Elmwood and Charles Street: Letters of Lowell and Diaries of Mrs. Fields

EDITED BY M. A. DEWOLFE HOWE

FOR four years from the establishment of the Atlantic Monthly, sixty-five years ago, James Russell Lowell was its editor. His immediate successor was his friend and publisher, James T. Fields. The diaries which Mrs. Fields was writing through most of the ten years of her husband’s editorship, and for some time thereafter, were full of allusions to Lowell which have not hitherto been printed. Among the many letters which she preserved there is, besides, a surprising number of characteristic communications from Lowell, both to Fields and to his wife, which Norton did not include in his Letters of James Russell Lowell, nor Scudder in his biography of Lowell. By joining some of the passages relating to him in Mrs. Fields’s journal with a few of his sprightly unpublished letters to the second editor of the Atlantic, it is possible to shake the dust of more than half a century from a friendship of uncommon interest, both in its personal aspects and in those of literary history, and to reveal it as a living thing.
Here, to begin with, is a note written to accompany one of Lowell’s most familiar poems, ‘After the Burial,’when he sent the manuscript to the editor of the Atlantic. Lowell’s practice of shunning capitals at the beginning of his letters, except for the first personal pronoun, is observed in the quotations that follow: —

ELMWOOD, 8th March, 1868
MY DEAR FIELDS: —
when I am in a financial crisis, which is on an average once in six weeks, I look first to my portfolio and then to you. The verses I send you are most of them more than of age, but Professors don’t write poems, and I even begin to doubt if poets do — always. But I suppose you will pay me for my name as you do others, and so I send the verses hoping you may also find something in them that is worth praise if not coin. Consolation and commonplace are twin sisters and I doubt not one sat at each ear of Eve after Cain’s misunderstanding with his brother. In some folks they cause resentment, and this little burst relieved mine under some desperate solacings after the death of our first child, twenty-one years ago. I trust there is nothing too immediately personal to myself in the poem to make the publishing of it a breach of that confidence which a man should keep sacred with himself.
With kind regards to Mrs. Fields, I remain always yours
J. R. LOWELL.

Another typical letter, dated ‘Elmwood, 12th July, 1868, 1/4 to 9 AM wind W. by N. Therm. 88°,’ begins: — MY DEAR FIELDS: —
as I swelter here, it is some consolation for me that you are roasting in that Yankee-baker which we call the Wte Mts. That repercussion of the sun’s heat from so many angles at once (the focus being the tourist) always struck me as one of the sublimest examples of the unvarying operation of natural laws. I wish you and Mrs. Fields might be made exceptions, but it can hardly be hoped.

Before the end of the month Fields had escaped the perils of New Hampshire heat, and paid a visit to Elmwood, thus chronicled by Mrs. Fields: —

July 25, 1868. — J. went out to sec Lowell last night. As he passed Longfellow’s door, Trap, the dog, was halfasleep apparently on the lawn, but hearing a footstep he leaped up and, seeing who it was, became overjoyed, leaped upon him and covered his hands with caresses. He stayed some time playing with him. Lowell was alone in his library, looking into an empty fireplace and smoking a pipe. He has been in Newport for a week, but was delighted to return to find his ‘own sponge hanging on its nail’ and to his books. He had become quite morbid because, while J. was away, a smaller sum than usual was sent him for his last poem. He thought it a delicate way of saying they wished to drop him. He was annoyed at the thought of having left out of his article on Dry den one of the finest points, he thought, that was making Dryden to appear the ‘Rubens’ of literature, which he appears to him to be.
Lowell is a man deeply pervaded with fine discontents. I do not believe the most favorable circumstances would improve him. Success, of which he has a very small share considering his deserts (for his books have a narrow circulation), would make him gayer and happier; whether so wise a man, I cannot but doubt.

He wears a chivalric, tender manner to his wife.

In the following autumn, Bayard Taylor and his wife were visiting Mr. and Mrs. Fields, and Lowell appears in her journal as one of the friends summoned in honor of their guests.

