertain, was one of those Congregationalists of the milder type who,
while strict in their opinions, are led by a sunny temperament to be
genial with their households and to allow them innocent amusements. The
mother was a Congregationalist, firm but not severe in her opinions;
but always controlled by that indomitable New England conscience of the
older time, which made her sacrifice herself to every call of charity and
even to refuse, as tradition says, to have window curtains in her house,
inasmuch as many around her could not even buy blankets. Add to this
the fact that Boston was then a great missionary centre, that several
prominent leaders in that cause were of the Scudder family, and the house
was a sort of headquarters for them, and that Horace Scudder’s own elder
brother, whose memoirs he wrote, went as a missionary to India, dying
at his post. Speaking of his father’s family in his memoir, he says of
it, “In the conduct of the household, there was recognition of some more
profound meaning in life than could find expression in mere enjoyment of
living; while the presence of a real religious sentiment banished that
counterfeit solemnity which would hang over innocent pleasure like a
cloud” (Scudder’s “Life of David Coit Scudder,” page 4). By one bred in
such an atmosphere of self-sacrifice, that quality may well be imbibed;
it may even become a second nature, so that the instinctive demand for
self-assertion may become subordinate until many a man ends in finding
full contentment in doing perfectly the appointed work of every day.
If we hold as we should that it is character, not mere talent, which
ennobles life, we may well feel that there is something not merely
pardonable, but ennobling, in such a habit of mind. Viewed in this light,
his simple devotion to modest duty may well be to many of us rather a
model than a thing to be criticised.




XVII

EDWARD ATKINSON




EDWARD ATKINSON


Edward Atkinson, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
since March 12, 1879, was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on February
10, 1827, and died in Boston on December 11, 1905. He was descended on
his father’s side from the patriot minute-man, Lieutenant Amos Atkinson,
and on the maternal side from Stephen Greenleaf, a well-known fighter of
Indians in the colonial period; thus honestly inheriting on both sides
that combative spirit in good causes which marked his life. Owing to
the business reverses of his father, he was prevented from receiving,
as his elder brother, William Parsons Atkinson, had received, a Harvard
College education, a training which was also extended to all of Edward
Atkinson’s sons, at a later day. At fifteen he entered the employment
of Read and Chadwick, Commission Merchants, Boston, in the capacity of
office boy; but he rapidly rose to the position of book-keeper, and
subsequently became connected with several cotton manufacturing companies
in Lewiston, Maine, and elsewhere. He was for many years the treasurer
of a number of such corporations, and in 1878 became President of the
Boston Manufacturers’ Mutual Insurance Company. Such business was in a
somewhat chaotic state when he took hold of it, but he remained in its
charge until his death, having during this time organized, enlarged, and
perfected the mutual insurance of industrial concerns. In 1855 he married
Miss Mary Caroline Heath, of Brookline, who died in December, 1907. He is
survived by seven children,—Mrs. Ernest Winsor, E. W. Atkinson, Charles
H. Atkinson, William Atkinson, Robert W. Atkinson, Miss C. P. Atkinson,
and Mrs. R. G. Wadsworth.

This gives the mere outline of a life of extraordinary activity and
usefulness which well merits a further delineation in detail. Mr.
Atkinson’s interest in public life began with a vote for Horace Mann in
1848. Twenty years after, speaking at Salem, he described himself as
never having been anything else than a Republican; but he was one of
those who supported Cleveland for President in 1884, and whose general
affinities were with the Democratic party. He opposed with especial vigor
what is often called “the imperial policy,” which followed the Cuban War,
and he conducted a periodical of his own from time to time, making the
most elaborate single battery which the war-party had to encounter.

From an early period of life he was a profuse and vigorous pamphleteer,
his first pamphlet being published during the Civil War and entitled
“Cheap Cotton by Free Labor,” and this publication led to his
acquaintance with David R. Wells and Charles Nordhoff, thenceforth his
life-long friends. His early pamphlets were on the cotton question in
different forms (1863-76); he wrote on blockade-running (1865); on the
Pacific Railway (1871); and on mutual fire insurance (1885), this last
being based on personal experience as the head of a mutual company. He
was also, during his whole life, in print and otherwise, a strong and
effective fighter for sound currency.

A large part of his attention from 1889 onward was occupied by
experiments in cooking and diet, culminating in an invention of his
own called “The Aladdin Oven.” This led him into investigations as
to the cost of nutrition in different countries, on which subject he
also wrote pamphlets. He soon was led into experiments so daring that
he claimed to have proved it possible to cook with it, in open air, a
five-course dinner for ten persons, and gave illustrations of this at
outdoor entertainments. He claimed that good nutrition could be had
for $1 per week, and that a family of five, by moderate management,
could be comfortably supported on $180 per year (Boston “Herald,”
October 8, 1891). These surprising figures unfortunately created among
the laboring-class a good deal of sharp criticism, culminating in the
mistaken inquiry, why he did not feed his own family at $180 a year, if
it was so easy? I can only say for one, that if the meals at that price
were like a dinner of which I partook at his own house with an invited
party, and at which I went through the promised five courses after seeing
them all prepared in the garden, I think that his standard of poverty
came very near to luxury.

Mingled with these things in later years was introduced another valuable
department of instruction. He was more and more called upon to give
addresses, especially on manufactures, before Southern audiences, and
there was no disposition to criticise him for his anti-slavery record.
Another man could hardly be found whose knowledge of manufacturing and of
insurance combined made him so fit to give counsel in the new business
impulse showing itself at the South. He wrote much (1877) on cotton
goods, called for an international cotton exposition, and gave an address
at Atlanta, Georgia, which was printed in Boston in 1881.

Looking now at Atkinson’s career with the eyes of a literary man, it
seems clear to me that no college training could possibly have added to
his power of accumulating knowledge or his wealth in the expression of
it. But the academic tradition might have best added to these general
statements in each case some simple address or essay which would bring
out clearly to the minds of an untrained audience the essential points of
each single theme. Almost everything he left is the talk of a specially
trained man to a limited audience, also well trained,—at least in the
particular department to which he addresses himself. The men to whom he
talks may not know how to read or write, but they are all practically
versed in the subjects of which he treats. He talks as a miner to miners,
a farmer to farmers, a cook to cooks; but among all of his papers which I
have examined, that in which he appears to the greatest advantage to the
general reader is his “Address before the Alumni of Andover Theological
Seminary” on June 9, 1886. Here he speaks as one representing a wholly
different pursuit from that of his auditors; a layman to clergymen, or
those aiming to become so. He says to them frankly at the outset, “I have
often thought [at church] that if a member of the congregation could
sometimes occupy the pulpit while the minister took his place in the pew,
it might be a benefit to both. The duty has been assigned to me to-day to
trace out the connection between morality and a true system of political
or industrial economy.”

He goes on to remind them that the book which is said to rank next to the
Bible toward the benefit of the human race is Adam Smith’s “Wealth of
Nations,” and that the same Adam Smith wrote a book on moral philosophy,
which is now but little read. He therefore takes the former of Smith’s
books, not the latter, as his theme, and thus proceeds:—

    “I wonder how many among your number ever recall the fact that
    it has been the richest manufacturers who have clothed the
    naked at the least cost to them; that it is the great bonanza
    farmer who now feeds the hungry at the lowest price; that
    Vanderbilt achieved his great fortune by reducing the cost of
    moving a barrel of flour a thousand miles,—from three dollars
    and fifty cents to less than seventy cents. This was the great
    work assigned to him, whether he knew it or not. His fortune
    was but an incident,—the main object, doubtless, to himself,
    but a trifling incident compared to what he saved others.”[18]

He then goes on to show that whatever may be the tricks or wrongs of
commerce, they lie on the surface, and that every great success is based
upon very simple facts.

    “The great manufacturer [he says] who guides the operations
    of a factory of a hundred thousand spindles, in which fifteen
    hundred men, women, and children earn their daily bread,
    himself works on a narrow margin of one fourth of a cent on
    each yard of cloth. If he shall not have applied truth to every
    branch of construction and of the operation of that factory, it
    will fail and become worthless; and then with toilsome labor a
    hundred and fifty thousand women might try to clothe themselves
    and you, who are now clothed by the service of fifteen hundred
    only.

    “Such is the disparity in the use of time, brought into
    beneficent action by modern manufacturing processes.

    “The banker who deals in credit by millions upon millions
    must possess truth of insight, truth of judgment, truth of
    character. Probity and integrity constitute his capital, for
    the very reason that the little margin which he seeks to gain
    for his own service is but the smallest fraction of a per cent
    upon each transaction. I supervise directly or indirectly the
    insurance upon four hundred million dollars’ worth of factory
    property. The products of these factories, machine-shops, and
    other works must be worth six hundred million dollars a year.
    It isn’t worth fifty cents on each hundred dollars to guarantee
    their notes or obligations, while ninety-nine and one half per
    cent of all the sales they make will be promptly paid when
    due.”[19]

He elsewhere turns from viewing the factory system with business eyes
alone to the consideration of it from the point of view of the laborer.
There is no want of sympathy, we soon find, in this man of inventions and
statistics. He thus goes on:—

    “The very manner in which this great seething, toiling, crowded
    mass of laboring men and women bear the hardships of life leads
    one to faith in humanity and itself gives confidence in the
    future. If it were not that there is a Divine order even in
    the hardships which seem so severe, and that even the least
    religious, in the technical sense, have faith in each other,
    the anarchist and nihilist might be a cause of dread.

    “As I walk through the great factories which are insured in the
    company of which I am president, trying to find out what more
    can be done to save them from destruction by fire, I wonder if
    I myself should not strike, just for the sake of variety, if I
    were a mule-spinner, obliged to bend over the machine, mending
    the ends of the thread, while I walked ten or fifteen miles a
    day without raising my eyes to the great light above. I wonder
    how men and women bear the monotony of the workshop and of
    the factory, in which the division of labor is carried to its
    utmost, and in which they must work year in and year out, only
    on some small part of a fabric or an implement, never becoming
    capable of making the whole fabric or of constructing the whole
    machine.”[20]

We thus find him quite ready to turn his varied knowledge and his
executive power towards schemes for the relief of the operative, schemes
of which he left many.

Mr. Atkinson, a year or two later (1890), wrote a similarly popularized
statement of social science for an address on “Religion and Life” before
the American Unitarian Association. In his usual matter-of-fact way,
he had prepared himself by inquiring at the headquarters of different
religious denominations for a printed creed of each. He first bought
an Episcopal creed at the Old Corner Bookstore for two cents, an
Orthodox creed at the Congregational Building for the same amount, then
a Methodist two-cent creed also, a Baptist creed for five cents, and
a Presbyterian one for ten, Unitarian and Universalist creeds being
furnished him for nothing; and then he proceeds to give some extracts
whose bigotry makes one shudder, and not wonder much that he expressed
sympathy mainly with the Catholics and the Jews, rather than with the
severer schools among Protestants. And it is already to be noticed how
much the tendency of liberal thought, during the last twenty years, has
been in the direction whither his sympathies went.

As time went on, he had to undergo the test which awaits all Northern
public men visiting the Southern States, but not met by all in so simple
and straightforward a way as he. Those who doubt the capacity of the
mass of men in our former slave states to listen to plainness of speech
should turn with interest to Atkinson’s plain talk to the leading men of
Atlanta, Georgia, in October, 1880. He says, almost at the beginning:
“Now, gentlemen of the South, I am going to use free speech for a
purpose and to speak some plain words of truth and soberness to you....
I speak, then, to you here and now as a Republican of Republicans, as an
Abolitionist of early time, a Free-Soiler of later date, and a Republican
of to-day.” And the record is that he was received with applause. He goes
on to say as frankly: “When slavery ended, not only were blacks made free
from the bondage imposed by others, but whites as well were redeemed by
the bondage they had imposed upon themselves.... When you study the past
system of slave labor with the present system of free labor, irrespective
of all personal considerations, you will be mad down to the soles of your
boots to think that you ever tolerated it; and when you have come to this
wholesome condition of mind, you will wonder how the devil you could have
been so slow in seeing it. [Laughter.]”

Then he suddenly drops down to the solid fact and says: “Are you not
asking Northern men to come here, and do you not seek Northern capital?
If you suppose either will come here unless every man can say what he
pleases, as I do now, you are mistaken.” Then he goes on with his speech,
rather long as he was apt to make them, but addressing a community much
more leisurely than that which he had left at home; filling their minds
with statistics, directions, and methods, till at last, recurring to the
question of caste and color, he closes fearlessly: “As you convert the
darkness of oppression and slavery to liberty and justice, so shall you
be judged by men, and by Him who created all the nations of the earth.”

After tracing the course and training of an eminent American at home,
it is often interesting to follow him into the new experiences of the
foreign traveler. In that very amusing book, “Notes from a Diary,” by
Grant Duff (later Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff), the author
writes that he came unexpectedly upon a breakfast (June, 1887), the
guests being “Atkinson, the New England Free Trader, Colonel Hay, and
Frederic Harrison, all of whom were well brought out by our host and
talked admirably.” I quote some extracts from the talk:—

“Mr. Atkinson said that quite the best after-dinner speech he had ever
heard was from Mr. Samuel Longfellow, brother of the poet. An excellent
speech had been made by Mr. Longworth, and the proceedings should have
closed, when Mr. Longfellow was very tactlessly asked to address the
meeting, which he did in the words: ‘It is, I think, well known that
worth makes the man, but want of it the fellow,’ and sat down.” After
this mild beginning we have records of good talk.

    “Other subjects [Grant Duff says] were the hostility of the
    Socialists in London to the Positivists and to the Trades
    Unions; the great American fortunes and their causes, the rapid
    melting away of some of them, the hindrance which they are to
    political success; and servants in the United States, of whom
    Atkinson spoke relatively, Colonel Hay absolutely, well, saying
    that he usually kept his from six to eight years....

    “Atkinson said that all the young thought and ability in
    America is in favor of free trade, but that free trade has
    not begun to make any way politically. Harrison remarked that
    he was unwillingly, but ever more and more, being driven
    to believe that the residuum was almost entirely composed
    of people who would not work. Atkinson took the same view,
    observing that during the war much was said about the misery
    of the working-women of Boston. He offered admirable terms
    if they would only go a little way into the country to work
    in his factory. Forty were at last got together to have the
    conditions explained—ten agreed to go next morning, of whom one
    arrived at the station, and she would not go alone!”

On another occasion we read in the “Diary”:

    “We talked of Father Taylor, and he [Atkinson] told us that the
    great orator once began a sermon by leaning over the pulpit,
    with his arms folded, and saying, ‘You people ought to be very
    good, if you’re not, for you live in Paradise already.’

    “The conversation, in which Sir Louis Malet took part, turned
    to Mill’s economical heresies, especially that which relates to
    the fostering of infant industries. Atkinson drew a striking
    picture of the highly primitive economic condition of the
    South before the war, and said that now factories of all kinds
    are springing up throughout the country in spite of the keen
    competition of the North. He cited a piece of advice given to
    his brother by Theodore Parker, ‘Never try to lecture down to
    your audience.’ This maxim is in strict accordance with an
    opinion expressed by Hugh Miller, whom, having to address on
    the other side of the Firth just the same sort of people as
    those amongst whom he lived at Cromarty, I took as my guide in
    this matter during the long period in which I was connected
    with the Elgin Burghs.

    “Atkinson went on to relate that at the time of Mr. Hayes’s
    election to the presidency there was great danger of an
    outbreak, and he sat in council with General Taylor and Abraham
    Hewitt, doing his best to prevent it. At length he exclaimed:
    ‘Now I think we may fairly say that the war is over. Here are
    we three acting together for a common object, and who are we?
    You, Mr. Hewitt, are the leader of the Democratic party in New
    York; I am an old Abolitionist who subscribed to furnish John
    Brown and his companions with rifles; you, General Taylor, are
    the last Confederate officer who surrendered an army, and you
    surrendered it not because you were willing to do so, but, as
    you yourself admit, because you couldn’t help it.’”

The publication which will perhaps be much consulted in coming years as
the best periodical organ of that party in the nation which was most
opposed to the Philippine war will doubtless be the work issued by Mr.
Atkinson on his own responsibility and by his own editing, from June 3,
1899, to September, 1900, under the name of “The Anti-Imperialist.” It
makes a solid volume of about 400 octavo pages, and was conducted wholly
on Atkinson’s own responsibility, financially and otherwise, though a
large part of the expense was paid him by volunteers, to the extent of
$5,657.87 or more, covering an outlay of $5,870.62, this amount being
largely received in sums of one dollar, obtained under what is known as
the chain method. For this amount were printed more than 100,000 copies
of a series of pamphlets, of which the first two were withdrawn from
the mail as seditious under President McKinley’s administration. A more
complete triumph of personal independence was perhaps never seen in our
literature, and it is easy to recognize the triumph it achieved for a
high-minded and courageous as well as constitutionally self-willed man.
The periodical exerted an influence which lasts to this day, although the
rapidity of political change has now thrown it into the background for
all except the systematic student of history. It seemed to Mr. Atkinson,
at any rate, his crowning work.

The books published by Edward Atkinson were the following: “The
Distribution of Profits,” 1885; “The Industrial Progress of the Nation,”
1889; “The Margin of Profit,” 1890; “Taxation and Work,” 1892; “Facts
and Figures the Basis of Economic Science,” 1894. This last was printed
at the Riverside Press, the others being issued by Putnam & Co., New
York. He wrote also the following papers in leading periodicals: “Is
Cotton our King?” (“Continental Monthly,” March, 1862); “Revenue Reform”
(“Atlantic,” October, 1871); “An American View of American Competition”
(“Fortnightly,” London, March, 1879); “The Unlearned Professions”
(“Atlantic,” June, 1880); “What makes the Rate of Interest” (“Forum,”
1880); “Elementary Instruction in the Mechanics Arts” (“Century,” May,
1881); “Leguminous Plants suggested for Ensilage” (“Agricultural,” 1882);
“Economy in Domestic Cookery” (“American Architect,” May, 1887); “Must
Humanity starve at Last?” “How can Wages be increased?” “The Struggle for
Subsistence,” “The Price of Life” (all in “Forum” for 1888); “How Society
reforms Itself,” and “The Problem of Poverty” (both in “Forum” for 1889);
“A Single Tax on Land” (“Century,” 1890); and many others. When the
amount of useful labor performed by the men of this generation comes to
be reviewed a century hence, it is doubtful whether a more substantial
and varied list will be found credited to the memory of any one in
America than that which attaches to the memory of Edward Atkinson.




XVIII

JAMES ELLIOT CABOT




JAMES ELLIOT CABOT


Our late associate, Elliot Cabot, of whom I have been appointed to
write a sketch, was to me, from my college days, an object of peculiar
interest, on a variety of grounds. He was distantly related to me, in
more than one way, through the endless intermarriages of the old Essex
County families. Though two years and a half older, he was but one year
in advance of me in Harvard College. He and his chum, Henry Bryant, who
had been my schoolmate, were among the early founders of the Harvard
Natural History Society, then lately established, of which I was an
ardent member; and I have never had such a sensation of earthly glory
as when I succeeded Bryant in the responsible function of Curator of
Entomology in that august body. I used sometimes in summer to encounter
Cabot in the Fresh Pond marshes, then undrained, which he afterwards
described so delightfully in the “Atlantic Monthly” in his paper entitled
“Sedge Birds” (xxiii, 384). On these occasions he bore his gun, and I
only the humbler weapon of a butterfly net. After we had left college, I
looked upon him with envy as one of the early and successful aspirants
to that German post-collegiate education which was already earnestly
desired, but rarely attained, by the more studious among Harvard
graduates. After his return, I was brought more or less in contact with
him, at the close of the “Dial” period, and in the following years of
Transcendentalism; and, later still, I was actively associated with him
for a time in that group of men who have always dreamed of accomplishing
something through the Harvard Visiting Committee, and have retired from
it with hopes unaccomplished. Apart from his labors as Emerson’s scribe
and editor, he seemed to withdraw himself more and more from active
life as time went on, and to accept gracefully the attitude which many
men find so hard,—that of being, in a manner, superseded by the rising
generation. This he could do more easily, since he left a family of sons
to represent in various forms the tastes and gifts that were combined
in him; and he also left a manuscript autobiography, terse, simple, and
modest, like himself, to represent what was in its way a quite unique
career. Of this sketch I have been allowed to avail myself through the
courtesy of his sons.

James Elliot Cabot was born in Boston June 18, 1821, his birthplace
being in Quincy Place, upon the slope of Fort Hill, in a house which
had belonged to his grandfather, Samuel Cabot, brother of George Cabot,
the well-known leader of the Federalists in his day. These brothers
belonged to a family originating in the Island of Jersey and coming early
to Salem, Massachusetts. Elliot Cabot’s father was also named Samuel,
while his mother was the eldest child of Thomas Handasyd Perkins and
Sarah Elliot; the former being best known as Colonel Perkins, who gave
his house and grounds on Pearl Street toward the foundation of the Blind
Asylum bearing his name, and also gave profuse gifts to other Boston
institutions; deriving meanwhile his military title from having held
command of the Boston Cadets. Elliot Cabot was, therefore, born and bred
in the most influential circle of the little city of that date, and he
dwelt in what was then the most attractive part of Boston, though long
since transformed into a business centre.

