VI Stage Folk and Others
Had anyone crossed the Charles Street threshold of the Fieldses with the expectation of encountering within none but the New England Augustans, he would soon have found himself happily disillusioned, even at a time when there was no Dickens in Boston. As it was in reality, so must it be in these pages, if they are to fulfill their purpose of restoring a vanished scene, the variety of which must indeed be counted among its most distinctive characteristics. The pages that follow will accordingly serve to illustrate the familiar fact that the pudding of a “family party” is often rendered the more acceptable by the introduction of a few plums not plucked from the domestic tree.
Mrs. Fields once noted in her diary the circumstance that, when her husband came to Boston from Portsmouth at the age of fourteen, and began to work as a “boy” in the bookshop of Carter & Hendee, the second of these employers had a box at the theatre and, to keep his young employees happy, used constantly to ask one or more of them to see a play in his company. Thus enabled in his youth to see such actors as the elder Booth, Fanny Kemble and her father, and many others of the best players to be seen in America at the time, Fields acquired a love of the theatre and of stage folk which stood him in good stead throughout his life. A certain exuberance in his own nature must have sought a response in social contacts other than those of the straiter sect of his local contemporaries. In men and women of the stage, in authors from beyond the compass of the local horizon, writers with whom he formed relations in his double capacity of editor and publisher, in artists and public men outside the immediate “literary” circle of Boston, Fields took an unceasing delight, shared by his wife, and still communicable through her journals.
From their pages, then, I propose to assemble here a group of passages relating first to stage folk, and then to others, and, since these records so largely explain themselves, to burden them as lightly as possible with explanations. Slender as certain of the entries are, each contributes something to a recovery of the time and of the persons that graced it.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, says his biographer, used to declare in his later years, “Though I am not genuine Boston, I am Boston-plated.” His intimate relation with Boston began in 1865, through the publication of a “Blue and Gold” edition of his poems by the firm of which Fields was a member, and the beginning of his editorship of “Every Saturday,” an illustrated journal issued under the same auspices. His range of acquaintance before that time was such that when the “plating” process began,—it was really more like a transmutation of metals,—he sometimes served as a sympathetic link between his new Boston and his old New York. It was in New York, only a few weeks after the assassination of Lincoln, that Aldrich appears in the diary, fresh from seeing his friend, Edwin Booth.
May 3, 1865.—An hour before we went to tea, Aldrich came to see us. He said he and Launt Thompson were staying with Edwin Booth alternate nights during this season of sorrow; that it was “all right between himself and the lady he was about to marry.” Then he described to us the first night while Booth was plunged in agony. He said the gas was left burning low and the bed stood in the corner, just where he lay sleepless, looking at a fearfully good crayon portrait of Wilkes Booth which glared at him over the gas. Launt Thompson started with the mother from New York for Philadelphia, where she was going to join her daughter the day that John Wilkes was shot, and an extra containing the news was brought them by a newsboy as they stepped on the ferry-boat. The old woman would have the paper. “He was her ‘Johnny’ after all,” said T. B. A.
Friday.—Have seen a lady who knows the person to whom Booth is engaged—said that her letter telling him she was true passed his letter of relinquishment on its way to Philadelphia. She thinks these two women have saved Booth. “I have been loved too well,” he said once....
Aldrich said we should not have been more astonished to hear he himself had done the terrible deed than he was to know Wilkes Booth had done it. “He was so gentle, gentler than I, and very handsome—a slight, beautiful figure,” and (as he described the face, it was the Greek Antinous kind of beauty there) I could not but reflect how the deed may deform the man. Nobody said he was beautiful after he was dead, but they laid a cloth upon the face and said how dreadful. It has been a strange experience to come among the people who know the family. I hoped I should be spared this, but the soul of good in things evil God means we should all see.
Sunday, May 7.—A radiant day. Went to hear Dr. Bellows—a grand discourse. After service sat in his drawing-room and talked and then walked together.... He too has been to see Edwin Booth. The poor fellow said to him, “Ah! if it had been a fellow like myself who had done this dreadful deed, the world would not have wondered—but Johnny!!”
Wednesday, January 3, 1866.—Dined with the Grahams and went to see Booth upon the occasion of his reappearance. The unmoved sadness of the young man and the unceasing plaudits of the house, half filled with his friends, were impressive and made it an occasion not to be forgotten.
September 23, 1866.—Edwin Booth and the Aldriches came to tea; also Tom Beal and Professor Sterry Hunt of Montreal, the latter late. Booth came in the twilight while a magnificent red and purple and gold sunset was staining the bay. The schooners anchored just off shore had already lighted their lanterns and swung them in the rigging, and the full moon cast a silver sheen over the scene. I hear he passes every Sunday morning while here at the grave of his wife in Mt. Auburn. He seems deeply saddened. He was very pleasant, however, and ready to talk, and gave amusing imitations—in particular of his black boy, Jan, who possesses, he says, the one accomplishment of forgetting everything he ought to remember. One day a man with a deep tragic voice, “Forrestian,” he said, came to him with letters of introduction asking Mr. Booth to assist him as he was about to go to England. Mr. B. told him he knew no one in England and could do nothing for him, he was sorry. If he ever found it possible to do him a service he would with pleasure. With that Mr. B. turned,—they were in the vestibule of the theatre—and entered the box-office to speak to someone there; immediately he heard the deep voice addressing Jan with “You are with Mr. Booth.” “Yes,” responded Jan with real negro accent, “I’m wid Mr. Booth.” “In what capacity—are you studying?” “Yaas,” returned Jan, unblushingly, “I’se studyin’.” “What are you upon now?” “Oh, Richelieu, Hamlet, an’ a few of dese yer.” “Ah, I should be pleased to enter into correspondence with you while I am abroad. Would you have any objections?” “Oh, no, no objection, no objection at all.” “Thank you, sir; good-day, sir.” With that they parted and Jan came with his mouth stretched wide with laughter. “Massa, what is ‘correspond’? I told him I’d correspond, what’d he mean, correspond?” Then Jan, convulsed with his joke, roared and roared again. They are surely a merry race, but provoking enough sometimes. They are capable of real attachments, however; this man has been several times dismissed but will not go. Booth told everything very dramatically, but I was especially struck with his description of a man travelling with two shaggy terrier pups in the cars. He had them in a basket and hung them up over his head and then composed himself to sleep. Waking up half an hour later, he observed a man on the opposite side of the car, his eyes starting from his head and the very picture of dismay, as if a demon were looking at him. The owner of the pups, following the direction of the man’s eyes, looked up and saw the two pups had their heads out of the basket. He quietly made a sign for them to go back and they disappeared. The man’s gaze did not apparently slacken, however, but in a moment became still more horrified when the pups again looked out. “What’s the matter?” said the owner. “What are those?” said the man, pointing with trembling finger; “pray excuse me, but I have been on a spree and I thought they were demons.” He introduced the subject of the stage and talked of points in “Hamlet,” which he had made for the first time, but occasionally through accident had omitted. The next day he will be sure to be asked by letter or newspaper why he omits certain points which would be so excellent to make, the writer thinks. He has had a life of strange vicissitudes, as almost all actors. He referred last night to his frequent travels during childhood over the Alleghanies with his father, of long nights spent in this kind of travel; and once in Nevada he walked fifty miles chiefly through snow. “Why?” said Lilian. “Because I was hard up, Lily,” he continued; “I walked it too in stage boots which were too tight—it was misery.”...
They had all gone by half-past ten, but we lay long awake thinking over poor Booth and his strange sad fortune. Hamlet, indeed!—although Forceythe Willson says, “I have been to see Mr. Hamlet play Booth.” Yes, perhaps when he is playing it for the 400th time with a bad cold, it may seem so; indeed I found it dullish myself, or his part, I mean, the other night; but he did play it once—the night of his reappearance in New York.
May 18, 1869.—Last Sunday evening Booth, Aldrich and his wife and sister, Dr. Holmes and Amelia and Launt Thompson, Leslie and ourselves took tea here together. In the evening came Mr. and Mrs. Emerson. We did have a rare and delightful symposium. Booth talked little as usual, and the next night went round to Aldrich’s and took himself off as he behaves in company!! Nevertheless he was glad to see Holmes, though every time Dr. H. addressed him across the table he seemed to receive an electric shock.
A chance meeting between William Warren and Fields in a lane at the seaside Manchester is recorded, with their talk, in the diary as early as 1865. Two entries in 1872 have to do with Jefferson, first alone and then with Warren. The friendship with Jefferson, begun so long ago, was continued until his death.
Tuesday, March 18, 1872.—Left Boston for a short trip to New York. Jefferson the actor, famous throughout the world for his impersonation of “Rip Van Winkle,” was on the train and finding us out (or J. him), came to our compartment car to pass the day. He talked without cessation and without effort. He described his sudden disease of the eyes quite bravely and simply, from the use of too much whiskey. He said the newspapers had said it was the gas, and many other reasons had been assigned first and last; but he firmly believed there was no other reason than too much whiskey. He had taken the habit—when he was somewhat below his ordinary physical and mental condition in the evening and wished to rise to the proper point and “carry the audience”—of taking a small glass of whiskey. This glass was after a time made two, and even three or four. Finally he was stricken down by a trouble of the eyes which threatened the entire extinction of sight. His physician at once suggested that unnatural use of stimulants was the cause, of which he himself is now entirely convinced and no longer touches anything stronger than claret. He has played to a larger variety of audiences probably than almost any other great actor. The immense applause he received in England, where he played 170 consecutive nights at the Adelphi in London, always as “Rip,” has only served to make him more modest, it would seem, more desirous to uphold himself artistically. He gave us a hint of his taste for fishing and described his trout-raising establishment in Jersey; very curious and wonderful it was. Nature preserves only one in a hundred of the eggs of trout to come to maturity. Mr. Jefferson in his pond is able to raise 85 out of 100. There seems no delight to him so great as that of sitting beside a stream on a sunny day, line in hand.
Talking of the everlasting repetition of “Rip,” he says he should be thankful to rest himself with another play, but this has been a growth and it would be a daring thing for him to attempt anything new with a public who would always compare him with himself in this play which is the result of years of his best thought and strength. I think myself, if he were quite well he would be almost sure to attempt something else. He told us several stories very dramatically. He is an odd, carelessly dressed little mortal, a cross between Charles Lamb and Grimaldi, but we have seldom passed a more delightful day of talk than with him. The hours absolutely fled away.
Wednesday, May 22, 1872.—Mr. Longfellow, Dr. Holmes, and Jefferson and Warren, the two first comedians of our time, dined here. The hour was three o’clock, to accommodate the two professional gentlemen. The hours until three, with the exception of two visits (Miss Sara Clarke and Miss Wainwright in spite of saying “engaged”), were occupied in making preparations for the little feast. I mean the hours after breakfast until time to dress. (Of hours before breakfast I have now-a-days nothing to say. I am not strong enough to do anything early, but country life this summer is to change all that.) Mr. Jefferson and Mr. Warren arrived first. Finding much to interest them in the pictures of our lower room, they lingered there a few moments before coming to the library, when we talked of Marney’s pictures (Mr. J. owns some of his water-colors) and looked about at others. Soon Longfellow came with Jamie. He said he felt like one on a journey. He left home early in the morning, had been sight-seeing in Boston all day, was to dine and go to the theatre with us afterward.
He asked Mr. Warren why a Mr. Inglis was selling his fine library and pictures—a question nobody had been able to solve. Mr. Inglis is, however, in some way connected with the stage, and Warren told us it was because he had been arrested with Mr. Harvey Parker and others and condemned to be thrown in the House of Correction, for selling liquor. His money protected him from the rigor of the law, but the disgrace remained. His children felt it much and he was going to Europe at least for a season. We could not help feeling the injustice of this when we remembered the myriad liquor shops for the poor all over the town, with which no one interferes.
Mr. Jefferson was deeply interested in our pictures of the players by Zanaçois. Dr. Holmes came in, talked a little at my suggestion about Anne Whitney’s bust of Keats, which he appears to know nothing about artistically (I observed the same lack of knowledge in Emerson), but he criticised the hair. He said he supposed nothing was known about Keats’s hair, so it might as well be one way as another. I told him on the contrary I owned some of it; whereat I got it out, and he went off in a little episode about an essay which he had sometimes thought of writing about hair. He has a machine by which the size of a hair can be measured and recorded. This he would like to use, and make a note of comparison between the hairs of “G. W.” (as he laughingly called Washington), Jefferson, Milton, and other celebrities of the earth. He thought it might be very curious to discover the difference in quality.
