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Literary Friends And Acquaintances

W >> William Dean Howells >> Literary Friends And Acquaintances



LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES

by William Dean Howells



CONTENTS:

Biographical
My First Visit to New England
First Impressions of Literary New York
Roundabout to Boston
Literary Boston As I Knew It
Oliver Wendell Holmes
The White Mr. Longfellow
Studies of Lowell
Cambridge Neighbors
A Belated Guest
My Mark Twain





LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES




BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

Long before I began the papers which make up this volume, I had meant to
write of literary history in New England as I had known it in the lives
of its great exemplars during the twenty-five years I lived near them. In
fact, I had meant to do this from the time I came among them; but I let
the days in which I almost constantly saw them go by without record save
such as I carried in a memory retentive, indeed, beyond the common, but
not so full as I could have wished when I began to invoke it for my work.
Still, upon insistent appeal, it responded in sufficient abundance; and,
though I now wish I could have remembered more instances, I think my
impressions were accurate enough. I am sure of having tried honestly to
impart them in the ten years or more when I was desultorily endeavoring
to share them with the reader.

The papers were written pretty much in the order they have here,
beginning with My First Visit to New England, which dates from the
earliest eighteen-nineties, if I may trust my recollection of reading it
from the manuscript to the editor of Harper's Magazine, where we lay
under the willows of Magnolia one pleasant summer morning in the first
years of that decade. It was printed no great while after in that
periodical; but I was so long in finishing the study of Lowell that it
had been anticipated in Harper's by other reminiscences of him, and it
was therefore first printed in Scribner's Magazine. It was the paper
with which I took the most pains, and when it was completed I still felt
it so incomplete that I referred it to his closest and my best friend,
the late Charles Eliot Norton, for his criticism. He thought it wanting
in unity; it was a group of studies instead of one study, he said; I must
do something to draw the different sketches together in a single effect
of portraiture; and this I did my best to do.

It was the latest written of the three articles which give the volume
substance, and it represents mare finally and fully than the others my
sense of the literary importance of the men whose like we shall not look
upon again. Longfellow was easily the greatest poet of the three, Holmes
often the most brilliant and felicitous, but Lowell, in spite of his
forays in politics, was the finest scholar and the most profoundly
literary, as he was above the others most deeply and thoroughly New
England in quality.

While I was doing these sketches, sometimes slighter and sometimes less
slight, of all those poets and essayists and novelists I had known in
Cambridge and Boston and Concord and New York, I was doing many other
things: half a dozen novels, as many more novelettes and shorter stories,
with essays and criticisms and verses; so that in January, 1900, I had
not yet done the paper on Lowell, which, with another, was to complete my
reminiscences of American literary life as I had witnessed it. When they
were all done at last they were republished in a volume which found
instant favor beyond my deserts if not its own.

There was a good deal of trouble with the name, but Literary Friends and
Acquaintance was an endeavor for modest accuracy with which I remained
satisfied until I thought, long too late, of Literary Friends and
Neighbors. Then I perceived that this would have been still more
accurate and quite as modest, and I gladly give any reader leave to call
the book by that name who likes.

Since the collection was first made, I have written little else quite of
the kind, except the paper on Bret Harte, which was first printed shortly
after his death; and the study of Mark Twain, which I had been preparing
to make for forty years and more, and wrote in two weeks of the spring of
1910. Others of my time and place have now passed whither there is
neither time nor place, and there are moments when I feel that I must try
to call them back and pay them such honor as my sense of their worth may
give; but the impulse has as yet failed to effect itself, and I do not
know how long I shall spare myself the supreme pleasure-pain, the "hochst
angenehmer Schmerz," of seeking to live here with those who live here no
more.

W. D. H.




MY FIRST VISIT TO NEW ENGLAND




I.