His summers were commonly spent at Nahant, then a simple and somewhat
primitive seaside spot, and his childhood was also largely passed in the
house in Brookline built by Colonel Perkins for his daughter. Elliot
Cabot went to school in Boston under the well-known teachers of that
day,—Thayer, Ingraham, and Leverett. When twelve years old, during the
absence of his parents in Europe, he was sent to a boarding-school
in Brookline, but spent Saturday and Sunday with numerous cousins at
the house of Colonel Perkins, their common grandfather, who lived in a
large and hospitable manner, maintaining an ampler establishment than
is to be found in the more crowded Boston of to-day. This ancestor was
a man of marked individuality, and I remember hearing from one of his
grandchildren an amusing account of the scene which occurred, on one
of these Sunday evenings, after the delivery of a total abstinence
sermon by the Rev. Dr. Channing, of whose parish Colonel Perkins was
one of the leading members. The whole theory of total abstinence was
then an absolute innovation, and its proclamation, which came rather
suddenly from Dr. Channing, impressed Colonel Perkins much as it might
have moved one of Thackeray’s English squires; insomuch that he had a
double allowance of wine served out that evening to each of his numerous
grandsons in place of their accustomed wineglass of diluted beverage, and
this to their visible disadvantage as the evening went on.

Elliot Cabot entered Harvard College in 1836 as Freshman, and though he
passed his entrance examinations well, took no prominent rank in his
class, but read all sorts of out-of-the-way books and studied natural
history. He was also an early reader of Carlyle’s “Sartor Resartus,”
then just published; and was, in general, quite disposed to pursue his
own course in mental culture. He belonged to the Hasty Pudding Club
and to the Porcellian Club, but spent much time with his classmates,
Henry Bryant and William Sohier, in shooting excursions, which had then
the charm of being strictly prohibited by the college. The young men
were obliged to carry their guns slung for concealment in two parts,
the barrels separated from the stock, under their cloaks, which were
then much worn instead of overcoats. This taste was strengthened by
the example of Cabot’s elder brother, afterwards Dr. Samuel Cabot, an
ornithologist; and as the latter was then studying medicine in Paris,
the young men used to send him quantities of specimens for purposes of
exchange. Dr. Henry Bryant is well remembered in Boston for the large
collection of birds given by him to the Boston Natural History Society.

Soon after his graduation, in 1840, Elliot Cabot went abroad with the
object of joining his elder brother in Switzerland, visiting Italy,
wintering in Paris, and returning home in the spring; but this ended
in his going for the winter to Heidelberg instead, a place then made
fascinating to all young Americans through the glowing accounts
in Longfellow’s “Hyperion.” They were also joined by two other
classmates,—Edward Holker Welch, afterwards well known in the Roman
Catholic priesthood, and John Fenwick Heath, of Virginia, well remembered
by the readers of Lowell’s letters. All of these four were aiming at
the profession of the law, although not one of them, I believe, finally
devoted himself to its practice. Migrating afterwards to Berlin, after
the fashion of German students, they were admitted to the University on
their Harvard degrees by Ranke, the great historian, who said, as he
inspected their parchments, “Ah! the High School at Boston!” which they
thought showed little respect for President Quincy’s parchment, until
they found that “Hoch Schule” was the German equivalent for University.
There they heard the lectures of Schelling, then famous, whom they found
to be a little man of ordinary appearance, old, infirm, and taking snuff
constantly, as if to keep himself awake. Later they again removed, this
time to Göttingen, where Cabot busied himself with the study of Kant,
and also attended courses in Rudolph Wagner’s laboratory. Here he shared
more of the social life of his companions, frequented their Liederkränze,
learned to fence and to dance, and spent many evenings at students’
festivals.

Cabot sums up his whole European reminiscences as follows: “As I look
back over my residence in Europe, what strikes me is the waste of time
and energy from having had no settled purpose to keep my head steady.
I seem to have been always well employed and happy, but I had been
indulging a disposition to mental sauntering, and the picking up of
scraps, very unfavorable to my education. I was, I think, naturally
inclined to hover somewhat above the solid earth of practical life, and
thus to miss its most useful lessons. The result, I think, was to confirm
me in the vices of my mental constitution and to cut off what chance
there was of my accomplishing something worth while.”

In March, 1843, he finally left Göttingen for home by way of Belgium and
England, and entered the Harvard Law School in the autumn, taking his
degree there two years later, in 1845. Renewing acquaintance with him
during this period, I found him to be, as always, modest and reticent in
manner, bearing unconsciously a certain European prestige upon him, which
so commanded the respect of a circle of young men that we gave him the
sobriquet of “Jarno,” after the well-known philosophic leader in Goethe’s
“Wilhelm Meister.” Whatever he may say of himself, I cannot help still
retaining somewhat of my old feeling about the mental training of the
man who, while in the Law School, could write a paper so admirable as
Cabot’s essay entitled “Immanuel Kant” (“Dial,” iv, 409), an essay which
seems to me now, as it then seemed, altogether the simplest and most
effective statement I have ever encountered of the essential principles
of that great thinker’s philosophy. I remember that when I told Cabot
that I had been trying to read Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason” in an
English translation, but could not understand it, he placidly replied
that he had read it twice in German and had thought he comprehended it,
but that Meiklejohn’s translation was beyond making out, so that I need
not be discouraged.

After graduating from the Law School, he went for a year into a law
office in Boston, acting as senior partner to my classmate, Francis
Edward Parker, who, being a born lawyer, as Cabot was not, found it
for his own profit to sever the partnership at the end of a year,
while Cabot retired from the profession forever. His German training
had meanwhile made him well known to the leaders of a new literary
enterprise, originating with Theodore Parker and based upon a meeting
at Mr. Emerson’s house in 1849, the object being the organization of a
new magazine, which should be, in Theodore Parker’s phrase, “the ‘Dial’
with a beard.” Liberals and reformers were present at the meeting,
including men so essentially diverse as Sumner and Thoreau. Parker
was, of course, to be the leading editor, and became such. Emerson
also consented, “rather weakly,” as Cabot says in his memoranda, to
appear, and contributed only the introductory address, while Cabot
himself agreed to act as corresponding secretary and business manager.
The “Massachusetts Quarterly Review” sustained itself with difficulty
for three years,—showing more of studious and systematic work than its
predecessor, the “Dial,” but far less of freshness and originality,—and
then went under.

A more successful enterprise in which he was meanwhile enlisted was
a trip to Lake Superior with Agassiz, in 1850, when Cabot acted as
secretary and wrote and illustrated the published volume of the
expedition,—a book which was then full of fresh novelties, and which is
still very readable. Soon after his return, he went into his brother
Edward’s architect office in Boston to put his accounts in order, and
ultimately became a partner in the business, erecting various buildings.

He was married on September 28, 1857, to Elizabeth Dwight, daughter
of Edmund Dwight, Esq., a woman of rare qualities and great public
usefulness, who singularly carried on the tradition of those Essex
County women of an earlier generation, who were such strong helpmates
to their husbands. Of Mrs. Cabot it might almost have been said, as was
said by John Lowell in 1826 of his cousin, Elizabeth Higginson, wife of
her double first cousin, George Cabot: “She had none of the advantages
of early education afforded so bountifully to the young ladies of the
present age; but she surpassed _all_ of them in the acuteness of her
observation, in the knowledge of human nature, and in her power of
expressing and defending the opinions which she had formed.”[21] Thus
Elliot Cabot writes of his wife: “From the time when the care of her
children ceased to occupy the most of her time, she gradually became one
of the most valuable of the town officials, as well as the unofficial
counselor of many who needed the unfailing succor of her inexhaustible
sympathy and practical helpfulness.”

Cabot visited Europe anew after his marriage, and after his return,
served for nine years as a school-committee-man in Brookline, where he
resided. He afterwards did faithful duty for six years as chairman
of the examining committee of Harvard Overseers. He gave for a single
year a series of lectures on Kant at Harvard University, and for a time
acted as instructor in Logic there, which included a supervision of the
forensics or written discussions then in vogue. The Civil War aroused
his sympathies strongly, especially when his brother Edward and his
personal friend, Francis L. Lee, became respectively Lieutenant-Colonel
and Colonel of the 44th Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry. Elliot Cabot
himself enlisted in a drill club, and did some work for the Sanitary
Commission. He also assisted greatly in organizing the Museum of Fine
Arts and in the administration of the Boston Athenæum.

Though a life-long student, he wrote little for the press,—a fact which
recalls Theodore Parker’s remark about him, that he “could make a good
law argument, but could not address it to the jury.” He rendered,
however, a great and permanent service, far outweighing that performed
by most American authors of his time, as volunteer secretary to Ralph
Waldo Emerson, a task which constituted his main occupation for five or
six years. After Emerson’s death, Cabot also wrote his memoirs, by the
wish of the family,—a book which will always remain the primary authority
on the subject with which it deals, although it was justly criticised
by others for a certain restricted tone which made it seem to be, as
it really was, the work of one shy and reticent man telling the story
of another. In describing Emerson, the biographer often unconsciously
described himself also; and the later publications of Mr. Emerson’s
only son show clearly that there was room for a more ample and varied
treatment in order to complete the work.

Under these circumstances, Cabot’s home life, while of even tenor, was a
singularly happy one. One of his strongest and life-long traits was his
love of children,—a trait which he also eminently shared with Emerson.
The group formed by him with two grandchildren in his lap, to whom he was
reading John Gilpin or Hans Andersen, is one which those who knew him at
home would never forget. It was characteristic also that in his German
copy of Kant’s “Critique of Pure Reason,” already mentioned, there were
found some papers covered with drawings of horses and carts which had
been made to amuse some eager child. Akin to this was his strong love
of flowers, united with a rare skill in making beautiful shrubs grow
here and there in such places as would bring out the lines and curves of
his estate at Beverly. Even during the last summer of his life, he was
cutting new little vistas on the Beverly hills. His sketches of landscape
in water-color were also very characteristic both of his delicate and
poetic appreciation of nature and of his skill and interest in drawing.
In 1885, while in Italy, he used to draw objects seen from the car window
as he traveled; and often in the morning, when his family came down to
breakfast at hotels, they found that he had already made an exquisite
sketch in pencil of some tower or arch.

His outward life, on the whole, seemed much akin to the lives led by
that considerable class of English gentlemen who adopt no profession,
dwelling mainly on their paternal estates, yet are neither politicians
nor fox-hunters; pursuing their own favorite studies, taking part from
time to time in the pursuits of science, art, or literature, even holding
minor public functions, but winning no widespread fame. He showed, on
the other hand, the freedom from prejudice, the progressive tendency,
and the ideal proclivities which belong more commonly to Americans. He
seemed to himself to have accomplished nothing; and yet he had indirectly
aided a great many men by the elevation of his tone and the breadth of
his intellectual sympathy. If he did not greatly help to stimulate the
thought of his time, he helped distinctly to enlarge and ennoble it. His
death occurred at Brookline, Massachusetts, on January 16, 1903. He died
as he had lived, a high-minded, stainless, and in some respects unique
type of American citizen.




XIX

EMILY DICKINSON




EMILY DICKINSON


Few events in American literary history have been more curious than the
sudden rise of Emily Dickinson many years since into a posthumous fame
only more accentuated by the utterly recluse character of her life. The
lines which formed a prelude to the first volume of her poems are the
only ones that have yet come to light which indicate even a temporary
desire to come in contact with the great world of readers; for she seems
to have had no reference, in all the rest, to anything but her own
thought and a few friends. But for her only sister, it is very doubtful
if her poems would ever have been printed at all; and when published,
they were launched quietly and without any expectation of a wide
audience. Yet the outcome of it was that six editions of the volume were
sold within six months, a suddenness of success almost without a parallel
in American literature.

On April 16, 1862, I took from the post-office the following letter:—

    MR. HIGGINSON,—Are you too deeply occupied to say if my verse
    is alive?

    The mind is so near itself it cannot see distinctly, and I have
    none to ask.

    Should you think it breathed, and had you the leisure to tell
    me, I should feel quick gratitude.

    If I make the mistake, that you dared to tell me would give me
    sincerer honor toward you.

    I inclose my name, asking you, if you please, sir, to tell me
    what is true?

    That you will not betray me it is needless to ask, since honor
    is its own pawn.

The letter was postmarked “Amherst,” and it was in a handwriting so
peculiar that it seemed as if the writer might have taken her first
lessons by studying the famous fossil bird-tracks in the museum of
that college town. Yet it was not in the slightest degree illiterate,
but cultivated, quaint, and wholly unique. Of punctuation there was
little; she used chiefly dashes, and it has been thought better, in
printing these letters, as with her poems, to give them the benefit
in this respect of the ordinary usages; and so with her habit as to
capitalization, as the printers call it, in which she followed the Old
English and present German method of thus distinguishing every noun
substantive. But the most curious thing about the letter was the total
absence of a signature. It proved, however, that she had written her name
on a card, and put it under the shelter of a smaller envelope inclosed
in the larger; and even this name was written—as if the shy writer
wished to recede as far as possible from view—in pencil, not in ink. The
name was Emily Dickinson. Inclosed with the letter were four poems, two
of which have since been separately printed,—“Safe in their alabaster
chambers” and “I’ll tell you how the sun rose,” besides the two that here
follow. The first comprises in its eight lines a truth so searching that
it seems a condensed summary of the whole experience of a long life:—

    “We play at paste
    Till qualified for pearl;
    Then drop the paste
    And deem ourself a fool.

    “The shapes, though, were similar
    And our new hands
    Learned gem-tactics,
    Practicing sands.”

Then came one which I have always classed among the most exquisite of her
productions, with a singular felicity of phrase and an aerial lift that
bears the ear upward with the bee it traces:—

    “The nearest dream recedes unrealized.
          The heaven we chase,
          Like the June bee
          Before the schoolboy,
          Invites the race,
          Stoops to an easy clover,
    Dips—evades—teases—deploys—
    Then to the royal clouds
          Lifts his light pinnace,
          Heedless of the boy
    Staring, bewildered, at the mocking sky.

          “Homesick for steadfast honey,—
          Ah! the bee flies not
    Which brews that rare variety.”

The impression of a wholly new and original poetic genius was as distinct
on my mind at the first reading of these four poems as it is now, after
half a century of further knowledge; and with it came the problem never
yet solved, what place ought to be assigned in literature to what is so
remarkable, yet so elusive of criticism. The bee himself did not evade
the schoolboy more than she evaded me; and even at this day I still stand
somewhat bewildered, like the boy.

Circumstances, however, soon brought me in contact with an uncle of Emily
Dickinson, a gentleman not now living: a prominent citizen of Worcester,
Massachusetts, a man of integrity and character, who shared her
abruptness and impulsiveness, but certainly not her poetic temperament,
from which he was indeed singularly remote. He could tell but little of
her, she being evidently an enigma to him, as to me. It is hard to say
what answer was made by me, under these circumstances, to this letter. It
is probable that the adviser sought to gain time a little and find out
with what strange creature he was dealing. I remember to have ventured
on some criticism which she afterwards called “surgery,” and on some
questions, part of which she evaded, as will be seen, with a naïve skill
such as the most experienced and worldly coquette might envy. Her second
letter (received April 26, 1862) was as follows:—

    MR. HIGGINSON,—Your kindness claimed earlier gratitude, but I
    was ill, and write to-day from my pillow.

    Thank you for the surgery; it was not so painful as I supposed.
    I bring you others, as you ask, though they might not differ.
    While my thought is undressed, I can make the distinction; but
    when I put them in the gown, they look alike and numb.

    You asked how old I was? I made no verse, but one or two, until
    this winter, sir.

    I had a terror since September, I could tell to none; and so
    I sing, as the boy does of the burying ground, because I am
    afraid.

    You inquire my books. For poets, I have Keats, and Mr. and
    Mrs. Browning. For prose, Mr. Ruskin, Sir Thomas Browne, and
    the Revelations. I went to school, but in your manner of the
    phrase had no education. When a little girl, I had a friend
    who taught me Immortality; but venturing too near, himself, he
    never returned. Soon after my tutor died, and for several years
    my lexicon was my only companion. Then I found one more, but he
    was not contented I be his scholar, so he left the land.

    You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a
    dog large as myself, that my father bought me. They are better
    than beings because they know, but do not tell; and the noise
    in the pool at noon excels my piano.

    I have a brother and sister; my mother does not care for
    thought, and father, too busy with his briefs to notice what
    we do. He buys me many books, but begs me not to read them,
    because he fears they joggle the mind. They are religious,
    except me, and address an eclipse, every morning, whom they
    call their “Father.”

    But I fear my story fatigues you. I would like to learn. Could
    you tell me how to grow, or is it unconveyed, like melody or
    witchcraft?

    You speak of Mr. Whitman. I never read his book, but was told
    that it was disgraceful.

    I read Miss Prescott’s “Circumstance,” but it followed me in
    the dark, so I avoided her.

    Two editors of journals came to my father’s house this winter,
    and asked me for my mind, and when I asked them “why” they said
    I was penurious, and they would use it for the world.

    I could not weigh myself, myself. My size felt small to me. I
    read your chapters in the “Atlantic,” and experienced honor for
    you. I was sure you would not reject a confiding question.

    Is this, sir, what you asked me to tell you? Your friend,

                                                      E. DICKINSON.

It will be seen that she had now drawn a step nearer, signing her name,
and as my “friend.” It will also be noticed that I had sounded her about
certain American authors, then much read; and that she knew how to put
her own criticisms in a very trenchant way. With this letter came some
more verses, still in the same birdlike script, as for instance the
following:—

    “Your riches taught me poverty,
      Myself a millionaire
    In little wealths, as girls could boast,
      Till, broad as Buenos Ayre,
    You drifted your dominions
      A different Peru,
    And I esteemed all poverty
      For life’s estate, with you.

    “Of mines, I little know, myself,
      But just the names of gems,
    The colors of the commonest,
      And scarce of diadems
    So much that, did I meet the queen,
      Her glory I should know;
    But this must be a different wealth,
      To miss it, beggars so.

    “I’m sure ’tis India, all day,
      To those who look on you
    Without a stint, without a blame,
      Might I but be the Jew!
    I’m sure it is Golconda
      Beyond my power to deem,
    To have a smile for mine, each day,
      How better than a gem!

    “At least, it solaces to know
      That there exists a gold
    Although I prove it just in time
      Its distance to behold;
    Its far, far treasure to surmise
      And estimate the pearl
    That slipped my simple fingers through
      While just a girl at school!”

Here was already manifest that defiance of form, never through
carelessness, and never precisely from whim, which so marked her. The
slightest change in the order of words—thus, “While yet at school, a
girl”—would have given her a rhyme for this last line; but no; she was
intent upon her thought, and it would not have satisfied her to make the
change. The other poem further showed, what had already been visible, a
rare and delicate sympathy with the life of nature:—

    “A bird came down the walk;
    He did not know I saw;
    He bit an angle-worm in halves
    And ate the fellow raw.

    “And then he drank a dew
    From a convenient grass,
    And then hopped sidewise to a wall,
    To let a beetle pass.

    “He glanced with rapid eyes
    That hurried all around;
    They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
    He stirred his velvet head

    “Like one in danger, cautious.
    I offered him a crumb,
    And he unrolled his feathers
    And rowed him softer home

    “Than oars divide the ocean,
    Too silver for a seam—
    Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
    Leap, plashless as they swim.”

It is possible that in a second letter I gave more of distinct praise or
encouragement, as her third is in a different mood. This was received
June 8, 1862. There is something startling in its opening image; and in
the yet stranger phrase that follows, where she apparently uses “mob” in
the sense of chaos or bewilderment:

    DEAR FRIEND,—Your letter gave no drunkenness, because I
    tasted rum before. Domingo comes but once; yet I have had few
    pleasures so deep as your opinion, and if I tried to thank you,
    my tears would block my tongue.

    My dying tutor told me that he would like to live till I had
    been a poet, but Death was much of mob as I could master, then.
    And when, far afterward, a sudden light on orchards, or a new
    fashion in the wind troubled my attention, I felt a palsy,
    here, the verses just relieve.

    Your second letter surprised me, and for a moment, swung. I
    had not supposed it. Your first gave no dishonor, because the
    true are not ashamed. I thanked you for your justice, but could
    not drop the bells whose jingling cooled my tramp. Perhaps the
    balm seemed better, because you bled me first. I smile when you
    suggest that I delay “to publish,” that being foreign to my
    thought as firmament to fin.

    If fame belonged to me, I could not escape her; if she did not,
    the longest day would pass me on the chase, and the approbation
    of my dog would forsake me then. My barefoot rank is better.