We were soon seated at the table (only six all told) where the conversation never flagged. Longfellow properly began it by saying he thought Mr. Charles Mathews was entirely unjust to Mr. Forrest as King Lear. He considered Mr. Forrest’s rendering of the part, and he sat through the whole, as fine and close to nature. He could not understand Mr. Mathews’s underrating it as he did. Of course the other two gentlemen could say nothing more than the difficulty Mr. Mathews from his nature would have in estimating at its proper worth anything Mr. Forrest might do, their idea of Art being so dissimilar. Here arose the question if one actor was a good judge of another. Jefferson said he sometimes thought actors very bad judges—indeed he preferred to be judged by an audience inspired by feeling rather than by one intellectually critical.
Jefferson has a clear blue eye, very fine and bright and sweet. Longfellow thinks his mouth a very weak one, and certainly his face is not impressive. Warren appears a man of finer intellect and more wit. He had many witty things to say and his little tales were always dramatically given. Dr. Holmes could not seem to recover from the idea that Jefferson had made a fortune out of one play and that he never played but one. “I hear, Mr. Jefferson,” he said, when he first came in, “that you have been playing the same play ever since you came here.” (He has been playing the same for a dozen years, I believe, nearly—and has been here three weeks!) Jefferson could hardly help laughing as he assured him that for the space of three weeks he had given the same every night. Dr. Holmes had a way at the table of talking of “you actors,” “you gentlemen of the stage,” until I saw Longfellow was quite disturbed at the unsympathetic unmannerliness of it, in appearance, and tried to talk more than ever in a different strain.
After I left the table, which I did because I thought they might like to smoke, Jamie sent for Parsons’s poems and read them some of the finest. Of course the talk was wittier and quicker as the time came to separate, but I cannot report upon it. The impression the two actors left upon me, however, was rather that of men who enjoyed coming up to the surface to breathe a natural air seldom vouchsafed to them than of men sparring with their wits—they are affectionate, gentle, subdued gentlemen and a noble contrast to the self-opinionated ignorance which we often meet in society. Dr. Holmes was, however, the wit of the occasion, as he always is, and everybody richly enjoyed his sallies. They stayed until the last moment—indeed I do not see how they got to their two theatres in time to dress. It must have been, as they say of eggs, a “hard scrabble.” We went afterward—we four—to see a new actor, Raymond, play “Colleen Bawn” at the Globe—pretty play, though very touching and melodramatic, by Boucicault. I must confess to dislike such plays where your feelings are wrought to the highest pitch for nothing.
The name of Fechter is familiar to the middle-aged through the memory of fathers, to the young through that of grandfathers. Readers of these pages will recall that Dickens, soon after reaching America in 1867, spoke of him in terms which caused Mrs. Fields to look forward with confidence to a new friendship. His coming to America was specifically heralded by an article, “On Mr. Fechter’s Acting,” contributed by Dickens to the “Atlantic” for August, 1869. When Fechter was in Boston, warmly received as Dickens’s friend, he often appears in the journals of Mrs. Fields, in conjunction with others.
Friday, February 25, 1870.—Mr. Fechter came to lunch with Mr. Longfellow, Mr. Appleton, Mr. and Mrs. Dorr. He talked freely about his Hamlet, so different from all other impersonations. His audience here he finds wonderfully good, better than any other; fine points which have never been applauded before bring out a round of applause. On the whole he appears to enjoy new hearers—does not understand the constant comparison between himself and Booth. They are already great friends. Booth was in the house the last night of his performance there; afterward he did not come to speak to him, and Fechter felt it; but a letter came yesterday saying he was so observed that he slipped away as soon as possible, and could not come on Sunday because visitors prevented him. Better late than never; it was pleasant to Fechter to hear from Booth—with one exception: he enclosed a notice from some newspaper, cutting up himself horribly and praising Fechter. “Ah! that won’t do; I shall send it back to him and tell him why. We are totally unlike in our Hamlets, and neither should be praised at the other’s expense.”
Mr. Fechter described minutely Mr. Dickens’s attack of paralysis last year, and, the year before, his prompt appearance in the box of the theatre at the last performance of “No Thoroughfare,” which he said he should do; but as Fechter had not heard of his return from America, it was a great shock. “If it had been ‘Hamlet,’ or any difficult play, I could not have gone on! He should not have done such a thing.” He told us a strange touching story of M’lle Mars, during her last years. She came upon the stage one night to give one of the youthful parts in which she had once been so famous. When she appeared, some heartless wretch threw her a wreath of immortelles, as if for her grave. She was so shocked that the drops stood on her brow, the rouge fell from her cheeks, and she stood motionless before the audience, a picture of age and misery. She could not continue her part.
He spoke with intense enthusiasm of Frédérick Lemaître, much as I have heard Mr. Dickens do. “The second-class actors were always arguing with him (only second-class people argue) and saying, ‘Why do you wish me to stand here, Frédérick?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he would say, ‘only do it.’”
Mr. Appleton was deeply interested in the fact that Shakespeare proved himself such a believer in ghosts, as “Hamlet” shows, and would like to push the subject farther, Mr. Fechter evidently finding much to say on this topic also. Mr. Longfellow was interested to ask about the Dumas, père et fils. Mr. Fechter has known them well and has many queer stories to tell of their relation to each other. Le fils calls mon père, “my youngest child born many years ago,” and the father usually introduces the son as M. Dumas, mon père. The motto on Fechter’s note paper is very curious and a type of the man—“Faiblesse vaut vice.” Mr. Longfellow spoke again of Mr. Dickens’s restlessness, of his terrible sadness. “Yes, yes,” said Fechter, “all his fame goes for nothing.”...
Jamie is so weak that he went to sleep almost as soon as they were gone. God knows what it all means; I do not.
It is odd that Fechter’s eyes should be brown after all. They look so light in the play. He is a round little man, naturally friendly, spontaneous. We do not know what his life has been, and we will not ask; that does not rest with us; but he is a very fine artist. His imitation of Mr. Dickens, as he sat on the lawn watching him at work, or as he joined him coming from his desk at lunchtime with tears on his cheek and a smile on his mouth, was very close to the life and delightful.
Mr. Longfellow did not talk much, not as much as the last time he was here, but he was lovely and kind.29 He brought a coin of the French Republic which had been touched by French wit, Liberté x (point), Egalité x (point), Fraternité x (point). And more to the same effect, without altering the coin.
Appleton has just bought a new Troyon, which he says he shall lend me for a week.
At the end of the following August there is a record of a talk with Fechter on the boat from Boston to Nahant, where he and the Fieldses dined with Longfellow. Dickens had died in the June just past, and Fechter had much to say of him and his family life. “Day by day,” wrote Mrs. Fields, “I am grateful to think of him at rest.” The little party at Nahant is described.
We found dear Longfellow looking through a glass to espy our approach, and all his dear little girls and Ernest and his wife and Appleton, who whisked me away from the dinner-table to his studio where he had some really good sketches. The conversation at table was half French, Longfellow and Appleton both finding it agreeable to recall the foreign scenes by the foreign tongue. But except a queer imitation of John Forster, by Fechter, I do not remember any quotable talk. F. said Forster always looked at everybody as if regarding their qualifications for a lunatic asylum (he is commissioner of lunacy), saying to himself, “Well, I’ll let you off today, but tomorrow you must certainly go and be shut up.” He describes Forster’s present state of health as something very precarious and wretched.
November 14, 1870.—Monday night went to see Fechter in “Claude Melnotte.” Longfellow and his daughter Edith sat in the box adjoining ours. It was the stage box where they were sheltered from observation; ours was the box next it, to be sure, but accessible to all eyes. During the curtain Longfellow came into our box; Mrs. Holmes and Mrs. Andrew were with me, both plain ladies dressed in mourning. His advent caused a little rustle of curiosity to ripple over the house. Longfellow was never looking finer than he is today. His white hair and deep blue eyes and kind face make his presence a benediction wherever he goes—of such men one cannot help feeling what Dr. Putnam so well expressed last Sunday in speaking of the presence of our Lord at a feast. “He rewarded the hospitality of his friends by his presence.”
Longfellow brought an illegible scrawl in his hand which Parsons had written from London to Lunt. He told me also of having lately received a photograph from Virginia of a young woman, and written under it were the words, “What fault can be found with this?” He said he thought of replying, “The fault of too great youth.” It certainly could not be agreeable to him to sit in the eye of the audience as he did; but he was very talkative and pleasant, expressed his disappointment at not having us at his Nilsson dinner, but his family were too many for him; said how he liked her for her frankness; told me of the old impressario Garrett, the Jew, coming without invitation and certainly without being wanted (as it sent “his children upstairs to dine”); and then, as the play was about to begin, he withdrew. He was much amused and disgusted by the platitudes of the play. Returned to his own box, Jamie said he laughed immoderately over the absurdities of it as it continued. He tooted as the instruments tooted and spouted as the second-rate actors spouted, all of which was highly amusing to Edith, who was weeping over the unhappy lovers, utterly absorbed in the play. Mrs. Holmes and Mrs. Andrew, too, were full of tears, and I found it no use attempting to say anything more during the evening.
Fechter was indeed marvellous. He raised the play into something human, something exquisite whenever he was upon the stage. His terrible earnestness sweeps the audience utterly away. But he is not the player for the million.
Sunday evening, December 11, 1870.—Went to Mr. Bartol’s and met Mr. Collyer. He was pleased to hear what Fechter said of him Saturday night (by the by we met Fechter at Mrs. Dorr’s dinner on Saturday), that he singled him out, found him a capital audience, and played to him. It was a fine house on Saturday and Fechter played “Don Cæsar.” It was never played better. Curtis was there, and fine company. Fechter was graceful and saucy too in talk at dinner—just right for the occasion.
Monday, December 19.—I have just returned from seeing Fechter in “Ruy Blas.” The public has just received the news that he is to leave the Globe Theatre and Boston in four weeks. The result was an enormous house, and the most fashionable house I have seen this season. He played with great fire and ease, but he has a wretched cold and his pronunciation was so thick and French (as it is apt to be when he is excited) that I could often hardly catch a word. But his audience was determined to be pleased and they caught and applauded all his good points. I saw but one dissenting spirit, that was a spoiled queen of fashion just returned from Europe, who saw nobody and nothing but herself....
Saturday, January 7, 1871.—Dined at Mr. Longfellow’s with Mr. Fechter. The poet welcomed us with a cordiality peculiar to himself and his children, with a simple glad-to-see written over their faces which is worth a world of talk. We had a merry table-talk although Fechter was laboring under the unnatural excitement of his position in having lost his season at the Globe, broken with the proprietor Cheney who was his friend, and finding himself without an engagement for the time. Also, so mischance held the day, Miss Leclercq, his only fit support, injured herself in the afternoon and their superb audience went away disappointed. However, the dinner went off beautifully, as it always must with Longfellow at the helm. There was some talk of poetry and the drama and J. amused them too with anecdotes. Then we adjourned to the room of Charles the East-India man, where we saw many curiosities and had a very pleasant hour before leaving. Passing through the dressing-room of our dear Longfellow, I was struck with seeing how like the house of a German student it was—a Goethean aspect of simplicity and largeness everywhere—books too are put on all the walls. It is surely a most attractive house.
January 13, 1871.—Today Jamie lunched with Appleton. We passed the evening at Mrs. Quincy’s. It is the great benefit to Fechter, but in consequence of the tickets being sold unjustly at auction, we shall not go. Unhappily there are rumors about town that Fechter is to be insulted in the theatre. I wish I could get word to him. I shall wait until J. gets home and then ask him to drive up to put F. on his guard.
January 23.—It proved an unnecessary alarm! The evening went off well enough but unenthusiastically, and at last Fechter gave all the money to the poor!
When Mrs. Fields first met that representative of the once alluring art of “elocution,” James E. Murdoch, he was already a veteran who had twice, at an interval of nearly twenty years, retired from the stage. Two notes about him recall his robust personality.
