Title: Literary Friends and Acquaintance; a Personal Retrospect of American Authorship
Author: Howells, William Dean
Language: English
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LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES

by William Dean Howells



CONTENTS:

   Biographical
   My First Visit to New England
   First Impressions of Literary New York
   Roundabout to Boston
   Literary Boston As I Knew It
   Oliver Wendell Holmes
   The White Mr. Longfellow
   Studies of Lowell
   Cambridge Neighbors
   A Belated Guest
   My Mark Twain



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES



BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

Long before I began the papers which make up this volume, I had meant to
write of literary history in New England as I had known it in the lives
of its great exemplars during the twenty-five years I lived near them. In
fact, I had meant to do this from the time I came among them; but I let
the days in which I almost constantly saw them go by without record save
such as I carried in a memory retentive, indeed, beyond the common, but
not so full as I could have wished when I began to invoke it for my work.
Still, upon insistent appeal, it responded in sufficient abundance; and,
though I now wish I could have remembered more instances, I think my
impressions were accurate enough. I am sure of having tried honestly to
impart them in the ten years or more when I was desultorily endeavoring
to share them with the reader.

The papers were written pretty much in the order they have here,
beginning with My First Visit to New England, which dates from the
earliest eighteen-nineties, if I may trust my recollection of reading it
from the manuscript to the editor of Harper’s Magazine, where we lay
under the willows of Magnolia one pleasant summer morning in the first
years of that decade. It was printed no great while after in that
periodical; but I was so long in finishing the study of Lowell that it
had been anticipated in Harper’s by other reminiscences of him, and it
was therefore first printed in Scribner’s Magazine. It was the paper
with which I took the most pains, and when it was completed I still felt
it so incomplete that I referred it to his closest and my best friend,
the late Charles Eliot Norton, for his criticism. He thought it wanting
in unity; it was a group of studies instead of one study, he said; I must
do something to draw the different sketches together in a single effect
of portraiture; and this I did my best to do.

It was the latest written of the three articles which give the volume
substance, and it represents mare finally and fully than the others my
sense of the literary importance of the men whose like we shall not look
upon again. Longfellow was easily the greatest poet of the three, Holmes
often the most brilliant and felicitous, but Lowell, in spite of his
forays in politics, was the finest scholar and the most profoundly
literary, as he was above the others most deeply and thoroughly New
England in quality.

While I was doing these sketches, sometimes slighter and sometimes less
slight, of all those poets and essayists and novelists I had known in
Cambridge and Boston and Concord and New York, I was doing many other
things: half a dozen novels, as many more novelettes and shorter stories,
with essays and criticisms and verses; so that in January, 1900, I had
not yet done the paper on Lowell, which, with another, was to complete my
reminiscences of American literary life as I had witnessed it. When they
were all done at last they were republished in a volume which found
instant favor beyond my deserts if not its own.

There was a good deal of trouble with the name, but Literary Friends and
Acquaintance was an endeavor for modest accuracy with which I remained
satisfied until I thought, long too late, of Literary Friends and
Neighbors. Then I perceived that this would have been still more
accurate and quite as modest, and I gladly give any reader leave to call
the book by that name who likes.

Since the collection was first made, I have written little else quite of
the kind, except the paper on Bret Harte, which was first printed shortly
after his death; and the study of Mark Twain, which I had been preparing
to make for forty years and more, and wrote in two weeks of the spring of
1910. Others of my time and place have now passed whither there is
neither time nor place, and there are moments when I feel that I must try
to call them back and pay them such honor as my sense of their worth may
give; but the impulse has as yet failed to effect itself, and I do not
know how long I shall spare myself the supreme pleasure-pain, the “hochst
angenehmer Schmerz,” of seeking to live here with those who live here no
more.

W. D. H.



MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND



I.

If there was any one in the world who had his being more wholly in
literature than I had in 1860, I am sure I should not have known where to
find him, and I doubt if he could have been found nearer the centres of
literary activity than I then was, or among those more purely devoted to
literature than myself. I had been for three years a writer of news
paragraphs, book notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in an
inland city, and I do not know that my life differed outwardly from that
of any other young journalist, who had begun as I had in a country
printing-office, and might be supposed to be looking forward to
advancement in his profession or in public affairs. But inwardly it was
altogether different with me. Inwardly I was a poet, with no wish to be
anything else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so far
forget myself as to be a novelist. I was, with my friend J. J. Piatt,
the half-author of a little volume of very unknown verse, and Mr. Lowell
had lately accepted and had begun to print in the Atlantic Monthly five
or six poems of mine. Besides this I had written poems, and sketches,
and criticisms for the Saturday Press of New York, a long-forgotten but
once very lively expression of literary intention in an extinct bohemia
of that city; and I was always writing poems, and sketches, and
criticisms in our own paper. These, as well as my feats in the renowned
periodicals of the East, met with kindness, if not honor, in my own city
which ought to have given me grave doubts whether I was any real prophet.
But it only intensified my literary ambition, already so strong that my
veins might well have run ink rather than blood, and gave me a higher
opinion of my fellow-citizens, if such a thing could be. They were
indeed very charming people, and such of them as I mostly saw were
readers and lovers of books. Society in Columbus at that day had a
pleasant refinement which I think I do not exaggerate in the fond
retrospect. It had the finality which it seems to have had nowhere since
the war; it had certain fixed ideals, which were none the less graceful
and becoming because they were the simple old American ideals, now
vanished, or fast vanishing, before the knowledge of good and evil as
they have it in Europe, and as it has imparted itself to American travel
and sojourn. There was a mixture of many strains in the capital of Ohio,
as there was throughout the State. Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New
York, and New England all joined to characterize the manners and customs.
I suppose it was the South which gave the social tone; the intellectual
taste among the elders was the Southern taste for the classic and the
standard in literature; but we who were younger preferred the modern
authors: we read Thackeray, and George Eliot, and Hawthorne, and Charles
Reade, and De Quincey, and Tennyson, and Browning, and Emerson, and
Longfellow, and I--I read Heine, and evermore Heine, when there was not
some new thing from the others. Now and then an immediate French book
penetrated to us: we read Michelet and About, I remember. We looked to
England and the East largely for our literary opinions; we accepted the
Saturday Review as law if we could not quite receive it as gospel. One
of us took the Cornhill Magazine, because Thackeray was the editor; the
Atlantic Monthly counted many readers among us; and a visiting young lady
from New England, who screamed at sight of the periodical in one of our
houses, “Why, have you got the Atlantic Monthly out here?” could be
answered, with cold superiority, “There are several contributors to the
Atlantic in Columbus.” There were in fact two: my room-mate, who wrote
Browning for it, while I wrote Heine and Longfellow. But I suppose two
are as rightfully several as twenty are.



II.

That was the heyday of lecturing, and now and then a literary light from
the East swam into our skies. I heard and saw Emerson, and I once met
Bayard Taylor socially, at the hospitable house where he was a guest
after his lecture. Heaven knows how I got through the evening. I do not
think I opened my mouth to address him a word; it was as much as I could
do to sit and look at him, while he tranquilly smoked, and chatted with
our host, and quaffed the beer which we had very good in the Nest. All
the while I did him homage as the first author by calling whom I had met.
I longed to tell him how much I liked his poems, which we used to get by
heart in those days, and I longed (how much more I longed!) to have him
know that:

     “Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren,”

that I had printed poems in the Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday Press,
and was the potential author of things destined to eclipse all literature
hitherto attempted. But I could not tell him; and there was no one else
who thought to tell him. Perhaps it was as well so; I might have
perished of his recognition, for my modesty was equal to my merit.

In fact I think we were all rather modest young fellows, we who formed
the group wont to spend some part of every evening at that house, where
there was always music, or whist, or gay talk, or all three. We had our
opinions of literary matters, but (perhaps because we had mostly accepted
them from England or New England, as I have said) we were not vain of
them; and we would by no means have urged them before a living literary
man like that. I believe none of us ventured to speak, except the poet,
my roommate, who said, He believed so and so was the original of so and
so; and was promptly told, He had no right to say such a thing.
Naturally, we came away rather critical of our host’s guest, whom I
afterwards knew as the kindliest heart in the world. But we had not
shone in his presence, and that galled us; and we chose to think that he
had not shone in ours.



III

At that time he was filling a large space in the thoughts of the young
people who had any thoughts about literature. He had come to his full
repute as an agreeable and intelligent traveller, and he still wore the
halo of his early adventures afoot in foreign lands when they were yet
really foreign. He had not written his novels of American life, once so
welcomed, and now so forgotten; it was very long before he had achieved
that incomparable translation of Faust which must always remain the
finest and best, and which would keep his name alive with Goethe’s, if he
had done nothing else worthy of remembrance. But what then most
commended him to the regard of us star-eyed youth (now blinking sadly
toward our seventies) was the poetry which he printed in the magazines
from time to time: in the first Putnam’s (where there was a dashing
picture of him in an Arab burnoose and, a turban), and in Harper’s, and
in the Atlantic. It was often very lovely poetry, I thought, and I still
think so; and it was rightfully his, though it paid the inevitable
allegiance to the manner of the great masters of the day. It was graced
for us by the pathetic romance of his early love, which some of its
sweetest and saddest numbers confessed, for the young girl he married
almost in her death hour; and we who were hoping to have our hearts
broken, or already had them so, would have been glad of something more of
the obvious poet in the popular lecturer we had seen refreshing himself
after his hour on the platform.

He remained for nearly a year the only author I had seen, and I met him
once again before I saw any other. Our second meeting was far from
Columbus, as far as remote Quebec, when I was on my way to New England by
way of Niagara and the Canadian rivers and cities. I stopped in Toronto,
and realized myself abroad without any signal adventures; but at Montreal
something very pretty happened to me. I came into the hotel office, the
evening of a first day’s lonely sight-seeing, and vainly explored the
register for the name of some acquaintance; as I turned from it two
smartly dressed young fellows embraced it, and I heard one of them say,
to my great amaze and happiness, “Hello, here’s Howells!”

“Oh,” I broke out upon him, “I was just looking for some one I knew. I
hope you are some one who knows me!”

“Only through your contributions to the Saturday Press,” said the young
fellow, and with these golden words, the precious first personal
recognition of my authorship I had ever received from a stranger, and the
rich reward of all my literary endeavor, he introduced himself and his
friend. I do not know what became of this friend, or where or how he
eliminated himself; but we two others were inseparable from that moment.
He was a young lawyer from New York, and when I came back from Italy,
four or five years later, I used to see his sign in Wall Street, with a
never-fulfilled intention of going in to see him. In whatever world he
happens now to be, I should like to send him my greetings, and confess to
him that my art has never since brought me so sweet a recompense, and
nothing a thousandth part so much like Fame, as that outcry of his over
the hotel register in Montreal. We were comrades for four or five rich
days, and shared our pleasures and expenses in viewing the monuments of
those ancient Canadian capitals, which I think we valued at all their
picturesque worth. We made jokes to mask our emotions; we giggled and
made giggle, in the right way; we fell in and out of love with all the
pretty faces and dresses we saw; and we talked evermore about literature
and literary people. He had more acquaintance with the one, and more
passion for the other, but he could tell me of Pfaff’s lager-beer cellar
on Broadway, where the Saturday Press fellows and the other Bohemians
met; and this, for the time, was enough: I resolved to visit it as soon
as I reached New York, in spite of the tobacco and beer (which I was
given to understand were de rigueur), though they both, so far as I had
known them, were apt to make me sick.

I was very desolate after I parted from this good fellow, who returned to
Montreal on his way to New York, while I remained in Quebec to continue
later on mine to New England. When I came in from seeing him off in a
calash for the boat, I discovered Bayard Taylor in the reading-room, where
he sat sunken in what seemed a somewhat weary muse. He did not know me,
or even notice me, though I made several errands in and out of the
reading-room in the vain hope that he might do so: doubly vain, for I am
aware now that I was still flown with the pride of that pretty experience
in Montreal, and trusted in a repetition of something like it. At last,
as no chance volunteered to help me, I mustered courage to go up to him
and name myself, and say I had once had the pleasure of meeting him at
Doctor-------‘s in Columbus. The poet gave no sign of consciousness at
the sound of a name which I had fondly begun to think might not be so all
unknown. He looked up with an unkindling eye, and asked, Ah, how was the
Doctor? and when I had reported favorably of the Doctor, our
conversation ended.

He was probably as tired as he looked, and he must have classed me with
that multitude all over the country who had shared the pleasure I
professed in meeting him before; it was surely my fault that I did not
speak my name loud enough to be recognized, if I spoke it at all; but the
courage I had mustered did not quite suffice for that. In after years he
assured me, first by letter and then by word, of his grief for an
incident which I can only recall now as the untoward beginning of a
cordial friendship. It was often my privilege, in those days, as
reviewer and editor, to testify my sense of the beautiful things he did
in so many kinds of literature, but I never liked any of them better than
I liked him. He had a fervent devotion to his art, and he was always
going to do the greatest things in it, with an expectation of effect that
never failed him. The things he actually did were none of them mean, or
wanting in quality, and some of them are of a lasting charm that any one
may feel who will turn to his poems; but no doubt many of them fell short
of his hopes of them with the reader. It was fine to meet him when he
was full of a new scheme; he talked of it with a single-hearted joy, and
tried to make you see it of the same colors and proportions it wore to
his eyes. He spared no toil to make it the perfect thing he dreamed it,
and he was not discouraged by any disappointment he suffered with the
critic or the public.

He was a tireless worker, and at last his health failed under his labors
at the newspaper desk, beneath the midnight gas, when he should long have
rested from such labors. I believe he was obliged to do them through one
of those business fortuities which deform and embitter all our lives; but
he was not the man to spare himself in any case. He was always
attempting new things, and he never ceased endeavoring to make his
scholarship reparation for the want of earlier opportunity and training.
I remember that I met him once in a Cambridge street with a book in his
hand which he let me take in mine. It was a Greek author, and he said he
was just beginning to read the language at fifty: a patriarchal age to me
of the early thirties!

I suppose I intimated the surprise I felt at his taking it up so late in
the day, for he said, with charming seriousness, “Oh, but you know, I
expect to use it in the other world.” Yea, that made it worth while, I
consented; but was he sure of the other world? “As sure as I am of
this,” he said; and I have always kept the impression of the young faith
which spoke in his voice and was more than his words.

I saw him last in the hour of those tremendous adieux which were paid him
in New York before he sailed to be minister in Germany. It was one of
the most graceful things done by President Hayes, who, most of all our
Presidents after Lincoln, honored himself in honoring literature by his
appointments, to give that place to Bayard Taylor. There was no one more
fit for it, and it was peculiarly fit that he should be so distinguished
to a people who knew and valued his scholarship and the service he had
done German letters. He was as happy in it, apparently, as a man could
be in anything here below, and he enjoyed to the last drop the many cups
of kindness pressed to his lips in parting; though I believe these
farewells, at a time when he was already fagged with work and excitement,
were notably harmful to him, and helped to hasten his end. Some of us
who were near of friendship went down to see him off when he sailed, as
the dismal and futile wont of friends is; and I recall the kind, great
fellow standing in the cabin, amid those sad flowers that heaped the
tables, saying good-by to one after another, and smiling fondly, smiling
wearily, upon all. There was champagne, of course, and an odious
hilarity, without meaning and without remission, till the warning bell
chased us ashore, and our brave poet escaped with what was left of his
life.



IV

I have followed him far from the moment of our first meeting; but even on
my way to venerate those New England luminaries, which chiefly drew my
eyes, I could not pay a less devoir to an author who, if Curtis was not,
was chief of the New York group of authors in that day. I distinguished
between the New-Englanders and the New-Yorkers, and I suppose there is no
question but our literary centre was then in Boston, wherever it is, or
is not, at present. But I thought Taylor then, and I think him now, one
of the first in our whole American province of the republic of letters,
in a day when it was in a recognizably flourishing state, whether we
regard quantity or quality in the names that gave it lustre. Lowell was
then in perfect command of those varied forces which will long, if not
lastingly, keep him in memory as first among our literary men, and master
in more kinds than any other American. Longfellow was in the fulness of
his world-wide fame, and in the ripeness of the beautiful genius which
was not to know decay while life endured. Emerson had emerged from the
popular darkness which had so long held him a hopeless mystic, and was
shining a lambent star of poesy and prophecy at the zenith. Hawthorne,
the exquisite artist, the unrivalled dreamer, whom we still always liken
this one and that one to, whenever this one or that one promises greatly
to please us, and still leave without a rival, without a companion, had
lately returned from his long sojourn abroad, and had given us the last
of the incomparable romances which the world was to have perfect from his
hand. Doctor Holmes had surpassed all expectations in those who most
admired his brilliant humor and charming poetry by the invention of a new
attitude if not a new sort in literature. The turn that civic affairs
had taken was favorable to the widest recognition of Whittier’s splendid
lyrical gift; and that heart of fire, doubly snow-bound by Quaker
tradition and Puritan environment; was penetrating every generous breast
with its flamy impulses, and fusing all wills in its noble purpose. Mrs.
Stowe, who far outfamed the rest as the author of the most renowned novel
ever written, was proving it no accident or miracle by the fiction she
was still writing.

This great New England group might be enlarged perhaps without loss of
quality by the inclusion of Thoreau, who came somewhat before his time,
and whose drastic criticism of our expediential and mainly futile
civilization would find more intelligent acceptance now than it did then,
when all resentment of its defects was specialized in enmity to Southern
slavery. Doctor Edward Everett Hale belonged in this group too, by
virtue of that humor, the most inventive and the most fantastic, the
sanest, the sweetest, the truest, which had begun to find expression in
the Atlantic Monthly; and there a wonderful young girl had written a
series of vivid sketches and taken the heart of youth everywhere with
amaze and joy, so that I thought it would be no less an event to meet
Harriet Prescott than to meet any of those I have named.

I expected somehow to meet them all, and I imagined them all easily
accessible in the office of the Atlantic Monthly, which had lately
adventured in the fine air of high literature where so many other
periodicals had gasped and died before it. The best of these, hitherto,
and better even than the Atlantic for some reasons, the lamented Putnam’s
Magazine, had perished of inanition at New York, and the claim of the
commercial capital to the literary primacy had passed with that brilliant
venture. New York had nothing distinctive to show for American
literature but the decrepit and doting Knickerbocker Magazine. Harper’s
New Monthly, though Curtis had already come to it from the wreck of
Putnam’s, and it had long ceased to be eclectic in material, and had
begun to stand for native work in the allied arts which it has since so
magnificently advanced, was not distinctively literary, and the Weekly
had just begun to make itself known. The Century, Scribner’s, the
Cosmopolitan, McClure’s, and I know not what others, were still
unimagined by five, and ten, and twenty years, and the Galaxy was to
flash and fade before any of them should kindle its more effectual fires.
The Nation, which was destined to chastise rather than nurture our young
literature, had still six years of dreamless potentiality before it; and
the Nation was always more Bostonian than New-Yorkish by nature, whatever
it was by nativity.

Philadelphia had long counted for nothing in the literary field. Graham’s
Magazine at one time showed a certain critical force, but it seemed to
perish of this expression of vitality; and there remained Godey’s Lady’s
Book and Peterson’s Magazine, publications really incredible in their
insipidity. In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal,
with the moral principles all standing on their heads in defence of
slavery; and in the West there was a feeble and foolish notion that
Western talent was repressed by Eastern jealousy. At Boston chiefly, if
not at Boston alone, was there a vigorous intellectual life among such
authors as I have named. Every young writer was ambitious to join his
name with theirs in the Atlantic Monthly, and in the lists of Ticknor &
Fields, who were literary publishers in a sense such as the business
world has known nowhere else before or since. Their imprint was a
warrant of quality to the reader and of immortality to the author, so
that if I could have had a book issued by them at that day I should now
be in the full enjoyment of an undying fame.



V.

Such was the literary situation as the passionate pilgrim from the West
approached his holy land at Boston, by way of the Grand Trunk Railway
from Quebec to Portland. I have no recollection of a sleeping-car, and I
suppose I waked and watched during the whole of that long, rough journey;
but I should hardly have slept if there had been a car for the purpose. I
was too eager to see what New England was like, and too anxious not to
lose the least glimpse of it, to close my eyes after I crossed the border
at Island Pond. I found that in the elm-dotted levels of Maine it was
very like the Western Reserve in northern Ohio, which is, indeed, a
portion of New England transferred with all its characteristic features,
and flattened out along the lake shore. It was not till I began to run
southward into the older regions of the country that it lost this look,
and became gratefully strange to me. It never had the effect of hoary
antiquity which I had expected of a country settled more than two
centuries; with its wood-built farms and villages it looked newer than
the coal-smoked brick of southern Ohio. I had prefigured the New England
landscape bare of forests, relieved here and there with the tees of
orchards or plantations; but I found apparently as much woodland as at
home.

At Portland I first saw the ocean, and this was a sort of disappointment.
Tides and salt water I had already had at Quebec, so that I was no longer
on the alert for them; but the color and the vastness of the sea I was
still to try upon my vision. When I stood on the Promenade at Portland
with the kind young Unitarian minister whom I had brought a letter to,
and who led me there for a most impressive first view of the ocean, I
could not make more of it than there was of Lake Erie; and I have never
thought the color of the sea comparable to the tender blue of the lake. I
did not hint my disappointment to my friend; I had too much regard for
the feelings of an Eastern man to decry his ocean to his face, and I felt
besides that it would be vulgar and provincial to make comparisons. I am
glad now that I held my tongue, for that kind soul is no longer in this
world, and I should not like to think he knew how far short of my
expectations the sea he was so proud of had fallen. I went up with him
into a tower or belvedere there was at hand; and when he pointed to the
eastern horizon and said, Now there was nothing but sea between us and
Africa, I pretended to expand with the thought, and began to sound myself
for the emotions which I ought to have felt at such a sight. But in my
heart I was empty, and Heaven knows whether I saw the steamer which the
ancient mariner in charge of that tower invited me to look at through his
telescope. I never could see anything but a vitreous glare through a
telescope, which has a vicious habit of dodging about through space, and
failing to bring down anything of less than planetary magnitude.

But there was something at Portland vastly more to me than seas or
continents, and that was the house where Longfellow was born. I believe,
now, I did not get the right house, but only the house he went to live in
later; but it served, and I rejoiced in it with a rapture that could not
have been more genuine if it had been the real birthplace of the poet. I
got my friend to show me

       “----the breezy dome of groves,
        The shadows of Deering’s woods,”

because they were in one of Longfellow’s loveliest and tenderest poems;
and I made an errand to the docks, for the sake of the

       “---black wharves and the slips,
        And the sea-tides tossing free,
        And Spanish sailors with bearded lips,
        And the beauty and mystery of the ships,
        And the magic of the sea,”

mainly for the reason that these were colors and shapes of the fond
vision of the poet’s past. I am in doubt whether it was at this time or
a later time that I went to revere

       “--the dead captains as they lay
        In their graves o’erlooking the tranquil bay,
        where they in battle died,”

but I am quite sure it was now that I wandered under

       “--the trees which shadow each well-known street,
        As they balance up and down,”

for when I was next in Portland the great fire had swept the city avenues
bare of most of those beautiful elms, whose Gothic arches and traceries I
well remember.

The fact is that in those days I was bursting with the most romantic
expectations of life in every way, and I looked at the whole world as
material that might be turned into literature, or that might be
associated with it somehow. I do not know how I managed to keep these
preposterous hopes within me, but perhaps the trick of satirizing them,
which I had early learnt, helped me to do it. I was at that particular
moment resolved above all things to see things as Heinrich Heine saw
them, or at least to report them as he did, no matter how I saw them; and
I went about framing phrases to this end, and trying to match the objects
of interest to them whenever there was the least chance of getting them
together.



VI.

I do not know how I first arrived in Boston, or whether it was before or
after I had passed a day or two in Salem. As Salem is on the way from
Portland, I will suppose that I stopped there first, and explored the
quaint old town (quainter then than now, but still quaint enough) for the
memorials of Hawthorne and of the witches which united to form the Salem
I cared for. I went and looked up the House of Seven Gables, and
suffered an unreasonable disappointment that it had not a great many more
of them; but there was no loss in the death-warrant of Bridget Bishop,
with the sheriff’s return of execution upon it, which I found at the
Court-house; if anything, the pathos of that witness of one of the
cruelest delusions in the world was rather in excess of my needs; I could
have got on with less. I saw the pins which the witches were sworn to
have thrust into the afflicted children, and I saw Gallows Hill, where
the hapless victims of the perjury were hanged. But that death-warrant
remained the most vivid color of my experience of the tragedy; I had no
need to invite myself to a sense of it, and it is still like a stain of
red in my memory.

The kind old ship’s captain whose guest I was, and who was transfigured
to poetry in my sense by the fact that he used to voyage to the African
coast for palm-oil in former days, led me all about the town, and showed
me the Custom-house, which I desired to see because it was in the preface
to the Scarlet Letter. But I perceived that he did not share my
enthusiasm for the author, and I became more and more sensible that in
Salem air there was a cool undercurrent of feeling about him. No doubt
the place was not altogether grateful for the celebrity his romance had
given it, and would have valued more the uninterrupted quiet of its own
flattering thoughts of itself; but when it came to hearing a young lady
say she knew a girl who said she would like to poison Hawthorne, it
seemed to the devout young pilgrim from the West that something more of
love for the great romancer would not have been too much for him.
Hawthorne had already had his say, however, and he had not used his
native town with any great tenderness. Indeed, the advantages to any
place of having a great genius born and reared in its midst are so
doubtful that it might be well for localities designing to become the
birthplaces of distinguished authors to think twice about it. Perhaps
only the largest capitals, like London and Paris, and New York and
Chicago, ought to risk it. But the authors have an unaccountable
perversity, and will seldom come into the world in the large cities,
which are alone without the sense of neighborhood, and the personal
susceptibilities so unfavorable to the practice of the literary art. I
dare say that it was owing to the local indifference to her greatest
name, or her reluctance from it, that I got a clearer impression of Salem
in some other respects than I should have had if I had been invited there
to devote myself solely to the associations of Hawthorne. For the first
time I saw an old New England town, I do not know, but the most
characteristic, and took into my young Western consciousness the fact of
a more complex civilization than I had yet known. My whole life had been
passed in a region where men were just beginning ancestors, and the
conception of family was very imperfect. Literature, of course, was full
of it, and it was not for a devotee of Thackeray to be theoretically
ignorant of its manifestations; but I had hitherto carelessly supposed
that family was nowhere regarded seriously in America except in Virginia,
where it furnished a joke for the rest of the nation. But now I found
myself confronted with it in its ancient houses, and heard its names
pronounced with a certain consideration, which I dare say was as much
their due in Salem as it could be anywhere. The names were all strange,
and all indifferent to me, but those fine square wooden mansions, of a
tasteful architecture, and a pale buff-color, withdrawing themselves in
quiet reserve from the quiet street, gave me an impression of family as
an actuality and a force which I had never had before, but which no
Westerner can yet understand the East without taking into account. I do
not suppose that I conceived of family as a fact of vital import then; I
think I rather regarded it as a color to be used in any aesthetic study
of the local conditions. I am not sure that I valued it more even for
literary purposes, than the steeple which the captain pointed out as the
first and last thing he saw when he came and went on his long voyages, or
than the great palm-oil casks, which he showed me, and which I related to
the tree that stood

        “Auf brennender Felsenwand.”

Whether that was the kind of palm that gives the oil, or was a sort only
suitable to be the dream of a lonely fir-tree in the North on a cold
height, I am in doubt to this day.

I heard, not without concern, that the neighboring industry of Lynn was
penetrating Salem, and that the ancient haunt of the witches and the
birthplace of our subtlest and somberest wizard was becoming a great
shoe-town; but my concern was less for its memories and sensibilities
than for an odious duty which I owed that industry, together with all the
others in New England. Before I left home I had promised my earliest
publisher that I would undertake to edit, or compile, or do something
literary to, a work on the operation of the more distinctive mechanical
inventions of our country, which he had conceived the notion of
publishing by subscription. He had furnished me, the most immechanical
of humankind, with a letter addressed generally to the great mills and
factories of the East, entreating their managers to unfold their
mysteries to me for the purposes of this volume. His letter had the
effect of shutting up some of them like clams, and others it put upon
their guard against my researches, lest I should seize the secret of
their special inventions and publish it to the world. I could not tell
the managers that I was both morally and mentally incapable of this; that
they might have explained and demonstrated the properties and functions
of their most recondite machinery, and upon examination afterwards found
me guiltless of having anything but a few verses of Heine or Tennyson or
Longfellow in my head. So I had to suffer in several places from their
unjust anxieties, and from my own weariness of their ingenious engines,
or else endure the pangs of a bad conscience from ignoring them. As long
as I was in Canada I was happy, for there was no industry in Canada that
I saw, except that of the peasant girls, in their Evangeline hats and
kirtles, tossing the hay in the way-side fields; but when I reached
Portland my troubles began. I went with that young minister of whom I
have spoken to a large foundry, where they were casting some sort of
ironmongery, and inspected the process from a distance beyond any chance
spurt of the molten metal, and came away sadly uncertain of putting the
rather fine spectacle to any practical use. A manufactory where they did
something with coal-oil (which I now heard for the first time called
kerosene) refused itself to me, and I said to myself that probably all
the other industries of Portland were as reserved, and I would not seek
to explore them; but when I got to Salem, my conscience stirred again.
If I knew that there were shoe-shops in Salem, ought not I to go and
inspect their processes? This was a question which would not answer
itself to my satisfaction, and I had no peace till I learned that I could
see shoemaking much better at Lynn, and that Lynn was such a little way
from Boston that I could readily run up there, if I did not wish to
examine the shoe machinery at once. I promised myself that I would run up
from Boston, but in order to do this I must first go to Boston.



VII.

I am supposing still that I saw Salem before I saw Boston, but however
the fact may be, I am sure that I decided it would be better to see
shoemaking in Lynn, where I really did see it, thirty years later. For
the purposes of the present visit, I contented myself with looking at a
machine in Haverhill, which chewed a shoe sole full of pegs, and dropped
it out of its iron jaws with an indifference as great as my own, and
probably as little sense of how it had done its work. I may be unjust to
that machine; Heaven knows I would not wrong it; and I must confess that
my head had no room in it for the conception of any machinery but the
mythological, which also I despised, in my revulsion from the
eighteenth-century poets to those of my own day.

I cannot quite make out after the lapse of so many years just how or when
I got to Haverhill, or whether it was before or after I had been in
Salem. There is an apparitional quality in my presences, at this point
or that, in the dim past; but I hope that, for the credit of their order,
ghosts are not commonly taken with such trivial things as I was. For
instance, in Haverhill I was much interested by the sight of a young man,
coming gayly down the steps of the hotel where I lodged, in peg-top
trousers so much more peg top than my own that I seemed to be wearing
mere spring-bottoms in comparison; and in a day when every one who
respected himself had a necktie as narrow as he could get, this youth had
one no wider than a shoestring, and red at that, while mine measured
almost an inch, and was black. To be sure, he was one of a band of negro
minstrels, who were to give a concert that night, and he had a light to
excel in fashion.

I will suppose, for convenience’ sake, that I visited Haverhill, too,
before I reached Boston: somehow that shoe-pegging machine must come in,
and it may as well come in here. When I actually found myself in Boston,
there were perhaps industries which it would have been well for me to
celebrate, but I either made believe there were none, or else I honestly
forgot all about them. In either case I released myself altogether to
the literary and historical associations of the place. I need not say
that I gave myself first to the first, and it rather surprised me to find
that the literary associations of Boston referred so largely to
Cambridge. I did not know much about Cambridge, except that it was the
seat of the university where Lowell was, and Longfellow had been,
professor; and somehow I had not realized it as the home of these poets.
That was rather stupid of me, but it is best to own the truth, and
afterward I came to know the place so well that I may safely confess my
earlier ignorance.

I had stopped in Boston at the Tremont House, which was still one of the
first hostelries of the country, and I must have inquired my way to
Cambridge there; but I was sceptical of the direction the Cambridge
horse-car took when I found it, and I hinted to the driver my anxieties
as to why he should be starting east when I had been told that Cambridge
was west of Boston. He reassured me in the laconic and sarcastic manner
of his kind, and we really reached Cambridge by the route he had taken.

The beautiful elms that shaded great part of the way massed themselves in
the “groves of academe” at the Square, and showed pleasant glimpses of
“Old Harvard’s scholar factories red,” then far fewer than now. It must
have been in vacation, for I met no one as I wandered through the college
yard, trying to make up my mind as to how I should learn where Lowell
lived; for it was he whom I had come to find. He had not only taken the
poems I sent him, but he had printed two of them in a single number of
the Atlantic, and had even written me a little note about them, which I
wore next my heart in my breast pocket till I almost wore it out; and so
I thought I might fitly report myself to him. But I have always been
helpless in finding my way, and I was still depressed by my failure to
convince the horse-car driver that he had taken the wrong road. I let
several people go by without questioning them, and those I did ask
abashed me farther by not knowing what I wanted to know. When I had
remitted my search for the moment, an ancient man, with an open mouth and
an inquiring eye, whom I never afterwards made out in Cambridge,
addressed me with a hospitable offer to show me the Washington Elm. I
thought this would give me time to embolden myself for the meeting with
the editor of the Atlantic if I should ever find him, and I went with
that kind old man, who when he had shown me the tree, and the spot where
Washington stood when he took command of the Continental forces, said
that he had a branch of it, and that if I would come to his house with
him he would give me a piece. In the end, I meant merely to flatter him
into telling me where I could find Lowell, but I dissembled my purpose
and pretended a passion for a piece of the historic elm, and the old man
led me not only to his house but his wood-house, where he sawed me off a
block so generous that I could not get it into my pocket. I feigned the
gratitude which I could see that he expected, and then I took courage to
put my question to him. Perhaps that patriarch lived only in the past,
and cared for history and not literature. He confessed that he could not
tell me where to find Lowell; but he did not forsake me; he set forth
with me upon the street again, and let no man pass without asking him. In
the end we met one who was able to say where Mr. Lowell was, and I found
him at last in a little study at the rear of a pleasant, old-fashioned
house near the Delta.

Lowell was not then at the height of his fame; he had just reached this
thirty years after, when he died; but I doubt if he was ever after a
greater power in his own country, or more completely embodied the
literary aspiration which would not and could not part itself from the
love of freedom and the hope of justice. For the sake of these he had
been willing to suffer the reproach which followed their friends in the
earlier days of the anti-slavery struggle: He had outlived the reproach
long before; but the fear of his strength remained with those who had
felt it, and he had not made himself more generally loved by the ‘Fable
for Critics’ than by the ‘Biglow Papers’, probably. But in the ‘Vision
of Sir Launfal’ and the ‘Legend of Brittany’ he had won a liking if not a
listening far wider than his humor and his wit had got him; and in his
lectures on the English poets, given not many years before he came to the
charge of the Atlantic, he had proved himself easily the wisest and
finest critic in our language. He was already, more than any American
poet,

        “Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn,
                  The love of love,”

and he held a place in the public sense which no other author among us
has held. I had myself never been a great reader of his poetry, when I
met him, though when I was a boy of ten years I had heard my father
repeat passages from the Biglow Papers against war and slavery and the
war for slavery upon Mexico, and later I had read those criticisms of
English poetry, and I knew Sir Launfal must be Lowell in some sort; but
my love for him as a poet was chiefly centred in my love for his tender
rhyme, ‘Auf Wiedersehen’, which I can not yet read without something of
the young pathos it first stirred in me. I knew and felt his greatness
some how apart from the literary proofs of it; he ruled my fancy and held
my allegiance as a character, as a man; and I am neither sorry nor
ashamed that I was abashed when I first came into his presence; and that
in spite of his words of welcome I sat inwardly quaking before him. He
was then forty-one years old, and nineteen my senior, and if there had
been nothing else to awe me, I might well have been quelled by the
disparity of our ages. But I have always been willing and even eager to
do homage to men who have done something, and notably to men who have
done something in the sort I wished to do something in, myself. I
could never recognize any other sort of superiority; but that I am proud
to recognize; and I had before Lowell some such feeling as an obscure
subaltern might have before his general. He was by nature a bit of a
disciplinarian, and the effect was from him as well as in me; I dare say
he let me feel whatever difference there was as helplessly as I felt it.
At the first encounter with people he always was apt to have a certain
frosty shyness, a smiling cold, as from the long, high-sunned winters of
his Puritan race; he was not quite himself till he had made you aware of
his quality: then no one could be sweeter, tenderer, warmer than he; then
he made you free of his whole heart; but you must be his captive before
he could do that. His whole personality had now an instant charm for me;
I could not keep my eyes from those beautiful eyes of his, which had a
certain starry serenity, and looked out so purely from under his white
forehead, shadowed with auburn hair untouched by age; or from the smile
that shaped the auburn beard, and gave the face in its form and color the
Christ-look which Page’s portrait has flattered in it.

His voice had as great a fascination for me as his face. The vibrant
tenderness and the crisp clearness of the tones, the perfect modulation,
the clear enunciation, the exquisite accent, the elect diction--I did not
know enough then to know that these were the gifts, these were the
graces, of one from whose tongue our rough English came music such as I
should never hear from any other. In this speech there was nothing of
our slipshod American slovenliness, but a truly Italian conscience and an
artistic sense of beauty in the instrument.

I saw, before he sat down across his writing-table from me, that he was
not far from the medium height; but his erect carriage made the most of
his five feet and odd inches. He had been smoking the pipe he loved, and
he put it back in his mouth, presently, as if he found himself at greater
ease with it, when he began to chat, or rather to let me show what manner
of young man I was by giving me the first word. I told him of the
trouble I had in finding him, and I could not help dragging in something
about Heine’s search for Borne, when he went to see him in Frankfort; but
I felt at once this was a false start, for Lowell was such an impassioned
lover of Cambridge, which was truly his patria, in the Italian sense,
that it must have hurt him to be unknown to any one in it; he said, a
little dryly, that he should not have thought I would have so much
difficulty; but he added, forgivingly, that this was not his own house,
which he was out of for the time. Then he spoke to me of Heine, and when
I showed my ardor for him, he sought to temper it with some judicious
criticisms, and told me that he had kept the first poem I sent him, for
the long time it had been unacknowledged, to make sure that it was not a
translation. He asked me about myself, and my name, and its Welsh
origin, and seemed to find the vanity I had in this harmless enough. When
I said I had tried hard to believe that I was at least the literary
descendant of Sir James Howels, he corrected me gently with “James
Howel,” and took down a volume of the ‘Familiar Letters’ from the shelves
behind him to prove me wrong. This was always his habit, as I found
afterwards when he quoted anything from a book he liked to get it and
read the passage over, as if he tasted a kind of hoarded sweetness in the
words. It visibly vexed him if they showed him in the least mistaken;
but

        “The love he bore to learning was at fault”

for this foible, and that other of setting people right if he thought
them wrong. I could not assert myself against his version of Howels’s
name, for my edition of his letters was far away in Ohio, and I was
obliged to own that the name was spelt in several different ways in it.
He perceived, no doubt, why I had chosen the form liked my own, with the
title which the pleasant old turncoat ought to have had from the many
masters he served according to their many minds, but never had except
from that erring edition. He did not afflict me for it, though; probably
it amused him too much; he asked me about the West, and when he found
that I was as proud of the West as I was of Wales, he seemed even better
pleased, and said he had always fancied that human nature was laid out on
rather a larger scale there than in the East, but he had seen very little
of the West. In my heart I did not think this then, and I do not think
it now; human nature has had more ground to spread over in the West; that
is all; but “it was not for me to bandy words with my sovereign.” He
said he liked to hear of the differences between the different sections,
for what we had most to fear in our country was a wearisome sameness of
type.

He did not say now, or at any other time during the many years I knew
him, any of those slighting things of the West which I had so often to
suffer from Eastern people, but suffered me to praise it all I would. He
asked me what way I had taken in coming to New England, and when I told
him, and began to rave of the beauty and quaintness of French Canada, and
to pour out my joy in Quebec, he said, with a smile that had now lost all
its frost, Yes, Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century; it was in
many ways more French than France, and its people spoke the language of
Voltaire, with the accent of Voltaire’s time.

I do not remember what else he talked of, though once I remembered it
with what I believed an ineffaceable distinctness. I set nothing of it
down at the time; I was too busy with the letters I was writing for a
Cincinnati paper; and I was severely bent upon keeping all personalities
out of them. This was very well, but I could wish now that I had
transgressed at least so far as to report some of the things that Lowell
said; for the paper did not print my letters, and it would have been
perfectly safe, and very useful for the present purpose. But perhaps he
did not say anything very memorable; to do that you must have something
positive in your listener; and I was the mere response, the hollow echo,
that youth must be in like circumstances. I was all the time afraid of
wearing my welcome out, and I hurried to go when I would so gladly have
staid. I do not remember where I meant to go, or why he should have
undertaken to show me the way across-lots, but this was what he did; and
when we came to a fence, which I clambered gracelessly over, he put his
hands on the top, and tried to take it at a bound. He tried twice, and
then laughed at his failure, but not with any great pleasure, and he was
not content till a third trial carried him across. Then he said, “I
commonly do that the first time,” as if it were a frequent habit with
him, while I remained discreetly silent, and for that moment at least
felt myself the elder of the man who had so much of the boy in him. He
had, indeed, much of the boy in him to the last, and he parted with each
hour of his youth reluctantly, pathetically.



VIII.

We walked across what must have been Jarvis Field to what must have been
North Avenue, and there he left me. But before he let me go he held my
hand while he could say that he wished me to dine with him; only, he was
not in his own house, and he would ask me to dine with him at the Parker
House in Boston, and would send me word of the time later.

I suppose I may have spent part of the intervening time in viewing the
wonders of Boston, and visiting the historic scenes and places in it and
about it. I certainly went over to Charleston, and ascended Bunker Hill
monument, and explored the navy-yard, where the immemorial man-of-war
begun in Jackson’s time was then silently stretching itself under its
long shed in a poetic arrest, as if the failure of the appropriation for
its completion had been some kind of enchantment. In Boston, I early
presented my letter of credit to the publisher it was drawn upon, not
that I needed money at the moment, but from a young eagerness to see if
it would be honored; and a literary attache of the house kindly went
about with me, and showed me the life of the city. A great city it
seemed to me then, and a seething vortex of business as well as a whirl
of gaiety, as I saw it in Washington Street, and in a promenade concert
at Copeland’s restaurant in Tremont Row. Probably I brought some
idealizing force to bear upon it, for I was not all so strange to the
world as I must seem; perhaps I accounted for quality as well as quantity
in my impressions of the New England metropolis, and aggrandized it in
the ratio of its literary importance. It seemed to me old, even after
Quebec, and very likely I credited the actual town with all the dead and
gone Bostonians in my sentimental census. If I did not, it was no fault
of my cicerone, who thought even more of the city he showed me than I
did. I do not know now who he was, and I never saw him after I came to
live there, with any certainty that it was he, though I was often
tormented with the vision of a spectacled face like his, but not like
enough to warrant me in addressing him.

He became part of that ghostly Boston of my first visit, which would
sometimes return and possess again the city I came to know so familiarly
in later years, and to be so passionately interested in. Some color of
my prime impressions has tinged the fictitious experiences of people in
my books, but I find very little of it in my memory. This is like a web
of frayed old lace, which I have to take carefully into my hold for fear
of its fragility, and make out as best I can the figure once so distinct
in it. There are the narrow streets, stretching saltworks to the docks,
which I haunted for their quaintness, and there is Faunal Hall, which I
cared to see so much more because Wendell Phillips had spoken in it than
because Otis and Adams had. There is the old Colonial House, and there
is the State House, which I dare say I explored, with the Common sloping
before it. There is Beacon Street, with the Hancock House where it is
incredibly no more, and there are the beginnings of Commonwealth Avenue,
and the other streets of the Back Bay, laid out with their basements left
hollowed in the made land, which the gravel trains were yet making out of
the westward hills. There is the Public Garden, newly planned and
planted, but without the massive bridge destined to make so ungratefully
little of the lake that occasioned it. But it is all very vague, and I
could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it then in my
place.

I think that I did not try to see Cambridge the same day that I saw
Lowell, but wisely came back to my hotel in Boston, and tried to realize
the fact. I went out another day, with an acquaintance from Ohio; whom I
ran upon in the street. We went to Mount Auburn together, and I viewed
its monuments with a reverence which I dare say their artistic quality
did not merit. But I am, not sorry for this, for perhaps they are not
quite so bad as some people pretend. The Gothic chapel of the cemetery,
unsorted as it was, gave me, with its half-dozen statues standing or
sitting about, an emotion such as I am afraid I could not receive now
from the Acropolis, Westminster Abbey, and Santa Crocea in one. I tried
hard for some aesthetic sense of it, and I made believe that I thought
this thing and that thing in the place moved me with its fitness or
beauty; but the truth is that I had no taste in anything but literature,
and did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced.

I did genuinely love the elmy quiet of the dear old Cambridge streets,
though, and I had a real and instant pleasure in the yellow colonial
houses, with their white corners and casements and their green blinds,
that lurked behind the shrubbery of the avenue I passed through to Mount
Auburn. The most beautiful among them was the most interesting for me,
for it was the house of Longfellow; my companion, who had seen it before,
pointed it out to me with an air of custom, and I would not let him see
that I valued the first sight of it as I did. I had hoped that somehow I
might be so favored as to see Longfellow himself, but when I asked about
him of those who knew, they said, “Oh, he is at Nahant,” and I thought
that Nahant must be a great way off, and at any rate I did not feel
authorized to go to him there. Neither did I go to see the author of
‘The Amber Gods’ who lived at Newburyport, I was told, as if I should
know where Newburyport was; I did not know, and I hated to ask. Besides,
it did not seem so simple as it had seemed in Ohio, to go and see a young
lady simply because I was infatuated with her literature; even as the
envoy of all the infatuated young people of Columbus, I could not quite
do this; and when I got home, I had to account for my failure as best I
could. Another failure of mine was the sight of Whittier, which I then
very much longed to have. They said, “Oh, Whittier lives at Amesbury,”
 but that put him at an indefinite distance, and without the introduction
I never would ask for, I found it impossible to set out in quest of him.
In the end, I saw no one in New England whom I was not presented to in
the regular way, except Lowell, whom I thought I had a right to call upon
in my quality of contributor, and from the acquaintance I had with him by
letter. I neither praise nor blame myself for this; it was my shyness
that with held me rather than my merit. There is really no harm in
seeking the presence of a famous man, and I doubt if the famous man
resents the wish of people to look upon him without some measure, great
or little, of affectation. There are bores everywhere, but he is
likelier to find them in the wonted figures of society than in those
young people, or old people, who come to him in the love of what he has
done. I am well aware how furiously Tennyson sometimes met his
worshippers, and how insolently Carlyle, but I think these facts are
little specks in their sincerity. Our own gentler and honester
celebrities did not forbid approach, and I have known some of them caress
adorers who seemed hardly worthy of their kindness; but that was better
than to have hurt any sensitive spirit who had ventured too far, by the
rules that govern us with common men.



IX.

My business relations were with the house that so promptly honored my
letter of credit. This house had published in the East the campaign life
of Lincoln which I had lately written, and I dare say would have
published the volume of poems I had written earlier with my friend Piatt,
if there had been any public for it; at least, I saw large numbers of the
book on the counters. But all my literary affiliations were with Ticknor
& Fields, and it was the Old Corner Book-Store on Washington Street that
drew my heart as soon as I had replenished my pocket in Cornhill. After
verifying the editor of the Atlantic Monthly I wised to verify its
publishers, and it very fitly happened that when I was shown into Mr.
Fields’s little room at the back of the store, with its window looking
upon School Street, and its scholarly keeping in books and prints, he had
just got the magazine sheets of a poem of mine from the Cambridge
printers. He was then lately from abroad, and he had the zest for
American things which a foreign sojourn is apt to renew in us, though I
did not know this then, and could not account for it in the kindness he
expressed for my poem. He introduced me to Mr. Ticknor, who I fancied
had not read my poem; but he seemed to know what it was from the junior
partner, and he asked me whether I had been paid for it. I confessed
that I had not, and then he got out a chamois-leather bag, and took from
it five half-eagles in gold and laid them on the green cloth top of the
desk, in much the shape and of much the size of the Great Bear. I have
never since felt myself paid so lavishly for any literary work, though I
have had more for a single piece than the twenty-five dollars that
dazzled me in this constellation. The publisher seemed aware of the
poetic character of the transaction; he let the pieces lie a moment,
before he gathered them up and put them into my hand, and said, “I always
think it is pleasant to have it in gold.”

But a terrible experience with the poem awaited me, and quenched for the
moment all my pleasure and pride. It was ‘The Pilot’s Story,’ which I
suppose has had as much acceptance as anything of mine in verse (I do not
boast of a vast acceptance for it), and I had attempted to treat in it a
phase of the national tragedy of slavery, as I had imagined it on a
Mississippi steamboat. A young planter has gambled away the slave-girl
who is the mother of his child, and when he tells her, she breaks out
upon him with the demand:

   “What will you say to our boy when he cries for me, there in Saint
   Louis?”

I had thought this very well, and natural and simple, but a fatal
proof-reader had not thought it well enough, or simple and natural
enough, and he had made the line read:

   “What will you say to our boy when he cries for ‘Ma,’ there in Saint
   Louis?”

He had even had the inspiration to quote the word he preferred to the one
I had written, so that there was no merciful possibility of mistaking it
for a misprint, and my blood froze in my veins at sight of it. Mr.
Fields had given me the sheets to read while he looked over some letters,
and he either felt the chill of my horror, or I made some sign or sound
of dismay that caught his notice, for he looked round at me. I could
only show him the passage with a gasp. I dare say he might have liked to
laugh, for it was cruelly funny, but he did not; he was concerned for the
magazine as well as for me. He declared that when he first read the line
he had thought I could not have written it so, and he agreed with me that
it would kill the poem if it came out in that shape. He instantly set
about repairing the mischief, so far as could be. He found that the
whole edition of that sheet had been printed, and the air blackened round
me again, lighted up here and there with baleful flashes of the newspaper
wit at my cost, which I previsioned in my misery; I knew what I should
have said of such a thing myself, if it had been another’s. But the
publisher at once decided that the sheet must be reprinted, and I went
away weak as if in the escape from some deadly peril. Afterwards it
appeared that the line had passed the first proof-reader as I wrote it,
but that the final reader had entered so sympathetically into the
realistic intention of my poem as to contribute the modification which
had nearly been my end.



X.

As it fell out, I lived without farther difficulty to the day and hour of
the dinner Lowell made for me; and I really think, looking at myself
impersonally, and remembering the sort of young fellow I was, that it
would have been a great pity if I had not. The dinner was at the
old-fashioned Boston hour of two, and the table was laid for four people
in some little upper room at Parker’s, which I was never afterwards able
to make sure of. Lowell was already, there when I came, and he presented
me, to my inexpressible delight and surprise, to Dr. Holmes, who was
there with him.

Holmes was in the most brilliant hour of that wonderful second youth
which his fame flowered into long after the world thought he had
completed the cycle of his literary life. He had already received full
recognition as a poet of delicate wit, nimble humor, airy imagination,
and exquisite grace, when the Autocrat papers advanced his name
indefinitely beyond the bounds which most immortals would have found
range enough. The marvel of his invention was still fresh in the minds
of men, and time had not dulled in any measure the sense of its novelty.
His readers all fondly identified him with his work; and I fully expected
to find myself in the Autocrat’s presence when I met Dr. Holmes. But
the fascination was none the less for that reason; and the winning smile,
the wise and humorous glance, the whole genial manner was as important to
me as if I had foreboded something altogether different. I found him
physically of the Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps,
and I could look into his face without that unpleasant effort which
giants of inferior mind so often cost the man of five feet four.

A little while after, Fields came in, and then our number and my pleasure
were complete.

Nothing else so richly satisfactory, indeed, as the whole affair could
have happened to a like youth at such a point in his career; and when I
sat down with Doctor Holmes and Mr. Fields, on Lowell’s right, I felt
through and through the dramatic perfection of the event. The kindly
Autocrat recognized some such quality of it in terms which were not the
less precious and gracious for their humorous excess. I have no reason
to think that he had yet read any of my poor verses, or had me otherwise
than wholly on trust from Lowell; but he leaned over towards his host,
and said, with a laughing look at me, “Well, James, this is something
like the apostolic succession; this is the laying on of hands.” I took
his sweet and caressing irony as he meant it; but the charm of it went to
my head long before any drop of wine, together with the charm of hearing
him and Lowell calling each other James and Wendell, and of finding them
still cordially boys together.

I would gladly have glimmered before those great lights in the talk that
followed, if I could have thought of anything brilliant to say, but I
could not, and so I let them shine without a ray of reflected splendor
from me. It was such talk as I had, of course, never heard before, and
it is not saying enough to say that I have never heard such talk since
except from these two men. It was as light and kind as it was deep and
true, and it ranged over a hundred things, with a perpetual sparkle of
Doctor Holmes’s wit, and the constant glow of Lowell’s incandescent
sense. From time to time Fields came in with one of his delightful
stories (sketches of character they were, which he sometimes did not mind
caricaturing), or with some criticism of the literary situation from his
stand-point of both lover and publisher of books. I heard fames that I
had accepted as proofs of power treated as factitious, and witnessed a
frankness concerning authorship, far and near, that I had not dreamed of
authors using. When Doctor Holmes understood that I wrote for the
‘Saturday Press’, which was running amuck among some Bostonian
immortalities of the day, he seemed willing that I should know they were
not thought so very undying in Boston, and that I should not take the
notion of a Mutual Admiration Society too seriously, or accept the New
York Bohemian view of Boston as true. For the most part the talk did not
address itself to me, but became an exchange of thoughts and fancies
between himself and Lowell. They touched, I remember, on certain matters
of technique, and the doctor confessed that he had a prejudice against
some words that he could not overcome; for instance, he said, nothing
could induce him to use ‘neath for beneath, no exigency of versification
or stress of rhyme. Lowell contended that he would use any word that
carried his meaning; and I think he did this to the hurt of some of his
earlier things. He was then probably in the revolt against too much
literature in literature, which every one is destined sooner or later to
share; there was a certain roughness, very like crudeness, which he
indulged before his thought and phrase mellowed to one music in his later
work. I tacitly agreed rather with the doctor, though I did not swerve
from my allegiance to Lowell, and if I had spoken I should have sided
with him: I would have given that or any other proof of my devotion.
Fields casually mentioned that he thought “The Dandelion” was the most
popularly liked of Lowell’s briefer poems, and I made haste to say that I
thought so too, though I did not really think anything about it; and then
I was sorry, for I could see that the poet did not like it, quite; and I
felt that I was duly punished for my dishonesty.

Hawthorne was named among other authors, probably by Fields, whose house
had just published his “Marble Faun,” and who had recently come home on
the same steamer with him. Doctor Holmes asked if I had met Hawthorne
yet, and when I confessed that I had hardly yet even hoped for such a
thing, he smiled his winning smile, and said: “Ah, well! I don’t know
that you will ever feel you have really met him. He is like a dim room
with a little taper of personality burning on the corner of the mantel.”

They all spoke of Hawthorne, and with the same affection, but the same
sense of something mystical and remote in him; and every word was
priceless to me. But these masters of the craft I was ‘prentice to
probably could not have said anything that I should not have found wise
and well, and I am sure now I should have been the loser if the talk had
shunned any of the phases of human nature which it touched. It is best
to find that all men are of the same make, and that there are certain
universal things which interest them as much as the supernal things, and
amuse them even more. There was a saying of Lowell’s which he was fond
of repeating at the menace of any form of the transcendental, and he
liked to warn himself and others with his homely, “Remember the
dinner-bell.” What I recall of the whole effect of a time so happy for
me is that in all that was said, however high, however fine, we were
never out of hearing of the dinner-bell; and perhaps this is the best
effect I can leave with the reader. It was the first dinner served in
courses that I had sat down to, and I felt that this service gave it a
romantic importance which the older fashion of the West still wanted.
Even at Governor Chase’s table in Columbus the Governor carved; I knew of
the dinner ‘a la Russe’, as it was then called, only from books; and it
was a sort of literary flavor that I tasted in the successive dishes.
When it came to the black coffee, and then to the ‘petits verres’ of
cognac, with lumps of sugar set fire to atop, it was something that so
far transcended my home-kept experience that it began to seem altogether
visionary.

Neither Fields nor Doctor Holmes smoked, and I had to confess that I did
not; but Lowell smoked enough for all three, and the spark of his cigar
began to show in the waning light before we rose from the table. The
time that never had, nor can ever have, its fellow for me, had to come to
an end, as all times must, and when I shook hands with Lowell in parting,
he overwhelmed me by saying that if I thought of going to Concord he
would send me a letter to Hawthorne. I was not to see Lowell again
during my stay in Boston; but Doctor Holmes asked me to tea for the next
evening, and Fields said I must come to breakfast with him in the
morning.



XI.

I recall with the affection due to his friendly nature, and to the
kindness afterwards to pass between us for many years, the whole aspect
of the publisher when I first saw him. His abundant hair, and his full
“beard as broad as ony spade,” that flowed from his throat in Homeric
curls, were touched with the first frost. He had a fine color, and his
eyes, as keen as they were kind, twinkled restlessly above the wholesome
russet-red of his cheeks. His portly frame was clad in those Scotch
tweeds which had not yet displaced the traditional broadcloth with us in
the West, though I had sent to New York for a rough suit, and so felt
myself not quite unworthy to meet a man fresh from the hands of the
London tailor.

Otherwise I stood as much in awe of him as his jovial soul would let me;
and if I might I should like to suggest to the literary youth of this day
some notion of the importance of his name to the literary youth of my
day. He gave aesthetic character to the house of Ticknor & Fields, but
he was by no means a silent partner on the economic side. No one can
forecast the fortune of a new book, but he knew as well as any publisher
can know not only whether a book was good, but whether the reader would
think so; and I suppose that his house made as few bad guesses, along
with their good ones, as any house that ever tried the uncertain temper
of the public with its ventures. In the minds of all who loved the plain
brown cloth and tasteful print of its issues he was more or less
intimately associated with their literature; and those who were not
mistaken in thinking De Quincey one of the delightfulest authors in the
world, were especially grateful to the man who first edited his writings
in book form, and proud that this edition was the effect of American
sympathy with them. At that day, I believed authorship the noblest
calling in the world, and I should still be at a loss to name any nobler.
The great authors I had met were to me the sum of greatness, and if I
could not rank their publisher with them by virtue of equal achievement,
I handsomely brevetted him worthy of their friendship, and honored him in
the visible measure of it.

In his house beside the Charles, and in the close neighborhood of Doctor
Holmes, I found an odor and an air of books such as I fancied might
belong to the famous literary houses of London. It is still there, that
friendly home of lettered refinement, and the gracious spirit which knew
how to welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness, and
the most of the little else there was in me, illumines it still, though
my host of that rapturous moment has many years been of those who are
only with us unseen and unheard. I remember his burlesque pretence that
morning of an inextinguishable grief when I owned that I had never eaten
blueberry cake before, and how he kept returning to the pathos of the
fact that there should be a region of the earth where blueberry cake was
unknown. We breakfasted in the pretty room whose windows look out
through leaves and flowers upon the river’s coming and going tides, and
whose walls were covered with the faces and the autographs of all the
contemporary poets and novelists. The Fieldses had spent some days with
Tennyson in their recent English sojourn, and Mrs. Fields had much to
tell of him, how he looked, how he smoked, how he read aloud, and how he
said, when he asked her to go with him to the tower of his house, “Come
up and see the sad English sunset!” which had an instant value to me such
as some rich verse of his might have had. I was very new to it all, how
new I could not very well say, but I flattered myself that I breathed in
that atmosphere as if in the return from life-long exile. Still I
patriotically bragged of the West a little, and I told them proudly that
in Columbus no book since Uncle Tom’s Cabin had sold so well as ‘The
Marble Faun’. This made the effect that I wished, but whether it was
true or not, Heaven knows; I only know that I heard it from our leading
bookseller, and I made no question of it myself.

After breakfast, Fields went away to the office, and I lingered, while
Mrs. Fields showed me from shelf to shelf in the library, and dazzled me
with the sight of authors’ copies, and volumes invaluable with the
autographs and the pencilled notes of the men whose names were dear to me
from my love of their work. Everywhere was some souvenir of the living
celebrities my hosts had met; and whom had they not met in that English
sojourn in days before England embittered herself to us during our civil
war? Not Tennyson only, but Thackeray, but Dickens, but Charles Reade,
but Carlyle, but many a minor fame was in my ears from converse so recent
with them that it was as if I heard their voices in their echoed words.

I do not remember how long I stayed; I remember I was afraid of staying
too long, and so I am sure I did not stay as long as I should have liked.
But I have not the least notion how I got away, and I am not certain
where I spent the rest of a day that began in the clouds, but had to be
ended on the common earth. I suppose I gave it mostly to wandering about
the city, and partly to recording my impressions of it for that newspaper
which never published them. The summer weather in Boston, with its sunny
heat struck through and through with the coolness of the sea, and its
clear air untainted with a breath of smoke, I have always loved, but it
had then a zest unknown before; and I should have thought it enough
simply to be alive in it. But everywhere I came upon something that fed
my famine for the old, the quaint, the picturesque, and however the day
passed it was a banquet, a festival. I can only recall my breathless
first sight of the Public Library and of the Athenaeum Gallery: great
sights then, which the Vatican and the Pitti hardly afterwards eclipsed
for mere emotion. In fact I did not see these elder treasuries of
literature and art between breakfasting with the Autocrat’s publisher in
the morning, and taking tea with the Autocrat himself in the evening, and
that made a whole world’s difference.



XII.

The tea of that simpler time is wholly inconceivable to this generation,
which knows the thing only as a mild form of afternoon reception; but I
suppose that in 1860 very few dined late in our whole pastoral republic.
Tea was the meal people asked people to when they wished to sit at long
leisure and large ease; it came at the end of the day, at six o’clock, or
seven; and one went to it in morning dress. It had an unceremonied
domesticity in the abundance of its light dishes, and I fancy these did
not vary much from East to West, except that we had a Southern touch in
our fried chicken and corn bread; but at the Autocrat’s tea table the
cheering cup had a flavor unknown to me before that day. He asked me if
I knew it, and I said it was English breakfast tea; for I had drunk it at
the publisher’s in the morning, and was willing not to seem strange to
it. “Ah, yes,” he said; “but this is the flower of the souchong; it is
the blossom, the poetry of tea,” and then he told me how it had been
given him by a friend, a merchant in the China trade, which used to
flourish in Boston, and was the poetry of commerce, as this delicate
beverage was of tea. That commerce is long past, and I fancy that the
plant ceased to bloom when the traffic fell into decay.

The Autocrat’s windows had the same outlook upon the Charles as the
publisher’s, and after tea we went up into a back parlor of the same
orientation, and saw the sunset die over the water, and the westering
flats and hills. Nowhere else in the world has the day a lovelier close,
and our talk took something of the mystic coloring that the heavens gave
those mantling expanses. It was chiefly his talk, but I have always
found the best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like, and
a quick sympathy and a subtle sense met all that I had to say from him
and from the unbroken circle of kindred intelligences about him. I saw
him then in the midst of his family, and perhaps never afterwards to
better advantage, or in a finer mood. We spoke of the things that people
perhaps once liked to deal with more than they do now; of the intimations
of immortality, of the experiences of morbid youth, and of all those
messages from the tremulous nerves which we take for prophecies. I was
not ashamed, before his tolerant wisdom, to acknowledge the effects that
had lingered so long with me in fancy and even in conduct, from a time of
broken health and troubled spirit; and I remember the exquisite tact in
him which recognized them as things common to all, however peculiar in
each, which left them mine for whatever obscure vanity I might have in
them, and yet gave me the companionship of the whole race in their
experience. We spoke of forebodings and presentiments; we approached the
mystic confines of the world from which no traveller has yet returned
with a passport ‘en regle’ and properly ‘vise’; and he held his light
course through these filmy impalpabilities with a charming sincerity,
with the scientific conscience that refuses either to deny the substance
of things unseen, or to affirm it. In the gathering dusk, so weird did
my fortune of being there and listening to him seem, that I might well
have been a blessed ghost, for all the reality I felt in myself.

I tried to tell him how much I had read him from my boyhood, and with
what joy and gain; and he was patient of these futilities, and I have no
doubt imagined the love that inspired them, and accepted that instead of
the poor praise. When the sunset passed, and the lamps were lighted, and
we all came back to our dear little firm-set earth, he began to question
me about my native region of it. From many forgotten inquiries I recall
his asking me what was the fashionable religion in Columbus, or the
Church that socially corresponded to the Unitarian Church in Boston. He
had first to clarify my intelligence as to-what Unitarianism was; we had
Universalists but not Unitarians; but when I understood, I answered from
such vantage as my own wholly outside Swedenborgianism gave me, that I
thought most of the most respectable people with us were of the
Presbyterian Church; some were certainly Episcopalians, but upon the
whole the largest number were Presbyterians. He found that very strange
indeed; and said that he did not believe there was a Presbyterian Church
in Boston; that the New England Calvinists were all of the Orthodox
Church. He had to explain Oxthodoxy to me, and then I could confess to
one Congregational Church in Columbus.

Probably I failed to give the Autocrat any very clear image of our social
frame in the West, but the fault was altogether mine, if I did. Such
lecturing tours as he had made had not taken him among us, as those of
Emerson and other New-Englanders had, and my report was positive rather
than comparative. I was full of pride in journalism at that day, and I
dare say that I vaunted the brilliancy and power of our newspapers more
than they merited; I should not have been likely to wrong them otherwise.
It is strange that in all the talk I had with him and Lowell, or rather
heard from them, I can recall nothing said of political affairs, though
Lincoln had then been nominated by the Republicans, and the Civil War had
practically begun. But we did not imagine such a thing in the North; we
rested secure in the belief that if Lincoln were elected the South would
eat all its fiery words, perhaps from the mere love and inveterate habit
of fire-eating.

I rent myself away from the Autocrat’s presence as early as I could, and
as my evening had been too full of happiness to sleep upon at once, I
spent the rest of the night till two in the morning wandering about the
streets and in the Common with a Harvard Senior whom I had met. He was a
youth of like literary passions with myself, but of such different
traditions in every possible way that his deeply schooled and definitely
regulated life seemed as anomalous to me as my own desultory and
self-found way must have seemed to him. We passed the time in the
delight of trying to make ourselves known to each other, and in a promise
to continue by letter the effort, which duly lapsed into silent patience
with the necessarily insoluble problem.



XIII.

I must have lingered in Boston for the introduction to Hawthorne which
Lowell had offered me, for when it came, with a little note of kindness
and counsel for myself such as only Lowell had the gift of writing, it
was already so near Sunday that I stayed over till Monday before I
started. I do not recall what I did with the time, except keep myself
from making it a burden to the people I knew, and wandering about the
city alone. Nothing of it remains to me except the fortune that favored
me that Sunday night with a view of the old Granary Burying-ground on
Tremont Street. I found the gates open, and I explored every path in the
place, wreaking myself in such meagre emotion as I could get from the
tomb of the Franklin family, and rejoicing with the whole soul of my
Western modernity in the evidence of a remote antiquity which so many of
the dim inscriptions afforded. I do not think that I have ever known
anything practically older than these monuments, though I have since
supped so full of classic and mediaeval ruin. I am sure that I was more
deeply touched by the epitaph of a poor little Puritan maiden who died at
sixteen in the early sixteen-thirties than afterwards by the tomb of
Caecilia Metella, and that the heartache which I tried to put into verse
when I got back to my room in the hotel was none the less genuine because
it would not lend itself to my literary purpose, and remains nothing but
pathos to this day.