    You think my gait “spasmodic.” I am in danger, sir. You think
    me “uncontrolled.” I have no tribunal.

    Would you have time to be the “friend” you should think I need?
    I have a little shape: it would not crowd your desk, nor make
    much racket as the mouse that dens your galleries.

    If I might bring you what I do—not so frequent to trouble
    you—and ask you if I told it clear, ’twould be control to me.
    The sailor cannot see the North, but knows the needle can. The
    “hand you stretch me in the dark” I put mine in, and turn away.
    I have no Saxon now:—

        As if I asked a common alms,
        And in my wandering hand
        A stranger pressed a kingdom,
        And I, bewildered, stand;
        As if I asked the Orient
        Had it for me a morn,
        And it should lift its purple dikes
        And shatter me with dawn!

    But, will you be my preceptor, Mr. Higginson?

With this came the poem since published in one of her volumes and
entitled “Renunciation”; and also that beginning “Of all the sounds
dispatched abroad,” thus fixing approximately the date of those two. I
must soon have written to ask her for her picture, that I might form some
impression of my enigmatical correspondent. To this came the following
reply, in July, 1862:—

    Could you believe me without? I had no portrait, now, but am
    small, like the wren; and my hair is bold like the chestnut
    bur; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass, that the guest
    leaves. Would this do just as well?

    It often alarms father. He says death might occur and he has
    moulds of all the rest, but has no mould of me; but I noticed
    the quick wore off those things, in a few days, and forestall
    the dishonor. You will think no caprice of me.

    You said “Dark.” I know the butterfly, and the lizard, and the
    orchis. Are not those _your_ countrymen?

    I am happy to be your scholar, and will deserve the kindness I
    cannot repay.

    If you truly consent, I recite now. Will you tell me my fault,
    frankly as to yourself, for I had rather wince than die. Men do
    not call the surgeon to commend the bone, but to set it, sir,
    and fracture within is more critical. And for this, preceptor,
    I shall bring you obedience, the blossom from my garden, and
    every gratitude I know.

    Perhaps you smile at me. I could not stop for that. My business
    is circumference. An ignorance, not of customs, but if caught
    with the dawn, or the sunset see me, myself the only kangaroo
    among the beauty, sir, if you please, it afflicts me, and I
    thought that instruction would take it away.

    Because you have much business, beside the growth of me, you
    will appoint, yourself, how often I shall come, without your
    inconvenience.

    And if at any time you regret you received me, or I prove a
    different fabric to that you supposed, you must banish me.

    When I state myself, as the representative of the verse, it
    does not mean me, but a supposed person.

    You are true about the “perfection.” To-day makes Yesterday
    mean.

    You spoke of “Pippa Passes.” I never heard anybody speak of
    “Pippa Passes” before. You see my posture is benighted.

    To thank you baffles me. Are you perfectly powerful? Had I a
    pleasure you had not, I could delight to bring it.

                                                      YOUR SCHOLAR.

This was accompanied by this strong poem, with its breathless conclusion.
The title is of my own giving:—

            THE SAINTS’ REST

    Of tribulation, these are they,
      Denoted by the white;
    The spangled gowns, a lesser rank
      Of victors designate.

    All these did conquer; but the ones
      Who overcame most times,
    Wear nothing commoner than snow,
      No ornaments but palms.

    “Surrender” is a sort unknown
      On this superior soil;
    “Defeat” an outgrown anguish,
      Remembered as the mile

    Our panting ancle barely passed
      When night devoured the road;
    But we stood whispering in the house,
      And all we said, was “Saved!”

    [Note by the writer of the verses.] I spelled ankle wrong.

It would seem that at first I tried a little—a very little—to lead
her in the direction of rules and traditions; but I fear it was
only perfunctory, and that she interested me more in her—so to
speak—unregenerate condition. Still, she recognizes the endeavor. In this
case, as will be seen, I called her attention to the fact that while she
took pains to correct the spelling of a word, she was utterly careless of
greater irregularities. It will be seen by her answer that with her usual
naïve adroitness she turns my point:—

    DEAR FRIEND,—Are these more orderly? I thank you for the truth.

    I had no monarch in my life, and cannot rule myself; and when
    I try to organize, my little force explodes and leaves me bare
    and charred.

    I think you called me “wayward.” Will you help me improve?

    I suppose the pride that stops the breath, in the core of
    woods, is not of ourself.

    You say I confess the little mistake, and omit the large.
    Because I can see orthography; but the ignorance out of sight
    is my preceptor’s charge.

    Of “shunning men and women,” they talk of hallowed things,
    aloud, and embarrass my dog. He and I don’t object to them, if
    they’ll exist their side. I think Carlo would please you. He is
    dumb, and brave. I think you would like the chestnut tree I met
    in my walk. It hit my notice suddenly, and I thought the skies
    were in blossom.

    Then there’s a noiseless noise in the orchard that I let
    persons hear.

    You told me in one letter you could not come to see me “now,”
    and I made no answer; not because I had none, but did not think
    myself the price that you should come so far.

    I do not ask so large a pleasure, lest you might deny me.

    You say, “Beyond your knowledge.” You would not jest with me,
    because I believe you; but, preceptor, you cannot mean it?

    All men say “What” to me, but I thought it a fashion.

    When much in the woods, as a little girl, I was told that the
    snake would bite me, that I might pick a poisonous flower, or
    goblins kidnap me; but I went along and met no one but angels,
    who were far shyer of me than I could be of them, so I haven’t
    that confidence in fraud which many exercise.

    I shall observe your precept, though I don’t understand it,
    always.

    I marked a line in one verse, because I met it after I made it,
    and never consciously touch a paint mixed by another person.

    I do not let go it, because it is mine. Have you the portrait
    of Mrs. Browning?

    Persons sent me three. If you had none, will you have mine?

                                                      YOUR SCHOLAR.

A month or two after this I entered the volunteer army of the Civil War,
and must have written to her during the winter of 1862-63 from South
Carolina or Florida, for the following reached me in camp:—

                                                           AMHERST.

    DEAR FRIEND,—I did not deem that planetary forces annulled, but
    suffered an exchange of territory, or world.

    I should have liked to see you before you became improbable.
    War feels to me an oblique place. Should there be other
    summers, would you perhaps come?

    I found you were gone, by accident, as I find systems are,
    or seasons of the year, and obtain no cause, but suppose it
    a treason of progress that dissolves as it goes. Carlo still
    remained, and I told him.

        Best gains must have the losses’ test,
        To constitute them gains.

    My shaggy ally assented.

    Perhaps death gave me awe for friends, striking sharp and
    early, for I held them since in a brittle love, of more alarm
    than peace. I trust you may pass the limit of war; and though
    not reared to prayer, when service is had in church for our
    arms, I include yourself.... I was thinking to-day, as I
    noticed, that the “Supernatural” was only the Natural disclosed.

        Not “Revelation” ’tis that waits,
        But our unfurnished eyes.

    But I fear I detain you. Should you, before this reaches you,
    experience immortality, who will inform me of the exchange?
    Could you, with honor, avoid death, I entreat you, sir. It
    would bereave

                                                        YOUR GNOME.

    I trust the “Procession of Flowers” was not a premonition.

I cannot explain this extraordinary signature, substituted for the now
customary “Your Scholar,” unless she imagined her friend to be in some
incredible and remote condition, imparting its strangeness to her.
Swedenborg somewhere has an image akin to her “oblique place,” where he
symbolizes evil as simply an oblique angle. With this letter came verses,
most refreshing in that clime of jasmines and mockingbirds, on the
familiar robin:—

            THE ROBIN

    The robin is the one
    That interrupts the morn
    With hurried, few, express reports
    When March is scarcely on.

    The robin is the one
    That overflows the noon
    With her cherubic quantity,
    An April but begun.

    The robin is the one
    That, speechless from her nest,
    Submits that home and certainty
    And sanctity are best.

In the summer of 1863 I was wounded, and in hospital for a time, during
which came this letter in pencil, written from what was practically a
hospital for her, though only for weak eyes:—

    DEAR FRIEND,—Are you in danger? I did not know that you were
    hurt. Will you tell me more? Mr. Hawthorne died.

    I was ill since September, and since April in Boston for a
    physician’s care. He does not let me go, yet I work in my
    prison, and make guests for myself.

    Carlo did not come, because that he would die in jail; and the
    mountains I could not hold now, so I brought but the Gods.

    I wish to see you more than before I failed. Will you tell me
    your health? I am surprised and anxious since receiving your
    note.

        The only news I know
        Is bulletins all day
        From Immortality.

    Can you render my pencil? The physician has taken away my pen.

    I inclose the address from a letter, lest my figures fail.

    Knowledge of your recovery would excel my own.

                                                      E. DICKINSON.

Later this arrived:—

    DEAR FRIEND,—I think of you so wholly that I cannot resist to
    write again, to ask if you are safe? Danger is not at first,
    for then we are unconscious, but in the after, slower days.

    Do not try to be saved, but let redemption find you, as
    it certainly will. Love is its own rescue; for we, at our
    supremest, are but its trembling emblems.

                                                      YOUR SCHOLAR.

These were my earliest letters from Emily Dickinson, in their order. From
this time and up to her death (May 15, 1886) we corresponded at varying
intervals, she always persistently keeping up this attitude of “Scholar,”
and assuming on my part a preceptorship which it is almost needless
to say did not exist. Always glad to hear her “recite,” as she called
it, I soon abandoned all attempt to guide in the slightest degree this
extraordinary nature, and simply accepted her confidences, giving as much
as I could of what might interest her in return.

Sometimes there would be a long pause, on my part, after which would come
a plaintive letter, always terse, like this:—

“Did I displease you? But won’t you tell me how?”

Or perhaps the announcement of some event, vast in her small sphere, as
this:—

                                                           Amherst.

    Carlo died.

                                                      E. Dickinson.

    Would you instruct me now?

Or sometimes there would arrive an exquisite little detached strain,
every word a picture, like this:—

       THE HUMMING-BIRD

    A route of evanescence
    With a revolving wheel;
    A resonance of emerald;
    A rush of cochineal.
    And every blossom on the bush
    Adjusts its tumbled head;—
    The mail from Tunis, probably,
    An easy morning’s ride.

Nothing in literature, I am sure, so condenses into a few words
that gorgeous atom of life and fire of which she here attempts the
description. It is, however, needless to conceal that many of her
brilliant fragments were less satisfying. She almost always grasped
whatever she sought, but with some fracture of grammar and dictionary
on the way. Often, too, she was obscure, and sometimes inscrutable; and
though obscurity is sometimes, in Coleridge’s phrase, a compliment to the
reader, yet it is never safe to press this compliment too hard.

Sometimes, on the other hand, her verses found too much favor for her
comfort, and she was urged to publish. In such cases I was sometimes put
forward as a defense; and the following letter was the fruit of some such
occasion:

    DEAR FRIEND,—Thank you for the advice. I shall implicitly
    follow it.

    The one who asked me for the lines I had never seen.

    He spoke of “a charity.” I refused, but did not inquire. He
    again earnestly urged, on the ground that in that way I might
    “aid unfortunate children.” The name of “child” was a snare to
    me, and I hesitated, choosing my most rudimentary, and without
    criterion.

    I inquired of you. You can scarcely estimate the opinion to one
    utterly guideless. Again thank you.

                                                      YOUR SCHOLAR.

Again came this, on a similar theme:—

    DEAR FRIEND,—Are you willing to tell me what is right? Mrs.
    Jackson, of Colorado [“H. H.,” her early schoolmate], was with
    me a few moments this week, and wished me to write for this.
    [A circular of the “No Name Series” was inclosed.] I told her
    I was unwilling, and she asked me why? I said I was incapable,
    and she seemed not to believe me and asked me not to decide
    for a few days. Meantime, she would write me. She was so
    sweetly noble, I would regret to estrange her, and if you would
    be willing to give me a note saying you disapproved it, and
    thought me unfit, she would believe you. I am sorry to flee so
    often to my safest friend, but hope he permits me.

In all this time—nearly eight years—we had never met, but she had sent
invitations like the following:—

                                                           AMHERST.

    DEAR FRIEND,—Whom my dog understood could not elude others.

    I should be so glad to see you, but think it an apparitional
    pleasure, not to be fulfilled. I am uncertain of Boston.

    I had promised to visit my physician for a few days in May, but
    father objects because he is in the habit of me.

    Is it more far to Amherst?

    You will find a minute host, but a spacious welcome....

    If I still entreat you to teach me, are you much displeased? I
    will be patient, constant, never reject your knife, and should
    my slowness goad you, you knew before myself that

        Except the smaller size
        No lives are round.
        These hurry to a sphere
        And show and end.
        The larger slower grow
        And later hang;
        The summers of Hesperides
        Are long.

Afterwards, came this:—

                                                           AMHERST.

    DEAR FRIEND,—A letter always feels to me like immortality
    because it is the mind alone without corporeal friend. Indebted
    in our talk to attitude and accent, there seems a spectral
    power in thought that walks alone. I would like to thank you
    for your great kindness, but never try to lift the words which
    I cannot hold.

    Should you come to Amherst, I might then succeed, though
    gratitude is the timid wealth of those who have nothing. I am
    sure that you speak the truth, because the noble do, but your
    letters always surprise me.

    My life has been too simple and stern to embarrass any. “Seen
    of Angels,” scarcely my responsibility.

    It is difficult not to be fictitious in so fair a place, but
    tests’ severe repairs are permitted all.

    When a little girl I remember hearing that remarkable passage
    and preferring the “Power,” not knowing at the time that
    “Kingdom” and “Glory” were included.

    You noticed my dwelling alone. To an emigrant, country is idle
    except it be his own. You speak kindly of seeing me; could it
    please your convenience to come so far as Amherst, I should be
    very glad, but I do not cross my father’s ground to any house
    or town.

    Of our greatest acts we are ignorant. You were not aware that
    you saved my life. To thank you in person has been since then
    one of my few requests.... You will excuse each that I say,
    because no one taught me.

At last, after many postponements, on August 16, 1870, I found myself
face to face with my hitherto unseen correspondent. It was at her
father’s house, one of those large, square, brick mansions so familiar in
our older New England towns, surrounded by trees and blossoming shrubs
without, and within exquisitely neat, cool, spacious, and fragrant with
flowers. After a little delay, I heard an extremely faint and pattering
footstep like that of a child, in the hall, and in glided, almost
noiselessly, a plain, shy little person, the face without a single good
feature, but with eyes, as she herself said, “like the sherry the guest
leaves in the glass,” and with smooth bands of reddish chestnut hair. She
had a quaint and nun-like look, as if she might be a German canoness of
some religious order, whose prescribed garb was white piqué, with a blue
net worsted shawl. She came toward me with two day-lilies, which she put
in a childlike way into my hand, saying softly, under her breath, “These
are my introduction,” and adding, also under her breath, in childlike
fashion, “Forgive me if I am frightened; I never see strangers, and
hardly know what I say.” But soon she began to talk, and thenceforward
continued almost constantly; pausing sometimes to beg that I would
talk instead, but readily recommencing when I evaded. There was not a
trace of affectation in all this; she seemed to speak absolutely for her
own relief, and wholly without watching its effect on her hearer. Led
on by me, she told much about her early life, in which her father was
always the chief figure,—evidently a man of the old type, _la vieille
roche_ of Puritanism,—a man who, as she said, read on Sunday “lonely and
rigorous books”; and who had from childhood inspired her with such awe,
that she never learned to tell time by the clock till she was fifteen,
simply because he had tried to explain it to her when she was a little
child, and she had been afraid to tell him that she did not understand,
and also afraid to ask any one else lest he should hear of it. Yet she
had never heard him speak a harsh word, and it needed only a glance at
his photograph to see how truly the Puritan tradition was preserved in
him. He did not wish his children, when little, to read anything but
the Bible; and when, one day, her brother brought her home Longfellow’s
“Kavanagh,” he put it secretly under the pianoforte cover, made signs
to her, and they both afterwards read it. It may have been before this,
however, that a student of her father’s was amazed to find that she and
her brother had never heard of Lydia Maria Child, then much read, and
he brought “Letters from New York,” and hid it in the great bush of
old-fashioned tree-box beside the front door. After the first book, she
thought in ecstasy, “This, then, is a book, and there are more of them.”
But she did not find so many as she expected, for she afterwards said to
me, “When I lost the use of my eyes, it was a comfort to think that there
were so few real books that I could easily find one to read me all of
them.” Afterwards, when she regained her eyes, she read Shakespeare, and
thought to herself, “Why is any other book needed?”

She went on talking constantly and saying, in the midst of narrative,
things quaint and aphoristic. “Is it oblivion or absorption when things
pass from our minds?” “Truth is such a rare thing, it is delightful to
tell it.” “I find ecstasy in living; the mere sense of living is joy
enough.” When I asked her if she never felt any want of employment, not
going off the grounds and rarely seeing a visitor, she answered, “I never
thought of conceiving that I could ever have the slightest approach to
such a want in all future time”; and then added, after a pause, “I feel
that I have not expressed myself strongly enough,” although it seemed to
me that she had. She told me of her household occupations, that she made
all their bread, because her father liked only hers; then saying shyly,
“And people must have puddings,” this very timidly and suggestively, as
if they were meteors or comets. Interspersed with these confidences came
phrases so emphasized as to seem the very wantonness of over-statement,
as if she pleased herself with putting into words what the most
extravagant might possibly think without saying, as thus: “How do most
people live without any thoughts? There are many people in the world,—you
must have noticed them in the street,—how do they live? How do they
get strength to put on their clothes in the morning?” Or this crowning
extravaganza: “If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no
fire can ever warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if
the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the
only ways I know it. Is there any other way?”

I have tried to describe her just as she was, with the aid of notes taken
at the time; but this interview left our relation very much what it was
before;—on my side an interest that was strong and even affectionate, but
not based on any thorough comprehension; and on her side a hope, always
rather baffled, that I should afford some aid in solving her abstruse
problem of life.

The impression undoubtedly made on me was that of an excess of tension,
and of something abnormal. Perhaps in time I could have got beyond that
somewhat overstrained relation which not my will, but her needs, had
forced upon us. Certainly I should have been most glad to bring it down
to the level of simple truth and every-day comradeship; but it was not
altogether easy. She was much too enigmatical a being for me to solve in
an hour’s interview, and an instinct told me that the slightest attempt
at direct cross-examination would make her withdraw into her shell; I
could only sit still and watch, as one does in the woods; I must name my
bird without a gun, as recommended by Emerson.

After my visit came this letter:—

    Enough is so vast a sweetness, I suppose it never occurs, only
    pathetic counterfeits.

    Fabulous to me as the men of the Revelations who “shall not
    hunger any more.” Even the possible has its insoluble particle.

    After you went, I took “Macbeth” and turned to “Birnam Wood.”
    Came twice “To Dunsinane.” I thought and went about my work....

    The vein cannot thank the artery, but her solemn indebtedness
    to him, even the stolidest admit, and so of me who try, whose
    effort leaves no sound.

    You ask great questions accidentally. To answer them would be
    events. I trust that you are safe.

    I ask you to forgive me for all the ignorance I had. I find no
    nomination sweet as your low opinion.

    Speak, if but to blame your obedient child.

    You told me of Mrs. Lowell’s poems. Would you tell me where
    I could find them, or are they not for sight? An article of
    yours, too, perhaps the only one you wrote that I never knew.
    It was about a “Latch.” Are you willing to tell me? [Perhaps “A
    Sketch.”]

    If I ask too much, you could please refuse. Shortness to live
    has made me bold.

    Abroad is close to-night and I have but to lift my hands to
    touch the “Heights of Abraham.”

                                                         DICKINSON.

When I said, at parting, that I would come again some time, she replied,
“Say, in a long time; that will be nearer. Some time is no time.” We
met only once again, and I have no express record of the visit. We
corresponded for years, at long intervals, her side of the intercourse
being, I fear, better sustained; and she sometimes wrote also to my wife,
inclosing flowers or fragrant leaves with a verse or two. Once she sent
her one of George Eliot’s books, I think “Middlemarch,” and wrote, “I am
bringing you a little granite book for you to lean upon.” At other times
she would send single poems, such as these:—

              THE BLUE JAY

    No brigadier throughout the year
    So civic as the jay.
    A neighbor and a warrior too,
    With shrill felicity
    Pursuing winds that censure us
    A February Day,
    The brother of the universe
    Was never blown away.
    The snow and he are intimate;
    I’ve often seen them play
    When heaven looked upon us all
    With such severity
    I felt apology were due
    To an insulted sky
    Whose pompous frown was nutriment
    To their temerity.
    The pillow of this daring head
    Is pungent evergreens;
    His larder—terse and militant—
    Unknown, refreshing things;
    His character—a tonic;
    His future—a dispute;
    Unfair an immortality
    That leaves this neighbor out.