Thursday morning, November 19, 1868. — Mr. Parton came to breakfast and Dr. Holmes came in before we had quite done. O. W. H. was delighted to see Mr. P., because of his papers on ‘Smoking and Drinking.’ He believes smoking paralyzes the will. Taylor, on the contrary, feels himself better for smoking; it subdues his physical energy so he can write; otherwise he is nervous to be up and away and his mind will not work.
At dinner we had Lowell, Parton, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor, Mr. and Mrs. Scott-Siddons, and, later, Aldrich. Lowell talked most interestingly, head and shoulders beyond everybody else. The Siddonses left early, the gentlemen all smitten by her beauty and loveliness. A kind of childish grace pervaded her and she was beautiful as a picture. I could not wonder at their delight. Lowell’s talk after their departure was of literature, of course. He had been reading Calderon for the last six months, in the original. He finds him inexhaustible, almost. Speaking of novels, he said Fielding was the master, although he considers there are but two perfect creations of individual character in all literature; these are Falstaff and Don Quixote; all the rest fall infinitely below — are imperfect and unworthy to stand by their side. Tom Jones he thought might come in, in the second rank, with many others, but far below. He said he could not tell his boys at Cambridge to read Tom Jones, for it might do them harm; but Fielding painted his own experience and the result was unrivalled. Thackeray and the rest were pleasant reading, very pleasant, and yet how could he tell his class that he read Tom Jones once a year! He scouted the idea of Pickwick or anybody else approaching his two great characters. They stood alone for all time. Rip Van Winkle was suggested, but he said, in the first place, that was not original. Few persons knew the story perhaps in the old Latin (he gave the name, but unhappily I have forgotten it), but it was only a remade dish after all.
Friday. — Bayard Taylor and his wife left for New York. Mr. Parton dined out and we had a quiet evening at home and went to bed early. (Parton thinks it would be possible to make the Atlantic Monthly far more popular. He suggests a writer named Mark Twain be engaged, and more articles connected with life than with literature.)

It is easy to believe that Lowell’s talk must have sounded much like his letters, which so often sound like talk. Witness the following sentences from a letter of December 31, 1868, in reply, apparently, to an appeal for a new essay for the Atlantic: —

Well, well, I am always astonished at the good nature of folks, and how much boring they will stand from authors. As I told Howells once, the day will come when a wiser generation will drive all its literary men into a corner and make a battue of the whole lot. However, ‘after me, the deluge,’ as Nero said, and I suppose they’ll stand another essay or two yet, if I can divine, or rather if I have absorbed enough of the general feeling about something to put a point on it.
It’s a mercy I’m not conceited! I should like to be, and try to be, and have fizzes of it now and then; but they soon go out and leave a fogo behind them I don’t like. But if I only were for a continuance, I should be as grand a bore as ever lived — as grand as Wordsworth, by Jove! I would come into town once a week to read you over one of my old poems (selecting the longest, of course), and point out its beauties to you. You would flee to Tierra del Fuego (ominous name!) to escape me. You would give up publishing. You would write an epic and read a book just to me every time I came. But no, it is too bright a dream. Let me [be] satisfied with my class, who have to hear me once a week, and with just enough conceit to read my lectures as if I had not stolen ’em as I am apt to do now. Look out for an essay that shall [make] Montaigne and Bacon cross as the devil — when they come to read it! It will come ere you think.
Yours ever
FABIUS C. LOWELL.

Lowell was soon writing again to Fields, on January 12, 1869, about a fiftieth birthday party at Elmwood: —

I am going to celebrate my golden wedding with Life, on the 22nd of next month, by a dinner or a supper or something of the kind, and I want you to jine. I shall get together a dozen or so of old friends, and it will be a great satisfaction for you and me to see how much grayer the rest of ’em are than we. I shall fit my invitations to this end, and the bald and hoary will have the chance of the lame, the halt, and the blind in the parable. If it should be a dinner, it won’t matter; but if a supper, be sure and forget your night-key and then you won’t have any anxiety, nor Mrs. Fields either. Of course, I shall have an account of the affair in the papers, with a list of the gifts (especially in money) and the names of all who donate. You will understand by what I have said that it is to be one of those delightful things they call a ‘surprise party,’ and I expect to live on it for a year — one friend for every month.

A week afterwards, in the course of a letter accepting the invitation of Mr. and Mrs. Fields for Lowell’s daughter to accompany them to Europe, he wrote: ‘Do you see that — is to commence his autobiography in Putnam’s Magazine? At least, I take it for granted from the title — The Ass in Life and Literature. If sincerely done, it will be interesting.'
Later in the year, Lowell wrote Fields a letter which must have been read with delight. A decorated sonnet, in Lowell’s clear script, and reading as follows, filled its third sheet: —

ON SOME RECENT SERMONS

’His death eclipsed the gaiety of nations, & impoverished the public stock of harmless pleasure.' — JOHNSON on Garrick.

A man of genius, simple, warm, sincere,} Bulldog
He left a world grown kindlier that he came;
His hand the hungry knew, but not his name;
Dumb creatures snuffed a friend when he drew near,
And the strange dog pricked one suspicious ear,
Then couched his head secure. Safe be this fame
From critics’ measured praise or closepicked blame, —
He loved God’s gentler face & made it dear.
Was then Stylites’ post the better way
Than mingling with his kind, a man with men,
Like Him that was & was not such as they?
I judge ye not, but, to my simple ken,

If on your guideboards the right names be kept, } Terrier
A Some foe hath changed their places while ye slept.

I think name will do instead of names, which befogged the their in the next verse.