XIV.

I am not able to say how I reached the town of Lowell, where I went
before going to Concord, that I might ease the unhappy conscience I had
about those factories which I hated so much to see, and have it clean for
the pleasure of meeting the fabricator of visions whom I was authorized
to molest in any air-castle where I might find him. I only know that I
went to Lowell, and visited one of the great mills, which with their
whirring spools, the ceaseless flight of their shuttles, and the
bewildering sight and sound of all their mechanism have since seemed to
me the death of the joy that ought to come from work, if not the
captivity of those who tended them. But then I thought it right and well
for me to be standing by,

        “With sick and scornful looks averse,”

while these others toiled; I did not see the tragedy in it, and I got my
pitiful literary antipathy away as soon as I could, no wiser for the
sight of the ingenious contrivances I inspected, and I am sorry to say no
sadder. In the cool of the evening I sat at the door of my hotel, and
watched the long files of the work-worn factory-girls stream by, with no
concern for them but to see which was pretty and which was plain, and
with no dream of a truer order than that which gave them ten hours’ work
a day in those hideous mills and lodged them in the barracks where they
rested from their toil.

I wonder if there is a stage that still runs between Lowell and Concord,
past meadow walls, and under the caressing boughs of way-side elms, and
through the bird-haunted gloom of woodland roads, in the freshness of the
summer morning? By a blessed chance I found that there was such a stage
in 1860, and I took it from my hotel, instead of going back to Boston and
up to Concord as I must have had to do by train. The journey gave me the
intimacy of the New England country as I could have had it in no other
fashion, and for the first time I saw it in all the summer sweetness
which I have often steeped my soul in since. The meadows were newly
mown, and the air was fragrant with the grass, stretching in long winrows
among the brown bowlders, or capped with canvas in the little haycocks it
had been gathered into the day before. I was fresh from the affluent
farms of the Western Reserve, and this care of the grass touched me with
a rude pity, which I also bestowed on the meagre fields of corn and
wheat; but still the land was lovelier than any I had ever seen, with its
old farmhouses, and brambled gray stone walls, its stony hillsides, its
staggering orchards, its wooded tops, and its thick-brackened valleys.
From West to East the difference was as great as I afterwards found it
from America to Europe, and my impression of something quaint and strange
was no keener when I saw Old England the next year than when I saw New
England now. I had imagined the landscape bare of trees, and I was
astonished to find it almost as full of them as at home, though they all
looked very little, as they well might to eyes used to the primeval
forests of Ohio. The road ran through them from time to time, and took
their coolness on its smooth hard reaches, and then issued again in the
glisten of the open fields.

I made phrases to myself about the scenery as we drove along; and yes, I
suppose I made phrases about the young girl who was one of the inside
passengers, and who, when the common strangeness had somewhat worn off,
began to sing, and sang most of the way to Concord. Perhaps she was not
very sage, and I am sure she was not of the caste of Vere de Vere, but
she was pretty enough, and she had a voice of a bird-like tunableness, so
that I would not have her out of the memory of that pleasant journey if I
could. She was long ago an elderly woman, if she lives, and I suppose
she would not now point out her fellow-passenger if he strolled in the
evening by the house where she had dismounted, upon her arrival in
Concord, and laugh and pull another girl away from the window, in the
high excitement of the prodigious adventure.



XV.

Her fellow-passenger was in far other excitement; he was to see
Hawthorne, and in a manner to meet Priscilla and Zenobia, and Hester
Prynne and little Pearl, and Miriam and Hilda, and Hollingsworth and
Coverdale, and Chillingworth and Dimmesdale, and Donatello and Kenyon;
and he had no heart for any such poor little reality as that, who could
not have been got into any story that one could respect, and must have
been difficult even in a Heinesque poem.

I wasted that whole evening and the next morning in fond delaying, and it
was not until after the indifferent dinner I got at the tavern where I
stopped, that I found courage to go and present Lowell’s letter to
Hawthorne. I would almost have foregone meeting the weird genius only to
have kept that letter, for it said certain infinitely precious things of
me with such a sweetness, such a grace, as Lowell alone could give his
praise. Years afterwards, when Hawthorne was dead, I met Mrs. Hawthorne,
and told her of the pang I had in parting with it, and she sent it me,
doubly enriched by Hawthorne’s keeping. But now if I were to see him at
all I must give up my letter, and I carried it in my hand to the door of
the cottage he called The Wayside. It was never otherwise than a very
modest place, but the modesty was greater then than to-day, and there was
already some preliminary carpentry at one end of the cottage, which I saw
was to result in an addition to it. I recall pleasant fields across the
road before it; behind rose a hill wooded with low pines, such as is made
in Septimius Felton the scene of the involuntary duel between Septimius
and the young British officer. I have a sense of the woods coming quite
down to the house, but if this was so I do not know what to do with a
grassy slope which seems to have stretched part way up the hill. As I
approached, I looked for the tower which the author was fabled to climb
into at sight of the coming guest, and pull the ladder up after him; and
I wondered whether he would fly before me in that sort, or imagine some
easier means of escaping me.

The door was opened to my ring by a tall handsome boy whom I suppose to
have been Mr. Julian Hawthorne; and the next moment I found myself in the
presence of the romancer, who entered from some room beyond. He advanced
carrying his head with a heavy forward droop, and with a pace for which I
decided that the word would be pondering. It was the pace of a bulky man
of fifty, and his head was that beautiful head we all know from the many
pictures of it. But Hawthorne’s look was different from that of any
picture of him that I have seen. It was sombre and brooding, as the look
of such a poet should have been; it was the look of a man who had dealt
faithfully and therefore sorrowfully with that problem of evil which
forever attracted, forever evaded Hawthorne. It was by no means
troubled; it was full of a dark repose. Others who knew him better and
saw him oftener were familiar with other aspects, and I remember that one
night at Longfellow’s table, when one of the guests happened to speak of
the photograph of Hawthorne which hung in a corner of the room, Lowell
said, after a glance at it, “Yes, it’s good; but it hasn’t his fine
‘accipitral’ [pertaining to the look of a bird of prey; hawklike. D.W.]
look.”

In the face that confronted me, however, there was nothing of keen
alertness; but only a sort of quiet, patient intelligence, for which I
seek the right word in vain. It was a very regular face, with beautiful
eyes; the mustache, still entirely dark, was dense over the fine mouth.
Hawthorne was dressed in black, and he had a certain effect which I
remember, of seeming to have on a black cravat with no visible collar. He
was such a man that if I had ignorantly met him anywhere I should have
instantly felt him to be a personage.

I must have given him the letter myself, for I have no recollection of
parting with it before, but I only remember his offering me his hand, and
making me shyly and tentatively welcome. After a few moments of the
demoralization which followed his hospitable attempts in me, he asked if
I would not like to go up on his hill with him and sit there, where he
smoked in the afternoon. He offered me a cigar, and when I said that I
did not smoke, he lighted it for himself, and we climbed the hill
together. At the top, where there was an outlook in the pines over the
Concord meadows, we found a log, and he invited me to a place on it
beside him, and at intervals of a minute or so he talked while he smoked.
Heaven preserved me from the folly of trying to tell him how much his
books had been to me, and though we got on rapidly at no time, I think we
got on better for this interposition. He asked me about Lowell, I dare
say, for I told him of my joy in meeting him and Doctor Holmes, and this
seemed greatly to interest him. Perhaps because he was so lately from
Europe, where our great men are always seen through the wrong end of the
telescope, he appeared surprised at my devotion, and asked me whether I
cared as much for meeting them as I should care for meeting the famous
English authors. I professed that I cared much more, though whether this
was true, I now have my doubts, and I think Hawthorne doubted it at the
time. But he said nothing in comment, and went on to speak generally of
Europe and America. He was curious about the West, which he seemed to
fancy much more purely American, and said he would like to see some part
of the country on which the shadow (or, if I must be precise, the damned
shadow) of Europe had not fallen. I told him I thought the West must
finally be characterized by the Germans, whom we had in great numbers,
and, purely from my zeal for German poetry, I tried to allege some proofs
of their present influence, though I could think of none outside of
politics, which I thought they affected wholesomely. I knew Hawthorne
was a Democrat, and I felt it well to touch politics lightly, but he had
no more to say about the fateful election then pending than Holmes or
Lowell had.

With the abrupt transition of his talk throughout, he began somehow to
speak of women, and said he had never seen a woman whom he thought quite
beautiful. In the same way he spoke of the New England temperament, and
suggested that the apparent coldness in it was also real, and that the
suppression of emotion for generations would extinguish it at last. Then
he questioned me as to my knowledge of Concord, and whether I had seen
any of the notable people. I answered that I had met no one but himself,
as yet, but I very much wished to see Emerson and Thoreau. I did not
think it needful to say that I wished to see Thoreau quite as much
because he had suffered in the cause of John Brown as because he had
written the books which had taken me; and when he said that Thoreau
prided himself on coming nearer the heart of a pine-tree than any other
human being, I could say honestly enough that I would rather come near
the heart of a man. This visibly pleased him, and I saw that it did not
displease him, when he asked whether I was not going to see his next
neighbor, Mr. Alcott, and I confessed that I had never heard of him. That
surprised as well as pleased him; he remarked, with whatever intention,
that there was nothing like recognition to make a man modest; and he
entered into some account of the philosopher, whom I suppose I need not
be much ashamed of not knowing then, since his influence was of the
immediate sort that makes a man important to his townsmen while he is
still strange to his countrymen.

Hawthorne descanted a little upon the landscape, and said certain of the
pleasant fields below us be longed to him; but he preferred his hill-top,
and if he could have his way those arable fields should be grown up to
pines too. He smoked fitfully, and slowly, and in the hour that we spent
together, his whiffs were of the desultory and unfinal character of his
words. When we went down, he asked me into his house again, and would
have me stay to tea, for which we found the table laid. But there was a
great deal of silence in it all, and at times, in spite of his shadowy
kindness, I felt my spirits sink. After tea, he showed me a book case,
where there were a few books toppling about on the half-filled shelves,
and said, coldly, “This is my library.” I knew that men were his books,
and though I myself cared for books so much, I found it fit and fine that
he should care so little, or seem to care so little. Some of his own
romances were among the volumes on these shelves, and when I put my
finger on the ‘Blithedale Romance’ and said that I preferred that to the
others, his face lighted up, and he said that he believed the Germans
liked that best too.

Upon the whole we parted such good friends that when I offered to take
leave he asked me how long I was to be in Concord, and not only bade me
come to see him again, but said he would give me a card to Emerson, if I
liked. I answered, of course, that I should like it beyond all things;
and he wrote on the back of his card something which I found, when I got
away, to be, “I find this young man worthy.” The quaintness, the little
stiffness of it, if one pleases to call it so, was amusing to one who was
not without his sense of humor, but the kindness filled me to the throat
with joy. In fact, I entirely liked Hawthorne. He had been as cordial
as so shy a man could show himself; and I perceived, with the repose that
nothing else can give, the entire sincerity of his soul.

Nothing could have been further from the behavior of this very great man
than any sort of posing, apparently, or a wish to affect me with a sense
of his greatness. I saw that he was as much abashed by our encounter as
I was; he was visibly shy to the point of discomfort, but in no ignoble
sense was he conscious, and as nearly as he could with one so much his
younger he made an absolute equality between us. My memory of him is
without alloy one of the finest pleasures of my life: In my heart I paid
him the same glad homage that I paid Lowell and Holmes, and he did
nothing to make me think that I had overpaid him. This seems perhaps
very little to say in his praise, but to my mind it is saying everything,
for I have known but few great men, especially of those I met in early
life, when I wished to lavish my admiration upon them, whom I have not
the impression of having left in my debt. Then, a defect of the Puritan
quality, which I have found in many New-Englanders, is that, wittingly or
unwittingly, they propose themselves to you as an example, or if not
quite this, that they surround themselves with a subtle ether of
potential disapprobation, in which, at the first sign of unworthiness in
you, they helplessly suffer you to gasp and perish; they have good
hearts, and they would probably come to your succor out of humanity, if
they knew how, but they do not know how. Hawthorne had nothing of this
about him; he was no more tacitly than he was explicitly didactic. I
thought him as thoroughly in keeping with his romances as Doctor Holmes
had seemed with his essays and poems, and I met him as I had met the
Autocrat in the supreme hour of his fame. He had just given the world
the last of those incomparable works which it was to have finished from
his hand; the ‘Marble Faun’ had worthily followed, at a somewhat longer
interval than usual, the ‘Blithedale Romance’, and the ‘House of Seven
Gables’, and the ‘Scarlet Letter’, and had, perhaps carried his name
higher than all the rest, and certainly farther. Everybody was reading
it, and more or less bewailing its indefinite close, but yielding him
that full honor and praise which a writer can hope for but once in his
life. Nobody dreamed that thereafter only precious fragments, sketches
more or less faltering, though all with the divine touch in them, were
further to enrich a legacy which in its kind is the finest the race has
received from any mind. As I have said, we are always finding new
Hawthornes, but the illusion soon wears away, and then we perceive that
they were not Hawthornes at all; that he had some peculiar difference
from them, which, by and-by, we shall no doubt consent must be his
difference from all men evermore.

I am painfully aware that I have not summoned before the reader the image
of the man as it has always stood in my memory, and I feel a sort of
shame for my failure. He was so altogether simple that it seems as if it
would be easy to do so; but perhaps a spirit from the other world would
be simple too, and yet would no more stand at parle, or consent to be
sketched, than Hawthorne. In fact, he was always more or less merging
into the shadow, which was in a few years wholly to close over him; there
was nothing uncanny in his presence, there was nothing even unwilling,
but he had that apparitional quality of some great minds which kept
Shakespeare largely unknown to those who thought themselves his
intimates, and has at last left him a sort of doubt. There was nothing
teasing or wilfully elusive in Hawthorne’s impalpability, such as I
afterwards felt in Thoreau; if he was not there to your touch, it was no
fault of his; it was because your touch was dull, and wanted the use of
contact with such natures. The hand passes through the veridical phantom
without a sense of its presence, but the phantom is none the less
veridical for all that.



XVI.

I kept the evening of the day I met Hawthorne wholly for the thoughts of
him, or rather for that reverberation which continues in the young
sensibilities after some important encounter. It must have been the next
morning that I went to find Thoreau, and I am dimly aware of making one
or two failures to find him, if I ever really found him at all.

He is an author who has fallen into that abeyance, awaiting all authors,
great or small, at some time or another; but I think that with him, at
least in regard to his most important book, it can be only transitory. I
have not read the story of his hermitage beside Walden Pond since the
year 1858, but I have a fancy that if I should take it up now, I should
think it a wiser and truer conception of the world than I thought it
then. It is no solution of the problem; men are not going to answer the
riddle of the painful earth by building themselves shanties and living
upon beans and watching ant-fights; but I do not believe Tolstoy himself
has more clearly shown the hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness
of the life of the world than Thoreau did in that book. If it were newly
written it could not fail of a far vaster acceptance than it had then,
when to those who thought and felt seriously it seemed that if slavery
could only be controlled, all things else would come right of themselves
with us. Slavery has not only been controlled, but it has been
destroyed, and yet things have not begun to come right with us; but it
was in the order of Providence that chattel slavery should cease before
industrial slavery, and the infinitely crueler and stupider vanity and
luxury bred of it, should be attacked. If there was then any prevision
of the struggle now at hand, the seers averted their eyes, and strove
only to cope with the less evil. Thoreau himself, who had so clear a
vision of the falsity and folly of society as we still have it, threw
himself into the tide that was already, in Kansas and Virginia, reddened
with war; he aided and abetted the John Brown raid, I do not recall how
much or in what sort; and he had suffered in prison for his opinions and
actions. It was this inevitable heroism of his that, more than his
literature even, made me wish to see him and revere him; and I do not
believe that I should have found the veneration difficult, when at last I
met him in his insufficient person, if he had otherwise been present to
my glowing expectation. He came into the room a quaint, stump figure of
a man, whose effect of long trunk and short limbs was heightened by his
fashionless trousers being let down too low. He had a noble face, with
tossed hair, a distraught eye, and a fine aquilinity of profile, which
made me think at once of Don Quixote and of Cervantes; but his nose
failed to add that foot to his stature which Lamb says a nose of that
shape will always give a man. He tried to place me geographically after
he had given me a chair not quite so far off as Ohio, though still across
the whole room, for he sat against one wall, and I against the other; but
apparently he failed to pull himself out of his revery by the effort, for
he remained in a dreamy muse, which all my attempts to say something fit
about John Brown and Walden Pond seemed only to deepen upon him. I have
not the least doubt that I was needless and valueless about both, and
that what I said could not well have prompted an important response; but
I did my poor best, and I was terribly disappointed in the result. The
truth is that in those days I was a helplessly concrete young person, and
all forms of the abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical
discomforts. I do not remember that Thoreau spoke of his books or of
himself at all, and when he began to speak of John Brown, it was not the
warm, palpable, loving, fearful old man of my conception, but a sort of
John Brown type, a John Brown ideal, a John Brown principle, which we
were somehow (with long pauses between the vague, orphic phrases) to
cherish, and to nourish ourselves upon.

It was not merely a defeat of my hopes, it was a rout, and I felt myself
so scattered over the field of thought that I could hardly bring my
forces together for retreat. I must have made some effort, vain and
foolish enough, to rematerialize my old demigod, but when I came away it
was with the feeling that there was very little more left of John Brown
than there was of me. His body was not mouldering in the grave, neither
was his soul marching on; his ideal, his type, his principle alone
existed, and I did not know what to do with it. I am not blaming
Thoreau; his words were addressed to a far other understanding than mine,
and it was my misfortune if I could not profit by them. I think, or I
venture to hope, that I could profit better by them now; but in this
record I am trying honestly to report their effect with the sort of youth
I was then.



XVII.

Such as I was, I rather wonder that I had the courage, after this
experiment of Thoreau, to present the card Hawthorne had given me to
Emerson. I must have gone to him at once, however, for I cannot make out
any interval of time between my visit to the disciple and my visit to the
master. I think it was Emerson himself who opened his door to me, for I
have a vision of the fine old man standing tall on his threshold, with
the card in his hand, and looking from it to me with a vague serenity,
while I waited a moment on the door-step below him. He must then have
been about sixty, but I remember nothing of age in his aspect, though I
have called him an old man. His hair, I am sure, was still entirely
dark, and his face had a kind of marble youthfulness, chiselled to a
delicate intelligence by the highest and noblest thinking that any man
has done. There was a strange charm in Emerson’s eyes, which I felt then
and always, something like that I saw in Lincoln’s, but shyer, but
sweeter and less sad. His smile was the very sweetest I have ever
beheld, and the contour of the mask and the line of the profile were in
keeping with this incomparable sweetness of the mouth, at once grave and
quaint, though quaint is not quite the word for it either, but subtly,
not unkindly arch, which again is not the word.

It was his great fortune to have been mostly misunderstood, and to have
reached the dense intelligence of his fellow-men after a whole lifetime
of perfectly simple and lucid appeal, and his countenance expressed the
patience and forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time. It
would be hard to persuade people now that Emerson once represented to the
popular mind all that was most hopelessly impossible, and that in a
certain sort he was a national joke, the type of the incomprehensible,
the byword of the poor paragrapher. He had perhaps disabused the
community somewhat by presenting himself here and there as a lecturer,
and talking face to face with men in terms which they could not refuse to
find as clear as they were wise; he was more and more read, by certain
persons, here and there; but we are still so far behind him in the reach
of his far-thinking that it need not be matter of wonder that twenty
years before his death he was the most misunderstood man in America. Yet
in that twilight where he dwelt he loomed large upon the imagination; the
minds that could not conceive him were still aware of his greatness. I
myself had not read much of him, but I knew the essays he was printing in
the Atlantic, and I knew certain of his poems, though by no means many;
yet I had this sense of him, that he was somehow, beyond and above my
ken, a presence of force and beauty and wisdom, uncompanioned in our
literature. He had lately stooped from his ethereal heights to take part
in the battle of humanity, and I suppose that if the truth were told he
was more to my young fervor because he had said that John Brown had made
the gallows glorious like the cross, than because he had uttered all
those truer and wiser things which will still a hundred years hence be
leading the thought of the world.

I do not know in just what sort he made me welcome, but I am aware of
sitting with him in his study or library, and of his presently speaking
of Hawthorne, whom I probably celebrated as I best could, and whom he
praised for his personal excellence, and for his fine qualities as a
neighbor. “But his last book,” he added, reflectively, “is a mere mush,”
 and I perceived that this great man was no better equipped to judge an
artistic fiction than the groundlings who were then crying out upon the
indefinite close of the Marble Faun. Apparently he had read it, as they
had, for the story, but it seems to me now, if it did not seem to me
then, that as far as the problem of evil was involved, the book must
leave it where it found it. That is forever insoluble, and it was rather
with that than with his more or less shadowy people that the romancer was
concerned. Emerson had, in fact, a defective sense as to specific pieces
of literature; he praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place,
especially among the new things, and he failed to see the worth of much
that was fine and precious beside the line of his fancy.

He began to ask me about the West, and about some unknown man in
Michigan; who had been sending him poems, and whom he seemed to think
very promising, though he has not apparently kept his word to do great
things. I did not find what Emerson had to say of my section very
accurate or important, though it was kindly enough, and just enough as to
what the West ought to do in literature. He thought it a pity that a
literary periodical which had lately been started in Cincinnati should be
appealing to the East for contributions, instead of relying upon the
writers nearer home; and he listened with what patience he could to my
modest opinion that we had not the writers nearer home. I never was of
those Westerners who believed that the West was kept out of literature by
the jealousy of the East, and I tried to explain why we had not the men
to write that magazine full in Ohio. He alleged the man in Michigan as
one who alone could do much to fill it worthily, and again I had to say
that I had never heard of him.

I felt rather guilty in my ignorance, and I had a notion that it did not
commend me, but happily at this moment Mr. Emerson was called to dinner,
and he asked me to come with him. After dinner we walked about in his
“pleached garden” a little, and then we came again into his library,
where I meant to linger only till I could fitly get away. He questioned
me about what I had seen of Concord, and whom besides Hawthorne I had
met, and when I told him only Thoreau, he asked me if I knew the poems of
Mr. William Ellery Channing. I have known them since, and felt their
quality, which I have gladly owned a genuine and original poetry; but I
answered then truly that I knew them only from Poe’s criticisms: cruel
and spiteful things which I should be ashamed of enjoying as I once did.

“Whose criticisms?” asked Emerson.

“Poe’s,” I said again.

“Oh,” he cried out, after a moment, as if he had returned from a far
search for my meaning, “you mean the jingle-man!”

I do not know why this should have put me to such confusion, but if I had
written the criticisms myself I do not think I could have been more
abashed. Perhaps I felt an edge of reproof, of admonition, in a
characterization of Poe which the world will hardly agree with; though I
do not agree with the world about him, myself, in its admiration. At any
rate, it made an end of me for the time, and I remained as if already
absent, while Emerson questioned me as to what I had written in the
Atlantic Monthly. He had evidently read none of my contributions, for he
looked at them, in the bound volume of the magazine which he got down,
with the effect of being wholly strange to them, and then gravely affixed
my initials to each. He followed me to the door, still speaking of
poetry, and as he took a kindly enough leave of me, he said one might
very well give a pleasant hour to it now and then.

A pleasant hour to poetry! I was meaning to give all time and all
eternity to poetry, and I should by no means have wished to find pleasure
in it; I should have thought that a proof of inferior quality in the
work; I should have preferred anxiety, anguish even, to pleasure. But if
Emerson thought from the glance he gave my verses that I had better not
lavish myself upon that kind of thing, unless there was a great deal more
of me than I could have made apparent in our meeting, no doubt he was
right. I was only too painfully aware of my shortcoming, but I felt that
it was shorter-coming than it need have been. I had somehow not
prospered in my visit to Emerson as I had with Hawthorne, and I came away
wondering in what sort I had gone wrong. I was not a forth-putting
youth, and I could not blame myself for anything in my approaches that
merited withholding; indeed, I made no approaches; but as I must needs
blame myself for something, I fell upon the fact that in my confused
retreat from Emerson’s presence I had failed in a certain slight point of
ceremony, and I magnified this into an offence of capital importance. I
went home to my hotel, and passed the afternoon in pure misery. I had
moments of wild question when I debated whether it would be better to go
back and own my error, or whether it would be better to write him a note,
and try to set myself right in that way. But in the end I did neither,
and I have since survived my mortal shame some forty years or more. But
at the time it did not seem possible that I should live through the day
with it, and I thought that I ought at least to go and confess it to
Hawthorne, and let him disown the wretch who had so poorly repaid the
kindness of his introduction by such misbehavior. I did indeed walk down
by the Wayside, in the cool of the evening, and there I saw Hawthorne for
the last time. He was sitting on one of the timbers beside his cottage,
and smoking with an air of friendly calm. I had got on very well with
him, and I longed to go in, and tell him how ill I had got on with
Emerson; I believed that though he cast me off, he would understand me,
and would perhaps see some hope for me in another world, though there
could be none in this.

But I had not the courage to speak of the affair to any one but Fields,
to whom I unpacked my heart when I got back to Boston, and he asked me
about my adventures in Concord. By this time I could see it in a
humorous light, and I did not much mind his lying back in his chair and
laughing and laughing, till I thought he would roll out of it. He
perfectly conceived the situation, and got an amusement from it that I
could get only through sympathy with him. But I thought it a favorable
moment to propose myself as the assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly,
which I had the belief I could very well become, with advantage to myself
if not to the magazine. He seemed to think so too; he said that if the
place had not just been filled, I should certainly have had it; and it
was to his recollection of this prompt ambition of mine that I suppose I
may have owed my succession to a like vacancy some four years later. He
was charmingly kind; he entered with the sweetest interest into the story
of my economic life, which had been full of changes and chances already.
But when I said very seriously that now I was tired of these fortuities,
and would like to be settled in something, he asked, with dancing eyes,

“Why, how old are you?”

“I am twenty-three,” I answered, and then the laughing fit took him
again.

“Well,” he said, “you begin young, out there!”

In my heart I did not think that twenty-three was so very young, but
perhaps it was; and if any one were to say that I had been portraying
here a youth whose aims were certainly beyond his achievements, who was
morbidly sensitive, and if not conceited was intolerably conscious, who
had met with incredible kindness, and had suffered no more than was good
for him, though he might not have merited his pain any more than his joy,
I do not know that I should gainsay him, for I am not at all sure that I
was not just that kind of youth when I paid my first visit to New
England.



FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF LITERARY NEW YORK

It was by boat that I arrived from Boston, on an August morning of 1860,
which was probably of the same quality as an August morning of 1900. I
used not to mind the weather much in those days; it was hot or it was
cold, it was wet or it was dry, but it was not my affair; and I suppose
that I sweltered about the strange city, with no sense of anything very
personal in the temperature, until nightfall. What I remember is being
high up in a hotel long since laid low, listening in the summer dark,
after the long day was done, to the Niagara roar of the omnibuses whose
tide then swept Broadway from curb to curb, for all the miles of its
length. At that hour the other city noises were stilled, or lost in this
vaster volume of sound, which seemed to fill the whole night. It had a
solemnity which the modern comer to New York will hardly imagine, for
that tide of omnibuses has long since ebbed away, and has left the air to
the strident discords of the elevated trains and the irregular alarum of
the grip-car gongs, which blend to no such harmonious thunder as rose
from the procession of those ponderous and innumerable vans. There was a
sort of inner quiet in the sound, and when I chose I slept off to it, and
woke to it in the morning refreshed and strengthened to explore the
literary situation in the metropolis.



I.

Not that I think I left this to the second day. Very probably I lost no
time in going to the office of the Saturday Press, as soon as I had my
breakfast after arriving, and I have a dim impression of anticipating the
earliest of the Bohemians, whose gay theory of life obliged them to a
good many hardships in lying down early in the morning, and rising up
late in the day. If it was the office-boy who bore me company during the
first hour of my visit, by-and-by the editors and contributors actually
began to come in. I would not be very specific about them if I could,
for since that Bohemia has faded from the map of the republic of letters,
it has grown more and more difficult to trace its citizenship to any
certain writer. There are some living who knew the Bohemians and even
loved them, but there are increasingly few who were of them, even in the
fond retrospect of youthful follies and errors. It was in fact but a
sickly colony, transplanted from the mother asphalt of Paris, and never
really striking root in the pavements of New York; it was a colony of
ideas, of theories, which had perhaps never had any deep root anywhere.
What these ideas, these theories, were in art and in life, it would not
be very easy to say; but in the Saturday Press they came to violent
expression, not to say explosion, against all existing forms of
respectability. If respectability was your ‘bete noire’, then you were a
Bohemian; and if you were in the habit of rendering yourself in prose,
then you necessarily shredded your prose into very fine paragraphs of a
sentence each, or of a very few words, or even of one word. I believe
this fashion prevailed till very lately with some of the dramatic
critics, who thought that it gave a quality of epigram to the style; and
I suppose it was borrowed from the more spasmodic moments of Victor Hugo
by the editor of the Press. He brought it back with him when he came
home from one of those sojourns in Paris which possess one of the French
accent rather than the French language; I long desired to write in that
fashion myself, but I had not the courage.

This editor was a man of such open and avowed cynicism that he may have
been, for all I know, a kindly optimist at heart; some say, however, that
he had really talked himself into being what he seemed. I only know that
his talk, the first day I saw him, was of such a sort that if he was half
as bad, he would have been too bad to be. He walked up and down his room
saying what lurid things he would directly do if any one accused him of
respectability, so that he might disabuse the minds of all witnesses.
There were four or five of his assistants and contributors listening to
the dreadful threats, which did not deceive even so great innocence as
mine, but I do not know whether they found it the sorry farce that I did.
They probably felt the fascination for him which I could not disown, in
spite of my inner disgust; and were watchful at the same time for the
effect of his words with one who was confessedly fresh from Boston, and
was full of delight in the people he had seen there. It appeared, with
him, to be proof of the inferiority of Boston that if you passed down
Washington Street, half a dozen men in the crowd would know you were
Holmes, or Lowell, or Longfellow, or Wendell Phillips; but in Broadway no
one would know who you were, or care to the measure of his smallest
blasphemy. I have since heard this more than once urged as a signal
advantage of New York for the aesthetic inhabitant, but I am not sure,
yet, that it is so. The unrecognized celebrity probably has his mind
quite as much upon himself as if some one pointed him out, and otherwise
I cannot think that the sense of neighborhood is such a bad thing for the
artist in any sort. It involves the sense of responsibility, which
cannot be too constant or too keen. If it narrows, it deepens; and this
may be the secret of Boston.



II.

It would not be easy to say just why the Bohemian group represented New
York literature to my imagination; for I certainly associated other names
with its best work, but perhaps it was because I had written for the
Saturday Press myself, and had my pride in it, and perhaps it was because
that paper really embodied the new literary life of the city. It was
clever, and full of the wit that tries its teeth upon everything. It
attacked all literary shams but its own, and it made itself felt and
feared. The young writers throughout the country were ambitious to be
seen in it, and they gave their best to it; they gave literally, for the
Saturday Press never paid in anything but hopes of paying, vaguer even
than promises. It is not too much to say that it was very nearly as well
for one to be accepted by the Press as to be accepted by the Atlantic,
and for the time there was no other literary comparison. To be in it was
to be in the company of Fitz James O’Brien, Fitzhugh Ludlow, Mr. Aldrich,
Mr. Stedman, and whoever else was liveliest in prose or loveliest in
verse at that day in New York. It was a power, and although it is true
that, as Henry Giles said of it, “Man cannot live by snapping-turtle
alone,” the Press was very good snapping-turtle. Or, it seemed so then;
I should be almost afraid to test it now, for I do not like
snapping-turtle so much as I once did, and I have grown nicer in my
taste, and want my snapping-turtle of the very best. What is certain is
that I went to the office of the Saturday Press in New York with much the
same sort of feeling I had in going to the office of the Atlantic Monthly
in Boston, but I came away with a very different feeling. I had found
there a bitterness against Boston as great as the bitterness against
respectability, and as Boston was then rapidly becoming my second
country, I could not join in the scorn thought of her and said of her by
the Bohemians. I fancied a conspiracy among them to shock the literary
pilgrim, and to minify the precious emotions he had experienced in
visiting other shrines; but I found no harm in that, for I knew just how
much to be shocked, and I thought I knew better how to value certain
things of the soul than they. Yet when their chief asked me how I got on
with Hawthorne, and I began to say that he was very shy and I was rather
shy, and the king of Bohemia took his pipe out to break in upon me with
“Oh, a couple of shysters!” and the rest laughed, I was abashed all they
could have wished, and was not restored to myself till one of them said
that the thought of Boston made him as ugly as sin; then I began to hope
again that men who took themselves so seriously as that need not be taken
very seriously by me.

In fact I had heard things almost as desperately cynical in other
newspaper offices before that, and I could not see what was so
distinctively Bohemian in these ‘anime prave’, these souls so baleful by
their own showing. But apparently Bohemia was not a state that you could
well imagine from one encounter, and since my stay in New York was to be
very short, I lost no time in acquainting myself further with it. That
very night I went to the beer-cellar, once very far up Broadway, where I
was given to know that the Bohemian nights were smoked and quaffed away.
It was said, so far West as Ohio, that the queen of Bohemia sometimes
came to Pfaff’s: a young girl of a sprightly gift in letters, whose name
or pseudonym had made itself pretty well known at that day, and whose
fate, pathetic at all times, out-tragedies almost any other in the
history of letters. She was seized with hydrophobia from the bite of her
dog, on a railroad train; and made a long journey home in the paroxysms
of that agonizing disease, which ended in her death after she reached New
York. But this was after her reign had ended, and no such black shadow
was cast forward upon Pfaff’s, whose name often figured in the verse and
the epigrammatically paragraphed prose of the ‘Saturday Press’. I felt
that as a contributor and at least a brevet Bohemian I ought not to go
home without visiting the famous place, and witnessing if I could not
share the revels of my comrades. As I neither drank beer nor smoked, my
part in the carousal was limited to a German pancake, which I found they
had very good at Pfaff’s, and to listening to the whirling words of my
commensals, at the long board spread for the Bohemians in a cavernous
space under the pavement. There were writers for the ‘Saturday Press’ and
for Vanity Fair (a hopefully comic paper of that day), and some of the
artists who drew for the illustrated periodicals. Nothing of their talk
remains with me, but the impression remains that it was not so good talk
as I had heard in Boston. At one moment of the orgy, which went but
slowly for an orgy, we were joined by some belated Bohemians whom the
others made a great clamor over; I was given to understand they were just
recovered from a fearful debauch; their locks were still damp from the
wet towels used to restore them, and their eyes were very frenzied. I was
presented to these types, who neither said nor did anything worthy of
their awful appearance, but dropped into seats at the table, and ate of
the supper with an appetite that seemed poor. I stayed hoping vainly for
worse things till eleven o’clock, and then I rose and took my leave of a
literary condition that had distinctly disappointed me. I do not say
that it may not have been wickeder and wittier than I found it; I only
report what I saw and heard in Bohemia on my first visit to New York, and
I know that my acquaintance with it was not exhaustive. When I came the
next year the Saturday Press was no more, and the editor and his
contributors had no longer a common centre. The best of the young
fellows whom I met there confessed, in a pleasant exchange of letters
which we had afterwards, that he thought the pose a vain and unprofitable
one; and when the Press was revived, after the war, it was without any of
the old Bohemian characteristics except that of not paying for material.
It could not last long upon these terms, and again it passed away, and
still waits its second palingenesis.

The editor passed away too, not long after, and the thing that he had
inspired altogether ceased to be. He was a man of a certain sardonic
power, and used it rather fiercely and freely, with a joy probably more
apparent than real in the pain it gave. In my last knowledge of him he
was much milder than when I first knew him, and I have the feeling that
he too came to own before he died that man cannot live by snapping-turtle
alone. He was kind to some neglected talents, and befriended them with a
vigor and a zeal which he would have been the last to let you call
generous. The chief of these was Walt Whitman, who, when the Saturday
Press took it up, had as hopeless a cause with the critics on either side
of the ocean as any man could have. It was not till long afterwards that
his English admirers began to discover him, and to make his countrymen
some noisy reproaches for ignoring him; they were wholly in the dark
concerning him when the Saturday Press, which first stood his friend, and
the young men whom the Press gathered about it, made him their cult. No
doubt he was more valued because he was so offensive in some ways than he
would have been if he had been in no way offensive, but it remains a fact
that they celebrated him quite as much as was good for them. He was
often at Pfaff’s with them, and the night of my visit he was the chief
fact of my experience. I did not know he was there till I was on my way
out, for he did not sit at the table under the pavement, but at the head
of one farther into the room. There, as I passed, some friendly fellow
stopped me and named me to him, and I remember how he leaned back in his
chair, and reached out his great hand to me, as if he were going to give
it me for good and all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian hair
upon it, and a branching beard and mustache, and gentle eyes that looked
most kindly into mine, and seemed to wish the liking which I instantly
gave him, though we hardly passed a word, and our acquaintance was summed
up in that glance and the grasp of his mighty fist upon my hand. I doubt
if he had any notion who or what I was beyond the fact that I was a young
poet of some sort, but he may possibly have remembered seeing my name
printed after some very Heinesque verses in the Press. I did not meet
him again for twenty years, and then I had only a moment with him when he
was reading the proofs of his poems in Boston. Some years later I saw
him for the last time, one day after his lecture on Lincoln, in that
city, when he came down from the platform to speak with some handshaking
friends who gathered about him. Then and always he gave me the sense of
a sweet and true soul, and I felt in him a spiritual dignity which I will
not try to reconcile with his printing in the forefront of his book a
passage from a private letter of Emerson’s, though I believe he would not
have seen such a thing as most other men would, or thought ill of it in
another. The spiritual purity which I felt in him no less than the
dignity is something that I will no more try to reconcile with what
denies it in his page; but such things we may well leave to the
adjustment of finer balances than we have at hand. I will make sure only
of the greatest benignity in the presence of the man. The apostle of the
rough, the uncouth, was the gentlest person; his barbaric yawp,
translated into the terms of social encounter, was an address of singular
quiet, delivered in a voice of winning and endearing friendliness.

As to his work itself, I suppose that I do not think it so valuable in
effect as in intention. He was a liberating force, a very “imperial
anarch” in literature; but liberty is never anything but a means, and
what Whitman achieved was a means and not an end, in what must be called
his verse. I like his prose, if there is a difference, much better;
there he is of a genial and comforting quality, very rich and cordial,
such as I felt him to be when I met him in person. His verse seems to me
not poetry, but the materials of poetry, like one’s emotions; yet I would
not misprize it, and I am glad to own that I have had moments of great
pleasure in it. Some French critic quoted in the Saturday Press (I
cannot think of his name) said the best thing of him when he said that he
made you a partner of the enterprise, for that is precisely what he does,
and that is what alienates and what endears in him, as you like or
dislike the partnership. It is still something neighborly, brotherly,
fatherly, and so I felt him to be when the benign old man looked on me
and spoke to me.



III.

That night at Pfaff’s must have been the last of the Bohemians for me,
and it was the last of New York authorship too, for the time. I do not
know why I should not have imagined trying to see Curtis, whom I knew so
much by heart, and whom I adored, but I may not have had the courage, or
I may have heard that he was out of town; Bryant, I believe, was then out
of the country; but at any rate I did not attempt him either. The
Bohemians were the beginning and the end of the story for me, and to tell
the truth I did not like the story. I remember that as I sat at that
table under the pavement, in Pfaff’s beer-cellar, and listened to the
wit that did not seem very funny, I thought of the dinner with Lowell,
the breakfast with Fields, the supper at the Autocrat’s, and felt that I
had fallen very far. In fact it can do no harm at this distance of time
to confess that it seemed to me then, and for a good while afterwards,
that a person who had seen the men and had the things said before him
that I had in Boston, could not keep himself too carefully in cotton; and
this was what I did all the following winter, though of course it was a
secret between me and me. I dare say it was not the worst thing I could
have done, in some respects.

My sojourn in New York could not have been very long, and the rest of it
was mainly given to viewing the monuments of the city from the windows of
omnibuses and the platforms of horse-cars. The world was so simple then
that there were perhaps only a half-dozen cities that had horse-cars in
them, and I travelled in those conveyances at New York with an unfaded
zest, even after my journeys back and forth between Boston and Cambridge.
I have not the least notion where I went or what I saw, but I suppose
that it was up and down the ugly east and west avenues, then lying open
to the eye in all the hideousness now partly concealed by the elevated
roads, and that I found them very stately and handsome. Indeed, New York
was really handsomer then than it is now, when it has so many more pieces
of beautiful architecture, for at that day the skyscrapers were not yet,
and there was a fine regularity in the streets that these brute bulks
have robbed of all shapeliness. Dirt and squalor there were a plenty,
but there was infinitely more comfort. The long succession of cross
streets was yet mostly secure from business, after you passed Clinton
Place; commerce was just beginning to show itself in Union Square, and
Madison Square was still the home of the McFlimsies, whose kin and kind
dwelt unmolested in the brownstone stretches of Fifth Avenue. I tried
hard to imagine them from the acquaintance Mr. Butler’s poem had given
me, and from the knowledge the gentle satire of The ‘Potiphar Papers’ had
spread broadcast through a community shocked by the excesses of our best
society; it was not half so bad then as the best now, probably. But I do
not think I made very much of it, perhaps because most of the people who
ought to have been in those fine mansions were away at the seaside and
the mountains.

The mountains I had seen on my way down from Canada, but the sea-side
not, and it would never do to go home without visiting some famous summer
resort. I must have fixed upon Long Branch because I must have heard of
it as then the most fashionable; and one afternoon I took the boat for
that place. By this means I not only saw sea-bathing for the first time,
but I saw a storm at sea: a squall struck us so suddenly that it blew
away all the camp-stools of the forward promenade; it was very exciting,
and I long meant to use in literature the black wall of cloud that
settled on the water before us like a sort of portable midnight; I now
throw it away upon the reader, as it were; it never would come in
anywhere. I stayed all night at Long Branch, and I had a bath the next
morning before breakfast: an extremely cold one, with a life-line to keep
me against the undertow. In this rite I had the company of a young
New-Yorker, whom I had met on the boat coming down, and who was of the
light, hopeful, adventurous business type which seems peculiar to the
city, and which has always attracted me. He told me much about his life,
and how he lived, and what it cost him to live. He had a large room at a
fashionable boardinghouse, and he paid fourteen dollars a week. In
Columbus I had such a room at such a house, and paid three and a half,
and I thought it a good deal. But those were the days before the war,
when America was the cheapest country in the world, and the West was
incredibly inexpensive.

After a day of lonely splendor at this scene of fashion and gaiety, I
went back to New York, and took the boat for Albany on my way home. I
noted that I had no longer the vivid interest in nature and human nature
which I had felt in setting out upon my travels, and I said to myself
that this was from having a mind so crowded with experiences and
impressions that it could receive no more; and I really suppose that if
the happiest phrase had offered itself to me at some moments, I should
scarcely have looked about me for a landscape or a figure to fit it to. I
was very glad to get back to my dear little city in the West (I found it
seething in an August sun that was hot enough to have calcined the
limestone State House), and to all the friends I was so fond of.



IV.

I did what I could to prove myself unworthy of them by refusing their
invitations, and giving myself wholly to literature, during the early
part of the winter that followed; and I did not realize my error till the
invitations ceased to come, and I found myself in an unbroken
intellectual solitude. The worst of it was that an ungrateful Muse did
little in return for the sacrifices I made her, and the things I now
wrote were not liked by the editors I sent them to. The editorial taste
is not always the test of merit, but it is the only one we have, and I am
not saying the editors were wrong in my case. There were then such a
very few places where you could market your work: the Atlantic in Boston
and Harper’s in New York were the magazines that paid, though the
Independent newspaper bought literary material; the Saturday Press
printed it without buying, and so did the old Knickerbocker Magazine,
though there was pecuniary good-will in both these cases. I toiled much
that winter over a story I had long been writing, and at last sent it to
the Atlantic, which had published five poems for me the year before.
After some weeks, or it may have been months, I got it back with a note
saying that the editors had the less regret in returning it because they
saw that in the May number of the Knickerbocker the first chapter of the
story had appeared. Then I remembered that, years before, I had sent
this chapter to that magazine, as a sketch to be printed by itself, and
afterwards had continued the story from it. I had never heard of its
acceptance, and supposed of course that it was rejected; but on my second
visit to New York I called at the Knickerbocker office, and a new editor,
of those that the magazine was always having in the days of its failing
fortunes, told me that he had found my sketch in rummaging about in a
barrel of his predecessors manuscripts, and had liked it, and printed
it. He said that there were fifteen dollars coming to me for that
sketch, and might he send the money to me? I said that he might, though
I do not see, to this day, why he did not give it me on the spot; and he
made a very small minute in a very large sheet of paper (really like Dick
Swiveller), and promised I should have it that night; but I sailed the
next day for Liverpool without it. I sailed without the money for some
verses that Vanity Fair bought of me, but I hardly expected that, for the
editor, who was then Artemus Ward, had frankly told me in taking my
address that ducats were few at that moment with Vanity Fair. I was then
on my way to be consul at Venice, where I spent the next four years in a
vigilance for Confederate privateers which none of them ever surprised.
I had asked for the consulate at Munich, where I hoped to steep myself
yet longer in German poetry, but when my appointment came, I found it was
for Rome. I was very glad to get Rome even; but the income of the office
was in fees, and I thought I had better go on to Washington and find out
how much the fees amounted to. People in Columbus who had been abroad
said that on five hundred dollars you could live in Rome like a prince,
but I doubted this; and when I learned at the State Department that the
fees of the Roman consulate came to only three hundred, I perceived that
I could not live better than a baron, probably, and I despaired. The
kindly chief of the consular bureau said that the President’s
secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr. John Hay, were interested in my
appointment, and he advised my going over to the White House and seeing
them. I lost no time in doing that, and I learned that as young Western
men they were interested in me because I was a young Western man who had
done something in literature, and they were willing to help me for that
reason, and for no other that I ever knew. They proposed my going to
Venice; the salary was then seven hundred and fifty, but they thought
they could get it put up to a thousand. In the end they got it put up to
fifteen hundred, and so I went to Venice, where if I did not live like a
prince on that income, I lived a good deal more like a prince than I
could have done at Rome on a fifth of it.

If the appointment was not present fortune, it was the beginning of the
best luck I have had in the world, and I am glad to owe it all to those
friends of my verse, who could have been no otherwise friends of me. They
were then beginning very early careers of distinction which have not been
wholly divided. Mr. Nicolay could have been about twenty-five, and Mr.
Hay nineteen or twenty. No one dreamed as yet of the opportunity opening
to them in being so constantly near the man whose life they have written,
and with whose fame they have imperishably interwrought their names. I
remember the sobered dignity of the one, and the humorous gaiety of the
other, and how we had some young men’s joking and laughing together, in
the anteroom where they received me, with the great soul entering upon
its travail beyond the closed door. They asked me if I had ever seen the
President, and I said that I had seen him at Columbus, the year before;
but I could not say how much I should like to see him again, and thank
him for the favor which I had no claim to at his hands, except such as
the slight campaign biography I had written could be thought to have
given me. That day or another, as I left my friends, I met him in the
corridor without, and he looked at the space I was part of with his
ineffably melancholy eyes, without knowing that I was the
indistinguishable person in whose “integrity and abilities he had reposed
such special confidence” as to have appointed him consul for Venice and
the ports of the Lombardo-Venetian Kingdom, though he might have
recognized the terms of my commission if I had reminded him of them. I
faltered a moment in my longing to address him, and then I decided that
every one who forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand,
did him a kindness; and I wish I could be as sure of the wisdom of all my
past behavior as I am of that piece of it. He walked up to the
water-cooler that stood in the corner, and drew himself a full goblet from
it, which he poured down his throat with a backward tilt of his head, and
then went wearily within doors. The whole affair, so simple, has always
remained one of a certain pathos in my memory, and I would rather have
seen Lincoln in that unconscious moment than on some statelier occasion.



V.

I went home to Ohio; and sent on the bond I was to file in the Treasury
Department; but it was mislaid there, and to prevent another chance of
that kind I carried on the duplicate myself. It was on my second visit
that I met the generous young Irishman William D. O’Connor, at the house
of my friend Piatt, and heard his ardent talk. He was one of the
promising men of that day, and he had written an anti-slavery novel in
the heroic mood of Victor Hugo, which greatly took my fancy; and I
believe he wrote poems too. He had not yet risen to be the chief of Walt
Whitman’s champions outside of the Saturday Press, but he had already
espoused the theory of Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare, then newly
exploited by the poor lady of Bacon’s name, who died constant to it in an
insane asylum. He used to speak of the reputed dramatist as “the fat
peasant of Stratford,” and he was otherwise picturesque of speech in a
measure that consoled, if it did not convince. The great war was then
full upon us, and when in the silences of our literary talk its awful
breath was heard, and its shadow fell upon the hearth where we gathered
round the first fires of autumn, O’Connor would lift his beautiful head
with a fine effect of prophecy, and say, “Friends, I feel a sense of
victory in the air.” He was not wrong; only the victory was for the
other aide.

Who beside O’Connor shared in these saddened symposiums I cannot tell
now; but probably other young journalists and office-holders, intending
litterateurs, since more or less extinct. I make certain only of the
young Boston publisher who issued a very handsome edition of ‘Leaves of
Grass’, and then failed promptly if not consequently. But I had already
met, in my first sojourn at the capital, a young journalist who had given
hostages to poetry, and whom I was very glad to see and proud to know.
Mr. Stedman and I were talking over that meeting the other day, and I can
be surer than I might have been without his memory, that I found him at a
friend’s house, where he was nursing himself for some slight sickness,
and that I sat by his bed while our souls launched together into the
joyful realms of hope and praise. In him I found the quality of Boston,
the honor and passion of literature, and not a mere pose of the literary
life; and the world knows without my telling how true he has been to his
ideal of it. His earthly mission then was to write letters from
Washington for the New York World, which started in life as a good young
evening paper, with a decided religious tone, so that the Saturday Press
could call it the Night-blooming Serious. I think Mr. Stedman wrote for
its editorial page at times, and his relation to it as a Washington
correspondent had an authority which is wanting to the function in these
days of perfected telegraphing. He had not yet achieved that seat in the
Stock Exchange whose possession has justified his recourse to business,
and has helped him to mean something more single in literature than many
more singly devoted to it. I used sometimes to speak about that with
another eager young author in certain middle years when we were chafing
in editorial harness, and we always decided that Stedman had the best of
it in being able to earn his living in a sort so alien to literature that
he could come to it unjaded, and with a gust unspoiled by kindred savors.
But no man shapes his own life, and I dare say that Stedman may have been
all the time envying us our tripods from his high place in the Stock
Exchange. What is certain is that he has come to stand for literature
and to embody New York in it as no one else does. In a community which
seems never to have had a conscious relation to letters, he has kept the
faith with dignity and fought the fight with constant courage. Scholar
and poet at once, he has spoken to his generation with authority which we
can forget only in the charm which makes us forget everything else.

But his fame was still before him when we met, and I could bring to him
an admiration for work which had not yet made itself known to so many;
but any admirer was welcome. We talked of what we had done, and each
said how much he liked certain thing of the other’s; I even seized my
advantage of his helplessness to read him a poem of mine which I had in
my pocket; he advised me where to place it; and if the reader will not
think it an unfair digression, I will tell here what became of that poem,
for I think its varied fortunes were amusing, and I hope my own
sufferings and final triumph with it will not be without encouragement to
the young literary endeavorer. It was a poem called, with no prophetic
sense of fitness, “Forlorn,” and I tried it first with the ‘Atlantic
Monthly’, which would not have it. Then I offered it in person to a
former editor of ‘Harper’s Monthly’, but he could not see his advantage
in it, and I carried it overseas to Venice with me. From that point I
sent it to all the English magazines as steadily as the post could carry
it away and bring it back. On my way home, four years later, I took it
to London with me, where a friend who knew Lewes, then just beginning
with the ‘Fortnightly Review’, sent it to him for me. It was promptly
returned, with a letter wholly reserved as to its quality, but full of a
poetic gratitude for my wish to contribute to the Fortnightly. Then I
heard that a certain Mr. Lucas was about to start a magazine, and I
offered the poem to him. The kindest letter of acceptance followed me to
America, and I counted upon fame and fortune as usual, when the news of
Mr. Lucas’s death came. I will not poorly joke an effect from my poem in
the fact; but the fact remains. By this time I was a writer in the
office of the ‘Nation’ newspaper, and after I left this place to be Mr.
Fields’s assistant on the Atlantic, I sent my poem to the Nation, where
it was printed at last. In such scant measure as my verses have pleased
it has found rather unusual favor, and I need not say that its
misfortunes endeared it to its author.

But all this is rather far away from my first meeting with Stedman in
Washington. Of course I liked him, and I thought him very handsome and
fine, with a full beard cut in the fashion he has always worn it, and
with poet’s eyes lighting an aquiline profile. Afterwards, when I saw
him afoot, I found him of a worldly splendor in dress, and envied him, as
much as I could envy him anything, the New York tailor whose art had
clothed him: I had a New York tailor too, but with a difference. He had
a worldly dash along with his supermundane gifts, which took me almost as
much, and all the more because I could see that he valued himself nothing
upon it. He was all for literature, and for literary men as the
superiors of every one. I must have opened my heart to him a good deal,
for when I told him how the newspaper I had written for from Canada and
New England had ceased to print my letters, he said, “Think of a man like
sitting in judgment on a man like you!” I thought of it, and was avenged
if not comforted; and at any rate I liked Stedman’s standing up so
stiffly for the honor of a craft that is rather too limp in some of its
votaries.

I suppose it was he who introduced me to the Stoddards, whom I met in New
York just before I sailed, and who were then in the glow of their early
fame as poets. They knew about my poor beginnings, and they were very,
very good to me. Stoddard went with me to Franklin Square, and gave the
sanction of his presence to the ineffectual offer of my poem there. But
what I relished most was the long talks I had with them both about
authorship in all its phases, and the exchange of delight in this poem
and that, this novel and that, with gay, wilful runs away to make some
wholly irrelevant joke, or fire puns into the air at no mark whatever.
Stoddard had then a fame, with the sweetness of personal affection in it,
from the lyrics and the odes that will perhaps best keep him known, and
Mrs. Stoddard was beginning to make her distinct and special quality felt
in the magazines, in verse and fiction. In both it seems to me that she
has failed of the recognition which her work merits. Her tales and
novels have in them a foretaste of realism, which was too strange for the
palate of their day, and is now too familiar, perhaps. It is a peculiar
fate, and would form the scheme of a pretty study in the history of
literature. But in whatever she did she left the stamp of a talent like
no other, and of a personality disdainful of literary environment. In a
time when most of us had to write like Tennyson, or Longfellow, or
Browning, she never would write like any one but herself.

I remember very well the lodging over a corner of Fourth Avenue and some
downtown street where I visited these winning and gifted people, and
tasted the pleasure of their racy talk, and the hospitality of their
good-will toward all literature, which certainly did not leave me out. We
sat before their grate in the chill of the last October days, and they
set each other on to one wild flight of wit after another, and again I
bathed my delighted spirit in the atmosphere of a realm where for the
time at least no

       “----rumor of oppression or defeat,
        Of unsuccessful or successful war,”

could penetrate. I liked the Stoddards because they were frankly not of
that Bohemia which I disliked so much, and thought it of no promise or
validity; and because I was fond of their poetry and found them in it. I
liked the absolutely literary keeping of their lives. He had then, and
for long after, a place in the Custom house, but he was no more of that
than Lamb was of India House. He belonged to that better world where
there is no interest but letters, and which was as much like heaven for
me as anything I could think of.

The meetings with the Stoddards repeated themselves when I came back to
sail from New York, early in November. Mixed up with the cordial
pleasure of them in my memory is a sense of the cold and wet outdoors,
and the misery of being in those infamous New York streets, then as for
long afterwards the squalidest in the world. The last night I saw my
friends they told me of the tragedy which had just happened at the camp
in the City Hall Park. Fitz James O’Brien, the brilliant young Irishman
who had dazzled us with his story of “The Diamond Lens,” and frozen our
blood with his ingenious tale of a ghost--“What was It”--a ghost that
could be felt and heard, but not seen--had enlisted for the war, and
risen to be an officer with the swift process of the first days of it. In
that camp he had just then shot and killed a man for some infraction of
discipline, and it was uncertain what the end would be. He was
acquitted, however, and it is known how he afterwards died of lockjaw
from a wound received in battle.



VI.

Before this last visit in New York there was a second visit to Boston,
which I need not dwell upon, because it was chiefly a revival of the
impressions of the first. Again I saw the Fieldses in their home; again
the Autocrat in his, and Lowell now beneath his own roof, beside the
study fire where I was so often to sit with him in coming years. At
dinner (which we had at two o’clock) the talk turned upon my appointment,
and he said of me to his wife: “Think of his having got Stillman’s place!
We ought to put poison in his wine,” and he told me of the wish the
painter had to go to Venice and follow up Ruskin’s work there in a book
of his own. But he would not let me feel very guilty, and I will not
pretend that I had any personal regret for my good fortune.

The place was given me perhaps because I had not nearly so many other
gifts as he who lost it, and who was at once artist, critic, journalist,
traveller, and eminently each. I met him afterwards in Rome, which the
powers bestowed upon him instead of Venice, and he forgave me, though I
do not know whether he forgave the powers. We walked far and long over
the Campagna, and I felt the charm of a most uncommon mind in talk which
came out richest and fullest in the presence of the wild nature which he
loved and knew so much better than most other men. I think that the book
he would have written about Venice is forever to be regretted, and I do
not at all console myself for its loss with the book I have written
myself.

At Lowell’s table that day they spoke of what sort of winter I should
find in Venice, and he inclined to the belief that I should want a fire
there. On his study hearth a very brisk one burned when we went back to
it, and kept out the chill of a cold easterly storm. We looked through
one of the windows at the rain, and he said he could remember standing
and looking out of that window at such a storm when he was a child; for
he was born in that house, and his life had kept coming back to it. He
died in it, at last.

In a lifting of the rain he walked with me down to the village, as he
always called the denser part of the town about Harvard Square, and saw
me aboard a horse-car for Boston. Before we parted he gave me two
charges: to open my mouth when I began to speak Italian, and to think
well of women. He said that our race spoke its own tongue with its teeth
shut, and so failed to master the languages that wanted freer utterance.
As to women, he said there were unworthy ones, but a good woman was the
best thing in the world, and a man was always the better for honoring
women.



ROUNDABOUT TO BOSTON

During the four years of my life in Venice the literary intention was
present with me at all times and in all places. I wrote many things in
verse, which I sent to the magazines in every part of the
English-speaking world, but they came unerringly back to me, except in
three instances only, when they were kept by the editors who finally
printed them. One of these pieces was published in the Atlantic Monthly;
another in Harpers Magazine; the third was got into the New York Ledger
through the kindness of Doctor Edward Everett Hale, who used I know not
what mighty magic to that end. I had not yet met him; but he interested
himself in my ballad as if it had been his own. His brother, Charles
Hale, later Consul-General for Egypt, whom I saw almost every moment of
the two visits he paid Venice in my time, had sent it to him, after
copying it in his own large, fair hand, so that it could be read. He was
not quite of that literary Boston which I so fondly remembered my
glimpses of; he was rather of a journalistic and literary Boston which I
had never known; but he was of Boston, after all. He had been in
Lowell’s classes at Harvard; he had often met Longfellow in Cambridge; he
knew Doctor Holmes, of course; and he let me talk of my idols to my
heart’s content. I think he must have been amused by my raptures; most
people would have been; but he was kind and patient, and he listened to
me with a sweet intelligence which I shall always gratefully remember. He
died too young, with his life’s possibilities mainly unfulfilled; but
none who knew him could fail to imagine them, or to love him for what he
was.



I.

Besides those few pitiful successes, I had nothing but defeats in the
sort of literature which I supposed was to be my calling, and the defeats
threw me upon prose; for some sort of literary thing, if not one, then
another, I must do if I lived; and I began to write those studies of
Venetian life which afterwards became a book, and which I contributed as
letters to the ‘Boston Advertiser’, after vainly offering them to more
aesthetic periodicals. However, I do not imagine that it was a very
smiling time for any literary endeavorer at home in the life-and-death
civil war then waging. Some few young men arose who made themselves
heard amid the din of arms even as far as Venice, but most of these were
hushed long ago. I fancy Theodore Winthrop, who began to speak, as it
were, from his soldier’s grave, so soon did his death follow the earliest
recognition by the public, and so many were his posthumous works, was
chief of these; but there were others whom the present readers must make
greater effort to remember. Forceythe Willson, who wrote The Old
Sergeant, became known for the rare quality of his poetry; and now and
then there came a poem from Aldrich, or Stedman, or Stoddard. The great
new series of the ‘Biglow Papers’ gathered volume with the force they had
from the beginning. The Autocrat was often in the pages of the Atlantic,
where one often found Whittier and Emerson, with many a fresh name now
faded. In Washington the Piatts were writing some of the most beautiful
verse of the war, and Brownell was sounding his battle lyrics like so
many trumpet blasts. The fiction which followed the war was yet all to
come. Whatever was done in any kind had some hint of the war in it,
inevitably; though in the very heart of it Longfellow was setting about
his great version of Dante peacefully, prayerfully, as he has told in the
noble sonnets which register the mood of his undertaking.

At Venice, if I was beyond the range of literary recognition I was in
direct relations with one of our greatest literary men, who was again of
that literary Boston which mainly represented American literature to me.
The official chief of the consul at Venice was the United States Minister
at Vienna, and in my time this minister was John Lothrop Motley, the
historian. He was removed, later, by that Johnson administration which
followed Lincoln’s so forgottenly that I name it with a sense of
something almost prehistoric. Among its worst errors was the attempted
discredit of a man who had given lustre to our name by his work, and who
was an ardent patriot as well as accomplished scholar. He visited Venice
during my first year, which was the darkest period of the civil war, and
I remember with what instant security, not to say severity, he rebuked my
scarcely whispered misgivings of the end, when I ventured to ask him what
he thought it would be. Austria had never recognized the Secessionists
as belligerents, and in the complications with France and England there
was little for our minister but to share the home indignation at the
sympathy of those powers with the South. In Motley this was heightened
by that feeling of astonishment, of wounded faith, which all Americans
with English friendships experienced in those days, and which he, whose
English friendships were many, experienced in peculiar degree.

I drifted about with him in his gondola, and refreshed myself, long
a-hungered for such talk, with his talk of literary life in London.
Through some acquaintance I had made in Venice I was able to be of use to
him in getting documents copied for him in the Venetian Archives,
especially the Relations of the Venetian Ambassadors at different courts
during the period and events he was studying. All such papers passed
through my hands in transmission to the historian, though now I do not
quite know why they need have done so; but perhaps he was willing to give
me the pleasure of being a partner, however humble, in the enterprise. My
recollection of him is of courtesy to a far younger man unqualified by
patronage, and of a presence of singular dignity and grace. He was one
of the handsomest men I ever saw, with beautiful eyes, a fine blond beard
of modish cut, and a sensitive nose, straight and fine. He was
altogether a figure of worldly splendor; and I had reason to know that he
did not let the credit of our nation suffer at the most aristocratic
court in Europe for want of a fit diplomatic costume, when some of our
ministers were trying to make their office do its full effect upon all
occasions in “the dress of an American gentleman.” The morning after his
arrival Mr. Motley came to me with a handful of newspapers which,
according to the Austrian custom at that day, had been opened in the
Venetian post-office. He wished me to protest against this on his behalf
as an infringement of his diplomatic extra-territoriality, and I proposed
to go at once to the director of the post: I had myself suffered in the
same way, and though I knew that a mere consul was helpless, I was
willing to see the double-headed eagle trodden under foot by a Minister
Plenipotentiary. Mr. Motley said that he would go with me, and we put
off in his gondola to the post-office. The director received us with the
utmost deference. He admitted the irregularity which the minister
complained of, and declared that he had no choice but to open every
foreign newspaper, to whomsoever addressed. He suggested, however, that
if the minister made his appeal to the Lieutenant-Governor of Venice,
Count Toggenburg would no doubt instantly order the exemption of his
newspapers from the general rule.

Mr. Motley said he would give himself the pleasure of calling upon the
Lieutenant-Governor, and “How fortunate,” he added, when we were got back
into the gondola, “that I should have happened to bring my court dress
with me!” I did not see the encounter of the high contending powers, but
I know that it ended in a complete victory for our minister.

I had no further active relations of an official kind with Mr. Motley,
except in the case of a naturalized American citizen, whose property was
slowly but surely wasting away in the keeping of the Venetian courts. An
order had at last been given for the surrender of the remnant to the
owner; but the Lombardo-Venetian authorities insisted that this should be
done through the United States Minister at Vienna, and Mr. Motley held as
firmly that it must be done through the United States Consul at Venice. I
could only report to him from time to time the unyielding attitude of the
Civil Tribunal, and at last he consented, as he wrote, “to act
officiously, not officially, in the matter,” and the hapless claimant got
what was left of his estate.

I had a glimpse of the historian afterwards in Boston, but it was only
for a moment, just before his appointment to England, where he was made
to suffer for Sumner in his quarrel with Grant. That injustice crowned
the injuries his country had done a most faithful patriot and
high-spirited gentleman, whose fame as an historian once filled the ear
of the English-speaking world. His books seemed to have been written in
a spirit already no longer modern; and I did not find the greatest of
them so moving as I expected when I came to it with all the ardor of my
admiration for the historian. William the Silent seemed to me, by his
worshipper’s own showing, scarcely level with the popular movement which
he did not so much direct as follow; but it is a good deal for a prince
to be able even to follow his people; and it cannot be said that Motley
does not fully recognize the greatness of the Dutch people, though he may
see the Prince of Orange too large. The study of their character made at
least a theoretical democrat of a scholar whose instincts were not
perhaps democratic, and his sympathy with that brave little republic
between the dikes strengthened him in his fealty to the great
commonwealth between the oceans. I believe that so far as he was of any
political tradition, he was of the old Boston Whig tradition; but when I
met him at Venice he was in the glow of a generous pride in our war as a
war against slavery. He spoke of the negroes and their simple-hearted,
single-minded devotion to the Union cause in terms that an original
abolitionist might have used, at a time when original abolitionists were
not so many as they have since become.

For the rest, I fancy it was very well for us to be represented at Vienna
in those days by an ideal democrat who was also a real swell, and who was
not likely to discredit us socially when we so much needed to be well
thought of in every way.

At a court where the family of Count Schmerling, the Prime Minister,
could not be received for want of the requisite descents, it was well to
have a minister who would not commit the mistake of inviting the First
Society to meet the Second Society, as a former Envoy Extraordinary had
done, with the effect of finding himself left entirely to the Second
Society during the rest of his stay in Vienna.



II.

