Julia Ward Howe at “Oak Glen,” Newport
To those persons who have only visited the town of Newport, taken its ocean drive, lunched at its Casino, strolled on its beach, and stared at its fine carriages and the fine people in them, that fill Bellevue Avenue of an afternoon, the idea of choosing Newport as a place to rest in must seem a very singular one. If their visit be a brief one, they may easily fail to discover that after leaving the limits of the gay summer city, with its brilliant social life, its polo matches, its races, balls, dinners, and fêtes, there still remains a district, some twelve miles in length, of the most rural character. The land here is principally owned by small farmers, who raise, and sell at exorbitant and unrural prices, the fruit, vegetables, eggs, milk, butter and cream which the Newport market-men, adding a liberal percentage, sell again to their summer customers. The interior of the island is in many respects the most agreeable part of it; the climate is better, being much freer from heavy fogs and sea mists, and the thermometer neither rises so high nor falls so low as in the town. The neighborhood of Lawton’s Valley is one of the most charming and healthy parts; and it is in this spot that Mrs. Howe has, for many years, made her summer home. The house stands a little removed from the cross-road which connects the East and West Roads, the two thoroughfares that traverse the island from Newport to Bristol Ferry. Behind the house there is a grove of trees—oaks, willows, maples, and pines—which is the haunt of many singing birds. The quiet house seems to be the centre of a circle of song, and the earliest hint of day is announced by their morning chorus. In this glen “The Mistress of the Valley,” as Mrs. Howe has styled herself, in one of her poems, spends many of her leisure hours, during the six months which she usually passes at her summer home. Here she sits with her books and needle-work, and of an afternoon there is reading aloud, and much pleasant talk under the trees; sometimes a visitor comes from town, over the five long miles of country road; but this is not so common an occurrence as to take away from the excitement created by the ringing of the door-bell. There are lotus trees at Oak Glen, but its mistress can not be said to eat thereof, for she is never idle, and what she calls rest would be thought by many people to be very hard work. She rests herself, after the work of the day, by reading her Greek books, which have given her the greatest intellectual enjoyment of the later years of her life. In the summer of 1886 she studied Plato in the original, and last year she read the plays of Sophocles.
The day’s routine is something in this order: Breakfast, in the American fashion, at eight o’clock, and then a stroll about the place, after which the household duties are attended to; and then a long morning of work. Letter-writing, which—with the family correspondence, business matters, the autograph fiends and the letter cranks—is a heavy burthen, is attended to first; and then whatever literary work is on the anvil is labored at steadily and uninterruptedly until one o’clock, when the great event of the day occurs. This is the arrival of the mail, which is brought from town by Jackson Carter, a neighbor, who combines the functions of local mail-carrier, milkman, expressman, vender of early vegetables, and purveyor of gossip generally; to which he adds the duty of touting for an African Methodist church. Jackson is of the African race, and though he signs his name with a cross, he is a shrewd, intelligent fellow, and is quite a model of industry. After the newspapers and the letters have been digested, comes the early dinner, followed by coffee served in the green parlor, which is quite the most important apartment of the establishment. It is an open-air parlor, in the shape of a semicircle, set about with a close, tall green hedge, and shaded by the spreading boughs of an ancient mulberry tree. Its inmates are completely shielded from the sight of any chance passers-by; and in its quiet shade they often overhear the comments of the strangers on the road outside, to whom the house is pointed out. It was in this small paradise that “Mr. Isaacs” was written, and read aloud to Mrs. Howe, chapter by chapter, as it was written by her nephew, Marion Crawford. Sometimes there is reading aloud from the newspapers and reviews here, and then the busiest woman in all Newport goes back to her sanctum for two more working hours; after which she either drives or walks till sunset.
If it is a drive, it will be, most likely, an expedition to the town, where some household necessity must be bought, or some visit is to be paid. If a stroll is the order of the day, it will be either across the fields to a hill-top near by, from which a wonderful view of the island and the bay is to be had, or along the country road, past the schoolhouse, and towards Mrs. Howe’s old home, Lawton’s Valley. In these sunset rambles, Mrs. Howe is very sure to be accompanied by one or more of her grandchildren, four of whom, with their mother, Mrs. Hall, pass the summers at Oak Glen. She finds the children excellent company, and they look forward to the romp which follows the twilight stroll as the greatest delight of the day. The romp takes place in the drawing-room, where the rugs are rolled up, and the furniture moved back against the wall, leaving the wooden floor bare for the dancing and prancing of the little feet. Mrs. Howe takes her place at the piano, strikes the chords of an exhilarating Irish jig, and the little company, sometimes enlarged by a contingent of the Richards cousins from Maine, dance and jig about with all the grace and abandon of childhood. After supper, when the children are at last quiet and tucked up in their little beds, there is more music—either with the piano, in the drawing-room, or, if it is a warm night, on the piazza, with the guitar. As the evenings grow longer, in the late summer and autumn, there is much reading aloud, but only from novels of the most amusing, sensational or romantic description. None others are admitted; after the long day of work and study, relaxation and diversion are the two things needed. I have observed that with most hard literary workers and speculative thinkers, this class of novel is most in demand. The more intellectual romances are greedily devoured by people whose customary occupations lead them into the realm of actualities, and whose working hours are devoted to some practical business.
