Part 19

“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.

[Illustration: _From a letter of Edward Lear’s to Fields_]

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.

VII

SARAH ORNE JEWETT

Such a statement about Mrs. Fields as that she “was to survive her husband many years and was to flourish as a copious second volume—the connection licenses the figure—of the work anciently issued,” almost identifies itself, without remark, as proceeding from the same friend, Henry James, whose words have colored a previous chapter of this book. The many years to which he referred were, indeed, nearly thirty-four in number, about a third of a century, or what is commonly counted a generation. For a longer period than that through which she was the wife of James T. Fields, she was thus his widow. Through nearly all of this period the need of her nature for an absorbing affectionate intimacy was met through her friendship with Sarah Orne Jewett. It was with reference to her that Mrs. Fields, in the preface to a collection of Miss Jewett’s letters, published in 1911, two years after her death, wrote of “the power that lies in friendship to sustain the giver as well as the receiver.” In the friendship of these two women it would have been impossible to define either one, to the exclusion of the other, as the giver or the receiver. They were certainly both sustained by their relation.

Miss Jewett, born in South Berwick, Maine, in 1849, and continuously identified with that place until her death in 1909, first entered the “Atlantic circle” in 1869, when she was but twenty years old, and Fields was still editor of the magazine. In that year a story by her, called “Mr. Bruce” and credited in the index of the magazine—for contributions then appeared unsigned—to “A. C. Eliot,” was printed in the “Atlantic.” Four years later, _Consule Howells_, “The Shore House,” a second story, appeared over her own name, the practice of printing signatures having meanwhile been instituted. In May, 1875, the “Atlantic” contained a poem by Miss Jewett, which may be quoted, not so much to remind the readers of those stories of New England on which her later fame was based, that in her earlier years she was much given to the writing of verse, as to explain in a way the union—there is no truer word for it—that came later to exist between herself and Mrs. Fields.

Thus it read:—

TOGETHER

I wonder if you really send Those dreams of you that come and go! I like to say, “She thought of me, And I have known it.” Is it so?

Though other friends walk by your side, Yet sometimes it must surely be, They wonder where your thoughts have gone, Because I have you here with me.

And when the busy day is done And work is ended, voices cease, When every one has said good night, In fading firelight, then in peace

I idly rest: you come to me,— Your dear love holds me close to you. If I could see you face to face It would not be more sweet and true;

I do not hear the words you speak, Nor touch your hands, nor see your eyes: Yet, far away the flowers may grow From whence to me the fragrance flies;

And so, across the empty miles Light from my star shines. Is it, dear, Your love has never gone away? I said farewell and—kept you here.

[Illustration: SARAH ORNE JEWETT]

It was not strange that the writer of just such a poem should have seemed to Fields, before his death in 1881, the ideal friend to fill the impending gap in the life of his wife. He must have known that, when the time should come for readjusting herself to life without him, she would need something more than random contacts with friends, no matter how rewarding each such relationship might be. He must have realized that the intensely personal element in her nature would require an outlet through an intensely personal devotion. If he could have foreseen the relation that grew up between Mrs. Fields and Miss Jewett—her junior by about fifteen years—almost immediately upon his death, and continued throughout the life of the younger friend, he would surely have felt a great security of satisfaction in what was yet to be. In all her personal manifestations, and in all her work, Miss Jewett embodied a quality of distinction, a quality of the true _aristophile_,—to employ a term which has seemed to me before to fit that small company of lovers of the best to which these ladies preëminently belonged,—that made them foreordained companions. To Mrs. Fields it meant much to stand in a close relation—apart from all considerations of a completely uniting friendship—with such an artist as Miss Jewett, to feel that through sympathy and encouragement she was furthering a true and permanent contribution to American letters. To Miss Jewett, whose life, before this intimacy began, had been led almost entirely in the Maine village of her birth,—a village of dignity and high traditions that were her own inheritance,—there came an extension of interests and stimulating contacts through finding herself a frequent member of another household than her own, and that a very nucleus of quickening human intercourse. To pursue her work of writing chiefly at South Berwick, to come to Boston, or Manchester, for that freshening of the spirit which the creative writer so greatly needs, and there to find the most sympathetic and devoted of friends, also much occupied herself with the writing of books and with all commerce of vital thoughts—what could have afforded a more delightful arrangement of life?