One of my consular colleagues under Motley was another historian, of no
such popularity, indeed, nor even of such success, but perhaps not of
inferior powers. This was Richard Hildreth, at Trieste, the author of
one of the sincerest if not the truest histories of the United States,
according to the testimony both of his liking and his misliking critics.
I have never read his history, and I speak of it only at second hand; but
I had read, before I met him, his novel of ‘Archy Moore, or The White
Slave’, which left an indelible impression of his imaginative verity upon
me. The impression is still so deep that after the lapse of nearly forty
years since I saw the book, I have no misgiving in speaking of it as a
powerful piece of realism. It treated passionately, intensely, though
with a superficial coldness, of wrongs now so remote from us in the
abolition of slavery that it is useless to hope it will ever beg
generally read hereafter, but it can safely be praised to any one who
wishes to study that bygone condition, and the literature which grew out
of it. I fancy it did not lack recognition in its time, altogether, for
I used to see it in Italian and French translations on the bookstalls. I
believe neither his history nor his novel brought the author more gain
than fame. He had worn himself out on a newspaper when he got his
appointment at Trieste, and I saw him in the shadow of the cloud that was
wholly to darken him before he died. He was a tall thin man, absent,
silent: already a phantom of himself, but with a scholarly serenity and
dignity amidst the ruin, when the worst came.

I first saw him at the pretty villa where he lived in the suburbs of
Trieste, and where I passed several days, and I remember him always
reading, reading, reading. He could with difficulty be roused from his
book by some strenuous appeal from his family to his conscience as a
host. The last night he sat with Paradise Lost in his hand, and nothing
could win him from it till he had finished it. Then he rose to go to
bed. Would not he bid his parting guest good-bye? The idea of farewell
perhaps dimly penetrated to him. He responded without looking round,

       “They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
        Through Eden took their solitary way,”

and so left the room.

I had earlier had some dealings with him as a fellow-consul concerning a
deserter from an American ship whom I inherited from my predecessor at
Venice. The man had already been four or five months in prison, and he
was in a fair way to end his life there; for it is our law that a
deserting sailor must be kept in the consul’s custody till some vessel of
our flag arrives, when the consul can oblige the master to take the
deserter and let him work his passage home. Such a vessel rarely came to
Venice even in times of peace, and in times of war there was no hope of
any. So I got leave of the consul at Trieste to transfer my captive to
that port, where now and then an American ship did touch. The flag
determines the nationality of the sailor, and this unhappy wretch was
theoretically our fellow-citizen; but when he got to Trieste he made a
clean breast of it to the consul. He confessed that when he shipped
under our flag he was a deserter from a British regiment at Malta; and he
begged piteously not to be sent home to America, where he had never been
in his life, nor ever wished to be. He wished to be sent back to his
regiment at Malta, and to whatever fate awaited him there. The case
certainly had its embarrassments; but the American consul contrived to
let our presumptive compatriot slip into the keeping of the British
consul, who promptly shipped him to Malta. In view of the strained
relations between England and America at that time this was a piece of
masterly diplomacy.

Besides my old Ohio-time friend Moncure D. Conway, who paid us a visit,
and in his immediate relations with literary Boston seemed to bring the
mountain to Mahomet, I saw no one else more literary than Henry Ward
Beecher. He was passing through Venice on his way to those efforts in
England in behalf of the Union which had a certain great effect at the
time; and in the tiny parlor of our apartment on the Grand Canal, I can
still see him sitting athletic, almost pugilistic, of presence, with his
strong face, but kind, framed in long hair that swept above his massive
forehead, and fell to the level of his humorously smiling mouth. His
eyes quaintly gleamed at the things we told him of our life in the
strange place; but he only partly relaxed from his strenuous pose, and
the hands that lay upon his knees were clinched. Afterwards, as he
passed our balcony in a gondola, he lifted the brave red fez he was
wearing (many people wore the fez for one caprice or another) and saluted
our eagle and us: we were often on the balcony behind the shield to
attest the authenticity of the American eagle.



III.

Before I left Venice, however, there came a turn in my literary luck, and
from the hand I could most have wished to reverse the adverse wheel of
fortune. I had labored out with great pains a paper on recent Italian
comedy, which I sent to Lowell, then with his friend Professor Norton
jointly editor of the North American Review; and he took it and wrote me
one of his loveliest letters about it, consoling me in an instant for all
the defeat I had undergone, and making it sweet and worthy to have lived
through that misery. It is one of the hard conditions of this state that
while we can mostly make out to let people taste the last drop of
bitterness and ill-will that is in us, our love and gratitude are only
semi-articulate at the best, and usually altogether tongue-tied. As
often as I tried afterwards to tell Lowell of the benediction, the
salvation, his letter was to me, I failed. But perhaps he would not have
understood, if I had spoken out all that was in me with the fulness I
could have given a resentment. His message came after years of thwarted
endeavor, and reinstated me in the belief that I could still do something
in literature. To be sure, the letters in the Advertiser had begun to
make their impression; among the first great pleasures they brought me
was a recognition from my diplomatic chief at Vienna; but I valued my
admission to the North American peculiarly because it was Lowell let me
in, and because I felt that in his charge it must be the place of highest
honor. He spoke of the pay for my article, in his letter, and asked me
where he should send it, and I answered, to my father-in-law, who put it
in his savings-bank, where he lived, in Brattleboro, Vermont. There it
remained, and I forgot all about it, so that when his affairs were
settled some years later and I was notified that there was a sum to my
credit in the bank, I said, with the confidence I have nearly always felt
when wrong, that I had no money there. The proof of my error was sent me
in a check, and then I bethought me of the pay for “Recent Italian
Comedy.”

It was not a day when I could really afford to forget money due me, but
then it was not a great deal of money. The Review was as poor as it was
proud, and I had two dollars a printed page for my paper. But this was
more than I got from the Advertiser, which gave me five dollars a column
for my letters, printed in a type so fine that the money, when translated
from greenbacks into gold at a discount of $2.80, must have been about a
dollar a thousand words. However, I was richly content with that, and
would gladly have let them have the letters for nothing.

Before I left Venice I had made my sketches into a book, which I sent on
to Messrs. Trubner & Co., in London. They had consented to look at it to
oblige my friend Conway, who during his sojourn with us in Venice, before
his settlement in London, had been forced to listen to some of it. They
answered me in due time that they would publish an edition of a thousand,
at half profits, if I could get some American house to take five hundred
copies. When I stopped in London I had so little hope of being able to
do this that I asked the Trubners if I might, without losing their offer,
try to get some other London house to publish my book. They said Yes,
almost joyously; and I began to take my manuscript about. At most places
they would not look at me or it, and they nowhere consented to read it.
The house promptest in refusing to consider it afterwards pirated one of
my novels, and with some expressions of good intention in that direction,
never paid me anything for it; though I believe the English still think
that this sort of behavior was peculiar to the American publisher in the
old buccaneering times. I was glad to go back to the Trubners with my
book, and on my way across the Atlantic I met a publisher who finally
agreed to take those five hundred copies. This was Mr. M. M. Hurd, of
Hurd & Houghton, a house then newly established in New York and
Cambridge. We played ring-toss and shuffleboard together, and became of
a friendship which lasts to this day. But it was not till some months
later, when I saw him in New York, that he consented to publish my book.
I remember how he said, with an air of vague misgiving, and an effect of
trying to justify himself in an imprudence, that it was not a great
matter anyway. I perceived that he had no faith in it, and to tell the
truth I had not much myself. But the book had an instant success, and it
has gone on from edition to edition ever since. There was just then the
interest of a not wholly generous surprise at American things among the
English. Our success in putting down the great Confederate rebellion had
caught the fancy of our cousins, and I think it was to this mood of
theirs that I owed largely the kindness they showed my book. There were
long and cordial reviews in all the great London journals, which I used
to carry about with me like love-letters; when I tried to show them to
other people, I could not understand their coldness concerning them.

At Boston, where we landed on our return home, there was a moment when it
seemed as if my small destiny might be linked at once with that of the
city which later became my home. I ran into the office of the Advertiser
to ask what had become of some sketches of Italian travel I had sent the
paper, and the managing editor made me promise not to take a place
anywhere before I had heard from him. I gladly promised, but I did not
hear from him, and when I returned to Boston a fortnight later, I found
that a fatal partner had refused to agree with him in engaging me upon
the paper. They even gave me back half a dozen unprinted letters of
mine, and I published them in the Nation, of New York, and afterwards in
the book called Italian Journeys.

But after I had encountered fortune in this frowning disguise, I had a
most joyful little visit with Lowell, which made me forget there was
anything in the world but the delight and glory of sitting with him in
his study at Elmwood and hearing him talk. It must have been my
freshness from Italy which made him talk chiefly of his own happy days in
the land which so sympathetically brevets all its lovers fellow-citizens.
At any rate he would talk of hardly anything else, and he talked late
into the night, and early into the morning. About two o’clock, when all
the house was still, he lighted a candle, and went down into the cellar,
and came back with certain bottles under his arms. I had not a very
learned palate in those days (or in these, for that matter), but I knew
enough of wine to understand that these bottles had been chosen upon that
principle which Longfellow put in verse, and used to repeat with a
humorous lifting of the eyebrows and hollowing of the voice:

       “If you have a friend to dine,
        Give him your best wine;
        If you have two,
        The second-best will do.”

As we sat in their mellow afterglow, Lowell spoke to me of my own life
and prospects, wisely and truly, as he always spoke. He said that it was
enough for a man who had stuff in him to be known to two or three people,
for they would not suffer him to be forgotten, and it would rest with
himself to get on. I told him that though I had not given up my place at
Venice, I was not going back, if I could find anything to do at home, and
I was now on my way to Ohio, where I should try my best to find
something; at the worst, I could turn to my trade of printer. He did not
think it need ever come to that; and he said that he believed I should
have an advantage with readers, if not with editors, in hailing from the
West; I should be more of a novelty. I knew very well that even in my
own West I should not have this advantage unless I appeared there with an
Eastern imprint, but I could not wish to urge my misgiving against his
faith. Was I not already richly successful? What better thing
personally could befall me, if I lived forever after on milk and honey,
than to be sitting there with my hero, my master, and having him talk to
me as if we were equal in deed and in fame?

The cat-bird called in the syringa thicket at his door, before we said
the good-night which was good morning, using the sweet Italian words, and
bidding each other the ‘Dorma bene’ which has the quality of a
benediction. He held my hand, and looked into my eyes with the sunny
kindness which never failed me, worthy or unworthy; and I went away to
bed. But not to sleep; only to dream such dreams as fill the heart of
youth when the recognition of its endeavor has come from the achievement
it holds highest and best.



IV.

I found nothing to do in Ohio; some places that I heard of proved
impossible one way or another, in Columbus and Cleveland, and Cincinnati;
there was always the fatal partner; and after three weeks I was again in
the East. I came to New York, resolved to fight my way in, somewhere,
and I did not rest a moment before I began the fight.

My notion was that which afterwards became Bartley Hubbard’s. “Get a
basis,” said the softening cynic of the Saturday Press, when I advised
with him, among other acquaintances. “Get a salaried place, something
regular on some paper, and then you can easily make up the rest.” But it
was a month before I achieved this vantage, and then I got it in a
quarter where I had not looked for it. I wrote editorials on European
and literary topics for different papers, but mostly for the Times, and
they paid me well and more than well; but I was nowhere offered a basis,
though once I got so far towards it as to secure a personal interview
with the editor-in-chief, who made me feel that I had seldom met so busy
a man. He praised some work of mine that he had read in his paper, but I
was never recalled to his presence; and now I think he judged rightly
that I should not be a lastingly good journalist. My point of view was
artistic; I wanted time to prepare my effects.

There was another and clearer prospect opened to me on a literary paper,
then newly come to the light, but long since gone out in the dark. Here
again my work was taken, and liked so much that I was offered the basis
(at twenty dollars a week) that I desired; I was even assigned to a desk
where I should write in the office; and the next morning I came joyfully
down to Spruce Street to occupy it. But I was met at the door by one of
the editors, who said lightly, as if it were a trifling affair, “Well,
we’ve concluded to waive the idea of an engagement,” and once more my
bright hopes of a basis dispersed themselves. I said, with what calm I
could, that they must do what they thought best, and I went on
skirmishing baselessly about for this and the other papers which had been
buying my material.

I had begun printing in the ‘Nation’ those letters about my Italian
journeys left over from the Boston Advertiser; they had been liked in the
office, and one day the editor astonished and delighted me by asking how
I would fancy giving up outside work to come there and write only for the
‘Nation’. We averaged my gains from all sources at forty dollars a week,
and I had my basis as unexpectedly as if I had dropped upon it from the
skies.

This must have been some time in November, and the next three or four
months were as happy a time for me as I have ever known. I kept on
printing my Italian material in the Nation; I wrote criticisms for it
(not very good criticisms, I think now), and I amused myself very much
with the treatment of social phases and events in a department which grew
up under my hand. My associations personally were of the most agreeable
kind. I worked with joy, with ardor, and I liked so much to be there, in
that place and in that company, that I hated to have each day come to an
end.

I believed that my lines were cast in New York for good and all; and I
renewed my relations with the literary friends I had made before going
abroad. I often stopped, on my way up town, at an apartment the
Stoddards had in Lafayette Place, or near it; I saw Stedman, and reasoned
high, to my heart’s content, of literary things with them and him.

With the winter Bayard Taylor came on from his home in Kennett and took
an apartment in East Twelfth Street, and once a week Mrs. Taylor and he
received all their friends there, with a simple and charming hospitality.
There was another house which we much resorted to--the house of James
Lorrimer Graham, afterwards Consul-General at Florence, where he died. I
had made his acquaintance at Venice three years before, and I came in for
my share of that love for literary men which all their perversities could
not extinguish in him. It was a veritable passion, which I used to think
he could not have felt so deeply if he had been a literary man himself.
There were delightful dinners at his house, where the wit of the
Stoddards shone, and Taylor beamed with joyous good-fellowship and
overflowed with invention; and Huntington, long Paris correspondent of
the Tribune, humorously tried to talk himself into the resolution of
spending the rest of his life in his own country. There was one evening
when C. P. Cranch, always of a most pensive presence and aspect, sang the
most killingly comic songs; and there was another evening when, after we
all went into the library, something tragical happened. Edwin Booth was
of our number, a gentle, rather silent person in company, or with at
least little social initiative, who, as his fate would, went up to the
cast of a huge hand that lay upon one of the shelves. “Whose hand is
this, Lorry?” he asked our host, as he took it up and turned it over in
both his own hands. Graham feigned not to hear, and Booth asked again,
“whose hand is this?” Then there was nothing for Graham but to say,
“It’s Lincoln’s hand,” and the man for whom it meant such unspeakable
things put it softly down without a word.



V.

It was one of the disappointments of a time which was nearly all joy that
I did not then meet a man who meant hardly less than Lowell himself for
me. George William Curtis was during my first winter in New York away on
one of the long lecturing rounds to which he gave so many of his winters,
and I did not see him till seven years afterwards, at Mr. Norton’s in
Cambridge. He then characteristically spent most of the evening in
discussing an obscure point in Browning’s poem of ‘My Last Duchess’. I
have long forgotten what the point was, but not the charm of Curtis’s
personality, his fine presence, his benign politeness, his almost
deferential tolerance of difference in opinion. Afterwards I saw him
again and again in Boston and New York, but always with a sense of
something elusive in his graciousness, for which something in me must
have been to blame. Cold, he was not, even to the youth that in those
days was apt to shiver in any but the higher temperatures, and yet I felt
that I made no advance in his kindness towards anything like the
friendship I knew in the Cambridge men. Perhaps I was so thoroughly
attuned to their mood that I could not be put in unison with another; and
perhaps in Curtis there was really not the material of much intimacy.

He had the potentiality of publicity in the sort of welcome he gave
equally to all men; and if I asked more I was not reasonable. Yet he was
never far from any man of good-will, and he was the intimate of
multitudes whose several existence he never dreamt of. In this sort he
had become my friend when he made his first great speech on the Kansas
question in 1855, which will seen as remote to the young men of this day
as the Thermopylae question to which he likened it. I was his admirer,
his lover, his worshipper before that for the things he had done in
literature, for the ‘Howadji’ books, and for the lovely fantasies of
‘Prue and I’, and for the sound-hearted satire of the ‘Potiphar Papers’,
and now suddenly I learnt that this brilliant and graceful talent, this
travelled and accomplished gentleman, this star of society who had
dazzled me with his splendor far off in my Western village obscurity, was
a man with the heart to feel the wrongs of men so little friended then as
to be denied all the rights of men. I do not remember any passage of the
speech, or any word of it, but I remember the joy, the pride with which
the soul of youth recognizes in the greatness it has honored the goodness
it may love. Mere politicians might be pro-slavery or anti-slavery
without touching me very much, but here was the citizen of a world far
greater than theirs, a light of the universal republic of letters, who
was willing and eager to stand or fall with the just cause, and that was
all in all to me. His country was my country, and his kindred my
kindred, and nothing could have kept me from following after him.

His whole life taught the lesson that the world is well lost whenever the
world is wrong; but never, I think, did any life teach this so sweetly,
so winningly. The wrong world itself might have been entreated by him to
be right, for he was one of the few reformers who have not in some
measure mixed their love of man with hate of men; his quarrel was with
error, and not with the persons who were in it. He was so gently
steadfast in his opinions that no one ever thought of him as a fanatic,
though many who held his opinions were assailed as fanatics, and suffered
the shame if they did not win the palm of martyrdom. In early life he
was a communist, and then when he came out of Brook Farm into the world
which he was so well fitted to adorn, and which would so gladly have kept
him all its own, he became an abolitionist in the very teeth of the world
which abhorred abolitionists. He was a believer in the cause of women’s
rights, which has no picturesqueness, and which chiefly appeals to the
sense of humor in the men who never dreamt of laughing at him. The man
who was in the last degree amiable was to the last degree unyielding
where conscience was concerned; the soul which was so tender had no
weakness in it; his lenity was the divination of a finer justice. His
honesty made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions; his good
sense made them doubt their own opinions, when they had as little
question of their own honesty.

I should not find it easy to speak of him as a man of letters only, for
humanity was above the humanities with him, and we all know how he turned
from the fairest career in literature to tread the thorny path of
politics because he believed that duty led the way, and that good
citizens were needed more than good romancers. No doubt they are, and
yet it must always be a keen regret with the men of my generation who
witnessed with such rapture the early proofs of his talent, that he could
not have devoted it wholly to the beautiful, and let others look after
the true. Now that I have said this I am half ashamed of it, for I know
well enough that what he did was best; but if my regret is mean, I will
let it remain, for it is faithful to the mood which many have been in
concerning him.

There can be no dispute, I am sure, as to the value of some of the
results he achieved in that other path. He did indeed create anew for us
the type of good-citizenship, well-nigh effaced in a sordid and selfish
time, and of an honest politician and a pure-minded journalist. He never
really forsook literature, and the world of actual interests and
experiences afforded him outlooks and perspectives, without which
aesthetic endeavor is self-limited and purblind. He was a great man of
letters, he was a great orator, he was a great political journalist, he
was a great citizen, he was a great philanthropist. But that last word
with its conventional application scarcely describes the brave and gentle
friend of men that he was. He was one that helped others by all that he
did, and said, and was, and the circle of his use was as wide as his
fame. There are other great men, plenty of them, common great men, whom
we know as names and powers, and whom we willingly let the ages have when
they die, for, living or dead, they are alike remote from us. They have
never been with us where we live; but this great man was the neighbor,
the contemporary, and the friend of all who read him or heard him; and
even in the swift forgetting of this electrical age the stamp of his
personality will not be effaced from their minds or hearts.



VI.

Of those evenings at the Taylors’ in New York, I can recall best the one
which was most significant for me, and even fatefully significant. Mr.
and Mrs. Fields were there, from Boston, and I renewed all the pleasure
of my earlier meetings with them. At the end Fields said, mockingly,
“Don’t despise Boston!” and I answered, as we shook hands, “Few are
worthy to live in Boston.” It was New-Year’s eve, and that night it came
on to snow so heavily that my horse-car could hardly plough its way up to
Forty-seventh Street through the drifts. The next day, and the next, I
wrote at home, because it was so hard to get down-town. The third day I
reached the office and found a letter on my desk from Fields, asking how
I should like to come to Boston and be his assistant on the ‘Atlantic
Monthly’. I submitted the matter at once to my chief on the ‘Nation’,
and with his frank goodwill I talked it over with Mr. Osgood, of Ticknor
& Fields, who was to see me further about it if I wished, when he came to
New York; and then I went to Boston to see Mr. Fields concerning details.
I was to sift all the manuscripts and correspond with contributors; I was
to do the literary proof-reading of the magazine; and I was to write the
four or five pages of book-notices, which were then printed at the end of
the periodical in finer type; and I was to have forty dollars a week. I
said that I was getting that already for less work, and then Mr. Fields
offered me ten dollars more. Upon these terms we closed, and on the 1st
of March, which was my twenty-ninth birthday, I went to Boston and began
my work. I had not decided to accept the place without advising with
Lowell; he counselled the step, and gave me some shrewd and useful
suggestions. The whole affair was conducted by Fields with his unfailing
tact and kindness, but it could not be kept from me that the
qualification I had as practical printer for the work was most valued, if
not the most valued, and that as proof-reader I was expected to make it
avail on the side of economy. Somewhere in life’s feast the course of
humble-pie must always come in; and if I did not wholly relish this, bit
of it, I dare say it was good for me, and I digested it perfectly.



LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT

Among my fellow-passengers on the train from New York to Boston, when I
went to begin my work there in 1866, as the assistant editor of the
Atlantic Monthly, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield
Republican, who created in a subordinate city a journal of metropolitan
importance. I had met him in Venice several years earlier, when he was
suffering from the cruel insomnia which had followed his overwork on that
newspaper, and when he told me that he was sleeping scarcely more than
one hour out of the twenty-four. His worn face attested the misery which
this must have been, and which lasted in some measure while he lived,
though I believe that rest and travel relieved him in his later years. He
was always a man of cordial friendliness, and he now expressed a most
gratifying interest when I told him what I was going to do in Boston. He
gave himself the pleasure of descanting upon the dramatic quality of the
fact that a young newspaper man from Ohio was about to share in the
destinies of the great literary periodical of New England.



I.

I do not think that such a fact would now move the fancy of the liveliest
newspaper man, so much has the West since returned upon the East in a
refluent wave of authorship. But then the West was almost an unknown
quality in our literary problem; and in fact there was scarcely any
literature outside of New England. Even this was of New England origin,
for it was almost wholly the work of New England men and women in the
“splendid exile” of New York. The Atlantic Monthly, which was
distinctively literary, was distinctively a New England magazine, though
from the first it had been characterized by what was more national, what
was more universal, in the New England temperament. Its chief
contributors for nearly twenty years were Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes,
Whittier, Emerson, Doctor Hale, Colonel Higginson, Mrs. Stowe, Whipple,
Rose Terry Cooke, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Prescott Spofford, Mrs.
Phelps Ward, and other New England writers who still lived in New
England, and largely in the region of Boston. Occasionally there came a
poem from Bryant, at New York, from Mr. Stedman, from Mr. Stoddard and
Mrs. Stoddard, from Mr. Aldrich, and from Bayard Taylor. But all these,
except the last, were not only of New England race, but of New England
birth. I think there was no contributor from the South but Mr. M. D.
Conway, and as yet the West scarcely counted, though four young poets
from Ohio, who were not immediately or remotely of Puritan origin, had
appeared in early numbers; Alice Cary, living with her sister in New
York, had written now and then from the beginning. Mr. John Hay solely
represented Illinois by a single paper, and he was of Rhode Island stock.
It was after my settlement at Boston that Mark Twain, of Missouri, became
a figure of world-wide fame at Hartford; and longer after, that Mr. Bret
Harte made that progress Eastward from California which was telegraphed
almost from hour to hour, as if it were the progress of a prince. Miss
Constance F. Woolson had not yet begun to write. Mr. James Whitcomb
Riley, Mr. Maurice Thompson, Miss Edith Thomas, Octave Thanet, Mr.
Charles Warren Stoddard, Mr. H. B. Fuller, Mrs. Catherwood, Mr. Hamlin
Garland, all whom I name at random among other Western writers, were then
as unknown as Mr. Cable, Miss Murfree, Mrs. Rives Chanler, Miss Grace
King, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, in the South,
which they by no means fully represent.

The editors of the Atlantic had been eager from the beginning to discover
any outlying literature; but, as I have said, there was in those days
very little good writing done beyond the borders of New England. If the
case is now different, and the best known among living American writers
are no longer New-Englanders, still I do not think the South and West
have yet trimmed the balance; and though perhaps the news writers now
more commonly appear in those quarters, I should not be so very sure that
they are not still characterized by New England ideals and examples. On
the other hand, I am very sure that in my early day we were characterized
by them, and wished to be so; we even felt that we failed in so far as we
expressed something native quite in our own way. The literary theories we
accepted were New England theories, the criticism we valued was New
England criticism, or, more strictly speaking, Boston theories, Boston
criticism.

Of those more constant contributors to the Atlantic whom I have
mentioned, it is of course known that Longfellow and Lowell lived in
Cambridge, Emerson at Concord, and Whittier at Amesbury. Colonel
Higginson was still and for many years afterwards at Newport; Mrs. Stowe
was then at Andover; Miss Prescott of Newburyport had become Mrs.
Spofford, and was presently in Boston, where her husband was a member of
the General Court; Mrs. Phelps Ward, as Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps,
dwelt in her father’s house at Andover. The chief of the Bostonians were
Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Doctor Holmes, and Doctor Hale. Yet Boston stood
for the whole Massachusetts group, and Massachusetts, in the literary
impulse, meant New England. I suppose we must all allow, whether we like
to do so or not, that the impulse seems now to have pretty well spent
itself. Certainly the city of Boston has distinctly waned in literature,
though it has waxed in wealth and population. I do not think there are
in Boston to-day even so many talents with a literary coloring in law,
science, theology, and journalism as there were formerly; though I have
no belief that the Boston talents are fewer or feebler than before. I
arrived in Boston, however, when all talents had more or less a literary
coloring, and when the greatest talents were literary. These expressed
with ripened fulness a civilization conceived in faith and brought forth
in good works; but that moment of maturity was the beginning of a
decadence which could only show itself much later. New England has
ceased to be a nation in itself, and it will perhaps never again have
anything like a national literature; but that was something like a
national literature; and it will probably be centuries yet before the
life of the whole country, the American life as distinguished from the
New England life, shall have anything so like a national literature. It
will be long before our larger life interprets itself in such imagination
as Hawthorne’s, such wisdom as Emerson’s, such poetry as Longfellow’s,
such prophecy as Whittier’s, such wit and grace as Holmes’s, such humor
and humanity as Lowell’s.



II.

The literature of those great men was, if I may suffer myself the figure,
the Socinian graft of a Calvinist stock. Their faith, in its varied
shades, was Unitarian, but their art was Puritan. So far as it was
imperfect--and great and beautiful as it was, I think it had its
imperfections--it was marred by the intense ethicism that pervaded the
New England mind for two hundred years, and that still characterizes it.
They or their fathers had broken away from orthodoxy in the great schism
at the beginning of the century, but, as if their heterodoxy were
conscience-stricken, they still helplessly pointed the moral in all they
did; some pointed it more directly, some less directly; but they all
pointed it. I should be far from blaming them for their ethical
intention, though I think they felt their vocation as prophets too much
for their good as poets. Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the
sermon, though not always, nor nearly always. It was in poetry and in
romance that they excelled; in the novel, so far as they attempted it,
they failed. I say this with the names of all the Bostonian group, and
those they influenced, in mind, and with a full sense of their greatness.
It may be ungracious to say that they have left no heirs to their
peculiar greatness; but it would be foolish to say that they left an
estate where they had none to bequeath. One cannot take account of such
a fantasy as Judd’s Margaret. The only New-Englander who has attempted
the novel on a scale proportioned to the work of the New-Englanders in
philosophy, in poetry, in romance, is Mr. De Forest, who is of New Haven,
and not of Boston. I do not forget the fictions of Doctor Holmes, or the
vivid inventions of Doctor Hale, but I do not call them novels; and I do
not forget the exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss Wilkins,
which is free from the ethicism of the great New England group, but which
has hardly the novelists’s scope. New England, in Hawthorne’s work,
achieved supremacy in romance; but the romance is always an allegory, and
the novel is a picture in which the truth to life is suffered to do its
unsermonized office for conduct; and New England yet lacks her novelist,
because it was her instinct and her conscience in fiction to be true to
an ideal of life rather than to life itself.

Even when we come to the exception that proves the rule, even to such a
signal exception as ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’, I think that what I say holds
true. That is almost the greatest work of imagination that we have
produced in prose, and it is the work of a New England woman, writing
from all the inspirations and traditions of New England. It is like
begging the question to say that I do not call it a novel, however; but
really, is it a novel, in the sense that ‘War and Peace’ is a novel, or
‘Madame Flaubert’, or ‘L’Assommoir’, or ‘Phineas Finn’, or ‘Dona
Perfecta’, or ‘Esther Waters’, or ‘Marta y Maria’, or ‘The Return of the
Native’, or ‘Virgin Soil’, or ‘David Grieve’? In a certain way it is
greater than any of these except the first; but its chief virtue, or its
prime virtue, is in its address to the conscience, and not its address to
the taste; to the ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense.

This does not quite say the thing, but it suggests it, and I should be
sorry if it conveyed to any reader a sense of slight; for I believe no
one has felt more deeply than myself the value of New England in
literature. The comparison of the literary situation at Boston to the
literary situation at Edinburgh in the times of the reviewers has never
seemed to me accurate or adequate, and it holds chiefly in the fact that
both seem to be of the past. Certainly New York is yet no London in
literature, and I think Boston was once vastly more than Edinburgh ever
was, at least in quality. The Scotch literature of the palmy days was
not wholly Scotch, and even when it was rooted in Scotch soil it flowered
in the air of an alien speech. But the New England literature of the
great day was the blossom of a New England root; and the language which
the Bostonians wrote was the native English of scholars fitly the heirs
of those who had brought the learning of the universities to
Massachusetts Bay two hundred years before, and was of as pure a lineage
as the English of the mother-country.



III.

The literary situation which confronted me when I came to Boston was,
then, as native as could well be; and whatever value I may be able to
give a personal study of it will be from the effect it made upon me as
one strange in everything but sympathy. I will not pretend that I saw it
in its entirety, and I have no hope of presenting anything like a
kinetoscopic impression of it. What I can do is to give here and there a
glimpse of it; and I shall wish the reader to keep in mind the fact that
it was in a “state of transition,” as everything is always and
everywhere. It was no sooner recognizably native than it ceased to be
fully so; and I became a witness of it after the change had begun. The
publishing house which so long embodied New England literature was
already attempting enterprises out of the line of its traditions, and one
of these had brought Mr. T. B. Aldrich from New York, a few weeks before
I arrived upon the scene in that dramatic quality which I think never
impressed any one but Mr. Bowles. Mr. Aldrich was the editor of ‘Every
Saturday’ when I came to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. We
were of nearly the same age, but he had a distinct and distinguished
priority of reputation, insomuch that in my Western remoteness I had
always ranged him with such elders and betters of mine as Holmes and
Lowell, and never imagined him the blond, slight youth I found him, with
every imaginable charm of contemporaneity. It is no part of the office
which I have intended for these slight and sufficiently wandering
glimpses of the past to show any writer in his final place; and above all
I do not presume to assign any living man his rank or station. But I
should be false to my own grateful sense of beauty in the work of this
poet if I did not at all times recognize his constancy to an ideal which
his name stands for. He is known in several kinds, but to my thinking he
is best in a certain nobler kind of poetry; a serious sort in which the
thought holds him above the scrupulosities of the art he loves and honors
so much. Sometimes the file slips in his hold, as the file must and
will; it is but an instrument at the best; but there is no mistouch in
the hand that lays itself upon the reader’s heart with the pulse of the
poet’s heart quick and true in it. There are sonnets of his, grave, and
simple, and lofty, which I think of with the glow and thrill possible
only from very beautiful poetry, and which impart such an emotion as we
can feel only

       “When a great thought strikes along the brain
        And flushes all the cheek.”

When I had the fortune to meet him first, I suppose that in the employ of
the kindly house we were both so eager to serve, our dignities were about
the same; for if the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ was a somewhat prouder affair
than an eclectic weekly like ‘Every Saturday’, he was supreme in his
place, and I was subordinate in mine. The house was careful, in the
attitude of its senior partner, not to distinguish between us, and we
were not slow to perceive the tact used in managing us; we had our own
joke of it; we compared notes to find whether we were equally used in
this thing or that; and we promptly shared the fun of our discovery with
Fields himself.

We had another impartial friend (no less a friend of joy in the life
which seems to have been pretty nearly all joy, as I look back upon it)
in the partner who became afterwards the head of the house, and who
forecast in his bold enterprises the change from a New England to an
American literary situation. In the end James R. Osgood failed, though
all his enterprises succeeded. The anomaly is sad, but it is not
infrequent. They were greater than his powers and his means, and before
they could reach their full fruition, they had to be enlarged to men of
longer purse and longer patience. He was singularly fitted both by
instinct and by education to become a great publisher; and he early
perceived that if a leading American house were to continue at Boston, it
must be hospitable to the talents of the whole country. He founded his
future upon those generous lines; but he wanted the qualities as well as
the resources for rearing the superstructure. Changes began to follow
each other rapidly after he came into control of the house. Misfortune
reduced the size and number of its periodicals. ‘The Young Folks’ was
sold outright, and the ‘North American Review’ (long before Mr. Rice
bought it and carried it to New York) was cut down one-half, so that
Aldrich said, it looked as if Destiny had sat upon it. His own
periodical, ‘Every Saturday’, was first enlarged to a stately quarto and
illustrated; and then, under stress of the calamities following the great
Boston fire, It collapsed to its former size. Then both the ‘Atlantic
Monthly’ and ‘Every Saturday’ were sold away from their old ownership,
and ‘Every Saturday’ was suppressed altogether, and we two ceased to be
of the same employ. There was some sort of evening rite (more funereal
than festive) the day after they were sold, and we followed Osgood away
from it, under the lamps. We all knew that it was his necessity that had
caused him to part with the periodicals; but he professed that it was his
pleasure, and he said he had not felt so light-hearted since he was a
boy. We asked him, How could he feel gay when he was no longer paying us
our salaries, and how could he justify it to his conscience? He liked
our mocking, and limped away from us with a rheumatic easing of his
weight from one foot to another: a figure pathetic now that it has gone
the way to dusty death, and dear to memory through benefactions unalloyed
by one unkindness.



IV.

But when I came to Boston early in 1866, the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ and
‘Harper’s’ then divided our magazine world between them; the ‘North
American Review’, in the control of Lowell and Professor Norton, had
entered upon a new life; ‘Every Saturday’ was an instant success in the
charge of Mr. Aldrich, who was by taste and training one of the best
editors; and ‘Our Young Folks’ had the field of juvenile periodical
literature to itself.

It was under the direction of Miss Lucy Larcom and of Mr. J. T.
Trowbridge, who had come from western New York, where he was born, and
must be noted as one of the first returners from the setting to the
rising sun. He naturalized himself in Boston in his later boyhood, and
he still breathes Boston air, where he dwells in the street called
Pleasant, on the shore of Spy Pond, at Arlington, and still weaves the
magic web of his satisfying stories for boys. He merges in their
popularity the fame of a poet which I do not think will always suffer
that eclipse, for his poems show him to have looked deeply into the heart
of common humanity, with a true and tender sense of it.

Miss Larcom scarcely seemed to change from date to date in the generation
that elapsed between the time I first saw her and the time I saw her
last, a year or two before her death. A goodness looked out of her
comely face, which made me think of the Madonna’s in Titian’s
“Assumption,” and her whole aspect expressed a mild and friendly spirit
which I find it hard to put in words. She was never of the fine world of
literature; she dwelt where she was born, in that unfashionable Beverly
which is not Beverly Farms, and was of a simple, sea-faring, God-fearing
race, as she has told in one of the loveliest autobiographies I know, “A
New England Girlhood.” She was the author of many poems, whose number
she constantly enlarged, but she was chiefly, and will be most lastingly,
famed for the one poem, ‘Hannah Binding Shoes’, which years before my
days in Boston had made her so widely known. She never again struck so
deep or so true a note; but if one has lodged such a note in the ear of
time, it is enough; and if we are to speak of eternity, one might very
well hold up one’s head in the fields of asphodel, if one could say to
the great others there, “I wrote Hannah Binding Shoes.” Her poem is
very, very sad, as all who have read it will remember; but Miss Larcom
herself was above everything cheerful, and she had a laugh of mellow
richness which willingly made itself heard. She was not only of true New
England stock, and a Boston author by right of race, but she came up to
that city every winter from her native town.

By the same right and on the same terms, another New England poetess,
whom I met those first days in Boston, was a Boston author. When I saw
Celia Thaxter she was just beginning to make her effect with those poems
and sketches which the sea sings and flashes through as it sings and
flashes around the Isles of Shoals, her summer home, where her girlhood
had been passed in a freedom as wild as the curlew’s. She was a most
beautiful creature, still very young, with a slender figure, and an
exquisite perfection of feature; she was in presence what her work was:
fine, frank, finished. I do not know whether other witnesses of our
literary history feel that the public has failed to keep her as fully in
mind as her work merited; but I do not think there can be any doubt but
our literature would be sensibly the poorer without her work. It is
interesting to remember how closely she kept to her native field, and it
is wonderful to consider how richly she made those sea-beaten rocks to
blossom. Something strangely full and bright came to her verse from the
mystical environment of the ocean, like the luxury of leaf and tint that
it gave the narrower flower-plots of her native isles. Her gift, indeed,
could not satisfy itself with the terms of one art alone, however varied,
and she learned to express in color the thoughts and feelings impatient
of the pallor of words.

She remains in my memories of that far Boston a distinct and vivid
personality; as the authoress of ‘Amber Gods’, and ‘In a Cellar’, and
‘Circumstance’, and those other wild romantic tales, remains the gentle
and somewhat evanescent presence I found her. Miss Prescott was now Mrs.
Spofford, and her husband was a rising young politician of the day. It
was his duties as member of the General Court that had brought them up
from Newburyport to Boston for that first winter; and I remember that the
evening when we met he was talking of their some time going to Italy that
she might study for imaginative literature certain Italian cities he
named. I have long since ceased to own those cities, but at the moment I
felt a pang of expropriation which I concealed as well as I could; and
now I heartily wish she could have fulfilled that purpose if it was a
purpose, or realized that dream if it was only a dream. Perhaps,
however, that sumptuous and glowing fancy of hers, which had taken the
fancy of the young readers of that day, needed the cold New England
background to bring out all its intensities of tint, all its splendors of
light. Its effects were such as could not last, or could not be farther
evolved; they were the expression of youth musing away from its
environment and smitten with the glories of a world afar and beyond, the
great world, the fine world, the impurpled world of romantic motives and
passions. But for what they were, I can never think them other than what
they appeared: the emanations of a rarely gifted and singularly poetic
mind. I feel better than I can say how necessarily they were the
emanations of a New England mind, and how to the subtler sense they must
impart the pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities which are the
long result of puritanism in the physiognomy of New England life.

Their author afterwards gave herself to the stricter study of this life
in many tales and sketches which showed an increasing mastery; but they
could not have the flush, the surprise, the delight of a young talent
trying itself in a kind native and, so far as I know, peculiar to it.
From time to time I still come upon a poem of hers which recalls that
earlier strain of music, of color, and I am content to trust it for my
abiding faith in the charm of things I have not read for thirty years.



V.

I speak of this one and that, as it happens, and with no thought of
giving a complete prospect of literary Boston thirty years ago. I am
aware that it will seem sparsely peopled in the effect I impart, and I
would have the reader always keep in mind the great fames at Cambridge
and at Concord, which formed so large a part of the celebrity of Boston.
I would also like him to think of it as still a great town, merely, where
every one knew every one else, and whose metropolitan liberation from
neighborhood was just begun.

Most distinctly of that yet uncitified Boston was the critic Edwin P.
Whipple, whose sympathies were indefinitely wider than his traditions. He
was a most generous lover of all that was excellent in literature; and
though I suppose we should call him an old-fashioned critic now, I
suspect it would be with no distinct sense of what is newer fashioned. He
was certainly as friendly to what promised well in the younger men as he
was to what was done well in their elders; and there was no one writing
in his day whose virtues failed of his recognition, though it might
happen that his foibles would escape Whipple’s censure. He wrote
strenuously and of course conscientiously; his point of view was solely
and always that which enabled him best to discern qualities. I doubt if
he had any theory of criticism except to find out what was good in an
author and praise it; and he rather blamed what was ethically bad than
what was aesthetically bad. In this he was strictly of New England, and
he was of New England in a certain general intelligence, which constantly
grew with an interrogative habit of mind.

He liked to talk to you of what he had found characteristic in your work,
to analyze you to yourself; and the very modesty of the man, which made
such a study impersonal as far as he was concerned, sometimes rendered
him insensible to the sufferings of his subject. He had a keen
perception of humor in others, but he had very little humor; he had a
love of the beautiful in literature which was perhaps sometimes greater
than his sense of it.

I write from a cursory acquaintance with his work, not recently renewed.
Of the presence of the man I have a vivider remembrance: a slight, short,
ecclesiasticized figure in black; with a white neckcloth and a silk hat
of strict decorum, and between the two a square face with square
features, intensified in their regard by a pair of very large glasses,
and the prominent, myopic eyes staring through them. He was a type of
out-dated New England scholarship in these aspects, but in the hospitable
qualities of his mind and heart, the sort of man to be kept fondly in the
memory of all who ever knew him.



VI.

Out of the vague of that far-off time another face and figure, as
essentially New En&land as this, and yet so different, relieve
themselves. Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as
far as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized Yankee.
He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking, and he so
became a literary product of a rarer and stranger sort than our
literature had otherwise known. He had gone from Cleveland to London,
with intervals of New York and the lecture platform, four or five years
before I saw him in Boston, shortly after I went there. We had met in
Ohio, and he had personally explained to me the ducatless well-meaning of
Vanity Fair in New York; but many men had since shaken the weary hand of
Artemus Ward when I grasped it one day in front of the Tremont Temple. He
did not recognize me, but he gave me at once a greeting of great
impersonal cordiality, with “How do you do? When did you come?” and
other questions that had no concern in them, till I began to dawn upon
him through a cloud of other half remembered faces. Then he seized my
hand and wrung it all over again, and repeated his friendly demands with
an intonation that was now “Why, how are you; how are you?” for me alone.
It was a bit of comedy, which had the fit pathetic relief of his
impending doom: this was already stamped upon his wasted face, and his
gay eyes had the death-look. His large, loose mouth was drawn, for all
its laughter at the fact which he owned; his profile, which burlesqued.
an eagle’s, was the profile of a drooping eagle; his lank length of limb
trembled away with him when we parted. I did not see him again; I
scarcely heard of him till I heard of his death, and this sad image
remains with me of the humorist who first gave the world a taste of the
humor which characterizes the whole American people.

I was meeting all kinds of distinguished persons, in my relation to the
magazine, and early that winter I met one who remains in my mind above
all others a person of distinction. He was scarcely a celebrity, but he
embodied certain social traits which were so characteristic of literary
Boston that it could not be approached without their recognition. The
Muses have often been acknowledged to be very nice young persons, but in
Boston they were really ladies; in Boston literature was of good family
and good society in a measure it has never been elsewhere. It might be
said even that reform was of good family in Boston; and literature and
reform equally shared the regard of Edmund Quincy, whose race was one of
the most aristocratic in New England. I had known him by his novel of
‘Wensley’ (it came so near being a first-rate novel), and by his Life of
Josiah Quincy, then a new book, but still better by his Boston letters to
the New York Tribune. These dealt frankly, in the old anti-slavery days
between 1850 and 1860, with other persons of distinction in Boston, who
did not see the right so clearly as Quincy did, or who at least let their
interests darken them to the ugliness of slavery. Their fault was all
the more comical because it was the error of men otherwise so correct, of
characters so stainless, of natures so upright; and the Quincy letters
got out of it all the fun there was in it. Quincy himself affected me as
the finest patrician type I had ever met. He was charmingly handsome,
with a nose of most fit aquilinity, smooth-shaven lips, “educated
whiskers,” and perfect glasses; his manner was beautiful, his voice
delightful, when at our first meeting he made me his reproaches in terms
of lovely kindness for having used in my ‘Venetian Life’ the Briticism
‘directly’ for ‘as soon as.’

Lowell once told me that Quincy had never had any calling or profession,
because when he found himself in the enjoyment of a moderate income on
leaving college, he decided to be simply a gentleman. He was too much of
a man to be merely that, and he was an abolitionist, a journalist, and
for conscience’ sake a satirist. Of that political mood of society which
he satirized was an eminent man whom it was also my good fortune to meet
in my early days in Boston; and if his great sweetness and kindness had
not instantly won my liking, I should still have been glad of the glimpse
of the older and statelier Boston which my slight acquaintance with
George Ticknor gave me. The historian of Spanish literature, the friend
and biographer of Prescott, and a leading figure of the intellectual
society of an epoch already closed, dwelt in the fine old square brick
mansion which yet stands at the corner of Park Street and Beacon, though
sunk now to a variety of business uses, and lamentably changed in aspect.
The interior was noble, and there was an air of scholarly quiet and of
lettered elegance in the library, where the host received his guests,
which seemed to pervade the whole house, and which made its appeal to the
imagination of one of them most potently. It seemed to me that to be
master of such circumstance and keeping would be enough of life in a
certain way; and it all lingers in my memory yet, as if it were one with
the gentle courtesy which welcomed me.

Among my fellow-guests one night was George S. Hillard, now a faded
reputation, and even then a life defeated of the high expectation of its
youth. I do not know whether his ‘Six Months in Italy’ still keeps
itself in print; but it was a book once very well known; and he was
perhaps the more gracious to me, as our host was, because of our common
Italian background. He was of the old Silver-gray Whig society too, and
I suppose that order of things imparted its tone to what I felt and saw
in that place. The civil war had come and gone, and that order accepted
the result if not with faith, then with patience. There were two young
English noblemen there that night, who had been travelling in the South,
and whose stories of the wretched conditions they had seen moved our host
to some open misgiving. But the Englishmen had no question; in spite of
all, they defended the accomplished fact, and when I ventured to say that
now at least there could be a hope of better things, while the old order
was only the perpetuation of despair, he mildly assented, with a gesture
of the hand that waived the point, and a deeply sighed, “Perhaps;
perhaps.”

He was a presence of great dignity, which seemed to recall the past with
a steadfast allegiance, and yet to relax itself towards the present in
the wisdom of the accumulated years. His whole life had been passed in
devotion to polite literature and in the society of the polite world; and
he was a type of scholar such as only the circumstances of Boston could
form. Those circumstances could alone form such another type as Quincy;
and I wish I could have felt then as I do now the advantage of meeting
them so contemporaneously.



VII.

The historian of Spanish literature was an old man nearer eighty than
seventy when I saw him, and I recall of him personally his dark tint, and
the scholarly refinement of his clean-shaven face, which seemed to me
rather English than American in character. He was quite exterior to the
Atlantic group of writers, and had no interest in me as one of it.
Literary Boston of that day was not a solidarity, as I soon perceived;
and I understood that it was only in my quality of stranger that I saw
the different phases of it. I should not be just to a vivid phase if I
failed to speak of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and the impulse of reform which
she personified. I did not sympathize with this then so much as I do
now, but I could appreciate it on the intellectual side. Once, many
years later, I heard Mrs. Howe speak in public, and it seemed to me that
she made one of the best speeches I had ever heard. It gave me for the
first time a notion of what women might do in that sort if they entered
public life; but when we met in those earlier days I was interested in
her as perhaps our chief poetess. I believe she did not care much to
speak of literature; she was alert for other meanings in life, and I
remember how she once brought to book a youthful matron who had perhaps
unduly lamented the hardships of housekeeping, with the sharp demand,
“Child, where is your religion?” After the many years of an acquaintance
which had not nearly so many meetings as years, it was pleasant to find
her, at the latest, as strenuous as ever for the faith of works, and as
eager to aid Stepniak as John Brown. In her beautiful old age she
survives a certain literary impulse of Boston, but a still higher impulse
of Boston she will not survive, for that will last while the city
endures.



VIII.

The Cambridge men were curiously apart from others that formed the great
New England group, and with whom in my earlier ignorance I had always
fancied them mingling. Now and then I met Doctor Holmes at Longfellow’s
table, but not oftener than now and then, and I never saw Emerson in
Cambridge at all except at Longfellow’s funeral. In my first years on
the Atlantic I sometimes saw him, when he would address me some grave,
rather retrorsive civilities, after I had been newly introduced to him,
as I had always to be on these occasions. I formed the belief that he
did not care for me, either in my being or doing, and I am far from
blaming him for that: on such points there might easily be two opinions,
and I was myself often of the mind I imagined in him.

If Emerson forgot me, it was perhaps because I was not of those qualities
of things which even then, it was said, he could remember so much better
than things themselves. In his later years I sometimes saw him in the
Boston streets with his beautiful face dreamily set, as he moved like one
to whose vision

       “Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn,
        Vast images in glimmering dawn,
        Half shown, are broken and withdrawn.”

It is known how before the end the eclipse became total and from moment
to moment the record inscribed upon his mind was erased. Some years
before he died I sat between him and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke, at an
‘Atlantic Breakfast’ where it was part of my editorial function to
preside. When he was not asking me who she was, I could hear him asking
her who I was. His great soul worked so independently of memory as we
conceive it, and so powerfully and essentially, that one could not help
wondering if; after all, our personal continuity, our identity hereafter,
was necessarily trammeled up with our enduring knowledge of what happens
here. His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event, and yet his
character, his personality, his identity fully persisted.

I do not know, whether the things that we printed for Emerson after his
memory began to fail so utterly were the work of earlier years or not,
but I know that they were of his best. There were certain poems which
could not have been more electly, more exquisitely his, or fashioned with
a keener and juster self-criticism. His vision transcended his time so
far that some who have tired themselves out in trying to catch up with
him have now begun to say that he was no seer at all; but I doubt if
these form the last court of appeal in his case. In manner, he was very
gentle, like all those great New England men, but he was cold, like many
of them, to the new-comer, or to the old-comer who came newly. As I have
elsewhere recorded, I once heard him speak critically of Hawthorne, and
once he expressed his surprise at the late flowering brilliancy of
Holmes’s gift in the Autocrat papers after all his friends supposed it
had borne its best fruit. But I recall no mention of Longfellow, or
Lowell, or Whittier from him. At a dinner where the talk glanced upon
Walt Whitman he turned to me as perhaps representing the interest
posterity might take in the matter, and referred to Whitman’s public use
of his privately written praise as something altogether unexpected. He
did not disown it or withdraw it, but seemed to feel (not indignantly)
that there had been an abuse of it.



IX.

The first time I saw Whittier was in Fields’s room at the publishing
office, where I had come upon some editorial errand to my chief. He
introduced me to the poet: a tall, spare figure in black of Quaker cut,
with a keen, clean-shaven face, black hair, and vivid black eyes. It was
just after his poem, ‘Snow Bound’, had made its great success, in the
modest fashion of those days, and had sold not two hundred thousand but
twenty thousand, and I tried to make him my compliment. I contrived to
say that I could not tell him how much I liked it; and he received the
inadequate expression of my feeling with doubtless as much effusion as he
would have met something more explicit and abundant. If he had judged
fit to take my contract off my hands in any way, I think he would have
been less able to do so than any of his New England contemporaries. In
him, as I have suggested, the Quaker calm was bound by the frosty
Puritanic air, and he was doubly cold to the touch of the stranger,
though he would thaw out to old friends, and sparkle in laugh and joke. I
myself never got so far with him as to experience this geniality, though
afterwards we became such friends as an old man and a young man could be
who rarely met. Our better acquaintance began with some talk, at a second
meeting, about Bayard Taylor’s ‘Story of Kennett’, which had then lately
appeared, and which he praised for its fidelity to Quaker character in
its less amiable aspects. No doubt I had made much of my own Quaker
descent (which I felt was one of the few things I had to be proud of),
and he therefore spoke the more frankly of those traits of brutality into
which the primitive sincerity of the sect sometimes degenerated. He
thought the habit of plain-speaking had to be jealously guarded to keep
it from becoming rude-speaking, and he matched with stories of his own
some things I had heard my father tell of Friends in the backwoods who
were Foes to good manners.

Whittier was one of the most generous of men towards the work of others,
especially the work of a new man, and if I did anything that he liked, I
could count upon him for cordial recognition. In the quiet of his
country home at Danvers he apparently read all the magazines, and kept
himself fully abreast of the literary movement, but I doubt if he so
fully appreciated the importance of the social movement. Like some
others of the great anti-slavery men, he seemed to imagine that mankind
had won itself a clear field by destroying chattel slavery, and he had.
no sympathy with those who think that the man who may any moment be out
of work is industrially a slave. This is not strange; so few men last
over from one reform to another that the wonder is that any should, not
that one should not. Whittier was prophet for one great need of the
divine to man, and he spoke his message with a fervor that at times was
like the trembling of a flame, or the quivering of midsummer sunshine. It
was hard to associate with the man as one saw him, still, shy, stiff, the
passion of his verse. This imbued not only his antislavery utterances,
but equally his ballads of the old witch and Quaker persecution, and
flashed a far light into the dimness where his interrogations of Mystery
pierced. Whatever doubt there can be of the fate of other New England
poets in the great and final account, it seems to me that certain of
these pieces make his place secure.

There is great inequality in his work, and I felt this so strongly that
when I came to have full charge of the Magazine, I ventured once to
distinguish. He sent me a poem, and I had the temerity to return it, and
beg him for something else. He magnanimously refrained from all show of
offence, and after a while, when he had printed the poem elsewhere, he
gave me another. By this time, I perceived that I had been wrong, not as
to the poem returned, but as to my function regarding him and such as he.
I had made my reflections, and never again did I venture to pass upon
what contributors of his quality sent me. I took it and printed it, and
praised the gods; and even now I think that with such men it was not my
duty to play the censor in the periodical which they had made what it
was. They had set it in authority over American literature, and it was
not for me to put myself in authority over them. Their fame was in their
own keeping, and it was not my part to guard it against them.

After that experience I not only practised an eager acquiescence in their
wish to reach the public through the Atlantic, but I used all the
delicacy I was master of in bowing the way to them. Sometimes my utmost
did not avail, or more strictly speaking it did not avail in one instance
with Emerson. He had given me upon much entreaty a poem which was one of
his greatest and best, but the proof-reader found a nominative at odds
with its verb. We had some trouble in reconciling them, and some other
delays, and meanwhile Doctor Holmes offered me a poem for the same
number. I now doubted whether I should get Emerson’s poem back in time
for it, but unluckily the proof did come back in time, and then I had to
choose between my poets, or acquaint them with the state of the case, and
let them choose what I should do. I really felt that Doctor Holmes had
the right to precedence, since Emerson had withheld his proof so long
that I could not count upon it; but I wrote to Emerson, and asked (as
nearly as I can remember) whether he would consent to let me put his poem
over to the next number, or would prefer to have it appear in the same
number with Doctor Holmes’s; the subjects were cognate, and I had my
misgivings. He wrote me back to “return the proofs and break up the
forms.” I could not go to this iconoclastic extreme with the
electrotypes of the magazine, but I could return the proofs. I did so,
feeling that I had done my possible, and silently grieving that there
could be such ire in heavenly minds.



X.

Emerson, as I say, I had once met in Cambridge, but Whittier never; and I
have a feeling that poet as Cambridge felt him to be, she had her
reservations concerning him. I cannot put these into words which would
not oversay them, but they were akin to those she might have refined upon
in regard to Mrs. Stowe. Neither of these great writers would have
appeared to Cambridge of the last literary quality; their fame was with a
world too vast to be the test that her own

        “One entire and perfect crysolite”

would have formed. Whittier in fact had not arrived at the clear
splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still
from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for
the author of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ her syntax was such a snare to her that
it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the
assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written
into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, in
transposition of phrases, the text was largely rewritten on the margin of
her proofs. The soul of her art was present, but the form was so often
absent, that when it was clothed on anew, it would have been hard to say
whose cut the garment was of in many places. In fact, the proof-reading
of the ‘Atlantic Monthly’ was something almost fearfully scrupulous and
perfect. The proofs were first read by the under proof-reader in the
printing-office; then the head reader passed them to me perfectly clean
as to typography, with his own abundant and most intelligent comments on
the literature; and then I read them, making what changes I chose, and
verifying every quotation, every date, every geographical and
biographical name, every foreign word to the last accent, every technical
and scientific term. Where it was possible or at all desirable the proof
was next submitted to the author. When it came back to me, I revised it,
accepting or rejecting the author’s judgment according as he was entitled
by his ability and knowledge or not to have them. The proof now went to
the printers for correction; they sent it again to the head reader, who
carefully revised it and returned it again to me. I read it a second
time, and it was again corrected. After this it was revised in the
office and sent to the stereotyper, from whom it came to the head reader
for a last revision in the plates.

It would not do to say how many of the first American writers owed their
correctness in print to the zeal of our proof-reading, but I may say that
there were very few who did not owe something. The wisest and ablest
were the most patient and grateful, like Mrs. Stowe, under correction; it
was only the beginners and the more ignorant who were angry; and almost
always the proof-reading editor had his way on disputed points. I look
back now, with respectful amazement at my proficiency in detecting the
errors of the great as well as the little. I was able to discover
mistakes even in the classical quotations of the deeply lettered Sumner,
and I remember, in the earliest years of my service on the Atlantic,
waiting in this statesman’s study amidst the prints and engravings that
attested his personal resemblance to Edmund Burke, with his proofs in my
hand and my heart in my mouth, to submit my doubts of his Latinity. I
forget how he received them; but he was not a very gracious person.

Mrs. Stowe was a gracious person, and carried into age the inalienable
charm of a woman who must have been very, charming earlier. I met her
only at the Fieldses’ in Boston, where one night I witnessed a
controversy between her and Doctor Holmes concerning homoeopathy and
allopathy which lasted well through dinner. After this lapse of time, I
cannot tell how the affair ended, but I feel sure of the liking with
which Mrs. Stowe inspired me. There was something very simple, very
motherly in her, and something divinely sincere. She was quite the
person to take ‘au grand serieux’ the monstrous imaginations of Lady
Byron’s jealousy and to feel it on her conscience to make public report
of them when she conceived that the time had come to do so.

In Francis Parkman I knew much later than in some others a
differentiation of the New England type which was not less
characteristic. He, like so many other Boston men of letters, was of
patrician family, and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons
to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suffering in which he
wrought at what is, I suppose, our greatest history. He wrought at it
piecemeal, and sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head aches
which tormented him, and the disorder of the heart which threatened his
life, allowed him a brief respite for the task which was dear to him. He
must have been more than a quarter of a century in completing it, and in
this time, as he once told me, it had given him a day-laborer’s wages;
but of course money was the least return he wished from it. I read the
regularly successive volumes of ‘The Jesuits in North America, The Old
Regime in Canada’, the ‘Wolfe and Montcalm’, and the others that went to
make up the whole history with a sufficiently noisy enthusiasm, and our
acquaintance began by his expressing his gratification with the praises
of them that I had put in print. We entered into relations as
contributor and editor, and I know that he was pleased with my eagerness
to get as many detachable chapters from the book in hand as he could give
me for the magazine, but he was of too fine a politeness to make this the
occasion of his first coming to see me. He had walked out to Cambridge,
where I then lived, in pursuance of a regimen which, I believe, finally
built up his health; that it was unsparing, I can testify from my own
share in one of his constitutionals in Boston, many years later.

His experience in laying the groundwork for his history, and his
researches in making it thorough, were such as to have liberated him to
the knowledge of other manners and ideals, but he remained strictly a
Bostonian, and as immutably of the Boston social and literary faith as
any I knew in that capital of accomplished facts. He had lived like an
Indian among the wild Western tribes; he consorted with the Canadian
archaeologists in their mousings among the colonial archives of their
fallen state; every year he went to Quebec or Paris to study the history
of New France in the original documents; European society was open to him
everywhere; but he had those limitations which I nearly always found in
the Boston men, I remember his talking to me of ‘The Rise of Silas
Lapham’, in a somewhat troubled and uncertain strain, and interpreting
his rise as the achievement of social recognition, without much or at all
liking it or me for it. I did not think it my part to point out that I
had supposed the rise to be a moral one; and later I fell under his
condemnation for certain high crimes and misdemeanors I had been guilty
of against a well-known ideal in fiction. These in fact constituted
lese-majesty of romanticism, which seemed to be disproportionately dear
to a man who was in his own way trying to tell the truth of human nature
as I was in mine. His displeasures passed, however, and my last meeting
with our greatest historian, as I think him, was of unalloyed
friendliness. He came to me during my final year in Boston for nothing
apparently but to tell me of his liking for a book of mine describing
boy-life in Southern Ohio a half-century ago. He wished to talk about
many points of this, which he found the same as his own boylife in the
neighborhood of Boston; and we could agree that the life of the
Anglo-Saxon boy was pretty much the same everywhere. He had helped
himself into my apartment with a crutch, but I do not remember how he had
fallen lame. It was the end of his long walks, I believe, and not long
afterwards I had the grief to read of his death. I noticed that perhaps
through his enforced quiet, he had put on weight; his fine face was full;
whereas when I first knew him he was almost delicately thin of figure and
feature. He was always of a distinguished presence, and his face had a
great distinction.

It had not the appealing charm I found in the face of James Parton,
another historian I knew earlier in my Boston days. I cannot say how
much his books, once so worthily popular, are now known but I have an
abiding sense of their excellence. I have not read the ‘Life of
Voltaire’, which was the last, but all the rest, from the first, I have
read, and if there are better American biographies than those of Franklin
or of Jefferson, I could not say where to find them. The Greeley and the
Burr were younger books, and so was the Jackson, and they were not nearly
so good; but to all the author had imparted the valuable humanity in
which he abounded. He was never of the fine world of literature, the
world that sniffs and sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. But
he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American
character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage,
and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he
had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived
the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came
near him without in some measure loving him. To me he was of a most
winning personality, which his strong, gentle face expressed, and a cast
in the eye which he could not bring to bear directly upon his vis-a-vis,
endeared. I never met him without wishing more of his company, for he
seldom failed to say something to whatever was most humane and most
modern in me. Our last meeting was at Newburyport, whither he had long
before removed from New York, and where in the serene atmosphere of the
ancient Puritan town he found leisure and inspiration for his work. He
was not then engaged upon any considerable task, and he had aged and
broken somewhat. But the old geniality, the old warmth glowed in him,
and made a summer amidst the storm of snow that blinded the wintry air
without. A new light had then lately come into my life, by which I saw
all things that did not somehow tell for human brotherhood dwarfish and
ugly, and he listened, as I imagined, to what I had to say with the
tolerant sympathy of a man who has been a long time thinking those
things, and views with a certain amusement the zeal of the fresh
discoverer.

There was yet another historian in Boston, whose acquaintance I made
later than either Parkman’s or Parton’s, and whose very recent death
leaves me with the grief of a friend. No ones indeed, could meet John
Codman Ropes without wishing to be his friend, or without finding a
friend in him. He had his likes and his dislikes, but he could have had
no enmities except for evil and meanness. I never knew a man of higher
soul, of sweeter nature, and his whole life was a monument of character.
It cannot wound him now to speak of the cruel deformity which came upon
him in his boyhood, and haunted all his after days with suffering. His
gentle face showed the pain which is always the part of the hunchback,
but nothing else in him confessed a sense of his affliction, and the
resolute activity of his mind denied it in every way. He was, as is well
known, a very able lawyer, in full practice, while he was making his
studies of military history, and winning recognition for almost unique
insight and thoroughness in that direction, though I believe that when he
came to embody the results in those extraordinary volumes recording the
battles of our civil war, he retired from the law in some measure. He
knew these battles more accurately than the generals who fought them, and
he was of a like proficiency in the European wars from the time of
Napoleon down to our own time. I have heard a story, which I cannot
vouch for, that when foreknowledge of his affliction, at the outbreak of
our civil war, forbade him to be a soldier, he became a student of
soldiership, and wreaked in that sort the passion of his most gallant
spirit. But whether this was true or not, it is certain that he pursued
the study with a devotion which never blinded him to the atrocity of war.
Some wars he could excuse and even justify, but for any war that seemed
wanton or aggressive, he had only abhorrence.

The last summer of a score that I had known him, we sat on the veranda of
his cottage at York Harbor, and looked out over the moonlit sea, and he
talked of the high and true things, with the inextinguishable zest for
the inquiry which I always found in him, though he was then feeling the
approaches of the malady which was so soon to end all groping in these
shadows for him. He must have faced the fact with the same courage and
the same trust with which he faced all facts. From the first I found him
a deeply religious man, not only in the ecclesiastical sense, but in the
more mystical meanings of the word, and he kept his faith as he kept his
youth to the last. Every one who knew him, knows how young he was in
heart, and how he liked to have those that were young in years about him.
He wished to have his house in Boston, as well as his cottage at York,
full of young men and young girls, whose joy of life he made his own, and
whose society he preferred to his contemporaries’. One could not blame
him for that, or for seeking the sun, wherever he could, but it would be
a false notion of him to suppose that his sympathies were solely or
chiefly with the happy. In every sort, as I knew him, he was fine and
good. The word is not worthy of him, after some of its uses and
associations, but if it were unsmutched by these, and whitened to its
primitive significance, I should say he was one of the most perfect
gentlemen I ever knew.



OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES



I.

Elsewhere we literary folk are apt to be such a common lot, with
tendencies here and there to be a shabby lot; we arrive from all sorts of
unexpected holes and corners of the earth, remote, obscure; and at the
best we do so often come up out of the ground; but at Boston we were of
ascertained and noted origin, and good part of us dropped from the skies.
Instead of holding horses before the doors of theatres; or capping verses
at the plough-tail; or tramping over Europe with nothing but a flute in
the pocket; or walking up to the metropolis with no luggage but the MS.
of a tragedy; or sleeping in doorways or under the arches of bridges; or
serving as apothecaries’ ‘prentices--we were good society from the
beginning. I think this was none the worse for us, and it was vastly the
better for good society.

Literature in Boston, indeed, was so respectable, and often of so high a
lineage, that to be a poet was not only to be good society, but almost to
be good family. If one names over the men who gave Boston her supremacy
in literature during that Unitarian harvest-time of the old Puritanic
seed-time which was her Augustan age, one names the people who were and
who had been socially first in the city ever since the self-exile of the
Tories at the time of the Revolution. To say Prescott, Motley, Parkman,
Lowell, Norton, Higginson, Dana, Emerson, Channing, was to say patrician,
in the truest and often the best sense, if not the largest. Boston was
small, but these were of her first citizens, and their primacy, in its
way, was of the same quality as that, say, of the chief families of
Venice. But these names can never have the effect for the stranger that
they had for one to the manner born. I say had, for I doubt whether in
Boston they still mean all that they once meant, and that their
equivalents meant in science, in law, in politics. The most famous, if
not the greatest of all the literary men of Boston, I have not mentioned
with them, for Longfellow was not of the place, though by his sympathies
and relations he became of it; and I have not mentioned Oliver Wendell
Holmes, because I think his name would come first into the reader’s
thought with the suggestion of social quality in the humanities.