Last year Mrs. Howe had at heart the revival of the Town and Country Club, of which she is the originator and President, and which in 1886 had omitted its meetings. These meetings, which take place fortnightly during the season, are held at the houses of different members, and are both social and intellectual in character. The substantial part of the feast is served first, in the form of a lecture or paper from some distinguished person, after which there are refreshments, and talk of an informal character. Among others who in past seasons have read before the Club are Bret Harte, Prof. Agassiz, the Rev. Edward Everett Hale, the late Wm. B. Rogers, Mark Twain, Charles Godfrey Leland (“Hans Breitmann”), and the Rev. Drs. James Freeman Clarke, Frederic H. Hedge and George Ellis.
Mrs. Howe’s work for the summer of 1887 included a paper on a subject connected with the Greek drama, to be read at the Concord School of Philosophy, and an essay for the Woman’s Congress which was held in the early fall. She is much interested in the arts and industries of women, and in connection with these maintains a wide correspondence. But it is not all work and no play, even at such a busy place as Oak Glen. There are whole days of delightful leisure. Sometimes these are spent on the water on board of some friend’s yacht; or a less pretentious catboat is chartered, which conveys Mrs. Howe and her guests to Conanicut, or to Jamestown, where the day is spent beside the waves. Last summer a beautiful schooner yacht was lent to Mrs. Howe for ten days, and a glorious cruise was made, under the most smiling of summer skies. A day on the water is the thing that is most highly enjoyed by the denizens of Oak Glen; but there are other days hardly less delightful, spent in some out-of-the-way rural spot, where picnics are not forbidden, though these, alas! are becoming rare, since the churlish notice was posted up at Glen Anna, forbidding all trespassing on these grounds, which, time out of mind, have been free to all who loved them. There are still the Paradise Rocks, near the house of Edwin Booth, and thither an expedition is occasionally made.
Country life is not without its drawbacks and troubles; but these are not so very heavy after all, compared with some of the tribulations of the city, or of those who place themselves at the mercy of summer hotel keepers and boarding-house ladies. The old white pony, Mingo, will get into the vegetable garden occasionally, and eat off the heads of the asparagus, and trample down the young corn; the neighbor’s pig sometimes gets through the weak place in the wall, with all her pinky progeny behind her, and takes possession of the very best flower-bed; the honeysuckle vine does need training; and the grapes will not ripen as well as they would have done, if the new trellis projected recently had been set up. But after all, taking into consideration the fact that Io, the Jersey cow, is giving ten quarts of rich milk a day, and that the new cook has mastered the simplest and most delightful of dishes—Newport corn-meal flap-jacks,—Mrs. Howe’s life at Oak Glen is as peaceful and happy an existence as one is apt to find in these nihilistic days of striking hotel waiters and crowded summer resorts.
Beautiful as Newport is in these soft days of early summer, it is even lovelier in the autumn, and every year it is harder to leave Oak Glen, to give up the wide arc of the heavens, and to look up into God’s sky, between the two lines of brick houses of a city street. Each winter the place at Newport is kept open a little longer, and it is only the closing days of November that find Mrs. Howe established in her house in Boston. Beacon Street, with its smooth macadamized roadway, whereon there is much pleasure driving, and in the winter a perfect sleighing carnival, is as pleasant a street as it is possible to live on, but a country road is always a better situation than a city street, and a forest path perhaps is best of all. When she is once settled in her Boston home, the manifold interests of the complex city life claim every hour in the day. Her remarkable powers of endurance, her splendid enjoyment of life and health make her winters as full of pleasure as the more peaceful summer-tide. It is a very different life from that led at Oak Glen; it has an endless variety of interests, social, private, public, charitable, philanthropic, musical, artistic, and intellectual. A half-dozen clubs and associations of women in the city and its near vicinity, which owe their existence in large part to Mrs. Howe’s efforts, claim her presence in their midst at least once in every year.
Among the public occasions which have held the greatest interest for Mrs. Howe of late years was the dedication of the new Kindergarten for the Blind in 1887, at which she read one of her happiest “occasional poems.” The authors’ reading in aid of the Longfellow memorial fund, at the Boston Museum, where, before an audience the like of which had never before been seen in the theatre, she read a poem in memory of Longfellow, was an occasion which will not soon be forgotten by those who were present. Mrs. Howe was the only woman who took part in the proceedings, the other authors who read from their own works being Dr. Holmes, Mr. Lowell, Mark Twain, Colonel Higginson, Prof. Norton, Mr. E. E. Hale, Mr. Aldrich and Mr. Howells. Mrs. Howe has spoken several times at the Nineteenth Century Club, and she is always glad to revisit New York, for though she is often thought to be a Bostonian, she never forgets that the first twenty years of her life were passed in New York, the city of her birth.
Maud Howe.
MR. HOWELLS