If there was any one in the world who had his being more wholly in
literature than I had in 1860, I am sure I should not have known where to
find him, and I doubt if he could have been found nearer the centres of
literary activity than I then was, or among those more purely devoted to
literature than myself. I had been for three years a writer of news
paragraphs, book notices, and political leaders on a daily paper in an
inland city, and I do not know that my life differed outwardly from that
of any other young journalist, who had begun as I had in a country
printing-office, and might be supposed to be looking forward to
advancement in his profession or in public affairs. But inwardly it was
altogether different with me. Inwardly I was a poet, with no wish to be
anything else, unless in a moment of careless affluence I might so far
forget myself as to be a novelist. I was, with my friend J. J. Piatt,
the half-author of a little volume of very unknown verse, and Mr. Lowell
had lately accepted and had begun to print in the Atlantic Monthly five
or six poems of mine. Besides this I had written poems, and sketches,
and criticisms for the Saturday Press of New York, a long-forgotten but
once very lively expression of literary intention in an extinct bohemia
of that city; and I was always writing poems, and sketches, and
criticisms in our own paper. These, as well as my feats in the renowned
periodicals of the East, met with kindness, if not honor, in my own city
which ought to have given me grave doubts whether I was any real prophet.
But it only intensified my literary ambition, already so strong that my
veins might well have run ink rather than blood, and gave me a higher
opinion of my fellow-citizens, if such a thing could be. They were
indeed very charming people, and such of them as I mostly saw were
readers and lovers of books. Society in Columbus at that day had a
pleasant refinement which I think I do not exaggerate in the fond
retrospect. It had the finality which it seems to have had nowhere since
the war; it had certain fixed ideals, which were none the less graceful
and becoming because they were the simple old American ideals, now
vanished, or fast vanishing, before the knowledge of good and evil as
they have it in Europe, and as it has imparted itself to American travel
and sojourn. There was a mixture of many strains in the capital of Ohio,
as there was throughout the State. Virginia, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, New
York, and New England all joined to characterize the manners and customs.
I suppose it was the South which gave the social tone; the intellectual
taste among the elders was the Southern taste for the classic and the
standard in literature; but we who were younger preferred the modern
authors: we read Thackeray, and George Eliot, and Hawthorne, and Charles
Reade, and De Quincey, and Tennyson, and Browning, and Emerson, and
Longfellow, and I--I read Heine, and evermore Heine, when there was not
some new thing from the others. Now and then an immediate French book
penetrated to us: we read Michelet and About, I remember. We looked to
England and the East largely for our literary opinions; we accepted the
Saturday Review as law if we could not quite receive it as gospel. One
of us took the Cornhill Magazine, because Thackeray was the editor; the
Atlantic Monthly counted many readers among us; and a visiting young lady
from New England, who screamed at sight of the periodical in one of our
houses, "Why, have you got the Atlantic Monthly out here?" could be
answered, with cold superiority, "There are several contributors to the
Atlantic in Columbus." There were in fact two: my room-mate, who wrote
Browning for it, while I wrote Heine and Longfellow. But I suppose two
are as rightfully several as twenty are.




II.

That was the heyday of lecturing, and now and then a literary light from
the East swam into our skies. I heard and saw Emerson, and I once met
Bayard Taylor socially, at the hospitable house where he was a guest
after his lecture. Heaven knows how I got through the evening. I do not
think I opened my mouth to address him a word; it was as much as I could
do to sit and look at him, while he tranquilly smoked, and chatted with
our host, and quaffed the beer which we had very good in the Nest. All
the while I did him homage as the first author by calling whom I had met.
I longed to tell him how much I liked his poems, which we used to get by
heart in those days, and I longed (how much more I longed!) to have him
know that:

"Auch ich war in Arkadien geboren,"

that I had printed poems in the Atlantic Monthly and the Saturday Press,
and was the potential author of things destined to eclipse all literature
hitherto attempted. But I could not tell him; and there was no one else
who thought to tell him. Perhaps it was as well so; I might have
perished of his recognition, for my modesty was equal to my merit.

In fact I think we were all rather modest young fellows, we who formed
the group wont to spend some part of every evening at that house, where
there was always music, or whist, or gay talk, or all three. We had our
opinions of literary matters, but (perhaps because we had mostly accepted
them from England or New England, as I have said) we were not vain of
them; and we would by no means have urged them before a living literary
man like that. I believe none of us ventured to speak, except the poet,
my roommate, who said, He believed so and so was the original of so and
so; and was promptly told, He had no right to say such a thing.
Naturally, we came away rather critical of our host's guest, whom I
afterwards knew as the kindliest heart in the world. But we had not
shone in his presence, and that galled us; and we chose to think that he
had not shone in ours.




