OLD NEWPORT DAYS
It was my good fortune, after discharge from the army during the Civil War, to dwell for a time under the hospitable roof of Mrs. Hannah Dame, in Newport, Rhode Island. Passing out of the front door one day, just as its bell rang, I saw before me one of the very handsomest men I had ever beheld, as I thought. He wore civilian dress, but with an unmistakable military air, and held out to me a card of introduction from a fellow officer. He had been discharged from the army on the expiration of his term of service with the regiment he had commanded in Frémont’s Mountain Department. Being out of employment for a time, and unsettled, as many of us were at that period, he came back to his early training as a market gardener, and, having made the professional discovery that most of the cabbages eaten in Boston were brought from New York, while nearly all the cauliflowers sold in New York were sent thither from Boston, he formed the plan of establishing a market garden midway between the two cities, and supplying each place with its favorite vegetable. This he did successfully for ten years, and thenmerged the enterprise in successive newer ones. In these he sometimes failed, but in the last one he succeeded where others had failed yet more completely, and astounded the nation by bringing the streets of New York into decent cleanliness and order for the first time on record. This man was Colonel George Edward Waring.
One of his minor achievements was that of organizing, at his house in Newport, the most efficient literary circle I ever knew, at a time when there were habitually more authors grouped in that city than anywhere else in America. But before giving a sketch of these persons, let me describe the house in which he received them. This house had been made internally the most attractive in Newport by the combined taste of himself and his wife, and was for a time the main centre of our simple and cordial group. In his study and elsewhere on the walls he had placed mottoes, taken partly from old English phrases and partly from the original Dutch, remembered almost from the cradle as coming from his Dutch maternal grandfather. Thus above his writing-desk the inscription read,Misérable à mon gré qui n’a chez soi où estre à soi(Alas for him who hath no home which is a home!). Under the mantelpiece and above the fireplace was the DutchEigen haasd iss goud waard(One’s own hearth is worthgold). In the dining-room there was inscribed above the fireplace, “Old wood to burn, Old wine to drink, Old friends to trust.” Opposite this was again the DutchPraatjes vullen den buik neit(Prattle does not fill the box). On two sides of the room there were, “Now good digestion wait on appetite, and health on both,” and also “In every feast there are two guests to be entertained, the body and the soul.” In almost every case the lettering of these mottoes was made into a decoration with peacock’s feathers, and formed a series of charming welcomes quite in harmony with the unfailing cordiality of the host and the fine and hearty voice of the hostess.
It was at this house that there were to be found gathered, more frequently than anywhere else, the literary or artistic people who were then so abundant in Newport,—where no other house was to be compared with it except that of Mrs. Howe, who then lived in the country, and had receptions and a world of her own.
We had, for instance, Dr. J. G. Holland, now best known as the original founder of the “Century Magazine,” then having but a fugitive literary fame based on books written under the name of Timothy Titcomb and entitled “Bitter-Sweet” and “Kathrina, Her Life and Mine.” He was personally attractive because of hismelodious voice, which made him of peculiar value for singing on all boating excursions. There was Edwin P. Whipple, a man reared in business, not literature; but with an inexhaustible memory of books and a fertile gift for producing them, especially those requiring personal anecdote and plenty of it. There was Dr. O. W. Holmes, who came to Newport as the guest of the Astor family, parents of the present English author of that name. At their house I spent one evening with Holmes, who was in his most brilliant mood, at the end of which he had talked himself into such an attack of asthma that he had to bid adieu to Newport forever, after an early breakfast the next morning.
There was the Reverend Charles T. Brooks, a man of angelic face and endless German translations, who made even Jean Paul readable and also unbelievable. There was Professor George Lane, from Harvard, a man so full of humor that people bought his new Latin Grammar merely for the fun to be got out of its notes. There was La Farge, just passing through the change which made a great artist out of a book-lover and a student of languages. He alone on this list made Newport his home for years, and reared his gifted and attractive children there, and it was always interesting to see how, one by one, they developed into artists or priests.
