diff options
| -rw-r--r-- | .gitattributes | 3 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | 3396.txt | 1350 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | 3396.zip | bin | 0 -> 30785 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | LICENSE.txt | 11 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | README.md | 2 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/whbos10.txt | 1346 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/whbos10.zip | bin | 0 -> 29894 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/whbos11.txt | 1347 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | old/whbos11.zip | bin | 0 -> 30644 bytes |
9 files changed, 4059 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/3396.txt b/3396.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..dc135cd --- /dev/null +++ b/3396.txt @@ -0,0 +1,1350 @@ +The Project Gutenberg EBook of Literary Boston, by William Dean Howells + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Literary Boston + From "Literary Friends And Acquaintances" + +Author: William Dean Howells + +Release Date: October 22, 2004 [EBook #3396] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY BOSTON *** + + + + +Produced by David Widger + + + + + +LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Literary Boston As I Knew It + +by William Dean Howells + + + +LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT + +Among my fellow-passengers on the train from New York to Boston, when I +went to begin my work there in 1866, as the assistant editor of the +Atlantic Monthly, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield +Republican, who created in a subordinate city a journal of metropolitan +importance. I had met him in Venice several years earlier, when he was +suffering from the cruel insomnia which had followed his overwork on that +newspaper, and when he told me that he was sleeping scarcely more than +one hour out of the twenty-four. His worn face attested the misery which +this must have been, and which lasted in some measure while he lived, +though I believe that rest and travel relieved him in his later years. He +was always a man of cordial friendliness, and he now expressed a most +gratifying interest when I told him what I was going to do in Boston. He +gave himself the pleasure of descanting upon the dramatic quality of the +fact that a young newspaper man from Ohio was about to share in the +destinies of the great literary periodical of New England. + + + + +I. + +I do not think that such a fact would now move the fancy of the liveliest +newspaper man, so much has the West since returned upon the East in a +refluent wave of authorship. But then the West was almost an unknown +quality in our literary problem; and in fact there was scarcely any +literature outside of New England. Even this was of New England origin, +for it was almost wholly the work of New England men and women in the +"splendid exile" of New York. The Atlantic Monthly, which was +distinctively literary, was distinctively a New England magazine, though +from the first it had been characterized by what was more national, what +was more universal, in the New England temperament. Its chief +contributors for nearly twenty years were Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, +Whittier, Emerson, Doctor Hale, Colonel Higginson, Mrs. Stowe, Whipple, +Rose Terry Cooke, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Prescott Spofford, Mrs. +Phelps Ward, and other New England writers who still lived in New +England, and largely in the region of Boston. Occasionally there came a +poem from Bryant, at New York, from Mr. Stedman, from Mr. Stoddard and +Mrs. Stoddard, from Mr. Aldrich, and from Bayard Taylor. But all these, +except the last, were not only of New England race, but of New England +birth. I think there was no contributor from the South but Mr. M. D. +Conway, and as yet the West scarcely counted, though four young poets +from Ohio, who were not immediately or remotely of Puritan origin, had +appeared in early numbers; Alice Cary, living with her sister in New +York, had written now and then from the beginning. Mr. John Hay solely +represented Illinois by a single paper, and he was of Rhode Island stock. +It was after my settlement at Boston that Mark Twain, of Missouri, became +a figure of world-wide fame at Hartford; and longer after, that Mr. Bret +Harte made that progress Eastward from California which was telegraphed +almost from hour to hour, as if it were the progress of a prince. Miss +Constance F. Woolson had not yet begun to write. Mr. James Whitcomb +Riley, Mr. Maurice Thompson, Miss Edith Thomas, Octave Thanet, Mr. +Charles Warren Stoddard, Mr. H. B. Fuller, Mrs. Catherwood, Mr. Hamlin +Garland, all whom I name at random among other Western writers, were then +as unknown as Mr. Cable, Miss Murfree, Mrs. Rives Chanler, Miss Grace +King, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, Mr. Thomas Nelson Page, in the South, +which they by no means fully represent. + +The editors of the Atlantic had been eager from the beginning to discover +any outlying literature; but, as I have said, there was in those days +very little good writing done beyond the borders of New England. If the +case is now different, and the best known among living American writers +are no longer New-Englanders, still I do not think the South and West +have yet trimmed the balance; and though perhaps the news writers now +more commonly appear in those quarters, I should not be so very sure that +they are not still characterized by New England ideals and examples. On +the other hand, I am very sure that in my early day we were characterized +by them, and wished to be so; we even felt that we failed in so far as we +expressed something native quite in our own way. The literary theories we +accepted were New England theories, the criticism we valued was New +England criticism, or, more strictly speaking, Boston theories, Boston +criticism. + +Of those more constant contributors to the Atlantic whom I have +mentioned, it is of course known that Longfellow and Lowell lived in +Cambridge, Emerson at Concord, and Whittier at Amesbury. Colonel +Higginson was still and for many years afterwards at Newport; Mrs. Stowe +was then at Andover; Miss Prescott of Newburyport had become Mrs. +Spofford, and was presently in Boston, where her husband was a member of +the General Court; Mrs. Phelps Ward, as Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, +dwelt in her father's house at Andover. The chief of the Bostonians were +Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Doctor Holmes, and Doctor Hale. Yet Boston stood +for the whole Massachusetts group, and Massachusetts, in the literary +impulse, meant New England. I suppose we must all allow, whether we like +to do so or not, that the impulse seems now to have pretty well spent +itself. Certainly the city of Boston has distinctly waned in literature, +though it has waxed in wealth and population. I do not think there are +in Boston to-day even so many talents with a literary coloring in law, +science, theology, and journalism as there were formerly; though I have +no belief that the Boston talents are fewer or feebler than before. I +arrived in Boston, however, when all talents had more or less a literary +coloring, and when the greatest talents were literary. These expressed +with ripened fulness a civilization conceived in faith and brought forth +in good works; but that moment of maturity was the beginning of a +decadence which could only show itself much later. New England has +ceased to be a nation in itself, and it will perhaps never again have +anything like a national literature; but that was something like a +national literature; and it will probably be centuries yet before the +life of the whole country, the American life as distinguished from the +New England life, shall have anything so like a national literature. It +will be long before our larger life interprets itself in such imagination +as Hawthorne's, such wisdom as Emerson's, such poetry as Longfellow's, +such prophecy as Whittier's, such wit and grace as Holmes's, such humor +and humanity as Lowell's. + +The literature of those great men was, if I may suffer myself the figure, +the Socinian graft of a Calvinist stock. Their faith, in its varied +shades, was Unitarian, but their art was Puritan. So far as it was +imperfect--and great and beautiful as it was, I think it had its +imperfections--it was marred by the intense ethicism that pervaded the +New England mind for two hundred years, and that still characterizes it. +They or their fathers had broken away from orthodoxy in the great schism +at the beginning of the century, but, as if their heterodoxy were +conscience-stricken, they still helplessly pointed the moral in all they +did; some pointed it more directly, some less directly; but they all +pointed it. I should be far from blaming them for their ethical +intention, though I think they felt their vocation as prophets too much +for their good as poets. Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the +sermon, though not always, nor nearly always. It was in poetry and in +romance that they excelled; in the novel, so far as they attempted it, +they failed. I say this with the names of all the Bostonian group, and +those they influenced, in mind, and with a full sense of their greatness. +It may be ungracious to say that they have left no heirs to their +peculiar greatness; but it would be foolish to say that they left an +estate where they had none to bequeath. One cannot take account of such +a fantasy as Judd's Margaret. The only New-Englander who has attempted +the novel on a scale proportioned to the work of the New-Englanders in +philosophy, in poetry, in romance, is Mr. De Forest, who is of New Haven, +and not of Boston. I do not forget the fictions of Doctor Holmes, or the +vivid inventions of Doctor Hale, but I do not call them novels; and I do +not forget the exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss Wilkins, +which is free from the ethicism of the great New England group, but which +has hardly the novelists's scope. New England, in Hawthorne's work, +achieved supremacy in romance; but the romance is always an allegory, and +the novel is a picture in which the truth to life is suffered to do its +unsermonized office for conduct; and New England yet lacks her novelist, +because it was her instinct and her conscience in fiction to be true to +an ideal of life rather than to life itself. + +Even when we come to the exception that proves the rule, even to such a +signal exception as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', I think that what I say holds +true. That is almost the greatest work of imagination that we have +produced in prose, and it is the work of a New England woman, writing +from all the inspirations and traditions of New England. It is like +begging the question to say that I do not call it a novel, however; but +really, is it a novel, in the sense that 'War and Peace' is a novel, or +'Madame Flaubert', or 'L'Assommoir', or 'Phineas Finn', or 'Dona +Perfecta', or 'Esther Waters', or 'Marta y Maria', or 'The Return of the +Native', or 'Virgin Soil', or 'David Grieve'? In a certain way it is +greater than any of these except the first; but its chief virtue, or its +prime virtue, is in its address to the conscience, and not its address to +the taste; to the ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense. + +This does not quite say the thing, but it suggests it, and I should be +sorry if it conveyed to any reader a sense of slight; for I believe no +one has felt more deeply than myself the value of New England in +literature. The comparison of the literary situation at Boston to the +literary situation at Edinburgh in the times of the reviewers has never +seemed to me accurate or adequate, and it holds chiefly in the fact that +both seem to be of the past. Certainly New York is yet no London in +literature, and I think Boston was once vastly more than Edinburgh ever +was, at least in quality. The Scotch literature of the palmy days was +not wholly Scotch, and even when it was rooted in Scotch soil it flowered +in the air of an alien speech. But the New England literature of the +great day was the blossom of a New England root; and the language which +the Bostonians wrote was the native English of scholars fitly the heirs +of those who had brought the learning of the universities to +Massachusetts Bay two hundred years before, and was of as pure a lineage +as the English of the mother-country. + + + + +III. + +The literary situation which confronted me when I came to Boston was, +then, as native as could well be; and whatever value I may be able to +give a personal study of it will be from the effect it made upon me as +one strange in everything but sympathy. I will not pretend that I saw it +in its entirety, and I have no hope of presenting anything like a +kinetoscopic impression of it. What I can do is to give here and there a +glimpse of it; and I shall wish the reader to keep in mind the fact that +it was in a "state of transition," as everything is always and +everywhere. It was no sooner recognizably native than it ceased to be +fully so; and I became a witness of it after the change had begun. The +publishing house which so long embodied New England literature was +already attempting enterprises out of the line of its traditions, and one +of these had brought Mr. T. B. Aldrich from New York, a few weeks before +I arrived upon the scene in that dramatic quality which I think never +impressed any one but Mr. Bowles. Mr. Aldrich was the editor of 'Every +Saturday' when I came to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. We +were of nearly the same age, but he had a distinct and distinguished +priority of reputation, insomuch that in my Western remoteness I had +always ranged him with such elders and betters of mine as Holmes and +Lowell, and never imagined him the blond, slight youth I found him, with +every imaginable charm of contemporaneity. It is no part of the office +which I have intended for these slight and sufficiently wandering +glimpses of the past to show any writer in his final place; and above all +I do not presume to assign any living man his rank or station. But I +should be false to my own grateful sense of beauty in the work of this +poet if I did not at all times recognize his constancy to an ideal which +his name stands for. He is known in several kinds, but to my thinking he +is best in a certain nobler kind of poetry; a serious sort in which the +thought holds him above the scrupulosities of the art he loves and honors +so much. Sometimes the file slips in his hold, as the file must and +will; it is but an instrument at the best; but there is no mistouch in +the hand that lays itself upon the reader's heart with the pulse of the +poet's heart quick and true in it. There are sonnets of his, grave, and +simple, and lofty, which I think of with the glow and thrill possible +only from very beautiful poetry, and which impart such an emotion as we +can feel only + + "When a great thought strikes along the brain + And flushes all the cheek." + +When I had the fortune to meet him first, I suppose that in the employ of +the kindly house we were both so eager to serve, our dignities were about +the same; for if the 'Atlantic Monthly' was a somewhat prouder affair +than an eclectic weekly like 'Every Saturday', he was supreme in his +place, and I was subordinate in mine. The house was careful, in the +attitude of its senior partner, not to distinguish between us, and we +were not slow to perceive the tact used in managing us; we had our own +joke of it; we compared notes to find whether we were equally used in +this thing or that; and we promptly shared the fun of our discovery with +Fields himself. + +We had another impartial friend (no less a friend of joy in the life +which seems to have been pretty nearly all joy, as I look back upon it) +in the partner who became afterwards the head of the house, and who +forecast in his bold enterprises the change from a New England to an +American literary situation. In the end James R. Osgood failed, though +all his enterprises succeeded. The anomaly is sad, but it is not +infrequent. They were greater than his powers and his means, and before +they could reach their full fruition, they had to be enlarged to men of +longer purse and longer patience. He was singularly fitted both by +instinct and by education to become a great publisher; and he early +perceived that if a leading American house were to continue at Boston, it +must be hospitable to the talents of the whole country. He founded his +future upon those generous lines; but he wanted the qualities as well as +the resources for rearing the superstructure. Changes began to follow +each other rapidly after he came into control of the house. Misfortune +reduced the size and number of its periodicals. 'The Young Folks' was +sold outright, and the 'North American Review' (long before Mr. Rice +bought it and carried it to New York) was cut down one-half, so that +Aldrich said, it looked as if Destiny had sat upon it. His own +periodical, 'Every Saturday', was first enlarged to a stately quarto and +illustrated; and then, under stress of the calamities following the great +Boston fire, It collapsed to its former size. Then both the 'Atlantic +Monthly' and 'Every Saturday' were sold away from their old ownership, +and 'Every Saturday' was suppressed altogether, and we two ceased to be +of the same employ. There was some sort of evening rite (more funereal +than festive) the day after they were sold, and we followed Osgood away +from it, under the lamps. We all knew that it was his necessity that had +caused him to part with the periodicals; but he professed that it was his +pleasure, and he said he had not felt so light-hearted since he was a +boy. We asked him, How could he feel gay when he was no longer paying us +our salaries, and how could he justify it to his conscience? He liked +our mocking, and limped away from us with a rheumatic easing of his +weight from one foot to another: a figure pathetic now that it has gone +the way to dusty death, and dear to memory through benefactions unalloyed +by one unkindness. + + + + +IV. + +But when I came to Boston early in 1866, the 'Atlantic Monthly' and +'Harper's' then divided our magazine world between them; the 'North +American Review', in the control of Lowell and Professor Norton, had +entered upon a new life; 'Every Saturday' was an instant success in the +charge of Mr. Aldrich, who was by taste and training one of the best +editors; and 'Our Young Folks' had the field of juvenile periodical +literature to itself. + +It was under the direction of Miss Lucy Larcom and of Mr. J. T. +Trowbridge, who had come from western New York, where he was born, and +must be noted as one of the first returners from the setting to the +rising sun. He naturalized himself in Boston in his later boyhood, and +he still breathes Boston air, where he dwells in the street called +Pleasant, on the shore of Spy Pond, at Arlington, and still weaves the +magic web of his satisfying stories for boys. He merges in their +popularity the fame of a poet which I do not think will always suffer +that eclipse, for his poems show him to have looked deeply into the heart +of common humanity, with a true and tender sense of it. + +Miss Larcom scarcely seemed to change from date to date in the generation +that elapsed between the time I first saw her and the time I saw her +last, a year or two before her death. A goodness looked out of her +comely face, which made me think of the Madonna's in Titian's +"Assumption," and her whole aspect expressed a mild and friendly spirit +which I find it hard to put in words. She was never of the fine world of +literature; she dwelt where she was born, in that unfashionable Beverly +which is not Beverly Farms, and was of a simple, sea-faring, God-fearing +race, as she has told in one of the loveliest autobiographies I know, "A +New England Girlhood." She was the author of many poems, whose number +she constantly enlarged, but she was chiefly, and will be most lastingly, +famed for the one poem, 'Hannah Binding Shoes', which years before my +days in Boston had made her so widely known. She never again struck so +deep or so true a note; but if one has lodged such a note in the ear of +time, it is enough; and if we are to speak of eternity, one might very +well hold up one's head in the fields of asphodel, if one could say to +the great others there, "I wrote Hannah Binding Shoes." Her poem is +very, very sad, as all who have read it will remember; but Miss Larcom +herself was above everything cheerful, and she had a laugh of mellow +richness which willingly made itself heard. She was not only of true New +England stock, and a Boston author by right of race, but she came up to +that city every winter from her native town. + +By the same right and on the same terms, another New England poetess, +whom I met those first days in Boston, was a Boston author. When I saw +Celia Thaxter she was just beginning to make her effect with those poems +and sketches which the sea sings and flashes through as it sings and +flashes around the Isles of Shoals, her summer home, where her girlhood +had been passed in a freedom as wild as the curlew's. She was a most +beautiful creature, still very young, with a slender figure, and an +exquisite perfection of feature; she was in presence what her work was: +fine, frank, finished. I do not know whether other witnesses of our +literary history feel that the public has failed to keep her as fully in +mind as her work merited; but I do not think there can be any doubt but +our literature would be sensibly the poorer without her work. It is +interesting to remember how closely she kept to her native field, and it +is wonderful to consider how richly she made those sea-beaten rocks to +blossom. Something strangely full and bright came to her verse from the +mystical environment of the ocean, like the luxury of leaf and tint that +it gave the narrower flower-plots of her native isles. Her gift, indeed, +could not satisfy itself with the terms of one art alone, however varied, +and she learned to express in color the thoughts and feelings impatient +of the pallor of words. + +She remains in my memories of that far Boston a distinct and vivid +personality; as the authoress of 'Amber Gods', and 'In a Cellar', and +'Circumstance', and those other wild romantic tales, remains the gentle +and somewhat evanescent presence I found her. Miss Prescott was now Mrs. +Spofford, and her husband was a rising young politician of the day. It +was his duties as member of the General Court that had brought them up +from Newburyport to Boston for that first winter; and I remember that the +evening when we met he was talking of their some time going to Italy that +she might study for imaginative literature certain Italian cities he +named. I have long since ceased to own those cities, but at the moment I +felt a pang of expropriation which I concealed as well as I could; and +now I heartily wish she could have fulfilled that purpose if it was a +purpose, or realized that dream if it was only a dream. Perhaps, +however, that sumptuous and glowing fancy of hers, which had taken the +fancy of the young readers of that day, needed the cold New England +background to bring out all its intensities of tint, all its splendors of +light. Its effects were such as could not last, or could not be farther +evolved; they were the expression of youth musing away from its +environment and smitten with the glories of a world afar and beyond, the +great world, the fine world, the impurpled world of romantic motives and +passions. But for what they were, I can never think them other than what +they appeared: the emanations of a rarely gifted and singularly poetic +mind. I feel better than I can say how necessarily they were the +emanations of a New England mind, and how to the subtler sense they must +impart the pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities which are the +long result of puritanism in the physiognomy of New England life. + +Their author afterwards gave herself to the stricter study of this life +in many tales and sketches which showed an increasing mastery; but they +could not have the flush, the surprise, the delight of a young talent +trying itself in a kind native and, so far as I know, peculiar to it. +From time to time I still come upon a poem of hers which recalls that +earlier strain of music, of color, and I am content to trust it for my +abiding faith in the charm of things I have not read for thirty years. + + + + +V. + +I speak of this one and that, as it happens, and with no thought of +giving a complete prospect of literary Boston thirty years ago. I am +aware that it will seem sparsely peopled in the effect I impart, and I +would have the reader always keep in mind the great fames at Cambridge +and at Concord, which formed so large a part of the celebrity of Boston. +I would also like him to think of it as still a great town, merely, where +every one knew every one else, and whose metropolitan liberation from +neighborhood was just begun. + +Most distinctly of that yet uncitified Boston was the critic Edwin P. +Whipple, whose sympathies were indefinitely wider than his traditions. He +was a most generous lover of all that was excellent in literature; and +though I suppose we should call him an old-fashioned critic now, I +suspect it would be with no distinct sense of what is newer fashioned. He +was certainly as friendly to what promised well in the younger men as he +was to what was done well in their elders; and there was no one writing +in his day whose virtues failed of his recognition, though it might +happen that his foibles would escape Whipple's censure. He wrote +strenuously and of course conscientiously; his point of view was solely +and always that which enabled him best to discern qualities. I doubt if +he had any theory of criticism except to find out what was good in an +author and praise it; and he rather blamed what was ethically bad than +what was aesthetically bad. In this he was strictly of New England, and +he was of New England in a certain general intelligence, which constantly +grew with an interrogative habit of mind. + +He liked to talk to you of what he had found characteristic in your work, +to analyze you to yourself; and the very modesty of the man, which made +such a study impersonal as far as he was concerned, sometimes rendered +him insensible to the sufferings of his subject. He had a keen +perception of humor in others, but he had very little humor; he had a +love of the beautiful in literature which was perhaps sometimes greater +than his sense of it. + +I write from a cursory acquaintance with his work, not recently renewed. +Of the presence of the man I have a vivider remembrance: a slight, short, +ecclesiasticized figure in black; with a white neckcloth and a silk hat +of strict decorum, and between the two a square face with square +features, intensified in their regard by a pair of very large glasses, +and the prominent, myopic eyes staring through them. He was a type of +out-dated New England scholarship in these aspects, but in the hospitable +qualities of his mind and heart, the sort of man to be kept fondly in the +memory of all who ever knew him. + +Out of the vague of that far-off time another face and figure, as +essentially New En&land as this, and yet so different, relieve +themselves. Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as +far as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized Yankee. +He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking, and he so +became a literary product of a rarer and stranger sort than our +literature had otherwise known. He had gone from Cleveland to London, +with intervals of New York and the lecture platform, four or five years +before I saw him in Boston, shortly after I went there. We had met in +Ohio, and he had personally explained to me the ducatless well-meaning of +Vanity Fair in New York; but many men had since shaken the weary hand of +Artemus Ward when I grasped it one day in front of the Tremont Temple. He +did not recognize me, but he gave me at once a greeting of great +impersonal cordiality, with "How do you do? When did you come?" and +other questions that had no concern in them, till I began to dawn upon +him through a cloud of other half remembered faces. Then he seized my +hand and wrung it all over again, and repeated his friendly demands with +an intonation that was now "Why, how are you; how are you?" for me alone. +It was a bit of comedy, which had the fit pathetic relief of his +impending doom: this was already stamped upon his wasted face, and his +gay eyes had the death-look. His large, loose mouth was drawn, for all +its laughter at the fact which he owned; his profile, which burlesqued. +an eagle's, was the profile of a drooping eagle; his lank length of limb +trembled away with him when we parted. I did not see him again; I +scarcely heard of him till I heard of his death, and this sad image +remains with me of the humorist who first gave the world a taste of the +humor which characterizes the whole American people. + +I was meeting all kinds of distinguished persons, in my relation to the +magazine, and early that winter I met one who remains in my mind above +all others a person of distinction. He was scarcely a celebrity, but he +embodied certain social traits which were so characteristic of literary +Boston that it could not be approached without their recognition. The +Muses have often been acknowledged to be very nice young persons, but in +Boston they were really ladies; in Boston literature was of good family +and good society in a measure it has never been elsewhere. It might be +said even that reform was of good family in Boston; and literature and +reform equally shared the regard of Edmund Quincy, whose race was one of +the most aristocratic in New England. I had known him by his novel of +'Wensley' (it came so near being a first-rate novel), and by his Life of +Josiah Quincy, then a new book, but still better by his Boston letters to +the New York Tribune. These dealt frankly, in the old anti-slavery days +between 1850 and 1860, with other persons of distinction in Boston, who +did not see the right so clearly as Quincy did, or who at least let their +interests darken them to the ugliness of slavery. Their fault was all +the more comical because it was the error of men otherwise so correct, of +characters so stainless, of natures so upright; and the Quincy letters +got out of it all the fun there was in it. Quincy himself affected me as +the finest patrician type I had ever met. He was charmingly handsome, +with a nose of most fit aquilinity, smooth-shaven lips, "educated +whiskers," and perfect glasses; his manner was beautiful, his voice +delightful, when at our first meeting he made me his reproaches in terms +of lovely kindness for having used in my 'Venetian Life' the Briticism +'directly' for 'as soon as.' + +Lowell once told me that Quincy had never had any calling or profession, +because when he found himself in the enjoyment of a moderate income on +leaving college, he decided to be simply a gentleman. He was too much of +a man to be merely that, and he was an abolitionist, a journalist, and +for conscience' sake a satirist. Of that political mood of society which +he satirized was an eminent man whom it was also my good fortune to meet +in my early days in Boston; and if his great sweetness and kindness had +not instantly won my liking, I should still have been glad of the glimpse +of the older and statelier Boston which my slight acquaintance with +George Ticknor gave me. The historian of Spanish literature, the friend +and biographer of Prescott, and a leading figure of the intellectual +society of an epoch already closed, dwelt in the fine old square brick +mansion which yet stands at the corner of Park Street and Beacon, though +sunk now to a variety of business uses, and lamentably changed in aspect. +The interior was noble, and there was an air of scholarly quiet and of +lettered elegance in the library, where the host received his guests, +which seemed to pervade the whole house, and which made its appeal to the +imagination of one of them most potently. It seemed to me that to be +master of such circumstance and keeping would be enough of life in a +certain way; and it all lingers in my memory yet, as if it were one with +the gentle courtesy which welcomed me. + +Among my fellow-guests one night was George S. Hillard, now a faded +reputation, and even then a life defeated of the high expectation of its +youth. I do not know whether his 'Six Months in Italy' still keeps +itself in print; but it was a book once very well known; and he was +perhaps the more gracious to me, as our host was, because of our common +Italian background. He was of the old Silver-gray Whig society too, and +I suppose that order of things imparted its tone to what I felt and saw +in that place. The civil war had come and gone, and that order accepted +the result if not with faith, then with patience. There were two young +English noblemen there that night, who had been travelling in the South, +and whose stories of the wretched conditions they had seen moved our host +to some open misgiving. But the Englishmen had no question; in spite of +all, they defended the accomplished fact, and when I ventured to say that +now at least there could be a hope of better things, while the old order +was only the perpetuation of despair, he mildly assented, with a gesture +of the hand that waived the point, and a deeply sighed, "Perhaps; +perhaps." + +He was a presence of great dignity, which seemed to recall the past with +a steadfast allegiance, and yet to relax itself towards the present in +the wisdom of the accumulated years. His whole life had been passed in +devotion to polite literature and in the society of the polite world; and +he was a type of scholar such as only the circumstances of Boston could +form. Those circumstances could alone form such another type as Quincy; +and I wish I could have felt then as I do now the advantage of meeting +them so contemporaneously. + + + + +VII. + +The historian of Spanish literature was an old man nearer eighty than +seventy when I saw him, and I recall of him personally his dark tint, and +the scholarly refinement of his clean-shaven face, which seemed to me +rather English than American in character. He was quite exterior to the +Atlantic group of writers, and had no interest in me as one of it. +Literary Boston of that day was not a solidarity, as I soon perceived; +and I understood that it was only in my quality of stranger that I saw +the different phases of it. I should not be just to a vivid phase if I +failed to speak of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and the impulse of reform which +she personified. I did not sympathize with this then so much as I do +now, but I could appreciate it on the intellectual side. Once, many +years later, I heard Mrs. Howe speak in public, and it seemed to me that +she made one of the best speeches I had ever heard. It gave me for the +first time a notion of what women might do in that sort if they entered +public life; but when we met in those earlier days I was interested in +her as perhaps our chief poetess. I believe she did not care much to +speak of literature; she was alert for other meanings in life, and I +remember how she once brought to book a youthful matron who had perhaps +unduly lamented the hardships of housekeeping, with the sharp demand, +"Child, where is your religion?" After the many years of an acquaintance +which had not nearly so many meetings as years, it was pleasant to find +her, at the latest, as strenuous as ever for the faith of works, and as +eager to aid Stepniak as John Brown. In her beautiful old age she +survives a certain literary impulse of Boston, but a still higher impulse +of Boston she will not survive, for that will last while the city +endures. + + + + +VIII. + +The Cambridge men were curiously apart from others that formed the great +New England group, and with whom in my earlier ignorance I had always +fancied them mingling. Now and then I met Doctor Holmes at Longfellow's +table, but not oftener than now and then, and I never saw Emerson in +Cambridge at all except at Longfellow's funeral. In my first years on +the Atlantic I sometimes saw him, when he would address me some grave, +rather retrorsive civilities, after I had been newly introduced to him, +as I had always to be on these occasions. I formed the belief that he +did not care for me, either in my being or doing, and I am far from +blaming him for that: on such points there might easily be two opinions, +and I was myself often of the mind I imagined in him. + +If Emerson forgot me, it was perhaps because I was not of those qualities +of things which even then, it was said, he could remember so much better +than things themselves. In his later years I sometimes saw him in the +Boston streets with his beautiful face dreamily set, as he moved like one +to whose vision + + "Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn, + Vast images in glimmering dawn, + Half shown, are broken and withdrawn." + +It is known how before the end the eclipse became total and from moment +to moment the record inscribed upon his mind was erased. Some years +before he died I sat between him and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke, at an +'Atlantic Breakfast' where it was part of my editorial function to +preside. When he was not asking me who she was, I could hear him asking +her who I was. His great soul worked so independently of memory as we +conceive it, and so powerfully and essentially, that one could not help +wondering if; after all, our personal continuity, our identity hereafter, +was necessarily trammeled up with our enduring knowledge of what happens +here. His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event, and yet his +character, his personality, his identity fully persisted. + +I do not know, whether the things that we printed for Emerson after his +memory began to fail so utterly were the work of earlier years or not, +but I know that they were of his best. There were certain poems which +could not have been more electly, more exquisitely his, or fashioned with +a keener and juster self-criticism. His vision transcended his time so +far that some who have tired themselves out in trying to catch up with +him have now begun to say that he was no seer at all; but I doubt if +these form the last court of appeal in his case. In manner, he was very +gentle, like all those great New England men, but he was cold, like many +of them, to the new-comer, or to the old-comer who came newly. As I have +elsewhere recorded, I once heard him speak critically of Hawthorne, and +once he expressed his surprise at the late flowering brilliancy of +Holmes's gift in the Autocrat papers after all his friends supposed it +had borne its best fruit. But I recall no mention of Longfellow, or +Lowell, or Whittier from him. At a dinner where the talk glanced upon +Walt Whitman he turned to me as perhaps representing the interest +posterity might take in the matter, and referred to Whitman's public use +of his privately written praise as something altogether unexpected. He +did not disown it or withdraw it, but seemed to feel (not indignantly) +that there had been an abuse of it. + + + + +IX. + +The first time I saw Whittier was in Fields's room at the publishing +office, where I had come upon some editorial errand to my chief. He +introduced me to the poet: a tall, spare figure in black of Quaker cut, +with a keen, clean-shaven face, black hair, and vivid black eyes. It was +just after his poem, 'Snow Bound', had made its great success, in the +modest fashion of those days, and had sold not two hundred thousand but +twenty thousand, and I tried to make him my compliment. I contrived to +say that I could not tell him how much I liked it; and he received the +inadequate expression of my feeling with doubtless as much effusion as he +would have met something more explicit and abundant. If he had judged +fit to take my contract off my hands in any way, I think he would have +been less able to do so than any of his New England contemporaries. In +him, as I have suggested, the Quaker calm was bound by the frosty +Puritanic air, and he was doubly cold to the touch of the stranger, +though he would thaw out to old friends, and sparkle in laugh and joke. I +myself never got so far with him as to experience this geniality, though +afterwards we became such friends as an old man and a young man could be +who rarely met. Our better acquaintance began with some talk, at a second +meeting, about Bayard Taylor's 'Story of Kennett', which had then lately +appeared, and which he praised for its fidelity to Quaker character in +its less amiable aspects. No doubt I had made much of my own Quaker +descent (which I felt was one of the few things I had to be proud of), +and he therefore spoke the more frankly of those traits of brutality into +which the primitive sincerity of the sect sometimes degenerated. He +thought the habit of plain-speaking had to be jealously guarded to keep +it from becoming rude-speaking, and he matched with stories of his own +some things I had heard my father tell of Friends in the backwoods who +were Foes to good manners. + +Whittier was one of the most generous of men towards the work of others, +especially the work of a new man, and if I did anything that he liked, I +could count upon him for cordial recognition. In the quiet of his +country home at Danvers he apparently read all the magazines, and kept +himself fully abreast of the literary movement, but I doubt if he so +fully appreciated the importance of the social movement. Like some +others of the great anti-slavery men, he seemed to imagine that mankind +had won itself a clear field by destroying chattel slavery, and he had. +no sympathy with those who think that the man who may any moment be out +of work is industrially a slave. This is not strange; so few men last +over from one reform to another that the wonder is that any should, not +that one should not. Whittier was prophet for one great need of the +divine to man, and he spoke his message with a fervor that at times was +like the trembling of a flame, or the quivering of midsummer sunshine. It +was hard to associate with the man as one saw him, still, shy, stiff, the +passion of his verse. This imbued not only his antislavery utterances, +but equally his ballads of the old witch and Quaker persecution, and +flashed a far light into the dimness where his interrogations of Mystery +pierced. Whatever doubt there can be of the fate of other New England +poets in the great and final account, it seems to me that certain of +these pieces make his place secure. + +There is great inequality in his work, and I felt this so strongly that +when I came to have full charge of the Magazine, I ventured once to +distinguish. He sent me a poem, and I had the temerity to return it, and +beg him for something else. He magnanimously refrained from all show of +offence, and after a while, when he had printed the poem elsewhere, he +gave me another. By this time, I perceived that I had been wrong, not as +to the poem returned, but as to my function regarding him and such as he. +I had made my reflections, and never again did I venture to pass upon +what contributors of his quality sent me. I took it and printed it, and +praised the gods; and even now I think that with such men it was not my +duty to play the censor in the periodical which they had made what it +was. They had set it in authority over American literature, and it was +not for me to put myself in authority over them. Their fame was in their +own keeping, and it was not my part to guard it against them. + +After that experience I not only practised an eager acquiescence in their +wish to reach the public through the Atlantic, but I used all the +delicacy I was master of in bowing the way to them. Sometimes my utmost +did not avail, or more strictly speaking it did not avail in one instance +with Emerson. He had given me upon much entreaty a poem which was one of +his greatest and best, but the proof-reader found a nominative at odds +with its verb. We had some trouble in reconciling them, and some other +delays, and meanwhile Doctor Holmes offered me a poem for the same +number. I now doubted whether I should get Emerson's poem back in time +for it, but unluckily the proof did come back in time, and then I had to +choose between my poets, or acquaint them with the state of the case, and +let them choose what I should do. I really felt that Doctor Holmes had +the right to precedence, since Emerson had withheld his proof so long +that I could not count upon it; but I wrote to Emerson, and asked (as +nearly as I can remember) whether he would consent to let me put his poem +over to the next number, or would prefer to have it appear in the same +number with Doctor Holmes's; the subjects were cognate, and I had my +misgivings. He wrote me back to "return the proofs and break up the +forms." I could not go to this iconoclastic extreme with the +electrotypes of the magazine, but I could return the proofs. I did so, +feeling that I had done my possible, and silently grieving that there +could be such ire in heavenly minds. + + + + +X. + +Emerson, as I say, I had once met in Cambridge, but Whittier never; and I +have a feeling that poet as Cambridge felt him to be, she had her +reservations concerning him. I cannot put these into words which would +not oversay them, but they were akin to those she might have refined upon +in regard to Mrs. Stowe. Neither of these great writers would have +appeared to Cambridge of the last literary quality; their fame was with a +world too vast to be the test that her own + + "One entire and perfect crysolite" + +would have formed. Whittier in fact had not arrived at the clear +splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still +from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for +the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' her syntax was such a snare to her that +it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the +assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written +into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, in +transposition of phrases, the text was largely rewritten on the margin of +her proofs. The soul of her art was present, but the form was so often +absent, that when it was clothed on anew, it would have been hard to say +whose cut the garment was of in many places. In fact, the proof-reading +of the 'Atlantic Monthly' was something almost fearfully scrupulous and +perfect. The proofs were first read by the under proof-reader in the +printing-office; then the head reader passed them to me perfectly clean +as to typography, with his own abundant and most intelligent comments on +the literature; and then I read them, making what changes I chose, and +verifying every quotation, every date, every geographical and +biographical name, every foreign word to the last accent, every technical +and scientific term. Where it was possible or at all desirable the proof +was next submitted to the author. When it came back to me, I revised it, +accepting or rejecting the author's judgment according as he was entitled +by his ability and knowledge or not to have them. The proof now went to +the printers for correction; they sent it again to the head reader, who +carefully revised it and returned it again to me. I read it a second +time, and it was again corrected. After this it was revised in the +office and sent to the stereotyper, from whom it came to the head reader +for a last revision in the plates. + +It would not do to say how many of the first American writers owed their +correctness in print to the zeal of our proof-reading, but I may say that +there were very few who did not owe something. The wisest and ablest +were the most patient and grateful, like Mrs. Stowe, under correction; it +was only the beginners and the more ignorant who were angry; and almost +always the proof-reading editor had his way on disputed points. I look +back now, with respectful amazement at my proficiency in detecting the +errors of the great as well as the little. I was able to discover +mistakes even in the classical quotations of the deeply lettered Sumner, +and I remember, in the earliest years of my service on the Atlantic, +waiting in this statesman's study amidst the prints and engravings that +attested his personal resemblance to Edmund Burke, with his proofs in my +hand and my heart in my mouth, to submit my doubts of his Latinity. I +forget how he received them; but he was not a very gracious person. + +Mrs. Stowe was a gracious person, and carried into age the inalienable +charm of a woman who must have been very, charming earlier. I met her +only at the Fieldses' in Boston, where one night I witnessed a +controversy between her and Doctor Holmes concerning homoeopathy and +allopathy which lasted well through dinner. After this lapse of time, I +cannot tell how the affair ended, but I feel sure of the liking with +which Mrs. Stowe inspired me. There was something very simple, very +motherly in her, and something divinely sincere. She was quite the +person to take 'au grand serieux' the monstrous imaginations of Lady +Byron's jealousy and to feel it on her conscience to make public report +of them when she conceived that the time had come to do so. + +In Francis Parkman I knew much later than in some others a +differentiation of the New England type which was not less +characteristic. He, like so many other Boston men of letters, was of +patrician family, and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons +to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suffering in which he +wrought at what is, I suppose, our greatest history. He wrought at it +piecemeal, and sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head aches +which tormented him, and the disorder of the heart which threatened his +life, allowed him a brief respite for the task which was dear to him. He +must have been more than a quarter of a century in completing it, and in +this time, as he once told me, it had given him a day-laborer's wages; +but of course money was the least return he wished from it. I read the +regularly successive volumes of 'The Jesuits in North America, The Old +Regime in Canada', the 'Wolfe and Montcalm', and the others that went to +make up the whole history with a sufficiently noisy enthusiasm, and our +acquaintance began by his expressing his gratification with the praises +of them that I had put in print. We entered into relations as +contributor and editor, and I know that he was pleased with my eagerness +to get as many detachable chapters from the book in hand as he could give +me for the magazine, but he was of too fine a politeness to make this the +occasion of his first coming to see me. He had walked out to Cambridge, +where I then lived, in pursuance of a regimen which, I believe, finally +built up his health; that it was unsparing, I can testify from my own +share in one of his constitutionals in Boston, many years later. + +His experience in laying the groundwork for his history, and his +researches in making it thorough, were such as to have liberated him to +the knowledge of other manners and ideals, but he remained strictly a +Bostonian, and as immutably of the Boston social and literary faith as +any I knew in that capital of accomplished facts. He had lived like an +Indian among the wild Western tribes; he consorted with the Canadian +archaeologists in their mousings among the colonial archives of their +fallen state; every year he went to Quebec or Paris to study the history +of New France in the original documents; European society was open to him +everywhere; but he had those limitations which I nearly always found in +the Boston men, I remember his talking to me of 'The Rise of Silas +Lapham', in a somewhat troubled and uncertain strain, and interpreting +his rise as the achievement of social recognition, without much or at all +liking it or me for it. I did not think it my part to point out that I +had supposed the rise to be a moral one; and later I fell under his +condemnation for certain high crimes and misdemeanors I had been guilty +of against a well-known ideal in fiction. These in fact constituted +lese-majesty of romanticism, which seemed to be disproportionately dear +to a man who was in his own way trying to tell the truth of human nature +as I was in mine. His displeasures passed, however, and my last meeting +with our greatest historian, as I think him, was of unalloyed +friendliness. He came to me during my final year in Boston for nothing +apparently but to tell me of his liking for a book of mine describing +boy-life in Southern Ohio a half-century ago. He wished to talk about +many points of this, which he found the same as his own boylife in the +neighborhood of Boston; and we could agree that the life of the +Anglo-Saxon boy was pretty much the same everywhere. He had helped +himself into my apartment with a crutch, but I do not remember how he had +fallen lame. It was the end of his long walks, I believe, and not long +afterwards I had the grief to read of his death. I noticed that perhaps +through his enforced quiet, he had put on weight; his fine face was full; +whereas when I first knew him he was almost delicately thin of figure and +feature. He was always of a distinguished presence, and his face had a +great distinction. + +It had not the appealing charm I found in the face of James Parton, +another historian I knew earlier in my Boston days. I cannot say how +much his books, once so worthily popular, are now known but I have an +abiding sense of their excellence. I