January 13, 1867.—I never met James E. Murdoch, the actor, to hear any talk until Sunday night. The knowledge of his patriotism, of his son who died in the war, and of the weary miles the father had travelled to comfort the soldiers by reading to them, and afterwards the large sums of money he had given to the country’s cause gathered up laboriously night by night by public “readings”—all this I had known. Of course no introduction could have been better, yet I liked the man even more than I had fancied was possible. He was so modest and talked in such a free generous way, purely for the entertainment of others, I fancied, because we saw he had a severe cold on his chest. The way too in which he recited “Sheridan’s Ride” and anything else for the children which he thought they would like was quite beautiful to see in a man of his years, who must have had quite enough of that kind of thing to do. His hobby is elocution. He is about to establish a school or college or something of that description, whatever its honorable title will be, at the West30 (the money having been granted in part by legislature, the other half to be made by his own public efforts) for the purpose of educating speakers and teaching men and women how to read. He has known Grant and Sheridan well, lived in camp with them at the same mess-table, and has the highest opinion of the patriotism and probity of both of them. There is no mistake about one thing. Mr. Murdoch made himself a power during the war, and now that is over does not cease to work, nor does he allow himself to presume upon the laurels he has won nor to brag of his own work.
Saturday morning, November 13, 1875.—After a western journey, left for home. Sunday met James E. Murdoch in the cars at Springfield. It was about six o’clock A.M., but he was bound for Newton. He came in therefore with us, and talked delightfully until we parted. He is an old man but as full of nerve, vigor, and ripened intellect as anyone whom I have seen. His talk of the stage, of his disgust for Macready’s book, his disgust at the manner in which Forrest treated his wife, his account of his own experiences, when he was glad to play for $35 a week, were deeply interesting. The better side of Forrest he understood and appreciated thoroughly.
The hospitalities of Charles Street were by no means confined to the men of the theatrical and kindred professions. In later years Miss Ellen Terry, Lady Gregory, and those other ladies associated with the stage who so surely found their way to Mrs. Fields’s door when they visited Boston, were but carrying on the traditions of the earlier decades. As the visitors came and went, the diary in the sixties and seventies recorded their exits and their entrances. A few passages are typical of many.
A portion of the notes relating to Charlotte Cushman will be the better understood for a preliminary remark upon a Boston event of huge local moment in the autumn of 1863. This was the dedication of the Great Organ, that wonder of the age, in Music Hall. The first public performance on the organ, at the ceremonies on the evening of November 2, were preceded by Charlotte Cushman’s reading of a dedicatory ode, contributed, according to the “Advertiser” of the next day, by an “anonymous lady of this city.” The secret of Mrs. Fields’s authorship of this poem, which the “Advertiser” found somewhat too long in spite of its merits, must have been shared by some of her friends, though it was temporarily kept from the public.
Sunday, September 20, 1863.—In the evening Charlotte Cushman and her niece, Dr. Dewey and Miss McGregor, Miss Mears and Mr. W. R. Emerson, passed a few hours with us. Charlotte, always of athletic but prejudiced mind, talked busily of people and events. She is a Seward-ite in politics and called Dr. Howe and Judge Conway “ass-sy” because they said Charles Sumner had prevented thus far a war with England. She has made money during the war, but believes apparently not at all in the patriotism of the people. She is to give one performance for “the Sanitary” in each of the four northern seacoast cities, also for fun and fame. She can’t endure to give up the stage. She is a woman of effects. She lives for effect, and yet doing always good things and possessed of most admirable qualities. She has warm friends. Mrs. Carlyle is extremely fond of her, gives her presents and says flattering things to her. “Cleverer than her husband,” says Miss Cushman. I put this quietly into my German pipe and puff peacefully.
Saturday Evening, September 26, 1863.—Charlotte Cushman played Lady Macbeth for the benefit of the Sanitary Commission to a large audience. Her reading of the letter when she first appears is one of her finest points. She moves her feet execrably and succeeds in developing all the devilish nature in the part, but discovers no beauty. Yet it is delightful to hear the wondrous poetry of the play intelligently and clearly rendered. It would be impossible to say this of the man who played Macbeth, who talked of “encarnardine,” and “heat-opprest brain,” for “oppressèd,” besides innumerable other faults and failures, which he mouthed too much for me to discover. Charlotte in the sleeping scene was fine—that deep-drawn breath of sleep is thrilling....
There has been an ode written to be spoken at the organ opening. No one is to know who wrote it. Miss Cushman will speak it if they are speedy enough in their finishing. This is of interest to many. I trust they will be ready for Miss Cushman.
Monday, November 2, 1863.—Miss Dodge and Una Hawthorne came to dine. At 7 o’clock we all started for the Music Hall. Miss Cushman read my ode in a most perfect manner. She was very nervous about it and skipped something, but what she did read was perfect. Her dress and manner too were dignified and beautiful. It was a night never to be forgotten. Afterward we had a little supper. Dr. and Mrs. Holmes, Mr. Ogden of New York, Dr. Upham31 and Judge Putnam and Mrs. Howe were added to our other guests. Charlotte Cushman left early the next day and Gail Hamilton and I sat down and took a long delicious draught of talk.
April 27, 1871.—Charlotte Cushman came to see us yesterday. Her full brain was brimming over, and her rich sympathetic voice is ringing now in my ears. She does not overestimate herself, that woman, which is part of her greatness, for the word does apply to her in a certain way because she grows nearer to it every day. J. de Maistre refused the epithet “grand” to Napoleon because he lacked more stature—but this hand-to-hand fight with death over herself (loving life clearly as she does) has strengthened her hold upon her affection for life, insensibly. She grows daily wiser and nobler.
November 13, 1871.—We all went together to Charlotte Cushman’s début in Queen Katherine at the Globe Theatre. A house filled with her friends and a noble piece of acting. She spoke to every woman’s heart there; by this I felt the high art and the noble sympathetic nature far above art which was in the woman and radiates from her. Much of the play beside was poor, but Mrs. Hunt was very amusing and we laughed and laughed at her sallies until I was quite ashamed. J. went behind the scenes and talked with C. C. She was in first-rate condition.
For other contacts with the stage, three brief passages may speak:—
November 8, 1866.—Went to see Ristori’s “Pia dei Tolomei” in the evening. It was pure and beautiful. Being R.’s benefit, she made a short speech, and exquisitely simple as it was, her fine voice and the slight difficulty of enunciating the English words made her speech one of the most touching features of the time.
Saturday.—Morning at home. Went to see Ristori for the last time, as Elizabeth, perhaps her finest characterization. Longfellow and Whittier had both promised to go with us, but the courage of both failed at the last moment. The house was crowded. Mr. Grau asked Mr. Fields to go and speak with the great actress, but he excused himself.
Whittier had never been inside of a theatre and could not quite feel like breaking the bonds now—besides he said it would cost him many nights of sleep. Longfellow does not face high tragedy before a crowd.
January 16, 1868.—Fanny Kemble read “The Merchant of Venice” in Boston last night—the old way of losing her breath when she appeared, as if totally overcome by the audience. We could not doubt that she felt her return deeply and sincerely, but—however, the feeling was undoubtedly real if short-lived, and we will give her credit for it. Her voice is sadly faded since the brilliant readings of ten years ago; she has had much sorrow since then and shows the marks of it. It is interesting to compare her work with Mr. Dickens’s; he is so much the greater artist! You can never mistake one of his characters for another, nor lose a syllable of his perfectly enunciated words. She speaks much more slowly usually, and there is a grand intonation as the verses sway from her lips, but one cannot be sure always if Jessica or Nerissa be speaking, Antonio or Bassanio. Her face is marvellous in tender passages, a serenity falls upon it born of immortal youth. It is beautiful enough for tears. She enjoys the wit too herself thoroughly, and brought out Launcelot Gobbo with great unction. An enormous and enthusiastic audience gave her hearty welcome. Longfellow could not come. His wife in the old days enjoyed this play too well when they used to go together for him to trust himself to hear it again.
Monday, May 18, 1868.—Raining like all possessed again today. I was to have done my gardening today but there is no chance yet. Walked over to Roxbury with J. yesterday and found everything gay with the coming loveliness. It has scarcely come, however. Jamie was much entertained by tales Mrs. Kemble’s agent told him of that lady: how she watched an Irish scrubbing woman dawdle over her work, who was paid by the hour, and finally called her to her (she was sitting at her own reading-desk in the hall), and said in her stately fashion, “I fear, madam, if you exert yourself so much over your work you will make yourself ill. Your health is seriously endangered by your severe efforts.” The woman, not seeing the sarcasm, replied in the strongest possible brogue to the effect that nothing short of the direst necessity would compel such dreadful labor. Whereat Mrs. Kemble, with a look not to be reproduced, and a wink to Mr. Pugh, withdrew. She read “Midsummer Night’s Dream” on Saturday P.M. We went, but found the place entirely without air and left after the first part. She did not begin with much spirit, but her voice was exquisite and her fun also, and her dress was an æsthetic pleasure, as a lady’s dress should always be, but alas! so seldom is, in this country.
Wednesday, November 9, 1870.—We have had a reception today for Miss Nilsson. Longfellow and Henry Ward Beecher were here, beside Perabo and many excellent or talented people, nearly sixty in all. It was a curious fact to give out seventy invitations and have sixty (or nearly that) present.
Miss Nilsson, Mrs. Richardson (her attendant), Alice Longfellow, and ourselves sat down to lunch afterward, when she sang snatches of her loveliest songs and talked and laughed and was as graceful and merry and sweet as ever a beautiful woman knows how to be. She is now twenty-seven years old. Her light hair, deep blue eyes, full glorious eyes, are of the Northern type, but her broad intellectual brow, her beautiful teeth, and strong character, belong only to the type of genius and beauty. She is not only brave but almost imperious, I fancy, at times; a manner quite necessary, I say, to protect her from vulgar animosity and audacity. We heard her last night sing “Auld Robin Gray” not only with exquisite feeling, but with a pronunciation of the Scottish dialect that appeared to us very remarkable. When we spoke to her of it she said, “Yes, but there is much like that too in the Swedish dialect. When I first came up a peasant to Stockholm to learn to sing, I had the dialect very bad indeed, and it was a long time before I lost it. Then I went to school in France, and now my accent and dialect are French. When I went back home and talked with the French dialect, they said to me, ‘Now Christine, don’t be absurd,’ but I could not help it. I catch everything. I have never studied English in my life. I am learning American fast. I have learned ‘I guess,’ and I shall soon say ‘I reckon’ by the time I come back from the West.”
Vieuxtemps, the violinist, she appreciates and enjoys highly as an artist. Of Ole Bull she says, “He is a charlatan. Ah, you will excuse me, but it is true.” Of Viardot-Garcia she has the highest admiration. Nothing ever gave her higher delight than Viardot’s compliment after hearing her “Mignon.” It was uncalled for, unexpected, and from the heart. She rehearsed what we recall so well, Viardot’s plain face, poor figure—and great genius triumphant over all. Well, we hear poor Viardot has lost her fortune by this sad French war.
I have set down nothing which can recall the strong sweet beauty of Nilsson. She is a power to command success—fine and strong and sweet. Her face glowed and responded and originated in a swift yet gentle way, as one person after another was presented, that was a study and a lesson. She neither looked nor seemed tired until the presentation was over, when she said she was hungry. “We have had no breakfast yet, nothing to eat all day; ah, I shall know again what it means when Mrs. Fields asks me to lunch at one o’clock!” with an arch look at me. I was extremely penitent and hurried the lunch, but the people could not go out of the dining-room. However, all was cleaned at last and we had a quiet cosy talk and sit-down, which was delightful.
On Saturday she sang from “Hamlet,” the mad scene of Ophelia. As usual, her dress and whole appearance were of the most refined and perfect beauty, and her singing we appreciated even more deeply than ever. She has not the remote exalté nature of highest genius, but she is the great singer of this new time, and her realism is in marked sympathy with her period.