III

At that time he was filling a large space in the thoughts of the young
people who had any thoughts about literature. He had come to his full
repute as an agreeable and intelligent traveller, and he still wore the
halo of his early adventures afoot in foreign lands when they were yet
really foreign. He had not written his novels of American life, once so
welcomed, and now so forgotten; it was very long before he had achieved
that incomparable translation of Faust which must always remain the
finest and best, and which would keep his name alive with Goethe's, if he
had done nothing else worthy of remembrance. But what then most
commended him to the regard of us star-eyed youth (now blinking sadly
toward our seventies) was the poetry which he printed in the magazines
from time to time: in the first Putnam's (where there was a dashing
picture of him in an Arab burnoose and, a turban), and in Harper's, and
in the Atlantic. It was often very lovely poetry, I thought, and I still
think so; and it was rightfully his, though it paid the inevitable
allegiance to the manner of the great masters of the day. It was graced
for us by the pathetic romance of his early love, which some of its
sweetest and saddest numbers confessed, for the young girl he married
almost in her death hour; and we who were hoping to have our hearts
broken, or already had them so, would have been glad of something more of
the obvious poet in the popular lecturer we had seen refreshing himself
after his hour on the platform.

He remained for nearly a year the only author I had seen, and I met him
once again before I saw any other. Our second meeting was far from
Columbus, as far as remote Quebec, when I was on my way to New England by
way of Niagara and the Canadian rivers and cities. I stopped in Toronto,
and realized myself abroad without any signal adventures; but at Montreal
something very pretty happened to me. I came into the hotel office, the
evening of a first day's lonely sight-seeing, and vainly explored the
register for the name of some acquaintance; as I turned from it two
smartly dressed young fellows embraced it, and I heard one of them say,
to my great amaze and happiness, "Hello, here's Howells!"

"Oh," I broke out upon him, "I was just looking for some one I knew. I
hope you are some one who knows me!"

"Only through your contributions to the Saturday Press," said the young
fellow, and with these golden words, the precious first personal
recognition of my authorship I had ever received from a stranger, and the
rich reward of all my literary endeavor, he introduced himself and his
friend. I do not know what became of this friend, or where or how he
eliminated himself; but we two others were inseparable from that moment.
He was a young lawyer from New York, and when I came back from Italy,
four or five years later, I used to see his sign in Wall Street, with a
never-fulfilled intention of going in to see him. In whatever world he
happens now to be, I should like to send him my greetings, and confess to
him that my art has never since brought me so sweet a recompense, and
nothing a thousandth part so much like Fame, as that outcry of his over
the hotel register in Montreal. We were comrades for four or five rich
days, and shared our pleasures and expenses in viewing the monuments of
those ancient Canadian capitals, which I think we valued at all their
picturesque worth. We made jokes to mask our emotions; we giggled and
made giggle, in the right way; we fell in and out of love with all the
pretty faces and dresses we saw; and we talked evermore about literature
and literary people. He had more acquaintance with the one, and more
passion for the other, but he could tell me of Pfaff's lager-beer cellar
on Broadway, where the Saturday Press fellows and the other Bohemians
met; and this, for the time, was enough: I resolved to visit it as soon
as I reached New York, in spite of the tobacco and beer (which I was
given to understand were de rigueur), though they both, so far as I had
known them, were apt to make me sick.

I was very desolate after I parted from this good fellow, who returned to
Montreal on his way to New York, while I remained in Quebec to continue
later on mine to New England. When I came in from seeing him off in a
calash for the boat, I discovered Bayard Taylor in the reading-room, where
he sat sunken in what seemed a somewhat weary muse. He did not know me,
or even notice me, though I made several errands in and out of the
reading-room in the vain hope that he might do so: doubly vain, for I am
aware now that I was still flown with the pride of that pretty experience
in Montreal, and trusted in a repetition of something like it. At last,
as no chance volunteered to help me, I mustered courage to go up to him
and name myself, and say I had once had the pleasure of meeting him at
Doctor-------'s in Columbus. The poet gave no sign of consciousness at
the sound of a name which I had fondly begun to think might not be so all
unknown. He looked up with an unkindling eye, and asked, Ah, how was the
Doctor? and when I had reported favorably of the Doctor, our
conversation ended.