There was George Boker, of Philadelphia, a young man of fortune, handsome, indolent, as poetic as a rich young man could spare time to be, and one whose letters now help to make attractive that most amusing book, the “Memoirs of Charles Godfrey Leland.” There was my refined and accomplished schoolmate and chum, Charles Perkins, who trained himself in Italian art and tried rather ineffectually to introduce it into the public schools of Boston and upon the outside of the Art Museum. There was Tom Appleton, the man of two continents, and Clarence King, the explorer of this one, and a charming story-teller, by the way. Let me pause longer over one or two of these many visitors.
One of them was long held the most readable of American biographers, but is now being strangely forgotten,—the most American of all transplanted Englishmen, James Parton, the historian. He has apparently dropped from our current literature and even from popular memory. I can only attribute this to a certain curious combination of strength and weakness which was more conspicuous in him than in most others. He always appeared to me the most absolutely truthful being I had ever encountered; no temptation, no threats, could move him from his position; but when he camein contact with a man of wholly opposite temperament, as, for instance, General Benjamin F. Butler, the other seemed able to wind Parton round his fingers. This would be the harder to believe had not Butler exerted something of the same influence on Wendell Phillips, another man of proud and yet trustful temperament. Furthermore, Parton was absolutely enthralled in a similar way through his chief object of literary interest, perhaps as being the man in the world most unlike him, Voltaire. On the other hand, no one could be more devoted to self-sacrifice than Parton when it became clear and needful. Day after day one would see him driving in the roads around Newport, with his palsy-stricken and helpless wife, ten years older than himself and best known to the world as Fanny Fern,—he sitting upright as a flagstaff and looking forward in deep absorption, settling some Voltairean problem a hundred years older than his own domestic sorrow.
I find in my diary (June 25, 1871) only this reference to one of the disappointing visitors at Newport:—
“Bret Harte is always simple and modest. He is terribly tired of ‘The Heathen Chinee,’ and almost annoyed at its popularity when better things of his have been less liked”—the usual experience of authors.
I find again, May 15, 1871: “I went up last Wednesday night to the Grand Army banquet [in Boston] and found it pleasant. The receptions of Hooker and Burnside were especially ardent. At our table we were about to give three cheers for Bret Harte as a man went up to the chief table. It turned out to be Mayor Gaston.” This mistake, however, showed Harte’s ready popularity at first, though some obstacles afterwards tended to diminish it. Among these obstacles was to be included, no doubt, the San Francisco newspapers, which were constantly showered among us from the Pacific shores with all the details of the enormous debts which Bret Harte had left behind him, and which he never in his life, so far as I could hear, made a serious effort to discharge. Through some distrust either of my friendship or of my resources, he never by any chance even offered, I believe, to borrow a dollar of me; but our more generous companion, George Waring, was not so fortunate.
Another person, of nobler type, appears but imperfectly in my letters, namely, Miss Charlotte Cushman. I find, to be sure, the following penetrating touches from a companion who had always that quality, and who says of Miss Cushman, in her diary: “She is very large, looks like an elderly man, with gray hair and very redcheeks—full of action and gesture—acts a dog just as well as a man or woman. She seems large-hearted, kind, and very bright and quick—looks in splendid health. She will be here for this month, but may take a house and return.” This expectation was fulfilled, and I find that the same authority later compared Miss Cushman in appearance to “an old boy given to eating apples and snowballing”; and, again, gave this description after seeing Miss Cushman’s new house: “The wildest turn of an insane kaleidoscope—the petrified antics of a crazy coon—with a dance of intoxicated lightning-rods breaking out over the roof.” This youthful impulsiveness was a part of her, and I remember that once, as we were driving across the first beach at Newport, Miss Cushman looked with delight across the long strip of sand, which the advancing waves were rapidly diminishing, as the little boys were being driven ashore by them, and exclaimed, “How those children have enjoyed running their little risk of danger! I know I did when I was a boy,” and there seemed nothing incongruous in the remark, nor yet when she turned to me afterwards and asked, seriously, whether I thought suicide absolutely unpardonable in a person proved to be hopelessly destined to die of cancer,—a terror with which she was long haunted. Again, I remember atone fashionable reception how Miss Cushman came with John Gilbert, the veteran actor, as her guest, and how much higher seemed their breeding, on the whole, than that of the mere fashionables of a day.