             THE WHITE HEAT

    Dare you see a soul at the white heat?
      Then crouch within the door;
    Red is the fire’s common tint,
      But when the vivid ore

    Has sated flame’s conditions,
      Its quivering substance plays
    Without a color, but the light
      Of unanointed blaze.

    Least village boasts its blacksmith,
      Whose anvil’s even din
    Stands symbol for the finer forge
      That soundless tugs within,

    Refining these impatient ores
      With hammer and with blaze,
    Until the designated light
      Repudiate the forge.

Then came the death of her father, that strong Puritan father who had
communicated to her so much of the vigor of his own nature, and who
bought her many books, but begged her not to read them. Mr. Edward
Dickinson, after service in the national House of Representatives and
other public positions, had become a member of the lower house of the
Massachusetts legislature. The session was unusually prolonged, and he
was making a speech upon some railway question at noon, one very hot day
(July 16, 1874), when he became suddenly faint and sat down. The house
adjourned, and a friend walked with him to his lodgings at the Tremont
House, where he began to pack his bag for home, after sending for a
physician, but died within three hours. Soon afterwards, I received the
following letter:—

    The last afternoon that my father lived, though with no
    premonition, I preferred to be with him, and invented an
    absence for mother, Vinnie [her sister] being asleep. He seemed
    peculiarly pleased, as I oftenest stayed with myself; and
    remarked, as the afternoon withdrew, he “would like it to not
    end.”

    His pleasure almost embarrassed me, and my brother coming, I
    suggested they walk. Next morning I woke him for the train, and
    saw him no more.

    His heart was pure and terrible, and I think no other like it
    exists.

    I am glad there is immortality, but would have tested it
    myself, before entrusting him. Mr. Bowles was with us. With
    that exception, I saw none. I have wished for you, since my
    father died, and had you an hour unengrossed, it would be
    almost priceless. Thank you for each kindness....

Later she wrote:—

    When I think of my father’s lonely life and lonelier death,
    there is this redress—

        Take all away;
        The only thing worth larceny
        Is left—the immortality.

    My earliest friend wrote me the week before he died, “If I
    live, I will go to Amherst; if I die, I certainly will.”

    Is your house deeper off?

                                                      YOUR SCHOLAR.

A year afterwards came this:—

    DEAR FRIEND,—Mother was paralyzed Tuesday, a year from the
    evening father died. I thought perhaps you would care.

                                                      YOUR SCHOLAR.

With this came the following verse, having a curious seventeenth-century
flavor:—

    “A death-blow is a life-blow to some,
    Who, till they died, did not alive become;
    Who, had they lived, had died, but when
    They died, vitality begun.”

And later came this kindred memorial of one of the oldest and most
faithful friends of the family, Mr. Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield
“Republican”:—

    DEAR FRIEND,—I felt it shelter to speak to you.

    My brother and sister are with Mr. Bowles, who is buried this
    afternoon.

    The last song that I heard—that was, since the birds—was “He
    leadeth me, he leadeth me; yea, though I walk”—then the voices
    stooped, the arch was so low.

After this added bereavement the inward life of the diminished household
became only more concentrated, and the world was held farther and
farther away. Yet to this period belongs the following letter, written
about 1880, which has more of what is commonly called the objective or
external quality than any she ever wrote me; and shows how close might
have been her observation and her sympathy, had her rare qualities taken
a somewhat different channel:—

    DEAR FRIEND,—I was touchingly reminded of [a child who had
    died] this morning by an Indian woman with gay baskets and
    a dazzling baby, at the kitchen door. Her little boy “once
    died,” she said, death to her dispelling him. I asked her what
    the baby liked, and she said “to step.” The prairie before
    the door was gay with flowers of hay, and I led her in. She
    argued with the birds, she leaned on clover walls and they
    fell, and dropped her. With jargon sweeter than a bell, she
    grappled buttercups, and they sank together, the buttercups the
    heaviest. What sweetest use of days! ’Twas noting some such
    scene made Vaughan humbly say,—

        “My days that are at best but dim and hoary.”

    I think it was Vaughan....

And these few fragmentary memorials—closing, like every human biography,
with funerals, yet with such as were to Emily Dickinson only the stately
introduction to a higher life—may well end with her description of the
death of the very summer she so loved.

    “As imperceptibly as grief
    The summer lapsed away,
    Too imperceptible at last
    To feel like perfidy.

    “A quietness distilled,
    As twilight long begun,
    Or Nature spending with herself
    Sequestered afternoon.

    “The dusk drew earlier in,
    The morning foreign shone,
    A courteous yet harrowing grace
    As guest that would be gone.

    “And thus without a wing
    Or service of a keel
    Our summer made her light escape
    Into the Beautiful.”




XX

JULIA WARD HOWE




JULIA WARD HOWE


Many years of what may be called intimacy with Mrs. Julia Ward Howe
do not impair one’s power of painting her as she is, and this for
two reasons: first, because she does not care to be portrayed in any
other way; and secondly, because her freshness of temperament is so
inexhaustible as to fix one’s attention always on what she said or did
not merely yesterday, but this morning. After knowing her more than forty
years, and having been fellow member or officer in half-a-dozen clubs
with her, first and last, during that time, I now see in her, not merely
the woman of to-day, but the woman who went through the education of
wifehood and motherhood, of reformer and agitator, and in all these was
educated by the experience of life.

She lived to refute much early criticism or hasty judgment, and this
partly from inward growth, partly because the society in which she moved
was growing for itself and understood her better. The wife of a reformer
is apt to be tested by the obstacles her husband encounters; if she
is sympathetic, she shares his difficulties, and if not, is perhaps
criticised by the very same people for not sharing his zeal. Mrs. Howe,
moreover, came to Boston at a time when all New Yorkers were there
regarded with a slight distrust; she bore and reared five children, and
doubtless, like all good mothers, had methods of her own; she went into
company, and was criticised by cliques which did not applaud. Whatever
she did, she might be in many eyes the object of prejudice. Beyond all,
there was, I suspect, a slight uncertainty in her own mind that was
reflected in her early poems.

From the moment when she came forward in the Woman Suffrage Movement,
however, there was a visible change; it gave a new brightness to her
face, a new cordiality in her manner, made her calmer, firmer; she found
herself among new friends and could disregard old critics. Nothing can be
more frank and characteristic than her own narrative of her first almost
accidental participation in a woman’s suffrage meeting. She had strayed
into the hall, still not half convinced, and was rather reluctantly
persuaded to take a seat on the platform, although some of her best
friends were there,—Garrison, Phillips, and James Freeman Clarke, her
pastor. But there was also Lucy Stone, who had long been the object of
imaginary disapproval; and yet Mrs. Howe, like every one else who heard
Lucy Stone’s sweet voice for the first time, was charmed and half won by
it. I remember the same experience at a New York meeting in the case of
Helen Hunt, who went to such a meeting on purpose to write a satirical
letter about it for the New York “Tribune,” but said to me, as we came
out together, “Do you suppose I could ever write a word against anything
which that woman wishes to have done?” Such was the influence of that
first meeting on Mrs. Howe. “When they requested me to speak,” she says,
“I could only say, I am with you. I have been with them ever since, and
have never seen any reason to go back from the pledge then given.” She
adds that she had everything to learn with respect to public speaking,
the rules of debate, and the management of her voice, she having hitherto
spoken in parlors only. In the same way she was gradually led into the
wider sphere of women’s congresses, and at last into the presidency of
the woman’s department at the great World’s Fair at New Orleans, in the
winter of 1883-84, at which she presided with great ability, organizing
a series of short talks on the exhibits, to be given by experts. While
in charge of this, she held a special meeting in the colored people’s
department, where the “Battle Hymn” was sung, and she spoke to them
of Garrison, Sumner, and Dr. Howe. Her daughter’s collection of books
written by women was presented to the Ladies’ Art Association of New
Orleans, and her whole enterprise was a singular triumph. In dealing with
public enterprises in all parts of the country she soon made herself
welcome everywhere. And yet this was the very woman who had written in
the “Salutatory” of her first volume of poems:—

      “I was born ’neath a clouded star,
    More in shadow than light have grown;
      Loving souls are not like trees
    That strongest and stateliest shoot alone.”

The truth is, that the life of a reformer always affords some training;
either giving it self-control or marring it altogether,—more frequently
the former; it was at any rate eminently so with her. It could be truly
said, in her case, that to have taken up reform was a liberal education.

Added to this was the fact that as her children grew, they filled and
educated the domestic side of her life. One of her most attractive poems
is that in which she describes herself as going out for exercise on a
rainy day and walking round her house, looking up each time at the window
where her children were watching with merry eagerness for the successive
glimpses of her. This is the poem I mean:—

          THE HEART’S ASTRONOMY

    This evening, as the twilight fell,
      My younger children watched for me;
    Like cherubs in the window framed,
      I saw the smiling group of three.

    While round and round the house I trudged,
      Intent to walk a weary mile,
    Oft as I passed within their range,
      The little things would beck and smile.

    They watched me, as Astronomers,
      Whose business lies in heaven afar,
    Await, beside the slanting glass,
      The reappearance of a star.

    Not so, not so, my pretty ones!
      Seek stars in yonder cloudless sky,
    But mark no steadfast path for me,—
      A comet dire and strange am I.

                   ...

    And ye, beloved ones, when ye know
      What wild, erratic natures are,
    Pray that the laws of heavenly force
      Would hold and guide the Mother star.

I remember well that household of young people in successive summers at
Newport, as they grew towards maturity; how they in turn came back from
school and college, each with individual tastes and gifts, full of life,
singing, dancing, reciting, poetizing, and one of them, at least, with a
talent for cookery which delighted all Newport; then their wooings and
marriages, always happy; their lives always busy; their temperaments so
varied. These are the influences under which “wild erratic natures” grow
calm.

A fine training it was also, for these children themselves, to see their
mother one of the few who could unite all kinds of friendship in the same
life. Having herself the _entrée_ of whatever the fashion of Newport
could in those days afford; entertaining brilliant or showy guests from
New York, Washington, London, or Paris; her doors were as readily open
at the same time to the plainest or most modest reformer—abolitionist,
woman suffragist, or Quaker; and this as a matter of course, without
struggle. I remember the indignation over this of a young visitor from
Italy, one of her own kindred, who was in early girlhood so independently
un-American that she came to this country only through defiance. Her
brother had said to her after one of her tirades, “Why do you not go
there and see for yourself?” She responded, “So I will,” and sailed the
next week. Once arrived, she antagonized everything, and I went in one
day and found her reclining in a great armchair, literally half buried in
some forty volumes of Balzac which had just been given her as a birthday
present. She was cutting the leaves of the least desirable volume, and
exclaimed to me, “I take refuge in Balzac from the heartlessness of
American society.” Then she went on to denounce this society freely,
but always excepted eagerly her hostess, who was “too good for it”; and
only complained of her that she had at that moment in the house two
young girls, daughters of an eminent reformer, who were utterly out of
place, she said,—knowing neither how to behave, how to dress, nor how
to pronounce. Never in my life, I think, did I hear a denunciation more
honorable to its object, especially when coming from such a source.

I never have encountered, at home or abroad, a group of people so
cultivated and agreeable as existed for a few years in Newport in the
summers. There were present, as intellectual and social forces, not
merely the Howes, but such families as the Bancrofts, the Warings, the
Partons, the Potters, the Woolseys, the Hunts, the Rogerses, the Hartes,
the Hollands, the Goodwins, Kate Field, and others besides, who were
readily brought together for any intellectual enjoyment. No one was the
recognized leader, though Mrs. Howe came nearest to it; but they met as
cheery companions, nearly all of whom have passed away. One also saw at
their houses some agreeable companions and foreign notabilities, as when
Mr. Bancroft entertained the Emperor and Empress of Brazil, passing under
an assumed name, but still attended by a veteran maid, who took occasion
to remind everybody that her Majesty was a Bourbon, with no amusing
result except that one good lady and experienced traveler bent one knee
for an instant in her salutation. The nearest contact of this circle with
the unequivocally fashionable world was perhaps when Mrs. William B.
Astor, the mother of the present representative of that name in England,
and herself a lover of all things intellectual, came among us.

It was in the midst of all this circle that the “Town and Country Club”
was formed, of which Mrs. Howe was president and I had the humbler
functions of vice-president, and it was under its auspices that the
festival indicated in the following programme took place, at the always
attractive seaside house of the late Mr. and Mrs. John W. Bigelow, of
New York. The plan was modeled after the Harvard Commencement exercises,
and its Latin programme, prepared by Professor Lane, then one of the
highest classical authorities in New England, gave a list of speakers
and subjects, the latter almost all drawn from Mrs. Howe’s ready wit.

                     Q · B · F · F · F · Q · S
                      Feminae Inlustrissimae
           Praestantissimae · Doctissimae · Peritissimae
                  Omnium · Scientarvum · Doctrici
               Omnium · Bonarum · Artium · Magistrae
                              Dominae

                        IULIA · WARD · HOWE
                   Praesidi · Magnificentissimae

                       Viro · Honoratissimo
                         Duci · Fortissimo
          In · Litteris · Humanioribus · Optime · Versato
          Domi · Militiaeque · Gloriam · Insignem · Nacto
                              Domino
                  Thomae · Wentworth · Higginsoni
                      Propraesidi · Vigilanti

                   Necnon · Omnibus · Sodalibus
                    Societatis · Urbanoruralis
                Feminis · et · Viris · Ornatissimis

             Aliisque · Omnibus · Ubicumque · Terrarum
               Quibus · Hae · Litterae · Pervenerint
                Salutem · In · Domino · Sempiternam

               Quoniam · Feminis · Praenobilissimis
                     Dominae · Annae · Bigelow
                  Dominae · Mariae · Annae · Mott
      Clementia · Doctrina · Humanitate · Semper · Insignibus
                    Societatem · Urbanoruralem
             Ad · Sollemnia · Festive · Concelebranda

           Invitare · Singulari · Benignitate · Placuit
                               Ergo
        Per · Has · Litteras · Omnibus · Notum · Sit · Quod
                        Comitia · Sollemnia
                   In · Aedibus · Bigelovensibus
                            Novi Portus
             Ante · Diem · Villi Kalendas · Septembres
             Anno · Salutis · CIↃ · IↃ · CCC · L XXXI
                     Hora Quinta Postmeridiana
             Qua · par · est · dignitate · habebuntur

    _Oratores hoc ordine dicturi sunt, praeter eos qui ualetudine
    uel alia causa impediti excusantur._

    I. Disquisitio Latina. “De Germanorum lingua et litteris.”
    Carolus Timotheus Brooks.

    II. Disquisitio Theologica. “How to sacrifice an Irish Bull to
    a Greek Goddess.” Thomas Wentworth Higginson.

    III. Dissertatio Rustica. “Social Small Potatoes; and how to
    enlarge their eyes.” Georgius Edvardus Waring.

    IV. Thesis Rhinosophica. “Our Noses, and What to do with them.”
    Francisca Filix Parton, Iacobi Uxor.

    V. Disquisitio Linguistica. “Hebrew Roots, with a plan of a new
    Grubbarium.” Guilielmus Watson Goodwin.

    VI. Poema. “The Pacific Woman.” Franciscus Bret Harte.

    VII. Oratio Historica. “The Ideal New York Alderman.” Iacobus
    Parton.

    Exercitationibus litterariis ad finem perductis, gradus
    honorarii Praesidis auspiciis augustissimis rite conferentur.

                          Mercurii Typis

I remember how I myself distrusted this particular project, which was
wholly hers. When she began to plan out the “parts” in advance,—the Rev.
Mr. Brooks, the foremost of German translators, with his Teutonic themes;
the agricultural Waring with his potatoes; Harte on Pacific women;
Parton with his New York aldermen, and I myself with two recent papers
mingled in one,—I ventured to remonstrate. “They will not write these
Commencement orations,” I said. “Then I will write them,” responded Mrs.
Howe, firmly. “They will not deliver them,” I said. “Then I will deliver
them,” she replied; and so, in some cases, she practically did. She and I
presided, dividing between us the two parts of Professor Goodwin’s Oxford
gown for our official adornment, to enforce the dignity of the occasion,
and the _Societas Urbanoruralis_, or Town and Country Club, proved equal
to the occasion. An essay on “rhinosophy” was given by “Fanny Fern”
(Mrs. Parton), which was illustrated on the blackboard by this equation,
written slowly by Mrs. Howe and read impressively:—

    “Nose + nose + nose = proboscis
      Nose - nose - nose = snub.”

She also sang a song occasionally, and once called up a class for
recitations from Mother Goose in six different languages; Professor
Goodwin beginning with a Greek version of “The Man in the Moon,” and
another Harvard man (now Dr. Gorham Bacon) following up with

    “Heu! iter didilum
        Felis cum fidulum
      Vacca transiluit lunam.
        Caniculus ridet
        Quum talem videt
      Et dish ambulavit cum spoonam.”

The question being asked by Mrs. Howe whether this last line was in
strict accordance with grammar, the scholar gave the following rule: “The
conditions of grammar should always give way to exigencies of rhyme.” In
conclusion, two young girls, Annie Bigelow and Mariana Mott, were called
forward to receive graduate degrees for law and medicine; the former’s
announcement coming in this simple form: “Annie Bigelow, my little lamb,
I welcome you to a long career at the ba-a.”

That time is long past, but “The Hurdy-Gurdy,” or any one of the later
children’s books by Mrs. Howe’s daughter, Mrs. Laura Richards, will
give a glimpse at the endless treasury of daring fun which the second
generation of that family inherited from their mother in her prime; which
last gift, indeed, has lasted pretty well to the present day. It was, we
must remember, never absolutely out of taste; but it must be owned that
she would fearlessly venture on half-a-dozen poor jokes for one good one.
Such a risk she feared not to take at any moment, beyond any woman I ever
knew. Nature gave her a perpetual youth, and what is youth if it be not
fearless?

In her earlier Newport period she was always kind and hospitable,
sometimes dreamy and forgetful, not always tactful. Bright things always
came readily to her lips, and a second thought sometimes came too late
to withhold a bit of sting. When she said to an artist who had at one
time painted numerous portraits of one large and well-known family,
“Mr. ⸺, given age and sex, could you create a Cabot?” it gave no cause
for just complaint, because the family likeness was so pervasive that
he would have grossly departed from nature had he left it out. But I
speak rather of the perils of human intercourse, especially from a keen
and ready hostess, where there is not time to see clearly how one’s
hearers may take a phrase. Thus when, in the deep valley of what was
then her country seat, she was guiding her guests down, one by one,
she suddenly stopped beside a rock or fountain and exclaimed,—for she
never premeditated things,—“Now, let each of us tell a short story
while we rest ourselves here!” The next to arrive was a German baron
well known in Newport and Cambridge,—a great authority in entomology,
who always lamented that he had wasted his life by undertaking so large
a theme as the diptera or two-winged insects, whereas the study of any
one family of these, as the flies or mosquitoes, gave enough occupation
for a man’s whole existence,—and he, prompt to obedience, told a lively
little German anecdote. “Capital, capital!” said our hostess, clapping
her hands merrily and looking at two ladies just descended on the scene.
“Tell it again, Baron, for these ladies; _tell it in English_.” It was
accordingly done, but I judged from the ladies’ faces that they would
have much preferred to hear it in German, as others had done, even if
they missed nine tenths of the words. Very likely the speaker herself may
have seen her error at the next moment, but in a busy life one must run
many risks. I doubt not she sometimes lost favor with a strange guest,
in those days, by the very quickness which gave her no time for second
thought. Yet, after all, of what quickness of wit may not this be said?
Time, practice, the habit of speaking in public meetings or presiding
over them, these helped to array all her quick-wittedness on the side
of tact and courtesy. Mrs. Howe was one of the earliest contributors
to the “Atlantic Monthly.” Her poem “Hamlet at the Boston” appeared
in the second year of the magazine, in February, 1859, and her “Trip
to Cuba” appeared in six successive numbers in that and the following
volume. Her poem “The Last Bird” also appeared in one of these volumes,
after which there was an interval of two and a half years during which
her contributions were suspended. Several more of her poems came out in
volume viii (1861), and the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in the number
for February, 1862 (ix, 145). During the next two years there appeared
six numbers of a striking series called “Lyrics of the Street.” Most of
these poems, with others, were included in a volume called “Later Lyrics”
(1865). She had previously, however, in 1853, published her first volume
of poems, entitled “Passion Flowers”; and these volumes were at a later
period condensed into one by her daughters, with some omissions,—not
always quite felicitous, as I think,—this definitive volume bearing the
name “From Sunset Ridge” (1898).