He was probably as tired as he looked, and he must have classed me with
that multitude all over the country who had shared the pleasure I
professed in meeting him before; it was surely my fault that I did not
speak my name loud enough to be recognized, if I spoke it at all; but the
courage I had mustered did not quite suffice for that. In after years he
assured me, first by letter and then by word, of his grief for an
incident which I can only recall now as the untoward beginning of a
cordial friendship. It was often my privilege, in those days, as
reviewer and editor, to testify my sense of the beautiful things he did
in so many kinds of literature, but I never liked any of them better than
I liked him. He had a fervent devotion to his art, and he was always
going to do the greatest things in it, with an expectation of effect that
never failed him. The things he actually did were none of them mean, or
wanting in quality, and some of them are of a lasting charm that any one
may feel who will turn to his poems; but no doubt many of them fell short
of his hopes of them with the reader. It was fine to meet him when he
was full of a new scheme; he talked of it with a single-hearted joy, and
tried to make you see it of the same colors and proportions it wore to
his eyes. He spared no toil to make it the perfect thing he dreamed it,
and he was not discouraged by any disappointment he suffered with the
critic or the public.

He was a tireless worker, and at last his health failed under his labors
at the newspaper desk, beneath the midnight gas, when he should long have
rested from such labors. I believe he was obliged to do them through one
of those business fortuities which deform and embitter all our lives; but
he was not the man to spare himself in any case. He was always
attempting new things, and he never ceased endeavoring to make his
scholarship reparation for the want of earlier opportunity and training.
I remember that I met him once in a Cambridge street with a book in his
hand which he let me take in mine. It was a Greek author, and he said he
was just beginning to read the language at fifty: a patriarchal age to me
of the early thirties!

I suppose I intimated the surprise I felt at his taking it up so late in
the day, for he said, with charming seriousness, "Oh, but you know, I
expect to use it in the other world." Yea, that made it worth while, I
consented; but was he sure of the other world? "As sure as I am of
this," he said; and I have always kept the impression of the young faith
which spoke in his voice and was more than his words.

I saw him last in the hour of those tremendous adieux which were paid him
in New York before he sailed to be minister in Germany. It was one of
the most graceful things done by President Hayes, who, most of all our
Presidents after Lincoln, honored himself in honoring literature by his
appointments, to give that place to Bayard Taylor. There was no one more
fit for it, and it was peculiarly fit that he should be so distinguished
to a people who knew and valued his scholarship and the service he had
done German letters. He was as happy in it, apparently, as a man could
be in anything here below, and he enjoyed to the last drop the many cups
of kindness pressed to his lips in parting; though I believe these
farewells, at a time when he was already fagged with work and excitement,
were notably harmful to him, and helped to hasten his end. Some of us
who were near of friendship went down to see him off when he sailed, as
the dismal and futile wont of friends is; and I recall the kind, great
fellow standing in the cabin, amid those sad flowers that heaped the
tables, saying good-by to one after another, and smiling fondly, smiling
wearily, upon all. There was champagne, of course, and an odious
hilarity, without meaning and without remission, till the warning bell
chased us ashore, and our brave poet escaped with what was left of his
life.