Holmes was of the Brahminical caste which his humorous recognition
invited from its subjectivity in the New England consciousness into the
light where all could know it and own it, and like Longfellow he was
allied to the patriciate of Boston by the most intimate ties of life. For
a long time, for the whole first period of his work, he stood for that
alone, its tastes, its prejudices, its foibles even, and when he came to
stand in his ‘second period, for vastly, for infinitely more, and to make
friends with the whole race, as few men have ever done, it was always, I
think, with a secret shiver of doubt, a backward look of longing, and an
eye askance. He was himself perfectly aware of this at times, and would
mark his several misgivings with a humorous sense of the situation. He
was essentially too kind to be of a narrow world, too human to be finally
of less than humanity, too gentle to be of the finest gentility. But
such limitations as he had were in the direction I have hinted, or
perhaps more than hinted; and I am by no means ready to make a mock of
them, as it would be so easy to do for some reasons that he has himself
suggested. To value aright the affection which the old Bostonian had for
Boston one must conceive of something like the patriotism of men in the
times when a man’s city was a man’s country, something Athenian,
something Florentine. The war that nationalized us liberated this love
to the whole country, but its first tenderness remained still for Boston,
and I suppose a Bostonian still thinks of himself first as a Bostonian
and then as an American, in a way that no New-Yorker could deal with
himself. The rich historical background dignifies and ennobles the
intense public spirit of the place, and gives it a kind of personality.



II.

In literature Doctor Holmes survived all the Bostonians who had given the
city her primacy in letters, but when I first knew him there was no
apparent ground for questioning it. I do not mean now the time when I
visited New England, but when I came to live near Boston, and to begin
the many happy years which I spent in her fine, intellectual air. I found
time to run in upon him, while I was there arranging to take my place on
the Atlantic Monthly, and I remember that in this brief moment with him
he brought me to book about some vaunting paragraph in the ‘Nation’
claiming the literary primacy for New York. He asked me if I knew who
wrote it, and I was obliged to own that I had written it myself, when
with the kindness he always showed me he protested against my position.
To tell the truth, I do not think now I had any very good reasons for it,
and I certainly could urge none that would stand against his. I could
only fall back upon the saving clause that this primacy was claimed
mainly if not wholly for New York in the future. He was willing to leave
me the connotations of prophecy, but I think he did even this out of
politeness rather than conviction, and I believe he had always a
sensitiveness where Boston was concerned, which could not seem ungenerous
to any generous mind. Whatever lingering doubt of me he may have had,
with reference to Boston, seemed to satisfy itself when several years
afterwards he happened to speak of a certain character in an early novel
of mine, who was not quite the kind of Bostonian one could wish to be.
The thing came up in talk with another person, who had referred to my
Bostonian, and the doctor had apparently made his acquaintance in the
book, and not liked him. “I understood, of course,” he said, “that he
was a Bostonian, not the Bostonian,” and I could truthfully answer that
this was by all means my own understanding too.

His fondness for his city, which no one could appreciate better than
myself, I hope, often found expression in a burlesque excess in his
writings, and in his talk perhaps oftener still. Hard upon my return
from Venice I had a half-hour with him in his old study on Charles
Street, where he still lived in 1865, and while I was there a young man
came in for the doctor’s help as a physician, though he looked so very
well, and was so lively and cheerful, that I have since had my doubts
whether he had not made a pretext for a glimpse of him as the Autocrat.
The doctor took him upon his word, however, and said he had been so long
out of practice that he could not do anything for him, but he gave him
the address of another physician, somewhere near Washington Street. “And
if you don’t know where Washington Street is,” he said, with a gay burst
at a certain vagueness which had come into the young man’s face, “you
don’t know anything.”

We had been talking of Venice, and what life was like there, and he made
me tell him in some detail. He was especially interested in what I had
to say of the minute subdivision and distribution of the necessaries, the
small coins, and the small values adapted to their purchase, the
intensely retail character, in fact, of household provisioning; and I
could see how he pleased himself in formulating the theory that the
higher a civilization the finer the apportionment of the demands and
supplies. The ideal, he said, was a civilization in which you could buy
two cents’ worth of beef, and a divergence from this standard was towards
barbarism.

The secret of the man who is universally interesting is that he is
universally interested, and this was, above all, the secret of the charm
that Doctor Holmes had for every one. No doubt he knew it, for what that
most alert intelligence did not know of itself was scarcely worth
knowing. This knowledge was one of his chief pleasures, I fancy; he
rejoiced in the consciousness which is one of the highest attributes of
the highly organized man, and he did not care for the consequences in
your mind, if you were so stupid as not to take him aright. I remember
the delight Henry James, the father of the novelist, had in reporting to
me the frankness of the doctor, when he had said to him, “Holmes, you are
intellectually the most alive man I ever knew.” “I am, I am,” said the
doctor. “From the crown of my head to the sole of my foot, I’m alive,
I’m alive!” Any one who ever saw him will imagine the vivid relish he
had in recognizing the fact. He could not be with you a moment without
shedding upon you the light of his flashing wit, his radiant humor, and
he shone equally upon the rich and poor in mind. His gaiety of heart
could not withhold itself from any chance of response, but he did wish
always to be fully understood, and to be liked by those he liked. He
gave his liking cautiously, though, for the affluence of his sympathies
left him without the reserves of colder natures, and he had to make up
for these with careful circumspection. He wished to know the character
of the person who made overtures to his acquaintance, for he was aware
that his friendship lay close to it; he wanted to be sure that he was a
nice person, and though I think he preferred social quality in his
fellow-man, he did not refuse himself to those who had merely a sweet and
wholesome humanity. He did not like anything that tasted or smelt of
Bohemianism in the personnel of literature, but he did not mind the scent
of the new-ploughed earth, or even of the barn-yard. I recall his
telling me once that after two younger brothers-in-letters had called
upon him in the odor of an habitual beeriness and smokiness, he opened
the window; and the very last time I saw him he remembered at eighty-five
the offence he had found on his first visit to New York, when a
metropolitan poet had asked him to lunch in a basement restaurant.



III.

He seemed not to mind, however, climbing to the little apartment we had
in Boston when we came there in 1866, and he made this call upon us in
due form, bringing Mrs. Holmes with him as if to accent the recognition
socially. We were then incredibly young, much younger than I find people
ever are nowadays, and in the consciousness of our youth we felt, to the
last exquisite value of the fact, what it was to have the Autocrat come
to see us; and I believe he was not displeased to perceive this; he liked
to know that you felt his quality in every way. That first winter,
however, I did not see him often, and in the spring we went to live in
Cambridge, and thereafter I met him chiefly at Longfellow’s, or when I
came in to dine at the Fieldses’, in Boston. It was at certain meetings
of the Dante Club, when Longfellow read aloud his translation for
criticism, and there was supper later, that one saw the doctor; and his
voice was heard at the supper rather than at the criticism, for he was no
Italianate. He always seemed to like a certain turn of the talk toward
the mystical, but with space for the feet on a firm ground of fact this
side of the shadows; when it came to going over among them, and laying
hold of them with the band of faith, as if they were substance, he was
not of the excursion. It is well known how fervent, I cannot say devout,
a spiritualist Longfellow’s brother-in-law, Appleton, was; and when he
was at the table too, it took all the poet’s delicate skill to keep him
and the Autocrat from involving themselves in a cataclysmal controversy
upon the matter of manifestations. With Doctor Holmes the inquiry was
inquiry, to the last, I believe, and the burden of proof was left to the
ghosts and their friends. His attitude was strictly scientific; he
denied nothing, but he expected the supernatural to be at least as
convincing as the natural.

There was a time in his history when the popular ignorance classed him
with those who were once rudely called infidels; but the world has since
gone so fast and so far that the mind he was of concerning religious
belief would now be thought religious by a good half of the religious
world. It is true that he had and always kept a grudge against the
ancestral Calvinism which afflicted his youth; and he was through all
rises and lapses of opinion essentially Unitarian; but of the honest
belief of any one, I am sure he never felt or spoke otherwise than most
tolerantly, most tenderly. As often as he spoke of religion, and his
talk tended to it very often, I never heard an irreligious word from him,
far less a scoff or sneer at religion; and I am certain that this was not
merely because he would have thought it bad taste, though undoubtedly he
would have thought it bad taste; I think it annoyed, it hurt him, to be
counted among the iconoclasts, and he would have been profoundly grieved
if he could have known how widely this false notion of him once
prevailed. It can do no harm at this late day to impart from the secrets
of the publishing house the fact that a supposed infidelity in the tone
of his story The Guardian Angel cost the Atlantic Monthly many
subscribers. Now the tone of that story would not be thought even mildly
agnostic, I fancy; and long before his death the author had outlived the
error concerning him.

It was not the best of his stories, by any means, and it would not be too
harsh to say that it was the poorest. His novels all belonged to an
order of romance which was as distinctly his own as the form of
dramatized essay which he invented in the Autocrat. If he did not think
poorly of them, he certainly did not think too proudly, and I heard him
quote with relish the phrase of a lady who had spoken of them to him as
his “medicated novels.” That, indeed, was perhaps what they were; a
faint, faint odor of the pharmacopoeia clung to their pages; their magic
was scientific. He knew this better than any one else, of course, and if
any one had said it in his turn he would hardly have minded it. But what
he did mind was the persistent misinterpretation of his intention in
certain quarters where he thought he had the right to respectful
criticism in stead of the succession of sneers that greeted the
successive numbers of his story; and it was no secret that he felt the
persecution keenly. Perhaps he thought that he had already reached that
time in his literary life when he was a fact rather than a question, and
when reasons and not feelings must have to do with his acceptance or
rejection. But he had to live many years yet before he reached this
state. When he did reach it, happily a good while before his death, I do
not believe any man ever enjoyed the like condition more. He loved to
feel himself out of the fight, with much work before him still, but with
nothing that could provoke ill-will in his activities. He loved at all
times to take himself objectively, if I may so express my sense of a
mental attitude that misled many. As I have said before, he was
universally interested, and he studied the universe from himself. I do
not know how one is to study it otherwise; the impersonal has really no
existence; but with all his subtlety and depth he was of a make so
simple, of a spirit so naive, that he could not practise the feints some
use to conceal that interest in self which, after all, every one knows is
only concealed. He frankly and joyously made himself the starting-point
in all his inquest of the hearts and minds of other men, but so far from
singling himself out in this, and standing apart in it, there never was
any one who was more eagerly and gladly your fellow-being in the things
of the soul.



IV.

In the things of the world, he had fences, and looked at some people
through palings and even over the broken bottles on the tops of walls;
and I think he was the loser by this, as well as they. But then I think
all fences are bad, and that God has made enough differences between men;
we need not trouble ourselves to multiply them. Even behind his fences,
however, Holmes had a heart kind for the outsiders, and I do not believe
any one came into personal relations with him who did not experience this
kindness. In that long and delightful talk I had with him on my return
from Venice (I can praise the talk because it was mainly his), we spoke
of the status of domestics in the Old World, and how fraternal the
relation of high and low was in Italy, while in England, between master
and man, it seemed without acknowledgment of their common humanity.
“Yes,” he said, “I always felt as if English servants expected to be
trampled on; but I can’t do that. If they want to be trampled on, they
must get some one else.” He thought that our American way was infinitely
better; and I believe that in spite of the fences there was always an
instinctive impulse with him to get upon common ground with his
fellow-man. I used to notice in the neighborhood cabman who served our
block on Beacon Street a sort of affectionate reverence for the Autocrat,
which could have come from nothing but the kindly terms between them; if
you went to him when he was engaged to Doctor Holmes, he told you so with
a sort of implication in his manner that the thought of anything else for
the time was profanation. The good fellow who took him his drives about
the Beverly and Manchester shores seemed to be quite in the joke of the
doctor’s humor, and within the bounds of his personal modesty and his
functional dignity permitted himself a smile at the doctor’s sallies,
when you stood talking with him, or listening to him at the
carriage-side.

The civic and social circumstance that a man values himself on is
commonly no part of his value, and certainly no part of his greatness.
Rather, it is the very thing that limits him, and I think that Doctor
Holmes appeared in the full measure of his generous personality to those
who did not and could not appreciate his circumstance, and not to those
who formed it, and who from life-long association were so dear and
comfortable to him. Those who best knew how great a man he was were
those who came from far to pay him their duty, or to thank him for some
help they had got from his books, or to ask his counsel or seek his
sympathy. With all such he was most winningly tender, most intelligently
patient. I suppose no great author was ever more visited by letter and
in person than he, or kept a faithfuler conscience for his guests. With
those who appeared to him in the flesh he used a miraculous tact, and I
fancy in his treatment of all the physician native in him bore a
characteristic part. No one seemed to be denied access to him, but it
was after a moment of preparation that one was admitted, and any one who
was at all sensitive must have felt from the first moment in his presence
that there could be no trespassing in point of time. If now and then
some insensitive began to trespass, there was a sliding-scale of
dismissal that never failed of its work, and that really saved the author
from the effect of intrusion. He was not bored because he would not be.

I transfer at random the impressions of many years to my page, and I
shall not try to observe a chronological order in these memories. Vivid
among them is that of a visit which I paid him with Osgood the publisher,
then newly the owner of the Atlantic Monthly, when I had newly become the
sole editor. We wished to signalize our accession to the control of the
magazine by a stroke that should tell most in the public eye, and we
thought of asking Doctor Holmes to do something again in the manner of
the Autocrat and the Professor at the Breakfast Table. Some letters had
passed between him and the management concerning our wish, and then
Osgood thought that it would be right and fit for us to go to him in
person. He proposed the visit, and Doctor Holmes received us with a mind
in which he had evidently formulated all his thoughts upon the matter.
His main question was whether at his age of sixty years a man was
justified in seeking to recall a public of the past, or to create a new
public in the present. He seemed to have looked the ground over not only
with a personal interest in the question, but with a keen scientific zest
for it as something which it was delightful to consider in its generic
relations; and I fancy that the pleasure of this inquiry more than
consoled him for such pangs of misgiving as he must have had in the
personal question. As commonly happens in the solution of such problems,
it was not solved; he was very willing to take our minds upon it, and to
incur the risk, if we thought it well and were willing to share it.

We came away rejoicing, and the new series began with the new year
following. It was by no means the popular success that we had hoped; not
because the author had not a thousand new things to say, or failed to say
them with the gust and freshness of his immortal youth, but because it
was not well to disturb a form associated in the public mind with an
achievement which had become classic. It is of the Autocrat of the
Breakfast Table that people think, when they think of the peculiar
species of dramatic essay which the author invented, and they think also
of the Professor at the Breakfast Table, because he followed so soon; but
the Poet at the Breakfast Table came so long after that his advent
alienated rather than conciliated liking. Very likely, if the Poet had
come first he would have had no second place in the affections of his
readers, for his talk was full of delightful matter; and at least one of
the poems which graced each instalment was one of the finest and greatest
that Doctor Holmes ever wrote. I mean “Homesick in Heaven,” which seems
to me not only what I have said, but one of the most important, the most
profoundly pathetic in the language. Indeed, I do not know any other
that in the same direction goes so far with suggestion so penetrating.
The other poems were mainly of a cast which did not win; the metaphysics
in them were too much for the human interest, and again there rose a
foolish clamor of the creeds against him on account of them. The great
talent, the beautiful and graceful fancy, the eager imagination of the
Autocrat could not avail in this third attempt, and I suppose the Poet at
the Breakfast Table must be confessed as near a failure as Doctor Holmes
could come. It certainly was so in the magazine which the brilliant
success of the first had availed to establish in the high place the
periodical must always hold in the history of American literature. Lowell
was never tired of saying, when he recurred to the first days of his
editorship, that the magazine could never have gone at all without the
Autocrat papers. He was proud of having insisted upon Holmes’s doing
something for the new venture, and he was fond of recalling the author’s
misgivings concerning his contributions, which later repeated themselves
with too much reason, though not with the reason that was in his own
mind.



V.

He lived twenty-five years after that self-question at sixty, and after
eighty he continued to prove that threescore was not the limit of a man’s
intellectual activity or literary charm. During all that time the work
he did in mere quantity was the work that a man in the prime of life
might well have been vain of doing, and it was of a quality not less
surprising. If I asked him with any sort of fair notice I could rely
upon him always for something for the January number, and throughout the
year I could count upon him for those occasional pieces in which he so
easily excelled all former writers of occasional verse, and which he
liked to keep from the newspapers for the magazine. He had a pride in
his promptness with copy, and you could always trust his promise. The
printer’s toe never galled the author’s kibe in his case; he wished to
have an early proof, which he corrected fastidiously, but not overmuch,
and he did not keep it long. He had really done all his work in the
manuscript, which came print-perfect and beautifully clear from his pen,
in that flowing, graceful hand which to the last kept a suggestion of the
pleasure he must have had in it. Like all wise contributors, he was not
only patient, but very glad of all the queries and challenges that
proof-reader and editor could accumulate on the margin of his proofs, and
when they were both altogether wrong he was still grateful. In one of
his poems there was some Latin-Quarter French, which our collective
purism questioned, and I remember how tender of us he was in maintaining
that in his Parisian time, at least, some ladies beyond the Seine said
“Eh, b’en,” instead of “Eh, bien.” He knew that we must be always on the
lookout for such little matters, and he would not wound our ignorance. I
do not think any one enjoyed praise more than he. Of course he would not
provoke it, but if it came of itself, he would not deny himself the
pleasure, as long as a relish of it remained. He used humorously to
recognize his delight in it, and to say of the lecture audiences which in
earlier times hesitated applause, “Why don’t they give me three times
three? I can stand it!” He himself gave in the generous fulness he
desired. He did not praise foolishly or dishonestly, though he would
spare an open dislike; but when a thing pleased him he knew how to say so
cordially and skilfully, so that it might help as well as delight. I
suppose no great author has tried more sincerely and faithfully to
befriend the beginner than he; and from time to time he would commend
something to me that he thought worth looking at, but never insistently.
In certain cases, where he had simply to ease a burden, from his own to
the editorial shoulders, he would ask that the aspirant might be
delicately treated. There might be personal reasons for this, but
usually his kindness of heart moved him. His tastes had their
geographical limit, but his sympathies were boundless, and the hopeless
creature for whom he interceded was oftener remote from Boston and New
England than otherwise.

It seems to me that he had a nature singularly affectionate, and that it
was this which was at fault if he gave somewhat too much of himself to
the celebration of the Class of ‘29, and all the multitude of Boston
occasions, large and little, embalmed in the clear amber of his verse,
somewhat to the disadvantage of the amber. If he were asked he could not
deny the many friendships and fellowships which united in the asking; the
immediate reclame from these things was sweet to him; but he loved to
comply as much as he loved to be praised. In the pleasure he got he
could feel himself a prophet in his own country, but the country which
owned him prophet began perhaps to feel rather too much as if it owned
him, and did not prize his vaticinations at all their worth. Some polite
Bostonians knew him chiefly on this side, and judged him to their own
detriment from it.



VI.

After we went to live in Cambridge, my life and the delight in it were so
wholly there that in ten years I had hardly been in as many Boston
houses. As I have said, I met Doctor Holmes at the Fieldses’, and at
Longfellow’s, when he came out to a Dante supper, which was not often,
and somewhat later at the Saturday Club dinners. One parlous time at the
publisher’s I have already recalled, when Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe and
the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy, and it required all the tact of the
host to lure them away from the dangerous theme. As it was, a battle
waged in the courteous forms of Fontenoy, went on pretty well through the
dinner, and it was only over the coffee that a truce was called. I need
not say which was heterodox, or that each had a deep and strenuous
conscience in the matter. I have always felt it a proof of his extreme
leniency to me, unworthy, that the doctor was able to tolerate my own
defection from the elder faith in medicine; and I could not feel his
kindness less caressing because I knew it a concession to an infirmity.
He said something like, After all a good physician was the great matter;
and I eagerly turned his clemency to praise of our family doctor.

He was very constant at the Saturday Club, as long as his strength
permitted, and few of its members missed fewer of its meetings. He
continued to sit at its table until the ghosts of Hawthorne, of Agassiz,
of Emerson, of Longfellow, of Lowell, out of others less famous, bore him
company there among the younger men in the flesh. It must have been very
melancholy, but nothing could deeply cloud his most cheerful spirit. His
strenuous interest in life kept him alive to all the things of it, after
so many of his friends were dead. The questions which he was wont to
deal with so fondly, so wisely, the great problems of the soul, were all
the more vital, perhaps, because the personal concern in them was
increased by the translation to some other being of the men who had so
often tried with him to fathom them here. The last time I was at that
table he sat alone there among those great memories; but he was as gay as
ever I saw him; his wit sparkled, his humor gleamed; the poetic touch was
deft and firm as of old; the serious curiosity, the instant sympathy
remained. To the witness he was pathetic, but to himself he could only
have been interesting, as the figure of a man surviving, in an alien but
not unfriendly present, the past which held so vast a part of all that
had constituted him. If he had thought of himself in this way, it would
have been without one emotion of self-pity, such as more maudlin souls
indulge, but with a love of knowledge and wisdom as keenly alert as in
his prime.

For three privileged years I lived all but next-door neighbor of Doctor
Holmes in that part of Beacon Street whither he removed after he left his
old home in Charles Street, and during these years I saw him rather
often. We were both on the water side, which means so much more than the
words say, and our library windows commanded the same general view of the
Charles rippling out into the Cambridge marshes and the sunsets, and
curving eastward under Long Bridge, through shipping that increased
onward to the sea. He said that you could count fourteen towns and
villages in the compass of that view, with the three conspicuous
monuments accenting the different attractions of it: the tower of
Memorial Hall at Harvard; the obelisk on Bunker Hill; and in the centre
of the picture that bulk of Tufts College which he said he expected to
greet his eyes the first thing when he opened them in the other world.
But the prospect, though generally the same, had certain precious
differences for each of us, which I have no doubt he valued himself as
much upon as I did. I have a notion that he fancied these were to be
enjoyed best in his library through two oval panes let into the bay there
apart from the windows, for he was apt to make you come and look out of
them if you got to talking of the view before you left. In this pleasant
study he lived among the books, which seemed to multiply from case to
case and shelf to shelf, and climb from floor to ceiling. Everything was
in exquisite order, and the desk where he wrote was as scrupulously neat
as if the sloven disarray of most authors’ desks were impossible to him.
He had a number of ingenious little contrivances for helping his work,
which he liked to show you; for a time a revolving book-case at the
corner of his desk seemed to be his pet; and after that came his
fountain-pen, which he used with due observance of its fountain
principle, though he was tolerant of me when I said I always dipped mine
in the inkstand; it was a merit in his eyes to use a fountain pen in
anywise. After you had gone over these objects with him, and perhaps
taken a peep at something he was examining through his microscope, he sat
down at one corner of his hearth, and invited you to an easy chair at the
other. His talk was always considerate of your wish to be heard, but the
person who wished to talk when he could listen to Doctor Holmes was his
own victim, and always the loser. If you were well advised you kept
yourself to the question and response which manifested your interest in
what he was saying, and let him talk on, with his sweet smile, and that
husky laugh he broke softly into at times. Perhaps he was not very well
when you came in upon him; then he would name his trouble, with a
scientific zest and accuracy, and pass quickly to other matters. As I
have noted, he was interested in himself only on the universal side; and
he liked to find his peculiarity in you better than to keep it his own;
he suffered a visible disappointment if he could not make you think or
say you were so and so too. The querulous note was not in his most
cheerful register; he would not dwell upon a specialized grief; though
sometimes I have known him touch very lightly and currently upon a slight
annoyance, or disrelish for this or that. As he grew older, he must have
had, of course, an old man’s disposition to speak of his infirmities; but
it was fine to see him catch himself up in this, when he became conscious
of it, and stop short with an abrupt turn to something else. With a real
interest, which he gave humorous excess, he would celebrate some little
ingenious thing that had fallen in his way, and I have heard him
expatiate with childlike delight upon the merits of a new razor he had
got: a sort of mower, which he could sweep recklessly over cheek and chin
without the least danger of cutting himself. The last time I saw him he
asked me if he had ever shown me that miraculous razor; and I doubt if he
quite liked my saying I had seen one of the same kind.

It seemed to me that he enjoyed sitting at his chimney-corner rather as
the type of a person having a good time than as such a person; he would
rather be up and about something, taking down a book, making a note,
going again to his little windows, and asking you if you had seen the
crows yet that sometimes alighted on the shoals left bare by the ebb-tide
behind the house. The reader will recall his lovely poem, “My Aviary,”
 which deals with the winged life of that pleasant prospect. I shared
with him in the flock of wild-ducks which used to come into our neighbor
waters in spring, when the ice broke up, and stayed as long as the
smallest space of brine remained unfrozen in the fall. He was graciously
willing I should share in them, and in the cloud of gulls which drifted
about in the currents of the sea and sky there, almost the whole year
round. I did not pretend an original right to them, coming so late as I
did to the place, and I think my deference pleased him.



VII.

As I have said, he liked his fences, or at least liked you to respect
them, or to be sensible of them. As often as I went to see him I was
made to wait in the little reception-room below, and never shown at once
to his study. My name would be carried up, and I would hear him
verifying my presence from the maid through the opened door; then there
came a cheery cry of wellcome: “Is that you? Come up, come up!” and I
found him sometimes half-way down the stairs to meet me. He would make
an excuse for having kept me below a moment, and say something about the
rule he had to observe in all cases, as if he would not have me feel his
fence a personal thing. I was aware how thoroughly his gentle spirit
pervaded the whole house; the Irish maid who opened the door had the
effect of being a neighbor too, and of being in the joke of the little
formality; she apologized in her turn for the reception-room; there was
certainly nothing trampled upon in her manner, but affection and
reverence for him whose gate she guarded, with something like the
sentiment she would have cherished for a dignitary of the Church, but
nicely differenced and adjusted to the Autocrat’s peculiar merits.

The last time I was in that place, a visitant who had lately knocked at
my own door was about to enter. I met the master of the house on the
landing of the stairs outside his study, and he led me in for the few
moments we could spend together. He spoke of the shadow so near, and
said he supposed there could be no hope, but he did not refuse the cheer
I offered him from my ignorance against his knowledge, and at something
that was thought or said he smiled, with even a breath of laughter, so
potent is the wont of a lifetime, though his eyes were full of tears, and
his voice broke with his words. Those who have sorrowed deepest will
understand this best.

It was during the few years of our Beacon Street neighborhood that he
spent those hundred days abroad in his last visit to England and France.
He was full of their delight when he came back, and my propinquity gave
me the advantage of hearing him speak of them at first hand. He
whimsically pleased himself most with his Derby-day experiences, and
enjoyed contrasting the crowd and occasion with that of forty or fifty
years earlier, when he had seen some famous race of the Derby won;
nothing else in England seemed to have moved him so much, though all that
royalties, dignities, and celebrities could well do for him had been
done. Of certain things that happened to him, characteristic of the
English, and interesting to him in their relation to himself through his
character of universally interested man, he spoke freely; but he has said
what he chose to the public about them, and I have no right to say more.
The thing that most vexed him during his sojourn apparently was to have
been described in one of the London papers as quite deaf; and I could
truly say to him that I had never imagined him at all deaf, or heard him
accused of it before. “Oh, yes,” he said, “I am a little hard of hearing
on one side. But it isn’t deafness.”

He had, indeed, few or none of the infirmities of age that make
themselves painfully or inconveniently evident. He carried his slight
figure erect, and until his latest years his step was quick and sure.
Once he spoke of the lessened height of old people, apropos of something
that was said, and “They will shrink, you know,” he added, as if he were
not at all concerned in the fact himself. If you met him in the street,
you encountered a spare, carefully dressed old gentleman, with a
clean-shaven face and a friendly smile, qualified by the involuntary
frown of his thick, senile brows; well coated, lustrously shod, well
gloved, in a silk hat, latterly wound with a mourning-weed. Sometimes he
did not know you when he knew you quite well, and at such times I think
it was kind to spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity; at
any rate, I am glad of the times when I did so. In society he had the
same vagueness, the same dimness; but after the moment he needed to make
sure of you, he was as vivid as ever in his life. He made me think of a
bed of embers on which the ashes have thinly gathered, and which, when
these are breathed away, sparkles and tinkles keenly up with all the
freshness of a newly kindled fire. He did not mind talking about his
age, and I fancied rather enjoyed doing so. Its approaches interested
him; if he was going, he liked to know just how and when he was going.
Once he spoke of his lasting strength in terms of imaginative humor: he
was still so intensely interested in nature, the universe, that it seemed
to him he was not like an old man so much as a lusty infant which
struggles against having the breast snatched from it. He laughed at the
notion of this, with that impersonal relish which seemed to me singularly
characteristic of the self-consciousness so marked in him. I never heard
one lugubrious word from him in regard to his years. He liked your
sympathy on all grounds where he could have it self-respectfully, but he
was a most manly spirit, and he would not have had it even as a type of
the universal decay. Possibly he would have been interested to have you
share in that analysis of himself which he was always making, if such a
thing could have been.

He had not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy in others,
and chiefly in our literary craft, which is somewhat ignobly given to it,
though he was patient, after all. He used to say, and I believe he has
said it in print,--[Holmes said it in print many times, in his three
novels and scattered through the “Breakfast Table” series. D.W.]--that
unless a man could show a good reason for writing verse, it was rather
against him, and a proof of weakness. I suppose this severe conclusion
was something he had reached after dealing with innumerable small poets
who sought the light in him with verses that no editor would admit to
print. Yet of morbidness he was often very tender; he knew it to be
disease, something that must be scientifically rather than ethically
treated. He was in the same degree kind to any sensitiveness, for he was
himself as sensitive as he was manly, and he was most delicately
sensitive to any rightful social claim upon him. I was once at a dinner
with him, where he was in some sort my host, in a company of people whom
he had not seen me with before, and he made a point of acquainting me
with each of them. It did not matter that I knew most of them already;
the proof of his thoughtfulness was precious, and I was sorry when I had
to disappoint it by confessing a previous knowledge.



VIII.

I had three memorable meetings with him not very long before he died: one
a year before, and the other two within a few months of the end. The
first of these was at luncheon in the summer-house of a friend whose
hospitality made it summer the year round, and we all went out to meet
him, when he drove up in his open carriage, with the little sunshade in
his hand, which he took with him for protection against the heat, and
also, a little, I think, for the whim of it. He sat a moment after he
arrived, as if to orient himself in respect to each of us. Beside the
gifted hostess, there was the most charming of all the American
essayists, and the Autocrat seemed at once to find himself singularly at
home with the people who greeted him. There was no interval needed for
fanning away the ashes; he tinkled up before he entered the house, and at
the table he was as vivid and scintillant as I ever saw him, if indeed I
ever saw him as much so. The talk began at once, and we had made him
believe that there was nothing egotistic in his taking the word, or
turning it in illustration from himself upon universal matters. I spoke
among other things of some humble ruins on the road to Gloucester, which
gave the way-side a very aged look; the tumbled foundation-stones of poor
bits of houses, and “Ah,” he said, “the cellar and the well?” He added,
to the company generally, “Do you know what I think are the two lines of
mine that go as deep as any others, in a certain direction?” and he began
to repeat stragglingly certain verses from one of his earlier poems,
until he came to the closing couplet. But I will give them in full,
because in going to look them up I have found them so lovely, and because
I can hear his voice again in every fondly accented syllable:

     “Who sees unmoved, a ruin at his feet,
     The lowliest home where human hearts have beat?
     Its hearth-stone, shaded with the bistre stain,
     A century’s showery torrents wash in vain;
     Its starving orchard where the thistle blows,
     And mossy trunks still mark the broken rows;
     Its chimney-loving poplar, oftenest seen
     Next an old roof, or where a roof has been;
     Its knot-grass, plantain,--all the social weeds,
     Man’s mute companions following where he leads;
     Its dwarfed pale flowers, that show their straggling heads,
     Sown by the wind from grass-choked garden-beds;
     Its woodbine creeping where it used to climb;
     Its roses breathing of the olden time;
     All the poor shows the curious idler sees,
     As life’s thin shadows waste by slow degrees,
     Till naught remains, the saddening tale to tell,
     Save home’s last wrecks--the CELLAR AND THE WELL!”

The poet’s chanting voice rose with a triumphant swell in the climax, and
“There,” he said, “isn’t it so? The cellar and the well--they can’t be
thrown down or burnt up; they are the human monuments that last longest
and defy decay.” He rejoiced openly in the sympathy that recognized with
him the divination of a most pathetic, most signal fact, and he repeated
the last couplet again at our entreaty, glad to be entreated for it. I do
not know whether all will agree with him concerning the relative
importance of the lines, but I think all must feel the exquisite beauty
of the picture to which they give the final touch.

He said a thousand witty and brilliant things that day, but his pleasure
in this gave me the most pleasure, and I recall the passage distinctly
out of the dimness that covers the rest. He chose to figure us younger
men, in touching upon the literary circumstance of the past and present,
as representative of modern feeling and thinking, and himself as no
longer contemporary. We knew he did this to be contradicted, and we
protested, affectionately, fervently, with all our hearts and minds; and
indeed there were none of his generation who had lived more widely into
ours. He was not a prophet like Emerson, nor ever a voice crying in the
wilderness like Whittier or Lowell. His note was heard rather amid the
sweet security of streets, but it was always for a finer and gentler
civility. He imagined no new rule of life, and no philosophy or theory
of life will be known by his name. He was not constructive; he was
essentially observant, and in this he showed the scientific nature. He
made his reader known to himself, first in the little, and then in the
larger things. From first to last he was a censor, but a most winning
and delightful censor, who could make us feel that our faults were other
people’s, and who was not wont

     “To bait his homilies with his brother worms.”

At one period he sat in the seat of the scorner, as far as Reform was
concerned, or perhaps reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous;
but he seemed to get a new heart with the new mind which came to him when
he began to write the Autocrat papers, and the light mocker of former
days became the serious and compassionate thinker, to whom most truly
nothing that was human was alien. His readers trusted and loved him; few
men have ever written so intimately with so much dignity, and perhaps
none has so endeared himself by saying just the thing for his reader that
his reader could not say for himself. He sought the universal through
himself in others, and he found to his delight and theirs that the most
universal thing was often, if not always, the most personal thing.

In my later meetings with him I was struck more and more by his
gentleness. I believe that men are apt to grow gentler as they grow
older, unless they are of the curmudgeon type, which rusts and crusts
with age, but with Doctor Holmes the gentleness was peculiarly marked. He
seemed to shrink from all things that could provoke controversy, or even
difference; he waived what might be a matter of dispute, and rather
sought the things that he could agree with you upon. In the last talk I
had with him he appeared to have no grudge left, except for the puritanic
orthodoxy in which he had been bred as a child. This he was not able to
forgive, though its tradition was interwoven with what was tenderest and
dearest in his recollections of childhood. We spoke of puritanism, and I
said I sometimes wondered what could be the mind of a man towards life
who had not been reared in its awful shadow, say an English Churchman, or
a Continental Catholic; and he said he could not imagine, and that he did
not believe such a man could at all enter into our feelings; puritanism,
he seemed to think, made an essential and ineradicable difference. I do
not believe he had any of that false sentiment which attributes virtue of
character to severity of creed, while it owns the creed to be wrong.

He differed from Longfellow in often speaking of his contemporaries. He
spoke of them frankly, but with an appreciative rather than a censorious
criticism. Of Longfellow himself he said that day, when I told him I had
been writing about him, and he seemed to me a man without error, that he
could think of but one error in him, and that was an error of taste, of
almost merely literary taste. It was at an earlier time that he talked
of Lowell, after his death, and told me that Lowell once in the fever of
his anti-slavery apostolate had written him, urging him strongly, as a
matter of duty, to come out for the cause he had himself so much at
heart. Afterwards Lowell wrote again, owning himself wrong in his
appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive. “He was ten years
younger than I,” said the doctor.

I found him that day I speak of in his house at Beverly Farms, where he
had a pleasant study in a corner by the porch, and he met me with all the
cheeriness of old. But he confessed that he had been greatly broken up
by the labor of preparing something that might be read at some
commemorative meeting, and had suffered from finding first that he could
not write something specially for it. Even the copying and adapting an
old poem had overtaxed him, and in this he showed the failing powers of
age. But otherwise he was still young, intellectually; that is, there
was no failure of interest in intellectual things, especially literary
things. Some new book lay on the table at his elbow, and he asked me if
I had seen it, and made some joke about his having had the good luck to
read it, and have it lying by him a few days before when the author
called. I do not know whether he schooled himself against an old man’s
tendency to revert to the past or not, but I know that he seldom did so.
That morning, however, he made several excursions into it, and told me
that his youthful satire of the ‘Spectre Pig’ had been provoked by a poem
of the elder Dana’s, where a phantom horse had been seriously employed,
with an effect of anticlimax which he had found irresistible. Another
foray was to recall the oppression and depression of his early religious
associations, and to speak with moving tenderness of his father, whose
hard doctrine as a minister was without effect upon his own kindly
nature.

In a letter written to me a few weeks after this time, upon an occasion
when he divined that some word from him would be more than commonly dear,
he recurred to the feeling he then expressed: “Fifty-six years ago--more
than half a century--I lost my own father, his age being seventy-three
years. As I have reached that period of life, passed it, and now left it
far behind, my recollections seem to brighten and bring back my boyhood
and early manhood in a clearer and fairer light than it came to me in my
middle decades. I have often wished of late years that I could tell him
how I cherished his memory; perhaps I may have the happiness of saying
all I long to tell him on the other side of that thin partition which I
love to think is all that divides us.”

Men are never long together without speaking of women, and I said how
inevitably men’s lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women,
and their strength failed at last and surrendered itself to their care. I
had not finished before I was made to feel that I was poaching, and
“Yes,” said the owner of the preserve, “I have spoken of that,” and he
went on to tell me just where. He was not going to have me suppose I had
invented those notions, and I could not do less than own that I must have
found them in his book, and forgotten it.

He spoke of his pleasant summer life in the air, at once soft and fresh,
of that lovely coast, and of his drives up and down the country roads.
Sometimes this lady and sometimes that came for him, and one or two
habitually, but he always had his own carriage ordered, if they failed,
that he might not fail of his drive in any fair weather. His cottage was
not immediately on the sea, but in full sight of it, and there was a
sense of the sea about it, as there is in all that incomparable region,
and I do not think he could have been at home anywhere beyond the reach
of its salt breath.

I was anxious not to outstay his strength, and I kept my eye on the clock
in frequent glances. I saw that he followed me in one of these, and I
said that I knew what his hours were, and I was watching so that I might
go away in time, and then he sweetly protested. Did I like that chair I
was sitting in? It was a gift to him, and he said who gave it, with a
pleasure in the fact that was very charming, as if he liked the
association of the thing with his friend. He was disposed to excuse the
formal look of his bookcases, which were filled with sets, and presented
some phalanxes of fiction in rather severe array.

When I rose to go, he was concerned about my being able to find my way
readily to the station, and he told me how to go, and what turns to take,
as if he liked realizing the way to himself. I believe he did not walk
much of late years, and I fancy he found much the same pleasure in
letting his imagination make this excursion to the station with me that
he would have found in actually going.

I saw him once more, but only once, when a day or two later he drove up
by our hotel in Magnolia toward the cottage where his secretary was
lodging. He saw us from his carriage, and called us gayly to him, to
make us rejoice with him at having finally got that commemorative poem
off his mind. He made a jest of the trouble it had cost him, even some
sleeplessness, and said he felt now like a convalescent. He was all
brightness, and friendliness, and eagerness to make us feel his mood,
through what was common to us all; and I am glad that this last
impression of him is so one with the first I ever had, and with that
which every reader receives from his work.

That is bright, and friendly and eager too, for it is throughout the very
expression of himself. I think it is a pity if an author disappoints
even the unreasonable expectation of the reader, whom his art has invited
to love him; but I do not believe that Doctor Holmes could inflict this
disappointment. Certainly he could disappoint no reasonable expectation,
no intelligent expectation. What he wrote, that he was, and every one
felt this who met him. He has therefore not died, as some men die, the
remote impersonal sort, but he is yet thrillingly alive in every page of
his books. The quantity of his literature is not great, but the quality
is very surprising, and surprising first of all as equality. From the
beginning to the end he wrote one man, of course in his successive
consciousnesses. Perhaps every one does this, but his work gives the
impression of an uncommon continuity, in spite of its being the effect of
a later and an earlier impulse so very marked as to have made the later
an astonishing revelation to those who thought they knew him.



IX.

It is not for me in such a paper as this to attempt any judgment of his
work. I have loved it, as I loved him, with a sense of its limitations
which is by no means a censure of its excellences. He was not a man who
cared to transcend; he liked bounds, he liked horizons, the constancy of
shores. If he put to sea, he kept in sight of land, like the ancient
navigators. He did not discover new continents; and I will own that I,
for my part, should not have liked to sail with Columbus. I think one
can safely affirm that as great and as useful men stayed behind, and
found an America of the mind without stirring from their thresholds.



THE WHITE MR. LONGFELLOW

We had expected to stay in Boston only until we could find a house in Old
Cambridge. This was not so simple a matter as it might seem; for the
ancient town had not yet quickened its scholarly pace to the modern step.
Indeed, in the spring of 1866 the impulse of expansion was not yet
visibly felt anywhere; the enormous material growth that followed the
civil war had not yet begun. In Cambridge the houses to be let were few,
and such as there were fell either below our pride or rose above our
purse. I wish I might tell how at last we bought a house; we had no
money, but we were rich in friends, who are still alive to shrink from
the story of their constant faith in a financial future which we
sometimes doubted, and who backed their credulity with their credit. It
is sufficient for the present record, which professes to be strictly
literary, to notify the fact that on the first day of May, 1866, we went
out to Cambridge and began to live in a house which we owned in fee if
not in deed, and which was none the less valuable for being covered with
mortgages. Physically, it was a carpenter’s box, of a sort which is
readily imagined by the Anglo-American genius for ugliness, but which it
is not so easy to impart a just conception of. A trim hedge of
arbor-vita; tried to hide it from the world in front, and a tall board
fence behind; the little lot was well planted (perhaps too well planted)
with pears, grapes, and currants, and there was a small open space which
I lost no time in digging up for a kitchen-garden. On one side of us
were the open fields; on the other a brief line of neighbor-houses;
across the street before us was a grove of stately oaks, which I never
could persuade Aldrich had painted leaves on them in the fall. We were
really in a poor suburb of a suburb; but such is the fascination of
ownership, even the ownership of a fully mortgaged property, that we
calculated the latitude and longitude of the whole earth from the spot we
called ours. In our walks about Cambridge we saw other places where we
might have been willing to live; only, we said, they were too far off: We
even prized the architecture of our little box, though we had but so
lately lived in a Gothic palace on the Grand Canal in Venice, and were
not uncritical of beauty in the possessions of others. Positive beauty
we could not have honestly said we thought our cottage had as a whole,
though we might have held out for something of the kind in the brackets
of turned wood under its eaves. But we were richly content with it; and
with life in Cambridge, as it began to open itself to us, we were
infinitely more than content. This life, so refined, so intelligent, so
gracefully simple, I do not suppose has anywhere else had its parallel.



I.

It was the moment before the old American customs had been changed by
European influences among people of easier circumstances; and in
Cambridge society kept what was best of its village traditions, and chose
to keep them in the full knowledge of different things. Nearly every one
had been abroad; and nearly every one had acquired the taste for olives
without losing a relish for native sauces; through the intellectual life
there was an entire democracy, and I do not believe that since the
capitalistic era began there was ever a community in which money counted
for less. There was little show of what money could buy; I remember but
one private carriage (naturally, a publisher’s); and there was not one
livery, except a livery in the larger sense kept by the stableman Pike,
who made us pay now a quarter and now a half dollar for a seat in his
carriages, according as he lost or gathered courage for the charge. We
thought him extortionate, and we mostly walked through snow and mud of
amazing depth and thickness.

The reader will imagine how acceptable this circumstance was to a young
literary man beginning life with a fully mortgaged house and a salary of
untried elasticity. If there were distinctions made in Cambridge they
were not against literature, and we found ourselves in the midst of a
charming society, indifferent, apparently, to all questions but those of
the higher education which comes so largely by nature. That is to say,
in the Cambridge of that day (and, I dare say, of this) a mind cultivated
in some sort was essential, and after that came civil manners, and the
willingness and ability to be agreeable and interesting; but the question
of riches or poverty did not enter. Even the question of family, which
is of so great concern in New England, was in abeyance. Perhaps it was
taken for granted that every one in Old Cambridge society must be of good
family, or he could not be there; perhaps his mere residence tacitly
ennobled him; certainly his acceptance was an informal patent of
gentility. To my mind, the structure of society was almost ideal, and
until we have a perfectly socialized condition of things I do not believe
we shall ever have a more perfect society. The instincts which governed
it were not such as can arise from the sordid competition of interests;
they flowed from a devotion to letters, and from a self-sacrifice in
material things which I can give no better notion of than by saying that
the outlay of the richest college magnate seemed to be graduated to the
income of the poorest.

In those days, the men whose names have given splendor to Cambridge were
still living there. I shall forget some of them in the alphabetical
enumeration of Louis Agassiz, Francis J. Child, Richard Henry Dana, Jun.,
John Fiske, Dr. Asa Gray, the family of the Jameses, father and sons,
Lowell, Longfellow, Charles Eliot Norton, Dr. John G. Palfrey, James
Pierce, Dr. Peabody, Professor Parsons, Professor Sophocles. The variety
of talents and of achievements was indeed so great that Mr. Bret Harte,
when fresh from his Pacific slope, justly said, after listening to a
partial rehearsal of them, “Why, you couldn’t fire a revolver from your
front porch anywhere without bringing down a two-volumer!” Everybody had
written a book, or an article, or a poem; or was in the process or
expectation of doing it, and doubtless those whose names escape me will
have greater difficulty in eluding fame. These kindly, these gifted folk
each came to see us and to make us at home among them; and my home is
still among them, on this side and on that side of the line between the
living and the dead which invisibly passes through all the streets of the
cities of men.



II.

We had the whole summer for the exploration of Cambridge before society
returned from the mountains and the sea-shore, and it was not till
October that I saw Longfellow. I heard again, as I heard when I first
came to Boston, that he was at Nahant, and though Nahant was no longer so
far away, now, as it was then, I did not think of seeking him out even
when we went for a day to explore that coast during the summer. It seems
strange that I cannot recall just when and where I saw him, but early
after his return to Cambridge I had a message from him asking me to come
to a meeting of the Dante Club at Craigie House.

Longfellow was that winter (1866-7) revising his translation of the
‘Paradiso’, and the Dante Club was the circle of Italianate friends and
scholars whom he invited to follow him and criticise his work from the
original, while he read his version aloud. Those who were most
constantly present were Lowell and Professor Norton, but from time to
time others came in, and we seldom sat down at the nine-o’clock supper
that followed the reading of the canto in less number than ten or twelve.

The criticism, especially from the accomplished Danteists I have named,
was frank and frequent. I believe they neither of them quite agreed with
Longfellow as to the form of version he had chosen, but, waiving that,
the question was how perfectly he had done his work upon the given lines:
I myself, with whatever right, great or little, I may have to an opinion,
believe thoroughly in Longfellow’s plan. When I read his version my
sense aches for the rhyme which he rejected, but my admiration for his
fidelity to Dante otherwise is immeasurable. I remember with equal
admiration the subtle and sympathetic scholarship of his critics, who
scrutinized every shade of meaning in a word or phrase that gave them
pause, and did not let it pass till all the reasons and facts had been
considered. Sometimes, and even often, Longfellow yielded to their
censure, but for the most part, when he was of another mind, he held to
his mind, and the passage had to go as he said. I make a little haste to
say that in all the meetings of the Club, during a whole winter of
Wednesday evenings, I myself, though I faithfully followed in an Italian
Dante with the rest, ventured upon one suggestion only. This was kindly,
even seriously, considered by the poet, and gently rejected. He could
not do anything otherwise than gently, and I was not suffered to feel
that I had done a presumptuous thing. I can see him now, as he looked up
from the proof-sheets on the round table before him, and over at me,
growing consciously smaller and smaller, like something through a
reversed opera-glass. He had a shaded drop-light in front of him, and in
its glow his beautiful and benignly noble head had a dignity peculiar to
him.

All the portraits of Longfellow are likenesses more or less bad and good,
for there was something as simple in the physiognomy as in the nature of
the man. His head, after he allowed his beard to grow and wore his hair
long in the manner of elderly men, was leonine, but mildly leonine, as
the old painters conceived the lion of St. Mark. Once Sophocles, the
ex-monk of Mount Athos, so long a Greek professor at Harvard, came in for
supper, after the reading was over, and he was leonine too, but of a
fierceness that contrasted finely with Longfellow’s mildness. I remember
the poet’s asking him something about the punishment of impaling, in
Turkey, and his answering, with an ironical gleam of his fiery eyes,
“Unhappily, it is obsolete.” I dare say he was not so leonine, either,
as he looked.

When Longfellow read verse, it was with a hollow, with a mellow resonant
murmur, like the note of some deep-throated horn. His voice was very
lulling in quality, and at the Dante Club it used to have early effect
with an old scholar who sat in a cavernous armchair at the corner of the
fire, and who drowsed audibly in the soft tone and the gentle heat. The
poet had a fat terrier who wished always to be present at the meetings of
the Club, and he commonly fell asleep at the same moment with that dear
old scholar, so that when they began to make themselves heard in concert,
one could not tell which it was that most took our thoughts from the text
of the Paradiso. When the duet opened, Longfellow would look up with an
arch recognition of the fact, and then go gravely on to the end of the
canto. At the close he would speak to his friend and lead him out to
supper as if he had not seen or heard anything amiss.



III.

In that elect company I was silent, partly because I was conscious of my
youthful inadequacy, and partly because I preferred to listen. But
Longfellow always behaved as if I were saying a succession of edifying
and delightful things, and from time to time he addressed himself to me,
so that I should not feel left out. He did not talk much himself, and I
recall nothing that he said. But he always spoke both wisely and simply,
without the least touch of pose, and with no intention of effect, but
with something that I must call quality for want of a better word; so
that at a table where Holmes sparkled, and Lowell glowed, and Agassiz
beamed, he cast the light of a gentle gaiety, which seemed to dim all
these vivider luminaries. While he spoke you did not miss Fields’s story
or Tom Appleton’s wit, or even the gracious amity of Mr. Norton, with his
unequalled intuitions.

The supper was very plain: a cold turkey, which the host carved, or a
haunch of venison, or some braces of grouse, or a platter of quails, with
a deep bowl of salad, and the sympathetic companionship of those elect
vintages which Longfellow loved, and which he chose with the inspiration
of affection. We usually began with oysters, and when some one who was
expected did not come promptly, Longfellow invited us to raid his plate,
as a just punishment of his delay. One evening Lowell remarked, with the
cayenne poised above his bluepoints, “It’s astonishing how fond these
fellows are of pepper.”

The old friend of the cavernous arm-chair was perhaps not wide enough
awake to repress an “Ah?” of deep interest in this fact of natural
history, and Lowell was provoked to go on. “Yes, I’ve dropped a red
pepper pod into a barrel of them, before now, and then taken them out in
a solid mass, clinging to it like a swarm of bees to their queen.”

“Is it possible?” cried the old friend; and then Longfellow intervened to
save him from worse, and turned the talk.

I reproach myself that I made no record of the talk, for I find that only
a few fragments of it have caught in my memory, and that the sieve which
should have kept the gold has let it wash away with the gravel. I
remember once Doctor Holmes’s talking of the physician as the true seer,
whose awful gift it was to behold with the fatal second sight of science
the shroud gathering to the throat of many a doomed man apparently in
perfect health, and happy in the promise of unnumbered days. The thought
may have been suggested by some of the toys of superstition which
intellectual people like to play with.

I never could be quite sure at first that Longfellow’s brother-in-law,
Appleton, was seriously a spiritualist, even when he disputed the most
strenuously with the unbelieving Autocrat. But he really was in earnest
about it, though he relished a joke at the expense of his doctrine, like
some clerics when they are in the safe company of other clerics. He told
me once of having recounted to Agassiz the facts of a very remarkable
seance, where the souls of the departed outdid themselves in the
athletics and acrobatics they seem so fond of over there, throwing large
stones across the room, moving pianos, and lifting dinner-tables and
setting them a-twirl under the chandelier. “And now,” he demanded, “what
do you say to that?” “Well, Mr. Appleton,” Agassiz answered, to
Appleton’s infinite delight, “I say that it did not happen.”

One night they began to speak at the Dante supper of the unhappy man
whose crime is a red stain in the Cambridge annals, and one and another
recalled their impressions of Professor Webster. It was possibly with a
retroactive sense that they had all felt something uncanny in him, but,
apropos of the deep salad-bowl in the centre of the table, Longfellow
remembered a supper Webster was at, where he lighted some chemical in
such a dish and held his head over it, with a handkerchief noosed about
his throat and lifted above it with one hand, while his face, in the pale
light, took on the livid ghastliness of that of a man hanged by the neck.

Another night the talk wandered to the visit which an English author (now
with God) paid America at the height of a popularity long since toppled
to the ground, with many another. He was in very good humor with our
whole continent, and at Longfellow’s table he found the champagne even
surprisingly fine. “But,” he said to his host, who now told the story,
“it cawn’t be genuine, you know!”

Many years afterwards this author revisited our shores, and I dined with
him at Longfellow’s, where he was anxious to constitute himself a guest
during his sojourn in our neighborhood. Longfellow was equally anxious
that he should not do so, and he took a harmless pleasure in
out-manoeuvring him. He seized a chance to speak with me alone, and
plotted to deliver him over to me without apparent unkindness, when the
latest horse-car should be going in to Boston, and begged me to walk him
to Harvard Square and put him aboard. “Put him aboard, and don’t leave
him till the car starts, and then watch that he doesn’t get off.”

These instructions he accompanied with a lifting of the eyebrows, and a
pursing of the mouth, in an anxiety not altogether burlesque. He knew
himself the prey of any one who chose to batten on him, and his
hospitality was subject to frightful abuse. Perhaps Mr. Norton has
somewhere told how, when he asked if a certain person who had been
outstaying his time was not a dreadful bore, Longfellow answered, with
angelic patience, “Yes; but then you know I have been bored so often!”

There was one fatal Englishman whom I shared with him during the great
part of a season: a poor soul, not without gifts, but always ready for
more, especially if they took the form of meat and drink. He had brought
letters from one of the best English men alive, who withdrew them too
late to save his American friends from the sad consequences of welcoming
him. So he established himself impregnably in a Boston club, and came
out every day to dine with Longfellow in Cambridge, beginning with his
return from Nahant in October and continuing far into December. That was
the year of the great horse-distemper, when the plague disabled the
transportation in Boston, and cut off all intercourse between the suburb
and the city on the street railways. “I did think,” Longfellow
pathetically lamented, “that when the horse-cars stopped running, I
should have a little respite from L., but he walks out.”

In the midst of his own suffering he was willing to advise with me
concerning some poems L. had offered to the Atlantic Monthly, and after
we had desperately read them together he said, with inspiration, “I think
these things are more adapted to music than the magazine,” and this
seemed so good a notion that when L. came to know their fate from me, I
answered, confidently, “I think they are rather more adapted to music.”
 He calmly asked, “Why?” and as this was an exigency which Longfellow had
not forecast for me, I was caught in it without hope of escape. I really
do not know what I said, but I know that I did not take the poems, such
was my literary conscience in those days; I am afraid I should be weaker
now.



IV.

The suppers of the Dante Club were a relaxation from the severity of
their toils on criticism, and I will not pretend that their table-talk
was of that seriousness which duller wits might have given themselves up
to. The passing stranger, especially if a light or jovial person, was
always welcome, and I never knew of the enforcement of the rule I heard
of, that if you came in without question on the Club nights, you were a
guest; but if you rang or knocked, you could not get in.

Any sort of diversion was hailed, and once Appleton proposed that
Longfellow should show us his wine-cellar. He took up the candle burning
on the table for the cigars, and led the way into the basement of the
beautiful old Colonial mansion, doubly memorable as Washington’s
headquarters while he was in Cambridge, and as the home of Longfellow for
so many years. The taper cast just the right gleams on the darkness,
bringing into relief the massive piers of brick, and the solid walls of
stone, which gave the cellar the effect of a casemate in some fortress,
and leaving the corners and distances to a romantic gloom. This basement
was a work of the days when men built more heavily if not more
substantially than now, but I forget, if I ever knew, what date the
wine-cellar was of. It was well stored with precious vintages, aptly
cobwebbed and dusty; but I could not find that it had any more charm than
the shelves of a library: it is the inside of bottles and of books that
makes its appeal. The whole place witnessed a bygone state and luxury,
which otherwise lingered in a dim legend or two. Longfellow once spoke
of certain old love-letters which dropped down on the basement stairs
from some place overhead; and there was the fable or the fact of a
subterranean passage under the street from Craigie House to the old
Batchelder House, which I relate to these letters with no authority I can
allege. But in Craigie House dwelt the proud fair lady who was buried in
the Cambridge church-yard with a slave at her head and a slave at her
feet.

        “Dust is in her beautiful eyes,”

and whether it was they that smiled or wept in their time over those
love-letters, I will leave the reader to say. The fortunes of her Tory
family fell with those of their party, and the last Vassal ended his days
a prisoner from his creditors in his own house, with a weekly enlargement
on Sundays, when the law could not reach him. It is known how the place
took Longfellow’s fancy when he first came to be professor in Harvard,
and how he was a lodger of the last Mistress Craigie there, long before
he became its owner. The house is square, with Longfellow’s study where
he read and wrote on the right of the door, and a statelier library
behind it; on the left is the drawing-room, with the dining-room in its
rear; from its square hall climbs a beautiful stairway with twisted
banisters, and a tall clock in their angle.

The study where the Dante Club met, and where I mostly saw Longfellow,
was a plain, pleasant room, with broad panelling in white painted pine;
in the centre before the fireplace stood his round table, laden with
books, papers, and proofs; in the farthest corner by the window was a
high desk which he sometimes stood at to write. In this room Washington
held his councils and transacted his business with all comers; in the
chamber overhead he slept. I do not think Longfellow associated the
place much with him, and I never heard him speak of Washington in
relation to it except once, when he told me with peculiar relish what he
called the true version of a pious story concerning the aide-de-camp who
blundered in upon him while he knelt in prayer. The father of his
country rose and rebuked the young man severely, and then resumed his
devotions. “He rebuked him,” said Longfellow, lifting his brows and
making rings round the pupils of his eyes, “by throwing his scabbard at
his head.”

All the front windows of Craigie House look, out over the open fields
across the Charles, which is now the Longfellow Memorial Garden. The
poet used to be amused with the popular superstition that he was holding
this vacant ground with a view to a rise in the price of lots, while all
he wanted was to keep a feature of his beloved landscape unchanged. Lofty
elms drooped at the corners of the house; on the lawn billowed clumps of
the lilac, which formed a thick hedge along the fence. There was a
terrace part way down this lawn, and when a white-painted balustrade was
set some fifteen years ago upon its brink, it seemed always to have been
there. Long verandas stretched on either side of the mansion; and behind
was an old-fashioned garden with beds primly edged with box after a
design of the poet’s own. Longfellow had a ghost story of this quaint
plaisance, which he used to tell with an artful reserve of the
catastrophe. He was coming home one winter night, and as he crossed the
garden he was startled by a white figure swaying before him. But he knew
that the only way was to advance upon it. He pushed boldly forward, and
was suddenly caught under the throat-by the clothes-line with a long
night-gown on it.

Perhaps it was at the end of a long night of the Dante Club that I heard
him tell this story. The evenings were sometimes mornings before the
reluctant break-up came, but they were never half long enough for me. I
have given no idea of the high reasoning of vital things which I must
often have heard at that table, and that I have forgotten it is no proof
that I did not hear it. The memory will not be ruled as to what it shall
bind and what it shall loose, and I should entreat mine in vain for
record of those meetings other than what I have given. Perhaps it would
be well, in the interest of some popular conceptions of what the social
intercourse of great wits must be, for me to invent some ennobling and
elevating passages of conversation at Longfellow’s; perhaps I ought to do
it for the sake of my own repute as a serious and adequate witness. But
I am rather helpless in the matter; I must set down what I remember, and
surely if I can remember no phrase from Holmes that a reader could live
or die by, it is something to recall how, when a certain potent cheese
was passing, he leaned over to gaze at it, and asked: “Does it kick? Does
it kick?” No strain of high poetic thinking remains to me from Lowell,
but he made me laugh unforgettably with his passive adventure one night
going home late, when a man suddenly leaped from the top of a high fence
upon the sidewalk at his feet, and after giving him the worst fright of
his life, disappeared peaceably into the darkness. To be sure, there was
one most memorable supper, when he read the “Bigelow Paper” he had
finished that day, and enriched the meaning of his verse with the beauty
of his voice. There lingers yet in my sense his very tone in giving the
last line of the passage lamenting the waste of the heroic lives which in
those dark hours of Johnson’s time seemed to have been

     “Butchered to make a blind man’s holiday.”

The hush that followed upon his ceasing was of that finest quality which
spoken praise always lacks; and I suppose that I could not give a just
notion of these Dante Club evenings without imparting the effect of such
silences. This I could not hopefully undertake to do; but I am tempted
to some effort of the kind by my remembrance of Longfellow’s old friend
George Washington Greene, who often came up from his home in Rhode
Island, to be at those sessions, and who was a most interesting and
amiable fact of those delicate silences. A full half of his earlier life
had been passed in Italy, where he and Longfellow met and loved each
other in their youth with an affection which the poet was constant to in
his age, after many vicissitudes, with the beautiful fidelity of his
nature. Greene was like an old Italian house-priest in manner, gentle,
suave, very suave, smooth as creamy curds, cultivated in the elegancies
of literary taste, and with a certain meek abeyance. I think I never
heard him speak, in all those evenings, except when Longfellow addressed
him, though he must have had the Dante scholarship for an occasional
criticism. It was at more recent dinners, where I met him with the
Longfellow family alone, that he broke now and then into a quotation from
some of the modern Italian poets he knew by heart (preferably Giusti),
and syllabled their verse with an exquisite Roman accent and a bewitching
Florentine rhythm. Now and then at these times he brought out a faded
Italian anecdote, faintly smelling of civet, and threadbare in its
ancient texture. He liked to speak of Goldoni and of Nota, of Niccolini
and Manzoni, of Monti and Leopardi; and if you came to America, of the
Revolution and his grandfather, the Quaker General Nathaniel Greene,
whose life he wrote (and I read) in three volumes: He worshipped
Longfellow, and their friendship continued while they lived, but towards
the last of his visits at Craigie House it had a pathos for the witness
which I should grieve to wrong. Greene was then a quivering paralytic,
and he clung tremulously to Longfellow’s arm in going out to dinner,
where even the modern Italian poets were silent upon his lips. When we
rose from table, Longfellow lifted him out of his chair, and took him
upon his arm again for their return to the study.

He was of lighter metal than most other members of the Dante Club, and he
was not of their immediate intimacy, living away from Cambridge, as he
did, and I shared his silence in their presence with full sympathy. I was
by far the youngest of their number, and I cannot yet quite make out why
I was of it at all. But at every moment I was as sensible of my good
fortune as of my ill desert. They were the men whom of all men living I
most honored, and it seemed to be impossible that I at my age should be
so perfectly fulfilling the dream of my life in their company. Often, the
nights were very cold, and as I returned home from Craigie House to the
carpenter’s box on Sacramento Street, a mile or two away, I was as if
soul-borne through the air by my pride and joy, while the frozen blocks
of snow clinked and tinkled before my feet stumbling along the middle of
the road. I still think that was the richest moment of my life, and I
look back at it as the moment, in a life not unblessed by chance, which I
would most like to live over again--if I must live any. The next winter
the sessions of the Dante Club were transferred to the house of Mr.
Norton, who was then completing his version of the ‘Vita Nuova’. This
has always seemed to me a work of not less graceful art than Longfellow’s
translation of the ‘Commedia’. In fact, it joins the effect of a
sympathy almost mounting to divination with a patient scholarship and a
delicate skill unknown to me elsewhere in such work. I do not know
whether Mr. Norton has satisfied himself better in his prose version of
the ‘Commedia’ than in this of the ‘Vita Nuova’, but I do not believe he
could have satisfied Dante better, unless he had rhymed his sonnets and
canzonets. I am sure he might have done this if he had chosen. He has
always pretended that it was impossible, but miracles are never
impossible in the right hands.



V.

After three or four years we sold the carpenter’s box on Sacramento
Street, and removed to a larger house near Harvard Square, and in the
immediate neighborhood of Longfellow. He gave me an easement across that
old garden behind his house, through an opening in the high board fence
which enclosed it, and I saw him oftener than ever, though the meetings
of the Dante Club had come to an end. At the last of them, Lowell had
asked him, with fond regret in his jest, “Longfellow, why don’t you do
that Indian poem in forty thousand verses?” The demand but feebly
expressed the reluctance in us all, though I suspect the Indian poem
existed only by the challenger’s invention. Before I leave my faint and
unworthy record of these great times I am tempted to mention an incident
poignant with tragical associations. The first night after Christmas the
holly and the pine wreathed about the chandelier above the supper-table
took fire from the gas, just as we came out from the reading, and
Longfellow ran forward and caught the burning garlands down and bore them
out. No one could speak for thinking what he must be thinking of when
the ineffable calamity of his home befell it. Curtis once told me that a
little while before Mrs. Longfellow’s death he was driving by Craigie
House with Holmes, who said be trembled to look at it, for those who
lived there had their happiness so perfect that no change, of all the
changes which must come to them, could fail to be for the worse. I did
not know Longfellow before that fatal time, and I shall not say that his
presence bore record of it except in my fancy. He may always have had
that look of one who had experienced the utmost harm that fate can do,
and henceforth could possess himself of what was left of life in peace.
He could never have been a man of the flowing ease that makes all comers
at home; some people complained of a certain ‘gene’ in him; and he had a
reserve with strangers, which never quite lost itself in the abandon of
friendship, as Lowell’s did. He was the most perfectly modest man I ever
saw, ever imagined, but he had a gentle dignity which I do not believe
any one, the coarsest, the obtusest, could trespass upon. In the years
when I began to know him, his long hair and the beautiful beard which
mixed with it were of one iron-gray, which I saw blanch to a perfect
silver, while that pearly tone of his complexion, which Appleton so
admired, lost itself in the wanness of age and pain. When he walked, he
had a kind of spring in his gait, as if now and again a buoyant thought
lifted him from the ground. It was fine to meet him coming down a
Cambridge street; you felt that the encounter made you a part of literary
history, and set you apart with him for the moment from the poor and
mean. When he appeared in Harvard Square, he beatified if not beautified
the ugliest and vulgarest looking spot on the planet outside of New York.
You could meet him sometimes at the market, if you were of the same
provision-man as he; and Longfellow remained as constant to his
tradespeople as to any other friends. He rather liked to bring his
proofs back to the printer’s himself, and we often found ourselves
together at the University Press, where the Atlantic Monthly used to be
printed. But outside of his own house Longfellow seemed to want a fit
atmosphere, and I love best to think of him in his study, where he
wrought at his lovely art with a serenity expressed in his smooth,
regular, and scrupulously perfect handwriting. It was quite vertical,
and rounded, with a slope neither to the right nor left, and at the time
I knew him first, he was fond of using a soft pencil on printing paper,
though commonly he wrote with a quill. Each letter was distinct in
shape, and between the verses was always the exact space of half an inch.
I have a good many of his poems written in this fashion, but whether they
were the first drafts or not I cannot say; very likely not. Towards the
last he no longer sent his poems to the magazines in his own hand; but
they were always signed in autograph.