have not read the 'Life of +Voltaire', which was the last, but all the rest, from the first, I have +read, and if there are better American biographies than those of Franklin +or of Jefferson, I could not say where to find them. The Greeley and the +Burr were younger books, and so was the Jackson, and they were not nearly +so good; but to all the author had imparted the valuable humanity in +which he abounded. He was never of the fine world of literature, the +world that sniffs and sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. But +he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American +character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage, +and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he +had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived +the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came +near him without in some measure loving him. To me he was of a most +winning personality, which his strong, gentle face expressed, and a cast +in the eye which he could not bring to bear directly upon his vis-a-vis, +endeared. I never met him without wishing more of his company, for he +seldom failed to say something to whatever was most humane and most +modern in me. Our last meeting was at Newburyport, whither he had long +before removed from New York, and where in the serene atmosphere of the +ancient Puritan town he found leisure and inspiration for his work. He +was not then engaged upon any considerable task, and he had aged and +broken somewhat. But the old geniality, the old warmth glowed in him, +and made a summer amidst the storm of snow that blinded the wintry air +without. A new light had then lately come into my life, by which I saw +all things that did not somehow tell for human brotherhood dwarfish and +ugly, and he listened, as I imagined, to what I had to say with the +tolerant sympathy of a man who has been a long time thinking those +things, and views with a certain amusement the zeal of the fresh +discoverer. + +There was yet another historian in Boston, whose acquaintance I made +later than either Parkman's or Parton's, and whose very recent death +leaves me with the grief of a friend. No ones indeed, could meet John +Codman Ropes without wishing to be his friend, or without finding a +friend in him. He had his likes and his dislikes, but he could have had +no enmities except for evil and meanness. I never knew a man of higher +soul, of sweeter nature, and his whole life was a monument of character. +It cannot wound him now to speak of the cruel deformity which came upon +him in his boyhood, and haunted all his after days with suffering. His +gentle face showed the pain which is always the part of the hunchback, +but nothing else in him confessed a sense of his affliction, and the +resolute activity of his mind denied it in every way. He was, as is well +known, a very able lawyer, in full practice, while he was making his +studies of military history, and winning recognition for almost unique +insight and thoroughness in that direction, though I believe that when he +came to embody the results in those extraordinary volumes recording the +battles of our civil war, he retired from the law in some measure. He +knew these battles more accurately than the generals who fought them, and +he was of a like proficiency in the European wars from the time of +Napoleon down to our own time. I have heard a story, which I cannot +vouch for, that when foreknowledge of his affliction, at the outbreak of +our civil war, forbade him to be a soldier, he became a student of +soldiership, and wreaked in that sort the passion of his most gallant +spirit. But whether this was true or not, it is certain that he pursued +the study with a devotion which never blinded him to the atrocity of war. +Some wars he could excuse and even justify, but for any war that seemed +wanton or aggressive, he had only abhorrence. + +The last summer of a score that I had known him, we sat on the veranda of +his cottage at York Harbor, and looked out over the moonlit sea, and he +talked of the high and true things, with the inextinguishable zest for +the inquiry which I always found in him, though he was then feeling the +approaches of the malady which was so soon to end all groping in these +shadows for him. He must have faced the fact with the same courage and +the same trust with which he faced all facts. From the first I found him +a deeply religious man, not only in the ecclesiastical sense, but in the +more mystical meanings of the word, and he kept his faith as he kept his +youth to the last. Every one who knew him, knows how young he was in +heart, and how he liked to have those that were young in years about him. +He wished to have his house in Boston, as well as his cottage at York, +full of young men and young girls, whose joy of life he made his own, and +whose society he preferred to his contemporaries'. One could not blame +him for that, or for seeking the sun, wherever he could, but it would be +a false notion of him to suppose that his sympathies were solely or +chiefly with the happy. In every sort, as I knew him, he was fine and +good. The word is not worthy of him, after some of its uses and +associations, but if it were unsmutched by these, and whitened to its +primitive significance, I should say he was one of the most perfect +gentlemen I ever knew. + + + + +ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS: + + Celia Thaxter + Charles F. Browne + Dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces + Edmund Quincy + Ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense + Few men last over from one reform to another + Francis Parkman + Generous lover of all that was excellent in literature + Got out of it all the fun there was in it + Greeting of great impersonal cordiality + Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds + His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event + Julia Ward Howe + Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it + Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave + Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities + Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking + Pointed the moral in all they did + Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon + Tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him + True to an ideal of life rather than to life itself + Wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look + When to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast + Whitman's public use of his privately written praise + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Literary Boston, by William Dean Howells + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERARY BOSTON *** + +***** This file should be named 3396.txt or 3396.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/3/3/9/3396/ + +Produced by David Widger + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, +set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to +copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to +protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project +Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you +charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you +do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the +rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose +such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and +research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do +practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is +subject to the trademark license, especially commercial +redistribution. + + + +*** START: FULL LICENSE *** + +THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE +PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK + +To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free +distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work +(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project +Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project +Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at +https://gutenberg.org/license). + + +Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic works + +1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to +and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property +(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all +the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy +all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. +If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the +terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or +entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. + +1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be +used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who +agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few +things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works +even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See +paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement +and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works. See paragraph 1.E below. + +1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" +or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the +collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an +individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are +located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from +copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative +works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg +are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project +Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by +freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of +this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with +the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by +keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project +Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. + +1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern +what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in +a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check +the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement +before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or +creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project +Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning +the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United +States. + +1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: + +1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate +access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently +whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the +phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project +Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, +copied or distributed: + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + +1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived +from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is +posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied +and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees +or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work +with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the +work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 +through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the +Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or +1.E.9. + +1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted +with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution +must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional +terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked +to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the +permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work. + +1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm +License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this +work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm. + +1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this +electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without +prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with +active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project +Gutenberg-tm License. + +1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, +compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any +word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or +distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than +"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version +posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org), +you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a +copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon +request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other +form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm +License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1. + +1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, +performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works +unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9. + +1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing +access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided +that + +- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from + the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method + you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is + owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he + has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the + Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments + must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you + prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax + returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and + sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the + address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to + the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation." + +- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies + you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he + does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm + License. You must require such a user to return or + destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium + and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of + Project Gutenberg-tm works. + +- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any + money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the + electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days + of receipt of the work. + +- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free + distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works. + +1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set +forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from +both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael +Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the +Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below. + +1.F. + +1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable +effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread +public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm +collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain +"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or +corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual +property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a +computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by +your equipment. + +1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right +of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project +Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project +Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all +liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal +fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT +LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE +PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH F3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE +TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE +LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR +INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH +DAMAGE. + +1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a +defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can +receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a +written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you +received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with +your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with +the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a +refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity +providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to +receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy +is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further +opportunities to fix the problem. + +1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth +in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER +WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO +WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE. + +1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied +warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. +If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the +law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be +interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by +the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any +provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions. + +1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the +trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone +providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance +with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production, +promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works, +harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, +that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do +or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm +work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any +Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause. + + +Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm + +Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of +electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers +including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists +because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from +people in all walks of life. + +Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the +assistance they need, is critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's +goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will +remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project +Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure +and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations. +To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation +and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 +and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org. + + +Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive +Foundation + +The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit +501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the +state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal +Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification +number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at +https://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg +Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent +permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws. + +The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S. +Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered +throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at +809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email +business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact +information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official +page at https://pglaf.org + +For additional contact information: + Dr. Gregory B. Newby + Chief Executive and Director + gbnewby@pglaf.org + + +Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg +Literary Archive Foundation + +Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide +spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of +increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be +freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest +array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations +($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt +status with the IRS. + +The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating +charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United +States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a +considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up +with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations +where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To +SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any +particular state visit https://pglaf.org + +While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we +have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition +against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who +approach us with offers to donate. + +International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make +any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from +outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff. + +Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation +methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other +ways including including checks, online payments and credit card +donations. To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate + + +Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works. + +Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm +concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared +with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project +Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support. + + +Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S. +unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily +keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition. + + +Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility: + + https://www.gutenberg.org + +This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, +including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary +Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to +subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. diff --git a/3396.zip b/3396.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..4ef3ee2 --- /dev/null +++ b/3396.zip diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..64cf5a7 --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #3396 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3396) diff --git a/old/whbos10.txt b/old/whbos10.