Mrs. Howe, like her friend Dr. Holmes, has perhaps had the disappointing
experience of concentrating her sure prospects of fame on a single poem.
What the “Chambered Nautilus” represents in his published volumes, the
“Battle Hymn of the Republic” represents for her. In each case the poet
was happy enough to secure, through influences impenetrable, one golden
moment. Even this poem, in Mrs. Howe’s case, was not (although many
suppose otherwise) a song sung by all the soldiers. The resounding lyric
of “John Brown’s Body” reached them much more readily, but the “Battle
Hymn” will doubtless survive all the rest of the rather disappointing
metrical products of the war. For the rest of her poems, they are rarely
quite enough concentrated; they reach our ears attractively, but not with
positive mastery. Of the war songs, the one entitled “Our Orders” was
perhaps the finest,—that which begins,—

    “Weave no more silks, ye Lyons looms,
      To deck our girls for gay delights!
    The crimson flower of battle blooms,
      And solemn marches fill the night.”

“Hamlet at the Boston” is a strong and noble poem, as is “The Last Bird,”
which has a flavor of Bryant about it. “Eros has Warning” and “Eros
Departs” are two of the profoundest; and so is the following, which I
have always thought her most original and powerful poem after the “Battle
Hymn,” in so far that I ventured to supply a feebler supplement to it on
a late birthday.

It is to be remembered that in the game of “Rouge et Noir” the
announcement by the dealer, “Rouge gagne,” implies that the red wins,
while the phrase “Donner de la couleur” means simply to follow suit and
accept what comes.

                 ROUGE GAGNE

    The wheel is turned, the cards are laid;
    The circle’s drawn, the bets are paid:
    I stake my gold upon the red.

    The rubies of the bosom mine,
    The river of life, so swift divine,
    In red all radiantly shine.

    Upon the cards, like gouts of blood,
    Lie dinted hearts, and diamonds good,
    The red for faith and hardihood.

    In red the sacred blushes start
    On errand from a virgin heart,
    To win its glorious counterpart.

    The rose that makes the summer fair,
    The velvet robe that sovereigns wear
    The red revealment could not spare.

    And men who conquer deadly odds
    By fields of ice and raging floods,
    Take the red passion from the gods.

    Now Love is red, and Wisdom pale,
    But human hearts are faint and frail
    Till Love meets Love, and bids it hail.

    I see the chasm, yawning dread;
    I see the flaming arch o’erhead:
    I stake my life upon the red.

This was my daring supplement, which appeared in the “Atlantic Monthly”
(Contributors’ Club) for October, 1906.

               LA COULEUR

    “I stake my life upon the red!”
    With hair still golden on her head,
    Dame Julia of the Valley said.

    But Time for her has plans not told,
    And while her patient years unfold
    They yield the white and not the gold.

    Where Alpine summits loftiest lie,
    The brown, the green, the red pass by,
    And whitest top is next the sky.

    And now with meeker garb bedight,
    Dame Julia sings in loftier light,
    “I stake my life upon the white!”

Turning to Mrs. Howe’s prose works, one finds something of the same
obstruction, here and there, from excess of material. Her autobiography,
entitled “Reminiscences,” might easily, in the hands of Mr. M. D.
Conway, for instance, have been spread out into three or four interesting
octavos; but in her more hurried grasp it is squeezed into one volume,
where groups of delightful interviews with heroes at home and abroad
are crowded into some single sentence. Her lectures are better arranged
and less tantalizing, and it would be hard to find a book in American
literature better worth reprinting and distributing than the little
volume containing her two addresses on “Modern Society.” In wit, in
wisdom, in anecdote, I know few books so racy. Next to it is the lecture
“Is Polite Society Polite?” so keen and pungent that it is said a young
man was once heard inquiring for Mrs. Howe after hearing it, in a country
town, and when asked why he wished to see her, replied, “Well, I did
put my brother in the poorhouse, and now that I have heard Mrs. Howe,
I suppose that I must take him out.” In the large collection of essays
comprised in the same volume with this, there are papers on Paris and on
Greece which are full of the finest flavor of anecdote, sympathy, and
memory, while here and there in all her books one meets with glimpses of
Italy which remind one of that scene on the celebration of the birthday
of Columbus, when she sat upon the platform of Faneuil Hall, the only
woman, and gave forth sympathetic talk in her gracious way to the loving
Italian audience, which gladly listened to their own sweet tongue from
her. Then, as always, she could trust herself freely in speech, for she
never spoke without fresh adaptation to the occasion, and her fortunate
memory for words and names is unimpaired at ninety.

Since I am here engaged upon a mere sketch of Mrs. Howe, not a formal
memoir, I have felt free to postpone until this time the details of
her birth and parentage. She was the daughter of Samuel and Julia Rush
(Cutler) Ward, and was born at the house of her parents in the Bowling
Green, New York city, on May 27, 1819. She was married on April 14, 1843,
at nearly twenty-four years of age, to Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, whom
she had met on visits to Boston. They soon went to Europe,—the first of
many similar voyages,—where her eldest daughter, Julia Romana, was born
during the next spring. This daughter was the author of a volume of poems
entitled “Stray Clouds,” and of a description of the Summer School of
Philosophy at Concord entitled “Philosophiæ Quæstor,” and was the founder
of a metaphysical club of which she was president. She became the wife
of the late Michael Anagnos, of Greek origin, her father’s successor
in charge of the Institution for the Blind, and the news of her early
death was received with general sorrow. Mrs. Howe’s second daughter was
named Florence Marion, became in 1871 the wife of David Prescott Hall,
of the New York Bar, and was author of “Social Customs” and “The Correct
Thing,” being also a frequent speaker before the women’s clubs. Mrs.
Howe’s third daughter, Mrs. Laura E. Richards, was married in the same
year to Henry Richards, of Gardiner, Maine, a town named for the family
of Mr. Richards’s mother, who established there a once famous school, the
Gardiner Lyceum. The younger Mrs. Richards is author of “Captain January”
and other stories of very wide circulation, written primarily for her
own children, and culminating in a set of nonsense books of irresistible
humor illustrated by herself. Mrs. Howe’s youngest daughter, Maud,
distinguished for her beauty and social attractiveness, is the wife of
Mr. John Elliott, an English artist, and has lived much in Italy, where
she has written various books of art and literature, of which “Atalanta
in the South” was the first and “Roma Beata” one of the last. Mrs. Howe’s
only son, Henry Marion, graduated at Harvard University in 1869 and from
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1871, is a mining engineer
and expert, and is a professor in the School of Mines at Columbia
University. His book on “The Metallurgy of Steel” has won for him a high
reputation. It will thus be seen that Mrs. Howe has had the rare and
perhaps unequaled experience of being not merely herself an author, but
the mother of five children, all authors. She has many grandchildren, and
even a great-grandchild, whose future career can hardly be surmised.

There was held, in honor of Mrs. Howe’s eighty-sixth birthday (May 27,
1905), a meeting of the Boston Authors’ Club, including a little festival
whose plan was taken from the annual Welsh festival of the Eistedfodd,
at which every bard of that nation brought four lines of verse—a sort
of four-leaved clover—to his chief. This being tried at short notice
for Mrs. Howe, there came in some sixty poems, of which I select a few,
almost at random, to make up the outcome of the festival, which last did
not perhaps suffer from the extreme shortness of the notice:—

           BIRTHDAY GREETINGS, LIMITED

    Why limit to one little four-line verse
      Each birthday wish, for her we meet to honor?
    Else it might take till mornrise to rehearse
      All the glad homage we would lavish on her!

                          JOHN TOWNSEND TROWBRIDGE.

           THE “NONNA” OF MAGNA ITALIA

    Within the glow shed by her heart of gold,
      Warm Southern sunshine cheers our Northern skies,
    And pilgrim wanderers, homesick and a-cold,
      Find their loved Italy in her welcoming eyes.

                                       VIDA D. SCUDDER.

       FIVE O’CLOCK WITH THE IMMORTALS

    The Sisters Three who spin our fate
    Greet Julia Ward, who comes quite late;
    How Greek wit flies! They scream with glee,
    Drop thread and shears, and make the tea.

                                 E. H. CLEMENT.

    Hope now abiding, faith long ago,
      Never a shadow between.
    White of the lilacs and white of the snow,
      Seventy and sixteen.

                           MARY GRAY MORRISON.

    In English, French, Italian, German, Greek,
    Our many-gifted President can speak.
    Wit, Wisdom, world-wide Knowledge grace her tongue
    And she is _only_ Eighty-six years young!

                                   NATHAN HASKELL DOLE.

    How to be gracious? How to be true?
    Poet, and Seer, and Woman too?
    To crown with Spring the Winter’s brow?
    Here is the answer: _this_ is Howe.

                      MARY ELIZABETH BLAKE.

    If man could change the universe
    By force of epigrams in verse,
    He’d smash some idols, I allow,
    But who would alter Mrs. Howe?

                        ROBERT GRANT.

    Lady who lovest and who livest Peace,
      And yet didst write Earth’s noblest battle song
    At Freedom’s bidding,—may thy fame increase
      Till dawns the warless age for which we long!

                            FREDERIC LAWRENCE KNOWLES.

    Dot oldt Fader Time must be cutting some dricks,
    Vhen he calls our goot Bresident’s age eighty-six.
    An octogeranium! Who would suppose?
    My dear Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, der time goes!

                YAWCOB STRAUSS (CHARLES FOLLEN ADAMS).

    You, who are of the spring,
    To whom Youth’s joys _must_ cling,
    May all that Love can give
    Beguile you long to live—
          Our Queen of Hearts.

              LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON.

    H ere, on this joyous day of days,
    O deign to list my skill-less praise.
    W hate’er be said with tongue or pen
    E xtolling thee, I cry “Amen.”

                        BEULAH MARIE DIX.

Mrs. Howe was not apprised of the project in advance, and certainly had
not seen the verses; but was, at any rate, ready as usual, and this
sketch may well close with her cheery answer:—

                        MRS. HOWE’S REPLY

    Why, bless you, I ain’t nothing, nor nobody, nor much,
    If you look in your Directory you’ll find a thousand such.
    I walk upon the level ground, I breathe upon the air,
    I study at a table and reflect upon a chair.

    I know a casual mixture of the Latin and the Greek,
    I know the Frenchman’s _parlez-vous_, and how the Germans speak;
    Well can I add, and well subtract, and say twice two is four,
    But of those direful sums and proofs remember nothing more.

    I wrote a poetry book one time, and then I wrote a play,
    And a friend who went to see it said she fainted right away.
    Then I got up high to speculate upon the Universe,
    And folks who heard me found themselves no better and no worse.

    Yes, I’ve had a lot of birthdays and I’m growing very old,
    That’s why they make so much of me, if once the truth were told.
    And I love the shade in summer, and in winter love the sun,
    And I’m just learning how to live, my wisdom’s just begun.

    Don’t trouble more to celebrate this natal day of mine,
    But keep the grasp of fellowship which warms us more than wine.
    Let us thank the lavish hand that gives world beauty to our eyes,
    And bless the days that saw us young, and years that make us wise.




XXI

WILLIAM JAMES ROLFE




WILLIAM JAMES ROLFE


The “man of one book” (_homo unius libri_) whom St. Thomas Aquinas
praised has now pretty nearly vanished from the world; and those men
are rare, especially in our versatile America, who have deliberately
chosen one department of literary work and pursued it without essential
variation up to old age. Of these, Francis Parkman was the most
conspicuous representative, and William James Rolfe is perhaps the
most noticeable successor,—a man who, upon a somewhat lower plane than
Parkman, has made for himself a permanent mark in a high region of
editorship, akin to that of Furnivall and a few compeers in England. A
teacher by profession all his life, his especial sphere has been the
English department, a department which he may indeed be said to have
created in our public schools, and thus indirectly in our colleges.

William James Rolfe, son of John and Lydia Davis (Moulton) Rolfe, was
born on December 10, 1827, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, a rural city
which has been the home at different times of a number of literary and
public men, and is still, by its wide, elm-shaded chief avenue and ocean
outlook, found attractive by all visitors. Rolfe’s boyhood, however,
was passed mainly in Lowell, Massachusetts, where he was fitted for
college in the high school. He spent three years at Amherst College,
but found himself unable to afford to remain any longer, and engaged
in school-teaching as a means of immediate support. A bankrupt country
academy at Wrentham, about twenty-five miles from Boston, was offered to
him rent free if he would keep a school in it, and, for want of anything
better, he took it. He had to teach all the grammar and high school
branches, including the fitting of boys for college, and his pupils
ranged from ten years old to those two or three years older than himself.
He was the only teacher, and heard from sixteen to twenty classes a
day. Besides these, which included classes in Latin, French, Greek, and
German, he had pupils out of school in Spanish and Italian, adding to all
this the enterprise, then wholly new, of systematically teaching English
with the study of standard writers. This was apparently a thing never
done before that time in the whole United States.

So marked was the impression made by his mode of teaching that it led
to his appointment as principal of the pioneer public high schools at
Dorchester, Massachusetts. He there required work in English of all his
pupils, boys and girls alike, including those who had collegiate aims.
At this time no English, as such, was required at any American college,
and it was only since 1846 that Harvard had introduced even a preliminary
examination, in which Worcester’s “Elements of History and Elements of
Geography” were added to the original departments of Latin, Greek, and
mathematics. Rolfe’s boys enjoyed the studies in English literature,
but feared lest they might fail in the required work in classics unless
they were excused from English. To relieve their anxiety and his own,
their teacher wrote to Professor Felton, afterwards President of Harvard,
telling him what his boys were doing in English, and asking permission
to omit some portion of his Greek Reader then required for admission.
Professor Felton replied, in substance, “Go ahead with the English
and let the Greek take care of itself.” As a result, all four of the
boys entered Harvard without conditions, and it is worth noticing that
they all testified that no part of their preparatory training was more
valuable to them in college than this in English. It is also noticeable
that the late Henry A. Clapp, of Boston, long eminent as a lecturer on
Shakespeare, was one of these boys.

In the summer of 1857 Mr. Rolfe was invited to take charge of the high
school at Lawrence, Massachusetts, on a larger scale than the Dorchester
institution, and was again promoted after four years to Salem, and the
next year to be principal of the Cambridge high school, where he remained
until 1868. Since that time he has continued to reside in Cambridge,
and has devoted himself to editorial and literary work. His literary
labors from 1869 to the present day have been vast and varied. He has
been one of the editors of the “Popular Science News” (formerly the
Boston “Journal of Chemistry”), and for nearly twenty years has had
charge of the department of Shakespeareana in the “Literary World” and
the “Critic,” to which he has also added “Poet-Lore.” He has written
casual articles for other periodicals. In 1865 he published a handbook
of Latin poetry with J. H. Hanson, A. M., of Waterville, Maine. In
1867 he followed this by an American edition of Craik’s “English of
Shakespeare.” Between 1867 and 1869, in connection with J. A. Gillet, he
brought out the “Cambridge course” in physics, in six volumes. In 1870
he edited Shakespeare’s “Merchant of Venice” with such success that by
1883 he had completed an edition of all the plays in forty volumes. It
has long been accepted as a standard critical authority, being quoted
as such by leading English and German editors. He was lately engaged
in a thorough revision of this edition, doing this task after he had
reached the age of seventy-five. He has also edited Scott’s complete
poems, as well as (separately) “The Lady of the Lake” and “The Lay of
the Last Minstrel”; an _édition de luxe_ of Tennyson’s works in twelve
volumes, and another, the Cambridge Edition, in one volume. He has edited
volumes of selections from Milton, Gray, Goldsmith, Wordsworth, and
Browning, with Mrs. Browning’s “Sonnets from the Portuguese.” He is also
the author of “Shakespeare the Boy,” with sketches of youthful life of
that period; “The Satchel Guide to Europe,” published anonymously for
twenty-eight years; and a book on the “Elementary Study of English.” With
his son, John C. Rolfe, Ph. D., Professor of Latin in the University of
Pennsylvania, he has edited Macaulay’s “Lays of Ancient Rome.” He has
published a series of elementary English classics in six volumes. He has
also supervised the publication of the “New Century _édition de luxe_”
of Shakespeare in twenty-four volumes, besides writing for it a “Life
of Shakespeare” which fills a volume of five hundred and fifty pages,
now published separately. It is safe to say that no other American, and
probably no Englishman, has rivaled him for the extent, variety, and
accuracy of his services as an editor.

This work may be justly divided into two parts: that dealing mainly with
Shakespeare, and that with single minor authors whose complete or partial
work he has reprinted. In Shakespeare he has, of course, the highest
theme to dwell on, but also that in which he has been preceded by a vast
series of workmen. In these his function has not been so much that of
original and individual criticism as of judiciously compiling the work
of predecessors, this last fact being especially true since the printing
of the Furness edition. It is in dealing with the minor authors that he
has been led to the discovery, at first seeming almost incredible, that
the poems which most claimed the attention of the world have for that
very reason been gradually most changed and perverted in printing. Gray’s
“Elegy in a Country Churchyard,” for instance, has appeared in polyglot
editions; it has been translated fifteen times into French, thirteen into
Italian, twelve times into Latin, and so on down through Greek, German,
Portuguese, and Hebrew. No one poem in the English language, even by
Longfellow, equals it in this respect. The editions which appeared in
Gray’s own time were kept correct through his own careful supervision;
and the changes in successive editions were at first those made by
himself, usually improvements, as where he changed “some village Cato”
to “some village Hampden,” and substituted in the same verse “Milton”
for “Tully” and “Cromwell” for “Cæsar.” But there are many errors in
Pickering’s edition, and these have been followed by most American
copies. It may perhaps be doubted whether Dr. Rolfe is quite correct in
his opinion where he says in his preface to this ode, “No vicissitudes of
taste or fashion have affected its popularity”; it is pretty certain that
young people do not know it by heart so generally as they once did, and
Wordsworth pronounced its dialect often “unintelligible”; but we are all
under obligation to Dr. Rolfe for his careful revision of this text.

Turning now to Scott’s “Lady of the Lake,” which would seem next in
familiarity to Gray’s “Elegy,” we find scores of corrections, made in
Rolfe’s, of errors that have crept gradually in since the edition of
1821. For instance, in Canto II, l. 685, every edition since 1821 has had
“I meant not all my _heart_ would say,” the correct reading being “my
_heat_ would say.” In Canto VI, l. 396, the Scottish “_boune_” has been
changed to “_bound_” and eight lines below, the old word “_barded_” has
become “_barbed_”; and these are but a few among many examples.

When we turn to Shakespeare, we find less direct service of this kind
required than in the minor authors; less need of the microscope. At
any rate, the variations have all been thoroughly scrutinized, and no
flagrant changes have come to light since the disastrous attempt in
that direction of Mr. Collier in 1852. On the other hand, we come to a
new class of variations, which it would have been well perhaps to have
stated more clearly in the volumes where they occur; namely, the studied
omissions, in Rolfe’s edition, of all indecent words or phrases. There
is much to be said for and against this process of Bowdlerizing, as it
was formerly called; and those who recall the publication of the original
Bowdler experiment in this line, half a century ago, and the seven
editions which it went through from 1818 to 1861, can remember with what
disapproval such expurgation was long regarded. Even now it is to be
noticed that the new edition of reprints of the early folio Shakespeares,
edited by two ladies, Misses Clarke and Porter, adopts no such method.
Of course the objection to the process is on the obvious ground that
concealment creates curiosity, and the great majority of copies of
Shakespeare will be always unexpurgated, so that it is very easy to turn
to them. Waiving this point, and assuming the spelling to be necessarily
modernized, it is difficult to conceive of any school edition done more
admirably than the new issue of Mr. Rolfe’s volumes of Shakespeare’s
works. The type is clear, the paper good, and the notes and appendices
are the result of long experience. When one turns back, for instance,
to the old days of Samuel Johnson’s editorship, and sees the utter
triviality and dullness of half the annotations of that very able man,
one feels the vast space of time elapsed between his annotations and Dr.
Rolfe’s. This applies even to notes that seem almost trivial, and many a
suggestion or bit of explanation which seems to a mere private student
utterly wasted can be fully justified by cases in which still simpler
points have proved seriously puzzling in the school-room.

It has been said that every Shakespeare critic ended with the desire to
be Shakespeare’s biographer, although fortunately most of them have been
daunted by discouragement or the unwillingness of booksellers. Here,
also, Mr. Rolfe’s persistent courage has carried him through, and his
work, aided by time and new discoveries, has probably portrayed, more
fully than that of any of his predecessors, the airy palace in which the
great enchanter dwelt. How far the occupant of the palace still remains
also a thing of air, we must leave for Miss Delia Bacon’s school of
heretics to determine. For myself, I prefer to believe, with Andrew Lang,
that “Shakespeare’s plays and poems were written by Shakespeare.”




XXII

GÖTTINGEN AND HARVARD A CENTURY AGO




GÖTTINGEN AND HARVARD A CENTURY AGO

    “Whene’er with haggard eyes I view
      This dungeon that I’m rotting in,
    I think of those companions true
    Who studied with me at the U-
      niversity of Göttingen,
      niversity of Göttingen.”