The mere fact that the death of Dickens could have called forth clerical expressions provoking Lowell to such scorn is in itself a measure of the distance we have traveled since 1870. The verses are not included in Lowell’s Poetical Works, nor are they listed in the Bibliography of James Russell Lowell, compiled by George Willis Cooke. With two slight changes they may be found, however, over Lowell’s signature, in Every Saturday, for August 6, 1870. The letter that, accompanied them read as follows: —

ELMWOOD, 17th July, 1870
MY DEAR FIELDS : —
I can stand it no longer! If Dickens is to be banned, the rest of us might as well fling up our hands. This hot weather, too, gives a foretaste that raises well-founded apprehension. It is a good primary school for the Institution of which the Rev’ds Fulton and Dunn seem to be ushers. Instead of going to Church today, where I might have heard something not wholly to my advantage, as the advertisements for lost people say, I have written a sermon. It is not a proper sonnet; but a cross between that and epigram — a kind of bull-terrier, in short, with the size of the one and the prick-ears and docked tail of the other, nor without his special talent for rats. Is there any grip in his jaw, or no? He is good-natured and scarce shows his teeth.
The thing is an improvisation and the weather awfully hot!
Sweltered your servant sits and sweats and swears (for alliteration only); but if you would like it for the Atlantic, why here it is on the next leaf. Or, if too late, why not Every Saturday? I could not even think of it sooner, for I have been wrestling with a bad head and an article on Chaucer, and I fear they have thrown me. I want rest, and a bath of poetry, but where may the wicked hope for either? My sonnet (if Leigh Hunt would let me call it so) hit me like a stray shot from nowhere that I could divine, and five minutes saw it finished. So why may it not be good? It came, anyhow, as a poem comes — though it is n’t just that. But my dog isn’t bad? He is from the life at any rate.
I shall make use of my first leisure to get into Boston. But I have got bedevilled with the text of Chaucer and am working on it with my usual phrenzy — thirteen hours, for example, yesterday, collating texts and writing into margins. I comfort myself that my Chaucer will bring a handsome price at my vandoo! I shall be easier in my coffin if it run up handsomely for Fanny and Mabel.
Do you want an essay for your Almanac if one should come, which is doubtful? I need one or two more to make a little volume, and I need a little volume for nameless reasons. O, if I could sell my land! I would transmute that gold into poetry. Or if only poems would come when you whistle for ’em!
Give my kindest regards to Mrs. Fields.
Yours always
J. R. L.

From my study, this first day for three weeks without a drowsy pain in my knowledge box, I really feel a little lively, and wonder at myself. But don’t be alarmed — it won’t last, any more than money does, or principle in a politician, or hair, or popular favor — or paper.

Lowell continues to make his appearance in Mrs. Fields’s diary.

December 7, 1871. — Last Sunday Charlotte Cushman dined here. Our guests asked to meet her were Mr. and Mrs. Lowell and Mr. Longfellow; Miss Stebbins and Miss Chapman, her guests, also came. We had a lovely social time, Lowell making himself especially interesting, as he always does when he can once work himself up to the pitch of going out at all. He talked a while with me about poetry and his own topics after dinner. He said, he was one of the few people who believed in absolute truth; that he always looked for certain qualities in writers, which if he could not discover, they no longer interested him and he did not care to read them. He discovered, for instance, in the writers who had survived the centuries the same kindred points; those points he studied until he discovered what the adamant was and where it was founded; then he would look into the writers of our own age to see if he could find the same stuff; there was little enough of it unfortunately. He does not like Reynolds’s portrait of Johnson; thought it untrue, far too handsome, yet highly characteristic in the management of the hands, which portray the man as he was when talking better probably than anything ever did. Mrs. Lowell appeared to enjoy herself. J. says L. is always more himself if Mrs. L. is happy and talkative. They are thinking of Europe. Mabel is to be married in April, and afterward they probably go at once to Europe.

The final passage from the diary to be used in this place has to do with Lowell’s Cambridge habitation rather than with the man himself. It was written in the midst of Aldrich’s occupancy of Elmwood, during Lowell’s two years’ absence in Europe.

Thursday, June 12, 1873. — Dined last night with the Aldriches and Mr. Bugbee at Mr. Lowell’s beautiful old Elmwood. It was a perfect night, cool, fresh, moonlighted, after a muggy day of heat. After dinner I went into the fine old study with Aldrich, where he showed me two or three little poems he has lately written. He was all ready to talk on literary topics and much in earnest about his own satisfaction over Miss Mehitable’s Son (which is indeed a very good story), and was full of disgust over the Nation’s cool dismissal of it. It was too bad; but that Dennet of the Nation is beneath contempt because of the slights he throws upon good literary work. Aldrich says he found Asphodel all worn to pieces, read and reread in the upstairs study. He finds Mr. Lowell’s library in curious disorder with respect to modern books. He is an easy lender and an easy borrower. The result is, everything is at loose ends. Only two volumes of Hawthorne can be found, for instance.

Of all the ‘Atlantic circle’ none had valued Hawthorne more highly than Lowell, or felt more truly that the place left vacant by his death could never be filled. Living himself until 1891, ten years after the death of Fields, he maintained to the end a friendship with Mrs. Fields filled for both of them with gracious memories.