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..42cbde6 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/whbos10.txt @@ -0,0 +1,1346 @@ +The Project Gutenberg Etext of Literary Boston, by W. D. Howells +#43 in our series by William Dean Howells + +Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check +the laws for your country before redistributing these files!!! + +Please take a look at the important information in this header. +We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an +electronic path open for the next readers. + +Please do not remove this. + +This should be the first thing seen when anyone opens the book. +Do not change or edit it without written permission. The words +are carefully chosen to provide users with the information they +need about what they can legally do with the texts. + + +**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** + +**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** + +*These Etexts Prepared By Hundreds of Volunteers and Donations* + +Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and +further information is included below. We need your donations. +The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3) +organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541 + +As of 12/12/00 contributions are only being solicited from people in: +Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, +Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Montana, +Nevada, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, +Texas, Vermont, and Wyoming. + +As the requirements for other states are met, +additions to this list will be made and fund raising +will begin in the additional states. Please feel +free to ask to check the status of your state. + +International donations are accepted, +but we don't know ANYTHING about how +to make them tax-deductible, or +even if they CAN be made deductible, +and don't have the staff to handle it +even if there are ways. + +These donations should be made to: + +Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation +PMB 113 +1739 University Ave. +Oxford, MS 38655-4109 + + +Title: Literary Boston + +Author: William Dean Howells + +Release Date: August, 2002 [Etext #3396] +[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule] +[The actual date this file first posted = 04/01/01] + +Edition: 10 + +Language: English + +The Project Gutenberg Etext of Literary Boston, by W. D. Howells +******This file should be named whbos10.txt or whbos10.zip****** + +Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, whbos11.txt +VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, whbos10a.txt + +This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net> + +Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions, +all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a +copyright notice is included. Therefore, we usually do NOT keep any +of these books in compliance with any particular paper edition. + +We are now trying to release all our books one year in advance +of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing. +Please be encouraged to send us error messages even years after +the official publication date. + +Please note: neither this list nor its contents are final till +midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement. +The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at +Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month. A +preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment +and editing by those who wish to do so. + +Most people start at our sites at: +http://gutenberg.net +http://promo.net/pg + + +Those of you who want to download any Etext before announcement +can surf to them as follows, and just download by date; this is +also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the +indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an +announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter. + +http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext02 +or +ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext02 + +Or /etext01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90 + +Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want, +as it appears in our Newsletters. + + +Information about Project Gutenberg (one page) + +We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work. The +time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours +to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright +searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc. This +projected audience is one hundred million readers. If our value +per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2 +million dollars per hour this year as we release fifty new Etext +files per month, or 500 more Etexts in 2000 for a total of 3000+ +If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total +should reach over 300 billion Etexts given away by year's end. + +The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext +Files by December 31, 2001. [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion] +This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers, +which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users. + +At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third +of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 3,333 Etexts unless we +manage to get some real funding. + +The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created +to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium. + +We need your donations more than ever! + +Presently, contributions are only being solicited from people in: +Colorado, Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, +Kentucky, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Montana, +Nevada, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, +Texas, Vermont, and Wyoming. + +As the requirements for other states are met, +additions to this list will be made and fund raising +will begin in the additional states. + +These donations should be made to: + +Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation +PMB 113 +1739 University Ave. +Oxford, MS 38655-4109 + + +Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, +EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541, +has been approved as a 501(c)(3) organization by the US Internal +Revenue Service (IRS). Donations are tax-deductible to the extent +permitted by law. As the requirements for other states are met, +additions to this list will be made and fund raising will begin in the +additional states. + +All donations should be made to the Project Gutenberg Literary +Archive Foundation. Mail to: + +Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation +PMB 113 +1739 University Avenue +Oxford, MS 38655-4109 [USA] + + +We need your donations more than ever! + +You can get up to date donation information at: + +http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html + + +*** + +If you can't reach Project Gutenberg, +you can always email directly to: + +Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com> + +hart@pobox.com forwards to hart@prairienet.org and archive.org +if your mail bounces from archive.org, I will still see it, if +it bounces from prairienet.org, better resend later on. . . . + +Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message. + +We would prefer to send you information by email. + + +*** + + +Example command-line FTP session: + +ftp ftp.ibiblio.org +login: anonymous +password: your@login +cd pub/docs/books/gutenberg +cd etext90 through etext99 or etext00 through etext02, etc. +dir [to see files] +get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files] +GET GUTINDEX.?? [to get a year's listing of books, e.g., GUTINDEX.99] +GET GUTINDEX.ALL [to get a listing of ALL books] + + +**The Legal Small Print** + + +(Three Pages) + +***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START*** +Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers. +They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with +your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from +someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our +fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement +disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how +you may distribute copies of this etext if you want to. + +*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT +By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm +etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept +this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive +a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by +sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person +you got it from. If you received this etext on a physical +medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request. + +ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS +This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etexts, +is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart +through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project"). +Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright +on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and +distribute it in the United States without permission and +without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth +below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext +under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark. + +Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market +any commercial products without permission. + +To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable +efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain +works. Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any +medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other +things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or +corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other +intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged +disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer +codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment. + +LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES +But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below, +[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may +receive this etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims +all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including +legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR +UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT, +INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE +OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE +POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. + +If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of +receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) +you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that +time to the person you received it from. If you received it +on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and +such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement +copy. If you received it electronically, such person may +choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to +receive it electronically. + +THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER +WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS +TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT +LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A +PARTICULAR PURPOSE. + +Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or +the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the +above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you +may have other legal rights. + +INDEMNITY +You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation, +and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated +with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm +texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including +legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the +following that you do or cause: [1] distribution of this etext, +[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the etext, +or [3] any Defect. + +DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm" +You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by +disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this +"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg, +or: + +[1] Only give exact copies of it. Among other things, this + requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the + etext or this "small print!" statement. You may however, + if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable + binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form, + including any form resulting from conversion by word + processing or hypertext software, but only so long as + *EITHER*: + + [*] The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and + does *not* contain characters other than those + intended by the author of the work, although tilde + (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may + be used to convey punctuation intended by the + author, and additional characters may be used to + indicate hypertext links; OR + + [*] The etext may be readily converted by the reader at + no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent + form by the program that displays the etext (as is + the case, for instance, with most word processors); + OR + + [*] You provide, or agree to also provide on request at + no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the + etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC + or other equivalent proprietary form). + +[2] Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this + "Small Print!" statement. + +[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the + gross profits you derive calculated using the method you + already use to calculate your applicable taxes. If you + don't derive profits, no royalty is due. Royalties are + payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation" + the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were + legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent + periodic) tax return. Please contact us beforehand to + let us know your plans and to work out the details. + +WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO? +Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of +public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed +in machine readable form. + +The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time, +public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses. +Money should be paid to the: +"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation." + +If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or +software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at: +hart@pobox.com + +*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.12.12.00*END* + + + + + +This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net> + + + + + +[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the +file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an +entire meal of them. D.W.] + + + + + +LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Literary Boston As I Knew It + +by William Dean Howells + + + + +LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT + +Among my fellow-passengers on the train from New York to Boston, when I +went to begin my work there in 1866, as the assistant editor of the +Atlantic Monthly, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield +Republican, who created in a subordinate city a journal of metropolitan +importance. I had met him in Venice several years earlier, when he was +suffering from the cruel insomnia which had followed his overwork on that +newspaper, and when he told me that he was sleeping scarcely more than +one hour out of the twenty-four. His worn face attested the misery which +this must have been, and which lasted in some measure while he lived, +though I believe that rest and travel relieved him in his later years. +He was always a man of cordial friendliness, and he now expressed a most +gratifying interest when I told him what I was going to do in Boston. +He gave himself the pleasure of descanting upon the dramatic quality of +the fact that a young newspaper man from Ohio was about to share in the +destinies of the great literary periodical of New England. + + + + +I. + +I do not think that such a fact would now move the fancy of the liveliest +newspaper man, so much has the West since returned upon the East in a +refluent wave of authorship. But then the West was almost an unknown +quality in our literary problem; and in fact there was scarcely any +literature outside of New England. Even this was of New England origin, +for it was almost wholly the work of New England men and women in the +"splendid exile" of New York. The Atlantic Monthly, which was +distinctively literary, was distinctively a New England magazine, though +from the first it had been characterized by what was more national, what +was more universal, in the New England temperament. Its chief +contributors for nearly twenty years were Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, +Whittier, Emerson, Doctor Hale, Colonel Higginson, Mrs. Stowe, Whipple, +Rose Terry Cooke, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Prescott Spofford, Mrs. +Phelps Ward, and other New England writers who still lived in New +England, and largely in the region of Boston. Occasionally there came a +poem from Bryant, at New York, from Mr. Stedman, from Mr. Stoddard and +Mrs. Stoddard, from Mr. Aldrich, and from Bayard Taylor. But all these, +except the last, were not only of New England race, but of New England +birth. I think there was no contributor from the South but Mr. M. D. +Conway, and as yet the West scarcely counted, though four young poets +from Ohio, who were not immediately or remotely of Puritan origin, had +appeared in early numbers; Alice Cary, living with her sister in New +York, had written now and then from the beginning. Mr. John Hay solely +represented Illinois by a single paper, and he was of Rhode Island stock. +It was after my settlement at Boston that Mark Twain, of Missouri, became +a figure of world-wide fame at Hartford; and longer after, that Mr. Bret +Harte made that progress Eastward from California which was telegraphed +almost from hour to hour, as if it were the progress of a prince. +Miss Constance F. Woolson had not yet begun to write. Mr. James +Whitcomb Riley, Mr. Maurice Thompson, Miss Edith Thomas, Octave Thanet, +Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard, Mr. H. B. Fuller, Mrs. Catherwood, +Mr. Hamlin Garland, all whom I name at random among other Western +writers, were then as unknown as Mr. Cable, Miss Murfree, Mrs. Rives +Chanler, Miss Grace King, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, Mr. Thomas Nelson +Page, in the South, which they by no means fully represent. + +The editors of the Atlantic had been eager from the beginning to discover +any outlying literature; but, as I have said, there was in those days +very little good writing done beyond the borders of New England. If the +case is now different, and the best known among living American writers +are no longer New-Englanders, still I do not think the South and West +have yet trimmed the balance; and though perhaps the news writers now +more commonly appear in those quarters, I should not be so very sure that +they are not still characterized by New England ideals and examples. +On the other hand, I am very sure that in my early day we were +characterized by them, and wished to be so; we even felt that we failed +in so far as we expressed something native quite in our own way. +The literary theories we accepted were New England theories, +the criticism we valued was New England criticism, or, more strictly +speaking, Boston theories, Boston criticism. + +Of those more constant contributors to the Atlantic whom I have +mentioned, it is of course known that Longfellow and Lowell lived in +Cambridge, Emerson at Concord, and Whittier at Amesbury. Colonel +Higginson was still and for many years afterwards at Newport; Mrs. Stowe +was then at Andover; Miss Prescott of Newburyport had become Mrs. +Spofford, and was presently in Boston, where her husband was a member of +the General Court; Mrs. Phelps Ward, as Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, +dwelt in her father's house at Andover. The chief of the Bostonians were +Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Doctor Holmes, and Doctor Hale. Yet Boston stood +for the whole Massachusetts group, and Massachusetts, in the literary +impulse, meant New England. I suppose we must all allow, whether we like +to do so or not, that the impulse seems now to have pretty well spent +itself. Certainly the city of Boston has distinctly waned in literature, +though it has waxed in wealth and population. I do not think there are +in Boston to-day even so many talents with a literary coloring in law, +science, theology, and journalism as there were formerly; though I have +no belief that the Boston talents are fewer or feebler than before. +I arrived in Boston, however, when all talents had more or less a +literary coloring, and when the greatest talents were literary. These +expressed with ripened fulness a civilization conceived in faith and +brought forth in good works; but that moment of maturity was the +beginning of a decadence which could only show itself much later. New +England has ceased to be a nation in itself, and it will perhaps never +again have anything like a national literature; but that was something +like a national literature; and it will probably be centuries yet before +the life of the whole country, the American life as distinguished from +the New England life, shall have anything so like a national literature. +It will be long before our larger life interprets itself in such +imagination as Hawthorne's, such wisdom as Emerson's, such poetry as +Longfellow's, such prophecy as Whittier's, such wit and grace as +Holmes's, such humor and humanity as Lowell's. + +The literature of those great men was, if I may suffer myself the figure, +the Socinian graft of a Calvinist stock. Their faith, in its varied +shades, was Unitarian, but their art was Puritan. So far as it was +imperfect--and great and beautiful as it was, I think it had its +imperfections--it was marred by the intense ethicism that pervaded the +New England mind for two hundred years, and that still characterizes it. +They or their fathers had broken away from orthodoxy in the great schism +at the beginning of the century, but, as if their heterodoxy were +conscience-stricken, they still helplessly pointed the moral in all they +did; some pointed it more directly, some less directly; but they all +pointed it. I should be far from blaming them for their ethical +intention, though I think they felt their vocation as prophets too much +for their good as poets. Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the +sermon, though not always, nor nearly always. It was in poetry and in +romance that they excelled; in the novel, so far as they attempted it, +they failed. I say this with the names of all the Bostonian group, and +those they influenced, in mind, and with a full sense of their greatness. +It may be ungracious to say that they have left no heirs to their +peculiar greatness; but it would be foolish to say that they left an +estate where they had none to bequeath. One cannot take account of such +a fantasy as Judd's Margaret. The only New-Englander who has attempted +the novel on a scale proportioned to the work of the New-Englanders in +philosophy, in poetry, in romance, is Mr. De Forest, who is of New Haven, +and not of Boston. I do not forget the fictions of Doctor Holmes, or the +vivid inventions of Doctor Hale, but I do not call them novels; and I do +not forget the exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss Wilkins, +which is free from the ethicism of the great New England group, but which +has hardly the novelists's scope. New England, in Hawthorne's work, +achieved supremacy in romance; but the romance is always an allegory, +and the novel is a picture in which the truth to life is suffered to do +its unsermonized office for conduct; and New England yet lacks her +novelist, because it was her instinct and her conscience in fiction to be +true to an ideal of life rather than to life itself. + +Even when we come to the exception that proves the rule, even to such a +signal exception as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', I think that what I say holds +true. That is almost the greatest work of imagination that we have +produced in prose, and it is the work of a New England woman, writing +from all the inspirations and traditions of New England. It is like +begging the question to say that I do not call it a novel, however; but +really, is it a novel, in the sense that 'War and Peace' is a novel, or +'Madame Flaubert', or 'L'Assommoir', or 'Phineas Finn', or 'Dona +Perfecta', or 'Esther Waters', or 'Marta y Maria', or 'The Return of the +Native', or 'Virgin Soil', or 'David Grieve'? In a certain way it is +greater than any of these except the first; but its chief virtue, or its +prime virtue, is in its address to the conscience, and not its address to +the taste; to the ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense. + +This does not quite say the thing, but it suggests it, and I should be +sorry if it conveyed to any reader a sense of slight; for I believe no +one has felt more deeply than myself the value of New England in +literature. The comparison of the literary situation at Boston to the +literary situation at Edinburgh in the times of the reviewers has never +seemed to me accurate or adequate, and it holds chiefly in the fact that +both seem to be of the past. Certainly New York is yet no London in +literature, and I think Boston was once vastly more than Edinburgh ever +was, at least in quality. The Scotch literature of the palmy days was +not wholly Scotch, and even when it was rooted in Scotch soil it flowered +in the air of an alien speech. But the New England literature of the +great day was the blossom of a New England root; and the language which +the Bostonians wrote was the native English of scholars fitly the heirs +of those who had brought the learning of the universities to +Massachusetts Bay two hundred years before, and was of as pure a lineage +as the English of the mother-country. + + + + +III. + +The literary situation which confronted me when I came to Boston was, +then, as native as could well be; and whatever value I may be able to +give a personal study of it will be from the effect it made upon me as +one strange in everything but sympathy. I will not pretend that I saw it +in its entirety, and I have no hope of presenting anything like a +kinetoscopic impression of it. What I can do is to give here and there a +glimpse of it; and I shall wish the reader to keep in mind the fact that +it was in a "state of transition," as everything is always and +everywhere. It was no sooner recognizably native than it ceased to be +fully so; and I became a witness of it after the change had begun. The +publishing house which so long embodied New England literature was +already attempting enterprises out of the line of its traditions, and one +of these had brought Mr. T. B. Aldrich from New York, a few weeks before +I arrived upon the scene in that dramatic quality which I think never +impressed any one but Mr. Bowles. Mr. Aldrich was the editor of 'Every +Saturday' when I came to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. +We were of nearly the same age, but he had a distinct and distinguished +priority of reputation, insomuch that in my Western remoteness I had +always ranged him with such elders and betters of mine as Holmes and +Lowell, and never imagined him the blond, slight youth I found him, with +every imaginable charm of contemporaneity. It is no part of the office +which I have intended for these slight and sufficiently wandering +glimpses of the past to show any writer in his final place; and above all +I do not presume to assign any living man his rank or station. But I +should be false to my own grateful sense of beauty in the work of this +poet if I did not at all times recognize his constancy to an ideal which +his name stands for. He is known in several kinds, but to my thinking he +is best in a certain nobler kind of poetry; a serious sort in which the +thought holds him above the scrupulosities of the art he loves and honors +so much. Sometimes the file slips in his hold, as the file must and +will; it is but an instrument at the best; but there is no mistouch in +the hand that lays itself upon the reader's heart with the pulse of the +poet's heart quick and true in it. There are sonnets of his, grave, and +simple, and lofty, which I think of with the glow and thrill possible +only from very beautiful poetry, and which impart such an emotion as we +can feel only + + "When a great thought strikes along the brain + And flushes all the cheek." + +When I had the fortune to meet him first, I suppose that in the employ of +the kindly house we were both so eager to serve, our dignities were about +the same; for if the 'Atlantic Monthly' was a somewhat prouder affair +than an eclectic weekly like 'Every Saturday', he was supreme in his +place, and I was subordinate in mine. The house was careful, in the +attitude of its senior partner, not to distinguish between us, and we +were not slow to perceive the tact used in managing us; we had our own +joke of it; we compared notes to find whether we were equally used in +this thing or that; and we promptly shared the fun of our discovery with +Fields himself. + +We had another impartial friend (no less a friend of joy in the life +which seems to have been pretty nearly all joy, as I look back upon it) +in the partner who became afterwards the head of the house, and who +forecast in his bold enterprises the change from a New England to an +American literary situation. In the end James R. Osgood failed, though +all his enterprises succeeded. The anomaly is sad, but it is not +infrequent. They were greater than his powers and his means, and before +they could reach their full fruition, they had to be enlarged to men of +longer purse and longer patience. He was singularly fitted both by +instinct and by education to become a great publisher; and he early +perceived that if a leading American house were to continue at Boston, +it must be hospitable to the talents of the whole country. He founded +his future upon those generous lines; but he wanted the qualities as well +as the resources for rearing the superstructure. Changes began to follow +each other rapidly after he came into control of the house. Misfortune +reduced the size and number of its periodicals. 