It has already been suggested that, when Thomas Bailey Aldrich made his migration to Boston as editor of “Every Saturday,” he brought into the circle of the Fieldses many fresh breezes from the outer world. In the diary of Mrs. Fields there are frequent notes revealing a friendship which lasted, indeed, long after the diary ceased, and up to the end of Aldrich’s life, in 1907. Two entries—the first relating to the meteoric author of “The Diamond Lens,” regarded in its day as a bright portent in the literary heavens, the second to the Aldriches themselves at the country place with the name which Aldrich embalmed in his excellent title, “From Ponkapog to Pesth”—warrant conversion from manuscript into print.
November 9, 1865.—Aldrich told us the story of Fitz-James O’Brien, the able author of “The Diamond Lens.” He was a handsome fellow, and began his career by running away with the wife of an English officer. The officer was in India, and Fitz-James and the guilty woman had fled to one of the seaports on the south of England in order to take passage for America, when the arrival of the woman’s husband was announced to them and O’Brien fled. He concealed himself on board a ship bound for New York. There he ran a career of dissipation, landing with only sixty dollars. He went to a first-rate hotel, ordered wines, and left a large bill behind when the time came to run away. Then he wrote for Harpers, and one publisher and another, writing little and over-drawing funds on a large scale. He came and lived six weeks upon Aldrich in his uncle’s house one summer when the family were away. One day he tried to borrow money of Harpers, and being refused he went into the bindery department, borrowed a board, printed on it, “I am starving,” bored holes through the ends, put in a string, hung it round his neck, allowed his fawn-colored gloves to depend over each end, and stood in the doorway where the firm should see him when they went to dinner. A great laugh and more money was the result of this escapade. Finally, when the war broke out, he enlisted, and this was the last A. heard of him for some time; but, being himself called to take a position on General Lander’s staff, he was on his way to Richmond and had reached Petersburg, when someone told him Fitz-James O’Brien had been shot dead. Then he went to the hospital and saw him lying there dead.
Shortly after this, when Bayard Taylor and his wife were dining in a hotel restaurant at Dover, I believe,—it was one of the south of England towns,—they saw themselves closely observed by a lady and gentleman sitting near them. Finally the gentleman arose and came to speak to Taylor, said he observed they were Americans, and asked if he had ever heard of F. J. O’Brien. “Oh, yes,” said Taylor, “I knew him very well. He was killed in our war.” Then the lady burst into tears and the gentleman said, “She is his mother!”
I forgot to say in the course of the story that he borrowed once sixty-five dollars for which A. became responsible, and when it was not paid he sent a letter to O’B. saying he must pay it. In return O’Brien sent him a challenge for a duel, which A. accepted, in the meantime discovering that an honorable fight could not be between a debtor and a creditor. However, when the time appointed arrived, O’Brien had absconded. We could not repress a smile at the idea of A.’s fighting, for he is a painfully small gentleman.
May 31, 1876.—Passed the day with the Aldriches at Ponkapog. Aldrich maintained at dinner that the horse railroad injured Charles Street. His wife and J. T. F. took the opposite ground. Finally J. said, “Well, the Philadelphians don’t agree with you; they have learned the value of horse railroads in their streets.” “Oh, that’s because they are such Christians,” said A. “They know whom the Lord loveth He chasteneth.”
He is a queer, witty creature. When the railroad dropped us at Green Lodge station, a tiny place surrounded by wild green woods and bog, we found him sitting on a corner of the platform where he said he had been “listening to the bullfrog tune his violin. He had been twanging at one string a long time!” Aldrich was in an ecstasy of delight, and in truth it was a day to put the most untuned spirit into tune. In the afternoon we floated on the beautiful pond. The whole day gave us a series of pictures—only thirteen miles from town, yet the beechwoods can be no more retired. Mr. Pierce owns 500 acres, and it must be a pleasure to him, while he is away in Washington, to feel that someone is using and enjoying his beautiful domain; and how could it be half so well used and enjoyed as by the family of a struggling literary man! The house they live in, which was going to decay, may really be considered a creation of Lilian’s. Altogether she is very clever and Aldrich most fortunate and our Washington senator is doubtless most content to think of the enjoyment of others in his domain.
Still more exotic a figure in Boston than Aldrich was William Morris Hunt—in spite of his temporary association with Harvard College and his Boston marriage. Both he and his wife are constantly to be met in the pages of Mrs. Fields’s journals, from which they emerged with some frequency into her published “Biographical Notes,” even as they have reappeared, with others, on earlier pages of this book.
In other places than Charles Street, Fields and Hunt were often meeting. One brief record of an encounter, at the end of a Saturday Club meeting, should surely be preserved, for all that it suggests of Hunt in amused rebellion against his surroundings.
Sunday, August 26, 1874.—Hunt came to Jamie when the afternoon was nearly ended and asked him to go up to his studio. As they went along, he said, “I’ve made a poem! First time I ever wrote anything in my life. ’Tisn’t long, only four lines, but I’ve got it written down.” Whereat then and there he pulled out his pocketbook and read:
“Boston is a hilly place;
People all are brothers-in-law.
If you or I want something done
They treat us then like mothers-in-law.
“This goes to the tune of Yankee Doodle,” Whereat he sang it out on the public highway. He looked very handsome, was beautifully dressed in brown velvet with a gold chain about his neck, but swore like a trooper and was in one of his most lawless moods.
He gave J. for me a photograph of a marvellous picture which he calls his Persian Sybil, Anahita. I see his wife in it as in so many of his best works. “I don’t mean to do any more portraits,” he said. “When I remember how I have wasted time on an eyebrow because somebody’s 14th cousin thought it ought to turn up a little more—it makes me mad!”
When the English painter, Lowes Dickinson, the father of G. Lowes Dickinson, was visiting the Fieldses in Boston, a photograph of Hunt’s portrait of Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw so impressed him that he asked to be taken to the painter’s studio. In Miss Helen M. Knowlton’s “Art Life of William Morris Hunt” this circumstance is related, together with its sequel, which was the publication of Hunt’s “Talks on Art” from notes made by Miss Knowlton herself. It is a surmise but slightly hazardous that a characteristic note found among the Fields papers was written apropos of Dickinson’s visit to Hunt: “Send ’em along—I mean Painters,” he wrote to Fields. “I have had a delightful day with your friend—and I know he is a painter—why? because he likes what I do well and hates what I do that ain’t worth....”
It has been seen that, as early as November, 1868, James Parton suggested that “a writer named Mark Twain” be engaged to contribute to the “Atlantic.”32 In October, 1868, “F. Bret Harte” wrote to the editor of the “Atlantic” from San Francisco: “As the author of ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp,’ I have to thank you for an invitation to contribute to the ‘Atlantic Monthly,’ but as editor of ‘The Overland,’ my duties claim most of my spare time outside of the Government office in which I am employed.... But I am glad of this opportunity to thank someone connected with the ‘Atlantic’ for its very gracious good-will toward me and my writings, particularly the book which G. W. Carleton of New York malformed in its birth. There was an extra kindness in your taking the deformed brat by the hand, and trying to recognize some traces of a parent so far away.”
It was in the discharge of his work as editor of the “Atlantic” that Fields, hospitable to practitioners of all the arts, entered especially into relations with writers whose paths might not otherwise have crossed his, and his wife’s. Of all the young Lochinvars of the pen who came out of the West while Mrs. Fields was keeping her diary, Bret Harte and Mark Twain were the daring and dauntless gallants who most captured the imagination and have longest held it. To each of them Mrs. Fields devoted a number of pages in her diary. We shall see first what she had to say about Bret Harte.
Friday, March 10, 1871.—Too many days full of interest have passed unrecorded. Chiefly I should record what I can recall of Francis Bret Harte, who has made his first visit to the East just now, since he went to San Francisco in his early youth. He is now apparently about 35 years old. His mind is full of the grand landscape of the West, and filled also with sympathetic interest in the half-developed natives who are to be seen there, nearer to the surface than in our Eastern cities. He told me of a gambler who had a friend lying dead in the upper room of a gambling house. The man went out to see about having services performed. “Better have it at the grave,” said the parson to whom he applied. Jim shook his head as if he feared the proper honors would not be paid his friend. The other then suggested they should find the minister and leave it to him. “Well,” said Jim, “yes, I wish you’d do just that, for I ain’t much of a funeral ‘sharp’ myself.” He told me also, as a sign of the wonderful recklessness which had pervaded San Francisco, that at one time there was a glut of tobacco in the market and, a block of houses going up at the same period, the foundations of those houses were laid of boxes of tobacco. Bret Harte, as the world calls him, is natural, warm-hearted, with a keen relish for fun, disposed to give just value to the strong language of the West, which he is by no means inclined to dispense with; at ease in every society, quick of sense and sight. Jamie, who saw him more than I, finds him lovable above all. We liked his wife too,—not handsome but with good honest sense, appreciative of him,—and two children. She is said to sing well, but poor woman! the fatigues of that most distressing journey across the continent, the fêtes, the heat (for the weather is unusually warm), have been almost too much for her and she is not certainly at her best. They dined and took tea here last Friday.
Tuesday, September 5, 1871.—J. went to Boston. I wrote in the pastures and walked all the morning. Coming home, after dinner, came a telegram for me to meet J. and Bret Harte at Beverly station with the pony carriage. I drove hard to catch the train, but arrived in season, glad to take up the two good boys and show them Beverly shore. Stopped at Mrs. Cabot’s returning to see Mrs. ——, etc. They were all glad to have a glimpse of Bret Harte. The talk turned a little upon Hawthorne, and I was much amused to hear Mrs. —— say, drawing herself up, “Yes, he was born in Salem, but we never knew anything about him.” (The truth was, Mrs. —— was the last person to appreciate him.)... Fortunately Miss Howes was present, whose father was one of Hawthorne’s best friends; so matters were made clear there. We left soon and came on to Manchester, where, after showing him the shore, we sat and talked during the evening.
Mr. Harte had much to say of the beautiful flowers of California, roses being in bloom about his own house there every month in the year. He found the cloudless skies and continued drought of California very hard to bear. For the first time in my life I considered how terrible perpetual cloudlessness would be! He thinks there is no beauty in the mountains of California, hard, bare, snowless peaks. Neither are there trees, nor any green grass.
He is delighted with the fragrant lawns of Newport and has, I believe, put into verse a delightful ghost story which he told us.33 He has taken a house of some antiquity in Newport, connected with which is the story of a lady who formerly lived there and who was very fond of the odor of mignonette. The flower was always growing in her house, and after her death, at two o’clock every night, a strong odor has always been perceived passing through the house as if wafted along by the garments of a woman. One night at the appointed hour, but entirely unconnected in his thought with the story Mr. Harte had long ago heard, he was arrested in his work by a strong perfume of mignonette which appeared to sweep by him. He looked about, thinking his wife might have placed a vase of flowers in the room, but finding nothing he began to follow the odor, which seemed to flit before him. Then he recalled, for the first time, the story he had heard. He opened the door; the odor was in the hall; he opened the room where the lady died, but there was no odor there; until returning, after making a circuit of the house, he found a faint perfume as if she had passed but not stayed there also. At last, somewhat oppressed perhaps by the ghostliness of the place and hour, he went out and stood upon the porch. There his dream vanished. The sweet lawn and tree flowers were emitting an odor, as is common at the hour when dews congeal, more sweet than at any other time of day or night, and the air was redolent of sweets which might easily be construed into mignonette. The story was well told and I shall be glad to see his poem.
Many good stories came off during the evening, some very characteristic of California; ones such as that of an uproar in a theatre and a man about to be killed, when someone shouts, “Don’t waste him, but kill a fiddler with him.” Also one of the opening nights at the California theatre, the place packed, when a man who has taken too much whiskey wishes a noise; immediately the manager, a strong executive man, catches him up with the help of a policeman, and before anybody knows the thing is done or the disturber what is the matter, he finds himself set down on the sidewalk outside in the street. “Well,” said he with an oath, “is this the way you do business here; raise a fellow before he has a chance to draw?” (referring to the game of poker).