Kate Field, who has been somewhat unwisely canonized by an injudicious annotator, was much in Newport, equally fearless in body and mind, and perhaps rather limited than enlarged by early contact with Italy and Mrs. Browning. She would come in from a manly boating-trip and fling herself on the sofa of the daintiest hostess, where the subsequent arrival of the best-bred guests did not disturb her from her position; but nothing would have amused her more than the deification which she received after death from some later adorers of her own sex.
I find the following sketches of different Newport visitors in a letter dated September 2, 1869:—
“We had an elder poet in Mr. [William Cullen] Bryant, on whom I called, and to my great surprise he returned it. I never saw him before. There is a little hardness about him, and he seems like one who has been habitually bored, but he is refined and gentle—thinner, older, and more sunken than his pictures—eyes not fine, head rather narrow and prominent; delicate in outline. He is quiteagreeable, and ⸺ chatted to him quite easily. I saw him several times, but he does not warm one.“At Governor Morgan’s I went to a reception for the [General] Grants. He is a much more noticeable man than I expected, and I should think his head would attract attention anywhere, and Richard Greenough [the sculptor] thought the same—and so imperturbable—without even a segar! Mrs. Grant I found intelligent and equable.... Sherman was there, too, the antipodes of Grant; nervous and mobile, looking like a country schoolmaster. He said to Bryant, in my hearing, ‘Yes, indeed! I know Mr. Bryant; he’s one of the veterans! When I was a boy at West Point he was a veteran. He used to edit a newspaper then!’“This quite ignored Mr. Bryant’s poetic side, which Sherman possibly may not have quite enjoyed. Far more interesting than this, I thought, was a naval reception where Farragut was given profuse honors, yet held them all as a trivial pleasure compared to an interview with his early teacher, Mr. Charles Folsom, the superintendent of the University Printing-Office at Cambridge. To him the great admiral returned again and again, and we saw them sitting with hands clasped, and serving well enough, as some one suggested, for a group of ‘War and Peace,’ such as the sculptors were just then portraying.”
“We had an elder poet in Mr. [William Cullen] Bryant, on whom I called, and to my great surprise he returned it. I never saw him before. There is a little hardness about him, and he seems like one who has been habitually bored, but he is refined and gentle—thinner, older, and more sunken than his pictures—eyes not fine, head rather narrow and prominent; delicate in outline. He is quiteagreeable, and ⸺ chatted to him quite easily. I saw him several times, but he does not warm one.
“At Governor Morgan’s I went to a reception for the [General] Grants. He is a much more noticeable man than I expected, and I should think his head would attract attention anywhere, and Richard Greenough [the sculptor] thought the same—and so imperturbable—without even a segar! Mrs. Grant I found intelligent and equable.... Sherman was there, too, the antipodes of Grant; nervous and mobile, looking like a country schoolmaster. He said to Bryant, in my hearing, ‘Yes, indeed! I know Mr. Bryant; he’s one of the veterans! When I was a boy at West Point he was a veteran. He used to edit a newspaper then!’
“This quite ignored Mr. Bryant’s poetic side, which Sherman possibly may not have quite enjoyed. Far more interesting than this, I thought, was a naval reception where Farragut was given profuse honors, yet held them all as a trivial pleasure compared to an interview with his early teacher, Mr. Charles Folsom, the superintendent of the University Printing-Office at Cambridge. To him the great admiral returned again and again, and we saw them sitting with hands clasped, and serving well enough, as some one suggested, for a group of ‘War and Peace,’ such as the sculptors were just then portraying.”
