At the Saturday Club
Few clubs have had a more distinguished membership than the Saturday Club of Boston, not even Dr. Johnson’s, to which the Saturday often compared itself in its golden days. It had Boston’s best learning, best poetry, best wit, best philanthropy, best statesmanship, and only lacked Boston’s best fashion because it had no great fondness for the Cotton Whigs of Beacon Street. Its origins were predominantly literary. As early as 1836 there had been a sort of informal organization which held a “Symposium” now and then, and which Emerson enjoyed for all that it was very clerical and that he said its seal might well be “two porcupines meeting with all their spines erect.” This organization languished, however, and Emerson—who here appears as very hungry for companions—and his friend Samuel Gray Ward planned in 1849 a Town-and-Country Club. This also languished under that name; but in the fifties two clubs grew up, existing side by side and more or less interlocking. The Magazine or Atlantic Club, purely literary, gradually faded, or rather gave way to the Atlantic dinners; the Saturday Club, for which Ward had suggested a less didactic membership and monthly dinners, was kept alive, clearly in no small part by Horatio Woodman’s special talent as high steward of the feasts, held on the last Saturday of each month except July, August, and September. Some such civilizing influence must have been needed in a group among whom Woodman’s introduction of mushrooms as a food seemed a startling novelty. According to Emerson’s journal Dwight was chosen to experiment first with the unfamiliar delicacy, and he amiably reported: “It tastes like a roof of a house.”
Something more than the fact that the publishers have made Edward Waldo Emerson’s The Early Years of the Saturday Club somewhat in the likeness of The Education of Henry Adams keeps reminding one of that other book, though Adams, nipping critic of orthodox Boston, is nowhere mentioned. The horribly dreary Boston world of Adams’s second chapter assuredly did not exist for the Saturday men, a body so festive that when Agassiz returned from Brazil in the summer of 1866, Lowell, Holmes, Fields, and the rest “joined hands, made a ring, and danced around him like a lot of boys, while Mr. Emerson stood apart, his face radiant.” In fact, no more genial chronicle of New England in negligee has been written. The Pundits were a long way from the Frog Pond when the Adirondack Club, most of its members then or later members of the Saturday Club as well, went to its first camp in 1858. Holmes would not leave the daily felicities of the Hub, and Longfellow, also no frontiersman, gave as excuse for staying at home the report that Emerson was taking a gun, though in fact Emerson never touched man or beast with a bullet. But Emerson was enchanted with the transcendental paradise which he found in the wilderness; and Lowell, younger and robuster, climbed a pine tree over fourteen feet in girth and sixty feet to the lowest branch.
Still, the Club dined more than it picnicked. While it unfortunately had no systematic Boswell, not a few of its good sayings are brought together in the record, particularly as taken down by Emerson in his omnivorous journal. There is Tom Appleton’s praise of horse-chestnuts: “I have carried this one in my pocket these ten years, and in all that time have had no touch of rheumatism. Indeed, its action is retrospective, for I never had rheumatism before.” And the same wit commented as follows upon a sad defect in the economy of nature: “Canvasback ducks eat the wild celery; and the common black duck, if it ate the wild celery, is just as good, only, damn ’em, they won’t eat it.” Once William Morris Hunt was asked if he would like to see a Japanese vase or cup which Norton had just received. “Like to see it?” Hunt exclaimed. “By God, it’s one of those damned ultimate things.” Felton, kept from a meeting by illness, “horizontally but ever cordially” wrote that he was “living on a pleasant variety of porridge and paregoric.” Holmes, referring to the immense vitality of Agassiz, said: “I cannot help thinking what a feast the cannibals would have if they boiled him.” Judge Hoar declared he valued the Book of Common Prayer for its special recognition of his native town: “O God who art the Author of good and the lover of Concord.” Holmes, no beauty, declared: “I have always considered my face a convenience rather than an ornament.” Longfellow, vexed at seeing plover on the table in May, 1858, “proclaimed aloud my disgust at seeing the game laws thus violated. If anybody wants to break a law, let him break the Fugitive Slave Law.” Whittier complained to Lowell over some delay in connection with a poem sent to the Atlantic: “Let me hear from thee some way. If thee fail to do this, I shall turn thee out of thy professor’s chair, by virtue of my new office of overseer.” To commentators who tamper with Shakespeare’s text, Lowell felt “inclined to apply the quadrisyllablic name of the brother of Agis, King of Sparta”; Felton identified the brother of Agis as Eudamidas.
A characteristic conversation between Holmes and Hawthorne goes thus: “Holmes said quickly ‘I wish you would come to the Club oftener.’ ‘I should like to,’ said Hawthorne, ‘but I can’t drink.’ ‘Neither can I.’ ‘Well, but I can’t eat.’ ‘Nevertheless, we should like to see you.’ ‘But I can’t talk, either.’” Actually, Hawthorne hardly ever spoke at the Club, preferring to sit next to Emerson or Longfellow and to let the other speak for him. Once, however, he spoke to amusing effect. Anthony Trollope, a guest, had roared out that only England produced good peaches or grapes. Lowell reports: “I appealed to Hawthorne, who sat opposite. His face mantled and trembled for a moment with some droll fancy, as one sees bubbles rise and send off rings in still water when a turtle stirs at the bottom, and then he said: ‘I asked an Englishman once who was praising their peaches to describe to me what he meant by a peach, and he described something very like a cucumber.’” A brilliant letter from the elder Henry James still further visualizes Hawthorne at the Club: “He has the look all the time, to one who doesn’t know him, of a rogue who suddenly finds himself in a company of detectives. But in spite of his rusticity, I felt a sympathy for him amounting to anguish.... It was so pathetic to see him, contented, sprawling Concord owl that he was and always has been, brought blindfold into the brilliant daylight, and expected to wink and be lively like any little dapper Tommy Titmouse or Jenny Wren. How he buried his eyes in his plate, and ate with a voracity that no person should dare to ask him a question... eating his dinner and doing absolutely nothing but that, and then going home to his Concord den to fall on his knees and ask his Heavenly Father why it was that an owl couldn’t remain an owl, and not be forced into the diversions of a canary.”
Some of these things were not actually uttered at the Club, but they pretty accurately represented its conversation. An abridgment would have to be almost as long as the book to do full justice to its wealth of material; it would have to repeat countless literary incidents: such as the fact that Lowell for a long time tried to find out something of Forceythe Willson, only to discover him living in Cambridge within two hundred yards of Elmwood; that E. J. Reed, the Chief Constructor of the British Navy, thought Longfellow had written “the finest poem on shipbuilding that ever was or probably ever will be written”; and that one of the members said Emerson’s “good word about a man’s character is like being knighted on the field of battle.” No one, indeed, emerges from the history in such noble proportions or in such an agreeable light as Emerson. Nor is this due to any partiality of his son. The truth plainly appears that even in the company of Agassiz and Hoar and Holmes and James and Lowell and Norton, Emerson was the spiritual master of the Club. Sumner, on the other hand, though heartily praised in a good many pages, simply refuses to seem attractive. He had the vices of manner for which Boston is too famous—its egotism, its insolence, its complacency. The early history of the Saturday Club goes far toward proving that fame unjust. Its members at least can be called inhuman only in the sense that they were honourable, conscientious, busy, temperate, and kind much beyond the common run of men conspicuously talented. And they lacked neither mirth nor fellowship. Why are their books on the whole not as good as themselves? Did the thinness of the product of most of them come from Puritan inhibitions? The history of the Saturday Club unconsciously emphasizes a discrepancy, for the men who wrote the gentle, pure, noble, but not too rich or varied classics of New England were themselves men of pretty full blood and high hearts.