'The Young Folks' was +sold outright, and the 'North American Review' (long before Mr. Rice +bought it and carried it to New York) was cut down one-half, so that +Aldrich said, it looked as if Destiny had sat upon it. His own +periodical, 'Every Saturday', was first enlarged to a stately quarto and +illustrated; and then, under stress of the calamities following the great +Boston fire, It collapsed to its former size. Then both the 'Atlantic +Monthly' and 'Every Saturday' were sold away from their old ownership, +and 'Every Saturday' was suppressed altogether, and we two ceased to be +of the same employ. There was some sort of evening rite (more funereal +than festive) the day after they were sold, and we followed Osgood away +from it, under the lamps. We all knew that it was his necessity that had +caused him to part with the periodicals; but he professed that it was his +pleasure, and he said he had not felt so light-hearted since he was a +boy. We asked him, How could he feel gay when he was no longer paying us +our salaries, and how could he justify it to his conscience? He liked +our mocking, and limped away from us with a rheumatic easing of his +weight from one foot to another: a figure pathetic now that it has gone +the way to dusty death, and dear to memory through benefactions unalloyed +by one unkindness. + + + + +IV. + +But when I came to Boston early in 1866, the 'Atlantic Monthly' and +'Harper's' then divided our magazine world between them; the 'North +American Review', in the control of Lowell and Professor Norton, had +entered upon a new life; 'Every Saturday' was an instant success in the +charge of Mr. Aldrich, who was by taste and training one of the best +editors; and 'Our Young Folks' had the field of juvenile periodical +literature to itself. + +It was under the direction of Miss Lucy Larcom and of Mr. J. T. +Trowbridge, who had come from western New York, where he was born, and +must be noted as one of the first returners from the setting to the +rising sun. He naturalized himself in Boston in his later boyhood, and +he still breathes Boston air, where he dwells in the street called +Pleasant, on the shore of Spy Pond, at Arlington, and still weaves the +magic web of his satisfying stories for boys. He merges in their +popularity the fame of a poet which I do not think will always suffer +that eclipse, for his poems show him to have looked deeply into the heart +of common humanity, with a true and tender sense of it. + +Miss Larcom scarcely seemed to change from date to date in the generation +that elapsed between the time I first saw her and the time I saw her +last, a year or two before her death. A goodness looked out of her +comely face, which made me think of the Madonna's in Titian's +"Assumption," and her whole aspect expressed a mild and friendly spirit +which I find it hard to put in words. She was never of the fine world of +literature; she dwelt where she was born, in that unfashionable Beverly +which is not Beverly Farms, and was of a simple, sea-faring, God-fearing +race, as she has told in one of the loveliest autobiographies I know, +"A New England Girlhood." She was the author of many poems, whose number +she constantly enlarged, but she was chiefly, and will be most lastingly, +famed for the one poem, 'Hannah Binding Shoes', which years before my +days in Boston had made her so widely known. She never again struck so +deep or so true a note; but if one has lodged such a note in the ear of +time, it is enough; and if we are to speak of eternity, one might very +well hold up one's head in the fields of asphodel, if one could say to +the great others there, "I wrote Hannah Binding Shoes." Her poem is +very, very sad, as all who have read it will remember; but Miss Larcom +herself was above everything cheerful, and she had a laugh of mellow +richness which willingly made itself heard. She was not only of true New +England stock, and a Boston author by right of race, but she came up to +that city every winter from her native town. + +By the same right and on the same terms, another New England poetess, +whom I met those first days in Boston, was a Boston author. When I saw +Celia Thaxter she was just beginning to make her effect with those poems +and sketches which the sea sings and flashes through as it sings and +flashes around the Isles of Shoals, her summer home, where her girlhood +had been passed in a freedom as wild as the curlew's. She was a most +beautiful creature, still very young , with a slender figure, and an +exquisite perfection of feature; she was in presence what her work was: +fine, frank, finished. I do not know whether other witnesses of our +literary history feel that the public has failed to keep her as fully in +mind as her work merited; but I do not think there can be any doubt but +our literature would be sensibly the poorer without her work. It is +interesting to remember how closely she kept to her native field, and it +is wonderful to consider how richly she made those sea-beaten rocks to +blossom. Something strangely full and bright came to her verse from the +mystical environment of the ocean, like the luxury of leaf and tint that +it gave the narrower flower-plots of her native isles. Her gift, indeed, +could not satisfy itself with the terms of one art alone, however varied, +and she learned to express in color the thoughts and feelings impatient +of the pallor of words. + +She remains in my memories of that far Boston a distinct and vivid +personality; as the authoress of 'Amber Gods', and 'In a Cellar', and +'Circumstance', and those other wild romantic tales, remains the gentle +and somewhat evanescent presence I found her. Miss Prescott was now Mrs. +Spofford, and her husband was a rising young politician of the day. It +was his duties as member of the General Court that had brought them up +from Newburyport to Boston for that first winter; and I remember that the +evening when we met he was talking of their some time going to Italy that +she might study for imaginative literature certain Italian cities he +named. I have long since ceased to own those cities, but at the moment I +felt a pang of expropriation which I concealed as well as I could; and +now I heartily wish she could have fulfilled that purpose if it was a +purpose, or realized that dream if it was only a dream. Perhaps, +however, that sumptuous and glowing fancy of hers, which had taken the +fancy of the young readers of that day, needed the cold New England +background to bring out all its intensities of tint, all its splendors of +light. Its effects were such as could not last, or could not be farther +evolved; they were the expression of youth musing away from its +environment and smitten with the glories of a world afar and beyond, the +great world, the fine world, the impurpled world of romantic motives and +passions. But for what they were, I can never think them other than what +they appeared: the emanations of a rarely gifted and singularly poetic +mind. I feel better than I can say how necessarily they were the +emanations of a New England mind, and how to the subtler sense they must +impart the pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities which are the +long result of puritanism in the physiognomy of New England life. + +Their author afterwards gave herself to the stricter study of this life +in many tales and sketches which showed an increasing mastery; but they +could not have the flush, the surprise, the delight of a young talent +trying itself in a kind native and, so far as I know, peculiar to it. +From time to time I still come upon a poem of hers which recalls that +earlier strain of music, of color, and I am content to trust it for my +abiding faith in the charm of things I have not read for thirty years. + + + + +V. + +I speak of this one and that, as it happens, and with no thought of +giving a complete prospect of literary Boston thirty years ago. I am +aware that it will seem sparsely peopled in the effect I impart, and I +would have the reader always keep in mind the great fames at Cambridge +and at Concord, which formed so large a part of the celebrity of Boston. +I would also like him to think of it as still a great town, merely, where +every one knew every one else, and whose metropolitan liberation from +neighborhood was just begun. + +Most distinctly of that yet uncitified Boston was the critic Edwin P. +Whipple, whose sympathies were indefinitely wider than his traditions. +He was a most generous lover of all that was excellent in literature; and +though I suppose we should call him an old-fashioned critic now, I +suspect it would be with no distinct sense of what is newer fashioned. +He was certainly as friendly to what promised well in the younger men as +he was to what was done well in their elders; and there was no one +writing in his day whose virtues failed of his recognition, though it +might happen that his foibles would escape Whipple's censure. He wrote +strenuously and of course conscientiously; his point of view was solely +and always that which enabled him best to discern qualities. I doubt if +he had any theory of criticism except to find out what was good in an +author and praise it; and he rather blamed what was ethically bad than +what was aesthetically bad. In this he was strictly of New England, and +he was of New England in a certain general intelligence, which constantly +grew with an interrogative habit of mind. + +He liked to talk to you of what he had found characteristic in your work, +to analyze you to yourself; and the very modesty of the man, which made +such a study impersonal as far as he was concerned, sometimes rendered +him insensible to the sufferings of his subject. He had a keen +perception of humor in others, but he had very little humor; he had a +love of the beautiful in literature which was perhaps sometimes greater +than his sense of it. + +I write from a cursory acquaintance with his work, not recently renewed. +Of the presence of the man I have a vivider remembrance: a slight, short, +ecclesiasticized figure in black; with a white neckcloth and a silk hat +of strict decorum, and between the two a square face with square +features, intensified in their regard by a pair of very large glasses, +and the prominent, myopic eyes staring through them. He was a type of +out-dated New England scholarship in these aspects, but in the hospitable +qualities of his mind and heart, the sort of man to be kept fondly in the +memory of all who ever knew him. + +Out of the vague of that far-off time another face and figure, as +essentially New En&land as this, and yet so different, relieve +themselves. Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as +far as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized Yankee. +He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking, and he so +became a literary product of a rarer and stranger sort than our +literature had otherwise known. He had gone from Cleveland to London, +with intervals of New York and the lecture platform, four or five years +before I saw him in Boston, shortly after I went there. We had met in +Ohio, and he had personally explained to me the ducatless well-meaning of +Vanity Fair in New York; but many men had since shaken the weary hand of +Artemus Ward when I grasped it one day in front of the Tremont Temple. +He did not recognize me, but he gave me at once a greeting of great +impersonal cordiality, with "How do you do? When did you come?" and +other questions that had no concern in them, till I began to dawn upon +him through a cloud of other half remembered faces. Then he seized my +hand and wrung it all over again, and repeated his friendly demands with +an intonation that was now "Why, how are you; how are you?" for me alone. +It was a bit of comedy, which had the fit pathetic relief of his +impending doom: this was already stamped upon his wasted face, and his +gay eyes had the death-look. His large, loose mouth was drawn, for all +its laughter at the fact which he owned; his profile, which burlesqued. +an eagle's, was the profile of a drooping eagle; his lank length of limb +trembled away with him when we parted. I did not see him again; +I scarcely heard of him till I heard of his death, and this sad image +remains with me of the humorist who first gave the world a taste of the +humor which characterizes the whole American people. + +I was meeting all kinds of distinguished persons, in my relation to the +magazine, and early that winter I met one who remains in my mind above +all others a person of distinction. He was scarcely a celebrity, but he +embodied certain social traits which were so characteristic of literary +Boston that it could not be approached without their recognition. +The Muses have often been acknowledged to be very nice young persons, +but in Boston they were really ladies; in Boston literature was of good +family and good society in a measure it has never been elsewhere. +It might be said even that reform was of good family in Boston; +and literature and reform equally shared the regard of Edmund Quincy, +whose race was one of the most aristocratic in New England. I had known +him by his novel of 'Wensley' (it came so near being a first-rate novel), +and by his Life of Josiah Quincy, then a new book, but still better by +his Boston letters to the New York Tribune. These dealt frankly, in the +old anti-slavery days between 1850 and 1860, with other persons of +distinction in Boston, who did not see the right so clearly as Quincy +did, or who at least let their interests darken them to the ugliness of +slavery. Their fault was all the more comical because it was the error +of men otherwise so correct, of characters so stainless, of natures so +upright; and the Quincy letters got out of it all the fun there was in +it. Quincy himself affected me as the finest patrician type I had ever +met. He was charmingly handsome, with a nose of most fit aquilinity, +smooth-shaven lips, "educated whiskers," and perfect glasses; his manner +was beautiful, his voice delightful, when at our first meeting he made me +his reproaches in terms of lovely kindness for having used in my +'Venetian Life' the Briticism 'directly' for 'as soon as.' + +Lowell once told me that Quincy had never had any calling or profession, +because when he found himself in the enjoyment of a moderate income on +leaving college, he decided to be simply a gentleman. He was too much of +a man to be merely that, and he was an abolitionist, a journalist, and +for conscience' sake a satirist. Of that political mood of society which +he satirized was an eminent man whom it was also my good fortune to meet +in my early days in Boston; and if his great sweetness and kindness had +not instantly won my liking, I should still have been glad of the glimpse +of the older and statelier Boston which my slight acquaintance with +George Ticknor gave me. The historian of Spanish literature, the friend +and biographer of Prescott, and a leading figure of the intellectual +society of an epoch already closed, dwelt in the fine old square brick +mansion which yet stands at the corner of Park Street and Beacon, though +sunk now to a variety of business uses, and lamentably changed in aspect. +The interior was noble, and there was an air of scholarly quiet and of +lettered elegance in the library, where the host received his guests, +which seemed to pervade the whole house, and which made its appeal to the +imagination of one of them most potently. It seemed to me that to be +master of such circumstance and keeping would be enough of life in a +certain way; and it all lingers in my memory yet, as if it were one with +the gentle courtesy which welcomed me. + +Among my fellow-guests one night was George S. Hillard, now a faded +reputation, and even then a life defeated of the high expectation of its +youth. I do not know whether his 'Six Months in Italy' still keeps +itself in print; but it was a book once very well known; and he was +perhaps the more gracious to me, as our host was, because of our common +Italian background. He was of the old Silver-gray Whig society too, and +I suppose that order of things imparted its tone to what I felt and saw +in that place. The civil war had come and gone, and that order accepted +the result if not with faith, then with patience. There were two young +English noblemen there that night, who had been travelling in the South, +and whose stories of the wretched conditions they had seen moved our host +to some open misgiving. But the Englishmen had no question; in spite of +all, they defended the accomplished fact, and when I ventured to say that +now at least there could be a hope of better things, while the old order +was only the perpetuation of despair, he mildly assented, with a gesture +of the hand that waived the point, and a deeply sighed, "Perhaps; +perhaps." + +He was a presence of great dignity, which seemed to recall the past with +a steadfast allegiance, and yet to relax itself towards the present in +the wisdom of the accumulated years. His whole life had been passed in +devotion to polite literature and in the society of the polite world; and +he was a type of scholar such as only the circumstances of Boston could +form. Those circumstances could alone form such another type as Quincy; +and I wish I could have felt then as I do now the advantage of meeting +them so contemporaneously. + + + + +VII. + +The historian of Spanish literature was an old man nearer eighty than +seventy when I saw him, and I recall of him personally his dark tint, +and the scholarly refinement of his clean-shaven face, which seemed to me +rather English than American in character. He was quite exterior to the +Atlantic group of writers, and had no interest in me as one of it. +Literary Boston of that day was not a solidarity, as I soon perceived; +and I understood that it was only in my quality of stranger that I saw +the different phases of it. I should not be just to a vivid phase if I +failed to speak of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and the impulse of reform which +she personified. I did not sympathize with this then so much as I do +now, but I could appreciate it on the intellectual side. Once, many +years later, I heard Mrs. Howe speak in public, and it seemed to me that +she made one of the best speeches I had ever heard. It gave me for the +first time a notion of what women might do in that sort if they entered +public life; but when we met in those earlier days I was interested in +her as perhaps our chief poetess. I believe she did not care much to +speak of literature; she was alert for other meanings in life, and I +remember how she once brought to book a youthful matron who had perhaps +unduly lamented the hardships of housekeeping, with the sharp demand, +"Child, where is your religion?" After the many years of an acquaintance +which had not nearly so many meetings as years, it was pleasant to find +her, at the latest, as strenuous as ever for the faith of works, and as +eager to aid Stepniak as John Brown. In her beautiful old age she +survives a certain literary impulse of Boston, but a still higher impulse +of Boston she will not survive, for that will last while the city +endures. + + + + +VIII. + +The Cambridge men were curiously apart from others that formed the great +New England group, and with whom in my earlier ignorance I had always +fancied them mingling. Now and then I met Doctor Holmes at Longfellow's +table, but not oftener than now and then, and I never saw Emerson in +Cambridge at all except at Longfellow's funeral. In my first years on +the Atlantic I sometimes saw him, when he would address me some grave, +rather retrorsive civilities, after I had been newly introduced to him, +as I had always to be on these occasions. I formed the belief that he +did not care for me, either in my being or doing, and I am far from +blaming him for that: on such points there might easily be two opinions, +and I was myself often of the mind I imagined in him. + +If Emerson forgot me, it was perhaps because I was not of those qualities +of things which even then, it was said, he could remember so much better +than things themselves. In his later years I sometimes saw him in the +Boston streets with his beautiful face dreamily set, as he moved like one +to whose vision + + "Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn, + Vast images in glimmering dawn, + Half shown, are broken and withdrawn." + +It is known how before the end the eclipse became total and from moment +to moment the record inscribed upon his mind was erased. Some years +before he died I sat between him and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke, at an +'Atlantic Breakfast' where it was part of my editorial function to +preside. When he was not asking me who she was, I could hear him asking +her who I was. His great soul worked so independently of memory as we +conceive it, and so powerfully and essentially, that one could not help +wondering if; after all, our personal continuity, our identity hereafter, +was necessarily trammeled up with our enduring knowledge of what happens +here. His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event, and yet his +character, his personality, his identity fully persisted. + +I do not know, whether the things that we printed for Emerson after his +memory began to fail so utterly were the work of earlier years or not, +but I know that they were of his best. There were certain poems which +could not have been more electly, more exquisitely his, or fashioned with +a keener and juster self-criticism. His vision transcended his time so +far that some who have tired themselves out in trying to catch up with +him have now begun to say that he was no seer at all; but I doubt if +these form the last court of appeal in his case. In manner, he was very +gentle, like all those great New England men, but he was cold, like many +of them, to the new-comer, or to the old-comer who came newly. As I have +elsewhere recorded, I once heard him speak critically of Hawthorne, and +once he expressed his surprise at the late flowering brilliancy of +Holmes's gift in the Autocrat papers after all his friends supposed it +had borne its best fruit. But I recall no mention of Longfellow, or +Lowell, or Whittier from him. At a dinner where the talk glanced upon +Walt Whitman he turned to me as perhaps representing the interest +posterity might take in the matter, and referred to Whitman's public use +of his privately written praise as something altogether unexpected. He +did not disown it or withdraw it, but seemed to feel (not indignantly) +that there had been an abuse of it. + + + + +IX. + +The first time I saw Whittier was in Fields's room at the publishing +office, where I had come upon some editorial errand to my chief. He +introduced me to the poet: a tall, spare figure in black of Quaker cut, +with a keen, clean-shaven face, black hair, and vivid black eyes. It was +just after his poem, 'Snow Bound', had made its great success, in the +modest fashion of those days, and had sold not two hundred thousand but +twenty thousand, and I tried to make him my compliment. I contrived to +say that I could not tell him how much I liked it; and he received the +inadequate expression of my feeling with doubtless as much effusion as he +would have met something more explicit and abundant. If he had judged +fit to take my contract off my hands in any way, I think he would have +been less able to do so than any of his New England contemporaries. +In him, as I have suggested, the Quaker calm was bound by the frosty +Puritanic air, and he was doubly cold to the touch of the stranger, +though he would thaw out to old friends, and sparkle in laugh and joke. +I myself never got so far with him as to experience this geniality, +though afterwards we became such friends as an old man and a young man +could be who rarely met. Our better acquaintance began with some talk, +at a second meeting, about Bayard Taylor's 'Story of Kennett', which had +then lately appeared, and which he praised for its fidelity to Quaker +character in its less amiable aspects. No doubt I had made much of my +own Quaker descent (which I felt was one of the few things I had to be +proud of), and he therefore spoke the more frankly of those traits of +brutality into which the primitive sincerity of the sect sometimes +degenerated. He thought the habit of plain-speaking had to be jealously +guarded to keep it from becoming rude-speaking, and he matched with +stories of his own some things I had heard my father tell of Friends in +the backwoods who were Foes to good manners. + +Whittier was one of the most generous of men towards the work of others, +especially the work of a new man, and if I did anything that he liked, +I could count upon him for cordial recognition. In the quiet of his +country home at Danvers he apparently read all the magazines, and kept +himself fully abreast of the literary movement, but I doubt if he so +fully appreciated the importance of the social movement. Like some +others of the great anti-slavery men, he seemed to imagine that mankind +had won itself a clear field by destroying chattel slavery, and he had. +no sympathy with those who think that the man who may any moment be out +of work is industrially a slave. This is not strange; so few men last +over from one reform to another that the wonder is that any should, not +that one should not. Whittier was prophet for one great need of the +divine to man, and he spoke his message with a fervor that at times was +like the trembling of a flame, or the quivering of midsummer sunshine. +It was hard to associate with the man as one saw him, still, shy, stiff, +the passion of his verse. This imbued not only his antislavery +utterances, but equally his ballads of the old witch and Quaker +persecution, and flashed a far light into the dimness where his +interrogations of Mystery pierced. Whatever doubt there can be of the +fate of other New England poets in the great and final account, it seems +to me that certain of these pieces make his place secure. + +There is great inequality in his work, and I felt this so strongly that +when I came to have full charge of the Magazine, I ventured once to +distinguish. He sent me a poem, and I had the temerity to return it, and +beg him for something else. He magnanimously refrained from all show of +offence, and after a while, when he had printed the poem elsewhere, +he gave me another. By this time, I perceived that I had been wrong, +not as to the poem returned, but as to my function regarding him and such +as he. I had made my reflections, and never again did I venture to pass +upon what contributors of his quality sent me. I took it and printed it, +and praised the gods; ,and even now I think that with such men it was not +my duty to play the censor in the periodical which they had made what it +was. They had set it in authority over American literature, and it was +not for me to put myself in authority over them. Their fame was in their +own keeping, and it was not my part to guard it against them. + +After that experience I not only practised an eager acquiescence in their +wish to reach