Mr. Harte is a very sensitive and nervous man. He struggles against himself all the time. He sat on the piazza with J. and talked till a late hour. This morning at breakfast I found him most interesting. He talked of his early and best-loved books. It appears that at the age of nine he was a lover and reader of Montaigne. Certain writers, he says, seem to him to stand out as friends and brothers side by side in literature. Now Horace and Montaigne are so associated in his mind. Mr. Emerson, he thinks, never in the least approaches a comprehension of the character of the man. With an admiration for his great sayings, he has never guessed at the subtle springs from which they come. The pleasant acceding to both sides in politics, and other traits of like nature, gives him affinity with Hawthorne. By the way, he is a true appreciator of Hawthorne. He was moved to much merriment yesterday by remembering a passage in the notes, where he slyly remarks, “Margaret Fuller’s cows hooked the other cows.” Speaking of Dr. Bartol, he said, “What a dear old man he is! A venerable baby, nothing more!” But Harte is most kindly and tender. His wife has been very ill and has given him cause for terrible anxiety. This accounts for much left undone, but he is an oblivious man oftentimes to his surroundings—leaves things behind!!
January 12, 1872.—Bret Harte was here at breakfast. It is curious to see his feeling with regard to society. For purely literary society, with its affectations and contempts, he has no sympathy. He has at length chosen New York as his residence, and among the Schuylers, Sherwoods, and their friends he appears to find what he enjoys. There is evidently a gêne about people and life here, and provincialisms which he found would hurt him. He is very sensitive and keen, with a love and reverence for Dickens almost peculiar in this coldly critical age. Bryant he finds very cold and totally unwilling to lead the conversation, as he should do when they are together, as he justly remarks, he being so much younger—but never a word without cart and horses to fetch it.
Bret Harte has a queer absent-minded way of spending his time, letting the hours slip by as if he had not altogether learned their value yet. It is a miracle to us how he lives, for he writes very little. Thus far I suppose he has had money from J. R. O. & Co., but I fancy they have done with giving out money save for a quid pro quo.
February, 1872 [during a visit to New York].—We had promised to dine with Mr. and Mrs. Harte early and go to the theatre afterward, therefore four o’clock found us at their door. He welcomed us by opening it himself and only this reassured Jamie. We had driven up in a “Crystal,” much to my amusement, in which J. had insisted I should sit until he discovered if that was the house. The scene was altogether comic. I shortened the ludicrousness as much as possible by jumping out and running quickly up the steps. Mrs. Harte was not ready to see me, but I found Mr. Barrett the actor with Mr. Harte in the parlor, and soon being invited upstairs, found Mrs. Barrett and Mrs. Harte together. We had a merry dinner together, the young actor evidently quite nervous with respect to the evening’s performance. He went an hour before us to the play. We sat in the stage box; the play was “Julius Cæsar.” It is useless to deny Edwin Booth great talent, exquisite grace and feeling. Both the young men, the first, Barrett, a man of intellect, and Booth, a man of inherited grace and feeling as well as good mind, have the advantage moreover of being born to the stage. Their stage habits fit them more perfectly than those of the drawing-room and they walk the stage with the ease that most men do their own parlors. During the performance Booth invited us into his drawing-room; a short carpeted way led from the box into the small room where he was sitting in Roman costume, pipe in mouth; he rose and called “Mary,” as we approached, when the tiniest woman ever called wife made her appearance. She is an ardent little spark of human flame and he really looks large beside her.
But his grace, his grace! His dress too, was as usual perfect—more, far more than all, both the actors had such feeling for Shakespeare and for their parts with which they are filling the stage nightly, that they were deeply and truly enthusiastic. It was a sight to warm Shakespeare.
Saturday, September 18, 1875.—Bret Harte came on the ½ past 12 train. He came in good health, save a headache which ripened as the day went on; but he was bubbling over with fun, full of the most natural and unexpected sallies. He wished to know if I was acquainted with the Cochin China hen. They had one at Cohasset. They had named him Benventuro (after a certain gay Italian singer of strong self-appreciation who came formerly to America). He said this hen’s state of mind on finding a half-exploded firecracker and her depressed condition since its explosion was something extraordinary. His description was so vivid that I still see this hen perambulating about the house, first with pride, second with precipitation, fallen into disgrace among her fellows.
He said Cohasset was not the place to live in the summer if one wanted sea-breezes. They all came straight from Chicago!! He fancied the place, thinking it an old fishing village, not unlike Yarmouth. Instead of which they prided themselves upon never having “any of your sea-smells,” and, being five miles from the doctor, could not be considered a cheerful place to live in with sick children. He said he was surprised to find J. T. F. without a sailor’s jacket and collar. The actors among whom he had been living rather overdid the business; their collars were wider, their shirts fuller, and their trousers more bulgy than those of any real sailor he had ever observed, and the manner of hitching up the trousers was entirely peculiar to themselves and to the stage.
We went to call upon the Burlingames. In describing Harrisburg, Virginia, where he had lectured, he said a committee-man came to invite him to take a walk, and he was so afflicted with a headache that he was ready to take or give away his life at any moment; so he accepted the invitation and walked out with him. The man observed that Harrisburg was a very healthy place; only one man a day died in that vicinity. “Oh!” said Harte, remembering the dangerous state of his own mind, “has that man died yet today?” The man shook his head gravely, never suspecting a joke, and said he didn’t know, but he would try to find out. Whereat Harte, to keep up the joke, said he wished he would. He went to the lecture forgetting all about it and saw this man hanging around without getting a chance to speak. The next morning very early, he managed to get an opportunity to speak to him. “I couldn’t find out exactly about that man yesterday,” he said. “What man?” said H. “Why, the one we were speaking of; the Coroner said he couldn’t say precisely who it was, but the one man would average all right.”
Harte said in speaking of Longfellow that no one had yet overpraised him. The delicate quality of humor, the exquisite fineness in the choice of words, the breadth and sweetness of his nature were something he could hardly help worshipping. One day after a dinner at Mr. Lowell’s he said, “I think I will not have a carriage to return to town. I will walk down to the Square.” “I will walk with you,” said Longfellow. When they arrived at his gate, he said, he was so beautiful that he could only think of the light and whiteness of the moon, and if he had stayed a moment longer he should have put his arms around him and made a fool of himself then and there. Whereat he said good night abruptly and turned away.
He brought his novel and play34 with him which are just now finished, for us to read. He has evidently enjoyed the play, and he enjoys the fame and the money they both bring him.
He is a dramatic, lovable creature with his blue silk pocket-handkerchief and red dressing slippers and his quick feelings. I could hate the man who could help loving him—or the woman either.
In the passages touching upon Mark Twain now to be copied from the journals, he is seen, not in Boston, but in Hartford. If Mrs. Fields had continued her diary until 1879, there would doubtless have been a faithful contemporaneous account of the humorist’s unhappy attempt to be funny both in the presence and at the expense of the “Augustans” assembled in honor of Whittier’s seventieth birthday.35 But Mrs. Fields’s reports of talk and observations under his own roof, in the days when his fame rested entirely upon a handful of his earlier books, should take their place in the authentic annals of an extraordinary personality. On the first of the two occasions recorded, Fields went alone to deliver a lecture in Hartford, and in answer to a post-card invitation signed “Mark,” stayed in the new house of the Clemenses. On the second occasion, three weeks later, Mrs. Fields accompanied him. After her husband’s return from the first visit she wrote:—
April 6, 1876.—He found Mrs. Clemens quite ill. They had been in New York where he had given four lectures hoping to get money for Dr. Brown. He had never lectured there before without making a great deal of money. This time he barely covered his expenses. He was very interesting and told J. the whole story of his life. They sat until midnight after the lecture, Mark drinking ale to make him sleepy. He says he can’t sleep as other people do; his kind of sleep is the only sort for him—three or four hours of good solid comfort—more than that makes him ill; he can’t afford to sleep all his thoughts away. He described the hunger of his childhood for books, how the “Fortunes of Nigel” was one of the first stories which came to him while he was learning to be a pilot on a Mississippi boat. He hid himself with it behind a barrel where he was found by the master, who read him a lecture upon the ruinous effects of reading. “I’ve seen it over and over agin,” he said. “You needn’t tell me anythin’ about it; if ye’re going to be a pilot on this river yer needn’t ever think of reading, for it just spiles all. Yer can’t remember how high the tides was in Can’s Gut three trips before the last now, I’ll wager.” “Why no,” said Mark, “that was six months ago.” “I don’t care if’t was,” said the man. “If you hadn’t been spiling yer mind by readin’ ye’d have remembered.” So he was never allowed to read any more after that. “And now,” says Mark, “not being able to have it when I was hungry for it, I can only read the Encyclopedia nowadays.” Which is not true—he reads everything.
The story of his courtship and marriage, too, was very strange and interesting. A portion of this has, however, leaked into the daily papers, so I will not repeat it here. One point interested me greatly, however, as showing the strength of character and rightness of vision in the man. He said he had not been married many months when his wife’s father came to him one evening and said, “My son, wouldn’t you like to go to Europe with your wife?” “Why yes, sir,” he said, “if I could afford it.” “Well then,” said he, “if you will leave off smoking and drinking ale you shall have ten thousand dollars this next year and go to Europe beside.” “Thank you, sir,” said Mark, “this is very good of you, and I appreciate it, but I can’t sell myself. I will do anything I can for you or any of your family, but I can’t sell myself.” The result was, said Mark, “I never smoked a cigar all that year nor drank a glass of ale; but when the next year came I found I must write a book, and when I sat down to write I found it wasn’t worth anything. I must have a cigar to steady my nerves. I began to smoke, and I wrote my book; but then I couldn’t sleep and I had to drink ale to go to sleep. Now if I had sold myself, I couldn’t have written my book, or I couldn’t have gone to sleep, but now everything works perfectly well.”
He and his wife have wretched health, poor things! And in spite of their beautiful home must often have rather a hard time. He is very eccentric, disturbed by every noise, and it cannot be altogether easy to have care of such a man. It is a very loving household though Mrs. Clemens’s mother, Mrs. Langdon, hardly knows what to make of him sometimes, it is quite evident.
Thursday, April 27, 1876.—We lunched and at 3 P.M. were en route for Hartford. I slept, and read Mr. Tom Appleton’s journal on the Nile, and looked out at the sunset and the torches of spring in the hollows, each in turn, doing more sleeping than either of the others, I fear, because I seem for some unexplained reason to be tired, as Mrs. Hawthorne used to say, far into the future. By giving up to it, however, I felt quite fresh when we arrived, at half-past seven o’clock, Mr. Clemens’ (Mark Twain’s) carriage waiting for us to take us to the hall where he was to perform for the second night in succession Peter Spyle in the “Loan of a Lover.” It is a pretty play, and the girl’s part, Gertrude, was well done by Miss Helen Smith; but Mr. Clemens’ part was a creation. I see no reason why, if he chose to adopt the profession of actor, he should not be as successful as Jefferson in whatever he might conclude to undertake. It is really amazing to see what a man of genius can do beside what is usually considered his legitimate sphere.
Afterward we went with Mr. Hammersley to the Club for a bit of supper—this I did not wish to do, but I was overruled of course by the decision of our host. We met at supper one of the clever actors who played in a little operetta called “The Artful Mendicants.” It was after twelve o’clock when we finally reached Mr. Clemens’ house. He believed his wife would have retired, as she is very delicate in health; but there she was expecting us, with a pretty supper table laid. When her husband discovered this, he fell down on his knees in mock desire for forgiveness. His mind was so full of the play, and with the poor figure he felt he had made in it, that he had entirely forgotten all her directions and injunctions. She is a very small, sweet-looking, simple, finished creature, charming in her ways and evidently deeply beloved by him. The house is a brick villa, designed by one of the first New York architects, standing in a lovely lawn which slopes down to a small stream or river at the side. In this spring season the blackbirds are busy in the trees and the air is sweet and vocal. Inside there is great luxury. Especially I delight in a lovely conservatory opening out of the drawing-room.
Although we had already eaten supper, the gentlemen took a glass of lager beer to keep Mrs. Clemens company while she ate a bit of bread after her long anxiety and waiting. Meantime Mr. Clemens talked. The quiet earnest manner of his speech would be impossible to reproduce, but there is a drawl in his tone peculiar to himself. Also he is much interested in actors and the art of acting just now, and seriously talks of going to Boston next week to the début of Anna Dickinson.