I once asked him if he were not a great deal interrupted, and he said,
with a faint sigh, Not more than was good for him, he fancied; if it were
not for the interruptions, he might overwork. He was not a friend to
stated exercise, I believe, nor fond of walking, as Lowell was; he had
not, indeed, the childish associations of the younger poet with the
Cambridge neighborhoods; and I never saw him walking for pleasure except
on the east veranda of his house, though I was told he loved walking in
his youth. In this and in some other things Longfellow was more European
than American, more Latin than Saxon. He once said quaintly that one got
a great deal of exercise in putting on and off one’s overcoat and
overshoes.

I suppose no one who asked decently at his door was denied access to him,
and there must have been times when he was overrun with volunteer
visitors; but I never heard him complain of them. He was very charitable
in the immediate sort which Christ seems to have meant; but he had his
preferences; humorously owned, among beggars. He liked the German
beggars least, and the Italian beggars most, as having most savair-faire;
in fact, we all loved the Italians in Cambridge. He was pleased with the
accounts I could give him of the love and honor I had known for him in
Italy, and one day there came a letter from an Italian admirer, addressed
to “Mr. Greatest Poet Longfellow,” which he said was the very most
amusing superscription he had ever seen.

It is known that the King of Italy offered Longfellow the cross of San
Lazzaro, which is the Italian literary decoration. It came through the
good offices of my old acquaintance Professor Messadaglia, then a deputy
in the Italian Parliament, whom, for some reason I cannot remember, I had
put in correspondence with Longfellow. The honor was wholly unexpected,
and it brought Longfellow a distress which was chiefly for the gentleman
who had procured him the impossible distinction. He showed me the pretty
collar and cross, not, I think, without a natural pleasure in it. No man
was ever less a bigot in things civil or religious than he, but he said,
firmly, “Of course, as a republican and a Protestant, I can’t accept a
decoration from a Catholic prince.” His decision was from his
conscience, and I think that all Americans who think duly about it will
approve his decision.



VI.

Such honors as he could fitly permit himself he did not refuse, and I
recall what zest he had in his election to the Arcadian Academy, which
had made him a shepherd of its Roman Fold, with the title, as he said, of
“Olimipico something.” But I fancy his sweetest pleasure in his vast
renown came from his popular recognition everywhere. Few were the lands,
few the languages he was unknown to: he showed me a version of the “Psalm
of Life” in Chinese. Apparently even the poor lost autograph-seeker was
not denied by his universal kindness; I know that he kept a store of
autographs ready written on small squares of paper for all who applied by
letter or in person; he said it was no trouble; but perhaps he was to be
excused for refusing the request of a lady for fifty autographs, which
she wished to offer as a novel attraction to her guests at a lunch party.

Foreigners of all kinds thronged upon him at their pleasure, apparently,
and with perfect impunity. Sometimes he got a little fun, very, very
kindly, out of their excuses and reasons; and the Englishman who came to
see him because there were no ruins to visit in America was no fable, as
I can testify from the poet himself. But he had no prejudice against
Englishmen, and even at a certain time when the coarse-handed British
criticism began to blame his delicate art for the universal acceptance of
his verse, and to try to sneer him into the rank of inferior poets, he
was without rancor for the clumsy misliking that he felt. He could not
understand rudeness; he was too finely framed for that; he could know it
only as Swedenborg’s most celestial angels perceived evil, as something
distressful, angular. The ill-will that seemed nearly always to go with
adverse criticism made him distrust criticism, and the discomfort which
mistaken or blundering praise gives probably made him shy of all
criticism. He said that in his early life as an author he used to seek
out and save all the notices of his poems, but in his latter days he read
only those that happened to fall in his way; these he cut out and amused
his leisure by putting together in scrapbooks. He was reluctant to make
any criticism of other poets; I do not remember ever to have heard him
make one; and his writings show no trace of the literary dislikes or
contempts which we so often mistake in ourselves for righteous judgments.
No doubt he had his resentments, but he hushed them in his heart, which
he did not suffer them to embitter. While Poe was writing of “Longfellow
and other Plagiarists,” Longfellow was helping to keep Poe alive by the
loans which always made themselves gifts in Poe’s case. He very, very
rarely spoke of himself at all, and almost never of the grievances which
he did not fail to share with all who live.

He was patient, as I said, of all things, and gentle beyond all mere
gentlemanliness. But it would have been a great mistake to mistake his
mildness for softness. It was most manly and firm; and of course it was
braced with the New England conscience he was born to. If he did not
find it well to assert himself, he was prompt in behalf of his friends,
and one of the fine things told of him was his resenting some censures of
Sumner at a dinner in Boston during the old pro-slavery times: he said to
the gentlemen present that Sumner was his friend, and he must leave their
company if they continued to assail him.

But he spoke almost as rarely of his friends as of himself. He liked the
large, impersonal topics which could be dealt with on their human side,
and involved characters rather than individuals. This was rather strange
in Cambridge, where we were apt to take our instances from the
environment. It was not the only thing he was strange in there; he was
not to that manner born; he lacked the final intimacies which can come
only of birth and lifelong association, and which make the men of the
Boston breed seem exclusive when they least feel so; he was Longfellow to
the friends who were James, and Charles, and Wendell to one another. He
and Hawthorne were classmates at college, but I never heard him mention
Hawthorne; I never heard him mention Whittier or Emerson. I think his
reticence about his contemporaries was largely due to his reluctance from
criticism: he was the finest artist of them all, and if he praised he
must have praised with the reservations of an honest man. Of younger
writers he was willing enough to speak. No new contributor made his mark
in the magazine unnoted by him, and sometimes I showed him verse in
manuscript which gave me peculiar pleasure. I remember his liking for
the first piece that Mr. Maurice Thompson sent me, and how he tasted the
fresh flavor of it, and inhaled its wild new fragrance. He admired the
skill of some of the young story-tellers; he praised the subtlety of one
in working out an intricate character, and said modestly that he could
never have done that sort of thing himself. It was entirely safe to
invite his judgment when in doubt, for he never suffered it to become
aggressive, or used it to urge upon me the manuscripts that must often
have been urged upon him.

Longfellow had a house at Nahant where he went every summer for more than
a quarter of a century. He found the slight transition change enough
from Cambridge, and liked it perhaps because it did not take him beyond
the range of the friends and strangers whose company he liked. Agassiz
was there, and Appleton; Sumner came to sojourn with him; and the
tourists of all nations found him there in half an hour after they
reached Boston. His cottage was very plain and simple, but was rich in
the sight of the illimitable, sea, and it had a luxury of rocks at the
foot of its garden, draped with sea-weed, and washed with the
indefatigable tides. As he grew older and feebler he ceased to go to
Nahant; he remained the whole year round at Cambridge; he professed to
like the summer which he said warmed him through there, better than the
cold spectacle of summer which had no such effect at Nahant.

The hospitality which was constant at either house was not merely of the
worldly sort. Longfellow loved good cheer; he tasted history and poetry
in a precious wine; and he liked people who were acquainted with manners
and men, and brought the air of capitals with them. But often the man
who dined with Longfellow was the man who needed a dinner; and from what
I have seen of the sweet courtesy that governed at that board, I am sure
that such a man could never have felt himself the least honored guest.
The poet’s heart was open to all the homelessness of the world; and I
remember how once when we sat at his table and I spoke of his poem of
“The Challenge,” then a new poem, and said how I had been touched by the
fancy of

       “The poverty-stricken millions
        Who challenge our wine and bread,
        And impeach us all as traitors,
        Both the living and the dead,”

his voice sank in grave humility as he answered, “Yes, I often think of
those things.” He had thought of them in the days of the slave, when he
had taken his place with the friends of the hopeless and hapless, and as
long as he lived he continued of the party which had freed the slave. He
did not often speak of politics, but when the movement of some of the
best Republicans away from their party began, he said that he could not
see the wisdom of their course. But this was said without censure or
criticism of them, and so far as I know he never permitted himself
anything like denunciation of those who in any wise differed from him. On
a matter of yet deeper interest, I do not feel authorized to speak for
him, but I think that as he grew older, his hold upon anything like a
creed weakened, though he remained of the Unitarian philosophy concerning
Christ. He did not latterly go to church, I believe; but then, very few
of his circle were church-goers. Once he said something very vague and
uncertain concerning the doctrine of another life when I affirmed my hope
of it, to the effect that he wished he could be sure, with the sigh that
so often clothed the expression of a misgiving with him.



VII.

When my acquaintance with Longfellow began he had written the things that
made his fame, and that it will probably rest upon: “Evangeline,”
 “Hiawatha,” and the “Courtship of Miles Standish” were by that time old
stories. But during the eighteen years that I knew him he produced the
best of his minor poems, the greatest of his sonnets, the sweetest of his
lyrics. His art ripened to the last, it grew richer and finer, and it
never knew decay. He rarely read anything of his own aloud, but in three
or four cases he read to me poems he had just finished, as if to give
himself the pleasure of hearing them with the sympathetic sense of
another. The hexameter piece, “Elizabeth,” in the third part of “Tales
of a Wayside Inn,” was one of these, and he liked my liking its
rhythmical form, which I believed one of the measures best adapted to the
English speech, and which he had used himself with so much pleasure and
success.

About this time he was greatly interested in the slight experiments I was
beginning to make in dramatic form, and he said that if he were himself a
young man he should write altogether for the stage; he thought the drama
had a greater future with us. He was pleased when a popular singer
wished to produce his “Masque of Pandora,” with music, and he was patient
when it failed of the effect hoped for it as an opera. When the late
Lawrence Barrett, in the enthusiasm which was one of the fine traits of
his generous character, had taken my play of “A Counterfeit Presentment,”
 and came to the Boston Museum with it, Longfellow could not apparently
have been more zealous for its popular acceptance if it had been his own
work. He invited himself to one of the rehearsals with me, and he sat
with me on the stage through the four acts with a fortitude which I still
wonder at, and with the keenest zest for all the details of the
performance. No finer testimony to the love and honor which all kinds of
people had for him could have been given than that shown by the actors
and employees of the theatre, high and low. They thronged the scenery,
those who were not upon the stage, and at the edge of every wing were
faces peering round at the poet, who sat unconscious of their adoration,
intent upon the play. He was intercepted at every step in going out, and
made to put his name to the photographs of himself which his worshippers
produced from their persons.

He came to the first night of the piece, and when it seemed to be finding
favor with the public, he leaned forward out of his line to nod and smile
at the author; when they, had the author up, it was the sweetest flattery
of the applause which abused his fondness that Longfellow clapped first
and loudest.

Where once he had given his kindness he could not again withhold it, and
he was anxious no fact should be interpreted as withdrawal. When the
Emperor Dom Pedro of Brazil, who was so great a lover of Longfellow, came
to Boston, he asked himself out to dine with the poet, who had expected
to offer him some such hospitality. Soon after, Longfellow met me, and
as if eager to forestall a possible feeling in me, said, “I wanted to ask
you to dinner with the Emperor, but he not only sent word he was coming,
he named his fellow-guests!” I answered that though I should probably
never come so near dining with an emperor again, I prized his wish to ask
me much more than the chance I had missed; and with this my great and
good friend seemed a little consoled. I believe that I do not speak too
confidently of our relation. He was truly the friend of all men, but I
had certainly the advantage of my propinquity. We were near neighbors, as
the pleonasm has it, both when I lived on Berkeley Street and after I had
built my own house on Concord Avenue; and I suppose he found my youthful
informality convenient. He always asked me to dinner when his old friend
Greene came to visit him, and then we had an Italian time together, with
more or less repetition in our talk, of what we had said before of
Italian poetry and Italian character. One day there came a note from him
saying, in effect, “Salvini is coming out to dine with me tomorrow night,
and I want you to come too. There will be no one else but Greene and
myself, and we will have an Italian dinner.”

Unhappily I had accepted a dinner in Boston for that night, and this
invitation put me in great misery. I must keep my engagement, but how
could I bear to miss meeting Salvini at Longfellow’s table on terms like
these? We consulted at home together and questioned whether I might not
rush into Boston, seek out my host there, possess him of the facts, and
frankly throw myself on his mercy. Then a sudden thought struck us: Go
to Longfellow, and submit the case to him! I went, and he entered with
delicate sympathy into the affair. But he decided that, taking the large
view of it, I must keep my engagement, lest I should run even a remote
risk of wounding my friend’s susceptibilities. I obeyed, and I had a
very good time, but I still feel that I missed the best time of my life,
and that I ought to be rewarded for my sacrifice, somewhere.

Longfellow so rarely spoke of himself in any way that one heard from him
few of those experiences of the distinguished man in contact with the
undistinguished, which he must have had so abundantly. But he told,
while it was fresh in his mind, an incident that happened to him one day
in Boston at a tobacconist’s, where a certain brand of cigars was
recommended to him as the kind Longfellow smoked. “Ah, then I must have
some of them; and I will ask you to send me a box,” said Longfellow, and
he wrote down his name and address. The cigar-dealer read it with the
smile of a worsted champion, and said, “Well, I guess you had me, that
time.” At a funeral a mourner wished to open conversation, and by way of
suggesting a theme of common interest, began, “You’ve buried, I believe?”

Sometimes people were shown by the poet through Craigie House who had no
knowledge of it except that it had been Washington’s headquarters. Of
course Longfellow was known by sight to every one in Cambridge. He was
daily in the streets, while his health endured, and as he kept no
carriage, he was often to be met in the horse-cars, which were such
common ground in Cambridge that they were often like small invited
parties of friends when they left Harvard Square, so that you expected
the gentlemen to jump up and ask the ladies whether they would have
chicken salad. In civic and political matters he mingled so far as to
vote regularly, and he voted with his party, trusting it for a general
regard to the public welfare.

I fancy he was somewhat shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems
always to be, from the sequestered habit of his life; but I think
Longfellow was incapable of marking any difference between himself and
them. I never heard from him anything that was ‘de haut en bas’, when he
spoke of people, and in Cambridge, where there was a good deal of
contempt for the less lettered, and we liked to smile though we did not
like to sneer, and to analyze if we did not censure, Longfellow and
Longfellow’s house were free of all that. Whatever his feeling may have
been towards other sorts and conditions of men, his effect was of an
entire democracy. He was always the most unassuming person in any
company, and at some large public dinners where I saw him I found him
patient of the greater attention that more public men paid themselves and
one another. He was not a speaker, and I never saw him on his feet at
dinner, except once, when he read a poem for Whittier, who was absent. He
disliked after-dinner speaking, and made conditions for his own exemption
from it.



VIII.

Once your friend, Longfellow was always your friend; he would not think
evil of you, and if he knew evil of you, he would be the last of all that
knew it to judge you for it. This may have been from the impersonal
habit of his mind, but I believe it was also the effect of principle, for
he would do what he could to arrest the delivery of judgment from others,
and would soften the sentences passed in his presence. Naturally this
brought him under some condemnation with those of a severer cast; and I
have heard him criticised for his benevolence towards all, and his
constancy to some who were not quite so true to themselves, perhaps. But
this leniency of Longfellow’s was what constituted him great as well as
good, for it is not our wisdom that censures others. As for his
goodness, I never saw a fault in him. I do not mean to say that he had
no faults, or that there were no better men, but only to give the witness
of my knowledge concerning him. I claim in no wise to have been his
intimate; such a thing was not possible in my case for quite apparent
reasons; and I doubt if Longfellow was capable of intimacy in the sense
we mostly attach to the word. Something more of egotism than I ever
found in him must go to the making of any intimacy which did not come
from the tenderest affections of his heart. But as a man shows himself
to those often with him, and in his noted relations with other men, he
showed himself without blame. All men that I have known, besides, have
had some foible (it often endeared them the more), or some meanness, or
pettiness, or bitterness; but Longfellow had none, nor the suggestion of
any. No breath of evil ever touched his name; he went in and out among
his fellow-men without the reproach that follows wrong; the worst thing I
ever heard said of him was that he had ‘gene’, and this was said by one
of those difficult Cambridge men who would have found ‘gene’ in a
celestial angel. Something that Bjornstjerne Bjornson wrote to me when
he was leaving America after a winter in Cambridge, comes nearer
suggesting Longfellow than all my talk. The Norsemen, in the days of
their stormy and reluctant conversion, used always to speak of Christ as
the White Christ, and Bjornson said in his letter, “Give my love to the
White Mr. Longfellow.”

A good many, years before Longfellow’s death he began to be sleepless,
and he suffered greatly. He said to me once that he felt as if he were
going about with his heart in a kind of mist. The whole night through he
would not be aware of having slept. “But,” he would add, with his
heavenly patience, “I always get a good deal of rest from lying down so
long.” I cannot say whether these conditions persisted, or how much his
insomnia had to do with his breaking health; three or four years before
the end came, we left Cambridge for a house farther in the country, and I
saw him less frequently than before. He did not allow our meetings to
cease; he asked me to dinner from time to time, as if to keep them up,
but it could not be with the old frequency. Once he made a point of
coming to see us in our cottage on the hill west of Cambridge, but it was
with an effort not visible in the days when he could end one of his brief
walks at our house on Concord Avenue; he never came but he left our house
more luminous for his having been there. Once he came to supper there to
meet Garfield (an old family friend of mine in Ohio), and though he was
suffering from a heavy cold, he would not scant us in his stay. I had
some very bad sherry which he drank with the serenity of a martyr, and I
shudder to this day to think what his kindness must have cost him. He
told his story of the clothes-line ghost, and Garfield matched it with
the story of an umbrella ghost who sheltered a friend of his through a
midnight storm, but was not cheerful company to his beneficiary, who
passed his hand through him at one point in the effort to take his arm.

After the end of four years I came to Cambridge to be treated for a long
sickness, which had nearly been my last, and when I could get about I
returned the visit Longfellow had not failed to pay me. But I did not
find him, and I never saw him again in life. I went into Boston to
finish the winter of 1881-2, and from time to time I heard that the poet
was failing in health. As soon as I felt able to bear the horse-car
journey I went out to Cambridge to see him. I had knocked once at his
door, the friendly door that had so often opened to his welcome, and
stood with the knocker in my hand when the door was suddenly set ajar,
and a maid showed her face wet with tears. “How is Mr. Longfellow?” I
palpitated, and with a burst of grief she answered, “Oh, the poor
gentleman has just departed!” I turned away as if from a helpless
intrusion at a death-bed.

At the services held in the house before the obsequies at the cemetery, I
saw the poet for the last time, where

        “Dead he lay among his books,”

in the library behind his study. Death seldom fails to bring serenity to
all, and I will not pretend that there was a peculiar peacefulness in
Longfellow’s noble mask, as I saw it then. It was calm and benign as it
had been in life; he could not have worn a gentler aspect in going out of
the world than he had always worn in it; he had not to wait for death to
dignify it with “the peace of God.” All who were left of his old
Cambridge were present, and among those who had come farther was Emerson.
He went up to the bier, and with his arms crossed on his breast, and his
elbows held in either hand, stood with his head pathetically fallen
forward, looking down at the dead face. Those who knew how his memory
was a mere blank, with faint gleams of recognition capriciously coming
and going in it, must have felt that he was struggling to remember who it
was lay there before him; and for me the electly simple words confessing
his failure will always be pathetic with his remembered aspect: “The
gentleman we have just been burying,” he said, to the friend who had come
with him, “was a sweet and beautiful soul; but I forget his name.”

I had the privilege and honor of looking over the unprinted poems
Longfellow left behind him, and of helping to decide which of them should
be published.

There were not many of them, and some of these few were quite
fragmentary. I gave my voice for the publication of all that had any
sort of completeness, for in every one there was a touch of his exquisite
art, the grace of his most lovely spirit. We have so far had two men
only who felt the claim of their gift to the very best that the most
patient skill could give its utterance: one was Hawthorne and the other
was Longfellow. I shall not undertake to say which was the greater
artist of these two; but I am sure that every one who has studied it must
feel with me that the art of Longfellow held out to the end with no touch
of decay in it, and that it equalled the art of any other poet of his
time. It knew when to give itself, and more and more it knew when to
withhold itself.

What Longfellow’s place in literature will be, I shall not offer to say;
that is Time’s affair, not mine; but I am sure that with Tennyson and
Browning he fully shared in the expression of an age which more
completely than any former age got itself said by its poets.



STUDIES OF LOWELL

I have already spoken of my earliest meetings with Lowell at Cambridge
when I came to New England on a literary pilgrimage from the West in
1860. I saw him more and more after I went to live in Cambridge in 1866;
and I now wish to record what I knew of him during the years that passed
between this date and that of his death. If the portrait I shall try to
paint does not seem a faithful likeness to others who knew him, I shall
only claim that so he looked to me, at this moment and at that. If I do
not keep myself quite out of the picture, what painter ever did?



I.

It was in the summer of 1865 that I came home from my consular post at
Venice; and two weeks after I landed in Boston, I went out to see Lowell
at Elmwood, and give him an inkstand that I had brought him from Italy.
The bronze lobster whose back opened and disclosed an inkpot and a
sand-box was quite ugly; but I thought it beautiful then, and if Lowell
thought otherwise he never did anything to let me know it. He put the
thing in the middle of his writing-table (he nearly always wrote on a
pasteboard pad resting upon his knees), and there it remained as long as
I knew the place--a matter of twenty-five years; but in all that time I
suppose the inkpot continued as dry as the sand-box.

My visit was in the heat of August, which is as fervid in Cambridge as it
can well be anywhere, and I still have a sense of his study windows
lifted to the summer night, and the crickets and grasshoppers crying in
at them from the lawns and the gardens outside. Other people went away
from Cambridge in the summer to the sea and to the mountains, but Lowell
always stayed at Elmwood, in an impassioned love for his home and for his
town. I must have found him there in the afternoon, and he must have
made me sup with him (dinner was at two o’clock) and then go with him for
a long night of talk in his study. He liked to have some one help him
idle the time away, and keep him as long as possible from his work; and
no doubt I was impersonally serving his turn in this way, aside from any
pleasure he might have had in my company as some one he had always been
kind to, and as a fresh arrival from the Italy dear to us both.

He lighted his pipe, and from the depths of his easychair, invited my shy
youth to all the ease it was capable of in his presence. It was not
much; I loved him, and he gave me reason to think that he was fond of me,
but in Lowell I was always conscious of an older and closer and stricter
civilization than my own, an unbroken tradition, a more authoritative
status. His democracy was more of the head and mine more of the heart,
and his denied the equality which mine affirmed. But his nature was so
noble and his reason so tolerant that whenever in our long acquaintance I
found it well to come to open rebellion, as I more than once did, he
admitted my right of insurrection, and never resented the outbreak. I
disliked to differ with him, and perhaps he subtly felt this so much that
he would not dislike me for doing it. He even suffered being taxed with
inconsistency, and where he saw that he had not been quite just, he would
take punishment for his error, with a contrition that was sometimes
humorous and always touching.

Just then it was the dark hour before the dawn with Italy, and he was
interested but not much encouraged by what I could tell him of the
feeling in Venice against the Austrians. He seemed to reserve a like
scepticism concerning the fine things I was hoping for the Italians in
literature, and he confessed an interest in the facts treated which in
the retrospect, I am aware, was more tolerant than participant of my
enthusiasm. That was always Lowell’s attitude towards the opinions of
people he liked, when he could not go their lengths with them, and
nothing was more characteristic of his affectionate nature and his just
intelligence. He was a man of the most strenuous convictions, but he
loved many sorts of people whose convictions he disagreed with, and he
suffered even prejudices counter to his own if they were not ignoble. In
the whimsicalities of others he delighted as much as in his own.



II.

Our associations with Italy held over until the next day, when after
breakfast he went with me towards Boston as far as “the village”: for so
he liked to speak of Cambridge in the custom of his younger days when
wide tracts of meadow separated Harvard Square from his life-long home at
Elmwood. We stood on the platform of the horsecar together, and when I
objected to his paying my fare in the American fashion, he allowed that
the Italian usage of each paying for himself was the politer way. He
would not commit himself about my returning to Venice (for I had not
given up my place, yet, and was away on leave), but he intimated his
distrust of the flattering conditions of life abroad. He said it was
charming to be treated ‘da signore’, but he seemed to doubt whether it
was well; and in this as in all other things he showed his final fealty
to the American ideal.

It was that serious and great moment after the successful close of the
civil war when the republican consciousness was more robust in us than
ever before or since; but I cannot recall any reference to the historical
interest of the time in Lowell’s talk. It had been all about literature
and about travel; and now with the suggestion of the word village it
began to be a little about his youth. I have said before how reluctant
he was to let his youth go from him; and perhaps the touch with my
juniority had made him realize how near he was to fifty, and set him
thinking of the past which had sorrows in it to age him beyond his years.
He would never speak of these, though he often spoke of the past. He
told once of having been on a brief journey when he was six years old,
with his father, and of driving up to the gate of Elmwood in the evening,
and his father saying, “Ah, this is a pleasant place! I wonder who lives
here--what little boy?” At another time he pointed out a certain window
in his study, and said he could see himself standing by it when he could
only get his chin on the window-sill. His memories of the house, and of
everything belonging to it, were very tender; but he could laugh over an
escapade of his youth when he helped his fellow-students pull down his
father’s fences, in the pure zeal of good-comradeship.



III.

My fortunes took me to New York, and I spent most of the winter of 1865-6
writing in the office of ‘The Nation’. I contributed several sketches of
Italian travel to that paper; and one of these brought me a precious
letter from Lowell. He praised my sketch, which he said he had read
without the least notion who had written it, and he wanted me to feel the
full value of such an impersonal pleasure in it. At the same time he did
not fail to tell me that he disliked some pseudo-cynical verses of mine
which he had read in another place; and I believe it was then that he
bade me “sweat the Heine out of” me, “as men sweat the mercury out of
their bones.”

When I was asked to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and came
on to Boston to talk the matter over with the publishers, I went out to
Cambridge and consulted Lowell. He strongly urged me to take the
position (I thought myself hopefully placed in New York on The Nation);
and at the same time he seemed to have it on his heart to say that he had
recommended some one else for it, never, he owned, having thought of me.

He was most cordial, but after I came to live in Cambridge (where the
magazine was printed, and I could more conveniently look over the
proofs), he did not call on me for more than a month, and seemed quite to
have forgotten me. We met one night at Mr. Norton’s, for one of the
Dante readings, and he took no special notice of me till I happened to
say something that offered him a chance to give me a little humorous
snub. I was speaking of a paper in the Magazine on the “Claudian
Emissary,” and I demanded (no doubt a little too airily) something like
“Who in the world ever heard of the Claudian Emissary?” “You are in
Cambridge, Mr. Howells,” Lowell answered, and laughed at my confusion.
Having put me down, he seemed to soften towards me, and at parting he
said, with a light of half-mocking tenderness in his beautiful eyes,
“Goodnight, fellow-townsman.” “I hardly knew we were fellow-townsmen,” I
returned. He liked that, apparently, and said he had been meaning to
call upon me; and that he was coming very soon.

He was as good as his word, and after that hardly a week of any kind of
weather passed but he mounted the steps to the door of the ugly little
house in which I lived, two miles away from him, and asked me to walk.
These walks continued, I suppose, until Lowell went abroad for a winter
in the early seventies. They took us all over Cambridge, which he knew
and loved every inch of, and led us afield through the straggling,
unhandsome outskirts, bedrabbled with squalid Irish neighborhoods, and
fraying off into marshes and salt meadows. He liked to indulge an excess
of admiration for the local landscape, and though I never heard him
profess a preference for the Charles River flats to the finest Alpine
scenery, I could well believe he would do so under provocation of a fit
listener’s surprise. He had always so much of the boy in him that he
liked to tease the over-serious or over-sincere. He liked to tease and
he liked to mock, especially his juniors, if any touch of affectation, or
any little exuberance of manner gave him the chance; when he once came to
fetch me, and the young mistress of the house entered with a certain
excessive elasticity, he sprang from his seat, and minced towards her,
with a burlesque of her buoyant carriage which made her laugh. When he
had given us his heart in trust of ours, he used us like a younger
brother and sister; or like his own children. He included our children
in his affection, and he enjoyed our fondness for them as if it were
something that had come back to him from his own youth. I think he had
also a sort of artistic, a sort of ethical pleasure in it, as being of
the good tradition, of the old honest, simple material, from which
pleasing effects in literature and civilization were wrought. He liked
giving the children books, and writing tricksy fancies in these, where he
masked as a fairy prince; and as long as he lived he remembered his early
kindness for them.



IV.

In those walks of ours I believe he did most of the talking, and from his
talk then and at other times there remains to me an impression of his
growing conservatism. I had in fact come into his life when it had spent
its impulse towards positive reform, and I was to be witness of its
increasing tendency towards the negative sort. He was quite past the
storm and stress of his anti-slavery age; with the close of the war which
had broken for him all his ideals of inviolable peace, he had reached the
age of misgiving. I do not mean that I ever heard him express doubt of
what he had helped to do, or regret for what he had done; but I know that
he viewed with critical anxiety what other men were doing with the
accomplished facts. His anxiety gave a cast of what one may call
reluctance from the political situation, and turned him back towards
those civic and social defences which he had once seemed willing to
abandon. I do not mean that he lost faith in democracy; this faith he
constantly then and signally afterwards affirmed; but he certainly had no
longer any faith in insubordination as a means of grace. He preached a
quite Socratic reverence for law, as law, and I remember that once when I
had got back from Canada in the usual disgust for the American
custom-house, and spoke lightly of smuggling as not an evil in itself,
and perhaps even a right under our vexatious tariff, he would not have
it, but held that the illegality of the act made it a moral of fence.
This was not the logic that would have justified the attitude of the
anti-slavery men towards the fugitive slave act; but it was in accord
with Lowell’s feeling about John Brown, whom he honored while always
condemning his violation of law; and it was in the line of all his later
thinking. In this, he wished you to agree with him, or at least he
wished to make you; but he did not wish you to be more of his mind than
he was himself. In one of those squalid Irish neighborhoods I confessed
a grudge (a mean and cruel grudge, I now think it) for the increasing
presence of that race among us, but this did not please him; and I am
sure that whatever misgiving he had as to the future of America, he would
not have had it less than it had been the refuge and opportunity of the
poor of any race or color. Yet he would not have had it this alone.
There was a line in his poem on Agassiz which he left out of the printed
version, at the fervent entreaty of his friends, as saying too bitterly
his disappointment with his country. Writing at the distance of Europe,
and with America in the perspective which the alien environment clouded,
he spoke of her as “The Land of Broken Promise.” It was a splendid
reproach, but perhaps too dramatic to bear the full test of analysis, and
yet it had the truth in it, and might, I think, have usefully stood, to
the end of making people think. Undoubtedly it expressed his sense of
the case, and in the same measure it would now express that of many who
love their country most among us. It is well to hold one’s country to
her promises, and if there are any who think she is forgetting them it is
their duty to say so, even to the point of bitter accusation. I do not
suppose it was the “common man” of Lincoln’s dream that Lowell thought
America was unfaithful to, though as I have suggested he could be tender
of the common man’s hopes in her; but he was impeaching in that blotted
line her sincerity with the uncommon man: the man who had expected of her
a constancy to the ideals of her youth end to the high martyr-moods of
the war which had given an unguarded and bewildering freedom to a race of
slaves. He was thinking of the shame of our municipal corruptions, the
debased quality of our national statesmanship, the decadence of our whole
civic tone, rather than of the increasing disabilities of the
hard-working poor, though his heart when he thought of them was with
them, too, as it was in “the time when the slave would not let him
sleep.”

He spoke very rarely of those times, perhaps because their political and
social associations were so knit up with the saddest and tenderest
personal memories, which it was still anguish to touch. Not only was he

                  “--not of the race
        That hawk, their sorrows in the market place,”

but so far as my witness went he shrank from mention of them. I do not
remember hearing him speak of the young wife who influenced him so
potently at the most vital moment, and turned him from his whole
scholarly and aristocratic tradition to an impassioned championship of
the oppressed; and he never spoke of the children he had lost. I recall
but one allusion to the days when he was fighting the anti-slavery battle
along the whole line, and this was with a humorous relish of his Irish
servant’s disgust in having to wait upon a negro whom he had asked to his
table.

He was rather severe in his notions of the subordination his domestics
owed him. They were “to do as they were bid,” and yet he had a
tenderness for such as had been any time with him, which was wounded when
once a hired man long in his employ greedily overreached him in a certain
transaction. He complained of that with a simple grief for the man’s
indelicacy after so many favors from him, rather than with any
resentment. His hauteur towards his dependents was theoretic; his actual
behavior was of the gentle consideration common among Americans of good
breeding, and that recreant hired man had no doubt never been suffered to
exceed him in shows of mutual politeness. Often when the maid was about
weightier matters, he came and opened his door to me himself, welcoming
me with the smile that was like no other. Sometimes he said, “Siete il
benvenuto,” or used some other Italian phrase, which put me at ease with
him in the region where we were most at home together.

Looking back I must confess that I do not see what it was he found to
make him wish for my company, which he presently insisted upon having
once a week at dinner. After the meal we turned into his study where we
sat before a wood fire in winter, and he smoked and talked. He smoked a
pipe which was always needing tobacco, or going out, so that I have the
figure of him before my eyes constantly getting out of his deep chair to
rekindle it from the fire with a paper lighter. He was often out of his
chair to get a book from the shelves that lined the walls, either for a
passage which he wished to read, or for some disputed point which he
wished to settle. If I had caused the dispute, he enjoyed putting me in
the wrong; if he could not, he sometimes whimsically persisted in his
error, in defiance of all authority; but mostly he had such reverence for
the truth that he would not question it even in jest.

If I dropped in upon him in the afternoon I was apt to find him reading
the old French poets, or the plays of Calderon, or the ‘Divina Commedia’,
which he magnanimously supposed me much better acquainted with than I was
because I knew some passages of it by heart. One day I came in quoting

        “Io son, cantava, io son dolce Sirena,
        Che i marinai in mezzo al mar dismago.”

He stared at me in a rapture with the matchless music, and then uttered
all his adoration and despair in one word. “Damn!” he said, and no more.
I believe he instantly proposed a walk that day, as if his study walls
with all their vistas into the great literatures cramped his soul
liberated to a sense of ineffable beauty of the verse of the ‘somma
poeta’. But commonly be preferred to have me sit down with him there
among the mute witnesses of the larger part of his life. As I have
suggested in my own case, it did not matter much whether you brought
anything to the feast or not. If he liked you he liked being with you,
not for what he got, but for what he gave. He was fond of one man whom I
recall as the most silent man I ever met. I never heard him say
anything, not even a dull thing, but Lowell delighted in him, and would
have you believe that he was full of quaint humor.



V.

While Lowell lived there was a superstition, which has perhaps survived
him, that he was an indolent man, wasting himself in barren studies and
minor efforts instead of devoting his great powers to some monumental
work worthy of them. If the robust body of literature, both poetry and
prose, which lives after him does not yet correct this vain delusion, the
time will come when it must; and in the meantime the delusion cannot vex
him now. I think it did vex him, then, and that he even shared it, and
tried at times to meet such shadowy claim as it had. One of the things
that people urged upon him was to write some sort of story, and it is
known how he attempted this in verse. It is less known that he attempted
it in prose, and that he went so far as to write the first chapter of a
novel. He read this to me, and though I praised it then, I have a
feeling now that if he had finished the novel it would have been a
failure. “But I shall never finish it,” he sighed, as if he felt
irremediable defects in it, and laid the manuscript away, to turn and
light his pipe. It was a rather old-fashioned study of a whimsical
character, and it did not arrive anywhere, so far as it went; but I
believe that it might have been different with a Yankee story in verse
such as we have fragmentarily in ‘The Nooning’ and ‘FitzAdam’s Story’.
Still, his gift was essentially lyrical and meditative, with the
universal New England tendency to allegory. He was wholly undramatic in
the actuation of the characters which he imagined so dramatically. He
liked to deal with his subject at first hand, to indulge through himself
all the whim and fancy which the more dramatic talent indulges through
its personages.

He enjoyed writing such a poem as “The Cathedral,” which is not of his
best, but which is more immediately himself, in all his moods, than some
better poems. He read it to me soon after it was written, and in the
long walk which we went hard upon the reading (our way led us through the
Port far towards East Cambridge, where he wished to show me a tupelo-tree
of his acquaintance, because I said I had never seen one), his talk was
still of the poem which he was greatly in conceit of. Later his
satisfaction with it received a check from the reserves of other friends
concerning some whimsical lines which seemed to them too great a drop
from the higher moods of the piece. Their reluctance nettled him;
perhaps he agreed with them; but he would not change the lines, and they
stand as he first wrote them. In fact, most of his lines stand as he
first wrote them; he would often change them in revision, and then, in a
second revision go back to the first version.

He was very sensitive to criticism, especially from those he valued
through his head or heart. He would try to hide his hurt, and he would
not let you speak of it, as though your sympathy unmanned him, but you
could see that he suffered. This notably happened in my remembrance from
a review in a journal which he greatly esteemed; and once when in a
notice of my own I had put one little thorny point among the flowers, he
confessed a puncture from it. He praised the criticism hardily, but I
knew that he winced under my recognition of the didactic quality which he
had not quite guarded himself against in the poetry otherwise praised. He
liked your liking, and he openly rejoiced in it; and I suppose he made
himself believe that in trying his verse with his friends he was testing
it; but I do not believe that he was, and I do not think he ever
corrected his judgment by theirs, however he suffered from it.

In any matter that concerned literary morals he was more than eager to
profit by another eye. One summer he sent me for the Magazine a poem
which, when I read it, I trembled to find in motive almost exactly like
one we had lately printed by another contributor. There was nothing for
it but to call his attention to the resemblance, and I went over to
Elmwood with the two poems. He was not at home, and I was obliged to
leave the poems, I suppose with some sort of note, for the next morning’s
post brought me a delicious letter from him, all one cry of confession,
the most complete, the most ample. He did not trouble himself to say
that his poem was an unconscious reproduction of the other; that was for
every reason unnecessary, but he had at once rewritten it upon wholly
different lines; and I do not think any reader was reminded of Mrs.
Akers’s “Among the Laurels” by Lowell’s “Foot-path.” He was not only
much more sensitive of others’ rights than his own, but in spite of a
certain severity in him, he was most tenderly regardful of their
sensibilities when he had imagined them: he did not always imagine them.



VI.

At this period, between the years 1866 and 1874, when he unwillingly went
abroad for a twelvemonth, Lowell was seen in very few Cambridge houses,
and in still fewer Boston houses. He was not an unsocial man, but he was
most distinctly not a society man. He loved chiefly the companionship of
books, and of men who loved books; but of women generally he had an
amusing diffidence; he revered them and honored them, but he would rather
not have had them about. This is over-saying it, of course, but the
truth is in what I say. There was never a more devoted husband, and he
was content to let his devotion to the sex end with that. He especially
could not abide difference of opinion in women; he valued their taste,
their wit, their humor, but he would have none of their reason. I was by
one day when he was arguing a point with one of his nieces, and after it
had gone on for some time, and the impartial witness must have owned that
she was getting the better of him he closed the controversy by giving her
a great kiss, with the words, “You are a very good girl, my dear,” and
practically putting her out of the room. As to women of the flirtatious
type, he did not dislike them; no man, perhaps, does; but he feared them,
and he said that with them there was but one way, and that was to run.

I have a notion that at this period Lowell was more freely and fully
himself than at any other. The passions and impulses of his younger
manhood had mellowed, the sorrows of that time had softened; he could
blamelessly live to himself in his affections and his sobered ideals. His
was always a duteous life; but he had pretty well given up making man
over in his own image, as we all wish some time to do, and then no longer
wish it. He fulfilled his obligations to his fellow-men as these sought
him out, but he had ceased to seek them. He loved his friends and their
love, but he had apparently no desire to enlarge their circle. It was
that hour of civic suspense, in which public men seemed still actuated by
unselfish aims, and one not essentially a politician might contentedly
wait to see what would come of their doing their best. At any rate,
without occasionally withholding open criticism or acclaim Lowell waited
among his books for the wounds of the war to heal themselves, and the
nation to begin her healthfuller and nobler life. With slavery gone,
what might not one expect of American democracy!

His life at Elmwood was of an entire simplicity. In the old colonial
mansion in which he was born, he dwelt in the embowering leafage, amid
the quiet of lawns and garden-plots broken by few noises ruder than those
from the elms and the syringas where

     “The oriole clattered and the cat-bird sang.”

From the tracks on Brattle Street, came the drowsy tinkle of horse-car
bells; and sometimes a funeral trailed its black length past the corner
of his grounds, and lost itself from sight under the shadows of the
willows that hid Mount Auburn from his study windows. In the winter the
deep New England snows kept their purity in the stretch of meadow behind
the house, which a double row of pines guarded in a domestic privacy. All
was of a modest dignity within and without the house, which Lowell loved
but did not imagine of a manorial presence; and he could not conceal his
annoyance with an over-enthusiastic account of his home in which the
simple chiselling of some panels was vaunted as rich wood-carving. There
was a graceful staircase, and a good wide hall, from which the
dining-room and drawing-room opened by opposite doors; behind the last,
in the southwest corner of the house, was his study.

There, literally, he lived during the six or seven years in which I knew
him after my coming to Cambridge. Summer and winter he sat there among
his books, seldom stirring abroad by day except for a walk, and by night
yet more rarely. He went to the monthly mid-day dinner of the Saturday
Club in Boston; he was very constant at the fortnightly meetings of his
whist-club, because he loved the old friends who formed it; he came
always to the Dante suppers at Longfellow’s, and he was familiarly in and
out at Mr. Norton’s, of course. But, otherwise, he kept to his study,
except for some rare and almost unwilling absences upon university
lecturing at Johns Hopkins or at Cornell.

For four years I did not take any summer outing from Cambridge myself,
and my associations with Elmwood and with Lowell are more of summer than
of winter weather meetings. But often we went our walks through the
snows, trudging along between the horsecar tracks which enclosed the only
well-broken-out paths in that simple old Cambridge. I date one memorable
expression of his from such a walk, when, as we were passing Longfellow’s
house, in mid-street, he came as near the declaration of his religious
faith as he ever did in my presence. He was speaking of the New
Testament, and he said, The truth was in it; but they had covered it up
with their hagiology. Though he had been bred a Unitarian, and had more
and more liberated himself from all creeds, he humorously affected an
abiding belief in hell, and similarly contended for the eternal
punishment of the wicked. He was of a religious nature, and he was very
reverent of other people’s religious feelings. He expressed a special
tolerance for my own inherited faith, no doubt because Mrs. Lowell was
also a Swedenborgian; but I do not think he was interested in it, and I
suspect that all religious formulations bored him. In his earlier poems
are many intimations and affirmations of belief in an overruling
providence, and especially in the God who declares vengeance His and will
repay men for their evil deeds, and will right the weak against the
strong. I think he never quite lost this, though when, in the last years
of his life, I asked him if he believed there was a moral government of
the universe, he answered gravely and with a sort of pain, The scale was
so vast, and we saw such a little part of it.

As to tine notion of a life after death, I never had any direct or
indirect expression from him; but I incline to the opinion that his hold
upon this weakened with his years, as it is sadly apt to do with men who
have read much and thought much: they have apparently exhausted their
potentialities of psychological life. Mystical Lowell was, as every poet
must be, but I do not think he liked mystery. One morning he told me
that when he came home the night before he had seen the Doppelganger of
one of his household: though, as he joked, he was not in a state to see
double.

He then said he used often to see people’s Doppelganger; at another time,
as to ghosts, he said, He was like Coleridge: he had seen too many of
‘em. Lest any weaker brethren should be caused to offend by the
restricted oath which I have reported him using in a moment of transport
it may be best to note here that I never heard him use any other
imprecation, and this one seldom.

Any grossness of speech was inconceivable of him; now and then, but only
very rarely, the human nature of some story “unmeet for ladies” was too
much for his sense of humor, and overcame him with amusement which he was
willing to impart, and did impart, but so that mainly the human nature of
it reached you. In this he was like the other great Cambridge men,
though he was opener than the others to contact with the commoner life.
He keenly delighted in every native and novel turn of phrase, and he
would not undervalue a vital word or a notion picked up out of the road
even if it had some dirt sticking to it.

He kept as close to the common life as a man of his patrician instincts
and cloistered habits could. I could go to him with any new find about
it and be sure of delighting him; after I began making my involuntary and
all but unconscious studies of Yankee character, especially in the
country, he was always glad to talk them over with me. Still, when I had
discovered a new accent or turn of speech in the fields he had
cultivated, I was aware of a subtle grudge mingling with his pleasure;
but this was after all less envy than a fine regret.

At the time I speak of there was certainly nothing in Lowell’s dress or
bearing that would have kept the common life aloof from him, if that life
were not always too proud to make advances to any one. In this
retrospect, I see him in the sack coat and rough suit which he wore upon
all out-door occasions, with heavy shoes, and a round hat. I never saw
him with a high hat on till he came home after his diplomatic stay in
London; then he had become rather rigorously correct in his costume, and
as conventional as he had formerly been indifferent. In both epochs he
was apt to be gloved, and the strong, broad hands, which left the
sensation of their vigor for some time after they had clasped yours, were
notably white. At the earlier period, he still wore his auburn hair
somewhat long; it was darker than his beard, which was branching and
full, and more straw-colored than auburn, as were his thick eyebrows;
neither hair nor beard was then touched with gray, as I now remember.
When he uncovered, his straight, wide, white forehead showed itself one
of the most beautiful that could be; his eyes were gay with humor, and
alert with all intelligence. He had an enchanting smile, a laugh that
was full of friendly joyousness, and a voice that was exquisite music.
Everything about him expressed his strenuous physical condition: he would
not wear an overcoat in the coldest Cambridge weather; at all times he
moved vigorously, and walked with a quick step, lifting his feet well
from the ground.



VII.

It gives me a pleasure which I am afraid I cannot impart, to linger in
this effort to materialize his presence from the fading memories of the
past. I am afraid I can as little impart a due sense of what he
spiritually was to my knowledge. It avails nothing for me to say that I
think no man of my years and desert had ever so true and constant a
friend. He was both younger and older than I by insomuch as he was a
poet through and through, and had been out of college before I was born.
But he had already come to the age of self-distrust when a man likes to
take counsel with his juniors as with his elders, and fancies he can
correct his perspective by the test of their fresher vision. Besides,
Lowell was most simply and pathetically reluctant to part with youth, and
was willing to cling to it wherever he found it. He could not in any
wise bear to be left-out. When Mr. Bret Harte came to Cambridge, and the
talk was all of the brilliant character-poems with which he had then
first dazzled the world, Lowell casually said, with a most touching,
however ungrounded sense of obsolescence, He could remember when the
‘Biglow Papers’ were all the talk. I need not declare that there was
nothing ungenerous in that. He was only too ready to hand down his
laurels to a younger man; but he wished to do it himself. Through the
modesty that is always a quality of such a nature, he was magnanimously
sensitive to the appearance of fading interest; he could not take it
otherwise than as a proof of his fading power. I had a curious hint of
this when one year in making up the prospectus of the Magazine for the
next, I omitted his name because I had nothing special to promise from
him, and because I was half ashamed to be always flourishing it in the
eyes of the public. “I see that you have dropped me this year,” he
wrote, and I could see that it had hurt, and I knew that he was glad to
believe the truth when I told him.

He did not care so much for popularity as for the praise of his friends.
If he liked you he wished you not only to like what he wrote, but to say
so. He was himself most cordial in his recognition of the things that
pleased him. What happened to me from him, happened to others, and I am
only describing his common habit when I say that nothing I did to his
liking failed to bring me a spoken or oftener a written acknowledgment.
This continued to the latest years of his life when the effort even to
give such pleasure must have cost him a physical pang.

He was of a very catholic taste; and he was apt to be carried away by a
little touch of life or humor, and to overvalue the piece in which he
found it; but, mainly his judgments of letters and men were just. One of
the dangers of scholarship was a peculiar danger in the Cambridge
keeping, but Lowell was almost as averse as Longfellow from contempt. He
could snub, and pitilessly, where he thought there was presumption and
apparently sometimes merely because he was in the mood; but I cannot
remember ever to have heard him sneer. He was often wonderfully patient
of tiresome people, and sometimes celestially insensible to vulgarity. In
spite of his reserve, he really wished people to like him; he was keenly
alive to neighborly good-will or ill-will; and when there was a question
of widening Elmwood avenue by taking part of his grounds, he was keenly
hurt by hearing that some one who lived near him had said he hoped the
city would cut down Lowell’s elms: his English elms, which his father had
planted, and with which he was himself almost one blood!



VIII.

In the period of which I am speaking, Lowell was constantly writing and
pretty constantly printing, though still the superstition held that he
was an idle man. To this time belongs the publication of some of his
finest poems, if not their inception: there were cases in which their
inception dated far back, even to ten or twenty years. He wrote his
poems at a heat, and the manuscript which came to me for the magazine was
usually the first draft, very little corrected. But if the cold fit took
him quickly it might hold him so fast that he would leave the poem in
abeyance till he could slowly live back to a liking for it.

The most of his best prose belongs to the time between 1866 and 1874, and
to this time we owe the several volumes of essays and criticisms called
‘Among My Books’ and ‘My Study Windows’. He wished to name these more
soberly, but at the urgence of his publishers he gave them titles which
they thought would be attractive to the public, though he felt that they
took from the dignity of his work. He was not a good business man in a
literary way, he submitted to others’ judgment in all such matters. I
doubt if he ever put a price upon anything he sold, and I dare say he was
usually surprised at the largeness of the price paid him; but sometimes
if his need was for a larger sum, he thought it too little, without
reference to former payments. This happened with a long poem in the
Atlantic, which I had urged the counting-room authorities to deal
handsomely with him for. I did not know how many hundred they gave him,
and when I met him I ventured to express the hope that the publishers had
done their part. He held up four fingers, “Quattro,” he said in Italian,
and then added with a disappointment which he tried to smile away, “I
thought they might have made it cinque.”

Between me and me I thought quattro very well, but probably Lowell had in
mind some end which cinque would have fitted better. It was pretty sure
to be an unselfish end, a pleasure to some one dear to him, a gift that
he had wished to make. Long afterwards when I had been the means of
getting him cinque for a poem one-tenth the length, he spoke of the
payment to me. “It came very handily; I had been wanting to give a
watch.”

I do not believe at any time Lowell was able to deal with money

     “Like wealthy men, not knowing what they give.”

more probably he felt a sacredness in the money got by literature, which
the literary man never quite rids him self of, even when he is not a
poet, and which made him wish to dedicate it to something finer than the
every day uses. He lived very quietly, but he had by no means more than
he needed to live upon, and at that time he had pecuniary losses. He was
writing hard, and was doing full work in his Harvard professorship, and
he was so far dependent upon his salary, that he felt its absence for the
year he went abroad. I do not know quite how to express my sense of
something unworldly, of something almost womanlike in his relation to
money.

He was not only generous of money, but he was generous of himself, when
he thought he could be of use, or merely of encouragement. He came all
the way into Boston to hear certain lectures of mine on the Italian
poets, which he could not have found either edifying or amusing, that he
might testify his interest in me, and show other people that they were
worth coming to. He would go carefully over a poem with me, word by
word, and criticise every turn of phrase, and after all be magnanimously
tolerant of my sticking to phrasings that he disliked. In a certain line

     “The silvern chords of the piano trembled,”

he objected to silvern. Why not silver? I alleged leathern, golden, and
like adjectives in defence of my word; but still he found an affectation
in it, and suffered it to stand with extreme reluctance. Another line of
another piece:

     “And what she would, would rather that she would not”

he would by no means suffer. He said that the stress falling on the last
word made it “public-school English,” and he mocked it with the answer a
maid had lately given him when he asked if the master of the house was at
home. She said, “No, sir, he is not,” when she ought to have said “No,
sir, he isn’t.” He was appeased when I came back the next day with the
stanza amended so that the verse could read:

     “And what she would, would rather she would not so”

but I fancy he never quite forgave my word silvern. Yet, he professed
not to have prejudices in such matters, but to use any word that would
serve his turn, without wincing; and he certainly did use and defend
words, as undisprivacied and disnatured, that made others wince.

He was otherwise such a stickler for the best diction that he would not
have had me use slovenly vernacular even in the dialogue in my stories:
my characters must not say they wanted to do so and so, but wished, and
the like. In a copy of one of my books which I found him reading, I saw
he had corrected my erring Western woulds and shoulds; as he grew old he
was less and less able to restrain himself from setting people right to
their faces. Once, in the vast area of my ignorance, he specified my
small acquaintance with a certain period of English poetry, saying,
“You’re rather shady, there, old fellow.” But he would not have had me
too learned, holding that he had himself been hurt for literature by his
scholarship.

His patience in analyzing my work with me might have been the easy effort
of his habit of teaching; and his willingness to give himself and his own
was no doubt more signally attested in his asking a brother man of
letters who wished to work up a subject in the college library, to stay a
fortnight in his house, and to share his study, his beloved study, with
him. This must truly have cost him dear, as any author of fixed habits
will understand. Happily the man of letters was a good fellow, and knew
how to prize the favor-done him, but if he had been otherwise, it would
have been the same to Lowell. He not only endured, but did many things
for the weaker brethren, which were amusing enough to one in the secret
of his inward revolt. Yet in these things he was considerate also of the
editor whom he might have made the sharer of his self-sacrifice, and he
seldom offered me manuscripts for others. The only real burden of the
kind that he put upon me was the diary of a Virginian who had travelled
in New England during the early thirties, and had set down his
impressions of men and manners there. It began charmingly, and went on
very well under Lowell’s discreet pruning, but after a while he seemed to
fall in love with the character of the diarist so much that he could not
bear to cut anything.



IX.

He had a great tenderness for the broken and ruined South, whose sins he
felt that he had had his share in visiting upon her, and he was willing
to do what he could to ease her sorrows in the case of any particular
Southerner. He could not help looking askance upon the dramatic shows of
retribution which some of the Northern politicians were working, but with
all his misgivings he continued to act with the Republican party until
after the election of Hayes; he was away from the country during the
Garfield campaign. He was in fact one of the Massachusetts electors
chosen by the Republican majority in 1816, and in that most painful hour
when there was question of the policy and justice of counting Hayes in
for the presidency, it was suggested by some of Lowell’s friends that he
should use the original right of the electors under the constitution, and
vote for Tilden, whom one vote would have chosen president over Hayes.
After he had cast his vote for Hayes, he quietly referred to the matter
one day, in the moment of lighting his pipe, with perhaps the faintest
trace of indignation in his tone. He said that whatever the first intent
of the constitution was, usage had made the presidential electors
strictly the instruments of the party which chose them, and that for him
to have voted for Tilden when he had been chosen to vote for Hayes would
have-been an act of bad faith.

He would have resumed for me all the old kindness of our relations before
the recent year of his absence, but this had inevitably worked a little
estrangement. He had at least lost the habit of me, and that says much
in such matters. He was not so perfectly at rest in the Cambridge
environment; in certain indefinable ways it did not so entirely suffice
him, though he would have been then and always the last to allow this. I
imagine his friends realized more than he, that certain delicate but
vital filaments of attachment had frayed and parted in alien air, and
left him heart-loose as he had not been before.

I do not know whether it crossed his mind after the election of Hayes
that he might be offered some place abroad, but it certainly crossed the
minds of some of his friends, and I could not feel that I was acting for
myself alone when I used a family connection with the President, very
early in his term, to let him know that I believed Lowell would accept a
diplomatic mission. I could assure him that I was writing wholly without
Lowell’s privity or authority, and I got back such a letter as I could
wish in its delicate sense of the situation. The President said that he
had already thought of offering Lowell something, and he gave me the
pleasure, a pleasure beyond any other I could imagine, of asking Lowell
whether he would accept the mission to Austria. I lost no time carrying
his letter to Elmwood, where I found Lowell over his coffee at dinner. He
saw me at the threshold, and called to me through the open door to come
in, and I handed him the letter, and sat down at table while he ran it
through. When he had read it, he gave a quick “Ah!” and threw it over
the length of the table to Mrs. Lowell. She read it in a smiling and
loyal reticence, as if she would not say one word of all she might wish
to say in urging his acceptance, though I could see that she was
intensely eager for it. The whole situation was of a perfect New England
character in its tacit significance; after Lowell had taken his coffee we
turned into his study without further allusion to the matter.

A day or two later he came to my house to say that he could not accept
the Austrian mission, and to ask me to tell the President so for him, and
make his acknowledgments, which he would also write himself. He remained
talking a little while of other things, and when he rose to go, he said
with a sigh of vague reluctance, “I should like to see a play of
Calderon,” as if it had nothing to do with any wish of his that could
still be fulfilled. “Upon this hint I acted,” and in due time it was
found in Washington, that the gentleman who had been offered the Spanish
mission would as lief go to Austria, and Lowell was sent to Madrid.



X.

When we met in London, some years later, he came almost every afternoon
to my lodging, and the story of our old-time Cambridge walks began again
in London phrases. There were not the vacant lots and outlying fields of
his native place, but we made shift with the vast, simple parks, and we
walked on the grass as we could not have done in an American park, and
were glad to feel the earth under our feet. I said how much it was like
those earlier tramps; and that pleased him, for he wished, whenever a
thing delighted him, to find a Cambridge quality in it.

But he was in love with everything English, and was determined I should
be so too, beginning with the English weather, which in summer cannot be
overpraised. He carried, of course, an umbrella, but he would not put it
up in the light showers that caught us at times, saying that the English
rain never wetted you. The thick short turf delighted him; he would
scarcely allow that the trees were the worse for foliage blighted by a
vile easterly storm in the spring of that year. The tender air, the
delicate veils that the moisture in it cast about all objects at the
least remove, the soft colors of the flowers, the dull blue of the low
sky showing through the rifts of the dirty white clouds, the hovering
pall of London smoke, were all dear to him, and he was anxious that I
should not lose anything of their charm.

He was anxious that I should not miss the value of anything in England,
and while he volunteered that the aristocracy had the corruptions of
aristocracies everywhere, he insisted upon my respectful interest in it
because it was so historical. Perhaps there was a touch of irony in this
demand, but it is certain that he was very happy in England. He had come
of the age when a man likes smooth, warm keeping, in which he need make
no struggle for his comfort; disciplined and obsequious service; society,
perfectly ascertained within the larger society which we call
civilization; and in an alien environment, for which he was in no wise
responsible, he could have these without a pang of the self-reproach
which at home makes a man unhappy amidst his luxuries, when he considers
their cost to others. He had a position which forbade thought of
unfairness in the conditions; he must not wake because of the slave, it
was his duty to sleep. Besides, at that time Lowell needed all the rest
he could get, for he had lately passed through trials such as break the
strength of men, and how them with premature age. He was living alone in
his little house in Lowndes Square, and Mrs. Lowell was in the country,
slowly recovering from the effects of the terrible typhus which she had
barely survived in Madrid. He was yet so near the anguish of that
experience that he told me he had still in his nerves the expectation of
a certain agonized cry from her which used to rend them. But he said he
had adjusted himself to this, and he went on to speak with a patience
which was more affecting in him than in men of more phlegmatic
temperament, of how we were able to adjust ourselves to all our trials
and to the constant presence of pain. He said he was never free of a
certain distress, which was often a sharp pang, in one of his shoulders,
but his physique had established such relations with it that, though he
was never unconscious of it, he was able to endure it without a
recognition of it as suffering.

He seemed to me, however, very well, and at his age of sixty-three, I
could not see that he was less alert and vigorous than he was when I
first knew him in Cambridge. He had the same brisk, light step, and
though his beard was well whitened and his auburn hair had grown ashen
through the red, his face had the freshness and his eyes the clearness of
a young man’s. I suppose the novelty of his life kept him from thinking
about his years; or perhaps in contact with those great, insenescent
Englishmen, he could not feel himself old. At any rate he did not once
speak of age, as he used to do ten years earlier, and I, then half
through my forties, was still “You young dog” to him. It was a bright
and cheerful renewal of the early kindliness between us, on which indeed
there had never been a shadow, except such as distance throws. He wished
apparently to do everything he could to assure us of his personal
interest; and we were amused to find him nervously apprehensive of any
purpose, such as was far from us, to profit by him officially. He
betrayed a distinct relief when he found we were not going to come upon
him even for admissions to the houses of parliament, which we were to see
by means of an English acquaintance. He had not perhaps found some other
fellow-citizens so considerate; he dreaded the half-duties of his place,
like presentations to the queen, and complained of the cheap ambitions he
had to gratify in that way.

He was so eager to have me like England in every way, and seemed so fond
of the English, that I thought it best to ask him whether he minded my
quoting, in a paper about Lexington, which I was just then going to print
in a London magazine, some humorous lines of his expressing the mounting
satisfaction of an imaginary Yankee story-teller who has the old fight
terminate in Lord Percy’s coming

     “To hammer stone for life in Concord jail.”

It had occurred to me that it might possibly embarrass him to have this
patriotic picture presented to a public which could not take our Fourth
of July pleasure in it, and I offered to suppress it, as I did afterwards
quite for literary reasons. He said, No, let it stand, and let them make
the worst of it; and I fancy that much of his success with a people who
are not gingerly with other people’s sensibilities came from the
frankness with which he trampled on their prejudice when he chose. He
said he always told them, when there was question of such things, that
the best society he had ever known was in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He
contended that the best English was spoken there; and so it was, when he
spoke it.

We were in London out of the season, and he was sorry that he could not
have me meet some titles who he declared had found pleasure in my books;
when we returned from Italy in the following June, he was prompt to do me
this honor. I dare say he wished me to feel it to its last implication,
and I did my best, but there was nothing in the evening I enjoyed so much
as his coming up to Mrs. Lowell, at the close, when there was only a
title or two left, and saying to her as he would have said to her at
Elmwood, where she would have personally planned it, “Fanny, that was a
fine dinner you gave us.” Of course, this was in a tender burlesque; but
it remains the supreme impression of what seemed to me a cloudlessly
happy period for Lowell. His wife was quite recovered of her long
suffering, and was again at the head of his house, sharing in his
pleasures, and enjoying his successes for his sake; successes so great
that people spoke of him seriously, as “an addition to society” in
London, where one man more or less seemed like a drop in the sea. She was
a woman perfectly of the New England type and tradition: almost
repellantly shy at first, and almost glacially cold with new
acquaintance, but afterwards very sweet and cordial. She was of a dark
beauty with a regular face of the Spanish outline; Lowell was of an ideal
manner towards her, and of an admiration which delicately travestied
itself and which she knew how to receive with smiling irony. After her
death, which occurred while he was still in England, he never spoke of
her to me, though before that he used to be always bringing her name in,
with a young lover-like fondness.



XI.

In the hurry of the London season I did not see so much of Lowell on our
second sojourn as on our first, but once when we were alone in his study
there was a return to the terms of the old meetings in Cambridge. He
smoked his pipe, and sat by his fire and philosophized; and but for the
great London sea swirling outside and bursting through our shelter, and
dashing him with notes that must be instantly answered, it was a very
fair image of the past. He wanted to tell me about his coachman whom he
had got at on his human side with great liking and amusement, and there
was a patient gentleness in his manner with the footman who had to keep
coming in upon him with those notes which was like the echo of his young
faith in the equality of men. But he always distinguished between the
simple unconscious equality of the ordinary American and its assumption
by a foreigner. He said he did not mind such an American’s coming into
his house with his hat on; but if a German or Englishman did it, he
wanted to knock it off. He was apt to be rather punctilious in his shows
of deference towards others, and at one time he practised removing his
own hat when he went into shops in Cambridge. It must have mystified the
Cambridge salesmen, and I doubt if he kept it up.

With reference to the doctrine of his young poetry, the fierce and the
tender humanity of his storm and stress period, I fancy a kind of baffle
in Lowell, which I should not perhaps find it easy to prove. I never
knew him by word or hint to renounce this doctrine, but he could not come
to seventy years without having seen many high hopes fade, and known many
inspired prophecies fail. When we have done our best to make the world
over, we are apt to be dismayed by finding it in much the old shape. As
he said of the moral government of the universe, the scale is so vast,
and a little difference, a little change for the better, is scarcely
perceptible to the eager consciousness of the wholesale reformer. But
with whatever sense of disappointment, of doubt as to his own deeds for
truer freedom and for better conditions I believe his sympathy was still
with those who had some heart for hoping and striving. I am sure that
though he did not agree with me in some of my own later notions for the
redemption of the race, he did not like me the less but rather the more
because (to my own great surprise I confess) I had now and then the
courage of my convictions, both literary and social.

He was probably most at odds with me in regard to my theories of fiction,
though he persisted in declaring his pleasure in my own fiction. He was
in fact, by nature and tradition, thoroughly romantic, and he could not
or would not suffer realism in any but a friend. He steadfastly refused
even to read the Russian masters, to his immense loss, as I tried to
persuade him, and even among the modern Spaniards, for whom he might have
had a sort of personal kindness from his love of Cervantes, he chose one
for his praise the least worthy, of it, and bore me down with his heavier
metal in argument when I opposed to Alarcon’s factitiousness the
delightful genuineness of Valdes. Ibsen, with all the Norwegians, he put
far from him; he would no more know them than the Russians; the French
naturalists he abhorred. I thought him all wrong, but you do not try
improving your elders when they have come to three score and ten years,
and I would rather have had his affection unbroken by our difference of
opinion than a perfect agreement. Where he even imagined that this
difference could work me harm, he was anxious to have me know that he
meant me none; and he was at the trouble to write me a letter when a
Boston paper had perverted its report of what he said in a public lecture
to my disadvantage, and to assure me that he had not me in mind. When
once he had given his liking, he could not bear that any shadow of change
should seem to have come upon him. He had a most beautiful and endearing
ideal of friendship; he desired to affirm it and to reaffirm it as often
as occasion offered, and if occasion did not offer, he made occasion. It
did not matter what you said or did that contraried him; if he thought he
had essentially divined you, you were still the same: and on his part he
was by no means exacting of equal demonstration, but seemed not even to
wish it.



XII.

After he was replaced at London by a minister more immediately
representative of the Democratic administration, he came home. He made a
brave show of not caring to have remained away, but in truth he had
become very fond of England, where he had made so many friends, and where
the distinction he had, in that comfortably padded environment, was so
agreeable to him.

It would have been like him to have secretly hoped that the new President
might keep him in London, but he never betrayed any ignoble
disappointment, and he would not join in any blame of him. At our first
meeting after he came home he spoke of the movement which had made Mr.
Cleveland president, and said he supposed that if he had been here, he
should have been in it. All his friends were, he added, a little
helplessly; but he seemed not to dislike my saying I knew one of his
friends who was not: in fact, as I have told, he never disliked a plump
difference--unless he disliked the differer.