the public through the Atlantic, but I used all the +delicacy I was master of in bowing the way to them. Sometimes my utmost +did not avail, or more strictly speaking it did not avail in one instance +with Emerson. He had given me upon much entreaty a poem which was one of +his greatest and best, but the proof-reader found a nominative at odds +with its verb. We had some trouble in reconciling them, and some other +delays, and meanwhile Doctor Holmes offered me a poem for the same +number. I now doubted whether I should get Emerson's poem back in time +for it, but unluckily the proof did come back in time, and then I had to +choose between my poets, or acquaint them with the state of the case, and +let them choose what I should do. I really felt that Doctor Holmes had +the right to precedence, since Emerson had withheld his proof so long +that I could not count upon it; but I wrote to Emerson, and asked (as +nearly as I can remember) whether he would consent to let me put his poem +over to the next number, or would prefer to have it appear in the same +number with Doctor Holmes's; the subjects were cognate, and I had my +misgivings. He wrote me back to "return the proofs and break up the +forms." I could not go to this iconoclastic extreme with the +electrotypes of the magazine, but I could return the proofs. I did so, +feeling that I had done my possible, and silently grieving that there +could be such ire in heavenly minds. + + + + +X. + +Emerson, as I say, I had once met in Cambridge, but Whittier never; +and I have a feeling that poet as Cambridge felt him to be, she had her +reservations concerning him. I cannot put these into words which would +not oversay them, but they were akin to those she might have refined upon +in regard to Mrs. Stowe. Neither of these great writers would have +appeared to Cambridge of the last literary quality; their fame was with a +world too vast to be the ,test that her own + + "One entire and perfect crysolite" + +would have formed. Whittier in fact had not arrived at the clear +splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still +from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for +the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' her syntax was such a snare to her that +it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the +assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written +into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, in +transposition of phrases, the text was largely rewritten on the margin of +her proofs. The soul of her art was present, but the form was so often +absent, that when it was clothed on anew, it would have been hard to say +whose cut the garment was of in many places. In fact, the proof-reading +of the 'Atlantic Monthly' was something almost fearfully scrupulous and +perfect. The proofs were first read by the under proof-reader in the +printing-office; then the head reader passed them to me perfectly clean +as to typography, with his own abundant and most intelligent comments on +the literature; and then I read them, making what changes I chose, and +verifying every quotation, every date, every geographical and +biographical name, every foreign word to the last accent, every technical +and scientific term. Where it was possible or at all desirable the proof +was next submitted to the author. When it came back to me, I revised it, +accepting or rejecting the author's judgment according as he was entitled +by his ability and knowledge or not to have them. The proof now went to +the printers for correction; they sent it again to the head reader, who +carefully revised it and returned it again to me. I read it a second +time, and it was again corrected. After this it was revised in the +office and sent to the stereotyper, from whom it came to the head reader +for a last revision in the plates. + +It would not do to say how many of the first American writers owed their +correctness in print to the zeal of our proof-reading, but I may say that +there were very few who did not owe something. The wisest and ablest +were the most patient and grateful, like Mrs. Stowe, under correction; +it was only the beginners and the more ignorant who were angry; and +almost always the proof-reading editor had his way on disputed points. +I look back now, with respectful amazement at my proficiency in detecting +the errors of the great as well as the little. I was able to discover +mistakes even in the classical quotations of the deeply lettered Sumner, +and I remember, in the earliest years of my service on the Atlantic, +waiting in this statesman's study amidst the prints and engravings that +attested his personal resemblance to Edmund Burke, with his proofs in my +hand and my heart in my mouth, to submit my doubts of his Latinity. I +forget how he received them; but he was not a very gracious person. + +Mrs. Stowe was a gracious person, and carried into age the inalienable +charm of a woman who must have been very, charming earlier. I met her +only at the Fieldses' in Boston, where one night I witnessed a +controversy between her and Doctor Holmes concerning homoeopathy and +allopathy which lasted well through dinner. After this lapse of time, +I cannot tell how the affair ended, but I feel sure of the liking with +which Mrs. Stowe inspired me. There ,was something very simple, very +motherly in her, and something divinely sincere. She was quite the +person to take 'au grand serieux' the monstrous imaginations of Lady +Byron's jealousy and to feel it on her conscience to make public report +of them when she conceived that the time had come to do so. + +In Francis Parkman I knew much later than in some others a +differentiation of the New England type which was not less +characteristic. He, like so many other Boston men of letters, was of +patrician family, and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons +to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suffering in which he +wrought at what is, I suppose, our greatest history. He wrought at it +piecemeal, and sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head aches +which tormented him, and the disorder of the heart which threatened his +life, allowed him a brief respite for the task which was dear to him. +He must have been more than a quarter of a century in completing it, and +in this time, as he once told me, it had given him a day-laborer's wages; +but of course money was the least return he wished from it. I read the +regularly successive volumes of 'The Jesuits in North America, The Old +Regime in Canada', the 'Wolfe and Montcalm', and the others that went to +make up the whole history with a sufficiently noisy enthusiasm, and our +acquaintance began by his expressing his gratification with the praises +of them that I had put in print. We entered into relations as +contributor and editor, and I know that he was pleased with my eagerness +to get as many detachable chapters from the book in hand as he could give +me for the magazine, but he was of too fine a politeness to make this the +occasion of his first coming to see me. He had walked out to Cambridge, +where I then lived, in pursuance of a regimen which, I believe, finally +built up his health; that it was unsparing, I can testify from my own +share in one of his constitutionals in Boston, many years later. + +His experience in laying the groundwork for his history, and his +researches in making it thorough, were such as to have liberated him to +the knowledge of other manners and ideals, but he remained strictly a +Bostonian, and as immutably of the Boston social and literary faith as +any I knew in that capital of accomplished facts. He had lived like an +Indian among the wild Western tribes; he consorted with the Canadian +archaeologists in their mousings among the colonial archives of their +fallen state; every year he went to Quebec or Paris to study the history +of New France in the original documents; European society was open to him +everywhere; but he had those limitations which I nearly always found in +the Boston men, I remember his talking to me of 'The Rise of Silas +Lapham', in a somewhat troubled and uncertain strain, and interpreting +his rise as the achievement of social recognition, without much or at all +liking it or me for it. I did not think it my part to point out that I +had supposed the rise to be a moral one; and later I fell under his +condemnation for certain high crimes and misdemeanors I had been guilty +of against a well-known ideal in fiction. These in fact constituted +lese-majesty of romanticism, which seemed to be disproportionately dear +to a man who was in his own way trying to tell the truth of human nature +as I was in mine. His displeasures passed, however, and my last meeting +with our greatest historian, as I think him, was of unalloyed +friendliness. He came to me during my final year in Boston for nothing +apparently but to tell me of his liking for a book of mine describing +boy-life in Southern Ohio a half-century ago. He wished to talk about +many points of this, which he found the same as his own boylife in the +neighborhood of Boston; and we could agree that the life of the Anglo- +Saxon boy was pretty much the same everywhere. He had helped himself +into my apartment with a crutch, but I do not remember how he had fallen +lame. It was the end of his long walks, I believe, and not long +afterwards I had the grief to read of his death. I noticed that perhaps +through his enforced quiet, he had put on weight; his fine face was full; +whereas when I first knew him he was almost delicately thin of figure and +feature. He was always of a distinguished presence, and his face had a +great distinction. + +It had not the appealing charm I found in the face of James Parton, +another historian I knew earlier in my Boston days. I cannot say how +much his books, once so worthily popular, are now known but I have an +abiding sense of their excellence. I have not read the 'Life of +Voltaire', which was the last, but all the rest, from the first, I have +read, and if there are better American biographies than those of Franklin +or of Jefferson, I could not say where to find them. The Greeley and the +Burr were younger books, and so was the Jackson, and they were not nearly +so good; but to all the author had imparted the valuable humanity in +which he abounded. He was never of the fine world of literature, the +world that sniffs and sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. +But he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American +character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage, +and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he +had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived +the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came +near him without in some measure loving him. To me he was of a most +winning personality, which his strong, gentle face expressed, and a cast +in the eye which he could not bring to bear directly upon his vis-a-vis, +endeared. I never met him without wishing more of his company, for he +seldom failed to say something to whatever was most humane and most +modern in me. Our last meeting was at Newburyport, whither he had long +before removed from New York, and where in the serene atmosphere of the +ancient Puritan town he found leisure and inspiration for his work. +He was not then engaged upon any considerable task, and he had aged and +broken somewhat. But the old geniality, the old warmth glowed in him, +and made a summer amidst the storm of snow that blinded the wintry air +without. A new light had then lately come into my life, by which I saw +all things that did not somehow tell for human brotherhood dwarfish and +ugly, and he listened, as I imagined, to what I had to say with the +tolerant sympathy of a man who has been a long time thinking those +things, and views with a certain amusement the zeal of the fresh +discoverer. + +There was yet another historian in Boston, whose acquaintance I made +later than either Parkman's or Parton's, and whose very recent death +leaves me with the grief of a friend. No ones indeed, could meet John +Codman Ropes without wishing to be his friend, or without finding a +friend in him. He had his likes and his dislikes, but he could have had +no enmities except for evil and meanness. I never knew a man of higher +soul, of sweeter nature, and his whole life was a monument of character. +It cannot wound him now to speak of the cruel deformity which came upon +him in his boyhood, and haunted all his after days with suffering. His +gentle face showed the pain which is always the part of the hunchback, +but nothing else in him confessed a sense of his affliction, and the +resolute activity of his mind denied it in every way. He was, as is well +known, a very able lawyer, in full practice, while he was making his +studies of military history, and winning recognition for almost unique +insight and thoroughness in that direction, though I believe that when he +came to embody the results in those extraordinary volumes recording the +battles of our civil war, he retired from the law in some measure. He +knew these battles more accurately than the generals who fought them, and +he was of a like proficiency in the European wars from the time of +Napoleon down to our own time. I have heard a story, which I cannot +vouch for, that when foreknowledge of his afliiction, at the outbreak of +our civil war, forbade him to be a soldier, he became a student of +soldiership, and wreaked in that sort the passion of his most gallant +spirit. But whether this was true or not, it is certain that he pursued +the study with a devotion which never blinded him to the atrocity of war. +Some wars he could excuse and even justify, but for any war that seemed +wanton or aggressive, he had only abhorrence. + +The last summer of a score that I had known him, we sat on the veranda of +his cottage at York Harbor, and looked out over the moonlit sea, and he +talked of the high and true things, with the inextinguishable zest for +the inquiry which I always found in him, though he was then feeling the +approaches of the malady which was so soon to end all groping in these +shadows for him. He must have faced the fact with the same courage and +the same trust with which he faced all facts. From the first I found him +a deeply religious man, not only in the ecclesiastical sense, but in the +more mystical meanings of the word, and he kept his faith as he kept his +youth to the last. Every one who knew him, knows how young he was in +heart, and how he liked to have those that were young in years about him. +He wished to have his house in Boston, as well as his cottage at York, +full of young men and young girls, whose joy of life he made his own, and +whose society he preferred to his contemporaries'. One could not blame +him for that, or for seeking the sun, wherever he could, but it would be +a false notion of him to suppose that his sympathies were solely or +chiefly with the happy. In every sort, as I knew him, he was fine and +good. The word is not worthy of him, after some of its uses and +associations, but if it were unsmutched by these, and whitened to its +primitive significance, I should say he was one of the most perfect +gentlemen I ever knew. + + + + +ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS: + +Celia Thaxter. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . +Charles F. Browne. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . +Dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces . . . . . . +Edmund Quincy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . +Ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . +Few men last over from one reform to another . . . . . . . . . . . . . . +Francis Parkman. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . +Generous lover of all that was excellent in literature . . . . . . . . . +Got out of it all the fun there was in it. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . +Greeting of great impersonal cordiality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . +Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds. . . . . . . . . +His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event. . . . . . . . . . . . . +Julia Ward Howe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . +Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . +Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave. . . . . . +Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities . . . . . . . . . . . . . +Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . +Pointed the moral in all they did. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . +Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon . . . . . . . . . . . . +Tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him. . . . . . . . . . . +True to an ideal of life rather than to life itself. . . . . . . . . . . +Wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look . . . . . . . . . . . . +When to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast . . . . . . . . . . . +Whitman's public use of his privately written praise . . . . . . . . . . + + + + + +End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Literary Boston, by W. D. Howells + diff --git a/old/whbos10.zip b/old/whbos10.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..d3e5c65 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/whbos10.zip diff --git a/old/whbos11.txt b/old/whbos11.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6e33ff0 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/whbos11.txt @@ -0,0 +1,1347 @@ +The Project Gutenberg Etext of Literary Boston, by W. D. Howells +#43 in our series by William Dean Howells + +Copyright laws are changing all over the world, be sure to check +the laws for your country before redistributing these files!!!!! + +Please take a look at the important information in this header. +We encourage you to keep this file on your own disk, keeping an +electronic path open for the next readers. + +Please do not remove this. + +This should be the first thing seen when anyone opens the book. +Do not change or edit it without written permission. The words +are carefully chosen to provide users with the information they +need about what they can legally do with the texts. + + +**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts** + +**Etexts Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since 1971** + +*****These Etexts Are Prepared By Thousands of Volunteers!***** + +Information on contacting Project Gutenberg to get Etexts, and +further information is included below, including for donations. + +The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3) +organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541 + + + +Title: Literary Boston + +Author: William Dean Howells + +Release Date: August, 2002 [Etext #3396] +[Yes, we are about one year ahead of schedule] +[The actual date this file first posted = 04/01/01] +[Last modified date = 11/22/01] + +Edition: 11 + +Language: English + +The Project Gutenberg Etext of Literary Boston, by W. D. Howells +******This file should be named whbos11.txt or whbos11.zip****** + +Corrected EDITIONS of our etexts get a new NUMBER, whbos12.txt +VERSIONS based on separate sources get new LETTER, whbos11a.txt + +This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net> + +Project Gutenberg Etexts are usually created from multiple editions, +all of which are in the Public Domain in the United States, unless a +copyright notice is included. Therefore, we usually do NOT keep any +of these books in compliance with any particular paper edition. + +We are now trying to release all our books one year in advance +of the official release dates, leaving time for better editing. +Please be encouraged to send us error messages even years after +the official publication date. + +Please note neither this listing nor its contents are final til +midnight of the last day of the month of any such announcement. +The official release date of all Project Gutenberg Etexts is at +Midnight, Central Time, of the last day of the stated month. A +preliminary version may often be posted for suggestion, comment +and editing by those who wish to do so. + +Most people start at our sites at: +http://gutenberg.net +http://promo.net/pg + + +Those of you who want to download any Etext before announcement +can surf to them as follows, and just download by date; this is +also a good way to get them instantly upon announcement, as the +indexes our cataloguers produce obviously take a while after an +announcement goes out in the Project Gutenberg Newsletter. + +http://www.ibiblio.org/gutenberg/etext03 +or +ftp://ftp.ibiblio.org/pub/docs/books/gutenberg/etext03 + +Or /etext02, 01, 00, 99, 98, 97, 96, 95, 94, 93, 92, 92, 91 or 90 + +Just search by the first five letters of the filename you want, +as it appears in our Newsletters. + + +Information about Project Gutenberg (one page) + +We produce about two million dollars for each hour we work. The +time it takes us, a rather conservative estimate, is fifty hours +to get any etext selected, entered, proofread, edited, copyright +searched and analyzed, the copyright letters written, etc. This +projected audience is one hundred million readers. If our value +per text is nominally estimated at one dollar then we produce $2 +million dollars per hour this year as we release fifty new Etext +files per month, or 500 more Etexts in 2000 for a total of 3000+ +If they reach just 1-2% of the world's population then the total +should reach over 300 billion Etexts given away by year's end. + +The Goal of Project Gutenberg is to Give Away One Trillion Etext +Files by December 31, 2001. [10,000 x 100,000,000 = 1 Trillion] +This is ten thousand titles each to one hundred million readers, +which is only about 4% of the present number of computer users. + +At our revised rates of production, we will reach only one-third +of that goal by the end of 2001, or about 4,000 Etexts unless we +manage to get some real funding. + +The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation has been created +to secure a future for Project Gutenberg into the next millennium. + +We need your donations more than ever! + +As of 10/28/01 contributions are only being solicited from people in: +Alabama, Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, +Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, +Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, +New York, North Carolina, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, Pennsylvania, +Rhode Island, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Vermont, +Virginia, Washington, Wisconsin, and Wyoming + +We have filed in about 45 states now, but these are the only ones +that have responded. + +As the requirements for other states are met, +additions to this list will be made and fund raising +will begin in the additional states. Please feel +free to ask to check the status of your state. + +In answer to various questions we have received on this: + +We are constantly working on finishing the paperwork +to legally request donations in all 50 states. If +your state is not listed and you would like to know +if we have added it since the list you have, just ask. + +While we cannot solicit donations from people in +states where we are not yet registered, we know +of no prohibition against accepting donations +from donors in these states who approach us with +an offer to donate. + + +International donations are accepted, +but we don't know ANYTHING about how +to make them tax-deductible, or +even if they CAN be made deductible, +and don't have the staff to handle it +even if there are ways. + +All donations should be made to: + +Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation +PMB 113 +1739 University Ave. +Oxford, MS 38655-4109 + + +The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a 501(c)(3) +organization with EIN [Employee Identification Number] 64-6221541, +and has been approved as a 501(c)(3) organization by the US Internal +Revenue Service (IRS). Donations are tax-deductible to the maximum +extent permitted by law. As the requirements for other states are met, +additions to this list will be made and fund raising will begin in the +additional states. + +We need your donations more than ever! + +You can get up to date donation information at: + +http://www.gutenberg.net/donation.html + + +*** + +If you can't reach Project Gutenberg, +you can always email directly to: + +Michael S. Hart <hart@pobox.com> + +hart@pobox.com forwards to hart@prairienet.org and archive.org +if your mail bounces from archive.org, I will still see it, if +it bounces from prairienet.org, better resend later on. . . . + +Prof. Hart will answer or forward your message. + +We would prefer to send you information by email. + + +*** + + +Example command-line FTP session: + +ftp ftp.ibiblio.org +login: anonymous +password: your@login +cd pub/docs/books/gutenberg +cd etext90 through etext99 or etext00 through etext02, etc. +dir [to see files] +get or mget [to get files. . .set bin for zip files] +GET GUTINDEX.?? [to get a year's listing of books, e.g., GUTINDEX.99] +GET GUTINDEX.ALL [to get a listing of ALL books] + + +**The Legal Small Print** + + +(Three Pages) + +***START**THE SMALL PRINT!**FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS**START*** +Why is this "Small Print!" statement here? You know: lawyers. +They tell us you might sue us if there is something wrong with +your copy of this etext, even if you got it for free from +someone other than us, and even if what's wrong is not our +fault. So, among other things, this "Small Print!" statement +disclaims most of our liability to you. It also tells you how +you may distribute copies of this etext if you want to. + +*BEFORE!