[Illustration: THE LIBRARY IN CHARLES STREET; MRS. FIELDS AT THE WINDOW, MISS JEWETT AT THE RIGHT]

Even as early as 1881, the year of Fields’s death, Miss Jewett published the fourth of her many books, “Country By-Ways,” preceded by “Deephaven” (1877), “Play Days” (1878), and “Old Friends and New” (1879). From 1881 onward her production was constant and abundant. In 1881 also began a period of remarkable productiveness on the part of Mrs. Fields. In that very year of her husband’s death she published both her “James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches,” and a second edition of “Under the Olive,” a small volume in which she had brought together in 1880 a number of poems in which the influence of the Greek and English poets is sometimes manifested—notably in “Theocritus”—to excellent purpose. If Mrs. Fields had been a poet of distinctive power, the fact would long ago have established itself. To make any such claim for her at this late day would be to depart from the purpose of this book. It was for the most part rather as a friend than as a daughter of the Muses that she turned to verse, the medium of utterance for so many of that nest of singing-birds in which her life was passed. In 1883 came her little volume “How to Help the Poor,” representing an interest in the less fortunate which prepared her to become one of the founders of the Associated Charities of Boston, kept her long active and influential in the service of that organization, and made her at the last one of its generous benefactors. In 1895 and 1900, respectively, appeared two more volumes of verse, “The Singing Shepherd and Other Poems,” assembling the work of earlier and later years, and “Orpheus, a Masque,” each strongly touched, like “Under the Olive,” with the Grecian spirit. From “The Singing Shepherd” I cannot resist quoting one of the best things it contains—a sonnet, “Flammantis Mœnia Mundi,” under which, in my own copy of the book, I find the penciled note, written probably more than twenty years ago: “Mrs. Fields tells me that this sonnet came to her complete, one may almost say; standing on her feet she made it, but for one or two small changes, just as it is, in about fifteen minutes.”

I stood alone in purple space and saw The burning walls of the world, like wings of flame, Circling the sphere; there was no break nor flaw In those vast airy battlements whence came The spirits who had done with time and fame And all the playthings of earth’s little hour; I saw them each, I knew them for the same, Mothers and brothers and the sons of power.

Yet were they changed; the flaming walls had burned Their perishable selves, and there remained Only the pure white vision of the soul, The mortal part consumed, and swift returned Ashes to ashes; while unscathed, unstained, The immortal passed beyond the earth’s control.

For the rest, her writings may be said to have grown out of the life which the pages of her diary have pictured. The successive volumes were these: “Whittier: Notes of his Life and of his Friendship” (New York, 1893); “A Shelf of Old Books” (New York, 1894); “Letters of Celia Thaxter” (edited with Miss Rose Lamb, Boston, 1895); “Authors and Friends” (Boston, 1896); “Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe” (Boston, 1897); “Nathaniel Hawthorne” (in the “Beacon Biographies,” Boston, 1899); “Charles Dudley Warner” (New York, 1909); and, after the death of the friend whose name appears above this chapter, “Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett” (Boston, 1911).

[Illustration: _An autograph copy of Mrs. Fields’s “Flammantis Mœnia Mundi” before its final revision_]

This catalogue of publications is in itself a dry bit of reading, and to add the titles of all the books produced by Miss Jewett after 1881 would not enliven the record. But the lists, explicit and implicit, will serve at least to suggest the range and nature of the activities of mind and spirit in which the two friends shared for many years. It is no wonder that Mrs. Fields, who abandoned the regular maintenance of her diary in the face of her husband’s failing health, resumed it in later years only under the special provocations of travel. In its place she took up the practice of writing daily missives—sometimes letters, more often the merest notes—to Miss Jewett whenever they were separated. These innumerable little messages of affection contained frequent references to persons and passing events, but rather as memoranda for talk when the two friends should meet than as records at all resembling the earlier journals. Such local friends as Mrs. Pratt and Mrs. Bell, in whom the spirit and wit of their father, Rufus Choate, shone on for later generations; Mrs. Whitman, mistress of the arts of color and of friendship; Miss Guiney, figuring always as “the Linnet,” even as Mrs. Thaxter was “the Sandpiper”; Dr. Holmes, Phillips Brooks, “dear Whittier”—these and scores of others, young and old, known and unknown to fame, people the scene which the little notes recall. There are, besides, such visitors from abroad as Matthew Arnold and his wife, Mrs. Humphry Ward and her daughter, M. and Mme. Brunetière, and Mme. Blanc (“Th. Bentzon”), whose article, “Condition de la Femme aux États-Unis,” in the “Revue des Deux Mondes” for September, 1894, could not have been written but for the knowledge of Boston acquired through a long visit to the house in Charles Street. Of the salon of her hostess she wrote: “Je voudrais essayer de peindre celui qui se rapproche le plus, par beaucoup de côtés, les salons de France de la meilleure époque, le salon de Mrs. J. T. Fields.” She goes on to paint it, and from the picture at least one fragment—apropos of the portraits in the house—should be rescued, if only for the piquancy conferred by Mme. Blanc’s native tongue upon a bit of anecdote: “Emerson réalise bien, en physique, l’idée d’immatérialité que je me faisais de lui. Mrs. Fields me conte une jolie anecdote: vers la fin de sa vie, il fut prit d’un singulier accès de curiosité; il voulut savoir une fois ce que c’était le whisky et entra dans un bar pour s’en servir:—Vous voulez un verre d’eau, Mr. Emerson? dit le garçon, sans lui donner le temps d’exprimer sa criminelle envie. Et le philosophe but son verre d’eau, ... et il mourut sans connaître le goût du whisky.”