To the majority of Harvard graduates the chief association with Göttingen
is Canning’s once-famous squib, of which this is the first verse, in the
“Anti-Jacobin.” But the historical tie between the two universities is
far too close to be forgotten; and I have lately come into possession
of some quite interesting letters which demonstrate this. They show
conclusively how much the development of Harvard College was influenced,
nearly a century ago, by the German models, and how little in comparison
by Oxford and Cambridge; and as the letters are all from men afterwards
eminent, and pioneers in that vast band of American students who have
since studied in Germany, their youthful opinions will possess a peculiar
interest.

The three persons through whom this influence most came were Joseph
Green Cogswell, Edward Everett, and George Ticknor, all then studying
at Göttingen. It happens that they had all been intimate in my
father’s family, and as he was very much interested in the affairs
of the college,—of which he became in 1818 the “Steward and Patron,”
and practically, as the Reverend A. P. Peabody assures us,[22] the
Treasurer,—they sent some of their appeals and arguments through him.
This paper will consist chiefly of extracts from these letters, which
speak for themselves as to the point of view in which the whole matter
presented itself.

It will be well to bear in mind the following details as to the early
history of these three men, taking them in order of age. Cogswell was
born in 1786, graduated (Harvard) in 1806, was tutor in 1814-15 (having
previously tried mercantile life), and went abroad in 1816. Ticknor was
born in 1791, graduated (Dartmouth) in 1807, went to Germany in 1815, and
was appointed professor of Modern Languages at Harvard in 1817. Everett
was born in 1794, graduated (Harvard) in 1811, and went abroad on his
appointment as Greek professor (Harvard) in 1815.

The first of these letters is from George Ticknor, and is a very
striking appeal in behalf of the Harvard College Library, which then
consisted of less than 20,000 volumes, although the largest in the United
States, with perhaps one exception.

                                           GÖTTINGEN, May 20, 1816.

    As you have talked a good deal in your letter about the college
    and its prospects, I suppose I may be allowed to say a few
    words about it in reply, though to be sure I have already
    said more than was perhaps proper in one like myself, who am
    not even a graduate there, and shall very probably get no
    other answer to what I may venture to say hereafter than that
    I should do better to mind my books, and let those who are
    intrusted with the affairs of ye (_sic_) college take care
    of them. I cannot, however, shut my eyes on the fact, that
    one _very_ important and principal cause of the difference
    between our University and the one here is the different
    value we affix to a good library, and the different ideas we
    have of what a good library is. In America we look on the
    Library at Cambridge as a wonder, and I am sure nobody ever
    had a more thorough veneration for it than I had; but it was
    not necessary for me to be here six months to find out that
    it is nearly or quite half a century behind the libraries of
    Europe, and that it is much less remarkable that our stock of
    learning is so small than that it is so great, considering the
    means from which it is drawn are so inadequate. But what is
    worse than the absolute poverty of our collections of books
    is the relative inconsequence in which we keep them. We found
    new professorships and build new colleges in abundance, but
    we buy no books; and yet it is to me the most obvious thing
    in the world that it would promote the cause of learning and
    the reputation of the University ten times more to give six
    thousand dollars a year to the Library than to found three
    professorships, and that it would have been wiser to have spent
    the whole sum that the new chapel had cost on books than on a
    fine suite of halls. The truth is, when we build up a literary
    Institution in America we think too much of convenience and
    comfort and luxury and show; and too little of real, laborious
    study and the means that will promote it. We have not yet
    learnt that the Library is not only the first convenience of
    a University, but that it is the very first necessity,—that
    it is the life and spirit,—and that all other considerations
    must yield to the prevalent one of increasing and opening it,
    and opening it on the most liberal terms to _all_ who are
    disposed to make use of it. I cannot better explain to you the
    difference between our University in Cambridge and the one
    here than by telling you that here I hardly say too much when
    I say that it _consists_ in the Library, and that in Cambridge
    the Library is one of the last things thought and talked
    about,—that here they have forty professors and more than two
    hundred thousand volumes to instruct them, and in Cambridge
    twenty professors and less than twenty thousand volumes. This,
    then, you see is the thing of which I am disposed to complain,
    that we give comparatively so little attention and money to
    the Library, which is, after all, the Alpha and Omega of the
    whole establishment,—that we are mortified and exasperated
    because we have no learned men, and yet make it _physically_
    impossible for our scholars to become such, and that to escape
    from this reproach we appoint a multitude of professors, but
    give them a library from which hardly one and _not_ one of them
    can qualify himself to execute the duties of his office. You
    will, perhaps, say that these professors do not complain. I
    can only answer that you find the blind are often as gay and
    happy as those who are blessed with sight; but take a Cambridge
    professor, and let him live one year by a library as ample and
    as liberally administered as this is; let him know what it is
    to be forever sure of having the very book he wants either to
    read or to refer to; let him in one word _know_ that he can
    never be discouraged from pursuing any inquiry for want of
    means, but on the contrary let him feel what it is to have all
    the excitements and assistance and encouragements which those
    who have gone before him in the same pursuits can give him,
    and then at the end of this year set him down again under the
    parsimonious administration of the Cambridge library,—and I
    will promise you that he shall be as discontented and clamorous
    as my argument can desire.

    But I will trouble you no more with my argument, though I
    am persuaded that the further progress of learning among us
    depends on the entire change of the system against which it is
    directed.

The next extract is from a letter of Cogswell’s, and gives a glimpse at
the actual work done by these young men:—

                                          GÖTTINGEN, March 8, 1817.

    I must tell you something about our colony at Göttingen before
    I discuss other subjects, for you probably care little about
    the University and its host of professors, except as they
    operate upon us. First as to the Professor (Everett) and Dr.
    Ticknor, as they are called here; everybody knows them in this
    part of Germany, and also knows how to value them. For once
    in my life I am proud to acknowledge myself an American on
    the European side of the Atlantic: never was a country more
    fortunate in its representation abroad than ours has been in
    this instance; they will gain more for us in this respect than
    even in the treasures of learning they will carry back. Little
    as I have of patriotism, I delight to listen to the character
    which is here given of my countrymen; I mean as countrymen, and
    not as my particular friends: the despondency which it produces
    in my own mind of ever obtaining a place by their sides is
    more than counterbalanced by the gratification of my national
    feelings, to say not a word of my individual attachment. You
    must not think me extravagant, but I venture to say that the
    notions which the European literati have entertained of
    America will be essentially changed by G. and E.’s [Ticknor’s
    and Everett’s] residence on the Continent; we were known to be
    a brave, a rich, and an enterprising people, but that a scholar
    was to be found among us, or any man who had a desire to be a
    scholar, had scarcely been conceived. It will also be the means
    of producing new correspondences and connections between the
    men of the American and European sides of the Atlantic, and
    spread much more widely among us a knowledge of the present
    literature and science of this Continent.

    Deducting the time from the 13th of December to the 27th of
    January during which I was confined to my room, I have been
    pretty industrious; through the winter I behaved as well as
    one could expect. German has been my chief study; to give it a
    relief I have attended one hour a day to a lecture in Italian
    on the Modern Arts, and, to feel satisfied that I had some
    sober inquiry in hand, I have devoted another to Professor
    Saalfeld’s course of European Statistics, so that I have
    generally been able to count at night twelve hours of private
    study and private instruction. This has only sharpened not
    satisfied my appetite. I have laid out for myself a course of
    more diligent labors the next semester. I shall then be at
    least eight hours in the lecture rooms, beginning at six in
    the morning. I must contrive, besides, to devote eight other
    hours to private study. I am not in the least Germanized, and
    yet it appalls me when I think of the difference between an
    education here and in America. The great evil with us is, in
    our primary schools, the best years for learning are trifled
    and whiled away; boys learn nothing because they have no
    instructors, because we demand of one the full [work?] of
    ten, and because laziness is the first lesson which one gets
    in all our great schools. I know very well that we want but
    few closet scholars, few learned philologists, and few verbal
    commentators; that all our systems of government and customs
    and life suppose a preparation for making practical men,—men
    who move, and are felt in the world; but all this could be
    better done without wasting every year from infancy to manhood.
    The system of education here is the very reverse of our own:
    in America boys are let loose upon the work when they are
    children, and fettered when they are sent to our college; here
    they are cloistered, too much so I acknowledge, till they
    can guide themselves, and then put at their own disposal at
    the universities. Luther’s Reformation threw all the monkish
    establishments in the Protestant countries into the hands of
    the Princes, and they very wisely appropriated them to the
    purposes of education, but unluckily they have retained more of
    the monastic seclusion than they ought. The three great schools
    in Saxony, Pforte, Meissen, and ⸺ are kept in convents, and the
    boys enjoy little more than the liberty of a cloister. They are
    all very famous, the first more particularly; out of it have
    come half of the great scholars of the country. Still they are
    essentially defective in the point above named. Just in the
    neighborhood of Gotha is the admirable institution of Salzmann,
    in a delightfully pleasant and healthy valley; his number is
    limited to thirty-eight, and he has twelve instructors,—admits
    no boy who does not bring with him the fairest character: when
    once admitted they become his children, and the reciprocal
    relation is cherished with corresponding tenderness and
    respect. I should like to proceed a little farther in this
    subject, but the bottom of my paper forbids.

The following is from Ticknor again, and shows, though without giving
details, that the young men had extended their observations beyond
Göttingen:—

                                      GÖTTINGEN, November 30, 1816.

    DEAR SIR,—On returning here about a fortnight since, after a
    journey through North Germany which had occupied us about two
    months, I found your kind letter of August 4 waiting to welcome
    me. I thank you for it with all my heart, and take the first
    moment of leisure I can find in the busy commencement of a new
    term, to answer it, that I may soon have the same pleasure
    again.

    You say you wish to hear from me what hours of relaxation
    I have, and what acquaintances I make, in this part of the
    Continent. The first is very easily told, and the last would
    not have been difficult before the journey from which I have
    just returned; but now the number is more than I can write or
    you willingly hear. However, I will answer both your inquiries
    in the spirit in which they are made.

    As to relaxation, in the sense of the word in which I used to
    employ it at home,—meaning the hours I lounged so happily away
    when the weariness of the evening came, on your sofa, and the
    time I used to pass with my friends in general, I know not how
    or why, but always gayly and thoughtlessly,—of this sort of
    relaxation I know nothing here but the end of an evening which
    I occasionally permit myself to spend with Cogswell, whose
    residence here has in this respect changed the whole color of
    my life. During the last semester, I used to visit occasionally
    at about twenty houses in Göttingen, chiefly as a means of
    learning to speak the language. As the population here is so
    changeable, and as every man is left to live exactly as he
    chooses, it is customary for all those who wish to continue
    their intercourse with the persons resident here to make a call
    at the beginning of each semester, which is considered a notice
    that they are still here and still mean to go into society.
    I, however, feel no longer the necessity of visiting for the
    purpose of learning German, and now that Cogswell is here
    cannot desire it for any other purpose; have made visits only
    to three or four of the professors, and shall, therefore, not
    go abroad at all. As to exercise, however, I have enough. Three
    times a day I must cross the city entirely to get my lessons.
    I go out twice besides, a shorter distance for dinner and a
    fourth lesson; and four times a week I take an hour’s exercise
    for conscience’ sake and my mother’s in the riding-school. Four
    times a week I make Cogswell a visit of half an hour after
    dinner, and three times I spend from nine to ten in the evening
    with him, so that I feel I am doing quite right and quite as
    little as I ought to do in giving up the remaining thirteen
    hours of the day to study, especially as I gave fourteen to it
    last winter without injury.

    The journey we have lately taken was for the express purpose
    of seeing all the universities or schools of any considerable
    name in the country. This in a couple of months we easily
    accomplished, and of course saw professors, directors, and
    schoolmasters—men of great learning and men of little learning,
    and men of no learning at all—in shoals.

This is from Cogswell again, and is certainly a clarion appeal as to the
need of thoroughness in teaching and learning:—

                                          GÖTTINGEN, July 13, 1817.

    I hope that you and every other person interested in the
    College are reconciled to Mr. Everett’s plan of remaining
    longer in Europe than was at first intended, as I am sure
    you would be do you know the use he makes of his time, and
    the benefit you are all to derive from his learning. Before
    I came to Göttingen I used to wonder why it was that he
    wished to remain here so long; I now wonder he can consent
    to leave so soon. The truth is, you all mistake the cause of
    your impatience: you believe that it comes from a desire of
    seeing him at work for and giving celebrity to the College,
    but it arises from a wish to have him in your society, at
    your dinner-tables, at your suppers, your clubs, and your
    ladies, at your tea-parties (you perceive I am aiming at Boston
    folks): however, all who have formed such expectations must be
    disappointed; he will find that most of these gratifications
    must be sacrificed to attain the objects of a scholar’s
    ambition. What can men think when they say that two years are
    sufficient to make a Greek scholar? Does not everybody know
    that it is the labor of half a common life to learn to read
    the language with tolerable facility? I remember to have heard
    little Drisen say, a few days after I came here, that he had
    been spending eighteen years, at least sixteen hours a day,
    exclusively upon Greek, and that he could not now read a page
    of the tragedians without a dictionary. When I went home I
    struck Greek from the list of my studies; I now think no more
    of attaining it than I do of becoming an astrologer. In fact,
    the most heart-breaking circumstance attending upon human
    knowledge is that a man can never go any farther than “to know
    how little’s to be known”; it fills, then, the mind of scholars
    with despair to look upon the map of science, as it does that
    of the traveler to look upon the map of the earth, for both see
    what a mere speck can be traveled over, and of that speck how
    imperfect is the knowledge which is acquired. Let any one who
    believes that he has penetrated the mysteries of all science,
    and learnt the powers and properties of whatever is contained
    in the kingdoms of air, earth, fire, and water, but just bring
    his knowledge to the test; let him, for example, begin with
    what seems the simplest of all inquiries, and enumerate the
    plants which grow upon the surface of the globe, and call them
    by their names, and, when he finds that this is beyond his
    limits, let him descend to a single class and bring within
    it all that the unfathomed caves of ocean and the unclimbed
    mountains bear; and as this is also higher than he can reach,
    let him go still lower and include only one family, or a
    particular species, or an individual plant, and mark his points
    of ignorance upon each, and then, if his pride of knowledge is
    not humbled enough, let him take but a leaf or the smallest
    part of the most common flower, and give a satisfactory
    solution for many of the phenomena they exhibit. But, you will
    ask, is Göttingen the only place for the acquisition of such
    learning? No, not the only, but I believe far the best for
    such learning as it is necessary for Mr. E. to fit him to make
    Cambridge in some degree a Göttingen, and render it no longer
    requisite to depend upon the latter for the formation of their
    scholars: it is true that very few of what the Germans call
    scholars are needed in America; if there would only be one
    thorough one to begin with, the number would soon be sufficient
    for all the uses which could be made of them, and for the
    literary character of the country. This one, I say, could
    never be formed there, because, in the first place, there is
    no one who knows how it is to be done; secondly, there are no
    books, and then, by the habits of desultory study practiced
    there, are wholly incompatible with it. A man as a scholar
    must be completely _upset_, to use a blacksmith’s phrase; he
    must have learnt to give up his love of society and of social
    pleasures, his interest in the common occurrences of life, in
    the political and religious contentions of the country, and
    in everything not directly connected with his single aim. Is
    there any one willing to make such a sacrifice? This I cannot
    answer, but I do assure you that it is the sacrifice made by
    almost every man of classical learning in Germany, though to be
    sure the sacrifice of the enjoyments of friendly intercourse
    with mankind to letters is paying much less dear for fame here
    than the same thing would be in America. For my own part I am
    sorry I came here, because I was too old to be _upset_; like a
    horseshoe worn thin, I shall break as soon as I begin to wear
    on the other side: it makes me very restless at this period of
    my life to find that I know nothing. I would not have wished to
    have made the discovery unless I could at the same time have
    been allowed to remain in some place where I could get rid of
    my ignorance; and, now that I must go from Göttingen, I have no
    hope of doing that.

The following from Edward Everett carries the war yet farther into
Africa, and criticises not merely American colleges, but also secondary
schools:—

                                     GÖTTINGEN, September 17, 1817.

    You must not laugh at me for proceeding to business the first
    thing, and informing you in some sort as an argument, that, if
    I have been unreasonable in prolonging my stay here, I have
    at least passed my time not wholly to disadvantage,—that I
    received this morning my diploma as Doctor of Philosophy of
    this University, the first American, and as far as I know,
    Englishman, on whom it has ever been conferred. You will
    perhaps have heard that it was my intention to have passed
    from this University to that of Oxford, and to have spent this
    winter there. I have altered this determination for the sake
    of joining forces with Theodore Lyman at Paris this winter;
    and as he proposes to pass the ensuing summer in traveling in
    the South of France, I shall take that opportunity of going to
    England. It is true I should have liked to have gone directly
    from Göttingen to Oxford, to have kept the thread as it were
    unbroken, and gone on with my studies without any interruption.
    But I find, even at Paris, that I have no object there but
    study; and Professor Gaisford, at Oxford, writes me that it
    is every way better that I should be there in summer, as the
    Library is open a greater part of the day. Meanwhile, I try to
    feel duly grateful to Providence and my friends at home to whom
    I owe the opportunity of resorting to the famous fountains of
    European wisdom. The only painful feeling I carry with me is
    that I may not have health, or strength, or ability to fulfill
    the demands which such an opportunity will create and justify.
    More is apt to be expected in such cases than it is possible
    to perform; besides that, after the schoolmaster is prepared
    for his duty, all depends upon whether the schoolboy is also
    prepared for his. You must not allow any report to the contrary
    to shake your faith in my good-will in the cause. Some remarks
    which I committed to paper at the request of my brother upon
    the subject of a National University,—an institution which by
    exciting an emulation in our quarter would be the best thing
    that could happen to Cambridge,—have, I hear, led some good men
    to believe that I was for deserting the service at Cambridge
    still more promptly than I had done at Boston,—a suggestion
    certainly too absurd to have been made, or to need to have been
    contradicted. However, still more important than all which
    national or state universities can do themselves immediately,
    is the necessity we must impose on the schools of reforming
    and improving themselves, or, rather, are the steps we must
    take to create good schools. All we have are bad, the common
    reading and writing ones not excepted; but of schools which we
    have to fit boys for college, I think the Boston Latin School
    and the Andover Academy are the only ones that deserve the
    name, and much I doubt if they deserve it. There is much truth
    in the remark so constantly made that we are not old enough
    for European perfection, but we are old enough to do well all
    it is worth while to do at all; and if a child here in eight
    years can read and speak Latin fluently, there is no reason
    why our youth, after spending the same time on it, should
    know little or nothing about it. Professional education with
    us commences little or no earlier than it does here, and yet
    we approach it in all departments with a quarter part of the
    previous qualification which is here possessed. But also it is
    the weakness of mankind to do more than he is obliged to. The
    sort of obligation, to be sure, which is felt, differs with
    different spirits, and one is content to be the first man in
    his ward, one in his town, one in his county, another in his
    state. To all these degrees of dignity the present education
    is adequate; and we turn out reputable ministers, doctors,
    lawyers, professors, and schoolmasters,—men who get to be as
    wise at ye (_sic_) age of threescore as their fathers were at
    sixty, and who transmit the concern of life to their children
    in as good condition as they took it themselves. Meanwhile, the
    physical and commercial progress of ye (_sic_) country goes on,
    and more numerous doctors and more ministers are turned out,
    not more learned ones, to meet it. I blushed burning red to
    the ears the other day as a friend here laid his hand upon a
    newspaper containing the address of the students at Baltimore
    to Mr. Monroe, with the translation of it. It was less matter
    that the translation was not English; my German friend could
    not detect that. But that the original was not Latin I could
    not, alas! conceal. It was, unfortunately, just like enough
    to very bad Latin to make it impossible to pass it off for
    Kickapoo or Pottawattamy, which I was at first inclined to
    attempt. My German persisted in it that it was meant for Latin,
    and I wished in my heart that the Baltimore lads would stick to
    the example of their fathers and mob the Federalists, so they
    would give over this inhuman violence on the poor old Romans. I
    say nothing of ye (_sic_) address, for like all [illegible] it
    seems to have been ye (_sic_) object, in the majority of those
    productions, for those who made them to compliment, not the
    President, but themselves. It is a pity Dr. Kirkland’s could
    not have been published first, to serve as a model how they
    might speak to the President without coldness on one side and
    adulation on the other, and of themselves without intrusion or
    forwardness.

The following letter transfers Edward Everett to Oxford, and gives in
a somewhat trenchant way his unfavorable criticisms on the English
universities of that day. He subsequently sent his son to Cambridge,
England, but it was forty years later:—

                                              OXFORD, June 6, 1818.