Most interesting, too, I found on one occasion, at Charles Perkins’s, the companionshipof two young Englishmen, James Bryce and Albert Dicey, both since eminent, but then just beginning their knowledge of this country. I vividly remember how Dicey came in rubbing his hands with delight, saying that Bryce had just heard a boarder at the hotel where he was staying sayEurōpeantwice, and had stopped to make a note of it in his diary. But I cannot allow further space to them, nor even to Mr. George Bancroft, about whom the reader will find a more ample sketch in this volume (page 95). I will, however, venture to repeat one little scene illustrating with what parental care he used to accompany young ladies on horseback in his old age, galloping over the Newport beaches. On one of these occasions, after he had dismounted to adjust his fair companion’s stirrup, he was heard to say to her caressingly, “Don’t call me Mr. Bancroft, call me George!”
In regard to my friend, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and her Newport life, I have written so fully of her in the article on page 287 of this volume that I shall hardly venture it again. Nor have I space in which to dwell on the further value to our little Newport circle of such women as Katharine P. Wormeley, the well-known translator of Balzac and Molière and the author of “Hospital Transports” during the war; or of the three accomplished Woolseysisters, of whom the eldest, under the name of “Susan Coolidge,” became a very influential writer for young people. She came first to Newport as the intimate friend of Mrs. Helen Maria Fiske Hunt, who was more generally known for many years as “H. H.” The latter came among us as the widow of one of the most distinguished officers whom the West Point service had reared. She was destined in all to spend five winters at Newport, and entered upon her literary life practically at that time. She lived there as happily, perhaps, as she could have dwelt in any town which she could christen “Sleepy Hollow,” as she did Newport; and where she could look from her window upon the fashionable avenue and see, she said, such “Headless Horsemen” as Irving described as having haunted the valley of that name.
After her second marriage she lived far away at the middle and then at the extreme western part of the continent, and we met but few times. She wrote to me freely, however, and I cannot do better than close by quoting from this brilliant woman’s very words her description of the manner in which she wrote the tale “Ramona,” now apparently destined to be her source of permanent fame. I do not know in literary history so vivid a picture of what may well be called spiritual inspiration in an impetuous woman’s soul.
The Berkeley, February 5, 1884.I am glad you say you are rejoiced that I am writing a story. But about the not hurrying it—I want to tell you something— You know I have for three or four years longed to write a story that should “tell” on the Indian question. But I knew I could not do it, knew I had no background—no local color for it.Last Spring, in So. Cal. [Southern California] I began to feel that I had—that the scene laid there—& the old Mexican life mixed in with just enough Indian, to enable me to tell what had happened to them—would be the very perfection of coloring. You know I have now lived six months in So. Cal.Still I did not see my way clear; got no plot; till one morning late last October, before I was wide awake, the whole plot flashed into my mind—not a vague one—the whole story just as it stands to-day: in less than five minutes: as if some one spoke it. I sprang up, went to my husband’s room, and told him: I was half frightened. From that time till I came here it haunted me, becoming more and more vivid. I was impatient to get at it. I wrote the first word of it Dec. 1st. As soon as I began it seemed impossible to write fast enough. In spite of myself, I write faster than I would write a letter. I write two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and Icannothelp it. It racks me like a struggle with an outside power. I cannot help being superstitious about it. I have never donehalfthe amount of work in the same time. Ordinarily it would be a simple impossibility. Twice since beginning it I have broken down utterly for a while—with a cold ostensibly, but with great nervous prostration added. What I have to endure in holding myself away from it, afternoons, on the days I am compelled to be in the house, no words can tell. It is like keeping away from a lover, whose hand I can reach!Now you will ask what sort of English it is I write at this lightning speed. So far as I can tell, the best I ever wrote! I have read it aloud as I have gone on, to one friend of keen literary perceptions and judgment, the most purely intellectual woman I know—Mrs. Trimble. She says it is smooth, strong, clear—“Tremendous” is her frequent epithet. I read the first ten chapters to Miss Woolsey this last week—she has been spending a few days with me ... but she says, “Far better than anything you ever have done.”The success of it—if it succeeds—will be that I do not even suggest my Indian history till the interest is so assured in the heroine—and hero—that people will not lay the book down. There is but one Indian in the story.Every now & then I force myself to stop & write a short story or a bit of verse: I can’t bear the strain: but the instant I open the pages of the other I write as I am writing now—as fast as I could copy! What do you think? Am I possessed of a demon? Is it a freak of mental disturbance, or what?I have the feeling that if I could only read it to you, you would know. If it is as good as Mrs. Trimble, Mr. Jackson & Miss Woolsey think, I shall be indeed rewarded, for it will “tell.” But I can’t believe it is. I am uneasy about it—but try as I may, all I can, I cannot write slowly for more than a few moments. I sit down at 9.30 or 10, & it is one before I know it. In good weather I then go out, after lunching, and keep out, religiously till five: but there have not been more than three out of eight good days all winter:—and the days when I am shut up, in my room from two till five, alone—with my Ramona and Alessandro, and cannot go along with them on their journey, are maddening.Fifty-two last October and I’m not a bit steadier-headed, you see, than ever! I don’t know whether to send this or burn it up. Don’t laugh at me whatever you do.Yours always,H. J.