IV

I have followed him far from the moment of our first meeting; but even on
my way to venerate those New England luminaries, which chiefly drew my
eyes, I could not pay a less devoir to an author who, if Curtis was not,
was chief of the New York group of authors in that day. I distinguished
between the New-Englanders and the New-Yorkers, and I suppose there is no
question but our literary centre was then in Boston, wherever it is, or
is not, at present. But I thought Taylor then, and I think him now, one
of the first in our whole American province of the republic of letters,
in a day when it was in a recognizably flourishing state, whether we
regard quantity or quality in the names that gave it lustre. Lowell was
then in perfect command of those varied forces which will long, if not
lastingly, keep him in memory as first among our literary men, and master
in more kinds than any other American. Longfellow was in the fulness of
his world-wide fame, and in the ripeness of the beautiful genius which
was not to know decay while life endured. Emerson had emerged from the
popular darkness which had so long held him a hopeless mystic, and was
shining a lambent star of poesy and prophecy at the zenith. Hawthorne,
the exquisite artist, the unrivalled dreamer, whom we still always liken
this one and that one to, whenever this one or that one promises greatly
to please us, and still leave without a rival, without a companion, had
lately returned from his long sojourn abroad, and had given us the last
of the incomparable romances which the world was to have perfect from his
hand. Doctor Holmes had surpassed all expectations in those who most
admired his brilliant humor and charming poetry by the invention of a new
attitude if not a new sort in literature. The turn that civic affairs
had taken was favorable to the widest recognition of Whittier's splendid
lyrical gift; and that heart of fire, doubly snow-bound by Quaker
tradition and Puritan environment; was penetrating every generous breast
with its flamy impulses, and fusing all wills in its noble purpose. Mrs.
Stowe, who far outfamed the rest as the author of the most renowned novel
ever written, was proving it no accident or miracle by the fiction she
was still writing.

This great New England group might be enlarged perhaps without loss of
quality by the inclusion of Thoreau, who came somewhat before his time,
and whose drastic criticism of our expediential and mainly futile
civilization would find more intelligent acceptance now than it did then,
when all resentment of its defects was specialized in enmity to Southern
slavery. Doctor Edward Everett Hale belonged in this group too, by
virtue of that humor, the most inventive and the most fantastic, the
sanest, the sweetest, the truest, which had begun to find expression in
the Atlantic Monthly; and there a wonderful young girl had written a
series of vivid sketches and taken the heart of youth everywhere with
amaze and joy, so that I thought it would be no less an event to meet
Harriet Prescott than to meet any of those I have named.

I expected somehow to meet them all, and I imagined them all easily
accessible in the office of the Atlantic Monthly, which had lately
adventured in the fine air of high literature where so many other
periodicals had gasped and died before it. The best of these, hitherto,
and better even than the Atlantic for some reasons, the lamented Putnam's
Magazine, had perished of inanition at New York, and the claim of the
commercial capital to the literary primacy had passed with that brilliant
venture. New York had nothing distinctive to show for American
literature but the decrepit and doting Knickerbocker Magazine. Harper's
New Monthly, though Curtis had already come to it from the wreck of
Putnam's, and it had long ceased to be eclectic in material, and had
begun to stand for native work in the allied arts which it has since so
magnificently advanced, was not distinctively literary, and the Weekly
had just begun to make itself known. The Century, Scribner's, the
Cosmopolitan, McClure's, and I know not what others, were still
unimagined by five, and ten, and twenty years, and the Galaxy was to
flash and fade before any of them should kindle its more effectual fires.
The Nation, which was destined to chastise rather than nurture our young
literature, had still six years of dreamless potentiality before it; and
the Nation was always more Bostonian than New-Yorkish by nature, whatever
it was by nativity.

Philadelphia had long counted for nothing in the literary field. Graham's
Magazine at one time showed a certain critical force, but it seemed to
perish of this expression of vitality; and there remained Godey's Lady's
Book and Peterson's Magazine, publications really incredible in their
insipidity. In the South there was nothing but a mistaken social ideal,
with the moral principles all standing on their heads in defence of
slavery; and in the West there was a feeble and foolish notion that
Western talent was repressed by Eastern jealousy. At Boston chiefly, if
not at Boston alone, was there a vigorous intellectual life among such
authors as I have named. Every young writer was ambitious to join his
name with theirs in the Atlantic Monthly, and in the lists of Ticknor &
Fields, who were literary publishers in a sense such as the business
world has known nowhere else before or since. Their imprint was a
warrant of quality to the reader and of immortality to the author, so
that if I could have had a book issued by them at that day I should now
be in the full enjoyment of an undying fame.

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