For several years he went back to England every summer, and it was not
until he took up his abode at Elmwood again that he spent a whole year at
home. One winter he passed at his sister’s home in Boston, but mostly he
lived with his daughter at Southborough. I have heard a story of his
going to Elmwood soon after his return in 1885, and sitting down in his
old study, where he declared with tears that the place was full of
ghosts. But four or five years later it was well for family reasons that
he should live there; and about the same time it happened that I had
taken a house for the summer in his neighborhood. He came to see me, and
to assure me, in all tacit forms of his sympathy in a sorrow for which
there could be no help; but it was not possible that the old intimate
relations should be resumed. The affection was there, as much on his
side as on mine, I believe; but he was now an old man and I was an
elderly man, and we could not, without insincerity, approach each other
in the things that had drawn us together in earlier and happier years.
His course was run; my own, in which he had taken such a generous
pleasure, could scarcely move his jaded interest. His life, so far as it
remained to him, had renewed itself in other air; the later friendships
beyond seas sufficed him, and were without the pang, without the effort
that must attend the knitting up of frayed ties here.

He could never have been anything but American, if he had tried, and he
certainly never tried; but he certainly did not return to the outward
simplicities of his life as I first knew it. There was no more
round-hat-and-sack-coat business for him; he wore a frock and a high hat,
and whatever else was rather like London than Cambridge; I do not know
but drab gaiters sometimes added to the effect of a gentleman of the old
school which he now produced upon the witness. Some fastidiousnesses
showed themselves in him, which were not so surprising. He complained of
the American lower class manner; the conductor and cabman would be kind
to you but they would not be respectful, and he could not see the fun of
this in the old way. Early in our acquaintance he rather stupified me by
saying, “I like you because you don’t put your hands on me,” and I heard
of his consenting to some sort of reception in those last years, “Yes, if
they won’t shake hands.”

Ever since his visit to Rome in 1875 he had let his heavy mustache grow
long till it dropped below the corners of his beard, which was now almost
white; his face had lost the ruddy hue so characteristic of him. I fancy
he was then ailing with premonitions of the disorder which a few years
later proved mortal, but he still bore himself with sufficient vigor, and
he walked the distance between his house and mine, though once when I
missed his visit the family reported that after he came in he sat a long
time with scarcely a word, as if too weary to talk. That winter, I went
into Boston to live, and I saw him only at infrequent intervals, when I
could go out to Elmwood. At such times I found him sitting in the room
which was formerly the drawing-room, but which had been joined with his
study by taking away the partitions beside the heavy mass of the old
colonial chimney. He told me that when he was a newborn babe, the nurse
had carried him round this chimney, for luck, and now in front of the
same hearth, the white old man stretched himself in an easy-chair, with
his writing-pad on his knees and his books on the table at his elbow, and
was willing to be entreated not to rise. I remember the sun used to come
in at the eastern windows full pour, and bathe the air in its warmth.

He always hailed me gayly, and if I found him with letters newly come
from England, as I sometimes did, he glowed and sparkled with fresh life.
He wanted to read passages from those letters, he wanted to talk about
their writers, and to make me feel their worth and charm as he did. He
still dreamed of going back to England the next summer, but that was not
to be. One day he received me not less gayly than usual, but with a
certain excitement, and began to tell me about an odd experience he had
had, not at all painful, but which had very much mystified him. He had
since seen the doctor, and the doctor had assured him that there was
nothing alarming in what had happened, and in recalling this assurance,
he began to look at the humorous aspects of the case, and to make some
jokes about it. He wished to talk of it, as men do of their maladies,
and very fully, and I gave him such proof of my interest as even inviting
him to talk of it would convey. In spite of the doctor’s assurance, and
his joyful acceptance of it, I doubt if at the bottom of his heart there
was not the stir of an uneasy misgiving; but he had not for a long time
shown himself so cheerful.

It was the beginning of the end. He recovered and relapsed, and
recovered again; but never for long. Late in the spring I came out, and
he had me stay to dinner, which was somehow as it used to be at two
o’clock; and after dinner we went out on his lawn. He got a long-handled
spud, and tried to grub up some dandelions which he found in his turf,
but after a moment or two he threw it down, and put his hand upon his
back with a groan. I did not see him again till I came out to take leave
of him before going away for the summer, and then I found him sitting on
the little porch in a western corner of his house, with a volume of Scott
closed upon his finger. There were some other people, and our meeting
was with the constraint of their presence. It was natural in nothing so
much as his saying very significantly to me, as if he knew of my heresies
concerning Scott, and would have me know he did not approve of them, that
there was nothing he now found so much pleasure in as Scott’s novels.
Another friend, equally heretical, was by, but neither of us attempted to
gainsay him. Lowell talked very little, but he told of having been a
walk to Beaver Brook, and of having wished to jump from one stone to
another in the stream, and of having had to give it up. He said, without
completing the sentence, If it had come to that with him! Then he fell
silent again; and with some vain talk of seeing him when I came back in
the fall, I went away sick at heart. I was not to see him again, and I
shall not look upon his like.

I am aware that I have here shown him from this point and from that in a
series of sketches which perhaps collectively impart, but do not assemble
his personality in one impression. He did not, indeed, make one
impression upon me, but a thousand impressions, which I should seek in
vain to embody in a single presentment. What I have cloudily before me
is the vision of a very lofty and simple soul, perplexed, and as it were
surprised and even dismayed at the complexity of the effects from motives
so single in it, but escaping always to a clear expression of what was
noblest and loveliest in itself at the supreme moments, in the divine
exigencies. I believe neither in heroes nor in saints; but I believe in
great and good men, for I have known them, and among such men Lowell was
of the richest nature I have known. His nature was not always serene or
pellucid; it was sometimes roiled by the currents that counter and cross
in all of us; but it was without the least alloy of insincerity, and it
was never darkened by the shadow of a selfish fear. His genius was an
instrument that responded in affluent harmony to the power that made him
a humorist and that made him a poet, and appointed him rarely to be quite
either alone.



CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS

Being the wholly literary spirit I was when I went to make my home in
Cambridge, I do not see how I could well have been more content if I had
found myself in the Elysian Fields with an agreeable eternity before me.
At twenty-nine, indeed, one is practically immortal, and at that age,
time had for me the effect of an eternity in which I had nothing to do
but to read books and dream of writing them, in the overflow of endless
hours from my work with the manuscripts, critical notices, and proofs of
the Atlantic Monthly. As for the social environment I should have been
puzzled if given my choice among the elect of all the ages, to find poets
and scholars more to my mind than those still in the flesh at Cambridge
in the early afternoon of the nineteenth century. They are now nearly
all dead, and I can speak of them in the freedom which is death’s
doubtful favor to the survivor; but if they were still alive I could say
little to their offence, unless their modesty was hurt with my praise.



I.

One of the first and truest of our Cambridge friends was that exquisite
intelligence, who, in a world where so many people are grotesquely
miscalled, was most fitly named; for no man ever kept here more perfectly
and purely the heart of such as the kingdom of heaven is of than Francis
J. Child. He was then in his prime, and I like to recall the outward
image which expressed the inner man as happily as his name. He was of
low stature and of an inclination which never became stoutness; but what
you most saw when you saw him was his face of consummate refinement: very
regular, with eyes always glassed by gold-rimmed spectacles, a straight,
short, most sensitive nose, and a beautiful mouth with the sweetest smile
mouth ever wore, and that was as wise and shrewd as it was sweet. In a
time when every other man was more or less bearded he was clean shaven,
and of a delightful freshness of coloring which his thick sunny hair,
clustering upon his head in close rings, admirably set off. I believe he
never became gray, and the last time I saw him, though he was broken then
with years and pain, his face had still the brightness of his
inextinguishable youth.

It is well known how great was Professor Child’s scholarship in the
branches of his Harvard work; and how especially, how uniquely, effective
it was in the study of English and Scottish balladry to which he gave so
many years of his life. He was a poet in his nature, and he wrought with
passion as well as knowledge in the achievement of as monumental a task
as any American has performed. But he might have been indefinitely less
than he was in any intellectual wise, and yet been precious to those who
knew him for the gentleness and the goodness which in him were protected
from misconception by a final dignity as delicate and as inviolable as
that of Longfellow himself.

We were still much less than a year from our life in Venice, when he came
to see us in Cambridge, and in the Italian interest which then commended
us to so many fine spirits among our neighbors we found ourselves at the
beginning of a life-long friendship with him. I was known to him only by
my letters from Venice, which afterwards became Venetian Life, and by a
bit of devotional verse which he had asked to include in a collection he
was making, but he immediately gave us the freedom of his heart, which
after wards was never withdrawn. In due time he imagined a home-school,
to which our little one was asked, and she had her first lessons with his
own daughter under his roof. These things drew us closer together, and
he was willing to be still nearer to me in any time of trouble. At one
such time when the shadow which must some time darken every door, hovered
at ours, he had the strength to make me face it and try to realize, while
it was still there, that it was not cruel and not evil. It passed, for
that time, but the sense of his help remained; and in my own case I can
testify of the potent tenderness which all who knew him must have known
in him. But in bearing my witness I feel accused, almost as if he were
present; by his fastidious reluctance from any recognition of his
helpfulness. When this came in the form of gratitude taking credit to
itself in a pose which reflected honor upon him as the architect of
greatness, he was delightfully impatient of it, and he was most amusingly
dramatic in reproducing the consciousness of certain ineffectual alumni
who used to overwhelm him at Commencement solemnities with some such
pompous acknowledgment as, “Professor Child, all that I have become, sir,
I owe to your influence in my college career.” He did, with delicious
mockery, the old-fashioned intellectual poseurs among the students, who
used to walk the groves of Harvard with bent head, and the left arm
crossing the back, while the other lodged its hand in the breast of the
high buttoned frock-coat; and I could fancy that his classes in college
did not form the sunniest exposure for young folly and vanity. I know
that he was intolerant of any manner of insincerity, and no flattery
could take him off his guard. I have seen him meet this with a cutting
phrase of rejection, and no man was more apt at snubbing the patronage
that offers itself at times to all men. But mostly he wished to do
people pleasure, and he seemed always to be studying how to do it; as for
need, I am sure that worthy and unworthy want had alike the way to his
heart.

Children were always his friends, and they repaid with adoration the
affection which he divided with them and with his flowers. I recall him
in no moments so characteristic as those he spent in making the little
ones laugh out of their hearts at his drolling, some festive evening in
his house, and those he gave to sharing with you his joy in his
gardening. This, I believe, began with violets, and it went on to roses,
which he grew in a splendor and profusion impossible to any but a true
lover with a genuine gift for them. Like Lowell, he spent his summers in
Cambridge, and in the afternoon, you could find him digging or pruning
among his roses with an ardor which few caprices of the weather could
interrupt. He would lift himself from their ranks, which he scarcely
overtopped, as you came up the footway to his door, and peer purblindly
across at you. If he knew you at once, he traversed the nodding and
swaying bushes, to give you the hand free of the trowel or knife; or if
you got indoors unseen by him he would come in holding towards you some
exquisite blossom that weighed down the tip of its long stem with a
succession of hospitable obeisances.

He graced with unaffected poetry a life of as hard study, of as hard
work, and as varied achievement as any I have known or read of; and he
played with gifts and acquirements such as in no great measure have made
reputations. He had a rare and lovely humor which could amuse itself
both in English and Italian with such an airy burletta as “Il Pesceballo”
 (he wrote it in Metastasian Italian, and Lowell put it in libretto
English); he had a critical sense as sound as it was subtle in all
literature; and whatever he wrote he imbued with the charm of a style
finely personal to himself. His learning in the line of his Harvard
teaching included an early English scholarship unrivalled in his time,
and his researches in ballad literature left no corner of it untouched. I
fancy this part of his study was peculiarly pleasant to him; for he loved
simple and natural things, and the beauty which he found nearest life.
At least he scorned the pedantic affectations of literary superiority;
and he used to quote with joyous laughter the swelling exclamation of an
Italian critic who proposed to leave the summits of polite learning for a
moment, with the cry, “Scendiamo fra il popolo!” (Let us go down among
the people.)



II.

Of course it was only so hard worked a man who could take thought and
trouble for another. He once took thought for me at a time when it was
very important to me, and when he took the trouble to secure for me an
engagement to deliver that course of Lowell lectures in Boston, which I
have said Lowell had the courage to go in town to hear. I do not
remember whether Professor Child was equal to so much, but he would have
been if it were necessary; and I rather rejoice now in the belief that he
did not seek quite that martyrdom.

He had done more than enough for me, but he had done only what he was
always willing to do for others. In the form of a favor to himself he
brought into my fife the great happiness of intimately knowing Hjalmar
Hjorth Boyesen, whom he had found one summer day among the shelves in the
Harvard library, and found to be a poet and an intending novelist. I do
not remember now just how this fact imparted itself to the professor, but
literature is of easily cultivated confidence in youth, and possibly the
revelation was spontaneous. At any rate, as a susceptible young editor,
I was asked to meet my potential contributor at the professor’s two
o’clock dinner, and when we came to coffee in the study, Boyesen took
from the pocket nearest his heart a chapter of ‘Gunnar’, and read it to
us.

Perhaps the good professor who brought us together had plotted to have
both novel and novelist make their impression at once upon the youthful
sub-editor; but at any rate they did not fail of an effect. I believe it
was that chapter where Gunnar and Ragnhild dance and sing a ‘stev’
together, for I associate with that far happy time the rich mellow tones
of the poet’s voice in the poet’s verse. These were most characteristic
of him, and it is as if I might put my ear against the ethereal wall
beyond which he is rapt and hear them yet.

Our meeting was on a lovely afternoon of summer, and the odor of the
professor’s roses stole in at the open windows, and became part of the
gentle event. Boyesen walked home with me, and for a fortnight after I
think we parted only to dream of the literature which we poured out upon
each other in every waking moment. I had just learned to know Bjornson’s
stories, and Boyesen told me of his poetry and of his drama, which in
even measure embodied the great Norse literary movement, and filled me
with the wonder and delight of that noble revolt against convention, that
brave return to nature and the springs of poetry in the heart and the
speech of the common people. Literature was Boyesen’s religion more than
the Swedenborgian philosophy in which we had both been spiritually
nurtured, and at every step of our mounting friendship we found ourselves
on common ground in our worship of it. I was a decade his senior, but at
thirty-five I was not yet so stricken in years as not to be able fully to
rejoice in the ardor which fused his whole being in an incandescent
poetic mass. I have known no man who loved poetry more generously and
passionately; and I think he was above all things a poet. His work took
the shape of scholarship, fiction, criticism, but poetry gave it all a
touch of grace and beauty. Some years after this first meeting of ours I
remember a pathetic moment with him, when I asked him why he had not
written any verse of late, and he answered, as if still in sad
astonishment at the fact, that he had found life was not all poetry. In
those earlier days I believe he really thought it was!

Perhaps it really is, and certainly in the course of a life that
stretched almost to half a century Boyesen learned more and more to see
the poetry of the everyday world at least as the material of art. He did
battle valiantly for that belief in many polemics, which I suppose gave
people a sufficiently false notion of him; and he showed his faith by
works in fiction which better illustrated his motive. Gunnar stands at
the beginning of these works, and at the farthest remove from it in
matter and method stands ‘The Mammon of Unrighteousness’. The lovely
idyl won him fame and friendship, and the great novel added neither to
him, though he had put the experience and the observation of his ripened
life into it. Whether it is too late or too early for it to win the
place in literature which it merits I do not know; but it always seemed
to me the very spite of fate that it should have failed of popular
effect. Yet I must own that it has so failed, and I own this without
bitterness towards Gunnar, which embalmed the spirit of his youth as ‘The
Mammon of Unrighteousness’ embodied the thought of his manhood.



III.

It was my pleasure, my privilege, to bring Gunnar before the public as
editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and to second the author in many a
struggle with the strange idiom he had cast the story in. The proofs
went back and forth between us till the author had profited by every hint
and suggestion of the editor. He was quick to profit by any hint, and he
never made the same mistake twice. He lived his English as fast as he
learned it; the right word became part of him; and he put away the wrong
word with instant and final rejection. He had not learned American
English without learning newspaper English, but if one touched a phrase
of it in his work, he felt in his nerves, which are the ultimate arbiters
in such matters, its difference from true American and true English. It
was wonderful how apt and how elect his diction was in those days; it
seemed as if his thought clothed itself in the fittest phrase without his
choosing. In his poetry he had extraordinary good fortune from the
first; his mind had an apparent affinity with what was most native, most
racy in our speech; and I have just been looking over Gunnar and
marvelling anew at the felicity and the beauty of his phrasing.

I do not know whether those who read his books stop much to consider how
rare his achievement was in the mere means of expression. Our speech is
rather more hospitable than most, and yet I can remember but five other
writers born to different languages who have handled English with
anything like his mastery. Two Italians, Ruffini, the novelist, and
Gallenga, the journalist; two Germans, Carl Schurz and Carl Hillebrand,
and the Dutch novelist Maarten Maartens, have some of them equalled but
none of them surpassed him. Yet he was a man grown when he began to
speak and to write English, though I believe he studied it somewhat in
Norway before he came to America. What English he knew he learned the
use of here, and in the measure of its idiomatic vigor we may be proud of
it as Americans.

He had least of his native grace, I think, in his criticism; and yet as a
critic he had qualities of rare temperance, acuteness, and knowledge. He
had very decided convictions in literary art; one kind of thing he
believed was good and all other kinds less good down to what was bad; but
he was not a bigot, and he made allowances for art-in-error. His hand
fell heavy only upon those heretics who not merely denied the faith but
pretended that artifice was better than nature, that decoration was more
than structure, that make-believe was something you could live by as you
live by truth. He was not strongest, however, in damnatory criticism.
His spirit was too large, too generous to dwell in that, and it rose
rather to its full height in his appreciations of the great authors whom
he loved, and whom he commented from the plenitude of his scholarship as
well as from his delighted sense of their grandeur. Here he was almost
as fine as in his poetry, and only less fine than in his more fortunate
essays in fiction.

After Gunnar he was a long while in striking another note so true. He
did not strike it again till he wrote ‘The Mammon of Unrighteousness’,
and after that he was sometimes of a wandering and uncertain touch. There
are certain stories of his which I cannot read without a painful sense of
their inequality not only to his talent, but to his knowledge of human
nature, and of American character. He understood our character quite as
well as he understood our language, but at times he seemed not to do so.
I think these were the times when he was overworked, and ought to have
been resting instead of writing. In such fatigue one loses command of
alien words, alien situations; and in estimating Boyesen’s achievements
we must never forget that he was born strange to our language and to our
life. In ‘Gunnar’ he handled the one with grace and charm; in his great
novel he handled both with masterly strength. I call ‘The Mammon of
Unrighteousness’ a great novel, and I am quite willing to say that I know
few novels by born Americans that surpass it in dealing with American
types and conditions. It has the vast horizon of the masterpieces of
fictions; its meanings are not for its characters alone, but for every
reader of it; when you close the book the story is not at an end.

I have a pang in praising it, for I remember that my praise cannot please
him any more. But it was a book worthy the powers which could have given
us yet greater things if they had not been spent on lesser things.
Boyesen could “toil terribly,” but for his fame he did not always toil
wisely, though he gave himself as utterly in his unwise work as in his
best; it was always the best he could do. Several years after our first
meeting in Cambridge, he went to live in New York, a city where money
counts for more and goes for less than in any other city of the world,
and he could not resist the temptation to write more and more when he
should have written less and less. He never wrote anything that was not
worth reading, but he wrote too much for one who was giving himself with
all his conscience to his academic work in the university honored by his
gifts and his attainments, and was lecturing far and near in the
vacations which should have been days and weeks and months of leisure.
The wonder is that even such a stock of health as his could stand the
strain so long, but he had no vices, and his only excesses were in the
direction of the work which he loved so well. When a man adds to his
achievements every year, we are apt to forget the things he has already
done; and I think it well to remind the reader that Boyesen, who died at
forty-eight, had written, besides articles, reviews, and lectures
unnumbered, four volumes of scholarly criticism on German and
Scandinavian literature, a volume of literary and social essays, a
popular history of Norway, a volume of poems, twelve volumes of fiction,
and four books for boys.

Boyesen’s energies were inexhaustible. He was not content to be merely a
scholar, merely an author; he wished to be an active citizen, to take his
part in honest politics, and to live for his day in things that most men
of letters shun. His experience in them helped him to know American life
better and to appreciate it more justly, both in its good and its evil;
and as a matter of fact he knew us very well. His acquaintance with us
had been wide and varied beyond that of most of our literary men, and
touched many aspects of our civilization which remain unknown to most
Americans. When he died he had been a journalist in Chicago, and a
teacher in Ohio; he had been a professor in Cornell University and a
literary free lance in New York; and everywhere his eyes and ears had
kept themselves open. As a teacher he learned to know the more fortunate
or the more ambitious of our youth, and as a lecturer his knowledge was
continually extending itself among all ages and classes of Americans.

He was through and through a Norseman, but he was none the less a very
American. Between Norsk and Yankee there is an affinity of spirit more
intimate than the ties of race. Both have the common-sense view of life;
both are unsentimental. When Boyesen told me that among the Norwegians
men never kissed each other, as the Germans, and the Frenchmen, and the
Italians do, I perceived that we stood upon common ground. When he
explained the democratic character of society in Norway, I could well
understand how he should find us a little behind his own countrymen in
the practice, if not the theory of equality, though they lived under a
king and we under a president. But he was proud of his American
citizenship; he knew all that it meant, at its best, for humanity. He
divined that the true expression of America was not civic, not social,
but domestic almost, and that the people in the simplest homes, or those
who remained in the tradition of a simple home life, were the true
Americans as yet, whatever the future Americans might be.

When I first knew him he was chafing with the impatience of youth and
ambition at what he thought his exile in the West. There was, to be
sure, a difference between Urbana, Ohio, and Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and he realized the difference in the extreme and perhaps beyond it. I
tried to make him believe that if a man had one or two friends anywhere
who loved letters and sympathized with him in his literary attempts, it
was incentive enough; but of course he wished to be in the centres of
literature, as we all do; and he never was content until he had set his
face and his foot Eastward. It was a great step for him from the
Swedenborgian school at Urbana to the young university at Ithaca; and I
remember his exultation in making it. But he could not rest there, and
in a few years he resigned his professorship, and came to New York, where
he entered high-heartedly upon the struggle with fortune which ended in
his appointment in Columbia.

New York is a mart and not a capital, in literature as well as in other
things, and doubtless he increasingly felt this. I know that there came
a time when he no longer thought the West must be exile for a literary
man; and his latest visits to its summer schools as a lecturer impressed
him with the genuineness of the interest felt there in culture of all
kinds. He spoke of this, with a due sense of what was pathetic as well
as what was grotesque in some of its manifestations; and I think that in
reconciling himself to our popular crudeness for the sake of our popular
earnestness, he completed his naturalization, in the only sense in which
our citizenship is worth having.

I do not wish to imply that he forgot his native land, or ceased to love
it proudly and tenderly. He kept for Norway the fondness which the man
sitting at his own hearth feels for the home of his boyhood. He was of
good family; his people were people of substance and condition, and he
could have had an easier life there than here. He could have won even
wider fame, and doubtless if he had remained in Norway, he would have
been one of that group of great Norwegians who have given their little
land renown surpassed by that of no other in the modern republic of
letters. The name of Boyesen would have been set with the names of
Bjornson, of Ibsen, of Kielland, and of Lie. But when once he had seen
America (at the wish of his father, who had visited the United States
before him), he thought only of becoming an American. When I first knew
him he was full of the poetry of his mother-land; his talk was of fjords
and glaciers, of firs and birches, of hulders and nixies, of housemen and
gaardsmen; but he was glad to be here, and I think he never regretted
that he had cast his lot with us. Always, of course, he had the deepest
interest in his country and countrymen. He stood the friend of every
Norwegian who came to him in want or trouble, and they, came to him
freely and frequently. He sympathized strongly with Norway in her
quarrel with Sweden, and her wish for equality as well as autonomy; and
though he did not go all lengths with the national party, he was decided
in his feeling that Sweden was unjust to her sister kingdom, and
strenuous for the principles of the Norwegian leaders.

But, as I have said, poetry, was what his ardent spirit mainly meditated
in that hour when I first knew him in Cambridge, before we had either of
us grown old and sad, if not wise. He overflowed with it, and he talked
as little as he dreamed of anything else in the vast half-summer we spent
together. He was constantly at my house, where in an absence of my
family I was living bachelor, and where we sat indoors and talked, or
sauntered outdoors and talked, with our heads in a cloud of fancies, not
unmixed with the mosquitoes of Cambridge: if I could have back the
fancies, I would be willing to have the mosquitoes with them. He looked
the poetry he lived: his eyes were the blue of sunlit fjords; his brown
silken hair was thick on the crown which it later abandoned to a
scholarly baldness; his soft, red lips half hid a boyish pout in the
youthful beard and mustache. He was short of stature, but of a stalwart
breadth of frame, and his voice was of a peculiar and endearing quality,
indescribably mellow and tender when he read his verse.

I have hardly the right to dwell so long upon him here, for he was only a
sojourner in Cambridge, but the memory of that early intimacy is too much
for my sense of proportion. As I have hinted, our intimacy was renewed
afterwards, when I too came to live in New York, where as long as he was
in this ‘dolce lome’, he hardly let a week go by without passing a long
evening with me. Our talk was still of literature and life, but more of
life than of literature, and we seldom spoke of those old times. I still
found him true to the ideals which had clarified themselves to both of us
as the duty of unswerving fealty to the real thing in whatever we did.
This we felt, as we had felt it long before, to be the sole source of
beauty and of art, and we warmed ourselves at each other’s hearts in our
devotion to it, amidst a misunderstanding environment which we did not
characterize by so mild an epithet. Boyesen, indeed, out-realisted me,
in the polemics of our aesthetics, and sometimes when an unbeliever was
by, I willingly left to my friend the affirmation of our faith, not
without some quaking at his unsparing strenuousness in disciplining the
heretic. But now that ardent and active soul is Elsewhere, and I have
ceased even to expect the ring, which, making itself heard at the late
hour of his coming, I knew always to be his and not another’s. That
mechanical expectation of those who will come no more is something
terrible, but when even that ceases, we know the irreparability of our
loss, and begin to realize how much of ourselves they have taken with
them.



IV.

It was some years before the Boyesen summer, which was the fourth or
fifth of our life in Cambridge, that I made the acquaintance of a man,
very much my senior, who remains one of the vividest personalities in my
recollection. I speak of him in this order perhaps because of an obscure
association with Boyesen through their religious faith, which was also
mine. But Henry James was incommensurably more Swedenborgian than either
of us: he lived and thought and felt Swedenborg with an entirety and
intensity far beyond the mere assent of other men. He did not do this in
any stupidly exclusive way, but in the most luminously inclusive way,
with a constant reference of these vain mundane shadows to the spiritual
realities from which they project. His piety, which sometimes expressed
itself in terms of alarming originality and freedom, was too large for
any ecclesiastical limits, and one may learn from the books which record
it, how absolutely individual his interpretations of Swedenborg were.
Clarifications they cannot be called, and in that other world whose
substantial verity was the inspiration of his life here, the two sages
may by this time have met and agreed to differ as to some points in the
doctrine of the Seer. In such a case, I cannot imagine the apostle
giving way; and I do not say he would be wrong to insist, but I think he
might now be willing to allow that the exegetic pages which sentence by
sentence were so brilliantly suggestive, had sometimes a collective
opacity which the most resolute vision could not penetrate. He put into
this dark wisdom the most brilliant intelligence ever brought to the
service of his mystical faith; he lighted it up with flashes of the
keenest wit and bathed it in the glow of a lambent humor, so that it is
truly wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible. But I have
only tried to read certain of his books, and perhaps if I had persisted
in the effort I might have found them all as clear at last as the one
which seems to me the clearest, and is certainly most encouragingly
suggestive: I mean the one called ‘Society the Redeemed Form of Man.’

He had his whole being in his belief; it had not only liberated him from
the bonds of the Calvinistic theology in which his youth was trammelled,
but it had secured him against the conscious ethicism of the prevailing
Unitarian doctrine which supremely worshipped Conduct; and it had colored
his vocabulary to such strange effects that he spoke of moral men with
abhorrence; as more hopelessly lost than sinners. Any one whose sphere
tempted him to recognition of the foibles of others, he called the Devil;
but in spite of his perception of such diabolism, he was rather fond of
yielding to it, for he had a most trenchant tongue. I myself once fell
under his condemnation as the Devil, by having too plainly shared his joy
in his characterization of certain fellow-men; perhaps a group of
Bostonians from whom he had just parted and whose reciprocal pleasure of
themselves he presented in the image of “simmering in their own fat and
putting a nice brown on each other.”

Swedenborg himself he did not spare as a man. He thought that very
likely his life had those lapses in it which some of his followers deny;
and he regarded him on the aesthetical side as essentially commonplace,
and as probably chosen for his prophetic function just because of his
imaginative nullity: his tremendous revelations could be the more
distinctly and unmistakably inscribed upon an intelligence of that sort,
which alone could render again a strictly literal report of them.

As to some other sorts of believers who thought they had a special
apprehension of the truth, he, had no mercy upon them if they betrayed,
however innocently, any self-complacency in their possession. I went one
evening to call upon him with a dear old Shaker elder, who had the
misfortune to say that his people believed themselves to be living the
angelic life. James fastened upon him with the suggestion that according
to Swedenborg the most celestial angels were unconscious of their own
perfection, and that if the Shakers felt they were of angelic condition
they were probably the sport of the hells. I was very glad to get my
poor old friend off alive, and to find that he was not even aware of
being cut asunder: I did not invite him to shake himself.

With spiritualists James had little or no sympathy; he was not so
impatient of them as the Swedenborgians commonly are, and he probably
acknowledged a measure of verity in the spiritistic phenomena; but he
seemed rather incurious concerning them, and he must have regarded them
as superfluities of naughtiness, mostly; as emanations from the hells.
His powerful and penetrating intellect interested itself with all social
and civil facts through his religion. He was essentially religious, but
he was very consciously a citizen, with most decided opinions upon
political questions. My own darkness as to anything like social reform
was then so dense that I cannot now be clear as to his feeling in such
matters, but I have the impression that it was far more radical than I
could understand. He was of a very merciful mind regarding things often
held in pitiless condemnation, but of charity, as it is commonly
understood, he had misgivings. He would never have turned away from him
that asketh; but he spoke with regret of some of his benefactions in the
past, large gifts of money to individuals, which he now thought had done
more harm than good.

I never knew him to judge men by the society scale. He was most human in
his relations with others, and was in correspondence with all sorts of
people seeking light and help; he answered their letters and tried to
instruct them, and no one was so low or weak but he or she could reach
him on his or her own level, though he had his humorous perception of
their foibles and disabilities; and he had that keen sense of the
grotesque which often goes with the kindliest nature. He told of his
dining, early in life, next a fellow-man from Cape Cod at the Astor
House, where such a man could seldom have found himself. When they were
served with meat this neighbor asked if he would mind his putting his fat
on James’s plate: he disliked fat. James said that he considered the
request, and seeing no good reason against it, consented.

He could be cruel with his tongue when he fancied insincerity or
pretence, and then cruelly sorry for the hurt he gave. He was indeed
tremulously sensitive, not only for himself but for others, and would
offer atonement far beyond the measure of the offence he supposed himself
to have given.

At all times he thought originally in words of delightful originality,
which painted a fact with the greatest vividness. Of a person who had a
nervous twitching of the face, and who wished to call up a friend to
them, he said, “He spasmed to the fellow across the room, and introduced
him.” His written style had traits of the same bold adventurousness, but
it was his speech which was most captivating. As I write of him I see
him before me: his white bearded face, with a kindly intensity which at
first glance seemed fierce, the mouth humorously shaping the mustache,
the eyes vague behind the glasses; his sensitive hand gripping the stick
on which he rested his weight to ease it from the artificial limb he
wore.



V.

The Goethean face and figure of Louis Agassiz were in those days to be
seen in the shady walks of Cambridge to which for me they lent a
Weimarish quality, in the degree that in Weimar itself a few years ago, I
felt a quality of Cambridge. Agassiz, of course, was Swiss and Latin,
and not Teutonic, but he was of the Continental European civilization,
and was widely different from the other Cambridge men in everything but
love of the place. “He is always an Europaen,” said Lowell one day, in
distinguishing concerning him; and for any one who had tasted the flavor
of the life beyond the ocean and the channel, this had its charm. Yet he
was extremely fond of his adoptive compatriots, and no alien born had a
truer or tenderer sense of New England character. I have an idea that no
one else of his day could have got so much money for science out of the
General Court of Massachusetts; and I have heard him speak with the
wisest and warmest appreciation of the hard material from which he was
able to extract this treasure. The legislators who voted appropriations
for his Museum and his other scientific objects were not usually lawyers
or professional men, with the perspectives of a liberal education, but
were hard-fisted farmers, who had a grip of the State’s money as if it
were their own, and yet gave it with intelligent munificence. They
understood that he did not want it for himself, and had no interested aim
in getting it; they knew that, as he once said, he had no time to make
money, and wished to use it solely for the advancement of learning; and
with this understanding they were ready, to help him generously. He
compared their liberality with that of kings and princes, when these
patronized science, with a recognition of the superior plebeian
generosity. It was on the veranda of his summer house at Nahant, while
he lay in the hammock, talking of this, that I heard him refer also to
the offer which Napoleon III. had made him, inviting him upon certain
splendid conditions to come to Paris after he had established himself in
Cambridge. He said that he had not come to America without going over
every such possibility in his own mind, and deciding beforehand against
it. He was a republican, by nationality and by preference, and was
entirely satisfied with his position and environment in New England.

Outside of his scientific circle in Cambridge he was more friends with
Longfellow than with any one else, I believe, and Longfellow told me how,
after the doctors had condemned Agassiz to inaction, on account of his
failing health he had broken down in his friend’s study, and wept like an
‘Europaer’, and lamented, “I shall never finish my work!” Some papers
which he had begun to write for the Magazine, in contravention of the
Darwinian theory, or part of it, which it is known Agassiz did not
accept, remained part of the work which he never finished. After his
death, I wished Professor Jeffries Wyman to write of him in the Atlantic,
but he excused himself on account of his many labors, and then he
voluntarily spoke of Agassiz’s methods, which he agreed with rather than
his theories, being himself thoroughly Darwinian. I think he said
Agassiz was the first to imagine establishing a fact not from a single
example, but from examples indefinitely repeated. If it was a question
of something about robins for instance, he would have a hundred robins
examined before he would receive an appearance as a fact.

Of course no preconception or prepossession of his own was suffered to
bar his way to the final truth he was seeking, and he joyously renounced
even a conclusion if he found it mistaken. I do not know whether Mrs.
Agassiz has put into her interesting life of him, a delightful story
which she told me about him. He came to her beaming one day, and
demanded, “You know I have always held such and such an opinion about a
certain group of fossil fishes?” “Yes, yes!” “Well, I have just been
reading------‘s new book, and he has shown me that there isn’t the least
truth in my theory”; and he burst into a laugh of unalloyed pleasure in
relinquishing his error.

I could touch science at Cambridge only on its literary and social side,
of course, and my meetings with Agassiz were not many. I recall a dinner
at his house to Mr. Bret Harte, when the poet came on from California,
and Agassiz approached him over the coffee through their mutual
scientific interest in the last meeting of the geological “Society upon
the Stanislow.” He quoted to the author some passages from the poem
recording the final proceedings of this body, which had particularly
pleased him, and I think Mr. Harte was as much amused at finding himself
thus in touch with the savant, as Agassiz could ever have been with that
delicious poem.

Agassiz lived at one end of Quincy Street, and James almost at the other
end, with an interval between them which but poorly typified their
difference of temperament. The one was all philosophical and the other
all scientific, and yet towards the close of his life, Agassiz may be
said to have led that movement towards the new position of science in
matters of mystery which is now characteristic of it. He was ancestrally
of the Swiss “Brahminical caste,” as so many of his friends in Cambridge
were of the Brahminical caste of New England; and perhaps it was the line
of ancestral pasteurs which at last drew him back, or on, to the
affirmation of an unformulated faith of his own. At any rate, before
most other savants would say that they had souls of their own he became,
by opening a summer school of science with prayer, nearly as consolatory
to the unscientific who wished to believe they had souls, as Mr. John
Fiske himself, though Mr. Fiske, as the arch-apostle of Darwinism, had
arrived at nearly the same point by such a very different road.



VI.

Mr. Fiske had been our neighbor in our first Cambridge home, and when we
went to live in Berkeley Street, he followed with his family and placed
himself across the way in a house which I already knew as the home of
Richard Henry Dana, the author of ‘Two Years Before the Mast.’ Like
nearly all the other Cambridge men of my acquaintance Dana was very much
my senior, and like the rest he welcomed my literary promise as cordially
as if it were performance, with no suggestion of the condescension which
was said to be his attitude towards many of his fellow-men. I never saw
anything of this, in fact, and I suppose he may have been a blend of
those patrician qualities and democratic principles which made Lowell
anomalous even to himself. He is part of the anti-slavery history of his
time, and he gave to the oppressed his strenuous help both as a man and a
politician; his gifts and learning in the law were freely at their
service. He never lost his interest in those white slaves, whose brutal
bondage he remembered as bound with them in his ‘Two Years Before the
Mast,’ and any luckless seaman with a case or cause might count upon his
friendship as surely as the black slaves of the South. He was able to
temper his indignation for their oppression with a humorous perception of
what was droll in its agents and circumstances; and I wish I could recall
all that he said once about sea-etiquette on merchant vessels, where the
chief mate might no more speak to the captain at table without being
addressed by him than a subject might put a question to his sovereign. He
was amusing in his stories of the Pacific trade in which he said it was
very noble to deal in furs from the Northwest, and very ignoble to deal
in hides along the Mexican and South American coasts. Every ship’s
master wished naturally to be in the fur-carrying trade, and in one of
Dana’s instances, two vessels encounter in mid-ocean, and exchange the
usual parley as to their respective ports of departure and destination.
The final demand comes through the trumpet, “What cargo?” and the captain
so challenged yields to temptation and roars back “Furs!” A moment of
hesitation elapses, and then the questioner pursues, “Here and there a
horn?”

There were other distinctions, of which seafaring men of other days were
keenly sensible, and Dana dramatized the meeting of a great, swelling
East Indiaman, with a little Atlantic trader, which has hailed her. She
shouts back through her captain’s trumpet that she is from Calcutta, and
laden with silks, spices, and other orient treasures, and in her turn she
requires like answer from the sail which has presumed to enter into
parley with her. “What cargo?” The trader confesses to a mixed cargo for
Boston, and to the final question, her master replies in meek apology,
“Only from Liverpool, sir!” and scuttles down the horizon as swiftly as
possible.

Dana was not of the Cambridge men whose calling was in Cambridge. He was
a lawyer in active practice, and he went every day to Boston. One was
apt to meet him in those horse-cars which formerly tinkled back and forth
between the two cities, and which were often so full of one’s
acquaintance that they had all the social elements of an afternoon tea.
They were abusively overcrowded at times, of course, and one might easily
see a prime literary celebrity swaying from, a strap, or hanging uneasily
by the hand-rail to the lower steps of the back platform. I do not mean
that I ever happened to see the author of Two Years Before the Mast in
either fact, but in his celebrity he had every qualification for the
illustration of my point. His book probably carried the American name
farther and wider than any American books except those of Irving and
Cooper at a day when our writers were very little known, and our
literature was the only infant industry not fostered against foreign
ravage, but expressly left to harden and strengthen itself as it best
might in a heartless neglect even at home. The book was delightful, and
I remember it from a reading of thirty years ago, as of the stuff that
classics are made of. I venture no conjecture as to its present
popularity, but of all books relating to the sea I think it, is the best.
The author when I knew him was still Richard Henry Dana, Jr., his father,
the aged poet, who first established the name in the public recognition,
being alive, though past literary activity. It was distinctively a
literary race, and in the actual generation it has given proofs of its
continued literary vitality in the romance of ‘Espiritu Santo’ by the
youngest daughter of the Dana I knew.



VII.

There could be no stronger contrast to him in origin, education, and
character than a man who lived at the same time in Cambridge, and who
produced a book which in its final fidelity to life is not unworthy to be
named with ‘Two Years Before the Mast.’ Ralph Keeler wrote the ‘Vagabond
Adventures’ which he had lived. I have it on my heart to name him in the
presence of our great literary men not only because I had an affection
for him, tenderer than I then knew, but because I believe his book is
worthier of more remembrance than it seems to enjoy. I was reading it
only the other day, and I found it delightful, and much better than I
imagined when I accepted for the Atlantic the several papers which it is
made up of. I am not sure but it belongs to the great literature in that
fidelity to life which I have spoken of, and which the author brought
himself to practise with such difficulty, and under so much stress from
his editor. He really wanted to fake it at times, but he was docile at
last and did it so honestly that it tells the history of his strange
career in much better terms than it can be given again. He had been, as
he claimed, “a cruel uncle’s ward” in his early orphan-hood, and while
yet almost a child he had run away from home, to fulfil his heart’s
desire of becoming a clog-dancer in a troupe of negro minstrels. But it
was first his fate to be cabin-boy and bootblack on a lake steamboat, and
meet with many squalid adventures, scarcely to be matched outside of a
Spanish picaresque novel. When he did become a dancer (and even a
danseuse) of the sort he aspired to be, the fruition of his hopes was so
little what he imagined that he was very willing to leave the Floating
Palace on the Mississippi in which his troupe voyaged and exhibited, and
enter the college of the Jesuit Fathers at Cape Girardeau in Missouri.
They were very good to him, and in their charge he picked up a good deal
more Latin, if not less Greek than another strolling player who also took
to literature. From college Keeler went to Europe, and then to
California, whence he wrote me that he was coming on to Boston with the
manuscript of a novel which he wished me to read for the magazine. I
reported against it to my chief, but nothing could shake Keeler’s faith
in it, until he had printed it at his own cost, and known it fail
instantly and decisively. He had come to Cambridge to see it through the
press, and he remained there four or five years, with certain brief
absences. Then, during the Cuban insurrection of the early seventies, he
accepted the invitation of a New York paper to go to Cuba as its
correspondent.

“Don’t go, Keeler,” I entreated him, when he came to tell me of his
intention. “They’ll garrote you down there.”

“Well,” he said, with the air of being pleasantly interested by the
coincidence, as he stood on my study hearth with his feet wide apart in a
fashion he had, and gayly flirted his hand in the air, “that’s what
Aldrich says, and he’s agreed to write my biography, on condition that I
make a last dying speech when they bring me out on the plaza to do it,
‘If I had taken the advice of my friend T. B. Aldrich, author of
‘Marjorie Daw and Other People,’ I should not now be in this place.’”

He went, and he did not come back. He was not indeed garroted as his
friends had promised, but he was probably assassinated on the steamer by
which he sailed from Santiago, for he never arrived in Havana, and was
never heard of again.

I now realize that I loved him, though I did as little to show it as men
commonly do. If I am to meet somewhere else the friends who are no
longer here, I should like to meet Ralph Keeler, and I would take some
chances of meeting in a happy place a soul which had by no means kept
itself unspotted, but which in all its consciousness of error, cheerfully
trusted that “the Almighty was not going to scoop any of us.” The faith
worded so grotesquely could not have been more simply or humbly affirmed,
and no man I think could have been more helplessly sincere. He had
nothing of that false self-respect which forbids a man to own himself
wrong promptly and utterly when need is; and in fact he owned to some
things in his checkered past which would hardly allow him any sort of
self-respect. He had always an essential gaiety not to be damped by any
discipline, and a docility which expressed itself in cheerful compliance.
“Why do you use bias for opinion?” I demanded, in going over a proof with
him. “Oh, because I’m such an ass--such a bi-ass.”

He had a philosophy which he liked to impress with a vivid touch on his
listener’s shoulder: “Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it.
It’s the only one you’ve got, or ever will have.” This light and joyous
creature could not but be a Pariah among our Brahmins, and I need not say
that I never met him in any of the great Cambridge houses. I am not sure
that he was a persona grata to every one in my own, for Keeler was framed
rather for men’s liking, and Mr. Aldrich and I had our subtleties as to
whether his mind about women was not so Chinese as somewhat to infect his
manner. Keeler was too really modest to be of any rebellious mind
towards the society which ignored him, and of too sweet a cheerfulness to
be greatly vexed by it. He lived on in the house of a suave old actor,
who oddly made his home in Cambridge, and he continued of a harmless
Bohemianism in his daily walk, which included lunches at Boston
restaurants as often as he could get you to let him give them you, if you
were of his acquaintance. On a Sunday he would appear coming out of the
post-office usually at the hour when all cultivated Cambridge was coming
for its letters, and wave a glad hand in air, and shout a blithe
salutation to the friend he had marked for his companion in a morning
stroll. The stroll was commonly over the flats towards Brighton (I do
not know why, except perhaps that it was out of the beat of the better
element) and the talk was mainly of literature, in which he was doing
less than he meant to do, and which he seemed never able quite to feel
was not a branch of the Show Business, and might not be legitimately
worked by like advertising, though he truly loved and honored it.

I suppose it was not altogether a happy life, and Keeler had his moments
of amusing depression, which showed their shadows in his smiling face. He
was of a slight figure and low stature, with hands and feet of almost
womanish littleness. He was very blonde, and his restless eyes were
blue; he wore his yellow beard in whiskers only, which he pulled
nervously but perhaps did not get to droop so much as he wished.



VIII.

Keeler was a native of Ohio, and there lived at Cambridge when I first
came there an Indianian, more accepted by literary society, who was of
real quality as a poet. Forceythe Willson, whose poem of “The Old
Sergeant” Doctor Holmes used to read publicly in the closing year of the
civil war, was of a Western altitude of figure, and of an extraordinary
beauty of face in an oriental sort. He had large, dark eyes with clouded
whites; his full, silken beard was of a flashing Persian blackness. He
was excessively nervous, to such an extreme that when I first met him at
Longfellow’s, he could not hold himself still in his chair. I think this
was an effect of shyness in him, as well as physical, for afterwards when
I went to find him in his own house he was much more at ease.

He preferred to receive me in the dim, large hall after opening his door
to me himself, and we sat down there and talked, I remember, of
supernatural things. He was much interested in spiritualism, and he had
several stories to tell of his own experience in such matters. But none
was so good as one which I had at second hand from Lowell, who thought it
almost the best ghost story he had ever heard. The spirit of Willson’s
father appeared to him, and stood before him. Willson was accustomed to
apparitions, and so he said simply, “Won’t you sit down, father?” The
phantom put out his hand to lay hold of a chair-back as some people do in
taking a seat, and his shadowy arm passed through the frame-work. “Ah!”
 he said, “I forgot that I was not substance.”

I do not know whether “The Old Sergeant” is ever read now; it has
probably passed with other great memories of the great war; and I am
afraid none of Willson’s other verse is remembered. But he was then a
distinct literary figure, and not to be left out of the count of our
poets. I did not see him again. Shortly afterwards I heard that he had
left Cambridge with signs of consumption, which must have run a rapid
course, for a very little later came the news of his death.



IX.

The most devoted Cantabrigian, after Lowell, whom I knew, would perhaps
have contended that if he had stayed with us Willson might have lived;
for John Holmes affirmed a faith in the virtues of the place which
ascribed almost an aseptic character to its air, and when he once
listened to my own complaints of an obstinate cold, he cheered himself,
if not me, with the declaration, “Well, one thing, Mr. Howells, Cambridge
never let a man keep a cold yet!”

If he had said it was better to live in Cambridge with a cold than
elsewhere without one I should have believed him; as it was, Cambridge
bore him out in his assertion, though she took her own time to do it.

Lowell had talked to me of him before I met him, celebrating his peculiar
humor with that affection which was not always so discriminating, and
Holmes was one of the first Cambridge men I knew. I knew him first in
the charming old Colonial house in which his famous brother and he were
born. It was demolished long before I left Cambridge, but in memory it
still stands on the ground since occupied by the Hemenway Gymnasium, and
shows for me through that bulk a phantom frame of Continental buff in the
shadow of elms that are shadows themselves. The ‘genius loci’ was
limping about the pleasant mansion with the rheumatism which then
expressed itself to his friends in a resolute smile, but which now
insists upon being an essential trait of the full-length presence to my
mind: a short stout figure, helped out with a cane, and a grizzled head
with features formed to win the heart rather than the eye of the
beholder.

In one of his own eyes there was a cast of such winning humor and
geniality that it took the liking more than any beauty could have done,
and the sweetest, shy laugh in the world went with this cast.

I long wished to get him to write something for the Magazine, and at last
I prevailed with him to review a history of Cambridge which had come out.

He did it charmingly of course, for he loved more to speak of Cambridge
than anything else. He held his native town in an idolatry which was not
blind, but which was none the less devoted because he was aware of her
droll points and her weak points. He always celebrated these as so many
virtues, and I think it was my own passion for her that first commended
me to him. I was not her son, but he felt that this was my misfortune
more than my fault, and he seemed more and more to forgive it. After we
had got upon the terms of editor and contributor, we met oftener than
before, though I do not now remember that I ever persuaded him to write
again for me. Once he gave me something, and then took it back, with a
self-distrust of it which I could not overcome.

When the Holmes house was taken down, he went to live with an old
domestic in a small house on the street amusingly called Appian Way. He
had certain rooms of her, and his own table, but he would not allow that
he was ever anything but a lodger in the place, where he continued till
he died. In the process of time he came so far to trust his experience
of me, that he formed the habit of giving me an annual supper. Some days
before this event, he would appear in my study, and with divers delicate
and tentative approaches, nearly always of the same tenor, he would say
that he should like to ask my family to an oyster supper with him. “But
you know,” he would explain, “I haven’t a house of my own to ask you to,
and I should like to give you the supper here.” When I had agreed to
this suggestion with due gravity, he would inquire our engagements, and
then say, as if a great load were off his mind, “Well, then, I will send
up a few oysters to-morrow,” or whatever day we had fixed on; and after a
little more talk to take the strangeness out of the affair, would go his
way. On the day appointed the fish-man would come with several gallons
of oysters, which he reported Mr. Holmes had asked him to bring, and in
the evening the giver of the feast would reappear, with a lank oil-cloth
bag, sagged by some bottles of wine. There was always a bottle of red
wine, and sometimes a bottle of champagne, and he had taken the
precaution to send some crackers beforehand, so that the supper should be
as entirely of his own giving as possible. He was forced to let us do
the cooking and to supply the cold-slaw, and perhaps he indemnified
himself for putting us to these charges and for the use of our linen and
silver, by the vast superfluity of his oysters, with which we remained
inundated for days. He did not care to eat many himself, but seemed
content to fancy doing us a pleasure; and I have known few greater ones
in life, than in the hospitality that so oddly played the host to us at
our own table.



X.

It must have seemed incomprehensible to such a Cantabrigian that we
should ever have been willing to leave Cambridge, and in fact I do not
well understand it myself. But if he resented it, he never showed his
resentment. As often as I happened to meet him after our defection he
used me with unabated kindness, and sparkled into some gaiety too
ethereal for remembrance. The last time I met him was at Lowell’s
funeral, when I drove home with him and Curtis and Child, and in the
revulsion from the stress of that saddest event, had our laugh, as people
do in the presence of death, at something droll we remembered of the
friend we mourned.

My nearest literary neighbor, when we lived in Sacramento Street, was the
Rev. Dr. John G. Palfrey, the historian of New England, whose
chimney-tops amid the pine-tops I could see from my study window when the
leaves were off the little grove of oaks between us. He was one of the
first of my acquaintances, not suffering the great disparity of our ages
to count against me, but tactfully and sweetly adjusting himself to my
youth in the friendly intercourse which he invited. He was a most gentle
and kindly old man, with still an interest in liberal things which lasted
till the infirmities of age secluded him from the world and all its
interests. As is known, he had been in his prime one of the foremost of
the New England anti-slavery men, and he had fought the good fight with a
heavy heart for a brother long settled in Louisiana who sided with the
South, and who after the civil war found himself disfranchised. In this
temporary disability he came North to visit Doctor Palfrey upon the
doctor’s insistence, though at first he would have nothing to do with
him, and refused even to answer his letters. “Of course,” the doctor
said, “I was not going to stand that from my mother’s son, and I simply
kept on writing.” So he prevailed, but the fiery old gentleman from
Louisiana was reconciled to nothing in the North but his brother, and
when he came to return my visit, he quickly touched upon his cause of
quarrel with us. “I can’t vote,” he declared, “but my coachman can, and
I don’t know how I’m to get the suffrage, unless my physician paints me
all over with the iodine he’s using for my rheumatic side.”

Doctor Palfrey was most distinctly of the Brahminical caste and was long
an eminent Unitarian minister, but at the time I began to know him he had
long quitted the pulpit. He was so far of civic or public character as
to be postmaster at Boston, when we were first neighbors, but this
officiality was probably so little in keeping with his nature that it was
like a return to his truer self when he ceased to hold the place, and
gave his time altogether to his history. It is a work which will hardly
be superseded in the interest of those who value thorough research and
temperate expression. It is very just, and without endeavor for picture
or drama it is to me very attractive. Much that has to be recorded of
New England lacks charm, but he gave form and dignity and presence to the
memories of the past, and the finer moments of that great story, he gave
with the simplicity that was their best setting. It seems to me such an
apology (in the old sense) as New England might have written for herself,
and in fact Doctor Palfrey was a personification of New England in one of
the best and truest kinds. He was refined in the essential gentleness of
his heart without being refined away; he kept the faith of her Puritan
tradition though he no longer kept the Puritan faith, and his defence of
the Puritan severity with the witches and Quakers was as impartial as it
was efficient in positing the Puritans as of their time, and rather
better and not worse than other people of the same time. He was himself
a most tolerant man, and his tolerance was never weak or fond; it stopped
well short of condoning error, which he condemned when he preferred to
leave it to its own punishment. Personally he was without any flavor of
harshness; his mind was as gentle as his manner, which was one of the
gentlest I have ever known.

Of as gentle make but of more pensive temper, with unexpected bursts of
lyrical gaiety, was Christopher Pearse Cranch, the poet, whom I had known
in New York long before he came to live in Cambridge. He could not only
play and sing most amusing songs, but he wrote very good poems and
painted pictures perhaps not so good. I always liked his Venetian
pictures, for their poetic, unsentimentalized veracity, and I printed as
well as liked many of his poems. During the time that I knew him more
than his due share of troubles and sorrows accumulated themselves on his
fine head, which the years had whitened, and gave a droop to the
beautiful, white-bearded face. But he had the artist soul and the poet
heart, and no doubt he could take refuge in these from the cares that
shadowed his visage. My acquaintance with him in Cambridge renewed
itself upon the very terms of its beginning in New York. We met at
Longfellow’s table, where he lifted up his voice in the Yankee folk-song,
“On Springfield Mountain there did dwell,” which he gave with a perfectly
killing mock-gravity.



XI.

At Cambridge the best society was better, it seems to me, than even that
of the neighboring capital. It would be rather hard to prove this, and I
must ask the reader to take my word for it, if he wishes to believe it.
The great interests in that pleasant world, which I think does not
present itself to my memory in a false iridiscence, were the intellectual
interests, and all other interests were lost in these to such as did not
seek them too insistently.

People held themselves high; they held themselves personally aloof from
people not duly assayed; their civilization was still Puritan though
their belief had long ceased to be so. They had weights and measure,
stamped in an earlier time, a time surer of itself than ours, by which
they rated the merit of all comers, and rejected such as did not bear the
test. These standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them;
most Americans have no standards of their own, but these are not
satisfied even with other people’s, and so our society is in a state of
tolerant and tremulous misgiving.

Family counted in Cambridge, without doubt, as it counts in New England
everywhere, but family alone did not mean position, and the want of
family did not mean the want of it. Money still less than family
commanded; one could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame, or
shame at all, for no one was very rich there, and no one was proud of his
riches.

I do not wonder that Turguenieff thought the conditions ideal, as Boyesen
portrayed them to him; and I look back at my own life there with wonder
at my good fortune. I was sensible, and I still am sensible this had its
alloys. I was young and unknown and was making my way, and I had to
suffer some of the penalties of these disadvantages; but I do not believe
that anywhere else in this ill-contrived economy, where it is vainly
imagined that the material struggle forms a high incentive and
inspiration, would my penalties have been so light. On the other hand,
the good that was done me I could never repay if I lived all over again
for others the life that I have so long lived for myself. At times, when
I had experienced from those elect spirits with whom I was associated,
some act of friendship, as signal as it was delicate, I used to ask
myself, how I could ever do anything unhandsome or ungenerous towards any
one again; and I had a bad conscience the next time I did it.

The air of the Cambridge that I knew was sufficiently cool to be bracing,
but what was of good import in me flourished in it. The life of the
place had its lateral limitations; sometimes its lights failed to detect
excellent things that lay beyond it; but upward it opened illimitably. I
speak of it frankly because that life as I witnessed it is now almost
wholly of the past. Cambridge is still the home of much that is good and
fine in our literature: one realizes this if one names Colonel Thomas
Wentworth Higginson, Mr. John Fiske, Mr. William James, Mr. Horace E.
Scudder, not to name any others, but the first had not yet come back to
live in his birthplace at the time I have been writing of, and the rest
had not yet their actual prominence. One, in deed among so many absent,
is still present there, whom from time to time I have hitherto named
without offering him the recognition which I should have known an
infringement of his preferences. But the literary Cambridge of thirty
years ago could not be clearly imagined or justly estimated without
taking into account the creative sympathy of a man whose contributions to
our literature only partially represent what he has constantly done for
the humanities. I am sure that, after the easy heroes of the day are
long forgot, and the noisy fames of the strenuous life shall dwindle to
their essential insignificance before those of the gentle life, we shall
all see in Charles Eliot Norton the eminent scholar who left the quiet of
his books to become our chief citizen at the moment when he warned his
countrymen of the ignominy and disaster of doing wrong.



A BELATED GUEST

It is doubtful whether the survivor of any order of things finds
compensation in the privilege, however undisputed by his contemporaries,
of recording his memories of it. This is, in the first two or three
instances, a pleasure. It is sweet to sit down, in the shade or by the
fire, and recall names, looks, and tones from the past; and if the
Absences thus entreated to become Presences are those of famous people,
they lend to the fond historian a little of their lustre, in which he
basks for the time with an agreeable sense of celebrity. But another
time comes, and comes very soon, when the pensive pleasure changes to the
pain of duty, and the precious privilege converts itself into a grievous
obligation. You are unable to choose your company among those immortal
shades; if one, why not another, where all seem to have a right to such
gleams of this ‘dolce lome’ as your reminiscences can shed upon them?
Then they gather so rapidly, as the years pass, in these pale realms,
that one, if one continues to survive, is in danger of wearing out such
welcome, great or small, as met ones recollections in the first two or
three instances, if one does one’s duty by each. People begin to say,
and not without reason, in a world so hurried and wearied as this: “Ah,
here he is again with his recollections!” Well, but if the recollections
by some magical good-fortune chance to concern such a contemporary of his
as, say, Bret Harte, shall not he be partially justified, or at least
excused?



I.

My recollections of Bret Harte begin with the arrest, on the Atlantic
shore, of that progress of his from the Pacific Slope, which, in the
simple days of 1871, was like the progress of a prince, in the universal
attention and interest which met and followed it. He was indeed a
prince, a fairy prince in whom every lover of his novel and enchanting
art felt a patriotic property, for his promise and performance in those
earliest tales of ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp’, and ‘Tennessee’s Partner’,
and ‘Maggles’, and ‘The Outcasts of Poker Flat’, were the earnests of an
American literature to come. If it is still to come, in great measure,
that is not Harte’s fault, for he kept on writing those stories, in one
form or another, as long as he lived. He wrote them first and last in
the spirit of Dickens, which no man of his time could quite help doing,
but he wrote them from the life of Bret Harte, on the soil and in the air
of the newest kind of new world, and their freshness took the soul of his
fellow-countrymen not only with joy, but with pride such as the
Europeans, who adored him much longer, could never know in him.

When the adventurous young editor who had proposed being his host for
Cambridge and the Boston neighborhood, while Harte was still in San
Francisco, and had not yet begun his princely progress eastward, read of
the honors that attended his coming from point to point, his courage
fell, as if he had perhaps, committed himself in too great an enterprise.
Who was he, indeed, that he should think of making this

        “Dear son of memory, great heir of fame,”

his guest, especially when he heard that in Chicago Harte failed of
attending a banquet of honor because the givers of it had not sent a
carriage to fetch him to it, as the alleged use was in San Francisco?
Whether true or not, and it was probably not true in just that form, it
must have been this rumor which determined his host to drive into Boston
for him with the handsomest hack which the livery of Cambridge afforded,
and not trust to the horse-car and the local expressman to get him and
his baggage out, as he would have done with a less portentous guest.
However it was, he instantly lost all fear when they met at the station,
and Harte pressed forward with his cordial hand-clasp, as if he were not
even a fairy prince, and with that voice and laugh which were surely the
most winning in the world. He was then, as always, a child of extreme
fashion as to his clothes and the cut of his beard, which he wore in a
mustache and the drooping side-whiskers of the day, and his jovial
physiognomy was as winning as his voice, with its straight nose and
fascinating thrust of the under lip, its fine eyes, and good forehead,
then thickly crowned with the black hair which grew early white, while
his mustache remained dark the most enviable and consoling effect
possible in the universal mortal necessity of either aging or dying. He
was, as one could not help seeing, thickly pitted, but after the first
glance one forgot this, so that a lady who met him for the first time
could say to him, “Mr. Harte, aren’t you afraid to go about in the cars
so recklessly when there is this scare about smallpox?” “No, madam,” he
could answer in that rich note of his, with an irony touched by
pseudo-pathos, “I bear a charmed life.”

The drive out from Boston was not too long for getting on terms of
personal friendship with the family which just filled the hack, the two
boys intensely interested in the novelties of a New England city and
suburb, and the father and mother continually exchanging admiration of
such aspects of nature as presented themselves in the leafless sidewalk
trees, and patches of park and lawn. They found everything so fine, so
refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California, where the natural
forms were so vast that one could not get on companionable terms with
them. Their host heard them without misgiving for the world of romance
which Harte had built up among those huge forms, and with a subtle
perception that this was no excursion of theirs to the East, but a
lifelong exodus from the exile which he presently understood they must
always have felt California to be. It is different now, when people are
every day being born in California, and must begin to feel it home from
the first breath, but it is notable that none of the Californians of that
great early day have gone back to live amid the scenes which inspired and
prospered them.

Before they came in sight of the editor’s humble roof he had mocked
himself to his guest for his trepidations, and Harte with burlesque
magnanimity had consented to be for that occasion only something less
formidable than he had loomed afar. He accepted with joy the theory of
passing a week in the home of virtuous poverty, and the week began as
delightfully as it went on. From first to last Cambridge amused him as
much as it charmed him by that air of academic distinction which was
stranger to him even than the refined trees and grass. It has already
been told how, after a list of the local celebrities had been recited to
him, he said, “why, you couldn’t stand on your front porch and fire off
your revolver without bringing down a two volumer,” and no doubt the
pleasure he had in it was the effect of its contrast with the wild
California he had known, and perhaps, when he had not altogether known
it, had invented.



II.

Cambridge began very promptly to show him those hospitalities which he
could value, and continued the fable of his fairy princeliness in the
curiosity of those humbler admirers who could not hope to be his hosts or
his fellow-guests at dinner or luncheon. Pretty presences in the
tie-backs of the period were seen to flit before the home of virtuous
poverty, hungering for any chance sight of him which his outgoings or
incomings might give. The chances were better with the outgoings than
with the incomings, for these were apt to be so hurried, in the final
result of his constitutional delays, as to have the rapidity of the
homing pigeon’s flight, and to afford hardly a glimpse to the quickest
eye. It cannot harm him, or any one now, to own that Harte was nearly
always late for those luncheons and dinners which he was always going out
to, and it needed the anxieties and energies of both families to get him
into his clothes, and then into the carriage where a good deal of final
buttoning must have been done, in order that he might not arrive so very
late. He was the only one concerned who was quite unconcerned; his
patience with his delays was inexhaustible; he arrived at the expected
houses smiling, serenely jovial, radiating a bland gaiety from his whole
person, and ready to ignore any discomfort he might have occasioned.

Of course, people were glad to have him on his own terms, and it may be
truly said that it was worth while to have him on any terms. There never
was a more charming companion, an easier or more delightful guest.

It was not from what he said, for he was not much of a talker, and almost
nothing of a story-teller; but he could now and then drop the fittest
word, and with a glance or smile of friendly intelligence express the
appreciation of another’s fit word which goes far to establish for a man
the character of boon humorist. It must be said of him that if he took
the honors easily that were paid him he took them modestly, and never by
word or look invited them, or implied that he expected them. It was fine
to see him humorously accepting the humorous attribution of scientific
sympathies from Agassiz, in compliment of his famous epic describing the
incidents that “broke up the society upon the Stanislow.” It was a
little fearsome to hear him frankly owning to Lowell his dislike for
something over-literary in the phrasing of certain verses of ‘The
Cathedral.’ But Lowell could stand that sort of thing from a man who
could say the sort of things that Harte said to him of that delicious
line picturing the bobolink as he

     “Runs down a brook of laughter in the air.”

This, Harte told him, was the line he liked best of all his lines, and
Lowell smoked well content with the praise. Yet they were not men to get
on easily together, Lowell having limitations in directions where Harte
had none. Afterward in London they did not meet often or willingly.
Lowell owned the brilliancy and uncommonness of Harte’s gift, while he
sumptuously surfeited his passion of finding everybody more or less a Jew
by finding that Harte was at least half a Jew on his father’s side; he
had long contended for the Hebraicism of his name.

With all his appreciation of the literary eminences whom Fields used to
class together as “the old saints,” Harte had a spice of irreverence that
enabled him to take them more ironically than they might have liked, and
to see the fun of a minor literary man’s relation to them. Emerson’s
smoking amused him, as a Jovian self-indulgence divinely out of character
with so supreme a god, and he shamelessly burlesqued it, telling how
Emerson at Concord had proposed having a “wet night” with him over a
glass of sherry, and had urged the scant wine upon his young friend with
a hospitable gesture of his cigar. But this was long after the Cambridge
episode, in which Longfellow alone escaped the corrosive touch of his
subtle irreverence, or, more strictly speaking, had only the effect of
his reverence. That gentle and exquisitely modest dignity, of
Longfellow’s he honored with as much veneration as it was in him to
bestow, and he had that sense of Longfellow’s beautiful and perfected art
which is almost a test of a critic’s own fineness.



III.

As for Harte’s talk, it was mostly ironical, not to the extreme of
satire, but tempered to an agreeable coolness even for the things he
admired. He did not apparently care to hear himself praised, but he
could very accurately and perfectly mark his discernment of excellence in
others. He was at times a keen observer of nature and again not,
apparently. Something was said before him and Lowell of the beauty of
his description of a rabbit, startled with fear among the ferns, and
lifting its head with the pulsation of its frightened heart visibly
shaking it; then the talk turned on the graphic homeliness of Dante’s
noticing how the dog’s skin moves upon it, and Harte spoke of the
exquisite shudder with which a horse tries to rid itself of a fly.

But once again, when an azalea was shown to him as the sort of bush that
Sandy drunkenly slept under in ‘The Idyl of Iced Gulch’, he asked, “Why,
is that an azalea?” To be sure, this might have been less from his
ignorance or indifference concerning the quality of the bush he had sent
Sandy to sleep under than from his willingness to make a mock of an
azalea in a very small pot, so disproportionate to uses which an azalea
of Californian size could easily lend itself to.