* YOU USE OR READ THIS ETEXT +By using or reading any part of this PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm +etext, you indicate that you understand, agree to and accept +this "Small Print!" statement. If you do not, you can receive +a refund of the money (if any) you paid for this etext by +sending a request within 30 days of receiving it to the person +you got it from. If you received this etext on a physical +medium (such as a disk), you must return it with your request. + +ABOUT PROJECT GUTENBERG-TM ETEXTS +This PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext, like most PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etexts, +is a "public domain" work distributed by Professor Michael S. Hart +through the Project Gutenberg Association (the "Project"). +Among other things, this means that no one owns a United States copyright +on or for this work, so the Project (and you!) can copy and +distribute it in the United States without permission and +without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, set forth +below, apply if you wish to copy and distribute this etext +under the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark. + +Please do not use the "PROJECT GUTENBERG" trademark to market +any commercial products without permission. + +To create these etexts, the Project expends considerable +efforts to identify, transcribe and proofread public domain +works. Despite these efforts, the Project's etexts and any +medium they may be on may contain "Defects". Among other +things, Defects may take the form of incomplete, inaccurate or +corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other +intellectual property infringement, a defective or damaged +disk or other etext medium, a computer virus, or computer +codes that damage or cannot be read by your equipment. + +LIMITED WARRANTY; DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES +But for the "Right of Replacement or Refund" described below, +[1] Michael Hart and the Foundation (and any other party you may +receive this etext from as a PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm etext) disclaims +all liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including +legal fees, and [2] YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE OR +UNDER STRICT LIABILITY, OR FOR BREACH OF WARRANTY OR CONTRACT, +INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE +OR INCIDENTAL DAMAGES, EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE +POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGES. + +If you discover a Defect in this etext within 90 days of +receiving it, you can receive a refund of the money (if any) +you paid for it by sending an explanatory note within that +time to the person you received it from. If you received it +on a physical medium, you must return it with your note, and +such person may choose to alternatively give you a replacement +copy. If you received it electronically, such person may +choose to alternatively give you a second opportunity to +receive it electronically. + +THIS ETEXT IS OTHERWISE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS-IS". NO OTHER +WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, ARE MADE TO YOU AS +TO THE ETEXT OR ANY MEDIUM IT MAY BE ON, INCLUDING BUT NOT +LIMITED TO WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A +PARTICULAR PURPOSE. + +Some states do not allow disclaimers of implied warranties or +the exclusion or limitation of consequential damages, so the +above disclaimers and exclusions may not apply to you, and you +may have other legal rights. + +INDEMNITY +You will indemnify and hold Michael Hart, the Foundation, +and its trustees and agents, and any volunteers associated +with the production and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm +texts harmless, from all liability, cost and expense, including +legal fees, that arise directly or indirectly from any of the +following that you do or cause: [1] distribution of this etext, +[2] alteration, modification, or addition to the etext, +or [3] any Defect. + +DISTRIBUTION UNDER "PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm" +You may distribute copies of this etext electronically, or by +disk, book or any other medium if you either delete this +"Small Print!" and all other references to Project Gutenberg, +or: + +[1] Only give exact copies of it. Among other things, this + requires that you do not remove, alter or modify the + etext or this "small print!" statement. You may however, + if you wish, distribute this etext in machine readable + binary, compressed, mark-up, or proprietary form, + including any form resulting from conversion by word + processing or hypertext software, but only so long as + *EITHER*: + + [*] The etext, when displayed, is clearly readable, and + does *not* contain characters other than those + intended by the author of the work, although tilde + (~), asterisk (*) and underline (_) characters may + be used to convey punctuation intended by the + author, and additional characters may be used to + indicate hypertext links; OR + + [*] The etext may be readily converted by the reader at + no expense into plain ASCII, EBCDIC or equivalent + form by the program that displays the etext (as is + the case, for instance, with most word processors); + OR + + [*] You provide, or agree to also provide on request at + no additional cost, fee or expense, a copy of the + etext in its original plain ASCII form (or in EBCDIC + or other equivalent proprietary form). + +[2] Honor the etext refund and replacement provisions of this + "Small Print!" statement. + +[3] Pay a trademark license fee to the Foundation of 20% of the + gross profits you derive calculated using the method you + already use to calculate your applicable taxes. If you + don't derive profits, no royalty is due. Royalties are + payable to "Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation" + the 60 days following each date you prepare (or were + legally required to prepare) your annual (or equivalent + periodic) tax return. Please contact us beforehand to + let us know your plans and to work out the details. + +WHAT IF YOU *WANT* TO SEND MONEY EVEN IF YOU DON'T HAVE TO? +Project Gutenberg is dedicated to increasing the number of +public domain and licensed works that can be freely distributed +in machine readable form. + +The Project gratefully accepts contributions of money, time, +public domain materials, or royalty free copyright licenses. +Money should be paid to the: +"Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation." + +If you are interested in contributing scanning equipment or +software or other items, please contact Michael Hart at: +hart@pobox.com + +[Portions of this header are copyright (C) 2001 by Michael S. Hart +and may be reprinted only when these Etexts are free of all fees.] +[Project Gutenberg is a TradeMark and may not be used in any sales +of Project Gutenberg Etexts or other materials be they hardware or +software or any other related product without express permission.] + +*END THE SMALL PRINT! FOR PUBLIC DOMAIN ETEXTS*Ver.10/04/01*END* + + + + + +This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net> + + + + + +[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the +file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an +entire meal of them. D.W.] + + + + + +LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Literary Boston As I Knew It + +by William Dean Howells + + + +LITERARY BOSTON AS I KNEW IT + +Among my fellow-passengers on the train from New York to Boston, when I +went to begin my work there in 1866, as the assistant editor of the +Atlantic Monthly, was the late Samuel Bowles, of the Springfield +Republican, who created in a subordinate city a journal of metropolitan +importance. I had met him in Venice several years earlier, when he was +suffering from the cruel insomnia which had followed his overwork on that +newspaper, and when he told me that he was sleeping scarcely more than +one hour out of the twenty-four. His worn face attested the misery which +this must have been, and which lasted in some measure while he lived, +though I believe that rest and travel relieved him in his later years. +He was always a man of cordial friendliness, and he now expressed a most +gratifying interest when I told him what I was going to do in Boston. +He gave himself the pleasure of descanting upon the dramatic quality of +the fact that a young newspaper man from Ohio was about to share in the +destinies of the great literary periodical of New England. + + + + +I. + +I do not think that such a fact would now move the fancy of the liveliest +newspaper man, so much has the West since returned upon the East in a +refluent wave of authorship. But then the West was almost an unknown +quality in our literary problem; and in fact there was scarcely any +literature outside of New England. Even this was of New England origin, +for it was almost wholly the work of New England men and women in the +"splendid exile" of New York. The Atlantic Monthly, which was +distinctively literary, was distinctively a New England magazine, though +from the first it had been characterized by what was more national, what +was more universal, in the New England temperament. Its chief +contributors for nearly twenty years were Longfellow, Lowell, Holmes, +Whittier, Emerson, Doctor Hale, Colonel Higginson, Mrs. Stowe, Whipple, +Rose Terry Cooke, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Mrs. Prescott Spofford, Mrs. +Phelps Ward, and other New England writers who still lived in New +England, and largely in the region of Boston. Occasionally there came a +poem from Bryant, at New York, from Mr. Stedman, from Mr. Stoddard and +Mrs. Stoddard, from Mr. Aldrich, and from Bayard Taylor. But all these, +except the last, were not only of New England race, but of New England +birth. I think there was no contributor from the South but Mr. M. D. +Conway, and as yet the West scarcely counted, though four young poets +from Ohio, who were not immediately or remotely of Puritan origin, had +appeared in early numbers; Alice Cary, living with her sister in New +York, had written now and then from the beginning. Mr. John Hay solely +represented Illinois by a single paper, and he was of Rhode Island stock. +It was after my settlement at Boston that Mark Twain, of Missouri, became +a figure of world-wide fame at Hartford; and longer after, that Mr. Bret +Harte made that progress Eastward from California which was telegraphed +almost from hour to hour, as if it were the progress of a prince. +Miss Constance F. Woolson had not yet begun to write. Mr. James +Whitcomb Riley, Mr. Maurice Thompson, Miss Edith Thomas, Octave Thanet, +Mr. Charles Warren Stoddard, Mr. H. B. Fuller, Mrs. Catherwood, +Mr. Hamlin Garland, all whom I name at random among other Western +writers, were then as unknown as Mr. Cable, Miss Murfree, Mrs. Rives +Chanler, Miss Grace King, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris, Mr. Thomas Nelson +Page, in the South, which they by no means fully represent. + +The editors of the Atlantic had been eager from the beginning to discover +any outlying literature; but, as I have said, there was in those days +very little good writing done beyond the borders of New England. If the +case is now different, and the best known among living American writers +are no longer New-Englanders, still I do not think the South and West +have yet trimmed the balance; and though perhaps the news writers now +more commonly appear in those quarters, I should not be so very sure that +they are not still characterized by New England ideals and examples. +On the other hand, I am very sure that in my early day we were +characterized by them, and wished to be so; we even felt that we failed +in so far as we expressed something native quite in our own way. +The literary theories we accepted were New England theories, +the criticism we valued was New England criticism, or, more strictly +speaking, Boston theories, Boston criticism. + +Of those more constant contributors to the Atlantic whom I have +mentioned, it is of course known that Longfellow and Lowell lived in +Cambridge, Emerson at Concord, and Whittier at Amesbury. Colonel +Higginson was still and for many years afterwards at Newport; Mrs. Stowe +was then at Andover; Miss Prescott of Newburyport had become Mrs. +Spofford, and was presently in Boston, where her husband was a member of +the General Court; Mrs. Phelps Ward, as Miss Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, +dwelt in her father's house at Andover. The chief of the Bostonians were +Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, Doctor Holmes, and Doctor Hale. Yet Boston stood +for the whole Massachusetts group, and Massachusetts, in the literary +impulse, meant New England. I suppose we must all allow, whether we like +to do so or not, that the impulse seems now to have pretty well spent +itself. Certainly the city of Boston has distinctly waned in literature, +though it has waxed in wealth and population. I do not think there are +in Boston to-day even so many talents with a literary coloring in law, +science, theology, and journalism as there were formerly; though I have +no belief that the Boston talents are fewer or feebler than before. +I arrived in Boston, however, when all talents had more or less a +literary coloring, and when the greatest talents were literary. These +expressed with ripened fulness a civilization conceived in faith and +brought forth in good works; but that moment of maturity was the +beginning of a decadence which could only show itself much later. New +England has ceased to be a nation in itself, and it will perhaps never +again have anything like a national literature; but that was something +like a national literature; and it will probably be centuries yet before +the life of the whole country, the American life as distinguished from +the New England life, shall have anything so like a national literature. +It will be long before our larger life interprets itself in such +imagination as Hawthorne's, such wisdom as Emerson's, such poetry as +Longfellow's, such prophecy as Whittier's, such wit and grace as +Holmes's, such humor and humanity as Lowell's. + +The literature of those great men was, if I may suffer myself the figure, +the Socinian graft of a Calvinist stock. Their faith, in its varied +shades, was Unitarian, but their art was Puritan. So far as it was +imperfect--and great and beautiful as it was, I think it had its +imperfections--it was marred by the intense ethicism that pervaded the +New England mind for two hundred years, and that still characterizes it. +They or their fathers had broken away from orthodoxy in the great schism +at the beginning of the century, but, as if their heterodoxy were +conscience-stricken, they still helplessly pointed the moral in all they +did; some pointed it more directly, some less directly; but they all +pointed it. I should be far from blaming them for their ethical +intention, though I think they felt their vocation as prophets too much +for their good as poets. Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the +sermon, though not always, nor nearly always. It was in poetry and in +romance that they excelled; in the novel, so far as they attempted it, +they failed. I say this with the names of all the Bostonian group, and +those they influenced, in mind, and with a full sense of their greatness. +It may be ungracious to say that they have left no heirs to their +peculiar greatness; but it would be foolish to say that they left an +estate where they had none to bequeath. One cannot take account of such +a fantasy as Judd's Margaret. The only New-Englander who has attempted +the novel on a scale proportioned to the work of the New-Englanders in +philosophy, in poetry, in romance, is Mr. De Forest, who is of New Haven, +and not of Boston. I do not forget the fictions of Doctor Holmes, or the +vivid inventions of Doctor Hale, but I do not call them novels; and I do +not forget the exquisitely realistic art of Miss Jewett or Miss Wilkins, +which is free from the ethicism of the great New England group, but which +has hardly the novelists's scope. New England, in Hawthorne's work, +achieved supremacy in romance; but the romance is always an allegory, +and the novel is a picture in which the truth to life is suffered to do +its unsermonized office for conduct; and New England yet lacks her +novelist, because it was her instinct and her conscience in fiction to be +true to an ideal of life rather than to life itself. + +Even when we come to the exception that proves the rule, even to such a +signal exception as 'Uncle Tom's Cabin', I think that what I say holds +true. That is almost the greatest work of imagination that we have +produced in prose, and it is the work of a New England woman, writing +from all the inspirations and traditions of New England. It is like +begging the question to say that I do not call it a novel, however; but +really, is it a novel, in the sense that 'War and Peace' is a novel, or +'Madame Flaubert', or 'L'Assommoir', or 'Phineas Finn', or 'Dona +Perfecta', or 'Esther Waters', or 'Marta y Maria', or 'The Return of the +Native', or 'Virgin Soil', or 'David Grieve'? In a certain way it is +greater than any of these except the first; but its chief virtue, or its +prime virtue, is in its address to the conscience, and not its address to +the taste; to the ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense. + +This does not quite say the thing, but it suggests it, and I should be +sorry if it conveyed to any reader a sense of slight; for I believe no +one has felt more deeply than myself the value of New England in +literature. The comparison of the literary situation at Boston to the +literary situation at Edinburgh in the times of the reviewers has never +seemed to me accurate or adequate, and it holds chiefly in the fact that +both seem to be of the past. Certainly New York is yet no London in +literature, and I think Boston was once vastly more than Edinburgh ever +was, at least in quality. The Scotch literature of the palmy days was +not wholly Scotch, and even when it was rooted in Scotch soil it flowered +in the air of an alien speech. But the New England literature of the +great day was the blossom of a New England root; and the language which +the Bostonians wrote was the native English of scholars fitly the heirs +of those who had brought the learning of the universities to +Massachusetts Bay two hundred years before, and was of as pure a lineage +as the English of the mother-country. + + + + +III. + +The literary situation which confronted me when I came to Boston was, +then, as native as could well be; and whatever value I may be able to +give a personal study of it will be from the effect it made upon me as +one strange in everything but sympathy. I will not pretend that I saw it +in its entirety, and I have no hope of presenting anything like a +kinetoscopic impression of it. What I can do is to give here and there a +glimpse of it; and I shall wish the reader to keep in mind the fact that +it was in a "state of transition," as everything is always and +everywhere. It was no sooner recognizably native than it ceased to be +fully so; and I became a witness of it after the change had begun. The +publishing house which so long embodied New England literature was +already attempting enterprises out of the line of its traditions, and one +of these had brought Mr. T. B. Aldrich from New York, a few weeks before +I arrived upon the scene in that dramatic quality which I think never +impressed any one but Mr. Bowles. Mr. Aldrich was the editor of 'Every +Saturday' when I came to be assistant editor of the Atlantic Monthly. +We were of nearly the same age, but he had a distinct and distinguished +priority of reputation, insomuch that in my Western remoteness I had +always ranged him with such elders and betters of mine as Holmes and +Lowell, and never imagined him the blond, slight youth I found him, with +every imaginable charm of contemporaneity. It is no part of the office +which I have intended for these slight and sufficiently wandering +glimpses of the past to show any writer in his final place; and above all +I do not presume to assign any living man his rank or station. But I +should be false to my own grateful sense of beauty in the work of this +poet if I did not at all times recognize his constancy to an ideal which +his name stands for. He is known in several kinds, but to my thinking he +is best in a certain nobler kind of poetry; a serious sort in which the +thought holds him above the scrupulosities of the art he loves and honors +so much. Sometimes the file slips in his hold, as the file must and +will; it is but an instrument at the best; but there is no mistouch in +the hand that lays itself upon the reader's heart with the pulse of the +poet's heart quick and true in it. There are sonnets of his, grave, and +simple, and lofty, which I think of with the glow and thrill possible +only from very beautiful poetry, and which impart such an emotion as we +can feel only + + "When a great thought strikes along the brain + And flushes all the cheek." + +When I had the fortune to meet him first, I suppose that in the employ of +the kindly house we were both so eager to serve, our dignities were about +the same; for if the 'Atlantic Monthly' was a somewhat prouder affair +than an eclectic weekly like 'Every Saturday', he was supreme in his +place, and I was subordinate in mine. The house was careful, in the +attitude of its senior partner, not to distinguish between us, and we +were not slow to perceive the tact used in managing us; we had our own +joke of it; we compared notes to find whether we were equally used in +this thing or that; and we promptly shared the fun of our discovery with +Fields himself. + +We had another impartial friend (no less a friend of joy in the life +which seems to have been pretty nearly all joy, as I look back upon it) +in the partner who became afterwards the head of the house, and who +forecast in his bold enterprises the change from a New England to an +American literary situation. In the end James R. Osgood failed, though +all his enterprises succeeded. The anomaly is sad, but it is not +infrequent. They were greater than his powers and his means, and before +they could reach their full fruition, they had to be enlarged to men of +longer purse and longer patience. He was singularly fitted both by +instinct and by education to become a great publisher; and he early +perceived that if a leading American house were to continue at Boston, +it must be hospitable to the talents of the whole country. He founded +his future upon those generous lines; but he wanted the qualities as well +as the resources for rearing the superstructure. Changes began to follow +each other rapidly after he came into control of the house. Misfortune +reduced the size and number of its periodicals. 'The Young Folks' was +sold outright, and the 'North American Review' (long before Mr. Rice +bought it and carried it to New York) was cut down one-half, so that +Aldrich said, it looked as if Destiny had sat upon it. His own +periodical, 'Every Saturday', was first enlarged to a stately quarto and +illustrated; and then, under stress of the calamities following the great +Boston fire, It collapsed to its former size. Then both the 'Atlantic +Monthly' and 'Every Saturday' were sold away from their old ownership, +and 'Every Saturday' was suppressed altogether, and we two ceased to be +of the same employ. There was some sort of evening rite (more funereal +than festive) the day after they were sold, and we followed Osgood away +from it, under the lamps. We all knew that it was his necessity that had +caused him to part with the periodicals; but he professed that it was his +pleasure, and he said he had not felt so light-hearted since he was a +boy. We asked him, How could he feel gay when he was no longer paying us +our salaries, and how could he justify it to his conscience? He liked +our mocking, and limped away from us with a rheumatic easing of his +weight from one foot to another: a figure pathetic now that it has gone +the way to dusty death, and dear to memory through benefactions unalloyed +by one unkindness. + + + + +IV. + +But when I came to Boston early in 1866, the 'Atlantic Monthly' and +'Harper's' then divided our magazine world between them; the 'North +American Review', in the control of Lowell and Professor Norton, had +entered upon a new life; 'Every Saturday' was an instant success in the +charge of Mr. Aldrich, who was by taste and training one of the best +editors; and 'Our Young Folks' had the field of juvenile periodical +literature to itself. + +It was under the direction of Miss Lucy Larcom and of Mr. J. T. +Trowbridge, who had come from western New York, where he was born, and +must be noted as one of the first returners from the setting to the +rising sun. He naturalized himself in Boston in his later boyhood, and +he still breathes Boston air, where he dwells in the street called +Pleasant, on the shore of Spy Pond, at Arlington, and still weaves the +magic web of his satisfying stories for boys. He merges in their +popularity the fame of a poet which I do not think will always suffer +that eclipse, for his poems show him to have looked deeply into the heart +of common humanity, with a true and tender sense of it. + +Miss Larcom scarcely seemed to change from date to date in the generation +that elapsed between the time I first saw her and the time I saw her +last, a year or two before her death. A goodness looked out of her +comely face, which made me think of the Madonna's in Titian's +"Assumption," and her whole aspect expressed a mild and friendly spirit +which I find it hard to put in words. She was never of the fine world of +literature; she dwelt where she was born, in that unfashionable Beverly +which is not Beverly Farms, and was of a simple, sea-faring, God-fearing +race, as she has told in one of the loveliest autobiographies I know, +"A New England Girlhood." She was the author of many poems, whose number +she constantly enlarged, but she was chiefly, and will be most lastingly, +famed for the one poem, 'Hannah Binding Shoes', which years before my +days in Boston had made her so widely known. She never again struck so +deep or so true a note; but if one has lodged such a note in the ear of +time, it is enough; and if we are to speak of eternity, one might very +well hold up one's head in the fields of asphodel, if one could say to +the great others there, "I wrote Hannah Binding Shoes." Her poem is +very, very sad, as all who have read it will remember; but Miss Larcom +herself was above everything cheerful, and she had a laugh of mellow +richness which willingly made itself heard. She was not only of true New +England stock, and a Boston author by right of race, but she came up to +that city every winter from her native town. + +By the same right and on the same terms, another New England poetess, +whom I met those first days in Boston, was a Boston author. When I saw +Celia Thaxter she was just beginning to make her effect with those poems +and sketches which the sea sings and flashes through as it sings and +flashes around the Isles of Shoals, her summer home, where her girlhood +had been passed in a freedom as wild as the curlew's. She was a most +beautiful creature, still very young, with a slender figure, and an +exquisite perfection of feature; she was in presence what her work was: +fine, frank, finished. I do not know whether other witnesses of our +literary history feel that the public has failed to keep her as fully in +mind as her work merited; but I do not think there can be any doubt but +our literature would be sensibly the poorer without her work. It is +interesting to remember how closely she kept to her native field, and it +is wonderful to consider how richly she made those sea-beaten rocks to +blossom. Something strangely full and bright came to her verse from the +mystical environment of the ocean, like the luxury of leaf and tint that +it gave the narrower flower-plots of her native isles. Her gift, indeed, +could not satisfy itself with the terms of one