We were a tired company and went soon to bed and to sleep. I slept late, but I found Mr. Clemens had been re-reading Dana’s “Two Years before the Mast” in bed early and revolving subjects for his “Autobiography.” Their two beautiful baby girls came to pass an hour with us after breakfast—exquisite affectionate children, the very fountain of joy to their interesting parents....
Returning to lunch, I found our host and hostess and eldest little girl in the drawing-room. We fell into talk of the mishaps of the stage and the disadvantage of an amateur under such circumstances. “For instance, on the first night of our little play,” said Mr. Clemens, “the trousers of one of the actors suddenly gave way entirely behind, which was very distressing to him, though we did not observe it at all.”
I want to stop here to give a little idea of the appearance of our host. He is forty years old, with some color in his cheeks and a heavy light-colored moustache, and overhanging light eyebrows. His eyes are grey and piercing, yet soft, and his whole face expresses great sensitiveness. He is exquisitely neat also, though careless, and his hands are small, not without delicacy. He is a small man, but his mass of hair seems the one rugged-looking thing about him. I thought in the play last night that it was a wig.
To return to our lunch table—he proceeded to speak of his “Autobiography,” which he intends to write as fully and simply as possible to leave behind him. His wife laughingly said she should look it over and leave out objectionable passages. “No,” he said, very earnestly, almost sternly, “you are not to edit it—it is to appear as it is written, with the whole tale told as truly as I can tell it. I shall take out passages from it, and publish as I go along in the ‘Atlantic’ and elsewhere, but I shall not limit myself as to space, and at whatever age I am writing about, even if I am an infant, and an idea comes to me about myself when I am forty, I shall put that in. Every man feels that his experience is unlike that of anybody else, and therefore he should write it down. He finds also that everybody else has thought and felt on some points precisely as he has done, and therefore he should write it down.”
The talk naturally branched to education, and thence to the country. He has lost all faith in our government. This wicked ungodly suffrage, he said, where the vote of a man who knew nothing was as good as the vote of a man of education and industry; this endeavor to equalize what God had made unequal was a wrong and a shame. He only hoped to live long enough to see such a wrong and such a government overthrown. Last summer he wrote an article for the “Atlantic,” printed without any signature, proposing the only solution of such evil of which he could conceive. “It is too late now,” he continued, “to restrict the suffrage; we must increase it—for this let us give every university man, let us say, ten votes, and every man with common-school education two votes, and a man of superior power and position a hundred votes, if we choose. This is the only way I see to get out of the false position into which we have fallen.”
At five, the hour appointed for dinner, I returned to the drawing-room where our host lay at full length on the floor with his head on cushions in the bay-window, reading, and taking what he called “delicious comfort.” Mrs. Perkins came in to dinner, and we had a cosy good time. Mr. Clemens described the preaching of a Western clergyman, a great favorite, with the smallest possible allowance of idea to the largest possible amount of words. It was so truthfully and vividly portrayed that we all concluded, perhaps, since the man was in such earnest, he moved his audience more than if he had troubled them with too many ideas. This truthfulness of Mr. Clemens, which will hardly allow him to portray anything in a way to make out a case by exaggerating or distorting a truth, is a wondrous and noble quality. This makes art and makes life, and will continue to make him a daily increasing power among us.
He is so unhappy and discontented with our government that he says he is not conscious of the least emotion of patriotism in himself. He is overwhelmed with shame and confusion and wishes he were not an American. He thinks seriously of going to England to live for a while, at least, and I think it not unlikely he may discover away from home a love of his country which is still waiting to be unfolded. I believe hope must dawn for us, that so much earnest endeavor of our statesmen and patriots cannot come to naught; and perhaps the very idea he has dropped, never believing that it can bring forth fruit, will be adopted in the end for our salvation. Certainly women’s suffrage and such a change as he proposes should be tried, since we cannot keep the untenable ground of the present....
It is most curious and interesting to watch this growing man of forty—to see how he studies and how high his aims are. His conversation is always earnest and careful, though full of fun. He is just now pondering much upon actors and their ways. Raymond, who is doing the “Gilded Age,” is so hopelessly given “to saving at the spigot and losing at the bung-hole” that he is evidently not over-satisfied nor does he count the acting everything it might be.
We sat talking, chiefly we women, after dinner and looking at the sunset. Mr. Clemens lay down with a book and J. went to look over his lecture. I did not go to lecture, but after all were gone I scribbled away at these pages and nearly finished Mr. Appleton’s “Nile Journal.” They returned rather late, it was after ten, bearing a box of delicious strawberries, Mrs. Colt’s gift from her endless greenhouses. They were a sensation; the whole of summer was foreshadowed by their scarlet globes. Some beer was brought for Mr. Clemens (who drinks nothing else, and as he eats but little this seems to answer the double end of nourishment and soothing for the nerves) and he began again to talk. He said it was astonishing what subjects were missed by the Poet Laureate. He thought the finest incident of the Crimean War had been certainly overlooked. That was the going down at sea of the man of war, Berkeley Castle. The ship with a whole regiment, one of the finest of the English army, on board, struck a rock near the Bosphorus. There was no help—the bottom was out and the boats would only hold the crew and the other helpless ones; there was no chance for the soldiers. The Colonel summoned them on deck; he told them the duty of soldiers was to die; they would do their duty as bravely there as if they were on the battle-field. He bade them shoulder arms and prepare for action. The drums beat, flags were flying, the service playing, as they all went down to silent death in the great deep.
Afterward Mr. Clemens described to us the reappearance before his congregation of an old clergyman who had been incapacitated for work during twelve years—coming suddenly into the pulpit just as the first hymn was ended. The younger pastor proposed they should sing the old man’s favorite, “Coronation,” omitting the first verse. He heard nothing of the omission, but beginning at the first verse he sang in a cracked treble the remaining stanza after all the people were still. There was a mingling of the comic and pathetic in this incident which made it consonant with the genius of our host. Our dear little hostess complained of want of air, and I saw she was very tired, so we all went to bed about eleven.
Saturday morning.—Dear J. was up early and out in the beautiful sunshine. I read and scribbled until breakfast at half-past nine. It was a lovely morning, and I had already ventured out of my window and round the house to hear the birds sing and see the face of spring before the hour came for breakfast. When I did go to the drawing-room, however, I found Mr. Clemens alone. He greeted me apparently as cheerfully as ever, and it was not until some moments had passed that he told me they had a very sick child upstairs. From that instant I saw, especially after his wife came in, that they could think of nothing else. They were half-distracted with anxiety. Their messenger could not find the doctor, which made matters worse. However, the little girl did not really seem very sick, so I could not help thinking they were unnecessarily excited. The effect on them, however, was just as bad as if the child were really very ill. The messenger was hardly despatched the second time before Jamie and Mr. Clemens began to talk of our getting away in the next train, whereat he (Mr. C.) said to his wife, “Why didn’t you tell me of that,” etc., etc. It was all over in a moment, but in his excitement he spoke more quickly than he knew, and his wife felt it. Nothing was said at the time, indeed we hardly observed it, but we were intensely amused and could not help finding it pathetic too afterward, when he came to us and said he spent the larger part of his life on his knees making apologies and now he had got to make an apology to us about the carriage. He was always bringing the blood to his wife’s face by his bad behavior, and here this very morning he had said such things about that carriage! His whole life was one long apology. His wife had told him to see how well we behaved (poor we!) and he knew he had everything to learn.
He was so amusing about it that he left us in a storm of laughter, yet at bottom I could see it was no laughing matter to him. He is in dead earnest, with a desire for growth and truth in life, and with such a sincere admiration for his wife’s sweetness and beauty of character that the most prejudiced and hardest heart could not fail to fall in love with him. She looked like an exquisite lily as we left her. So white and delicate and tender. Such sensitiveness and self-control as she possesses are very, very rare.
May Day.—Longfellow, Greene, Alexander Agassiz and Dr. Holmes dined with us. This made summer, Longfellow said at table—that this was May Day enough, it was no matter how cold it was outside. (The wind outside had been raging all day and winter seemed to be giving us a last fling.) Jamie recalled one or two things “Mark Twain” had said which I have omitted. When he lectured a few weeks ago in New York, he said he had just reached the middle of his lecture and was going on with flying colors when he saw in the audience just in front of him a noble gray head and beard. “Nobody told me that William Cullen Bryant was there, but I had seen his picture and I knew that was the old man. I was sure he saw the failure I was making, and all the weak points in what I was saying, and I couldn’t do anything more—that old man just spoiled my work. Then they told me afterward that my lecture was good and all that; I could only say, ‘no, no, that fine old head spoiled all I had to say that night.’”
Longfellow was quite like himself again, but the talk was mainly sustained by Dr. Holmes and Mr. Agassiz. When Dr. Holmes first came in he looked earnestly at the portrait of Sydney Smith. “It reminds me of our famous story-teller, Sullivan,” he said; “it is full of epicureanism. The mouth is made for kisses and canvas-backs.” Later on in the dinner, when Mr. Agassiz was describing the fatigue he suffered after talking Spanish all day while he still understood the language very imperfectly, “Why,” said Holmes, “it’s like playing the piano with mittens on.”
There was something pathetic in the fact of this young man sitting here among his father’s friends, almost in the very place his father had filled so many times—but his speech was manly and wise, from a full brain. They talked of the spectroscope as on the whole the most important discovery the world had known. “Well, what is it?” said Longfellow. “Explain it to us.” (I was glad enough to have him ask.) Agassiz explained quite clearly that it was an instrument to discover the elements which compose the sun, and proceeded to unfold its working in some detail. Two men made the discovery simultaneously, one in India and one in England. This spectroscope has been infinitely improved, however, by every living mind brought to bear upon it, almost, since its first so-called discovery. It is so difficult, Dr. H. said, to tell where an invention began; you could go back until it seemed that no man that ever lived really did it—like some verses, whereupon one of Gray’s was given as an example. The talk turned somewhat upon the manner of putting things, the English manner being so poor and inexpressive compared with the southern natures—the French being the masters of expression.
Longfellow gave a delightful account of the old artist and spiritualist, Kirkup, the discoverer of the Dante portrait, though Greene undertook to say that a certain Wilde was the man. I never heard anybody else have the credit but Kirkup, and certainly England believes it was he.
I think they all had “a good time”; I am sure I did.
As Mark Twain, in the preceding pages may be said to have led the reader back into the Boston and Cambridge circle, so there were constant excursions of interest from that circle out into the world in which such a man as Sumner stood as the friend of such another as Longfellow. For twenty-three years, from 1851 till his death in 1874, Sumner was a member of the United States Senate, and consequently was much more to be seen in Washington than in the State he represented. He appears from time to time in the pages of Mrs. Fields’s diary, and in the two ensuing passages figures first at her Boston dinner-table and then in Washington:
Saturday, November 18, 1865.—Last night Miss Kate Field and Charles Sumner dined with us. Before we went to dinner Charlotte Foster, the young colored girl whom Elizabeth Whittier was so fond of and who is now secretary of the Freedmen’s Bureau, came in to call. She is very pretty and good. It is difficult nevertheless for her to find a boarding-place. People do not readily admit a colored woman into their families. I shall help her to find a good home....
Mr. Sumner opened the conversation at dinner by asking Miss Field to tell him something of Mr. Landor. She, smiling, said that was difficult now because she had talked and written so much of him that she hardly knew what was left unsaid. Mr. Sumner described his own first introduction then at the house of his old friend, Mr. Kenyon, in London. He had dropped in there by accident, but was positively engaged elsewhere at dinner; before he left, however, he was able to parry skilfully a remark aimed at the Yankees, which tickled Mr. Landor and made him try to hold on and induce him to stay. He was obliged to go then, however, but he returned a few days after to breakfast, when Landor asked him why the body of Washington did not rest in the Capitol at Washington. “Because,” said Mr. Sumner, “his family wished his ashes to remain at Mt. Vernon.” “Ashes,” said L., “his body was not burned; why do you say ‘ashes,’ sir?” “I quoted, ‘E’en in our ashes live their wonted fires,’ and he said nothing more at the time, but,” added Mr. Sumner, “I have never used ‘ashes’ since.”
Kate Field said “his wife was a perfect fiend”; but Mr. Sumner was inclined to doubt the statement. “These marriages with men of genius are hard,” he said, “because genius wins the race in the end.”