You never could be sure of Harte; he could only by chance be caught in
earnest about anything or anybody. Except for those slight recognitions
of literary, traits in his talk with Lowell, nothing remained from his
conversation but the general criticism he passed upon his brilliant
fellow-Hebrew Heine, as “rather scorbutic.” He preferred to talk about
the little matters of common incident and experience. He amused himself
with such things as the mystification of the postman of whom he asked his
way to Phillips Avenue, where he adventurously supposed his host to be
living. “Why,” the postman said, “there is no Phillips Avenue in
Cambridge. There’s Phillips Place.” “Well,” Harte assented, “Phillips
Place will do; but there is a Phillips Avenue.” He entered eagerly into
the canvass of the distinctions and celebrities asked to meet him at the
reception made for him, but he had even a greater pleasure in
compassionating his host for the vast disparity between the caterer’s
china and plated ware and the simplicities and humilities of the home of
virtuous poverty; and he spluttered with delight at the sight of the
lofty ‘epergnes’ set up and down the supper-table when he was brought in
to note the preparations made in his honor. Those monumental structures
were an inexhaustible joy to him; he walked round and round the room, and
viewed them in different perspectives, so as to get the full effect of
the towering forms that dwarfed it so.

He was a tease, as many a sweet and fine wit is apt to be, but his
teasing was of the quality of a caress, so much kindness went with it. He
lamented as an irreparable loss his having missed seeing that night an
absent-minded brother in literature, who came in rubber shoes, and
forgetfully wore them throughout the evening. That hospitable soul of
Ralph Keeler, who had known him in California, but had trembled for their
acquaintance when he read of all the honors that might well have spoiled
Harte for the friends of his simpler days, rejoiced in the unchanged
cordiality of his nature when they met, and presently gave him one of
those restaurant lunches in Boston, which he was always sumptuously
providing out of his destitution. Harte was the life of a time which was
perhaps less a feast of reason than a flow of soul. The truth is, there
was nothing but careless stories carelessly told, and jokes and laughing,
and a great deal of mere laughing without the jokes, the whole as unlike
the ideal of a literary symposium as well might be; but there was present
one who met with that pleasant Boston company for the first time, and to
whom Harte attributed a superstition of Boston seriousness not realized
then and there. “Look at him,” he said, from time to time. “This is the
dream of his life,” and then shouted and choked with fun at the
difference between the occasion and the expectation he would have
imagined in his commensal’s mind. At a dinner long after in London,
where several of the commensals of that time met again, with other
literary friends of a like age and stature, Harte laid his arms well
along their shoulders as they formed in a half-circle before him, and
screamed out in mocking mirth at the bulbous favor to which the slim
shapes of the earlier date had come. The sight was not less a rapture to
him that he was himself the prey of the same practical joke from the
passing years. The hair which the years had wholly swept from some of
those thoughtful brows, or left spindling autumnal spears, “or few or
none,” to “shake against the cold,” had whitened to a wintry snow on his,
while his mustache had kept its youthful black. “He looks,” one of his
friends said to another as they walked home together, “like a French
marquis of the ancien regime.” “Yes,” the other assented, thoughtfully,
“or like an American actor made up for the part.”

The saying closely fitted the outward fact, but was of a subtle injustice
in its implication of anything histrionic in Harte’s nature. Never was
any man less a ‘poseur’; he made simply and helplessly known what he was
at any and every moment, and he would join the witness very cheerfully in
enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself. In the
course of events, which were in his case so very human, it came about on
a subsequent visit of his to Boston that an impatient creditor decided to
right himself out of the proceeds of the lecture which was to be given,
and had the law corporeally present at the house of the friend where
Harte dined, and in the anteroom at the lecture-hall, and on the
platform, where the lecture was delivered with beautiful aplomb and
untroubled charm. He was indeed the only one privy to the law’s presence
who was not the least affected by it, so that when his host of an earlier
time ventured to suggest, “Well, Harte, this is the old literary
tradition; this is the Fleet business over again,” he joyously smote his
thigh and crowed out, “Yes, the Fleet!” No doubt he tasted all the
delicate humor of the situation, and his pleasure in it was quite
unaffected.

If his temperament was not adapted to the harsh conditions of the elder
American world, it might very well be that his temperament was not
altogether in the wrong. If it disabled him for certain experiences of
life, it was the source of what was most delightful in his personality,
and perhaps most beautiful in his talent. It enabled him to do such
things as he did without being at all anguished for the things he did not
do, and indeed could not. His talent was not a facile gift; he owned
that he often went day after day to his desk, and sat down before that
yellow post-office paper on which he liked to write his literature, in
that exquisitely refined script of his, without being able to inscribe a
line. It may be owned for him that though he came to the East at
thirty-four, which ought to have been the very prime of his powers, he
seemed to have arrived after the age of observation was past for him. He
saw nothing aright, either in Newport, where he went to live, or in New
York, where he sojourned, or on those lecturing tours which took him
about the whole country; or if he saw it aright, he could not report it
aright, or would not. After repeated and almost invariable failures to
deal with the novel characters and circumstances which he encountered he
left off trying, and frankly went back to the semi-mythical California he
had half discovered, half created, and wrote Bret Harte over and over as
long as he lived. This, whether he did it from instinct or from reason,
was the best thing he could do, and it went as nearly as might be to
satisfy the insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer to be
found on our map.

It is imaginable of Harte that this temperament defended him from any
bitterness in the disappointment he may have shared with that simple
American public which in the early eighteen-seventies expected any and
everything of him in fiction and drama. The long breath was not his; he
could not write a novel, though he produced the like of one or two, and
his plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it. At any
rate, they could not keep it, even when they got it, and they denoted the
fatigue or the indifference of their author in being dramatizations of
his longer or shorter fictions, and not originally dramatic efforts. The
direction in which his originality lasted longest, and most strikingly
affirmed his power, was in the direction of his verse.

Whatever minds there may be about Harte’s fiction finally, there can
hardly be more than one mind about his poetry. He was indeed a poet;
whether he wrote what drolly called itself “dialect,” or wrote language,
he was a poet of a fine and fresh touch. It must be allowed him that in
prose as well he had the inventive gift, but he had it in verse far more
importantly. There are lines, phrases, turns in his poems,
characterizations, and pictures which will remain as enduringly as
anything American, if that is not saying altogether too little for them.
In poetry he rose to all the occasions he made for himself, though he
could not rise to the occasions made for him, and so far failed in the
demands he acceded to for a Phi Beta Kappa poem, as to come to that
august Harvard occasion with a jingle so trivial, so out of keeping, so
inadequate that his enemies, if he ever truly had any, must have suffered
from it almost as much as his friends. He himself did not suffer from
his failure, from having read before the most elect assembly of the
country a poem which would hardly have served the careless needs of an
informal dinner after the speaking had begun; he took the whole
disastrous business lightly, gayly, leniently, kindly, as that golden
temperament of his enabled him to take all the good or bad of life.

The first year of his Eastern sojourn was salaried in a sum which took
the souls of all his young contemporaries with wonder, if no baser
passion, in the days when dollars were of so much farther flight than
now, but its net result in a literary return to his publishers was one
story and two or three poems. They had not profited much by his book,
which, it will doubtless amaze a time of fifty thousand editions selling
before their publication, to learn had sold only thirty-five hundred in
the sixth month of its career, as Harte himself,

     “With sick and scornful looks averse,”

confided to his Cambridge host after his first interview with the Boston
counting-room. It was the volume which contained “The Luck of Roaring
Camp,” and the other early tales which made him a continental, and then
an all but a world-wide fame. Stories that had been talked over, and
laughed over, and cried over all up and down the land, that had been
received with acclaim by criticism almost as boisterous as their
popularity, and recognized as the promise of greater things than any done
before in their kind, came to no more than this pitiful figure over the
booksellers’ counters. It argued much for the publishers that in spite
of this stupefying result they were willing, they were eager, to pay him
ten thousand dollars for whatever, however much or little, he chose to
write in a year: Their offer was made in Boston, after some offers
mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague, had been made in New
York.

It was not his fault that their venture proved of such slight return in
literary material. Harte was in the midst of new and alien
conditions,--[See a corollary in M. Froude who visited the U.S. for a few
months and then published a comprehensive analysis of the nation and its
people. Twain’s rebuttal (Mr. Froude’s Progress) would have been ‘a
propos’ for Harte in Cambridge. D.W.]--and he had always his temperament
against him, as well as the reluctant if not the niggard nature of his
muse. He would no doubt have been only too glad to do more than he did
for the money, but actually if not literally he could not do more. When
it came to literature, all the gay improvidence of life forsook him, and
he became a stern, rigorous, exacting self-master, who spared himself
nothing to achieve the perfection at which he aimed. He was of the order
of literary men like Goldsmith and De Quincey, and Sterne and Steele, in
his relations with the outer world, but in his relations with the inner
world he was one of the most duteous and exemplary citizens. There was
nothing of his easy-going hilarity in that world; there he was of a
Puritanic severity, and of a conscience that forgave him no pang. Other
California writers have testified to the fidelity with which he did his
work as editor. He made himself not merely the arbiter but the
inspiration of his contributors, and in a region where literature had
hardly yet replaced the wild sage-brush of frontier journalism, he made
the sand-lots of San Francisco to blossom as the rose, and created a
literary periodical of the first class on the borders of civilization.

It is useless to wonder now what would have been his future if the
publisher of the Overland Monthly had been of imagination or capital
enough to meet the demand which Harte dimly intimated to his Cambridge
host as the condition of his remaining in California. Publishers, men
with sufficient capital, are of a greatly varying gift in the regions of
prophecy, and he of the Overland Monthly was not to be blamed if he could
not foresee his account in paying Harte ten thousand a year to continue
editing the magazine. He did according to his lights, and Harte came to
the East, and then went to England, where his last twenty-five years were
passed in cultivating the wild plant of his Pacific Slope discovery. It
was always the same plant, leaf and flower and fruit, but it perennially
pleased the constant English world, and thence the European world, though
it presently failed of much delighting these fastidious States. Probably
he would have done something else if he could; he did not keep on doing
the wild mining-camp thing because it was the easiest, but because it was
for him the only possible thing. Very likely he might have preferred not
doing anything.



IV.

The joyous visit of a week, which has been here so poorly recovered from
the past, came to an end, and the host went with his guest to the station
in as much vehicular magnificence as had marked his going to meet him
there. Harte was no longer the alarming portent of the earlier time, but
an experience of unalloyed delight. You must love a person whose worst
trouble-giving was made somehow a favor by his own unconsciousness of the
trouble, and it was a most flattering triumph to have got him in time, or
only a little late, to so many luncheons and dinners. If only now he
could be got to the train in time the victory would be complete, the
happiness of the visit without a flaw. Success seemed to crown the
fondest hope in this respect. The train had not yet left the station;
there stood the parlor-car which Harte had seats in; and he was followed
aboard for those last words in which people try to linger out pleasures
they have known together. In this case the sweetest of the pleasures had
been sitting up late after those dinners, and talking them over, and then
degenerating from that talk into the mere giggle and making giggle which
Charles Lamb found the best thing in life. It had come to this as the
host and guest sat together for those parting moments, when Harte
suddenly started up in the discovery of having forgotten to get some
cigars. They rushed out of the train together, and after a wild descent
upon the cigar-counter of the restaurant, Harte rushed back to his car.
But by this time the train was already moving with that deceitful
slowness of the departing train, and Harte had to clamber up the steps of
the rearmost platform. His host clambered after, to make sure that he
was aboard, which done, he dropped to the ground, while Harte drew out of
the station, blandly smiling, and waving his hand with a cigar in it, in
picturesque farewell from the platform.

Then his host realized that he had dropped to the ground barely in time
to escape being crushed against the side of the archway that sharply
descended beside the steps of the train, and he went and sat down in that
handsomest hack, and was for a moment deathly sick at the danger that had
not realized itself to him in season. To be sure, he was able, long
after, to adapt the incident to the exigencies of fiction, and to have a
character, not otherwise to be conveniently disposed of, actually crushed
to death between a moving train and such an archway.

Besides, he had then and always afterward, the immense super-compensation
of the memories of that visit from one of the most charming personalities
in the world,

     “In life’s morning march when his bosom was young,”

and when infinitely less would have sated him. Now death has come to
join its vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life, and that
blithe spirit is elsewhere. But nothing can take from him who remains
the witchery of that most winning presence. Still it looks smiling from
the platform of the car, and casts a farewell of mock heartbreak from it.
Still a gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years that are now
numbered, and out of somewhere the hearer’s sense is rapt with the mellow
cordial of a voice that was like no other.

[This last paragraph reminds one again that, as with Holmes: a great poet
writes the best prose. D.W.]



MY MARK TWAIN



I.

It was in the little office of James T. Fields, over the bookstore of
Ticknor & Fields, at 124 Tremont Street, Boston, that I first met my
friend of now forty-four years, Samuel L. Clemens. Mr. Fields was then
the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I was his proud and glad
assistant, with a pretty free hand as to manuscripts, and an unmanacled
command of the book-notices at the end of the magazine. I wrote nearly
all of them myself, and in 1869 I had written rather a long notice of a
book just winning its way to universal favor. In this review I had
intimated my reservations concerning the ‘Innocents Abroad’, but I had
the luck, if not the sense, to recognize that it was such fun as we had
not had before. I forget just what I said in praise of it, and it does
not matter; it is enough that I praised it enough to satisfy the author.
He now signified as much, and he stamped his gratitude into my memory
with a story wonderfully allegorizing the situation, which the mock
modesty of print forbids my repeating here. Throughout my long
acquaintance with him his graphic touch was always allowing itself a
freedom which I cannot bring my fainter pencil to illustrate. He had the
Southwestern, the Lincolnian, the Elizabethan breadth of parlance, which
I suppose one ought not to call coarse without calling one’s self
prudish; and I was often hiding away in discreet holes and corners the
letters in which he had loosed his bold fancy to stoop on rank
suggestion; I could not bear to burn them, and I could not, after the
first reading, quite bear to look at them. I shall best give my feeling
on this point by saying that in it he was Shakespearian, or if his ghost
will not suffer me the word, then he was Baconian.

At the time of our first meeting, which must have been well toward the
winter, Clemens (as I must call him instead of Mark Twain, which seemed
always somehow to mask him from my personal sense) was wearing a sealskin
coat, with the fur out, in the satisfaction of a caprice, or the love of
strong effect which he was apt to indulge through life. I do not know
what droll comment was in Fields’s mind with respect to this garment, but
probably he felt that here was an original who was not to be brought to
any Bostonian book in the judgment of his vivid qualities. With his
crest of dense red hair, and the wide sweep of his flaming mustache,
Clemens was not discordantly clothed in that sealskin coat, which
afterward, in spite of his own warmth in it, sent the cold chills through
me when I once accompanied it down Broadway, and shared the immense
publicity it won him. He had always a relish for personal effect, which
expressed itself in the white suit of complete serge which he wore in his
last years, and in the Oxford gown which he put on for every possible
occasion, and said he would like to wear all the time. That was not
vanity in him, but a keen feeling for costume which the severity of our
modern tailoring forbids men, though it flatters women to every excess in
it; yet he also enjoyed the shock, the offence, the pang which it gave
the sensibilities of others. Then there were times he played these
pranks for pure fun, and for the pleasure of the witness. Once I
remember seeing him come into his drawing-room at Hartford in a pair of
white cowskin slippers, with the hair out, and do a crippled colored
uncle to the joy of all beholders. Or, I must not say all, for I
remember also the dismay of Mrs. Clemens, and her low, despairing cry of,
“Oh, Youth!” That was her name for him among their friends, and it
fitted him as no other would, though I fancied with her it was a
shrinking from his baptismal Samuel, or the vernacular Sam of his earlier
companionships. He was a youth to the end of his days, the heart of a
boy with the head of a sage; the heart of a good boy, or a bad boy, but
always a wilful boy, and wilfulest to show himself out at every time for
just the boy he was.



II.

There is a gap in my recollections of Clemens, which I think is of a year
or two, for the next thing I remember of him is meeting him at a lunch in
Boston, given us by that genius of hospitality, the tragically destined
Ralph Keeler, author of one of the most unjustly forgotten books,
‘Vagabond Adventures’, a true bit of picaresque autobiography. Keeler
never had any money, to the general knowledge, and he never borrowed, and
he could not have had credit at the restaurant where he invited us to
feast at his expense. There was T. B. Aldrich, there was J. T. Fields,
much the oldest of our company, who had just freed himself from the
trammels of the publishing business, and was feeling his freedom in every
word; there was Bret Harte, who had lately come East in his princely
progress from California; and there was Clemens. Nothing remains to me
of the happy time but a sense of idle and aimless and joyful talk-play,
beginning and ending nowhere, of eager laughter, of countless good
stories from Fields, of a heat-lightning shimmer of wit from Aldrich, of
an occasional concentration of our joint mockeries upon our host, who
took it gladly; and amid the discourse, so little improving, but so full
of good fellowship, Bret Harte’s fleeting dramatization of Clemens’s
mental attitude toward a symposium of Boston illuminates. “Why,
fellows,” he spluttered, “this is the dream of Mark’s life,” and I
remember the glance from under Clemens’s feathery eyebrows which betrayed
his enjoyment of the fun. We had beefsteak with mushrooms, which in
recognition of their shape Aldrich hailed as shoe-pegs, and to crown the
feast we had an omelette souse, which the waiter brought in as flat as a
pancake, amid our shouts of congratulations to poor Keeler, who took them
with appreciative submission. It was in every way what a Boston literary
lunch ought not to have been in the popular ideal which Harte attributed
to Clemens.

Our next meeting was at Hartford, or, rather, at Springfield, where
Clemens greeted us on the way to Hartford. Aldrich was going on to be
his guest, and I was going to be Charles Dudley Warner’s, but Clemens had
come part way to welcome us both. In the good fellowship of that cordial
neighborhood we had two such days as the aging sun no longer shines on in
his round. There was constant running in and out of friendly houses
where the lively hosts and guests called one another by their Christian
names or nicknames, and no such vain ceremony as knocking or ringing at
doors. Clemens was then building the stately mansion in which he
satisfied his love of magnificence as if it had been another sealskin
coat, and he was at the crest of the prosperity which enabled him to
humor every whim or extravagance. The house was the design of that most
original artist, Edward Potter, who once, when hard pressed by
incompetent curiosity for the name of his style in a certain church,
proposed that it should be called the English violet order of
architecture; and this house was so absolutely suited to the owner’s
humor that I suppose there never was another house like it; but its
character must be for recognition farther along in these reminiscences.
The vividest impression which Clemens gave us two ravenous young Boston
authors was of the satisfying, the surfeiting nature of subscription
publication. An army of agents was overrunning the country with the
prospectuses of his books, and delivering them by the scores of thousands
in completed sale. Of the ‘Innocents Abroad’ he said, “It sells right
along just like the Bible,” and ‘Roughing It’ was swiftly following,
without perhaps ever quite overtaking it in popularity. But he lectured
Aldrich and me on the folly of that mode of publication in the trade
which we had thought it the highest success to achieve a chance in.
“Anything but subscription publication is printing for private
circulation,” he maintained, and he so won upon our greed and hope that
on the way back to Boston we planned the joint authorship of a volume
adapted to subscription publication. We got a very good name for it, as
we believed, in Memorable Murders, and we never got farther with it, but
by the time we reached Boston we were rolling in wealth so deep that we
could hardly walk home in the frugal fashion by which we still thought it
best to spare car fare; carriage fare we did not dream of even in that
opulence.



III.

The visits to Hartford which had begun with this affluence continued
without actual increase of riches for me, but now I went alone, and in
Warner’s European and Egyptian absences I formed the habit of going to
Clemens. By this time he was in his new house, where he used to give me
a royal chamber on the ground floor, and come in at night after I had
gone to bed to take off the burglar alarm so that the family should not
be roused if anybody tried to get in at my window. This would be after
we had sat up late, he smoking the last of his innumerable cigars, and
soothing his tense nerves with a mild hot Scotch, while we both talked
and talked and talked, of everything in the heavens and on the earth, and
the waters under the earth. After two days of this talk I would come
away hollow, realizing myself best in the image of one of those
locust-shells which you find sticking to the bark of trees at the end of
summer. Once, after some such bout of brains, we went down to New York
together, and sat facing each other in the Pullman smoker without passing
a syllable till we had occasion to say, “Well, we’re there.” Then, with
our installation in a now vanished hotel (the old Brunswick, to be
specific), the talk began again with the inspiration of the novel
environment, and went on and on. We wished to be asleep, but we could
not stop, and he lounged through the rooms in the long nightgown which he
always wore in preference to the pajamas which he despised, and told the
story of his life, the inexhaustible, the fairy, the Arabian Nights
story, which I could never tire of even when it began to be told over
again. Or at times he would reason high--

       “Of Providence, foreknowledge, will and fate,
        Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute,”

walking up and down, and halting now and then, with a fine toss and slant
of his shaggy head, as some bold thought or splendid joke struck him.

He was in those days a constant attendant at the church of his great
friend, the Rev. Joseph H. Twichell, and at least tacitly far from the
entire negation he came to at last. I should say he had hardly yet
examined the grounds of his passive acceptance of his wife’s belief, for
it was hers and not his, and he held it unscanned in the beautiful and
tender loyalty to her which was the most moving quality of his most
faithful soul. I make bold to speak of the love between them, because
without it I could not make him known to others as he was known to me. It
was a greater part of him than the love of most men for their wives, and
she merited all the worship he could give her, all the devotion, all the
implicit obedience, by her surpassing force and beauty of character. She
was in a way the loveliest person I have ever seen, the gentlest, the
kindest, without a touch of weakness; she united wonderful tact with
wonderful truth; and Clemens not only accepted her rule implicitly, but
he rejoiced, he gloried in it. I am not sure that he noticed all her
goodness in the actions that made it a heavenly vision to others, he so
had the habit of her goodness; but if there was any forlorn and helpless
creature in the room Mrs. Clemens was somehow promptly at his side or
hers; she was always seeking occasion of kindness to those in her
household or out of it; she loved to let her heart go beyond the reach of
her hand, and imagined the whole hard and suffering world with compassion
for its structural as well as incidental wrongs. I suppose she had her
ladyhood limitations, her female fears of etiquette and convention, but
she did not let them hamper the wild and splendid generosity with which
Clemens rebelled against the social stupidities and cruelties. She had
been a lifelong invalid when he met her, and he liked to tell the
beautiful story of their courtship to each new friend whom he found
capable of feeling its beauty or worthy of hearing it. Naturally, her
father had hesitated to give her into the keeping of the young strange
Westerner, who had risen up out of the unknown with his giant reputation
of burlesque humorist, and demanded guaranties, demanded proofs. “He
asked me,” Clemens would say, “if I couldn’t give him the names of people
who knew me in California, and when it was time to hear from them I heard
from him. ‘Well, Mr. Clemens,’ he said, ‘nobody seems to have a very
good word for you.’ I hadn’t referred him to people that I thought were
going to whitewash me. I thought it was all up with me, but I was
disappointed. ‘So I guess I shall have to back you myself.’”

Whether this made him faithfuler to the trust put in him I cannot say,
but probably not; it was always in him to be faithful to any trust, and
in proportion as a trust of his own was betrayed he was ruthlessly and
implacably resentful. But I wish now to speak of the happiness of that
household in Hartford which responded so perfectly to the ideals of the
mother when the three daughters, so lovely and so gifted, were yet little
children. There had been a boy, and “Yes, I killed him,” Clemens once
said, with the unsparing self-blame in which he would wreak an unavailing
regret. He meant that he had taken the child out imprudently, and the
child had taken the cold which he died of, but it was by no means certain
this was through its father’s imprudence. I never heard him speak of his
son except that once, but no doubt in his deep heart his loss was
irreparably present. He was a very tender father and delighted in the
minds of his children, but he was wise enough to leave their training
altogether to the wisdom of their mother. He left them to that in
everything, keeping for himself the pleasure of teaching them little
scenes of drama, learning languages with them, and leading them in
singing. They came to the table with their parents, and could have set
him an example in behavior when, in moments of intense excitement, he
used to leave his place and walk up and down the room, flying his napkin
and talking and talking.

It was after his first English sojourn that I used to visit him, and he
was then full of praise of everything English: the English personal
independence and public spirit, and hospitality, and truth. He liked to
tell stories in proof of their virtues, but he was not blind to the
defects of their virtues: their submissive acceptance of caste, their
callousness with strangers; their bluntness with one another. Mrs.
Clemens had been in a way to suffer socially more than he, and she
praised the English less. She had sat after dinner with ladies who
snubbed and ignored one another, and left her to find her own amusement
in the absence of the attention with which Americans perhaps cloy their
guests, but which she could not help preferring. In their successive
sojourns among them I believe he came to like the English less and she
more; the fine delight of his first acceptance among them did not renew
itself till his Oxford degree was given him; then it made his cup run
over, and he was glad the whole world should see it.

His wife would not chill the ardor of his early Anglomania, and in this,
as in everything, she wished to humor him to the utmost. No one could
have realized more than she his essential fineness, his innate nobleness.
Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know them to be, but
from the outside I should say that this marriage was one of the most
perfect. It lasted in his absolute devotion to the day of her death,
that delayed long in cruel suffering, and that left one side of him in
lasting night. From Florence there came to me heartbreaking letters from
him about the torture she was undergoing, and at last a letter saying she
was dead, with the simple-hearted cry, “I wish I was with Livy.” I do
not know why I have left saying till now that she was a very beautiful
woman, classically regular in features, with black hair smooth over her
forehead, and with tenderly peering, myopia eyes, always behind glasses,
and a smile of angelic kindness. But this kindness went with a sense of
humor which qualified her to appreciate the self-lawed genius of a man
who will be remembered with the great humorists of all time, with
Cervantes, with Swift, or with any others worthy his company; none of
them was his equal in humanity.



IV.

Clemens had appointed himself, with the architect’s connivance, a
luxurious study over the library in his new house, but as his children
grew older this study, with its carved and cushioned arm-chairs, was
given over to them for a school-room, and he took the room above his
stable, which had been intended for his coachman. There we used to talk
together, when we were not walking and talking together, until he
discovered that he could make a more commodious use of the billiard-room
at the top of his house, for the purposes of literature and friendship.
It was pretty cold up there in the early spring and late fall weather
with which I chiefly associate the place, but by lighting up all the
gas-burners and kindling a reluctant fire on the hearth we could keep it
well above freezing. Clemens could also push the balls about, and,
without rivalry from me, who could no more play billiards than smoke,
could win endless games of pool, while he carried points of argument
against imaginable differers in opinion. Here he wrote many of his tales
and sketches, and for anything I know some of his books. I particularly
remember his reading me here his first rough sketch of Captain
Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven, with the real name of the captain, whom I
knew already from his many stories about him.

We had a peculiar pleasure in looking off from the high windows on the
pretty Hartford landscape, and down from them into the tops of the trees
clothing the hillside by which his house stood. We agreed that there was
a novel charm in trees seen from such a vantage, far surpassing that of
the farther scenery. He had not been a country boy for nothing; rather
he had been a country boy, or, still better, a village boy, for
everything that Nature can offer the young of our species, and no aspect
of her was lost on him. We were natives of the same vast Mississippi
Valley; and Missouri was not so far from Ohio but that we were akin in
our first knowledges of woods and fields as we were in our early
parlance. I had outgrown the use of mine through my greater bookishness,
but I gladly recognized the phrases which he employed for their lasting
juiciness and the long-remembered savor they had on his mental palate.

I have elsewhere sufficiently spoken of his unsophisticated use of words,
of the diction which forms the backbone of his manly style. If I mention
my own greater bookishness, by which I mean his less quantitative
reading, it is to give myself better occasion to note that he was always
reading some vital book. It might be some out-of-the-way book, but it
had the root of the human matter in it: a volume of great trials; one of
the supreme autobiographies; a signal passage of history, a narrative of
travel, a story of captivity, which gave him life at first-hand. As I
remember, he did not care much for fiction, and in that sort he had
certain distinct loathings; there were certain authors whose names he
seemed not so much to pronounce as to spew out of his mouth. Goldsmith
was one of these, but his prime abhorrence was my dear and honored prime
favorite, Jane Austen. He once said to me, I suppose after he had been
reading some of my unsparing praises of her--I am always praising her,
“You seem to think that woman could write,” and he forbore withering me
with his scorn, apparently because we had been friends so long, and he
more pitied than hated me for my bad taste. He seemed not to have any
preferences among novelists; or at least I never heard him express any.
He used to read the modern novels I praised, in or out of print; but I do
not think he much liked reading fiction. As for plays, he detested the
theatre, and said he would as lief do a sum as follow a plot on the
stage. He could not, or did not, give any reasons for his literary
abhorrences, and perhaps he really had none. But he could have said very
distinctly, if he had needed, why he liked the books he did. I was away
at the time of his great Browning passion, and I know of it chiefly from
hearsay; but at the time Tolstoy was doing what could be done to make me
over Clemens wrote, “That man seems to have been to you what Browning was
to me.” I do not know that he had other favorites among the poets, but
he had favorite poems which he liked to read to you, and he read, of
course, splendidly. I have forgotten what piece of John Hay’s it was
that he liked so much, but I remembered how he fiercely revelled in the
vengefulness of William Morris’s ‘Sir Guy of the Dolorous Blast,’ and how
he especially exalted in the lines which tell of the supposed speaker’s
joy in slaying the murderer of his brother:

       “I am threescore years and ten,
        And my hair is ‘nigh turned gray,
        But I am glad to think of the moment when
        I took his life away.”

Generally, I fancy his pleasure in poetry was not great, and I do not
believe he cared much for the conventionally accepted masterpieces of
literature. He liked to find out good things and great things for
himself; sometimes he would discover these in a masterpiece new to him
alone, and then, if you brought his ignorance home to him, he enjoyed it,
and enjoyed it the more the more you rubbed it in.

Of all the literary men I have known he was the most unliterary in his
make and manner. I do not know whether he had any acquaintance with
Latin, but I believe not the least; German he knew pretty well, and
Italian enough late in life to have fun with it; but he used English in
all its alien derivations as if it were native to his own air, as if it
had come up out of American, out of Missourian ground. His style was
what we know, for good and for bad, but his manner, if I may difference
the two, was as entirely his own as if no one had ever written before. I
have noted before this how he was not enslaved to the consecutiveness in
writing which the rest of us try to keep chained to. That is, he wrote
as he thought, and as all men think, without sequence, without an eye to
what went before or should come after. If something beyond or beside
what he was saying occurred to him, he invited it into his page, and made
it as much at home there as the nature of it would suffer him. Then, when
he was through with the welcoming of this casual and unexpected guest, he
would go back to the company he was entertaining, and keep on with what
he had been talking about. He observed this manner in the construction
of his sentences, and the arrangement of his chapters, and the ordering
or disordering of his compilations.--[Nowhere is this characteristic
better found than in Twain’s ‘Autobiography,’ it was not a “style” it was
unselfconscious thought D.W.]--I helped him with a Library of Humor,
which he once edited, and when I had done my work according to tradition,
with authors, times, and topics carefully studied in due sequence, he
tore it all apart, and “chucked” the pieces in wherever the fancy, for
them took him at the moment. He was right: we were not making a
text-book, but a book for the pleasure rather than the instruction of the
reader, and he did not see why the principle on which he built his
travels and reminiscences and tales and novels should not apply to it;
and I do not now see, either, though at the time it confounded me. On
minor points he was, beyond any author I have known, without favorite
phrases or pet words. He utterly despised the avoidance of repetitions
out of fear of tautology. If a word served his turn better than a
substitute, he would use it as many times in a page as he chose.



V.

At that time I had become editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and I had
allegiances belonging to the conduct of what was and still remains the
most scrupulously cultivated of our periodicals. When Clemens began to
write for it he came willingly under its rules, for with all his
wilfulness there never was a more biddable man in things you could show
him a reason for. He never made the least of that trouble which so
abounds for the hapless editor from narrower-minded contributors. If you
wanted a thing changed, very good, he changed it; if you suggested that a
word or a sentence or a paragraph had better be struck out, very good, he
struck it out. His proof-sheets came back each a veritable “mush of
concession,” as Emerson says. Now and then he would try a little
stronger language than ‘The Atlantic’ had stomach for, and once when I
sent him a proof I made him observe that I had left out the profanity. He
wrote back: “Mrs. Clemens opened that proof, and lit into the room with
danger in her eye. What profanity? You see, when I read the manuscript
to her I skipped that.” It was part of his joke to pretend a violence in
that gentlest creature which the more amusingly realized the situation to
their friends.

I was always very glad of him and proud of him as a contributor, but I
must not claim the whole merit, or the first merit of having him write
for us. It was the publisher, the late H. O. Houghton, who felt the
incongruity of his absence from the leading periodical of the country,
and was always urging me to get him to write. I will take the credit of
being eager for him, but it is to the publisher’s credit that he tried,
so far as the modest traditions of ‘The Atlantic’ would permit, to meet
the expectations in pay which the colossal profits of Clemens’s books
might naturally have bred in him. Whether he was really able to do this
he never knew from Clemens himself, but probably twenty dollars a page
did not surfeit the author of books that “sold right along just like the
Bible.”

We had several short contributions from Clemens first, all of capital
quality, and then we had the series of papers which went mainly to the
making of his great book, ‘Life on the Mississippi’. Upon the whole I
have the notion that Clemens thought this his greatest book, and he was
supported in his opinion by that of the ‘portier’ in his hotel at Vienna,
and that of the German Emperor, who, as he told me with equal respect for
the preference of each, united in thinking it his best; with such
far-sundered social poles approaching in its favor, he apparently found
himself without standing for opposition. At any rate, the papers won
instant appreciation from his editor and publisher, and from the readers
of their periodical, which they expected to prosper beyond precedent in
its circulation. But those were days of simpler acceptance of the
popular rights of newspapers than these are, when magazines strictly
guard their vested interests against them. ‘The New York Times’ and the
‘St. Louis Democrat’ profited by the advance copies of the magazine sent
them to reprint the papers month by month. Together they covered nearly
the whole reading territory of the Union, and the terms of their daily
publication enabled them to anticipate the magazine in its own restricted
field. Its subscription list was not enlarged in the slightest measure,
and The Atlantic Monthly languished on the news-stands as undesired as
ever.



VI.

It was among my later visits to Hartford that we began to talk up the
notion of collaborating a play, but we did not arrive at any clear
intention, and it was a telegram out of the clear sky that one day
summoned me from Boston to help with a continuation of Colonel Sellers. I
had been a witness of the high joy of Clemens in the prodigious triumph
of the first Colonel Sellers, which had been dramatized from the novel of
‘The Gilded Age.’ This was the joint work of Clemens and Charles Dudley
Warner, and the story had been put upon the stage by some one in Utah,
whom Clemens first brought to book in the courts for violation of his
copyright, and then indemnified for such rights as his adaptation of the
book had given him. The structure of the play as John T. Raymond gave it
was substantially the work of this unknown dramatist. Clemens never
pretended, to me at any rate, that he had the least hand in it; he
frankly owned that he was incapable of dramatization; yet the vital part
was his, for the characters in the play were his as the book embodied
them, and the success which it won with the public was justly his. This
he shared equally with the actor, following the company with an agent,
who counted out the author’s share of the gate money, and sent him a note
of the amount every day by postal card. The postals used to come about
dinner-time, and Clemens would read them aloud to us in wild triumph.

One hundred and fifty dollars--two hundred dollars--three hundred dollars
were the gay figures which they bore, and which he flaunted in the air
before he sat down at table, or rose from it to brandish, and then,
flinging his napkin into his chair, walked up and down to exult in.

By-and-by the popularity, of the play waned, and the time came when he
sickened of the whole affair, and withdrew his agent, and took whatever
gain from it the actor apportioned him. He was apt to have these sudden
surceases, following upon the intensities of his earlier interest; though
he seemed always to have the notion of making something more of Colonel
Sellers. But when I arrived in Hartford in answer to his summons, I
found him with no definite idea of what he wanted to do with him. I
represented that we must have some sort of plan, and he agreed that we
should both jot down a scenario overnight and compare our respective
schemes the next morning. As the author of a large number of little
plays which have been privately presented throughout the United States
and in parts of the United Kingdom, without ever getting upon the public
stage except for the noble ends of charity, and then promptly getting off
it, I felt authorized to make him observe that his scheme was as nearly
nothing as chaos could be. He agreed hilariously with me, and was
willing to let it stand in proof of his entire dramatic inability. At the
same time he liked my plot very much, which ultimated Sellers, according
to Clemens’s intention, as a man crazed by his own inventions and by his
superstition that he was the rightful heir to an English earldom. The
exuberant nature of Sellers and the vast range of his imagination served
our purpose in other ways. Clemens made him a spiritualist, whose
specialty in the occult was materialization; he became on impulse an
ardent temperance reformer, and he headed a procession of temperance
ladies after disinterestedly testing the deleterious effects of liquor
upon himself until he could not walk straight; always he wore a
marvellous fire-extinguisher strapped on his back, to give proof in any
emergency of the effectiveness of his invention in that way.

We had a jubilant fortnight in working the particulars of these things
out. It was not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else, but I
could very easily write like Clemens, and we took the play scene and
scene about, quite secure of coming out in temperamental agreement. The
characters remained for the most part his, and I varied them only to make
them more like his than, if possible, he could. Several years after,
when I looked over a copy of the play, I could not always tell my work
from his; I only knew that I had done certain scenes. We would work all
day long at our several tasks, and then at night, before dinner, read
them over to each other. No dramatists ever got greater joy out of their
creations, and when I reflect that the public never had the chance of
sharing our joy I pity the public from a full heart. I still believe
that the play was immensely funny; I still believe that if it could once
have got behind the footlights it would have continued to pack the house
before them for an indefinite succession of nights. But this may be my
fondness.

At any rate, it was not to be. Raymond had identified himself with
Sellers in the play-going imagination, and whether consciously or
unconsciously we constantly worked with Raymond in our minds. But before
this time bitter displeasures had risen between Clemens and Raymond, and
Clemens was determined that Raymond should never have the play. He first
offered it to several other actors, who eagerly caught it, only to give
it back with the despairing renunciation, “That is a Raymond play.” We
tried managers with it, but their only question was whether they could
get Raymond to do it. In the mean time Raymond had provided himself with
a play for the winter--a very good play, by Demarest Lloyd; and he was in
no hurry for ours. Perhaps he did not really care for it perhaps he knew
when he heard of it that it must come to him in the end. In the end it
did, from my hand, for Clemens would not meet him. I found him in a mood
of sweet reasonableness, perhaps the more softened by one of those
lunches which our publisher, the hospitable James R. Osgood, was always
bringing people together over in Boston. He said that he could not do
the play that winter, but he was sure that he should like it, and he had
no doubt he would do it the next winter. So I gave him the manuscript,
in spite of Clemens’s charges, for his suspicions and rancors were such
that he would not have had me leave it for a moment in the actor’s hands.
But it seemed a conclusion that involved success and fortune for us. In
due time, but I do not remember how long after, Raymond declared himself
delighted with the piece; he entered into a satisfactory agreement for
it, and at the beginning of the next season he started with it to
Buffalo, where he was to give a first production. At Rochester he paused
long enough to return it, with the explanation that a friend had noted to
him the fact that Colonel Sellers in the play was a lunatic, and insanity
was so serious a thing that it could not be represented on the stage
without outraging the sensibilities of the audience; or words to that
effect. We were too far off to allege Hamlet to the contrary, or King
Lear, or to instance the delight which generations of readers throughout
the world had taken in the mad freaks of Don Quixote. Whatever were the
real reasons of Raymond for rejecting the play, we had to be content with
those he gave, and to set about getting it into other hands. In this
effort we failed even more signally than before, if that were possible.
At last a clever and charming elocutionist, who had long wished to get
himself on the stage, heard of it and asked to see it. We would have
shown it to any one by this time, and we very willingly showed it to him.
He came to Hartford and did some scenes from it for us. I must say he
did them very well, quite as well as Raymond could have done them, in
whose manner he did them. But now, late toward spring, the question was
where he could get an engagement with the play, and we ended by hiring a
theatre in New York for a week of trial performances.

Clemens came on with me to Boston, where we were going to make some
changes in the piece, and where we made them to our satisfaction, but not
to the effect of that high rapture which we had in the first draft. He
went back to Hartford, and then the cold fit came upon me, and “in
visions of the night, in slumberings upon the bed,” ghastly forms of
failure appalled me, and when I rose in the morning I wrote him: “Here is
a play which every manager has put out-of-doors and which every actor
known to us has refused, and now we go and give it to an elocutioner. We
are fools.” Whether Clemens agreed with me or not in my conclusion, he
agreed with me in my premises, and we promptly bought our play off the
stage at a cost of seven hundred dollars, which we shared between us. But
Clemens was never a man to give up. I relinquished gratis all right and
title I had in the play, and he paid its entire expenses for a week of
one-night stands in the country. It never came to New York; and yet I
think now that if it had come, it would have succeeded. So hard does the
faith of the unsuccessful dramatist in his work die.



VII.

There is an incident of this time so characteristic of both men that I
will yield to the temptation of giving it here. After I had gone to
Hartford in response to Clemens’s telegram, Matthew Arnold arrived in
Boston, and one of my family called on his, to explain why I was not at
home to receive his introduction: I had gone to see Mark Twain. “Oh, but
he doesn’t like that sort of thing, does he?” “He likes Mr. Clemens very
much,” my representative answered, “and he thinks him one of the greatest
men he ever knew.” I was still Clemens’s guest at Hartford when Arnold
came there to lecture, and one night we went to meet him at a reception.
While his hand laxly held mine in greeting, I saw his eyes fixed
intensely on the other side of the room. “Who-who in the world is that?”
 I looked and said, “Oh, that is Mark Twain.” I do not remember just how
their instant encounter was contrived by Arnold’s wish, but I have the
impression that they were not parted for long during the evening, and the
next night Arnold, as if still under the glamour of that potent presence,
was at Clemens’s house. I cannot say how they got on, or what they made
of each other; if Clemens ever spoke of Arnold, I do not recall what he
said, but Arnold had shown a sense of him from which the incredulous
sniff of the polite world, now so universally exploded, had already
perished. It might well have done so with his first dramatic vision of
that prodigious head. Clemens was then hard upon fifty, and he had kept,
as he did to the end, the slender figure of his youth, but the ashes of
the burnt-out years were beginning to gray the fires of that splendid
shock of red hair which he held to the height of a stature apparently
greater than it was, and tilted from side to side in his undulating walk.
He glimmered at you from the narrow slits of fine blue-greenish eyes,
under branching brows, which with age grew more and more like a sort of
plumage, and he was apt to smile into your face with a subtle but amiable
perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence; you were all there for
him, but he was not all there for you.



VIII.

I shall, not try to give chronological order to my recollections of him,
but since I am just now with him in Hartford I will speak of him in
association with the place. Once when I came on from Cambridge he
followed me to my room to see that the water was not frozen in my bath,
or something of the kind, for it was very cold weather, and then
hospitably lingered. Not to lose time in banalities I began at once from
the thread of thought in my mind. “I wonder why we hate the past so,”
 and he responded from the depths of his own consciousness, “It’s so
damned humiliating,” which is what any man would say of his past if he
were honest; but honest men are few when it comes to themselves. Clemens
was one of the few, and the first of them among all the people I have
known. I have known, I suppose, men as truthful, but not so promptly, so
absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful. He could
lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm; he was, not
stupidly truthful; but his first impulse was to say out the thing and
everything that was in him. To those who can understand it will not be
contradictory of his sense of humiliation from the past, that he was not
ashamed for anything he ever did to the point of wishing to hide it. He
could be, and he was, bitterly sorry for his errors, which he had enough
of in his life, but he was not ashamed in that mean way. What he had
done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent, and if it was bad he was
rather amused than troubled as to the effect in your mind. He would not
obtrude the fact upon you, but if it were in the way of personal history
he would not dream of withholding it, far less of hiding it.

He was the readiest of men to allow an error if he were found in it. In
one of our walks about Hartford, when he was in the first fine flush of
his agnosticism, he declared that Christianity had done nothing to
improve morals and conditions, and that the world under the highest pagan
civilization was as well off as it was under the highest Christian
influences. I happened to be fresh from the reading of Charles Loring
Brace’s ‘Gesta Christi’; or, ‘History of Humane Progress’, and I could
offer him abundant proofs that he was wrong. He did not like that
evidently, but he instantly gave way, saying he had not known those
things. Later he was more tolerant in his denials of Christianity, but
just then he was feeling his freedom from it, and rejoicing in having
broken what he felt to have been the shackles of belief worn so long. He
greatly admired Robert Ingersoll, whom he called an angelic orator, and
regarded as an evangel of a new gospel--the gospel of free thought. He
took the warmest interest in the newspaper controversy raging at the time
as to the existence of a hell; when the noes carried the day, I suppose
that no enemy of perdition was more pleased. He still loved his old
friend and pastor, Mr. Twichell, but he no longer went to hear him preach
his sage and beautiful sermons, and was, I think, thereby the greater
loser. Long before that I had asked him if he went regularly to church,
and he groaned out: “Oh yes, I go. It ‘most kills me, but I go,” and I
did not need his telling me to understand that he went because his wife
wished it. He did tell me, after they both ceased to go, that it had
finally come to her saying, “Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be
lost with you.” He could accept that willingness for supreme sacrifice
and exult in it because of the supreme truth as he saw it. After they had
both ceased to be formal Christians, she was still grieved by his denial
of immortality, so grieved that he resolved upon one of those heroic
lies, which for love’s sake he held above even the truth, and he went to
her, saying that he had been thinking the whole matter over, and now he
was convinced that the soul did live after death. It was too late. Her
keen vision pierced through his ruse, as it did when he brought the
doctor who had diagnosticated her case as organic disease of the heart,
and, after making him go over the facts of it again with her, made him
declare it merely functional.

To make an end of these records as to Clemens’s beliefs, so far as I knew
them, I should say that he never went back to anything like faith in the
Christian theology, or in the notion of life after death, or in a
conscious divinity. It is best to be honest in this matter; he would
have hated anything else, and I do not believe that the truth in it can
hurt any one. At one period he argued that there must have been a cause,
a conscious source of things; that the universe could not have come by
chance. I have heard also that in his last hours or moments he said, or
his dearest ones hoped he had said, something about meeting again. But
the expression, of which they could not be certain, was of the vaguest,
and it was perhaps addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness.
All his expressions to me were of a courageous, renunciation of any hope
of living again, or elsewhere seeing those he had lost. He suffered
terribly in their loss, and he was not fool enough to try ignoring his
grief. He knew that for this there were but two medicines; that it would
wear itself out with the years, and that meanwhile there was nothing for
it but those respites in which the mourner forgets himself in slumber. I
remember that in a black hour of my own when I was called down to see
him, as he thought from sleep, he said with an infinite, an exquisite
compassion, “Oh, did I wake you, did I wake, you?” Nothing more, but the
look, the voice, were everything; and while I live they cannot pass from
my sense.



IX.

He was the most caressing of men in his pity, but he had the fine
instinct, which would have pleased Lowell, of never putting his hands on
you--fine, delicate hands, with taper fingers, and pink nails, like a
girl’s, and sensitively quivering in moments of emotion; he did not paw
you with them to show his affection, as so many of us Americans are apt
to do. Among the half-dozen, or half-hundred, personalities that each of
us becomes, I should say that Clemens’s central and final personality was
something exquisite. His casual acquaintance might know him, perhaps,
from his fierce intensity, his wild pleasure in shocking people with his
ribaldries and profanities, or from the mere need of loosing his
rebellious spirit in that way, as anything but exquisite, and yet that
was what in the last analysis he was. They might come away loathing or
hating him, but one could not know him well without realizing him the
most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men. He was
Southwestern, and born amid the oppression of a race that had no rights
as against ours, but I never saw a man more regardful of negroes. He had
a yellow butler when I first began to know him, because he said he could
not bear to order a white man about, but the terms of his ordering George
were those of the softest entreaty which command ever wore. He loved to
rely upon George, who was such a broken reed in some things, though so
stanch in others, and the fervent Republican in politics that Clemens
then liked him to be. He could interpret Clemens’s meaning to the public
without conveying his mood, and could render his roughest answer smooth
to the person denied his presence. His general instructions were that
this presence was to be denied all but personal friends, but the soft
heart of George was sometimes touched by importunity, and once he came up
into the billiard-room saying that Mr. Smith wished to see Clemens. Upon
inquiry, Mr. Smith developed no ties of friendship, and Clemens said,
“You go and tell Mr. Smith that I wouldn’t come down to see the Twelve
Apostles.” George turned from the threshold where he had kept himself,
and framed a paraphrase of this message which apparently sent Mr. Smith
away content with himself and all the rest of the world.

The part of him that was Western in his Southwestern origin Clemens kept
to the end, but he was the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew. No
man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery, and no one
has ever poured such scorn upon the second-hand, Walter-Scotticized,
pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal. He held himself responsible for
the wrong which the white race had done the black race in slavery, and he
explained, in paying the way of a negro student through Yale, that he was
doing it as his part of the reparation due from every white to every
black man. He said he had never seen this student, nor ever wished to
see him or know his name; it was quite enough that he was a negro. About
that time a colored cadet was expelled from West Point for some point of
conduct “unbecoming an officer and gentleman,” and there was the usual
shabby philosophy in a portion of the press to the effect that a negro
could never feel the claim of honor. The man was fifteen parts white,
but, “Oh yes,” Clemens said, with bitter irony, “it was that one part
black that undid him.” It made him a “nigger” and incapable of being a
gentleman. It was to blame for the whole thing. The fifteen parts white
were guiltless.

Clemens was entirely satisfied with the result of the Civil War, and he
was eager to have its facts and meanings brought out at once in history.
He ridiculed the notion, held by many, that “it was not yet time” to
philosophize the events of the great struggle; that we must “wait till
its passions had cooled,” and “the clouds of strife had cleared away.” He
maintained that the time would never come when we should see its motives
and men and deeds more clearly, and that now, now, was the hour to
ascertain them in lasting verity. Picturesquely and dramatically he
portrayed the imbecility of deferring the inquiry at any point to the
distance of future years when inevitably the facts would begin to put on
fable.

He had powers of sarcasm and a relentless rancor in his contempt which
those who knew him best appreciated most. The late Noah Brooks, who had
been in California at the beginning of Clemens’s career, and had
witnessed the effect of his ridicule before he had learned to temper it,
once said to me that he would rather have any one else in the world down
on him than Mark Twain. But as Clemens grew older he grew more merciful,
not to the wrong, but to the men who were in it. The wrong was often the
source of his wildest drolling. He considered it in such hopelessness of
ever doing it justice that his despair broke in laughter.



X.

I go back to that house in Hartford, where I was so often a happy guest,
with tenderness for each of its endearing aspects. Over the chimney in
the library which had been cured of smoking by so much art and science,
Clemens had written in perennial brass the words of Emerson, “The
ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it,” and he gave his
guests a welcome of the simplest and sweetest cordiality: but I must not
go aside to them from my recollections of him, which will be of
sufficient garrulity, if I give them as fully as I wish. The windows of
the library looked northward from the hillside above which the house
stood, and over the little valley with the stream in it, and they showed
the leaves of the trees that almost brushed them as in a Claude Lorraine
glass. To the eastward the dining-room opened amply, and to the south
there was a wide hall, where the voices of friends made themselves heard
as they entered without ceremony and answered his joyous hail. At the
west was a little semicircular conservatory of a pattern invented by Mrs.
Harriet Beecher Stowe, and adopted in most of the houses of her kindly
neighborhood. The plants were set in the ground, and the flowering vines
climbed up the sides and overhung the roof above the silent spray of a
fountain companied by callas and other water-loving lilies. There, while
we breakfasted, Patrick came in from the barn and sprinkled the pretty
bower, which poured out its responsive perfume in the delicate accents of
its varied blossoms. Breakfast was Clemens’s best meal, and he sat
longer at his steak and coffee than at the courses of his dinner;
luncheon was nothing to him, unless, as might happen, he made it his
dinner, and reserved the later repast as the occasion of walking up and
down the room, and discoursing at large on anything that came into his
head. Like most good talkers, he liked other people to have their say;
he did not talk them down; he stopped instantly at another’s remark and
gladly or politely heard him through; he even made believe to find
suggestion or inspiration in what was said. His children came to the
table, as I have told, and after dinner he was apt to join his fine tenor
to their trebles in singing.

Fully half our meetings were at my house in Cambridge, where he made
himself as much at home as in Hartford. He would come ostensibly to stay
at the Parker House, in Boston, and take a room, where he would light the
gas and leave it burning, after dressing, while he drove out to Cambridge
and stayed two or three days with us. Once, I suppose it was after a
lecture, he came in evening dress and passed twenty-four hours with us in
that guise, wearing an overcoat to hide it when we went for a walk.
Sometimes he wore the slippers which he preferred to shoes at home, and
if it was muddy, as it was wont to be in Cambridge, he would put a pair
of rubbers over them for our rambles. He liked the lawlessness and our
delight in allowing it, and he rejoiced in the confession of his hostess,
after we had once almost worn ourselves out in our pleasure with the
intense talk, with the stories and the laughing, that his coming almost
killed her, but it was worth it.

In those days he was troubled with sleeplessness, or, rather, with
reluctant sleepiness, and he had various specifics for promoting it. At
first it had been champagne just before going to bed, and we provided
that, but later he appeared from Boston with four bottles of lager-beer
under his arms; lager-beer, he said now, was the only thing to make you
go to sleep, and we provided that. Still later, on a visit I paid him at
Hartford, I learned that hot Scotch was the only soporific worth
considering, and Scotch-whiskey duly found its place on our sideboard.
One day, very long afterward, I asked him if he were still taking hot
Scotch to make him sleep. He said he was not taking anything. For a
while he had found going to bed on the bath-room floor a soporific; then
one night he went to rest in his own bed at ten o’clock, and had gone
promptly to sleep without anything. He had done the like with the like
effect ever since. Of course, it amused him; there were few experiences
of life, grave or gay, which did not amuse him, even when they wronged
him.

He came on to Cambridge in April, 1875, to go with me to the centennial
ceremonies at Concord in celebration of the battle of the Minute Men with
the British troops a hundred years before. We both had special
invitations, including passage from Boston; but I said, Why bother to go
into Boston when we could just as well take the train for Concord at the
Cambridge station? He equally decided that it would be absurd; so we
breakfasted deliberately, and then walked to the station, reasoning of
many things as usual. When the train stopped, we found it packed inside
and out. People stood dense on the platforms of the cars; to our
startled eyes they seemed to project from the windows, and unless memory
betrays me they lay strewn upon the roofs like brakemen slain at the post
of duty.

Whether this was really so or not, it is certain that the train presented
an impenetrable front even to our imagination, and we left it to go its
way without the slightest effort to board. We remounted the fame-worn
steps of Porter’s Station, and began exploring North Cambridge for some
means of transportation overland to Concord, for we were that far on the
road by which the British went and came on the day of the battle. The
liverymen whom we appealed to received us, some with compassion, some
with derision, but in either mood convinced us that we could not have
hired a cat to attempt our conveyance, much less a horse, or vehicle of
any description. It was a raw, windy day, very unlike the exceptionally
hot April day when the routed redcoats, pursued by the Colonials, fled
panting back to Boston, with “their tongues hanging out like dogs,” but
we could not take due comfort in the vision of their discomfiture; we
could almost envy them, for they had at least got to Concord. A swift
procession of coaches, carriages, and buggies, all going to Concord,
passed us, inert and helpless, on the sidewalk in the peculiarly cold mud
of North Cambridge. We began to wonder if we might not stop one of them
and bribe it to take us, but we had not the courage to try, and Clemens
seized the opportunity to begin suffering with an acute indigestion,
which gave his humor a very dismal cast. I felt keenly the shame of
defeat, and the guilt of responsibility for our failure, and when a gay
party of students came toward us on the top of a tally ho, luxuriously
empty inside, we felt that our chance had come, and our last chance. He
said that if I would stop them and tell them who I was they would gladly,
perhaps proudly, give us passage; I contended that if with his far vaster
renown he would approach them, our success would be assured. While we
stood, lost in this “contest of civilities,” the coach passed us, with
gay notes blown from the horns of the students, and then Clemens started
in pursuit, encouraged with shouts from the merry party who could not
imagine who was trying to run them down, to a rivalry in speed. The
unequal match could end only in one way, and I am glad I cannot recall
what he said when he came back to me. Since then I have often wondered
at the grief which would have wrung those blithe young hearts if they
could have known that they might have had the company of Mark Twain to
Concord that day and did not.

We hung about, unavailingly, in the bitter wind a while longer, and then
slowly, very slowly, made our way home. We wished to pass as much time
as possible, in order to give probability to the deceit we intended to
practise, for we could not bear to own ourselves baffled in our boasted
wisdom of taking the train at Porter’s Station, and had agreed to say
that we had been to Concord and got back. Even after coming home to my
house, we felt that our statement would be wanting in verisimilitude
without further delay, and we crept quietly into my library, and made up
a roaring fire on the hearth, and thawed ourselves out in the heat of it
before we regained our courage for the undertaking. With all these
precautions we failed, for when our statement was imparted to the
proposed victim she instantly pronounced it unreliable, and we were left
with it on our hands intact. I think the humor of this situation was
finally a greater pleasure to Clemens than an actual visit to Concord
would have been; only a few weeks before his death he laughed our defeat
over with one of my family in Bermuda, and exulted in our prompt
detection.



XI.

From our joint experience in failing I argue that Clemens’s affection for
me must have been great to enable him to condone in me the final
defection which was apt to be the end of our enterprises. I have fancied
that I presented to him a surface of such entire trustworthiness that he
could not imagine the depths of unreliability beneath it; and that never
realizing it, he always broke through with fresh surprise but unimpaired
faith. He liked, beyond all things, to push an affair to the bitter end,
and the end was never too bitter unless it brought grief or harm to
another. Once in a telegraph office at a railway station he was treated
with such insolent neglect by the young lady in charge, who was
preoccupied in a flirtation with a “gentleman friend,” that emulous of
the public spirit which he admired in the English, he told her he should
report her to her superiors, and (probably to her astonishment) he did
so. He went back to Hartford, and in due time the poor girl came to me
in, terror and in tears; for I had abetted Clemens in his action, and had
joined my name to his in his appeal to the authorities. She was
threatened with dismissal unless she made full apology to him and brought
back assurance of its acceptance. I felt able to give this, and, of
course, he eagerly approved; I think he telegraphed his approval. Another
time, some years afterward, we sat down together in places near the end
of a car, and a brakeman came in looking for his official note-book.
Clemens found that he had sat down upon it, and handed it to him; the man
scolded him very abusively, and came back again and again, still scolding
him for having no more sense than to sit down on a note-book. The
patience of Clemens in bearing it was so angelic that I saw fit to
comment, “I suppose you will report this fellow.” “Yes,” he answered,
slowly and sadly. “That’s what I should have done once. But now I
remember that he gets twenty dollars a month.”

Nothing could have been wiser, nothing tenderer, and his humanity was not
for humanity alone. He abhorred the dull and savage joy of the sportsman
in a lucky shot, an unerring aim, and once when I met him in the country
he had just been sickened by the success of a gunner in bringing down a
blackbird, and he described the poor, stricken, glossy thing, how it lay
throbbing its life out on the grass, with such pity as he might have
given a wounded child. I find this a fit place to say that his mind and
soul were with those who do the hard work of the world, in fear of those
who give them a chance for their livelihoods and underpay them all they
can. He never went so far in socialism as I have gone, if he went that
way at all, but he was fascinated with Looking Backward and had Bellamy
to visit him; and from the first he had a luminous vision of organized
labor as the only present help for working-men. He would show that side
with such clearness and such force that you could not say anything in
hopeful contradiction; he saw with that relentless insight of his that
with Unions was the working-man’s only present hope of standing up like a
man against money and the power of it. There was a time when I was
afraid that his eyes were a little holden from the truth; but in the very
last talk I heard from him I found that I was wrong, and that this great
humorist was as great a humanist as ever. I wish that all the work-folk
could know this, and could know him their friend in life as he was in
literature; as he was in such a glorious gospel of equality as the
‘Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.’



XII.

Whether I will or no I must let things come into my story thoughtwise, as
he would have let them, for I cannot remember them in their order. One
night, while we were giving a party, he suddenly stormed in with a friend
of his and mine, Mr. Twichell, and immediately began to eat and drink of
our supper, for they had come straight to our house from walking to
Boston, or so great a part of the way as to be a-hungered and a-thirst. I
can see him now as he stood up in the midst of our friends, with his head
thrown back, and in his hand a dish of those escalloped oysters without
which no party in Cambridge was really a party, exulting in the tale of
his adventure, which had abounded in the most original characters and
amusing incidents at every mile of their progress. They had broken their
journey with a night’s rest, and they had helped themselves lavishly out
by rail in the last half; but still it had been a mighty walk to do in
two days. Clemens was a great walker, in those years, and was always
telling of his tramps with Mr. Twichell to Talcott’s Tower, ten miles out
of Hartford. As he walked of course he talked, and of course he smoked.
Whenever he had been a few days with us, the whole house had to be aired,
for he smoked all over it from breakfast to bedtime. He always went to
bed with a cigar in his mouth, and sometimes, mindful of my fire
insurance, I went up and took it away, still burning, after he had fallen
asleep. I do not know how much a man may smoke and live, but apparently
he smoked as much as a man could, for he smoked incessantly.

He did not care much to meet people, as I fancied, and we were greedy of
him for ourselves; he was precious to us; and I would not have exposed
him to the critical edge of that Cambridge acquaintance which might not
have appreciated him at, say, his transatlantic value. In America his
popularity was as instant as it was vast. But it must be acknowledged
that for a much longer time here than in England polite learning
hesitated his praise. In England rank, fashion, and culture rejoiced in
him. Lord mayors, lord chief justices, and magnates of many kinds were
his hosts; he was desired in country houses, and his bold genius
captivated the favor of periodicals which spurned the rest of our nation.
But in his own country it was different. In proportion as people thought
themselves refined they questioned that quality which all recognize in
him now, but which was then the inspired knowledge of the simple-hearted
multitude. I went with him to see Longfellow, but I do not think
Longfellow made much of him, and Lowell made less. He stopped as if with
the long Semitic curve of Clemens’s nose, which in the indulgence of his
passion for finding every one more or less a Jew he pronounced
unmistakably racial. It was two of my most fastidious Cambridge friends
who accepted him with the English, the European entirety--namely, Charles
Eliot Norton and Professor Francis J. Child. Norton was then newly back
from a long sojourn abroad, and his judgments were delocalized. He met
Clemens as if they had both been in England, and rejoiced in his bold
freedom from environment, and in the rich variety and boundless reach of
his talk. Child was of a personal liberty as great in its fastidious way
as that of Clemens himself, and though he knew him only at second hand,
he exulted in the most audacious instance of his grotesquery, as I shall
have to tell by-and-by, almost solely. I cannot say just why Clemens
seemed not to hit the favor of our community of scribes and scholars, as
Bret Harte had done, when he came on from California, and swept them
before him, disrupting their dinners and delaying their lunches with
impunity; but it is certain he did not, and I had better say so.

I am surprised to find from the bibliographical authorities that it was
so late as 1875 when he came with the manuscript of Tom Sawyer, and asked
me to read it, as a friend and critic, and not as an editor. I have an
impression that this was at Mrs. Clemens’s instance in his own
uncertainty about printing it. She trusted me, I can say with a
satisfaction few things now give me, to be her husband’s true and cordial
adviser, and I was so. I believe I never failed him in this part, though
in so many of our enterprises and projects I was false as water through
my temperamental love of backing out of any undertaking. I believe this
never ceased to astonish him, and it has always astonished me; it appears
to me quite out of character; though it is certain that an undertaking,
when I have entered upon it, holds me rather than I it. But however this
immaterial matter may be, I am glad to remember that I thoroughly liked
Tom Sawyer, and said so with every possible amplification. Very likely,
I also made my suggestions for its improvement; I could not have been a
real critic without that; and I have no doubt they were gratefully
accepted and, I hope, never acted upon. I went with him to the horse-car
station in Harvard Square, as my frequent wont was, and put him aboard a
car with his MS. in his hand, stayed and reassured, so far as I counted,
concerning it. I do not know what his misgivings were; perhaps they were
his wife’s misgivings, for she wished him to be known not only for the
wild and boundless humor that was in him, but for the beauty and
tenderness and “natural piety”; and she would not have had him judged by
a too close fidelity to the rude conditions of Tom Sawyer’s life. This
is the meaning that I read into the fact of his coming to me with those
doubts.



XIII.

Clemens had then and for many years the habit of writing to me about what
he was doing, and still more of what he was experiencing. Nothing struck
his imagination, in or out of the daily routine, but he wished to write
me of it, and he wrote with the greatest fulness and a lavish
dramatization, sometimes to the length of twenty or forty pages, so that
I have now perhaps fifteen hundred pages of his letters. They will no
doubt some day be published, but I am not even referring to them in these
records, which I think had best come to the reader with an old man’s
falterings and uncertainties. With his frequent absences and my own
abroad, and the intrusion of calamitous cares, the rich tide of his
letters was more and more interrupted. At times it almost ceased, and
then it would come again, a torrent. In the very last weeks of his life
he burst forth, and, though too weak himself to write, he dictated his
rage with me for recommending to him a certain author whose truthfulness
he could not deny, but whom he hated for his truthfulness to sordid and
ugly conditions. At heart Clemens was romantic, and he would have had
the world of fiction stately and handsome and whatever the real world was
not; but he was not romanticistic, and he was too helplessly an artist
not to wish his own work to show life as he had seen it. I was preparing
to rap him back for these letters when I read that he had got home to
die; he would have liked the rapping back.

He liked coming to Boston, especially for those luncheons and dinners in
which the fertile hospitality of our publisher, Osgood, abounded. He
dwelt equidistant from Boston and New York, and he had special friends in
New York, but he said he much preferred coming to Boston; of late years
he never went there, and he had lost the habit of it long before he came
home from Europe to live in New York. At these feasts, which were often
of after-dinner-speaking measure, he could always be trusted for
something of amazing delightfulness. Once, when Osgood could think of no
other occasion for a dinner, he gave himself a birthday dinner, and asked
his friends and authors. The beautiful and splendid trooper-like blaring
was there, and I recall how in the long, rambling speech in which Clemens
went round the table hitting every head at it, and especially visiting
Osgood with thanks for his ingenious pretext for our entertainment, he
congratulated blaring upon his engineering genius and his hypnotic
control of municipal governments. He said that if there was a plan for
draining a city at a cost of a million, by seeking the level of the water
in the down-hill course of the sewers, blaring would come with a plan to
drain that town up-hill at twice the cost and carry it through the Common
Council without opposition. It is hard to say whether the time was
gladder at these dinners, or at the small lunches at which Osgood and
Aldrich and I foregathered with him and talked the afternoon away till
well toward the winter twilight.