The Berkeley, February 5, 1884.
I am glad you say you are rejoiced that I am writing a story. But about the not hurrying it—I want to tell you something— You know I have for three or four years longed to write a story that should “tell” on the Indian question. But I knew I could not do it, knew I had no background—no local color for it.
Last Spring, in So. Cal. [Southern California] I began to feel that I had—that the scene laid there—& the old Mexican life mixed in with just enough Indian, to enable me to tell what had happened to them—would be the very perfection of coloring. You know I have now lived six months in So. Cal.
Still I did not see my way clear; got no plot; till one morning late last October, before I was wide awake, the whole plot flashed into my mind—not a vague one—the whole story just as it stands to-day: in less than five minutes: as if some one spoke it. I sprang up, went to my husband’s room, and told him: I was half frightened. From that time till I came here it haunted me, becoming more and more vivid. I was impatient to get at it. I wrote the first word of it Dec. 1st. As soon as I began it seemed impossible to write fast enough. In spite of myself, I write faster than I would write a letter. I write two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and Icannothelp it. It racks me like a struggle with an outside power. I cannot help being superstitious about it. I have never donehalfthe amount of work in the same time. Ordinarily it would be a simple impossibility. Twice since beginning it I have broken down utterly for a while—with a cold ostensibly, but with great nervous prostration added. What I have to endure in holding myself away from it, afternoons, on the days I am compelled to be in the house, no words can tell. It is like keeping away from a lover, whose hand I can reach!
Now you will ask what sort of English it is I write at this lightning speed. So far as I can tell, the best I ever wrote! I have read it aloud as I have gone on, to one friend of keen literary perceptions and judgment, the most purely intellectual woman I know—Mrs. Trimble. She says it is smooth, strong, clear—“Tremendous” is her frequent epithet. I read the first ten chapters to Miss Woolsey this last week—she has been spending a few days with me ... but she says, “Far better than anything you ever have done.”
The success of it—if it succeeds—will be that I do not even suggest my Indian history till the interest is so assured in the heroine—and hero—that people will not lay the book down. There is but one Indian in the story.
Every now & then I force myself to stop & write a short story or a bit of verse: I can’t bear the strain: but the instant I open the pages of the other I write as I am writing now—as fast as I could copy! What do you think? Am I possessed of a demon? Is it a freak of mental disturbance, or what?
I have the feeling that if I could only read it to you, you would know. If it is as good as Mrs. Trimble, Mr. Jackson & Miss Woolsey think, I shall be indeed rewarded, for it will “tell.” But I can’t believe it is. I am uneasy about it—but try as I may, all I can, I cannot write slowly for more than a few moments. I sit down at 9.30 or 10, & it is one before I know it. In good weather I then go out, after lunching, and keep out, religiously till five: but there have not been more than three out of eight good days all winter:—and the days when I am shut up, in my room from two till five, alone—with my Ramona and Alessandro, and cannot go along with them on their journey, are maddening.
Fifty-two last October and I’m not a bit steadier-headed, you see, than ever! I don’t know whether to send this or burn it up. Don’t laugh at me whatever you do.
Yours always,
H. J.