    I have been over two Months in England, and am now visiting
    Oxford, having passed a Week in Cambridge. There is more
    teaching and more learning in our American Cambridge than
    there is in both the English Universities together, tho’
    between them they have four times Our number of Students. The
    misfortune for us is that our subjects are not so hopeful. We
    are obliged to do at Cambridge [U. S.] that which is done at
    Eton and Westminster, at Winchester, Rugby, and Harrow, as well
    as at Oxford and Cambridge. Boys _may_ go to Eton at 6, and
    do go often at 8, 10, and of Necessity before 12. They stay
    there under excellent Masters, 6 Years, and then come to the
    University. Whereas a smart clever boy with us, will learn out,
    even at Mr. Gould’s, in 4 Years, and it was the boast of a very
    distinguished Man Named Bird [Samuel Bird, H. C., 1809], who
    was two Years before me at Cambridge, that he had fitted in
    160 days. And I really think that I could, in six months teach
    a mature lad, who was willing to work hard, all the Latin and
    Greek requisite for admission.

This letter from Cogswell refers to George Bancroft, who was subsequently
sent out by Harvard College, after his graduation in 1817, that he might
be trained for the service of the institution.

                                          GÖTTINGEN, May 4th, 1819.

    It was truly generous and noble in the corporation to send out
    young Bancroft in the manner I understand they did; he will
    reward them for it. I thought very much of him, when I had
    him under my charge at Cambridge, and now he appears to me
    to promise a great deal more. I know not at whose suggestion
    this was done, but from the wisdom of the measure, I should
    conclude it must be the President’s; it is applying the remedy
    exactly when it is most wanted, a taste once created for
    classical learning at the College, and the means furnished for
    cultivating it, and the long desired reform in education in my
    opinion is virtually made; knowledge of every other kind may be
    as well acquired among us, as the purposes to which it is to
    be applied demand. We are not wanting in good lawyers or good
    physicians, and if we could but form a body of men of taste and
    letters, our literary reputation would not long remain at the
    low stand which it now is.

It appears from a letter of my father’s, fourteen years later (November
21, 1833), that, after four years abroad, Mr. Bancroft’s college career
was a disappointment, and he was evidently regarded as a man spoiled by
vanity and self-consciousness, and not commanding a strong influence over
his pupils. My father wrote of these two teachers:—

                                   CAMBRIDGE, MASS., 21 Nov., 1833.

    Cogswell at New York to negotiate. He is much better fitted
    for a City. He loves society, bustle, fashion, polish, and
    good living. He would do best in some Mercantile House as a
    partner, say to Bankers like Prime, Ward, and King. He was at
    first a Scholar, a Lawyer in Maine. His wife dying,—sister to
    Dr. Nichols’ wife (Gilman),—Mr. C. went abroad. Was supercargo,
    then a residing agent of Wm. Gray’s in Europe, Holland, France,
    and Italy; was a good Merchant; expensive in his habits, he
    did not accumulate; tired of roving, he accepted the office
    of Librarian here. He would not manage things under control
    of others, and so left College and sat up Round Hill School.
    His partner, Bancroft,—an unsuccessful scholar, pet of Dr.
    Kirkland’s, who like Everett had four years abroad, mostly
    Germany, and at expense of College,—came here unfit for
    anything. His manners, style of writing, Theology, etc., bad,
    and as a Tutor only the laughing butt of all College. Such an
    one was easily marked as unfit for a School.

From whatever cause, he remained as tutor for one year only (1822-23),
leaving Cambridge for the Round Hill School.

It would be curious to dwell on the later influence upon the college of
the other men from whom so much was reasonably expected. Ticknor, the
only one who was not a Harvard graduate, probably did most for Harvard
of them all, for he became professor of Modern Languages, and introduced
in that department the elective system, which there became really the
nucleus of the expanded system of later days. Everett, when President,
actually set himself against that method when the attempt had been
made to enlarge it under Quincy. Cogswell was librarian from 1821 to
1823; left Harvard for the Round Hill School, and became ultimately the
organizer of the Astor Library. Frederic Henry Hedge, who had studied in
Göttingen as a schoolboy and belonged to a younger circle, did not become
professor until many years later.

But while the immediate results of personal service to the college on
the part of this group of remarkable men may have been inadequate,—since
even Ticknor, ere parting, had with the institution a disagreement never
yet fully elucidated,—yet their collective influence both on Harvard
University and on American education was enormous. They helped to break
up that intellectual sterility which had begun to show itself during
the isolation of a merely colonial life; they prepared the way for the
vast modern growth of colleges, schools, and libraries in this country,
and indirectly helped that birth of a literature which gave us Irving,
Cooper, Bryant, and the “North American Review”; and culminated later in
the brilliant Boston circle of authors, almost all of whom were Harvard
men, and all of whom had felt the Harvard influence.




XXIII

OLD NEWPORT DAYS




OLD NEWPORT DAYS


It was my good fortune, after discharge from the army during the Civil
War, to dwell for a time under the hospitable roof of Mrs. Hannah Dame,
in Newport, Rhode Island. Passing out of the front door one day, just as
its bell rang, I saw before me one of the very handsomest men I had ever
beheld, as I thought. He wore civilian dress, but with an unmistakable
military air, and held out to me a card of introduction from a fellow
officer. He had been discharged from the army on the expiration of his
term of service with the regiment he had commanded in Frémont’s Mountain
Department. Being out of employment for a time, and unsettled, as many of
us were at that period, he came back to his early training as a market
gardener, and, having made the professional discovery that most of the
cabbages eaten in Boston were brought from New York, while nearly all
the cauliflowers sold in New York were sent thither from Boston, he
formed the plan of establishing a market garden midway between the two
cities, and supplying each place with its favorite vegetable. This he did
successfully for ten years, and then merged the enterprise in successive
newer ones. In these he sometimes failed, but in the last one he
succeeded where others had failed yet more completely, and astounded the
nation by bringing the streets of New York into decent cleanliness and
order for the first time on record. This man was Colonel George Edward
Waring.

One of his minor achievements was that of organizing, at his house in
Newport, the most efficient literary circle I ever knew, at a time when
there were habitually more authors grouped in that city than anywhere
else in America. But before giving a sketch of these persons, let me
describe the house in which he received them. This house had been made
internally the most attractive in Newport by the combined taste of
himself and his wife, and was for a time the main centre of our simple
and cordial group. In his study and elsewhere on the walls he had placed
mottoes, taken partly from old English phrases and partly from the
original Dutch, remembered almost from the cradle as coming from his
Dutch maternal grandfather. Thus above his writing-desk the inscription
read, _Misérable à mon gré qui n’a chez soi où estre à soi_ (Alas for him
who hath no home which is a home!). Under the mantelpiece and above the
fireplace was the Dutch _Eigen haasd iss goud waard_ (One’s own hearth is
worth gold). In the dining-room there was inscribed above the fireplace,
“Old wood to burn, Old wine to drink, Old friends to trust.” Opposite
this was again the Dutch _Praatjes vullen den buik neit_ (Prattle does
not fill the box). On two sides of the room there were, “Now good
digestion wait on appetite, and health on both,” and also “In every feast
there are two guests to be entertained, the body and the soul.” In almost
every case the lettering of these mottoes was made into a decoration with
peacock’s feathers, and formed a series of charming welcomes quite in
harmony with the unfailing cordiality of the host and the fine and hearty
voice of the hostess.

It was at this house that there were to be found gathered, more
frequently than anywhere else, the literary or artistic people who were
then so abundant in Newport,—where no other house was to be compared
with it except that of Mrs. Howe, who then lived in the country, and had
receptions and a world of her own.

We had, for instance, Dr. J. G. Holland, now best known as the original
founder of the “Century Magazine,” then having but a fugitive literary
fame based on books written under the name of Timothy Titcomb and
entitled “Bitter-Sweet” and “Kathrina, Her Life and Mine.” He was
personally attractive because of his melodious voice, which made him
of peculiar value for singing on all boating excursions. There was
Edwin P. Whipple, a man reared in business, not literature; but with an
inexhaustible memory of books and a fertile gift for producing them,
especially those requiring personal anecdote and plenty of it. There was
Dr. O. W. Holmes, who came to Newport as the guest of the Astor family,
parents of the present English author of that name. At their house I
spent one evening with Holmes, who was in his most brilliant mood, at the
end of which he had talked himself into such an attack of asthma that he
had to bid adieu to Newport forever, after an early breakfast the next
morning.

There was the Reverend Charles T. Brooks, a man of angelic face and
endless German translations, who made even Jean Paul readable and also
unbelievable. There was Professor George Lane, from Harvard, a man so
full of humor that people bought his new Latin Grammar merely for the
fun to be got out of its notes. There was La Farge, just passing through
the change which made a great artist out of a book-lover and a student
of languages. He alone on this list made Newport his home for years,
and reared his gifted and attractive children there, and it was always
interesting to see how, one by one, they developed into artists or
priests.

There was George Boker, of Philadelphia, a young man of fortune,
handsome, indolent, as poetic as a rich young man could spare time to
be, and one whose letters now help to make attractive that most amusing
book, the “Memoirs of Charles Godfrey Leland.” There was my refined and
accomplished schoolmate and chum, Charles Perkins, who trained himself
in Italian art and tried rather ineffectually to introduce it into the
public schools of Boston and upon the outside of the Art Museum. There
was Tom Appleton, the man of two continents, and Clarence King, the
explorer of this one, and a charming story-teller, by the way. Let me
pause longer over one or two of these many visitors.

One of them was long held the most readable of American biographers, but
is now being strangely forgotten,—the most American of all transplanted
Englishmen, James Parton, the historian. He has apparently dropped from
our current literature and even from popular memory. I can only attribute
this to a certain curious combination of strength and weakness which
was more conspicuous in him than in most others. He always appeared
to me the most absolutely truthful being I had ever encountered; no
temptation, no threats, could move him from his position; but when he
came in contact with a man of wholly opposite temperament, as, for
instance, General Benjamin F. Butler, the other seemed able to wind
Parton round his fingers. This would be the harder to believe had not
Butler exerted something of the same influence on Wendell Phillips,
another man of proud and yet trustful temperament. Furthermore, Parton
was absolutely enthralled in a similar way through his chief object of
literary interest, perhaps as being the man in the world most unlike
him, Voltaire. On the other hand, no one could be more devoted to
self-sacrifice than Parton when it became clear and needful. Day after
day one would see him driving in the roads around Newport, with his
palsy-stricken and helpless wife, ten years older than himself and best
known to the world as Fanny Fern,—he sitting upright as a flagstaff and
looking forward in deep absorption, settling some Voltairean problem a
hundred years older than his own domestic sorrow.

I find in my diary (June 25, 1871) only this reference to one of the
disappointing visitors at Newport:—

“Bret Harte is always simple and modest. He is terribly tired of ‘The
Heathen Chinee,’ and almost annoyed at its popularity when better things
of his have been less liked”—the usual experience of authors.

I find again, May 15, 1871: “I went up last Wednesday night to the Grand
Army banquet [in Boston] and found it pleasant. The receptions of Hooker
and Burnside were especially ardent. At our table we were about to give
three cheers for Bret Harte as a man went up to the chief table. It
turned out to be Mayor Gaston.” This mistake, however, showed Harte’s
ready popularity at first, though some obstacles afterwards tended to
diminish it. Among these obstacles was to be included, no doubt, the San
Francisco newspapers, which were constantly showered among us from the
Pacific shores with all the details of the enormous debts which Bret
Harte had left behind him, and which he never in his life, so far as I
could hear, made a serious effort to discharge. Through some distrust
either of my friendship or of my resources, he never by any chance even
offered, I believe, to borrow a dollar of me; but our more generous
companion, George Waring, was not so fortunate.

Another person, of nobler type, appears but imperfectly in my letters,
namely, Miss Charlotte Cushman. I find, to be sure, the following
penetrating touches from a companion who had always that quality, and
who says of Miss Cushman, in her diary: “She is very large, looks like
an elderly man, with gray hair and very red cheeks—full of action
and gesture—acts a dog just as well as a man or woman. She seems
large-hearted, kind, and very bright and quick—looks in splendid health.
She will be here for this month, but may take a house and return.” This
expectation was fulfilled, and I find that the same authority later
compared Miss Cushman in appearance to “an old boy given to eating apples
and snowballing”; and, again, gave this description after seeing Miss
Cushman’s new house: “The wildest turn of an insane kaleidoscope—the
petrified antics of a crazy coon—with a dance of intoxicated
lightning-rods breaking out over the roof.” This youthful impulsiveness
was a part of her, and I remember that once, as we were driving across
the first beach at Newport, Miss Cushman looked with delight across the
long strip of sand, which the advancing waves were rapidly diminishing,
as the little boys were being driven ashore by them, and exclaimed, “How
those children have enjoyed running their little risk of danger! I know
I did when I was a boy,” and there seemed nothing incongruous in the
remark, nor yet when she turned to me afterwards and asked, seriously,
whether I thought suicide absolutely unpardonable in a person proved to
be hopelessly destined to die of cancer,—a terror with which she was
long haunted. Again, I remember at one fashionable reception how Miss
Cushman came with John Gilbert, the veteran actor, as her guest, and how
much higher seemed their breeding, on the whole, than that of the mere
fashionables of a day.

Kate Field, who has been somewhat unwisely canonized by an injudicious
annotator, was much in Newport, equally fearless in body and mind, and
perhaps rather limited than enlarged by early contact with Italy and Mrs.
Browning. She would come in from a manly boating-trip and fling herself
on the sofa of the daintiest hostess, where the subsequent arrival of the
best-bred guests did not disturb her from her position; but nothing would
have amused her more than the deification which she received after death
from some later adorers of her own sex.

I find the following sketches of different Newport visitors in a letter
dated September 2, 1869:—

    “We had an elder poet in Mr. [William Cullen] Bryant, on whom
    I called, and to my great surprise he returned it. I never saw
    him before. There is a little hardness about him, and he seems
    like one who has been habitually bored, but he is refined and
    gentle—thinner, older, and more sunken than his pictures—eyes
    not fine, head rather narrow and prominent; delicate in
    outline. He is quite agreeable, and ⸺ chatted to him quite
    easily. I saw him several times, but he does not warm one.

    “At Governor Morgan’s I went to a reception for the [General]
    Grants. He is a much more noticeable man than I expected, and
    I should think his head would attract attention anywhere,
    and Richard Greenough [the sculptor] thought the same—and
    so imperturbable—without even a segar! Mrs. Grant I found
    intelligent and equable.... Sherman was there, too, the
    antipodes of Grant; nervous and mobile, looking like a country
    schoolmaster. He said to Bryant, in my hearing, ‘Yes, indeed! I
    know Mr. Bryant; he’s one of the veterans! When I was a boy at
    West Point he was a veteran. He used to edit a newspaper then!’

    “This quite ignored Mr. Bryant’s poetic side, which Sherman
    possibly may not have quite enjoyed. Far more interesting than
    this, I thought, was a naval reception where Farragut was
    given profuse honors, yet held them all as a trivial pleasure
    compared to an interview with his early teacher, Mr. Charles
    Folsom, the superintendent of the University Printing-Office at
    Cambridge. To him the great admiral returned again and again,
    and we saw them sitting with hands clasped, and serving well
    enough, as some one suggested, for a group of ‘War and Peace,’
    such as the sculptors were just then portraying.”

Most interesting, too, I found on one occasion, at Charles Perkins’s, the
companionship of two young Englishmen, James Bryce and Albert Dicey,
both since eminent, but then just beginning their knowledge of this
country. I vividly remember how Dicey came in rubbing his hands with
delight, saying that Bryce had just heard a boarder at the hotel where
he was staying say _Eurōpean_ twice, and had stopped to make a note of
it in his diary. But I cannot allow further space to them, nor even to
Mr. George Bancroft, about whom the reader will find a more ample sketch
in this volume (page 95). I will, however, venture to repeat one little
scene illustrating with what parental care he used to accompany young
ladies on horseback in his old age, galloping over the Newport beaches.
On one of these occasions, after he had dismounted to adjust his fair
companion’s stirrup, he was heard to say to her caressingly, “Don’t call
me Mr. Bancroft, call me George!”

In regard to my friend, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and her Newport life, I have
written so fully of her in the article on page 287 of this volume that I
shall hardly venture it again. Nor have I space in which to dwell on the
further value to our little Newport circle of such women as Katharine P.
Wormeley, the well-known translator of Balzac and Molière and the author
of “Hospital Transports” during the war; or of the three accomplished
Woolsey sisters, of whom the eldest, under the name of “Susan Coolidge,”
became a very influential writer for young people. She came first to
Newport as the intimate friend of Mrs. Helen Maria Fiske Hunt, who was
more generally known for many years as “H. H.” The latter came among us
as the widow of one of the most distinguished officers whom the West
Point service had reared. She was destined in all to spend five winters
at Newport, and entered upon her literary life practically at that time.
She lived there as happily, perhaps, as she could have dwelt in any town
which she could christen “Sleepy Hollow,” as she did Newport; and where
she could look from her window upon the fashionable avenue and see, she
said, such “Headless Horsemen” as Irving described as having haunted the
valley of that name.

After her second marriage she lived far away at the middle and then at
the extreme western part of the continent, and we met but few times. She
wrote to me freely, however, and I cannot do better than close by quoting
from this brilliant woman’s very words her description of the manner in
which she wrote the tale “Ramona,” now apparently destined to be her
source of permanent fame. I do not know in literary history so vivid a
picture of what may well be called spiritual inspiration in an impetuous
woman’s soul.

                                    THE BERKELEY, February 5, 1884.

    I am glad you say you are rejoiced that I am writing a story.
    But about the not hurrying it—I want to tell you something— You
    know I have for three or four years longed to write a story
    that should “tell” on the Indian question. But I knew I could
    not do it, knew I had no background—no local color for it.

    Last Spring, in So. Cal. [Southern California] I began to feel
    that I had—that the scene laid there—& the old Mexican life
    mixed in with just enough Indian, to enable me to tell what had
    happened to them—would be the very perfection of coloring. You
    know I have now lived six months in So. Cal.

    Still I did not see my way clear; got no plot; till one morning
    late last October, before I was wide awake, the whole plot
    flashed into my mind—not a vague one—the whole story just as it
    stands to-day: in less than five minutes: as if some one spoke
    it. I sprang up, went to my husband’s room, and told him: I was
    half frightened. From that time till I came here it haunted me,
    becoming more and more vivid. I was impatient to get at it.
    I wrote the first word of it Dec. 1st. As soon as I began it
    seemed impossible to write fast enough. In spite of myself, I
    write faster than I would write a letter. I write two thousand
    to three thousand words in a morning, and I _cannot_ help it.
    It racks me like a struggle with an outside power. I cannot
    help being superstitious about it. I have never done _half_
    the amount of work in the same time. Ordinarily it would be a
    simple impossibility. Twice since beginning it I have broken
    down utterly for a while—with a cold ostensibly, but with great
    nervous prostration added. What I have to endure in holding
    myself away from it, afternoons, on the days I am compelled to
    be in the house, no words can tell. It is like keeping away
    from a lover, whose hand I can reach!

    Now you will ask what sort of English it is I write at this
    lightning speed. So far as I can tell, the best I ever wrote!
    I have read it aloud as I have gone on, to one friend of keen
    literary perceptions and judgment, the most purely intellectual
    woman I know—Mrs. Trimble. She says it is smooth, strong,
    clear—“Tremendous” is her frequent epithet. I read the first
    ten chapters to Miss Woolsey this last week—she has been
    spending a few days with me ... but she says, “Far better than
    anything you ever have done.”

    The success of it—if it succeeds—will be that I do not even
    suggest my Indian history till the interest is so assured in
    the heroine—and hero—that people will not lay the book down.
    There is but one Indian in the story.

    Every now & then I force myself to stop & write a short story
    or a bit of verse: I can’t bear the strain: but the instant I
    open the pages of the other I write as I am writing now—as fast
    as I could copy! What do you think? Am I possessed of a demon?
    Is it a freak of mental disturbance, or what?

    I have the feeling that if I could only read it to you, you
    would know. If it is as good as Mrs. Trimble, Mr. Jackson &
    Miss Woolsey think, I shall be indeed rewarded, for it will
    “tell.” But I can’t believe it is. I am uneasy about it—but try
    as I may, all I can, I cannot write slowly for more than a few
    moments. I sit down at 9.30 or 10, & it is one before I know
    it. In good weather I then go out, after lunching, and keep
    out, religiously till five: but there have not been more than
    three out of eight good days all winter:—and the days when I am
    shut up, in my room from two till five, alone—with my Ramona
    and Alessandro, and cannot go along with them on their journey,
    are maddening.

    Fifty-two last October and I’m not a bit steadier-headed, you
    see, than ever! I don’t know whether to send this or burn it
    up. Don’t laugh at me whatever you do.