[Illustration: MRS. FIELDS ON HER MANCHESTER PIAZZA]

But if the notes of Mrs. Fields to Miss Jewett, and Miss Jewett’s own letters to her friend in Boston, do not provide any counterpart to the diaries which make up the greater portion of this book, there are, in the journals kept by Mrs. Fields on special occasions of travel, records of experiences shared by the two friends which should be given here.

When they went to Europe together, as early as 1882, the two travellers were happily characterized by Whittier in a sonnet, “Godspeed,” as

her in whom All graces and sweet charities unite The old Greek beauty set in holier light; And her for whom New England’s byways bloom, Who walks among us welcome as the Spring, Calling up blossoms where her light feet stray.

No effort or adventure seemed to daunt the companions in their journeyings. There was an indomitable quality in Mrs. Fields which Miss Jewett used to ascribe to her “May blood,” with its strain of abolitionism, and it showed itself when she accepted with enthusiasm, and successfully urged Miss Jewett to accept, an invitation to make a two months’ winter cruise in West Indian waters, in company with Mr. and Mrs. Aldrich, on the yacht Hermione of their friend, Henry L. Pierce. The diary of Mrs. Fields records discomforts and pleasures with an equal hand, and gives lively glimpses of island and ocean scenes. At Santo Domingo, for example, the President of the Republic of Haiti dined on the Hermione on St. Valentine’s Day, 1896, and talked in a manner to which the impending liberation of Cuba from the Spanish yoke may now be seen to have added some significance.

Anything more interesting than his conversation [wrote Mrs. Fields] would be impossible to find. He ended just before we left the table by speaking of Cuba. He is inclined to believe that the day of Spain is over. The people are already conquerors in the interior and are approaching Havana. Spain will soon be compelled to retire to her coast defenses and she is sure to be driven thence in two years or sooner. Of course, if the Cubans are recognized by the great powers they will triumph all the sooner.

“Do these island republics take the part of Cuba?” someone asked.

“I will tell you a little tale of a camel,” he said, “if you will allow me—a camel greatly overladen who lamented his sad fate. ‘I am bent to the earth,’ he said; ‘everything is heaped upon me and I feel as if I could never rise again under such a load.’ Upon his pack was seated a flea, who heard the lament of the camel. Immediately the flea jumped to the ground. ‘See!’ he said; ‘now rise, I have relieved you of my own weight.’ ‘Thank you, Mr. Elephant,’ said the camel, as he glanced at the flea hopping away. The recognition of these islands would help Cuba about as much,” he added laughingly.

But the President of Haiti, concerning whom much more might be quoted, is less a part of the present picture than Thomas Bailey Aldrich, of whom Mrs. Fields wrote, February 21:—

T. B. A.’s wit and pleasant company never fail—he is so natural, finding fault at times, without being a fault-finder, and being crusty like another human creature when out of sorts—but on the whole a most refreshing companion, coming up from below every morning with a shining countenance, his hair curling like a boy’s, and ready for a new day. He said yesterday that he should like to live 450 years—“shouldn’t you?” “No,” I said; “I am on tip-toe for the flight.” “Ah,” he said with a visible shudder, “we know nothing about it! Oddly enough, I have strange impressions of having lived before—once in London especially—not at St. Paul’s, or Pall Mall, or in any of the great places where I might have been deceived by previous imaginations,—not at all,—but among some old streets where I had never been before and where I had no associations.” He would have gone on in this vein and would have drawn me into giving some reasons for my faith which would have been none to him, but fortunately we were interrupted. He is full of quips and cranks in talk—is a worshipper of the English language and a good student of Murray’s Grammar, in which he faithfully believes. His own training in it he values as much as anything which ever came to him. He picks up the unfortunates, of which I am chief, who say “people” meaning “persons,” who say “at length” for “at last,” and who use foolish redundancies, but I cannot seem to record his fun. He began to joke Bridget early in the voyage about the necessity of being tattooed when she arrived at the Windward Islands, like the rest of the crew! Fancying that he saw a sort of half idea that he was in earnest, he kept it up and told her that the butter-mark of Ponkapog should be the device! The matter had nearly blown over when yesterday he wanted her suddenly and called, “Bridget,” at the gangway rather sharply. “Here, sir,” said the dear creature running quickly to mount the stairs. “The tattoo-man is here,” said T. B. With all seriousness Bridget paused a moment, wavered, looked again, and then came on laughing to do what he really wanted. “That man will be the death of me—so he will,” said B. as she went away on her errand. She is his slave; gets his clothes and waits upon him every moment; but his fun and sweetness with her “_désennuie de service_,” and more, charges it with pleasantness.