He was a great figure, and the principal figure, at one of the first of
the now worn-out Authors’ Readings, which was held in the Boston Museum
to aid a Longfellow memorial. It was the late George Parsons Lathrop
(everybody seems to be late in these sad days) who imagined the reading,
but when it came to a price for seats I can always claim the glory of
fixing it at five dollars. The price if not the occasion proved
irresistible, and the museum was packed from the floor to the topmost
gallery. Norton presided, and when it came Clemens’s turn to read he
introduced him with such exquisite praises as he best knew how to give,
but before he closed he fell a prey to one of those lapses of tact which
are the peculiar peril of people of the greatest tact. He was reminded
of Darwin’s delight in Mark Twain, and how when he came from his long
day’s exhausting study, and sank into bed at midnight, he took up a
volume of Mark Twain, whose books he always kept on a table beside him,
and whatever had been his tormenting problem, or excess of toil, he felt
secure of a good night’s rest from it. A sort of blank ensued which
Clemens filled in the only possible way. He said he should always be
glad that he had contributed to the repose of that great man, whom
science owed so much, and then without waiting for the joy in every
breast to burst forth, he began to read. It was curious to watch his
triumph with the house. His carefully studied effects would reach the
first rows in the orchestra first, and ripple in laughter back to the
standees against the wall, and then with a fine resurgence come again to
the rear orchestra seats, and so rise from gallery to gallery till it
fell back, a cataract of applause from the topmost rows of seats. He was
such a practised speaker that he knew all the stops of that simple
instrument man, and there is no doubt that these results were accurately
intended from his unerring knowledge. He was the most consummate public
performer I ever saw, and it was an incomparable pleasure to hear him
lecture; on the platform he was the great and finished actor which he
probably would not have been on the stage. He was fond of private
theatricals, and liked to play in them with his children and their
friends, in dramatizations of such stories of his as ‘The Prince and the
Pauper;’ but I never saw him in any of these scenes. When he read his
manuscript to you, it was with a thorough, however involuntary,
recognition of its dramatic qualities; he held that an actor added fully
half to the character the author created. With my own hurried and
half-hearted reading of passages which I wished to try on him from
unprinted chapters (say, out of ‘The Undiscovered Country’ or ‘A Modern
Instance’) he said frankly that my reading could spoil anything. He was
realistic, but he was essentially histrionic, and he was rightly so.
What we have strongly conceived we ought to make others strongly imagine,
and we ought to use every genuine art to that end.



XIV.

There came a time when the lecturing which had been the joy of his prime
became his loathing, loathing unutterable, and when he renounced it with
indescribable violence. Yet he was always hankering for those fleshpots
whose savor lingered on his palate and filled his nostrils after his
withdrawal from the platform. The Authors’ Readings when they had won
their brief popularity abounded in suggestion for him. Reading from
one’s book was not so bad as giving a lecture written for a lecture’s
purpose, and he was willing at last to compromise. He had a magnificent
scheme for touring the country with Aldrich and Mr. G. W. Cable and
myself, in a private car, with a cook of our own, and every facility for
living on the fat of the land. We should read only four times a week, in
an entertainment that should not last more than an hour and a half. He
would be the impresario, and would guarantee us others at least
seventy-five dollars a day, and pay every expense of the enterprise,
which he provisionally called the Circus, himself. But Aldrich and I
were now no longer in those earlier thirties when we so cheerfully
imagined ‘Memorable Murders’ for subscription publication; we both
abhorred public appearances, and, at any rate, I was going to Europe for
a year. So the plan fell through except as regarded Mr. Cable, who, in
his way, was as fine a performer as Clemens, and could both read and sing
the matter of his books. On a far less stupendous scale they two made
the rounds of the great lecturing circuit together. But I believe a
famous lecture-manager had charge of them and travelled with them.

He was a most sanguine man, a most amiable person, and such a believer in
fortune that Clemens used to say of him, as he said of one of his early
publishers, that you could rely upon fifty per cent. of everything he
promised. I myself many years later became a follower of this hopeful
prophet, and I can testify that in my case at least he was able to keep
ninety-nine, and even a hundred, per cent. of his word. It was I who was
much nearer failing of mine, for I promptly began to lose sleep from the
nervous stress of my lecturing and from the gratifying but killing
receptions afterward, and I was truly in that state from insomnia which
Clemens recognized in the brief letter I got from him in the Western
city, after half a dozen wakeful nights. He sardonically congratulated
me on having gone into “the lecture field,” and then he said: “I know
where you are now. You are in hell.”

It was this perdition which he re-entered when he undertook that
round-the-world lecturing tour for the payment of the debts left to him
by the bankruptcy of his firm in the publishing business. It was not
purely perdition for him, or, rather, it was perdition for only one-half
of him, the author-half; for the actor-half it was paradise. The author
who takes up lecturing without the ability to give histrionic support to
the literary reputation which he brings to the crude test of his reader’s
eyes and ears, invokes a peril and a misery unknown to the lecturer who
has made his first public from the platform. Clemens was victorious on
the platform from the beginning, and it would be folly to pretend that he
did not exult in his triumphs there. But I suppose, with the wearing
nerves of middle life, he hated more and more the personal swarming of
interest upon him, and all the inevitable clatter of the thing. Yet he
faced it, and he labored round our tiresome globe that he might pay the
uttermost farthing of debts which he had not knowingly contracted, the
debts of his partners who had meant well and done ill, not because they
were evil, but because they were unwise, and as unfit for their work as
he was. “Pay what thou owest.” That is right, even when thou owest it
by the error of others, and even when thou owest it to a bank, which had
not lent it from love of thee, but in the hard line of business and thy
need.

Clemens’s behavior in this matter redounded to his glory among the
nations of the whole earth, and especially in this nation, so wrapped in
commerce and so little used to honor among its many thieves. He had
behaved like Walter Scott, as millions rejoiced to know, who had not
known how Walter Scott had behaved till they knew it was like Clemens. No
doubt it will be put to his credit in the books of the Recording Angel,
but what the Judge of all the Earth will say of it at the Last Day there
is no telling. I should not be surprised if He accounted it of less
merit than some other things that Clemens did and was: less than his
abhorrence of the Spanish War, and the destruction of the South-African
republics, and our deceit of the Filipinos, and his hate of slavery, and
his payment of his portion of our race’s debt to the race of the colored
student whom he saw through college, and his support of a poor artist for
three years in Paris, and his loan of opportunity to the youth who became
the most brilliant of our actor-dramatists, and his eager pardon of the
thoughtless girl who was near paying the penalty of her impertinence with
the loss of her place, and his remembering that the insolent brakeman got
so few dollars a month, and his sympathy for working-men standing up to
money in their Unions, and even his pity for the wounded bird throbbing
out its little life on the grass for the pleasure of the cruel fool who
shot it. These and the thousand other charities and beneficences in
which he abounded, openly or secretly, may avail him more than the
discharge of his firm’s liabilities with the Judge of all the Earth, who
surely will do right, but whose measures and criterions no man knows, and
I least of all men.

He made no great show of sympathy with people in their anxieties, but it
never failed, and at a time when I lay sick for many weeks his letters
were of comfort to those who feared I might not rise again. His hand was
out in help for those who needed help, and in kindness for those who
needed kindness. There remains in my mind the dreary sense of a long,
long drive to the uttermost bounds of the South End at Boston, where he
went to call upon some obscure person whose claim stretched in a
lengthening chain from his early days in Missouri--a most inadequate
person, in whose vacuity the gloom of the dull day deepened till it was
almost too deep for tears. He bore the ordeal with grim heroism, and
silently smoked away the sense of it, as we drove back to Cambridge, in
his slippered feet, sombrely musing, sombrely swearing. But he knew he
had done the right, the kind thing, and he was content. He came the
whole way from Hartford to go with me to a friendless play of mine, which
Alessandro Salvini was giving in a series of matinees to houses never
enlarging themselves beyond the count of the brave two hundred who sat it
through, and he stayed my fainting spirit with a cheer beyond flagons,
joining me in my joke at the misery of it, and carrying the fun farther.

Before that he had come to witness the aesthetic suicide of Anna
Dickinson, who had been a flaming light of the political platform in the
war days, and had been left by them consuming in a hapless ambition for
the theatre. The poor girl had had a play written especially for her,
and as Anne Boleyn she ranted and exhorted through the five acts, drawing
ever nearer the utter defeat of the anticlimax. We could hardly look at
each other for pity, Clemens sitting there in the box he had taken, with
his shaggy head out over the corner and his slippered feet curled under
him: he either went to a place in his slippers or he carried them with
him, and put them on as soon as he could put off his boots. When it was
so that we could not longer follow her failure and live, he began to talk
of the absolute close of her career which the thing was, and how probably
she had no conception that it was the end. He philosophized the
mercifulness of the fact, and of the ignorance of most of us, when
mortally sick or fatally wounded. We think it is not the end, because we
have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end. Some can push
by the awful hour and live again, but for Anna Dickinson there could be,
and was, no such palingenesis. Of course we got that solemn joy out of
reading her fate aright which is the compensation of the wise spectator
in witnessing the inexorable doom of others.



XV.

When Messrs. Houghton & Mifflin became owners of The Atlantic Monthly,
Mr. Houghton fancied having some breakfasts and dinners, which should
bring the publisher and the editor face to face with the contributors,
who were bidden from far and near. Of course, the subtle fiend of
advertising, who has now grown so unblushing bold, lurked under the
covers at these banquets, and the junior partner and the young editor had
their joint and separate fine anguishes of misgiving as to the taste and
the principle of them; but they were really very simple-hearted and
honestly meant hospitalities, and they prospered as they ought, and gave
great pleasure and no pain. I forget some of the “emergent occasions,”
 but I am sure of a birthday dinner most unexpectedly accepted by
Whittier, and a birthday luncheon to Mrs. Stowe, and I think a birthday
dinner to Longfellow; but the passing years have left me in the dark as
to the pretext of that supper at which Clemens made his awful speech, and
came so near being the death of us all. At the breakfasts and luncheons
we had the pleasure of our lady contributors’ company, but that night
there were only men, and because of our great strength we survived.

I suppose the year was about 1879, but here the almanac is unimportant,
and I can only say that it was after Clemens had become a very valued
contributor of the magazine, where he found himself to his own great
explicit satisfaction. He had jubilantly accepted our invitation, and
had promised a speech, which it appeared afterward he had prepared with
unusual care and confidence. It was his custom always to think out his
speeches, mentally wording them, and then memorizing them by a peculiar
system of mnemonics which he had invented. On the dinner-table a certain
succession of knife, spoon, salt-cellar, and butter-plate symbolized a
train of ideas, and on the billiard-table a ball, a cue, and a piece of
chalk served the same purpose. With a diagram of these printed on the
brain he had full command of the phrases which his excogitation had
attached to them, and which embodied the ideas in perfect form. He
believed he had been particularly fortunate in his notion for the speech
of that evening, and he had worked it out in joyous self-reliance. It was
the notion of three tramps, three deadbeats, visiting a California
mining-camp, and imposing themselves upon the innocent miners as
respectively Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver
Wendell, Holmes. The humor of the conception must prosper or must fail
according to the mood of the hearer, but Clemens felt sure of compelling
this to sympathy, and he looked forward to an unparalleled triumph.

But there were two things that he had not taken into account. One was
the species of religious veneration in which these men were held by those
nearest them, a thing that I should not be able to realize to people
remote from them in time and place. They were men of extraordinary
dignity, of the thing called presence, for want of some clearer word, so
that no one could well approach them in a personally light or trifling
spirit. I do not suppose that anybody more truly valued them or more
piously loved them than Clemens himself, but the intoxication of his
fancy carried him beyond the bounds of that regard, and emboldened him to
the other thing which he had not taken into account-namely, the immense
hazard of working his fancy out before their faces, and expecting them to
enter into the delight of it. If neither Emerson, nor Longfellow, nor
Holmes had been there, the scheme might possibly have carried, but even
this is doubtful, for those who so devoutly honored them would have
overcome their horror with difficulty, and perhaps would not have
overcome it at all.

The publisher, with a modesty very ungrateful to me, had abdicated his
office of host, and I was the hapless president, fulfilling the abhorred.
function of calling people to their feet and making them speak. When I
came to Clemens I introduced him with the cordial admiring I had for him
as one of my greatest contributors and dearest friends. Here, I said, in
sum, was a humorist who never left you hanging your head for having
enjoyed his joke; and then the amazing mistake, the bewildering blunder,
the cruel catastrophe was upon us. I believe that after the scope of the
burlesque made itself clear, there was no one there, including the
burlesquer himself, who was not smitten with a desolating dismay. There
fell a silence, weighing many tons to the square inch, which deepened
from moment to moment, and was broken only by the hysterical and
blood-curdling laughter of a single guest, whose name shall not be handed
down to infamy. Nobody knew whether to look at the speaker or down at
his plate. I chose my plate as the least affliction, and so I do not
know how Clemens looked, except when I stole a glance at him, and saw him
standing solitary amid his appalled and appalling listeners, with his
joke dead on his hands. From a first glance at the great three whom his
jest had made its theme, I was aware of Longfellow sitting upright, and
regarding the humorist with an air of pensive puzzle, of Holmes busily
writing on his menu, with a well-feigned effect of preoccupation, and of
Emerson, holding his elbows, and listening with a sort of Jovian oblivion
of this nether world in that lapse of memory which saved him in those
later years from so much bother. Clemens must have dragged his joke to
the climax and left it there, but I cannot say this from any sense of the
fact. Of what happened afterward at the table where the immense, the
wholly innocent, the truly unimagined affront was offered, I have no
longer the least remembrance. I next remember being in a room of the
hotel, where Clemens was not to sleep, but to toss in despair, and
Charles Dudley Warner’s saying, in the gloom, “Well, Mark, you’re a funny
fellow.” It was as well as anything else he could have said, but Clemens
seemed unable to accept the tribute.

I stayed the night with him, and the next morning, after a haggard
breakfast, we drove about and he made some purchases of bric-a-brac for
his house in Hartford, with a soul as far away from bric-a-brac as ever
the soul of man was. He went home by an early train, and he lost no time
in writing back to the three divine personalities which he had so
involuntarily seemed to flout. They all wrote back to him, making it as
light for him as they could. I have heard that Emerson was a good deal
mystified, and in his sublime forgetfulness asked, Who was this gentleman
who appeared to think he had offered him some sort of annoyance! But I
am not sure that this is accurate. What I am sure of is that Longfellow,
a few days after, in my study, stopped before a photograph of Clemens and
said, “Ah, he is a wag!” and nothing more. Holmes told me, with deep
emotion, such as a brother humorist might well feel, that he had not lost
an instant in replying to Clemens’s letter, and assuring him that there
had not been the least offence, and entreating him never to think of the
matter again. “He said that he was a fool, but he was God’s fool,”
 Holmes quoted from the letter, with a true sense of the pathos and the
humor of the self-abasement.

To me Clemens wrote a week later, “It doesn’t get any better; it burns
like fire.” But now I understand that it was not shame that burnt, but
rage for a blunder which he had so incredibly committed. That to have
conceived of those men, the most dignified in our literature, our
civilization, as impersonable by three hoboes, and then to have imagined
that he could ask them personally to enjoy the monstrous travesty, was a
break, he saw too late, for which there was no repair. Yet the time
came, and not so very long afterward, when some mention was made of the
incident as a mistake, and he said, with all his fierceness, “But I don’t
admit that it was a mistake,” and it was not so in the minds of all
witnesses at second hand. The morning after the dreadful dinner there
came a glowing note from Professor Child, who had read the newspaper
report of it, praising Clemens’s burlesque as the richest piece of humor
in the world, and betraying no sense of incongruity in its perpetration
in the presence of its victims. I think it must always have ground in
Clemens’s soul, that he was the prey of circumstances, and that if he had
some more favoring occasion he could retrieve his loss in it by giving
the thing the right setting. Not more than two or three years ago, he
came to try me as to trying it again at a meeting of newspaper men in
Washington. I had to own my fears, while I alleged Child’s note on the
other hand, but in the end he did not try it with the newspaper men. I
do not know whether he has ever printed it or not, but since the thing
happened I have often wondered how much offence there really was in it. I
am not sure but the horror of the spectators read more indignation into
the subjects of the hapless drolling than they felt. But it must have
been difficult for them to bear it with equanimity. To be sure, they
were not themselves mocked; the joke was, of course, beside them;
nevertheless, their personality was trifled with, and I could only end by
reflecting that if I had been in their place I should not have liked it
myself. Clemens would have liked it himself, for he had the heart for
that sort of wild play, and he so loved a joke that even if it took the
form of a liberty, and was yet a good joke, he would have loved it. But
perhaps this burlesque was not a good joke.



XVI.

Clemens was oftenest at my house in Cambridge, but he was also sometimes
at my house in Belmont; when, after a year in Europe, we went to live in
Boston, he was more rarely with us. We could never be long together
without something out of the common happening, and one day something far
out of the common happened, which fortunately refused the nature of
absolute tragedy, while remaining rather the saddest sort of comedy. We
were looking out of my library window on that view of the Charles which I
was so proud of sharing with my all-but-next-door neighbor, Doctor
Holmes, when another friend who was with us called out with curiously
impersonal interest, “Oh, see that woman getting into the water!” This
would have excited curiosity and alarmed anxiety far less lively than
ours, and Clemens and I rushed downstairs and out through my basement and
back gate. At the same time a coachman came out of a stable next door,
and grappled by the shoulders a woman who was somewhat deliberately
getting down the steps to the water over the face of the embankment.
Before we could reach them he had pulled her up to the driveway, and
stood holding her there while she crazily grieved at her rescue. As soon
as he saw us he went back into his stable, and left us with the poor wild
creature on our hands. She was not very young and not very pretty, and
we could not have flattered ourselves with the notion of anything
romantic in her suicidal mania, but we could take her on the broad human
level, and on this we proposed to escort her up Beacon Street till we
could give her into the keeping of one of those kindly policemen whom our
neighborhood knew. Naturally there was no policeman known to us or
unknown the whole way to the Public Garden. We had to circumvent our
charge in her present design of drowning herself, and walk her past the
streets crossing Beacon to the river. At these points it needed
considerable reasoning to overcome her wish and some active manoeuvring
in both of us to enforce our arguments. Nobody else appeared to be
interested, and though we did not court publicity in the performance of
the duty so strangely laid upon us, still it was rather disappointing to
be so entirely ignored.

There are some four or five crossings to the river between 302 Beacon
Street and the Public Garden, and the suggestions at our command were
pretty well exhausted by the time we reached it. Still the expected
policeman was nowhere in sight; but a brilliant thought occurred to
Clemens. He asked me where the nearest police station was, and when I
told him, he started off at his highest speed, leaving me in sole charge
of our hapless ward. All my powers of suasion were now taxed to the
utmost, and I began attracting attention as a short, stout gentleman in
early middle life endeavoring to distrain a respectable female of her
personal liberty, when his accomplice had abandoned him to his wicked
design. After a much longer time than I thought I should have taken to
get a policeman from the station, Clemens reappeared in easy conversation
with an officer who had probably realized that he was in the company of
Mark Twain, and was in no hurry to end the interview. He took possession
of our captive, and we saw her no more. I now wonder that with our joint
instinct for failure we ever got rid of her; but I am sure we did, and
few things in life have given me greater relief. When we got back to my
house we found the friend we had left there quite unruffled and not much
concerned to know the facts of our adventure. My impression is that he
had been taking a nap on my lounge; he appeared refreshed and even gay;
but if I am inexact in these details he is alive to refute me.



XVII.

A little after this Clemens went abroad with his family, and lived
several years in Germany. His letters still came, but at longer
intervals, and the thread of our intimate relations was inevitably
broken. He would write me when something I had written pleased him, or
when something signal occurred to him, or some political or social
outrage stirred him to wrath, and he wished to free his mind in pious
profanity. During this sojourn he came near dying of pneumonia in
Berlin, and he had slight relapses from it after coming home. In Berlin
also he had the honor of dining with the German Emperor at the table of a
cousin married to a high officer of the court. Clemens was a man to
enjoy such a distinction; he knew how to take it as a delegated
recognition from the German people; but as coming from a rather cockahoop
sovereign who had as yet only his sovereignty to value himself upon, he
was not very proud of it. He expressed a quiet disdain of the event as
between the imperiality and himself, on whom it was supposed to confer
such glory, crowning his life with the topmost leaf of laurel. He was in
the same mood in his account of an English dinner many years before,
where there was a “little Scotch lord” present, to whom the English
tacitly referred Clemens’s talk, and laughed when the lord laughed, and
were grave when he failed to smile. Of all the men I have known he was
the farthest from a snob, though he valued recognition, and liked the
flattery of the fashionable fair when it came in his way. He would not
go out of his way for it, but like most able and brilliant men he loved
the minds of women, their wit, their agile cleverness, their sensitive
perception, their humorous appreciation, the saucy things they would say,
and their pretty, temerarious defiances. He had, of course, the keenest
sense of what was truly dignified and truly undignified in people; but he
was not really interested in what we call society affairs; they scarcely
existed for him, though his books witness how he abhorred the dreadful
fools who through some chance of birth or wealth hold themselves
different from other men.

Commonly he did not keep things to himself, especially dislikes and
condemnations. Upon most current events he had strong opinions, and he
uttered them strongly. After a while he was silent in them, but if you
tried him you found him in them still. He was tremendously worked up by
a certain famous trial, as most of us were who lived in the time of it.
He believed the accused guilty, but when we met some months after it was
over, and I tempted him to speak his mind upon it, he would only say. The
man had suffered enough; as if the man had expiated his wrong, and he was
not going to do anything to renew his penalty. I found that very
curious, very delicate. His continued blame could not come to the
sufferer’s knowledge, but he felt it his duty to forbear it.

He was apt to wear himself out in the vehemence of his resentments; or,
he had so spent himself in uttering them that he had literally nothing
more to say. You could offer Clemens offences that would anger other men
and he did not mind; he would account for them from human nature; but if
he thought you had in any way played him false you were anathema and
maranatha forever. Yet not forever, perhaps, for by and-by, after years,
he would be silent. There were two men, half a generation apart in their
succession, whom he thought equally atrocious in their treason to him,
and of whom he used to talk terrifyingly, even after they were out of the
world. He went farther than Heine, who said that he forgave his enemies,
but not till they were dead. Clemens did not forgive his dead enemies;
their death seemed to deepen their crimes, like a base evasion, or a
cowardly attempt to escape; he pursued them to the grave; he would like
to dig them up and take vengeance upon their clay. So he said, but no
doubt he would not have hurt them if he had had them living before him.
He was generous without stint; he trusted without measure, but where his
generosity was abused, or his trust betrayed, he was a fire of vengeance,
a consuming flame of suspicion that no sprinkling of cool patience from
others could quench; it had to burn itself out. He was eagerly and
lavishly hospitable, but if a man seemed willing to batten on him, or in
any way to lie down upon him, Clemens despised him unutterably. In his
frenzies of resentment or suspicion he would not, and doubtless could
not, listen to reason. But if between the paroxysms he were confronted
with the facts he would own them, no matter how much they told against
him. At one period he fancied that a certain newspaper was hounding him
with biting censure and poisonous paragraphs, and he was filling himself
up with wrath to be duly discharged on the editor’s head. Later, he
wrote me with a humorous joy in his mistake that Warner had advised him
to have the paper watched for these injuries. He had done so, and how
many mentions of him did I reckon he had found in three months? Just
two, and they were rather indifferent than unfriendly. So the paper was
acquitted, and the editor’s life was spared. The wretch never knew how
near he was to losing it, with incredible preliminaries of obloquy, and a
subsequent devotion to lasting infamy.

His memory for favors was as good as for injuries, and he liked to return
your friendliness with as loud a band of music as could be bought or
bribed for the occasion. All that you had to do was to signify that you
wanted his help. When my father was consul at Toronto during Arthur’s
administration, he fancied that his place was in danger, and he appealed
to me. In turn I appealed to Clemens, bethinking myself of his
friendship with Grant and Grant’s friendship with Arthur. I asked him to
write to Grant in my father’s behalf, but No, he answered me, I must come
to Hartford, and we would go on to New York together and see Grant
personally. This was before, and long before, Clemens became Grant’s
publisher and splendid benefactor, but the men liked each other as such
men could not help doing. Clemens made the appointment, and we went to
find Grant in his business office, that place where his business
innocence was afterward so betrayed. He was very simple and very
cordial, and I was instantly the more at home with him, because his voice
was the soft, rounded, Ohio River accent to which my years were earliest
used from my steamboating uncles, my earliest heroes. When I stated my
business he merely said, Oh no; that must not be; he would write to Mr.
Arthur; and he did so that day; and my father lived to lay down his
office, when he tired of it, with no urgence from above.

It is not irrelevant to Clemens to say that Grant seemed to like finding
himself in company with two literary men, one of whom at least he could
make sure of, and unlike that silent man he was reputed, he talked
constantly, and so far as he might he talked literature. At least he
talked of John Phoenix, that delightfulest of the early Pacific Slope
humorists, whom he had known under his real name of George H. Derby, when
they were fellow-cadets at West Point. It was mighty pretty, as Pepys
would say, to see the delicate deference Clemens paid our plain hero, and
the manly respect with which he listened. While Grant talked, his
luncheon was brought in from some unassuming restaurant near by, and he
asked us to join him in the baked beans and coffee which were served us
in a little room out of the office with about the same circumstance as at
a railroad refreshment-counter. The baked beans and coffee were of about
the railroad-refreshment quality; but eating them with Grant was like
sitting down to baked beans and coffee with Julius Caesar, or Alexander,
or some other great Plutarchan captain. One of the highest satisfactions
of Clemens’s often supremely satisfactory life was his relation to Grant.
It was his proud joy to tell how he found Grant about to sign a contract
for his book on certainly very good terms, and said to him that he would
himself publish the book and give him a percentage three times as large.
He said Grant seemed to doubt whether he could honorably withdraw from
the negotiation at that point, but Clemens overbore his scruples, and it
was his unparalleled privilege, his princely pleasure, to pay the author
a far larger check for his work than had ever been paid to an author
before. He valued even more than this splendid opportunity the sacred
moments in which their business brought him into the presence of the
slowly dying, heroically living man whom he was so befriending; and he
told me in words which surely lost none of their simple pathos through
his report how Grant described his suffering.

The prosperity, of this venture was the beginning of Clemens’s adversity,
for it led to excesses of enterprise which were forms of dissipation. The
young sculptor who had come back to him from Paris modelled a small bust
of Grant, which Clemens multiplied in great numbers to his great loss,
and the success of Grant’s book tempted him to launch on publishing seas
where his bark presently foundered. The first and greatest of his
disasters was the Life of Pope Leo XIII, which he came to tell me of,
when he had imagined it, in a sort of delirious exultation. He had no
words in which to paint the magnificence of the project, or to forecast
its colossal success. It would have a currency bounded only by the
number of Catholics in Christendom. It would be translated into every
language which was anywhere written or printed; it would be circulated
literally in every country of the globe, and Clemens’s book agents would
carry the prospectuses and then the bound copies of the work to the ends
of the whole earth. Not only would every Catholic buy it, but every
Catholic must, as he was a good Catholic, as he hoped to be saved. It
was a magnificent scheme, and it captivated me, as it had captivated
Clemens; it dazzled us both, and neither of us saw the fatal defect in
it. We did not consider how often Catholics could not read, how often
when they could, they might not wish to read. The event proved that
whether they could read or not the immeasurable majority did not wish to
read the life of the Pope, though it was written by a dignitary of the
Church and issued to the world with every sanction from the Vatican. The
failure was incredible to Clemens; his sanguine soul was utterly
confounded, and soon a silence fell upon it where it had been so
exuberantly jubilant.



XIX.

The occasions which brought us to New York together were not nearly so
frequent as those which united us in Boston, but there was a dinner given
him by a friend which remains memorable from the fatuity of two men
present, so different in everything but their fatuity. One was the sweet
old comedian Billy Florence, who was urging the unsuccessful dramatist
across the table to write him a play about Oliver Cromwell, and giving
the reasons why he thought himself peculiarly fitted to portray the
character of Cromwell. The other was a modestly millioned rich man who
was then only beginning to amass the moneys afterward heaped so high, and
was still in the condition to be flattered by the condescension of a yet
greater millionaire. His contribution to our gaiety was the verbatim
report of a call he had made upon William H. Vanderbilt, whom he had
found just about starting out of town, with his trunks actually in the
front hall, but who had stayed to receive the narrator. He had, in fact,
sat down on one of the trunks, and talked with the easiest friendliness,
and quite, we were given to infer, like an ordinary human being. Clemens
often kept on with some thread of the talk when we came away from a
dinner, but now he was silent, as if “high sorrowful and cloyed”; and it
was not till well afterward that I found he had noted the facts from the
bitterness with which he mocked the rich man, and the pity he expressed
for the actor.

He had begun before that to amass those evidences against mankind which
eventuated with him in his theory of what he called “the damned human
race.” This was not an expression of piety, but of the kind contempt to
which he was driven by our follies and iniquities as he had observed them
in himself as well as in others. It was as mild a misanthropy, probably,
as ever caressed the objects of its malediction. But I believe it was
about the year 1900 that his sense of our perdition became insupportable
and broke out in a mixed abhorrence and amusement which spared no
occasion, so that I could quite understand why Mrs. Clemens should have
found some compensation, when kept to her room by sickness, in the
reflection that now she should not hear so much about “the damned human
race.” He told of that with the same wild joy that he told of
overhearing her repetition of one of his most inclusive profanities, and
her explanation that she meant him to hear it so that he might know how
it sounded. The contrast of the lurid blasphemy with her heavenly
whiteness should have been enough to cure any one less grounded than he
in what must be owned was as fixed a habit as smoking with him. When I
first knew him he rarely vented his fury in that sort, and I fancy he was
under a promise to her which he kept sacred till the wear and tear of his
nerves with advancing years disabled him. Then it would be like him to
struggle with himself till he could struggle no longer and to ask his
promise back, and it would be like her to give it back. His profanity
was the heritage of his boyhood and young manhood in social conditions
and under the duress of exigencies in which everybody swore about as
impersonally as he smoked. It is best to recognize the fact of it, and I
do so the more readily because I cannot suppose the Recording Angel
really minded it much more than that Guardian. Angel of his. It
probably grieved them about equally, but they could equally forgive it.
Nothing came of his pose regarding “the damned human race” except his
invention of the Human Race Luncheon Club. This was confined to four
persons who were never all got together, and it soon perished of their
indifference.

In the earlier days that I have more specially in mind one of the
questions that we used to debate a good deal was whether every human
motive was not selfish. We inquired as to every impulse, the noblest,
the holiest in effect, and he found them in the last analysis of selfish
origin. Pretty nearly the whole time of a certain railroad run from New
York to Hartford was taken up with the scrutiny of the self-sacrifice of
a mother for her child, of the abandon of the lover who dies in saving
his mistress from fire or flood, of the hero’s courage in the field and
the martyr’s at the stake. Each he found springing from the unconscious
love of self and the dread of the greater pain which the self-sacrificer
would suffer in-forbearing the sacrifice. If we had any time left from
this inquiry that day, he must have devoted it to a high regret that
Napoleon did not carry out his purpose of invading England, for then he
would have destroyed the feudal aristocracy, or “reformed the lords,” as
it might be called now. He thought that would have been an incalculable
blessing to the English people and the world. Clemens was always
beautifully and unfalteringly a republican. None of his occasional
misgivings for America implicated a return to monarchy. Yet he felt
passionately the splendor of the English monarchy, and there was a time
when he gloried in that figurative poetry by which the king was phrased
as “the Majesty of England.” He rolled the words deep-throatedly out,
and exulted in their beauty as if it were beyond any other glory of the
world. He read, or read at, English history a great deal, and one of the
by-products of his restless invention was a game of English Kings (like
the game of Authors) for children. I do not know whether he ever
perfected this, but I am quite sure it was not put upon the market. Very
likely he brought it to a practicable stage, and then tired of it, as he
was apt to do in the ultimation of his vehement undertakings.



XX.

He satisfied the impassioned demand of his nature for incessant
activities of every kind by taking a personal as well as a pecuniary
interest in the inventions of others. At one moment “the damned human
race” was almost to be redeemed by a process of founding brass without
air bubbles in it; if this could once be accomplished, as I understood,
or misunderstood, brass could be used in art-printing to a degree
hitherto impossible. I dare say I have got it wrong, but I am not
mistaken as to Clemens’s enthusiasm for the process, and his heavy losses
in paying its way to ultimate failure. He was simultaneously absorbed in
the perfection of a type-setting machine, which he was paying the
inventor a salary to bring to a perfection so expensive that it was
practically impracticable. We were both printers by trade, and I could
take the same interest in this wonderful piece of mechanism that he
could; and it was so truly wonderful that it did everything but walk and
talk. Its ingenious creator was so bent upon realizing the highest ideal
in it that he produced a machine of quite unimpeachable efficiency. But
it was so costly, when finished, that it could not be made for less than
twenty thousand dollars, if the parts were made by hand. This sum was
prohibitive of its introduction, unless the requisite capital could be
found for making the parts by machinery, and Clemens spent many months in
vainly trying to get this money together. In the mean time simpler
machines had been invented and the market filled, and his investment of
three hundred thousand dollars in the beautiful miracle remained
permanent but not profitable. I once went with him to witness its
performance, and it did seem to me the last word in its way, but it had
been spoken too exquisitely, too fastidiously. I never heard him devote
the inventor to the infernal gods, as he was apt to do with the geniuses
he lost money by, and so I think he did not regard him as a traitor.

In these things, and in his other schemes for the ‘subiti guadagni’ of
the speculator and the “sudden making of splendid names” for the
benefactors of our species, Clemens satisfied the Colonel Sellers nature
in himself (from which he drew the picture of that wild and lovable
figure), and perhaps made as good use of his money as he could. He did
not care much for money in itself, but he luxuriated in the lavish use of
it, and he was as generous with it as ever a man was. He liked giving it,
but he commonly wearied of giving it himself, and wherever he lived he
established an almoner, whom he fully trusted to keep his left hand
ignorant of what his right hand was doing. I believe he felt no finality
in charity, but did it because in its provisional way it was the only
thing a man could do. I never heard him go really into any sociological
inquiry, and I have a feeling that that sort of thing baffled and
dispirited him. No one can read The Connecticut Yankee and not be aware
of the length and breadth of his sympathies with poverty, but apparently
he had not thought out any scheme for righting the economic wrongs we
abound in. I cannot remember our ever getting quite down to a discussion
of the matter; we came very near it once in the day of the vast wave of
emotion sent over the world by ‘Looking Backward,’ and again when we were
all so troubled by the great coal strike in Pennsylvania; in considering
that he seemed to be for the time doubtful of the justice of the
workingman’s cause. At all other times he seemed to know that whatever
wrongs the workingman committed work was always in the right.

When Clemens returned to America with his family, after lecturing round
the world, I again saw him in New York, where I so often saw him while he
was shaping himself for that heroic enterprise. He would come to me, and
talk sorrowfully over his financial ruin, and picture it to himself as
the stuff of some unhappy dream, which, after long prosperity, had
culminated the wrong way. It was very melancholy, very touching, but the
sorrow to which he had come home from his long journey had not that
forlorn bewilderment in it. He was looking wonderfully well, and when I
wanted the name of his elixir, he said it was plasmon. He was apt, for a
man who had put faith so decidedly away from him, to take it back and pin
it to some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort. Once, when he was
well on in years, he came to New York without glasses, and announced that
he and all his family, so astigmatic and myopic and old-sighted, had, so
to speak, burned their spectacles behind them upon the instruction of
some sage who had found out that they were a delusion. The next time he
came he wore spectacles freely, almost ostentatiously, and I heard from
others that the whole Clemens family had been near losing their eyesight
by the miracle worked in their behalf. Now, I was not surprised to learn
that “the damned human race” was to be saved by plasmon, if anything, and
that my first duty was to visit the plasmon agency with him, and procure
enough plasmon to secure my family against the ills it was heir to for
evermore. I did not immediately understand that plasmon was one of the
investments which he had made from “the substance of things hoped for,”
 and in the destiny of a disastrous disappointment. But after paying off
the creditors of his late publishing firm, he had to do something with
his money, and it was not his fault if he did not make a fortune out of
plasmon.



XXI.

For a time it was a question whether he should not go back with his
family to their old home in Hartford. Perhaps the father’s and mother’s
hearts drew them there all the more strongly because of the grief written
ineffaceably over it, but for the younger ones it was no longer the
measure of the world. It was easier for all to stay on indefinitely in
New York, which is a sojourn without circumstance, and equally the home
of exile and of indecision. The Clemenses took a pleasant, spacious
house at Riverdale, on the Hudson, and there I began to see them again on
something like the sweet old terms. They lived far more unpretentiously
than they used, and I think with a notion of economy, which they had
never very successfully practised. I recall that at the end of a certain
year in Hartford, when they had been saving and paying cash for
everything, Clemens wrote, reminding me of their avowed experiment, and
asking me to guess how many bills they had at New Year’s; he hastened to
say that a horse-car would not have held them. At Riverdale they kept no
carriage, and there was a snowy night when I drove up to their handsome
old mansion in the station carryall, which was crusted with mud as from
the going down of the Deluge after transporting Noah and his family from
the Ark to whatever point they decided to settle at provisionally. But
the good talk, the rich talk, the talk that could never suffer poverty of
mind or soul, was there, and we jubilantly found ourselves again in our
middle youth. It was the mighty moment when Clemens was building his
engines of war for the destruction of Christian Science, which
superstition nobody, and he least of all, expected to destroy. It would
not be easy to say whether in his talk of it his disgust for the
illiterate twaddle of Mrs. Eddy’s book, or his admiration of her genius
for organization was the greater. He believed that as a religious
machine the Christian Science Church was as perfect as the Roman Church
and destined to be, more formidable in its control of the minds of men.
He looked for its spread over the whole of Christendom, and throughout
the winter he spent at Riverdale he was ready to meet all listeners more
than half-way with his convictions of its powerful grasp of the average
human desire to get something for nothing. The vacuous vulgarity of its
texts was a perpetual joy to him, while he bowed with serious respect to
the sagacity which built so securely upon the everlasting rock of human
credulity and folly.

An interesting phase of his psychology in this business was not only his
admiration for the masterly, policy of the Christian Science hierarchy,
but his willingness to allow the miracles of its healers to be tried on
his friends and family, if they wished it. He had a tender heart for the
whole generation of empirics, as well as the newer sorts of scientitians,
but he seemed to base his faith in them largely upon the failure of the
regulars rather than upon their own successes, which also he believed in.
He was recurrently, but not insistently, desirous that you should try
their strange magics when you were going to try the familiar medicines.



XXII.

The order of my acquaintance, or call it intimacy, with Clemens was this:
our first meeting in Boston, my visits to him in Hartford, his visits to
me in Cambridge, in Belmont, and in Boston, our briefer and less frequent
meetings in Paris and New York, all with repeated interruptions through
my absences in Europe, and his sojourns in London, Berlin, Vienna, and
Florence, and his flights to the many ends, and odds and ends, of the
earth. I will not try to follow the events, if they were not rather the
subjective experiences, of those different periods and points of time
which I must not fail to make include his summer at York Harbor, and his
divers residences in New York, on Tenth Street and on Fifth Avenue, at
Riverdale, and at Stormfield, which his daughter has told me he loved
best of all his houses and hoped to make his home for long years.

Not much remains to me of the week or so that we had together in Paris
early in the summer of 1904. The first thing I got at my bankers was a
cable message announcing that my father was stricken with paralysis, but
urging my stay for further intelligence, and I went about, till the final
summons came, with my head in a mist of care and dread. Clemens was very
kind and brotherly through it all. He was living greatly to his mind in
one of those arcaded little hotels in the Rue de Rivoli, and he was free
from all household duties to range with me. We drove together to make
calls of digestion at many houses where he had got indigestion through
his reluctance from their hospitality, for he hated dining out. But, as
he explained, his wife wanted him to make these visits, and he did it, as
he did everything she wanted. ‘At one place, some suburban villa, he
could get no answer to his ring, and he “hove” his cards over the gate
just as it opened, and he had the shame of explaining in his
unexplanatory French to the man picking them up. He was excruciatingly
helpless with his cabmen, but by very cordially smiling and casting
himself on the drivers’ mercy he always managed to get where he wanted.
The family was on the verge of their many moves, and he was doing some
small errands; he said that the others did the main things, and left him
to do what the cat might.

It was with that return upon the buoyant billow of plasmon, renewed in
look and limb, that Clemens’s universally pervasive popularity began in
his own country. He had hitherto been more intelligently accepted or
more largely imagined in Europe, and I suppose it was my sense of this
that inspired the stupidity of my saying to him when we came to consider
“the state of polite learning” among us, “You mustn’t expect people to
keep it up here as they do in England.” But it appeared that his
countrymen were only wanting the chance, and they kept it up in honor of
him past all precedent. One does not go into a catalogue of dinners,
receptions, meetings, speeches, and the like, when there are more vital
things to speak of. He loved these obvious joys, and he eagerly strove
with the occasions they gave him for the brilliancy which seemed so
exhaustless and was so exhausting. His friends saw that he was wearing
himself out, and it was not because of Mrs. Clemens’s health alone that
they were glad to have him take refuge at Riverdale. The family lived
there two happy, hopeless years, and then it was ordered that they should
change for his wife’s sake to some less exacting climate. Clemens was
not eager to go to Florence, but his imagination was taken as it would
have been in the old-young days by the notion of packing his furniture
into flexible steel cages from his house in Hartford and unpacking it
from them untouched at his villa in Fiesole. He got what pleasure any
man could out of that triumph of mind over matter, but the shadow was
creeping up his life. One sunny afternoon we sat on the grass before the
mansion, after his wife had begun to get well enough for removal, and we
looked up toward a balcony where by-and-by that lovely presence made
itself visible, as if it had stooped there from a cloud. A hand frailly
waved a handkerchief; Clemens ran over the lawn toward it, calling
tenderly: “What? What?” as if it might be an asking for him instead of
the greeting it really was for me. It was the last time I saw her, if
indeed I can be said to have seen her then, and long afterward when I
said how beautiful we all thought her, how good, how wise, how
wonderfully perfect in every relation of life, he cried out in a breaking
voice: “Oh, why didn’t you ever tell her? She thought you didn’t like
her.” What a pang it was then not to have told her, but how could we
have told her? His unreason endeared him to me more than all his wisdom.

To that Riverdale sojourn belong my impressions of his most violent
anti-Christian Science rages, which began with the postponement of his
book, and softened into acceptance of the delay till he had well-nigh
forgotten his wrath when it come out. There was also one of those joint
episodes of ours, which, strangely enough, did not eventuate in entire
failure, as most of our joint episodes did. He wrote furiously to me of
a wrong which had been done to one of the most helpless and one of the
most helped of our literary brethren, asking me to join with him in
recovering the money paid over by that brother’s publisher to a false
friend who had withheld it and would not give any account of it. Our
hapless brother had appealed to Clemens, as he had to me, with the facts,
but not asking our help, probably because he knew he need not ask; and
Clemens enclosed to me a very taking-by-the-throat message which he
proposed sending to the false friend. For once I had some sense, and
answered that this would never do, for we had really no power in the
matter, and I contrived a letter to the recreant so softly diplomatic
that I shall always think of it with pride when my honesties no longer
give me satisfaction, saying that this incident had come to our
knowledge, and suggesting that we felt sure he would not finally wish to
withhold the money. Nothing more, practically, than that, but that was
enough; there came promptly back a letter of justification, covering a
very substantial check, which we hilariously forwarded to our
beneficiary. But the helpless man who was so used to being helped did
not answer with the gladness I, at least, expected of him. He
acknowledged the check as he would any ordinary payment, and then he made
us observe that there was still a large sum due him out of the moneys
withheld. At this point I proposed to Clemens that we should let the
nonchalant victim collect the remnant himself. Clouds of sorrow had
gathered about the bowed head of the delinquent since we began on him,
and my fickle sympathies were turning his way from the victim who was
really to blame for leaving his affairs so unguardedly to him in the
first place. Clemens made some sort of grit assent, and we dropped the
matter. He was more used to ingratitude from those he helped than I was,
who found being lain down upon not so amusing as he found my revolt. He
reckoned I was right, he said, and after that I think we never recurred
to the incident. It was not ingratitude that he ever minded; it was
treachery, that really maddened him past forgiveness.



XXIII.

During the summer he spent at York Harbor I was only forty minutes away
at Kittery Point, and we saw each other often; but this was before the
last time at Riverdale. He had a wide, low cottage in a pine grove
overlooking York River, and we used to sit at a corner of the veranda
farthest away from Mrs. Clemens’s window, where we could read our
manuscripts to each other, and tell our stories, and laugh our hearts out
without disturbing her. At first she had been about the house, and there
was one gentle afternoon when she made tea for us in the parlor, but that
was the last time I spoke with her. After that it was really a question
of how soonest and easiest she could be got back to Riverdale; but, of
course, there were specious delays in which she seemed no worse and
seemed a little better, and Clemens could work at a novel he had begun.
He had taken a room in the house of a friend and neighbor, a fisherman
and boatman; there was a table where he could write, and a bed where he
could lie down and read; and there, unless my memory has played me one of
those constructive tricks that people’s memories indulge in, he read me
the first chapters of an admirable story. The scene was laid in a
Missouri town, and the characters such as he had known in boyhood; but as
often as I tried to make him own it, he denied having written any such
story; it is possible that I dreamed it, but I hope the MS. will yet be
found. Upon reflection I cannot believe that I dreamed it, and I cannot
believe that it was an effect of that sort of pseudomnemonics which I
have mentioned. The characters in the novel are too clearly outlined in
my recollection, together with some critical reservations of my own
concerning them. Not only does he seem to have read me those first
chapters, but to have talked them over with me and outlined the whole
story.

I cannot say whether or not he believed that his wife would recover; he
fought the fear of her death to the end; for her life was far more
largely his than the lives of most men’s wives are theirs. For his own
life I believe he would never have much cared, if I may trust a saying of
one who was so absolutely without pose as he was. He said that he never
saw a dead man whom he did not envy for having had it over and being done
with it. Life had always amused him, and in the resurgence of its
interests after his sorrow had ebbed away he was again deeply interested
in the world and in the human race, which, though damned, abounded in
subjects of curious inquiry. When the time came for his wife’s removal
from York Harbor I went with him to Boston, where he wished to look up
the best means of her conveyance to New York. The inquiry absorbed him:
the sort of invalid car he could get; how she could be carried to the
village station; how the car could be detached from the eastern train at
Boston and carried round to the southern train on the other side of the
city, and then how it could be attached to the Hudson River train at New
York and left at Riverdale. There was no particular of the business
which he did not scrutinize and master, not only with his poignant
concern for her welfare, but with his strong curiosity as to how these
unusual things were done with the usual means. With the inertness that
grows upon an aging man he had been used to delegating more and more
things, but of that thing I perceived that he would not delegate the
least detail.

He had meant never to go abroad again, but when it came time to go he did
not look forward to returning; he expected to live in Florence always
after that; they were used to the life and they had been happy there some
years earlier before he went with his wife for the cure of Nauheim. But
when he came home again it was for good and all. It was natural that he
should wish to live in New York, where they had already had a pleasant
year in Tenth Street. I used to see him there in an upper room, looking
south over a quiet open space of back yards where we fought our battles
in behalf of the Filipinos and the Boers, and he carried on his campaign
against the missionaries in China. He had not yet formed his habit of
lying for whole days in bed and reading and writing there, yet he was a
good deal in bed, from weakness, I suppose, and for the mere comfort of
it.

My perspectives are not very clear, and in the foreshortening of events
which always takes place in our review of the past I may not always time
things aright. But I believe it was not until he had taken his house at
21 Fifth Avenue that he began to talk to me of writing his autobiography.
He meant that it should be a perfectly veracious record of his life and
period; for the first time in literature there should be a true history
of a man and a true presentation of the men the man had known. As we
talked it over the scheme enlarged itself in our riotous fancy. We said
it should be not only a book, it should be a library, not only a library,
but a literature. It should make good the world’s loss through Omar’s
barbarity at Alexandria; there was no image so grotesque, so extravagant
that we did not play with it; and the work so far as he carried it was
really done on a colossal scale. But one day he said that as to veracity
it was a failure; he had begun to lie, and that if no man ever yet told
the truth about himself it was because no man ever could. How far he had
carried his autobiography I cannot say; he dictated the matter several
hours each day; and the public has already seen long passages from it,
and can judge, probably, of the make and matter of the whole from these.
It is immensely inclusive, and it observes no order or sequence. Whether
now, after his death, it will be published soon or late I have no means
of knowing. Once or twice he said in a vague way that it was not to be
published for twenty years, so that the discomfort of publicity might be
minimized for all the survivors. Suddenly he told me he was not working
at it; but I did not understand whether he had finished it or merely
dropped it; I never asked.

We lived in the same city, but for old men rather far apart, he at Tenth
Street and I at Seventieth, and with our colds and other disabilities we
did not see each other often. He expected me to come to him, and I would
not without some return of my visits, but we never ceased to be friends,
and good friends, so far as I know. I joked him once as to how I was
going to come out in his autobiography, and he gave me some sort of
joking reassurance. There was one incident, however, that brought us
very frequently and actively together. He came one Sunday afternoon to
have me call with him on Maxim Gorky, who was staying at a hotel a few
streets above mine. We were both interested in Gorky, Clemens rather
more as a revolutionist and I as a realist, though I too wished the
Russian Tsar ill, and the novelist well in his mission to the Russian
sympathizers in this republic. But I had lived through the episode of
Kossuth’s visit to us and his vain endeavor to raise funds for the
Hungarian cause in 1851, when we were a younger and nobler nation than
now, with hearts if not hands, opener to the “oppressed of Europe”; the
oppressed of America, the four or five millions of slaves, we did not
count. I did not believe that Gorky could get the money for the cause of
freedom in Russia which he had come to get; as I told a valued friend of
his and mine, I did not believe he could get twenty-five hundred dollars,
and I think now I set the figure too high. I had already refused to sign
the sort of general appeal his friends were making to our principles and
pockets because I felt it so wholly idle, and when the paper was produced
in Gorky’s presence and Clemens put his name to it I still refused. The
next day Gorky was expelled from his hotel with the woman who was not his
wife, but who, I am bound to say, did not look as if she were not, at
least to me, who am, however, not versed in those aspects of human
nature.

I might have escaped unnoted, but Clemens’s familiar head gave us away to
the reporters waiting at the elevator’s mouth for all who went to see
Gorky. As it was, a hunt of interviewers ensued for us severally and
jointly. I could remain aloof in my hotel apartment, returning answer to
such guardians of the public right to know everything that I had nothing
to say of Gorky’s domestic affairs; for the public interest had now
strayed far from the revolution, and centred entirely upon these. But
with Clemens it was different; he lived in a house with a street door
kept by a single butler, and he was constantly rung for. I forget how
long the siege lasted, but long enough for us to have fun with it. That
was the moment of the great Vesuvian eruption, and we figured ourselves
in easy reach of a volcano which was every now and then “blowing a cone
off,” as the telegraphic phrase was. The roof of the great market in
Naples had just broken in under its load of ashes and cinders, and
crashed hundreds of people; and we asked each other if we were not sorry
we had not been there, where the pressure would have been far less
terrific than it was with us in Fifth Avenue. The forbidden butler came
up with a message that there were some gentlemen below who wanted to see
Clemens.

“How many?” he demanded.

“Five,” the butler faltered.

“Reporters?”

The butler feigned uncertainty.

“What would you do?” he asked me.

“I wouldn’t see them,” I said, and then Clemens went directly down to
them. How or by what means he appeased their voracity I cannot say, but
I fancy it was by the confession of the exact truth, which was harmless
enough. They went away joyfully, and he came back in radiant
satisfaction with having seen them. Of course he was right and I wrong,
and he was right as to the point at issue between Gorky and those who had
helplessly treated him with such cruel ignominy. In America it is not
the convention for men to live openly in hotels with women who are not
their wives. Gorky had violated this convention and he had to pay the
penalty; and concerning the destruction of his efficiency as an emissary
of the revolution, his blunder was worse than a crime.



XXIV.

To the period of Clemens’s residence in Fifth Avenue belongs his
efflorescence in white serge. He was always rather aggressively
indifferent about dress, and at a very early date in our acquaintance
Aldrich and I attempted his reform by clubbing to buy him a cravat. But
he would not put away his stiff little black bow, and until he imagined
the suit of white serge, he wore always a suit of black serge, truly
deplorable in the cut of the sagging frock. After his measure had once
been taken he refused to make his clothes the occasion of personal
interviews with his tailor; he sent the stuff by the kind elderly woman
who had been in the service of the family from the earliest days of his
marriage, and accepted the result without criticism. But the white serge
was an inspiration which few men would have had the courage to act upon.
The first time I saw him wear it was at the authors’ hearing before the
Congressional Committee on Copyright in Washington. Nothing could have
been more dramatic than the gesture with which he flung off his long
loose overcoat, and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of
his silvery head. It was a magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup;
but the magnificent speech which he made, tearing to shreds the venerable
farrago of nonsense about nonproperty in ideas which had formed the basis
of all copyright legislation, made you forget even his spectacularity.

It is well known how proud he was of his Oxford gown, not merely because
it symbolized the honor in which he was held by the highest literary body
in the world, but because it was so rich and so beautiful. The red and
the lavender of the cloth flattered his eyes as the silken black of the
same degree of Doctor of Letters, given him years before at Yale, could
not do. His frank, defiant happiness in it, mixed with a due sense of
burlesque, was something that those lacking his poet-soul could never
imagine; they accounted it vain, weak; but that would not have mattered
to him if he had known it. In his London sojourn he had formed the
top-hat habit, and for a while he lounged splendidly up and down Fifth
Avenue in that society emblem; but he seemed to tire of it, and to return
kindly to the soft hat of his Southwestern tradition.

He disliked clubs; I don’t know whether he belonged to any in New York,
but I never met him in one. As I have told, he himself had formed the
Human Race Club, but as he never could get it together it hardly counted.
There was to have been a meeting of it the time of my only visit to
Stormfield in April of last year; but of three who were to have come I
alone came. We got on very well without the absentees, after finding
them in the wrong, as usual, and the visit was like those I used to have
with him so many years before in Hartford, but there was not the old
ferment of subjects. Many things had been discussed and put away for
good, but we had our old fondness for nature and for each other, who were
so differently parts of it. He showed his absolute content with his
house, and that was the greater pleasure for me because it was my son who
designed it. The architect had been so fortunate as to be able to plan
it where a natural avenue of savins, the closeknit, slender, cypress-like
cedars of New England, led away from the rear of the villa to the little
level of a pergola, meant some day to be wreathed and roofed with vines.
But in the early spring days all the landscape was in the beautiful
nakedness of the northern winter. It opened in the surpassing loveliness
of wooded and meadowed uplands, under skies that were the first days
blue, and the last gray over a rainy and then a snowy floor. We walked
up and down, up and down, between the villa terrace and the pergola, and
talked with the melancholy amusement, the sad tolerance of age for the
sort of men and things that used to excite us or enrage us; now we were
far past turbulence or anger. Once we took a walk together across the
yellow pastures to a chasmal creek on his grounds, where the ice still
knit the clayey banks together like crystal mosses; and the stream far
down clashed through and over the stones and the shards of ice. Clemens
pointed out the scenery he had bought to give himself elbow-room, and
showed me the lot he was going to have me build on. The next day we came
again with the geologist he had asked up to Stormfield to analyze its
rocks. Truly he loved the place, though he had been so weary of change
and so indifferent to it that he never saw it till he came to live in it.
He left it all to the architect whom he had known from a child in the
intimacy which bound our families together, though we bodily lived far
enough apart. I loved his little ones and he was sweet to mine and was
their delighted-in and wondered-at friend. Once and once again, and yet
again and again, the black shadow that shall never be lifted where it
falls, fell in his house and in mine, during the forty years and more
that we were friends, and endeared us the more to each other.



XXV.

My visit at Stormfield came to an end with tender relucting on his part
and on mine. Every morning before I dressed I heard him sounding my name
through the house for the fun of it and I know for the fondness; and if I
looked out of my door, there he was in his long nightgown swaying up and
down the corridor, and wagging his great white head like a boy that
leaves his bed and comes out in the hope of frolic with some one. The
last morning a soft sugarsnow had fallen and was falling, and I drove
through it down to the station in the carriage which had been given him
by his wife’s father when they were first married, and been kept all
those intervening years in honorable retirement for this final use. Its
springs had not grown yielding with time; it had rather the stiffness and
severity of age; but for him it must have swung low like the sweet
chariot of the negro “spiritual” which I heard him sing with such fervor,
when those wonderful hymns of the slaves began to make their way
northward. ‘Go Down, Daniel’, was one in which I can hear his quavering
tenor now. He was a lover of the things he liked, and full of a passion
for them which satisfied itself in reading them matchlessly aloud. No
one could read ‘Uncle Remus’ like him; his voice echoed the voices of the
negro nurses who told his childhood the wonderful tales. I remember
especially his rapture with Mr. Cable’s ‘Old Creole Days,’ and the
thrilling force with which he gave the forbidding of the leper’s brother
when the city’s survey ran the course of an avenue through the cottage
where the leper lived in hiding: “Strit must not pass!”

Out of a nature rich and fertile beyond any I have known, the material
given him by the Mystery that makes a man and then leaves him to make
himself over, he wrought a character of high nobility upon a foundation
of clear and solid truth. At the last day he will not have to confess
anything, for all his life was the free knowledge of any one who would
ask him of it. The Searcher of hearts will not bring him to shame at
that day, for he did not try to hide any of the things for which he was
often so bitterly sorry. He knew where the Responsibility lay, and he
took a man’s share of it bravely; but not the less fearlessly he left the
rest of the answer to the God who had imagined men.

It is in vain that I try to give a notion of the intensity with which he
pierced to the heart of life, and the breadth of vision with which he
compassed the whole world, and tried for the reason of things, and then
left trying. We had other meetings, insignificantly sad and brief; but
the last time I saw him alive was made memorable to me by the kind, clear
judicial sense with which he explained and justified the labor-unions as
the sole present help of the weak against the strong.

Next I saw him dead, lying in his coffin amid those flowers with which we
garland our despair in that pitiless hour. After the voice of his old
friend Twichell had been lifted in the prayer which it wailed through in
broken-hearted supplication, I looked a moment at the face I knew so
well; and it was patient with the patience I had so often seen in it:
something of puzzle, a great silent dignity, an assent to what must be
from the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the
laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him. Emerson,
Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes--I knew them all and all the rest of our
sages, poets, seers, critics, humorists; they were like one another and
like other literary men; but Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln
of our literature.

ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS:


   Absolute devotion to the day of her death,
   Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful
   Addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness
   Amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence
   Amuse him, even when they wronged him
   Amusingly realized the situation to their friends
   But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month
   Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions
   Church: “Oh yes, I go. It ‘most kills me, but I go,”
    Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature
   Despair broke in laughter
   Despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology
   Everlasting rock of human credulity and folly
   Flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour
   He did not care much for fiction
   He did not paw you with his hands to show his affection
   He was a youth to the end of his days
   Heroic lies
   His coming almost killed her, but it was worth it
   Honest men are few when it comes to themselves
   It was mighty pretty, as Pepys would say
   Jane Austen
   Left him to do what the cat might
   Lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm
   Liked to find out good things and great things for himself
   Livy Clemens: nthe loveliest person I have ever seen
   Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know
   Mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world
   Mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here
   Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew
   Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men
   Nearly nothing as chaos could be
   Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy
   Never saw a man more regardful of negroes
   No man ever yet told the truth about himself
   No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery
   Not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else
   Ought not to call coarse without calling one’s self prudish
   Polite learning hesitated his praise
   Praised it enough to satisfy the author
   Reparation due from every white to every black man
   Shackles of belief worn so long
   Some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort
   Stupidly truthful
   The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it
   Truthful
   Used to ingratitude from those he helped
   Vacuous vulgarity of its texts
   Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal
   We have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end
   Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you
   What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent
   Whether every human motive was not selfish
   Wonder why we hate the past so--“It’s so damned humiliating!”



ETEXT EDITOR’S BOOKMARKS

   Absolute devotion to the day of her death,
   Absolutely, so positively, so almost aggressively truthful
   Abstract, the air-drawn, afflicted me like physical discomforts
   Act officiously, not officially
   Addressed to their tenderness out of his tenderness
   Always sumptuously providing out of his destitution
   Amiable perception, and yet with a sort of remote absence
   Amuse him, even when they wronged him
   Amusingly realized the situation to their friends
   Anglo-American genius for ugliness
   Appeal, which he had come to recognize as invasive
   Appeared to have no grudge left
   Backed their credulity with their credit
   Bayard Taylor: incomparable translation of Faust
   Became gratefully strange
   Best talkers are willing that you should talk if you like
   But now I remember that he gets twenty dollars a month”
    Candle burning on the table for the cigars
   Celia Thaxter
   Charles Reade
   Charles F. Browne
   Christianity had done nothing to improve morals and conditions
   Church: “Oh yes, I go It ‘most kills me, but I go,”
    Clemens was sole, incomparable, the Lincoln of our literature
   Cold-slaw
   Collective opacity
   Confidence I have nearly always felt when wrong
   Could make us feel that our faults were other people’s
   Could easily believe now that it was some one else who saw it
   Could only by chance be caught in earnest about anything
   Couldn’t fire your revolver without bringing down a two volumer
   Dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces
   Death of the joy that ought to come from work
   Death’s vague conjectures to the broken expectations of life
   Despair broke in laughter
   Despised the avoidance of repetitions out of fear of tautology
   Did not feel the effect I would so willingly have experienced
   Dinner was at the old-fashioned Boston hour of two
   Discomfort which mistaken or blundering praise
   Dollars were of so much farther flight than now
   Edmund Quincy
   Edward Everett Hale
   Either to deny the substance of things unseen, or to affirm it
   Emerson
   Enjoying whatever was amusing in the disadvantage to himself
   Espoused the theory of Bacon’s authorship of Shakespeare
   Ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense
   Everlasting rock of human credulity and folly
   Expectation of those who will come no more
   Express the appreciation of another’s fit word
   Feigned the gratitude which I could see that he expected
   Fell either below our pride or rose above our purse
   Felt that this was my misfortune more than my fault
   Few men last over from one reform to another
   First dinner served in courses that I had sat down to
   Flowers with which we garland our despair in that pitiless hour
   Forbearance of a wise man content to bide his time
   Forebore to speak needlessly to him, or to shake his hand
   Found life was not all poetry
   Francis Parkman
   Gay laugh comes across the abysm of the years
   Generous lover of all that was excellent in literature
   George William Curtis
   Giggle which Charles Lamb found the best thing in life
   Give him your best wine
   Got out of it all the fun there was in it
   Greeting of great impersonal cordiality
   Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds
   Hard of hearing on one side. But it isn’t deafness
   Harriet Beecher Stowe and the Autocrat clashed upon homeopathy
   Hate of hate, the scorn of scorn, The love of love
   He was not bored because he would not be
   He did not care much for fiction
   He was not constructive; he was essentially observant
   He had no time to make money
   He was a youth to the end of his days
   He did not paw you with his hands to show his affection
   Heine
   Heroic lies
   His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event
   His readers trusted and loved him
   His enemies suffered from it almost as much as his friends
   His coming almost killed her, but it was worth it
   His plays were too bad for the stage, or else too good for it
   Hollowness, the hopelessness, the unworthiness of life
   Honest men are few when it comes to themselves
   I find this young man worthy
   I believe neither in heroes nor in saints
   I did not know, and I hated to ask
   If he was half as bad, he would have been too bad to be
   If he was not there to your touch, it was no fault of his
   In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal
   Incredible in their insipidity
   Industrial slavery
   Insatiable English fancy for the wild America no longer there
   Intellectual poseurs
   It is well to hold one’s country to her promises
   It was mighty pretty, as Pepys would say
   Jane Austen
   Julia Ward Howe
   Left him to do what the cat might
   Lie, of course, and did to save others from grief or harm
   Liked being with you, not for what he got, but for what he gave
   Liked to find out good things and great things for himself
   Lincoln
   Literary dislikes or contempts
   Livy Clemens: nthe loveliest person I have ever seen
   Long breath was not his; he could not write a novel
   Longfellow
   Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it
   Love of freedom and the hope of justice
   Love and gratitude are only semi-articulate at the best
   Lowell
   Made all men trust him when they doubted his opinions
   Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave
   Man who had so much of the boy in him
   Marriages are what the parties to them alone really know
   Mellow cordial of a voice that was like no other
   Memory will not be ruled
   Men who took themselves so seriously as that need
   Men’s lives ended where they began, in the keeping of women
   Met with kindness, if not honor
   Might so far forget myself as to be a novelist
   Mind and soul were with those who do the hard work of the world
   Mock modesty of print forbids my repeating here
   Most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew
   Most serious, the most humane, the most conscientious of men
   Motley
   Napoleonic height which spiritually overtops the Alps
   Nearly nothing as chaos could be
   Never saw a man more regardful of negroes
   Never saw a dead man whom he did not envy
   Never paid in anything but hopes of paying
   No man ever yet told the truth about himself
   No time to make money
   No man more perfectly sensed and more entirely abhorred slavery
   Not quite himself till he had made you aware of his quality
   Not a man who cared to transcend; he liked bounds
   Not much patience with the unmanly craving for sympathy
   Not much of a talker, and almost nothing of a story-teller
   Not possible for Clemens to write like anybody else
   Now death has come to join its vague conjectures
   NYC, a city where money counts for more and goes for less
   Odious hilarity, without meaning and without remission
   Offers mortifyingly mean, and others insultingly vague
   Old man’s tendency to revert to the past
   Old man’s disposition to speak of his infirmities
   One could be openly poor in Cambridge without open shame
   Only one concerned who was quite unconcerned
   Ought not to call coarse without calling one’s self prudish
   Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities
   Person who wished to talk when he could listen
   Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking
   Pointed the moral in all they did
   Polite learning hesitated his praise
   Praised it enough to satisfy the author
   Praised extravagantly, and in the wrong place
   Put your finger on the present moment and enjoy it
   Quarrel was with error, and not with the persons who were in it
   Quebec was a bit of the seventeenth century
   Reformers, who are so often tedious and ridiculous
   Remember the dinner-bell
   Reparation due from every white to every black man
   Secret of the man who is universally interesting
   Seen through the wrong end of the telescope
   Shackles of belief worn so long
   Shy of his fellow-men, as the scholar seems always to be
   So refined, after the gigantic coarseness of California
   Some superstition, usually of a hygienic sort
   Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon
   Sought the things that he could agree with you upon
   Spare his years the fatigue of recalling your identity
   Standards were their own, and they were satisfied with them
   Stoddard
   Study in a corner by the porch
   Stupidly truthful
   The world is well lost whenever the world is wrong
   The ornament of a house is the friends who frequent it
   Things common to all, however peculiar in each
   Thoreau
   Those who have sorrowed deepest will understand this best
   Times when a man’s city was a man’s country
   Tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him
   True to an ideal of life rather than to life itself
   Truthful
   Turn of the talk toward the mystical
   Used to ingratitude from those he helped
   Vacuous vulgarity of its texts
   Visited one of the great mills
   Walter-Scotticized, pseudo-chivalry of the Southern ideal
   Wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look
   We have never ended before, and we do not see how we can end
   Welcome me, and make the least of my shyness and strangeness
   Well, if you are to be lost, I want to be lost with you
   What he had done he owned to, good, bad, or indifferent
   When to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast
   Whether every human motive was not selfish
   Whitman’s public use of his privately written praise
   Wit that tries its teeth upon everything
   Women’s rights
   Wonder why we hate the past so--“It’s so damned humiliating!”
    Wonderful to me how it should remain so unintelligible
   Work gives the impression of an uncommon continuity
   Wrote them first and last in the spirit of Dickens





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