                           Yours always,

                                                              H. J.




XXIV

A HALF-CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE




A HALF-CENTURY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE

(1857-1907)


I

The brilliant French author, Stendhal, used to describe his ideal of
a happy life as dwelling in a Paris garret and writing endless plays
and novels. This might seem to any Anglo-American a fantastic wish;
and no doubt the early colonists on this side of the Atlantic Ocean,
after fighting through the Revolution by the aid of Rochambeau and his
Frenchmen, might have felt quite out of place had they followed their
triumphant allies back to Europe, in 1781, and inspected their way of
living. We can hardly wonder, on the other hand, that the accomplished
French traveler, Philarète Chasles, on visiting this country in 1851,
looked through the land in despair at not finding a humorist, although
the very boy of sixteen who stood near him at the rudder of a Mississippi
steam-boat may have been he who was destined to amuse the civilized world
under the name of Mark Twain.[23]

That which was, however, to astonish most seriously all European
observers who were watching the dawn of the young American republic,
was its presuming to develop itself in its own original way, and not
conventionally. It was destined, as Cicero said of ancient Rome, to
produce its statesmen and orators first, and its poets later. Literature
was not inclined to show itself with much promptness, during and after
long years of conflict, first with the Indians, then with the mother
country. There were individual instances of good writing: Judge Sewall’s
private diaries, sometimes simple and noble, sometimes unconsciously
eloquent, often infinitely amusing; William Byrd’s and Sarah Knight’s
piquant glimpses of early Virginia travel; Cotton Mather’s quaint and
sometimes eloquent passages; Freneau’s poetry, from which Scott and
Campbell borrowed phrases. Behind all, there was the stately figure of
Jonathan Edwards standing gravely in the background, like a monk at the
cloister door, with his treatise on the “Freedom of the Will.”

Thus much for the scanty literary product; but when we turn to look for
a new-born statesmanship in a nation equally new-born, the fact suddenly
strikes us that the intellectual strength of the colonists lay there. The
same discovery astonished England through the pamphlet works of Jay,
Lee, and Dickinson; destined to be soon followed up with a long series of
equally strong productions, to which Lord Chatham paid that fine tribute
in his speech before the House of Lords on January 20, 1775. “I must
declare and avow,” he said, “that in all my reading and observation—and
it has been my favorite study—I have read Thucydides and have studied
and admired the master-states of the world—for solidity of reasoning,
force of sagacity, and wisdom of conclusion, under such a complication
of difficult circumstances, no nation, or body of men, can stand in
preference to the general Congress of Philadelphia.” Yet it is to be
noticed further that here, as in other instances, the literary foresight
in British criticism had already gone in advance of even the statesman’s
judgment, for Horace Walpole, the most brilliant of the literary men
of his time, had predicted to his friend Mason, two years before the
Declaration of Independence, that there would one day be a Thucydides in
Boston and a Xenophon in New York.

It is interesting to know that such predictions were by degrees shadowed
forth even among children in America, as they certainly were among those
of us who, living in Cambridge as boys, were permitted the privilege of
looking over whole boxes of Washington’s yet unprinted letters in the
hands of our kind neighbor, Jared Sparks (1834-37); manuscripts whose
curved and varied signatures we had the inexhaustible boyish pleasure
of studying and comparing; as we had also that of enjoying the pithy
wisdom of Franklin in his own handwriting a few years later (1840), in
the hands of the same kind and neighborly editor. But it was not always
recognized by those who grew up in the new-born nation that in the mother
country itself a period of literary ebb tide was then prevailing. When
Fisher Ames, being laid on the shelf as a Federalist statesman, wrote the
first really important essay on American Literature,—an essay published
in 1809, after his death,—he frankly treated literature itself as merely
one of the ornaments of despotism. He wrote of it, “The time seems to
be near, and, perhaps, is already arrived, when poetry, at least poetry
of transcendent merit, will be considered among the lost arts. It is a
long time since England has produced a first-rate poet. If America had
not to boast at all what our parent country boasts no longer, it will
not be thought a proof of the deficiency of our genius.” Believing as
he did, that human freedom could never last long in a democracy, Ames
thought that perhaps, when liberty had given place to an emperor, this
monarch might desire to see splendor in his court, and to occupy his
subjects with the cultivation of the arts and sciences. At any rate, he
maintained, “After some ages we shall have many poor and a few rich, many
grossly ignorant, a considerable number learned, and a few eminently
learned. Nature, never prodigal of her gifts, will produce some men
of genius, who will be admired and imitated.” The first part of this
prophecy failed, but the latter part fulfilled itself in a manner quite
unexpected.


II

The point unconsciously ignored by Fisher Ames, and by the whole
Federalist party of his day, was that there was already being created on
this side of the ocean, not merely a new nation, but a new temperament.
How far this temperament was to arise from a change of climate, and how
far from a new political organization, no one could then foresee, nor
is its origin yet fully analyzed; but the fact itself is now coming to
be more and more recognized. It may be that Nature said, at about that
time, “‘Thus far the English is my best race; but we have had Englishmen
enough; now for another turning of the globe, and a further novelty. We
need something with a little more buoyancy than the Englishman: let us
lighten the structure, even at some peril in the process. Put in one
drop more of nervous fluid and make the American.’ With that drop, a new
range of promise opened on the human race, and a lighter, finer, more
highly organized type of mankind was born.” This remark, which appeared
first in the “Atlantic Monthly,” called down the wrath of Matthew Arnold,
who missed the point entirely in calling it “tall talk” or a species
of brag, overlooking the fact that it was written as a physiological
caution addressed to this nervous race against overworking its children
in school. In reality, it was a point of the greatest importance. If
Americans are to be merely duplicate Englishmen, Nature might have
said, the experiment is not so very interesting, but if they are to
represent a new human type, the sooner we know it, the better. No one
finally did more toward recognizing this new type than did Matthew Arnold
himself, when he afterwards wrote, in 1887, “Our countrymen [namely, the
English], with a thousand good qualities, are really, perhaps, a good
deal wanting in lucidity and flexibility”; and again in the same essay,
“The whole American nation may be called ‘intelligent,’ that is to say,
‘quick.’”[24] This would seem to yield the whole point between himself
and the American writer whom he had criticised, and who happened to be
the author of this present volume.

One of the best indications of this very difference of temperament, even
to this day, is the way in which American journalists and magazinists
are received in England, and their English compeers among ourselves.
An American author connected with the “St. Nicholas Magazine” was told
by a London publisher, within my recollection, that the plan of the
periodical was essentially wrong. “The pages of riddles at the end, for
instance,” he said, “no child would ever guess them”; and although the
American assured him that they were guessed regularly every month in
twenty thousand families or more, the publisher still shook his head. As
to the element of humor itself, it used to be the claim of a brilliant
New York talker that he had dined through three English counties on
the strength of the jokes which he had found in the corners of an old
American “Farmer’s Almanac” which he had happened to put into his trunk
when packing for his European trip.

From Brissot and Volney, Chastellux and Crèvecœur, down to Ampère and
De Tocqueville, there was a French appreciation, denied to the English,
of this lighter quality; and this certainly seems to indicate that the
change in the Anglo-American temperament had already begun to show
itself. Ampère especially notices what he calls “une veine européenne”
among the educated classes. Many years after, when Mrs. Frances Anne
Kemble, writing in reference to the dramatic stage, pointed out that the
theatrical instinct of Americans created in them an affinity for the
French which the English, hating exhibitions of emotion and self-display,
did not share, she recognized in our nation this tinge of the French
temperament, while perhaps giving to it an inadequate explanation.


III

The local literary prominence given, first to Philadelphia by Franklin
and Brockden Brown, and then to New York by Cooper and Irving, was
in each case too detached and fragmentary to create more than these
individual fames, however marked or lasting these may be. It required
time and a concentrated influence to constitute a literary group in
America. Bryant and Channing, with all their marked powers, served only
as a transition to it. Yet the group was surely coming, and its creation
has perhaps never been put in so compact a summary as that made by
that clear-minded ex-editor of the “Atlantic Monthly,” the late Horace
Scudder. He said, “It is too early to make a full survey of the immense
importance to American letters of the work done by half-a-dozen great
men in the middle of this century. The body of prose and verse created
by them is constituting the solid foundation upon which other structures
are to rise; the humanity which it holds is entering into the life of
the country, and no material invention, or scientific discovery, or
institutional prosperity, or accumulation of wealth will so powerfully
affect the spiritual well-being of the nation for generations to come.”

The geographical headquarters of this particular group was Boston, of
which Cambridge and Concord may be regarded for this purpose as suburbs.
Such a circle of authors as Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Lowell,
Whittier, Alcott, Thoreau, Parkman, and others had never before met in
America; and now that they have passed away, no such local group anywhere
remains: nor has the most marked individual genius elsewhere—such, for
instance, as that of Poe or Whitman—been the centre of so conspicuous a
combination. The best literary representative of this group of men in
bulk was undoubtedly the “Atlantic Monthly,” to which almost every one
of them contributed, and of which they made up the substantial opening
strength.

With these there was, undoubtedly, a secondary force developed at that
period in a remarkable lecture system, which spread itself rapidly over
the country, and in which most of the above authors took some part and
several took leading parts, these lectures having much formative power
over the intellect of the nation. Conspicuous among the lecturers also
were such men as Gough, Beecher, Chapin, Whipple, Holland, Curtis, and
lesser men who are now collectively beginning to fade into oblivion.
With these may be added the kindred force of Abolitionists, headed by
Wendell Phillips and Frederick Douglass, whose remarkable powers drew to
their audiences many who did not agree with them. Women like Lucretia
Mott, Anna Dickinson, and Lucy Stone joined the force. These lectures
were inseparably linked with literature as a kindred source of popular
education; they were subject, however, to the limitation of being rather
suggestive than instructive, because they always came in a detached
way and so did not favor coherent thinking. The much larger influence
now exerted by courses of lectures in the leading cities does more to
strengthen the habit of consecutive thought than did the earlier system;
and such courses, joined with the great improvement in public schools,
are assisting vastly in the progress of public education. The leader
who most distinguished himself in this last direction was, doubtless,
Horace Mann, who died in 1859. The influence of American colleges, while
steadily maturing into universities all over the country, has made itself
felt more and more obviously, especially as these colleges have with
startling suddenness and comprehensiveness extended their privileges to
women also, whether in the form of coeducation or of institutions for
women only.

For many years, the higher intellectual training of Americans was
obtained almost entirely through periods of study in Europe, especially
in Germany. Men, of whom Everett, Ticknor, Cogswell, and Bancroft were
the pioneers, beginning in 1818 or thereabouts, discovered that Germany
and not England must be made our national model in this higher education;
and this discovery was strengthened by the number of German refugees,
often highly trained men, who sought this country for political safety.
The influence of German literature on the American mind was undoubtedly
at its highest point half a century ago, and the passing away of the
great group of German authors then visible was even more striking than
have been the corresponding changes in England and America; but the
leadership of Germany in purely scientific thought and invention has
kept on increasing, so that the mental tie between that nation and our
own was perhaps never stronger than now.

In respect to literature, the increased tendency to fiction, everywhere
visible, has nowhere been more marked than in America. Since the days of
Cooper and Mrs. Stowe, the recognized leader in this department has been
Mr. Howells; that is, if we base leadership on higher standards than that
of mere comparison of sales. The actual sale of copies in this department
of literature has been greater in certain cases than the world has before
seen; but it has rarely occurred that books thus copiously multiplied
have taken very high rank under more deliberate criticism. In some cases,
as in that of Bret Harte, an author has won fame in early life by the
creation of a few striking characters, and has then gone on reproducing
them without visible progress; and this result has been most apt to occur
wherever British praise has come in strongly, that being often more
easily won by a few interesting novelties than by anything deeper in the
way of local coloring or permanent delineation.


IV

It is sometimes said that there was never yet a great migration which did
not result in some new form of national genius; and this should be true
in America, if anywhere. He who lands from Europe on our shores perceives
a difference in the sky above his head; the height seems greater, the
zenith farther off, the horizon wall steeper. With this result on the
one side, and the vast and constant mixture of races on the other, there
must inevitably be a change. No portion of our immigrant body desires to
retain its national tongue; all races wish their children to learn the
English language as soon as possible, yet no imported race wishes its
children to take the British race, as such, for models. Our newcomers
unconsciously say with that keen thinker, David Wasson, “The Englishman
is undoubtedly a wholesome figure to the mental eye; but will not twenty
million copies of him do, for the present?” The Englishman’s strong point
is his vigorous insularity; that of the American his power of adaptation.
Each of these attitudes has its perils. The Englishman stands firmly on
his feet, but he who merely does this never advances. The American’s
disposition is to step forward even at the risk of a fall. Washington
Irving, who seemed at first to so acute a French observer as Chasles
a mere reproduction of Pope and Addison, wrote to John Lothrop Motley
two years before his own death, “You are properly sensible of the high
calling of the American press,—that rising tribunal before which the
whole world is to be summoned, its history to be revised and rewritten,
and the judgment of past ages to be canceled or confirmed.” For one who
can look back sixty years to a time when the best literary periodical
in America was called “The Albion,” it is difficult to realize how the
intellectual relations of the two nations are now changed. M. D. Conway
once pointed out that the English magazines, such as the “Contemporary
Review” and the “Fortnightly,” were simply circular letters addressed
by a few cultivated gentlemen to the fellow members of their respective
London clubs. Where there is an American periodical, on the other hand,
the most striking contribution may proceed from a previously unknown
author, and may turn out to have been addressed practically to all the
world.

So far as the intellectual life of a nation exhibits itself in
literature, England may always have one advantage over us,—if advantage
it be,—that of possessing in London a recognized publishing centre,
where authors, editors, and publishers are all brought together. In
America, the conditions of our early political activity have supplied us
with a series of such centres, in a smaller way, beginning, doubtless,
with Philadelphia, then changing to New York, then to Boston, and again
reverting, in some degree, to New York. I say “in some degree” because
Washington has long been the political centre of the nation, and tends
more and more to occupy the same central position in respect to science,
at least; while Western cities, notably Chicago and San Francisco,
tend steadily to become literary centres for the wide regions they
represent. Meanwhile the vast activities of journalism, the readiness of
communication everywhere, the detached position of colleges, with many
other influences, decentralize literature more and more. Emerson used to
say that Europe stretched to the Alleghanies, but this at least has been
corrected, and the national spirit is coming to claim the whole continent
for its own.

There is undoubtedly a tendency in the United States to transfer
intellectual allegiance, for a time, to science rather than to
literature. This may be only a swing of the pendulum; but its temporary
influence has nowhere been better defined or characterized than by the
late Clarence King, formerly director of the United States Geological
Survey, who wrote thus a little before his death: “With all its novel
modern powers and practical sense, I am forced to admit that the purely
scientific brain is miserably mechanical; it seems to have become a
splendid sort of self-directed machine, an incredible automaton, grinding
on with its analyses or constructions. But for pure sentiment, for all
that spontaneous, joyous Greek waywardness of fancy, for the temperature
of passion and the subtler thrill of ideality, you might as well look to
a wrought-iron derrick.”

Whatever charges can be brought against the American people, no one has
yet attributed to them any want of self-confidence or self-esteem; and
though this trait may be sometimes unattractive, the philosophers agree
that it is the only path to greatness. “The only nations which ever come
to be called historic,” says Tolstoi in his “Anna Karenina,” “are those
which recognize the importance and worth of their own institutions.”
Emerson, putting the thing more tersely, as is his wont, says that “no
man can do anything well who does not think that what he does is the
centre of the visible universe.” The history of the American republic
was really the most interesting in the world, from the outset, were it
only from the mere fact that however small its scale, it yet showed a
self-governing people in a condition never before witnessed on the globe;
and so to this is now added the vaster contemplation of it as a nation of
seventy millions rapidly growing more and more. If there is no interest
in the spectacle of such a nation, laboring with all its might to build
up an advanced civilization, then there is nothing interesting on earth.
The time will come when all men will wonder, not that Americans attached
so much importance to their national development at this period, but
that they appreciated it so little. Canon Zincke has computed that in
1980 the English-speaking population of the globe will number, at the
present rate of progress, one thousand millions, and that of this number
eight hundred millions will dwell in the United States. No plans can
be too far-seeing, no toils and sacrifices too great, in establishing
this vast future civilization. It is in this light, for instance, that
we must view the immense endowments of Mr. Carnegie, which more than
fulfill the generalization of the acute author of a late Scotch novel,
“The House with Green Shutters,” who says that while a Scotchman has all
the great essentials for commercial success, “his combinations are rarely
Napoleonic until he becomes an American.”

When one looks at the apparently uncertain, but really tentative steps
taken by the trustees of the Carnegie Institution at Washington, one
sees how much must yet lie before us in our provisions for intellectual
progress. The numerical increase of our common schools and universities
is perhaps as rapid as is best, and the number of merely scientific
societies is large, but the provision for the publication of works of
real thought and literature is still far too small. The endowment of the
Smithsonian Institution now extends most comprehensively over all the
vast historical work in American history, now so widely undertaken, and
the Carnegie Institution bids fair to provide well for purely scientific
work and the publication of its results. But the far more difficult task
of developing and directing pure literature is as yet hardly attempted.
Our magazines tend more and more to become mainly picture-books, and
our really creative authors are geographically scattered and, for the
most part, wholesomely poor. We should always remember, moreover, what
is true especially in these works of fiction, that not only individual
books, but whole schools of them, emerge and disappear, like the flash of
a revolving light; you must make the most of it while you have it. “The
highways of literature are spread over,” said Holmes, “with the shells
of dead novels, each of which has been swallowed at a mouthful by the
public, and is done with.”

In America, as in England, the leading literary groups are just now to be
found less among the poets than among the writers of prose fiction. Of
these younger authors, we have in America such men as Winston Churchill,
Robert Grant, Hamlin Garland, Owen Wister, Arthur S. Pier, and George
Wasson; any one of whom may at any moment surprise us by doing something
better than the best he has before achieved. The same promise of a high
standard is visible in women, among whom may be named not merely those of
maturer standing, as Harriet Prescott Spofford, who is the leader, but
her younger sisters, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Edith Wharton, and Josephine
Preston Peabody. The drama also is advancing with rapid steps, and is
likely to be still more successful in such hands as those of William
Vaughn Moody, Ridgely Torrence, and Percy McKaye. The leader of English
dramatic criticism, William Archer, found within the last year, as he
tells us, no less than eight or nine notable American dramas in active
representation on the stage, whereas eight years earlier there was but
one.

Similar signs of promise are showing themselves in the direction of
literature, social science, and higher education generally, all of which
have an honored representative, still in middle life, in Professor
George E. Woodberry. Professor Newcomb has just boldly pointed out that
we have intellectually grown, as a nation, “from the high school of our
Revolutionary ancestors to the college; from the college we have grown
to the university stage. Now we have grown to a point where we need
something beyond the university.” What he claims for science is yet more
needed in the walks of pure literature, and is there incomparably harder
to attain, since it has there to deal with that more subtle and vaster
form of mental action which culminates in Shakespeare instead of Newton.
This higher effort, which the French Academy alone even attempts,—however
it may fail in the accomplished results,—may at least be kept before us
as an ideal for American students and writers, even should its demands be
reduced to something as simple as those laid down by Coleridge when he
announced his ability to “inform the dullest writer how he might write
an interesting book.” “Let him,” says Coleridge, “relate the events of
his own life with honesty, not disguising the feeling that accompanied
them.”[25] Thus simple, it would seem, are the requirements for a really
good book; but, alas! who is to fulfill them? Yet if anywhere, why not in
America?




FOOTNOTES


[1] _Outlook_, October, 1907.

[2] Bancroft’s _History of the United States_, i, 247.

[3] E. W. Pierce’s _Indian Biography_.

[4] Young’s _Chronicles of the Pilgrims_, 158.

[5] Thatcher’s _Lives of Indians_, i, 119.

[6] Thatcher’s _Lives of Indians_, i, 120.

[7] Young’s _Chronicles of the Pilgrims_, 194.

[8] Belknap’s _American Biography_, ii, 214.

[9] Young’s _Chronicles of the Pilgrims_, 194, note.

[10] E. W. Pierce’s _Indian Biography_, 22.

[11] E. W. Pierce’s _Indian Biography_, 25.

[12] Sanborn and Harris’s _Alcott_, ii, 566.

[13] _Emerson in Concord_, 120.

[14] Sanborn and Harris’s _Alcott_, i, 264.

[15] Sanborn and Harris’s _Alcott_, i, 262.

[16] Sanborn and Harris’s _Alcott_, ii, 477.

[17] _Memoirs_, ii, 473.

[18] _Address before the Alumni of Andover_, 1.

[19] _Address before the Alumni of Andover_, 10.

[20] _Address to Workingmen in Providence_, April 11, 1886, p. 19.

[21] Lodge’s _George Cabot_, 12, note.

[22] _Harvard Reminiscences_, by Andrew Preston Peabody, D. D., LL. D.,
p. 18.

[23] “Toute l’Amérique ne possède pas un humoriste.” _Études sur la
Littérature et les Mœurs des Anglo-Américains_, Paris, 1851.

[24] _Nineteenth Century_, xxii, 324, 319.

[25] _Quarterly Review_, xcviii, 456.

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