Then Kate brought the authority of Mr. Browning and others to back her statement, but, referring to Mr. Landor’s temper, she said that while the Storys were at Siena passing the summer one year, the Brownings took a villa near by and Mr. Landor lived opposite, while she and Miss Isa Blagden went down to make the Brownings a visit. During their stay Mr. Landor fancied that the stock of tea lately purchased for his use was poisoned, and threw it all out of the window. The Contadine reaped the benefit of this; they came and gathered it up like a flock of doves.
Mr. Sumner spoke of the high, very high place he accorded to Mr. Landor as a writer of prose. He had been a source of great admiration to him for years, he said. As long ago as when G. W. Greene was living in Rome and first becoming a writer, he asked Mr. Sumner what masters of prose he should study. “Then,” said Mr. S., “you remember his own style was bad; the sentences apt to be jumbled up together. I told him to read Bacon, and Hooker, and all the prose of Dryden he could find in the prefaces and elsewhere, and Walter Savage Landor; and my reverence for Mr. Landor as a writer of prose has never diminished.”
Later during the dinner, talking of his life abroad, Mr. Sumner was reminded of a letter he had received from John P. Hale, our minister plenipotentiary to Spain. He said for a number of years, while Mr. Hale was in the Senate, whenever appeals came from our foreign ministers or consuls abroad asking for increase of salary, Mr. Hale would jump up and say, “Gentlemen of the Senate, allow me to say I would engage to live at any point in Europe upon the salary now granted by the Government. It is no economy, indeed it is a great lack of economy, to think of raising these salaries.”
“Hereupon comes a letter from Spain urging an increase of salary in terms which would convulse the Senate with laughter after the protestations they have heard so often. I should like nothing better than to read it to them.” For the lack of their presence, however, he read it to us, and it was amusing truly, as if the old days and speeches were a blank.
Mr. Sumner easily slipped from this subject into others connected with the Government.
Kate Field said that Judge Russell told her that President Johnson was no better than a sot, and that the head of the Washingtonian Home (a refuge for inebriates here) had been sent for, as a man having skill in such cases, to try to save him. “Is this true, Mr. Sumner?” she asked. Mr. Sumner said not one word at first; then asked, “What authority had Judge Russell for making such an assertion?” Kate did not know, and I thought on the whole Mr. Sumner, who knew the man had really been sent for by the President himself, it is supposed for some other reason, doubted the whole tale. I doubted it sincerely from the first moment, and I wonder a man can be left to say such things.
Sumner then continued to describe very vividly what he had known of Andy Johnson’s behavior. When he left Tennessee to come to Washington to be Vice-President, he travelled with a negro servant and two demijohns of whiskey which he dispensed freely, drinking enough himself at the same time to arrive at Washington in a maudlin condition, in which state he remained until after the fourth of March. He was then living at the hotel, and a young Massachusetts officer, who lived on the same floor and was obliged to pass Mr. Johnson’s door many times a day, told Mr. S. that during the two days subsequent to Mr. Johnson’s arrival he saw, while passing his room, and counted twenty-six glasses of whiskey go in. At length good men interfered; they saw delirium tremens or some other dreadful thing would be the result if this continued, and old Mr. Blair went with Mr. Preston King and persuaded Mr. Johnson to go down and stay at Mr. Blair’s house, and he surrendered at discretion. It was a small house and a very quiet family, but they stowed Mr. Johnson away and Mr. King also, who was kind enough to offer to take care of him. Shortly after this Mr. Lincoln and Mr. Sumner had gone down the river in a yacht, and had landed at General Grant’s headquarters. They were sitting together at two desks reading the papers for the day when Mr. Sumner observed a figure darken the door, and looking up found Mr. Johnson. “Ah, Mr. Vice-President, how do you do,” he said, putting his papers aside. “Mr. President, here is the Vice-President.” Mr. Lincoln arose and extended his hand, but as Mr. Sumner thought very coldly, and after a short time they started again for their yacht. Mr. Johnson walked as far as the wharf, talking with Mr. Lincoln, but when they arrived there, Mr. Lincoln did not say, “Come with us and have lunch,” or “Come at night and have dinner,” but bade him simply “Good-bye” there, where they observed him afterward watching their departure with Mr. King by his side, who had come to rejoin him.
“This,” said Mr. Sumner, “is all Mr. Lincoln saw of Mr. Johnson. One week after this time the President was assassinated, and they never met from that hour until his death.”
Mr. Sumner thinks Mr. Beecher is making a dangerous and deadly mistake, and told him so. He said further to Mr. B. that his anxieties prevented him from sleeping, that he had not slept for three nights. “I should think so,” Mr. Beecher replied, “you talk like a man who had been deprived of his natural rest.” The two men have a respect for each other and talk kindly of each other, but they do not see things from the same point of view now at all.
Friday morning, March 21, 1872.—L. W. J. and her daughter met us at the cars [in New York] bound to go with us to Washington. A pleasant day’s journey we had of it with their friendly faces to accompany us and with Colonel Winthrop to meet us at the train. The evening of our arrival Jamie went at once to see Charles Sumner who lives in a fine house adjoining our hotel. Nothing could be finer than the situation he has chosen. He kept J. until midnight and tried to detain him still longer, but the knowledge that I was waiting for him made him insist at length upon coming away. He found him better in health than he had supposed from the newspapers, and “the same old Sumner,” as Jamie said.
Saturday morning I went in early with J. and passed the entire morning with the Senator. Several colored persons came in as we sat there, and those who were people of eminence were introduced. He talked of literature and showed us his own curiosities which appear to be numberless. Jamie was called away, but he urged me to stay. He said he had sent a message to the Senate which required a reply and he expected every moment to hear the sound of hoofs on the pavement, as he had requested a special messenger to be sent on horseback. The messenger did not arrive, but I stayed on all the same until his carriage came to take him to the Capitol, when he insisted that I should accompany him. He showed me all the wonders of the place, not forgetting the doors which Crawford never lived even to design in clay altogether, but which his wife, desiring to have the money, caused to be finished by her husband’s workmen and foisted upon our Government. They are poor enough. Sumner opposed her in what he considered a dishonest attempt to get money, but of course he could not make an open opposition of this nature against a lady, the widow of his friend.
Sumner’s character is one of the most extraordinary pictures of opposing elements ever combined in one person. He is so possessed by Sumner that there is really no room for the fair existence of another in his world. Position, popularity, domestic happiness, health, have one by one been cut away from him, but he still stands erect, with as large a faith in Sumner and with as determined a look toward the future as if it beckoned him to glory and happiness. I suppose he must believe that the next turn of Fortune’s wheel must give him the favor he has now lost; but were he another man, all the honors of the state could hardly recompense him in the least for what he has lost. He has a firm proud spirit which his terrible bodily suffering does not appear to make falter. His health is so precarious that doubtless a few more adverse strokes would finish him; but he has had all there are to have, one would say. His friends, however, uphold him most tenderly; letters from dear Mrs. Child and others lay upon his table urging him to put away all excitement and try to live for the service of the state. Public honor, probity, the high service of his country seem to be the passions which animate him and by which he endures. He has a mania for collecting rare books and pictures nowadays and it is almost pitiful to see how this fancy runs away with him and how he must frequently be deceived. The tragedy of his marriage would be far more tragic if it had left any scar (as far as mortal can discover) save upon his pride. I would not do a man whom I hold in such honor any injustice, but he never seemed in love.
Sunday.—Not well—kept to my room in the Arlington Hotel all day, obliged to refuse to see guests also, and dear J. has gone alone to dine with Sumner. I had hoped to see his home once more and to see him among his peers. There is always a doubt of course, but especially in his state of health, whether we may ever meet again. If not, I shall not soon forget his stately carriage at the Capitol yesterday nor the store he sets at present upon his counted friends.
He pointed out the great avenue named Massachusetts, and the school house named after himself, with a just and noble pride yesterday. The trees are all ready to burst into leaf. Read Bayard Taylor’s Norwegian story, “Lars”—very sweet and fine it is—just missing “an excuse for being.” L. J. fills us with new respect and regard. Her devotion to her daughter is so perfect and so wise.
Jamie returned about 12 o’clock. There had been a gorgeous dinner. The guests were Caleb Cushing, Carl Schurz, Perley Poore, Mr. Hill, J. T. F. The service was worthy of the house of an English nobleman, the feast worthy of Lucullus. It fairly astonished J. to see Sumner eat. He of course sat at S.’s right. Not a wine, nor a dish, was left untasted and even the richest puddings were taken in large quantities. I thought of poor Mrs. Child and other devout admirers of this their Republican (!) leader, then of Charlotte Brontë’s story of Thackeray at dinner. Some day, said J., we shall take up the paper and find Sumner is no more, and it will be after one of these dinners.
The talk astonished J., utterly unused as he is to look behind the scenes of government. Caleb Cushing, a man over 70, who appears to have the vigor of 50, called Stanton “a master of duplicity.” Caleb Cushing said Seward was the first man who introduced ungentlemanly bearing into the Cabinet. Until he came there, there was no smoking, no putting up of the feet, but always a fine courtesy and dignity of behavior was preserved.
Before leaving the diaries from which so many pages have already been drawn, before letting the last of the familiar faces which look out from them fade again from sight, it would be a pity not to assemble a few entries recalling notable persons of whom Mrs. Fields made fragmentary but significant record. Here, for instance, are glimpses of Henry Ward Beecher, fresh from the great service he rendered to the Union cause in the Civil War by his speeches in England.
Tuesday, November 17, 1863.—J. T. F. saw Mr. Kennard today and we heard from him the particulars of Mr. Beecher’s landing. He came on shore in the warm fog which was the precursor of the heavy rain we have today, at 3 o’clock A.M. of Sunday. He went to the Parker House until day should break and Mr. Kennard could come and take him to the retirement of Brookline, to pass the day until the train should leave for New York. News of his arrival getting abroad, a company of orthodox deacons waited upon him very early to invite him to preach. “Gentlemen, do you take me for a fool,” he said, “to jump so readily into the harness of the pulpit even before the fatigue of the voyage has worn away?” He heard of the illness of one of his younger children and therefore hastened as quickly as possible toward home.
The day before the one upon which he was to speak at Exeter Hall he awoke in the morning with a heavy headache; his voice, too, was seriously impaired by over-use. He wanted to speak, his whole heart was in it, yet how in this condition? He shut himself up in the house all that day and hoped for better things and went early to bed that night. The next morning at dawn he awoke, he opened his eyes quickly. “Is God to suffer me to do this work?” He leaped from the bed with a bound. His head was clear and fresh, but his voice—he hardly dared to try that. “I will speak to my sister three thousand miles away,” he said, and cried, “Harriet.” The tones were clear and strong. “Thank God!” he said—then speedily dressed—trying his voice again and again—then he sat down and wrote off the heads of his address. All he needed to say came freshly and purely to his mind just in the form he wished. The day ebbed away and the carriage came to take him to the hall. When he descended to the street, to his surprise there was a long file of policemen, through whom he was conducted because of the crowds waiting about his door. He was obliged to descend also at some distance from Exeter Hall, and he was again conducted through another line of police before he reached the door. The people pushed and cried out so that he ran from the carriage towards the hall; and one of the staid policemen, observing a man running, cried out and caught him by the coat-tail saying he mustn’t run there, that line was preserved for the great speaker. “Well, my friend,” said Mr. Beecher, “I can tell you one thing. There won’t be much speaking till I get there.” While he hurried on, he felt a woman lay hold of the skirts of his coat. The police, seeing her, tried to push her away, but she said to one of them, “I belong to his party.” Mr. B. said, “I overheard the poor thing, but I thought if she chose to tell a lie I would not push her away; but as I neared the door she crept up and whispered to me, ‘I am one of your people. Don’t you remember ——, a Scotch woman who used to live in Brooklyn and go to the Plymouth Church? I have thought of this for weeks and longed and dreamt of being with you again. Now my desire is heard.’”
The rest of this wonderful night the public journals and his own letters can tell us of—have told us. He has been as it were a man raised up for this dark hour of our dear Country. May he live to see the promised land, and not only from the top of Pisgah.
December 10, 1863.—Visit from H. W. Beecher.... Mr. Beecher did not like Mr. Browning. He found him flippant and worldly. To be sure he had but one interview and could scarcely judge, but had he met the man by chance in a company he should never have sought him a second time. He said of Charles Lamb that he always reminded him of a honeysuckle growing between and over a rough trellis; it would cover the stakes, it would throw out blossoms and tendrils, it would attract hummingbirds and make corners for their nests and fill the wide air with its fragrance. Such was C. Lamb to him.
He was sure he could have liked Mrs. Browning—so credulous, generous, outspoken. He liked strong outspoken people, yet he liked serene people too; but then, he loved the world in its wide variety.
He said his boy wished to be either a stage-driver or a missionary. His fancy was for stage-driving; he thought perhaps his duty might make him a missionary....
It was such a privilege to see him back and such a privilege to grasp his hand, I could say nothing but be happy and thankful.
A few years later a passing shape from still an earlier generation casts its shadow of tragic outline across the pages of the diary.
Sunday, January 6, 1867.—A driving snow-storm. Last night Jamie went to the Club; met W. Everett, who said that while his father was member of Congress and was at one time returning from Washington to Boston he was stopped in the street as he passed through Philadelphia by a haggard man wrapped in a cloak. “I am Aaron Burr,” said the figure, “and I pray you to ask Congress for an appropriation to aid me in my misery.” Mr. E. replied that the member from his own district was the person to whom to apply. “I know that,” was the sad rejoinder, “but the others are all strangers to me and I pray you to help me.” After some reflection Mr. Everett promised to try to do something in his behalf; fortunately, however, he was released by death before Congress was again in session.
Then soon appears a more cheerful figure, in the person of the Rev. Elijah Kellogg whose lines of “Spartacus to the Gladiators” have resounded in many a schoolhouse. His tales of the Stowes and the family Bible may still divert a generation that knows not Spartacus.
Thursday, January 10, 1867.—Yesterday J. fell in with a Mr. Kellogg, a clergyman from Harpswell, Maine, the author of many noble things, among the rest, of the “Speech of Spartacus” which is in Sargent’s “School Speaker,” a piece of which the boys are very fond, but the masters are obliged to forbid their speaking it because it always takes the prize. He wrote it while in college, to speak himself. He went to school with Longfellow, though he is younger than the poet, and the latter calls him a man of genius. He is a preacher of the gospel and for the past ten months has been speaking every Sunday at the Sailor’s Bethel with great effect. He called to see J. and told him some queer anecdotes regarding his sea-life. He dresses like a fisherman, red shirt, etc., while at home. He remembers Professor Stowe and his wife well. He says their arrival at Brunswick was looked for with eagerness by many, with some natural curiosity by himself. One day about the time they were expected he was in his boat floating near the pier and preparing to return to his island where he lives, as the tide was going down and if he delayed much longer he would be ashore; but he observed a woman sitting on a cask upon the wharf swinging her heels, with two large holes the size of a dollar each in the back of her stockings, a man standing by her side, and several children playing about. At once he believed it must be the new professor, so he dallied about in his boat observing them. Presently the man cried out, “Hallo there, will you give my wife a sail?” “I can’t,” he replied, “there’s no wind.” “Will you give her a row then?” “The tide’s too low and I shan’t get home.” “Oh,” said the woman, “we will pay you; you’d better take me out a little way.” “No, I can’t,” he said. Presently he heard somebody say something about that’s being the minister and not a fisherman at all. “Do you think so?” said Mrs. Stowe. With that he dropped down into the bottom of his boat and was off before another word.
He told Mr. Fields also of the professor who preceded Professor Stowe. He was an unmarried man with three sisters, all of whom were insane at times and frequently one of them was away from home in an asylum. One day the brother was away, the eldest sister being at home in apparently good health, when another professor came to visit them to whom she wished to be particularly polite. “What will you have for dinner,” said she, “today?” “Oh! the best thing you’ve got,” he replied. So when dinner came she had stewed the family Bible with cabbage for his repast. He speaks with the greatest enthusiasm of the beauty of that Maine coast. We must go there.
Out of what seems a past almost pre-Augustan come these memories of N. P. Willis, a poet who suffered the misfortune of outliving much of his own fame.
Thursday, January 31, 1867.—The papers of last night brought the news of N. P. Willis’s death and that he was to be buried in Boston from St. Paul’s Church today. Early this morning a note came from Mrs. Willis asking Mr. Fields to see Dr. Howe and Edmund Quincy, to ask them to be pall-bearers with himself and Colonel Trimble. Fortunately last night J. had seen the announcement, and before going to Longfellow’s made up his mind to ask Longfellow and Lowell to come in to assist at the ceremony of their brother-author; he had also sent to Professor Holmes before the note came from Mrs. Willis. He then sent immediately for the others whom she mentioned and for a quantity of exquisite flowers. All his plans turned out as he had arranged and hoped and the poet’s grave was attended by the noblest America had to offer. The dead face was not exposed, but the people pressed forward to take a sprig from the coffin in memory of one who had strewn many a flower of thought on the hard way of their lives. There are some to speak hardly of Willis, but usually the awe of death ennobles his memory to the grateful world of his appreciators. “Refrain! refrain!” we long to say to the others who would carp. “If you have tears, shed them on the poet’s grave.”
There had been previously an exquisite and touching service at Idlewild where Octavius Frothingham did all a man could do, inspired by the occasion and the loveliness of the day and scene. The service here would have seemed cold as stone except for the gracious poets who surrounded the body and prevented one thought of chill lack of sympathy from penetrating the flowers with which it was covered. I could not restrain my tears when I remembered a few years, only two, and the same company had borne Hawthorne’s body to its burial. Which, which, of that beloved and worshipped few was next to be borne by the weeping remnant!!
Wednesday, July 1, 1868.—In our walk yesterday J. delighted himself and me by rehearsing his memories of Willis. J. was at the Astor House when Willis returned first from Europe with his young bride. He was then the observed of all observers. As in those days travellers crossed in sailing vessels, his coming was not heralded; the first that was known of their arrival was when he walked into the Astor with his beautiful young wife upon his arm. He wore a brown cloak thrown gracefully about his shoulders and was a man to remind one of Lady Blessington’s saying, “If Willis had been born to £10,000 a year he would have been a perfect man.” He was then at the head of the world of literature in America; his influence could do anything and his heart and purse were both at the service of the needy asker. Unfortunately from the first he never paid his debts. J. said he never believed the tales of Willis’s dissipation. He spent money freely even when he had it not. All the English folk, lords and ladies, who then came to see America were the guests of Willis.
I asked what his wife was like! “Like a seraph. She was lovely with all womanly attractions.”
Of the various “causes” to which Mrs. Fields and her husband paid allegiance, the cause of equal opportunity for men and women cannot justly be left unmentioned. They espoused it before its friends were taken with the seriousness they have long commanded, and, as the following passage will suggest, were full of sympathy with those who fought its early battles. The impact of one of these combatants, Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, a reformer in sundry fields, against the rock of conservatism represented by the President of Harvard College, is the subject of a lively bit of record.
September 22, 1876.—At four came Miss Phelps, at six came Mrs. Livermore. Ah! She is indeed a great woman—a strong arm to those who are weak, a new faith in time of trouble. She came to tea as fresh as if she had been calmly sunning herself all the week instead of speaking at a great meeting at Faneuil Hall the previous evening and taking cold in the process. She talked most wittily and brilliantly, beside laughing most heartily and merrily over all dear J.’s absurd stories and illustrations. He told her of a woman who came to speak to him after one of his lectures, to thank him for what he was trying to do for the education of women. She said, “I was educated at home with my brothers and taught all they were taught, learning my lessons by their side and reciting with them until the time came for them to go to college. Nobody ever told me I was not to go to college! And when the moment arrived and it dawned upon me that I was to be left behind to do nothing, to learn nothing more, I was terribly unhappy.”
“I know just how she felt,” said Mrs. Livermore; “there was a party of six of us girls, sisters and cousins, who had studied with our brothers up to the time for going to college. We were all ready, but what was to be done? We were told that no girls had entered Harvard thus far. We said to each other, we six girls will go to Cambridge and call upon President Quincy, show him where we stand in our lessons, and ask him to admit us. I was the youngest of the party. I was noted for being rather hot and intemperate in speech in those days, and the girls made me promise before we left the house [not to speak]—‘For as sure as you do,’ they said, ‘you will spoil all.’ So I promised, and we went to Cambridge and found Mr. Quincy. The girls laid their proposition before him as clearly as they dared, by showing him what they had done in their lessons. ‘Very smart girls, unusually capable girls,’ he said encouragingly; ‘but can you cook?’ ‘Oh, yes, sir,’ said one, ‘we have kept house for some time.’ ‘Highly important,’ he said; and so on during the space of an hour.”
Mrs. Livermore said she found he was toying with them and they were as far away from the subject in their minds as the moment they arrived, and, forgetting her promise of silence, she said: “‘But, Mr. Quincy, what we came to ask is, will you allow us to come to college when our brothers do? You say we are sufficiently prepared; is there anything to prevent our admission?’ ‘Oh, yes, my dear, we never allow girls at Harvard; you know, the place for girls is at home.’ ‘Yes, but, Mr. Quincy, if we are prepared, we would not ask to recite, but may we not attend the recitations and sit silent in the classes?’ ‘No, my dear, you may not.’ ‘Then I wish—’ ‘What do you wish?’ he said. ‘I wish I were God for one instant, that I might kill every woman from Eve down and let you have a masculine world all to yourselves and see how you would like that.’ Up to this point the girls had been kept up by excitement, but there we broke down. I tried the best I could not to cry, but I found my eyes were getting full, and the only thing for us to do was to leave as soon as we could for home. We lived in the vicinity of Copp’s Hill and I can see, as distinctly as if it were yesterday, the room looking out on the burial-ground in which we all sat down together and cried ourselves half-blind. ‘I wish I was dead,’ said one. ‘I wish I had never been born,’ said another. ‘Martha, get up from that stone seat,’ said a third; ‘you’ll get cold.’ ‘I don’t care if I do,’ said Martha; ‘I shall perhaps die the sooner.’ We were all terribly indignant.”
I was deeply interested in this history. I was standing over the cradle of woman’s emancipation and seeing it rocked by the hand of sorrow and indignation.
Other passages might be cited merely to illustrate the skill and industry of Mrs. Fields in reducing to narrative form the mass of reported talk of one sort or another which her husband brought home to her. A striking instance of this is found in the full rendering of a story told by R. H. Dana, Jr., to Fields, at a time when they were discussing a new edition of “Two Years before the Mast.” It is a long dramatic account of Dana’s experience on a burning ship in the Pacific, which he told Fields he had “never yet found time to write down.” In Charles Francis Adams’s biography of Dana, the bare bones of the story are preserved in a diary Dana was keeping during the voyage in which this calamity occurred. If Adams could but have turned to the diary of Mrs. Fields for 1868, he would have found a detailed description of an episode in Dana’s life which might well have been included in his biography.
But the if’s of bookmaking are hardly less abundant than those of history. If, for a single instance, this were in any real sense a biography of Mrs. Fields, it would be necessary for the reader to explore with the compiler the journals and letters written during two visits the Fieldses made to Europe in 1859 and 1869. But this would be foreign to the present purpose, which has not been either to produce a biography, or to evoke all the interesting persons known to Mrs. Fields, at home and abroad, but rather to present them and her against her own intimate and distinctive background. She herself has written, in her “Authors and Friends,” of Tennyson and Lady Tennyson, and to the pictures she has drawn of them it would be easily possible to add fresh lines from the unprinted records—as it would be, also, to bring forth passages touching upon many another familiar figure of Victorian England. The roving lover who justified himself by singing that They were my visits, but thou art my home, stated, in essence, the principle to which these pages have adhered. The frequenters of the house in Charles Street well knew that something of its color and flavor was derived from the excursions its hostess made into other scenes. Yet her own color and flavor were not those of the visitor, but of the visited. It is a pity that many who would have been welcome visitors—none more than Edward Lear—never came. Even as it is, there is ample ground for laying the emphasis of this book upon the panorama of a picturesque social life chiefly as seen from within the hospitable walls of Mr. and Mrs. Fields. When he died in 1881, a long and happy chapter in her long and happy life came to its close.