art alone, however varied, +and she learned to express in color the thoughts and feelings impatient +of the pallor of words. + +She remains in my memories of that far Boston a distinct and vivid +personality; as the authoress of 'Amber Gods', and 'In a Cellar', and +'Circumstance', and those other wild romantic tales, remains the gentle +and somewhat evanescent presence I found her. Miss Prescott was now Mrs. +Spofford, and her husband was a rising young politician of the day. It +was his duties as member of the General Court that had brought them up +from Newburyport to Boston for that first winter; and I remember that the +evening when we met he was talking of their some time going to Italy that +she might study for imaginative literature certain Italian cities he +named. I have long since ceased to own those cities, but at the moment I +felt a pang of expropriation which I concealed as well as I could; and +now I heartily wish she could have fulfilled that purpose if it was a +purpose, or realized that dream if it was only a dream. Perhaps, +however, that sumptuous and glowing fancy of hers, which had taken the +fancy of the young readers of that day, needed the cold New England +background to bring out all its intensities of tint, all its splendors of +light. Its effects were such as could not last, or could not be farther +evolved; they were the expression of youth musing away from its +environment and smitten with the glories of a world afar and beyond, the +great world, the fine world, the impurpled world of romantic motives and +passions. But for what they were, I can never think them other than what +they appeared: the emanations of a rarely gifted and singularly poetic +mind. I feel better than I can say how necessarily they were the +emanations of a New England mind, and how to the subtler sense they must +impart the pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities which are the +long result of puritanism in the physiognomy of New England life. + +Their author afterwards gave herself to the stricter study of this life +in many tales and sketches which showed an increasing mastery; but they +could not have the flush, the surprise, the delight of a young talent +trying itself in a kind native and, so far as I know, peculiar to it. +From time to time I still come upon a poem of hers which recalls that +earlier strain of music, of color, and I am content to trust it for my +abiding faith in the charm of things I have not read for thirty years. + + + + +V. + +I speak of this one and that, as it happens, and with no thought of +giving a complete prospect of literary Boston thirty years ago. I am +aware that it will seem sparsely peopled in the effect I impart, and I +would have the reader always keep in mind the great fames at Cambridge +and at Concord, which formed so large a part of the celebrity of Boston. +I would also like him to think of it as still a great town, merely, where +every one knew every one else, and whose metropolitan liberation from +neighborhood was just begun. + +Most distinctly of that yet uncitified Boston was the critic Edwin P. +Whipple, whose sympathies were indefinitely wider than his traditions. +He was a most generous lover of all that was excellent in literature; and +though I suppose we should call him an old-fashioned critic now, I +suspect it would be with no distinct sense of what is newer fashioned. +He was certainly as friendly to what promised well in the younger men as +he was to what was done well in their elders; and there was no one +writing in his day whose virtues failed of his recognition, though it +might happen that his foibles would escape Whipple's censure. He wrote +strenuously and of course conscientiously; his point of view was solely +and always that which enabled him best to discern qualities. I doubt if +he had any theory of criticism except to find out what was good in an +author and praise it; and he rather blamed what was ethically bad than +what was aesthetically bad. In this he was strictly of New England, and +he was of New England in a certain general intelligence, which constantly +grew with an interrogative habit of mind. + +He liked to talk to you of what he had found characteristic in your work, +to analyze you to yourself; and the very modesty of the man, which made +such a study impersonal as far as he was concerned, sometimes rendered +him insensible to the sufferings of his subject. He had a keen +perception of humor in others, but he had very little humor; he had a +love of the beautiful in literature which was perhaps sometimes greater +than his sense of it. + +I write from a cursory acquaintance with his work, not recently renewed. +Of the presence of the man I have a vivider remembrance: a slight, short, +ecclesiasticized figure in black; with a white neckcloth and a silk hat +of strict decorum, and between the two a square face with square +features, intensified in their regard by a pair of very large glasses, +and the prominent, myopic eyes staring through them. He was a type of +out-dated New England scholarship in these aspects, but in the hospitable +qualities of his mind and heart, the sort of man to be kept fondly in the +memory of all who ever knew him. + +Out of the vague of that far-off time another face and figure, as +essentially New En&land as this, and yet so different, relieve +themselves. Charles F. Browne, whose drollery wafted his pseudonym as +far as the English speech could carry laughter, was a Westernized Yankee. +He added an Ohio way of talking to the Maine way of thinking, and he so +became a literary product of a rarer and stranger sort than our +literature had otherwise known. He had gone from Cleveland to London, +with intervals of New York and the lecture platform, four or five years +before I saw him in Boston, shortly after I went there. We had met in +Ohio, and he had personally explained to me the ducatless well-meaning of +Vanity Fair in New York; but many men had since shaken the weary hand of +Artemus Ward when I grasped it one day in front of the Tremont Temple. +He did not recognize me, but he gave me at once a greeting of great +impersonal cordiality, with "How do you do? When did you come?" and +other questions that had no concern in them, till I began to dawn upon +him through a cloud of other half remembered faces. Then he seized my +hand and wrung it all over again, and repeated his friendly demands with +an intonation that was now "Why, how are you; how are you?" for me alone. +It was a bit of comedy, which had the fit pathetic relief of his +impending doom: this was already stamped upon his wasted face, and his +gay eyes had the death-look. His large, loose mouth was drawn, for all +its laughter at the fact which he owned; his profile, which burlesqued. +an eagle's, was the profile of a drooping eagle; his lank length of limb +trembled away with him when we parted. I did not see him again; +I scarcely heard of him till I heard of his death, and this sad image +remains with me of the humorist who first gave the world a taste of the +humor which characterizes the whole American people. + +I was meeting all kinds of distinguished persons, in my relation to the +magazine, and early that winter I met one who remains in my mind above +all others a person of distinction. He was scarcely a celebrity, but he +embodied certain social traits which were so characteristic of literary +Boston that it could not be approached without their recognition. +The Muses have often been acknowledged to be very nice young persons, +but in Boston they were really ladies; in Boston literature was of good +family and good society in a measure it has never been elsewhere. +It might be said even that reform was of good family in Boston; +and literature and reform equally shared the regard of Edmund Quincy, +whose race was one of the most aristocratic in New England. I had known +him by his novel of 'Wensley' (it came so near being a first-rate novel), +and by his Life of Josiah Quincy, then a new book, but still better by +his Boston letters to the New York Tribune. These dealt frankly, in the +old anti-slavery days between 1850 and 1860, with other persons of +distinction in Boston, who did not see the right so clearly as Quincy +did, or who at least let their interests darken them to the ugliness of +slavery. Their fault was all the more comical because it was the error +of men otherwise so correct, of characters so stainless, of natures so +upright; and the Quincy letters got out of it all the fun there was in +it. Quincy himself affected me as the finest patrician type I had ever +met. He was charmingly handsome, with a nose of most fit aquilinity, +smooth-shaven lips, "educated whiskers," and perfect glasses; his manner +was beautiful, his voice delightful, when at our first meeting he made me +his reproaches in terms of lovely kindness for having used in my +'Venetian Life' the Briticism 'directly' for 'as soon as.' + +Lowell once told me that Quincy had never had any calling or profession, +because when he found himself in the enjoyment of a moderate income on +leaving college, he decided to be simply a gentleman. He was too much of +a man to be merely that, and he was an abolitionist, a journalist, and +for conscience' sake a satirist. Of that political mood of society which +he satirized was an eminent man whom it was also my good fortune to meet +in my early days in Boston; and if his great sweetness and kindness had +not instantly won my liking, I should still have been glad of the glimpse +of the older and statelier Boston which my slight acquaintance with +George Ticknor gave me. The historian of Spanish literature, the friend +and biographer of Prescott, and a leading figure of the intellectual +society of an epoch already closed, dwelt in the fine old square brick +mansion which yet stands at the corner of Park Street and Beacon, though +sunk now to a variety of business uses, and lamentably changed in aspect. +The interior was noble, and there was an air of scholarly quiet and of +lettered elegance in the library, where the host received his guests, +which seemed to pervade the whole house, and which made its appeal to the +imagination of one of them most potently. It seemed to me that to be +master of such circumstance and keeping would be enough of life in a +certain way; and it all lingers in my memory yet, as if it were one with +the gentle courtesy which welcomed me. + +Among my fellow-guests one night was George S. Hillard, now a faded +reputation, and even then a life defeated of the high expectation of its +youth. I do not know whether his 'Six Months in Italy' still keeps +itself in print; but it was a book once very well known; and he was +perhaps the more gracious to me, as our host was, because of our common +Italian background. He was of the old Silver-gray Whig society too, and +I suppose that order of things imparted its tone to what I felt and saw +in that place. The civil war had come and gone, and that order accepted +the result if not with faith, then with patience. There were two young +English noblemen there that night, who had been travelling in the South, +and whose stories of the wretched conditions they had seen moved our host +to some open misgiving. But the Englishmen had no question; in spite of +all, they defended the accomplished fact, and when I ventured to say that +now at least there could be a hope of better things, while the old order +was only the perpetuation of despair, he mildly assented, with a gesture +of the hand that waived the point, and a deeply sighed, "Perhaps; +perhaps." + +He was a presence of great dignity, which seemed to recall the past with +a steadfast allegiance, and yet to relax itself towards the present in +the wisdom of the accumulated years. His whole life had been passed in +devotion to polite literature and in the society of the polite world; and +he was a type of scholar such as only the circumstances of Boston could +form. Those circumstances could alone form such another type as Quincy; +and I wish I could have felt then as I do now the advantage of meeting +them so contemporaneously. + + + + +VII. + +The historian of Spanish literature was an old man nearer eighty than +seventy when I saw him, and I recall of him personally his dark tint, +and the scholarly refinement of his clean-shaven face, which seemed to me +rather English than American in character. He was quite exterior to the +Atlantic group of writers, and had no interest in me as one of it. +Literary Boston of that day was not a solidarity, as I soon perceived; +and I understood that it was only in my quality of stranger that I saw +the different phases of it. I should not be just to a vivid phase if I +failed to speak of Mrs. Julia Ward Howe and the impulse of reform which +she personified. I did not sympathize with this then so much as I do +now, but I could appreciate it on the intellectual side. Once, many +years later, I heard Mrs. Howe speak in public, and it seemed to me that +she made one of the best speeches I had ever heard. It gave me for the +first time a notion of what women might do in that sort if they entered +public life; but when we met in those earlier days I was interested in +her as perhaps our chief poetess. I believe she did not care much to +speak of literature; she was alert for other meanings in life, and I +remember how she once brought to book a youthful matron who had perhaps +unduly lamented the hardships of housekeeping, with the sharp demand, +"Child, where is your religion?" After the many years of an acquaintance +which had not nearly so many meetings as years, it was pleasant to find +her, at the latest, as strenuous as ever for the faith of works, and as +eager to aid Stepniak as John Brown. In her beautiful old age she +survives a certain literary impulse of Boston, but a still higher impulse +of Boston she will not survive, for that will last while the city +endures. + + + + +VIII. + +The Cambridge men were curiously apart from others that formed the great +New England group, and with whom in my earlier ignorance I had always +fancied them mingling. Now and then I met Doctor Holmes at Longfellow's +table, but not oftener than now and then, and I never saw Emerson in +Cambridge at all except at Longfellow's funeral. In my first years on +the Atlantic I sometimes saw him, when he would address me some grave, +rather retrorsive civilities, after I had been newly introduced to him, +as I had always to be on these occasions. I formed the belief that he +did not care for me, either in my being or doing, and I am far from +blaming him for that: on such points there might easily be two opinions, +and I was myself often of the mind I imagined in him. + +If Emerson forgot me, it was perhaps because I was not of those qualities +of things which even then, it was said, he could remember so much better +than things themselves. In his later years I sometimes saw him in the +Boston streets with his beautiful face dreamily set, as he moved like one +to whose vision + + "Heaven opens inward, chasms yawn, + Vast images in glimmering dawn, + Half shown, are broken and withdrawn." + +It is known how before the end the eclipse became total and from moment +to moment the record inscribed upon his mind was erased. Some years +before he died I sat between him and Mrs. Rose Terry Cooke, at an +'Atlantic Breakfast' where it was part of my editorial function to +preside. When he was not asking me who she was, I could hear him asking +her who I was. His great soul worked so independently of memory as we +conceive it, and so powerfully and essentially, that one could not help +wondering if; after all, our personal continuity, our identity hereafter, +was necessarily trammeled up with our enduring knowledge of what happens +here. His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event, and yet his +character, his personality, his identity fully persisted. + +I do not know, whether the things that we printed for Emerson after his +memory began to fail so utterly were the work of earlier years or not, +but I know that they were of his best. There were certain poems which +could not have been more electly, more exquisitely his, or fashioned with +a keener and juster self-criticism. His vision transcended his time so +far that some who have tired themselves out in trying to catch up with +him have now begun to say that he was no seer at all; but I doubt if +these form the last court of appeal in his case. In manner, he was very +gentle, like all those great New England men, but he was cold, like many +of them, to the new-comer, or to the old-comer who came newly. As I have +elsewhere recorded, I once heard him speak critically of Hawthorne, and +once he expressed his surprise at the late flowering brilliancy of +Holmes's gift in the Autocrat papers after all his friends supposed it +had borne its best fruit. But I recall no mention of Longfellow, or +Lowell, or Whittier from him. At a dinner where the talk glanced upon +Walt Whitman he turned to me as perhaps representing the interest +posterity might take in the matter, and referred to Whitman's public use +of his privately written praise as something altogether unexpected. He +did not disown it or withdraw it, but seemed to feel (not indignantly) +that there had been an abuse of it. + + + + +IX. + +The first time I saw Whittier was in Fields's room at the publishing +office, where I had come upon some editorial errand to my chief. He +introduced me to the poet: a tall, spare figure in black of Quaker cut, +with a keen, clean-shaven face, black hair, and vivid black eyes. It was +just after his poem, 'Snow Bound', had made its great success, in the +modest fashion of those days, and had sold not two hundred thousand but +twenty thousand, and I tried to make him my compliment. I contrived to +say that I could not tell him how much I liked it; and he received the +inadequate expression of my feeling with doubtless as much effusion as he +would have met something more explicit and abundant. If he had judged +fit to take my contract off my hands in any way, I think he would have +been less able to do so than any of his New England contemporaries. +In him, as I have suggested, the Quaker calm was bound by the frosty +Puritanic air, and he was doubly cold to the touch of the stranger, +though he would thaw out to old friends, and sparkle in laugh and joke. +I myself never got so far with him as to experience this geniality, +though afterwards we became such friends as an old man and a young man +could be who rarely met. Our better acquaintance began with some talk, +at a second meeting, about Bayard Taylor's 'Story of Kennett', which had +then lately appeared, and which he praised for its fidelity to Quaker +character in its less amiable aspects. No doubt I had made much of my +own Quaker descent (which I felt was one of the few things I had to be +proud of), and he therefore spoke the more frankly of those traits of +brutality into which the primitive sincerity of the sect sometimes +degenerated. He thought the habit of plain-speaking had to be jealously +guarded to keep it from becoming rude-speaking, and he matched with +stories of his own some things I had heard my father tell of Friends in +the backwoods who were Foes to good manners. + +Whittier was one of the most generous of men towards the work of others, +especially the work of a new man, and if I did anything that he liked, +I could count upon him for cordial recognition. In the quiet of his +country home at Danvers he apparently read all the magazines, and kept +himself fully abreast of the literary movement, but I doubt if he so +fully appreciated the importance of the social movement. Like some +others of the great anti-slavery men, he seemed to imagine that mankind +had won itself a clear field by destroying chattel slavery, and he had. +no sympathy with those who think that the man who may any moment be out +of work is industrially a slave. This is not strange; so few men last +over from one reform to another that the wonder is that any should, not +that one should not. Whittier was prophet for one great need of the +divine to man, and he spoke his message with a fervor that at times was +like the trembling of a flame, or the quivering of midsummer sunshine. +It was hard to associate with the man as one saw him, still, shy, stiff, +the passion of his verse. This imbued not only his antislavery +utterances, but equally his ballads of the old witch and Quaker +persecution, and flashed a far light into the dimness where his +interrogations of Mystery pierced. Whatever doubt there can be of the +fate of other New England poets in the great and final account, it seems +to me that certain of these pieces make his place secure. + +There is great inequality in his work, and I felt this so strongly that +when I came to have full charge of the Magazine, I ventured once to +distinguish. He sent me a poem, and I had the temerity to return it, and +beg him for something else. He magnanimously refrained from all show of +offence, and after a while, when he had printed the poem elsewhere, +he gave me another. By this time, I perceived that I had been wrong, +not as to the poem returned, but as to my function regarding him and such +as he. I had made my reflections, and never again did I venture to pass +upon what contributors of his quality sent me. I took it and printed it, +and praised the gods; and even now I think that with such men it was not +my duty to play the censor in the periodical which they had made what it +was. They had set it in authority over American literature, and it was +not for me to put myself in authority over them. Their fame was in their +own keeping, and it was not my part to guard it against them. + +After that experience I not only practised an eager acquiescence in their +wish to reach the public through the Atlantic, but I used all the +delicacy I was master of in bowing the way to them. Sometimes my utmost +did not avail, or more strictly speaking it did not avail in one instance +with Emerson. He had given me upon much entreaty a poem which was one of +his greatest and best, but the proof-reader found a nominative at odds +with its verb. We had some trouble in reconciling them, and some other +delays, and meanwhile Doctor Holmes offered me a poem for the same +number. I now doubted whether I should get Emerson's poem back in time +for it, but unluckily the proof did come back in time, and then I had to +choose between my poets, or acquaint them with the state of the case, and +let them choose what I should do. I really felt that Doctor Holmes had +the right to precedence, since Emerson had withheld his proof so long +that I could not count upon it; but I wrote to Emerson, and asked (as +nearly as I can remember) whether he would consent to let me put his poem +over to the next number, or would prefer to have it appear in the same +number with Doctor Holmes's; the subjects were cognate, and I had my +misgivings. He wrote me back to "return the proofs and break up the +forms." I could not go to this iconoclastic extreme with the +electrotypes of the magazine, but I could return the proofs. I did so, +feeling that I had done my possible, and silently grieving that there +could be such ire in heavenly minds. + + + + +X. + +Emerson, as I say, I had once met in Cambridge, but Whittier never; +and I have a feeling that poet as Cambridge felt him to be, she had her +reservations concerning him. I cannot put these into words which would +not oversay them, but they were akin to those she might have refined upon +in regard to Mrs. Stowe. Neither of these great writers would have +appeared to Cambridge of the last literary quality; their fame was with a +world too vast to be the test that her own + + "One entire and perfect crysolite" + +would have formed. Whittier in fact had not arrived at the clear +splendor of his later work without some earlier turbidity; he was still +from time to time capable of a false rhyme, like morn and dawn. As for +the author of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' her syntax was such a snare to her that +it sometimes needed the combined skill of all the proof-readers and the +assistant editor to extricate her. Of course, nothing was ever written +into her work, but in changes of diction, in correction of solecisms, in +transposition of phrases, the text was largely rewritten on the margin of +her proofs. The soul of her art was present, but the form was so often +absent, that when it was clothed on anew, it would have been hard to say +whose cut the garment was of in many places. In fact, the proof-reading +of the 'Atlantic Monthly' was something almost fearfully scrupulous and +perfect. The proofs were first read by the under proof-reader in the +printing-office; then the head reader passed them to me perfectly clean +as to typography, with his own abundant and most intelligent comments on +the literature; and then I read them, making what changes I chose, and +verifying every quotation, every date, every geographical and +biographical name, every foreign word to the last accent, every technical +and scientific term. Where it was possible or at all desirable the proof +was next submitted to the author. When it came back to me, I revised it, +accepting or rejecting the author's judgment according as he was entitled +by his ability and knowledge or not to have them. The proof now went to +the printers for correction; they sent it again to the head reader, who +carefully revised it and returned it again to me. I read it a second +time, and it was again corrected. After this it was revised in the +office and sent to the stereotyper, from whom it came to the head reader +for a last revision in the plates. + +It would not do to say how many of the first American writers owed their +correctness in print to the zeal of our proof-reading, but I may say that +there were very few who did not owe something. The wisest and ablest +were the most patient and grateful, like Mrs. Stowe, under correction; +it was only the beginners and the more ignorant who were angry; and +almost always the proof-reading editor had his way on disputed points. +I look back now, with respectful amazement at my proficiency in detecting +the errors of the great as well as the little. I was able to discover +mistakes even in the classical quotations of the deeply lettered Sumner, +and I remember, in the earliest years of my service on the Atlantic, +waiting in this statesman's study amidst the prints and engravings that +attested his personal resemblance to Edmund Burke, with his proofs in my +hand and my heart in my mouth, to submit my doubts of his Latinity. I +forget how he received them; but he was not a very gracious person. + +Mrs. Stowe was a gracious person, and carried into age the inalienable +charm of a woman who must have been very, charming earlier. I met her +only at the Fieldses' in Boston, where one night I witnessed a +controversy between her and Doctor Holmes concerning homoeopathy and +allopathy which lasted well through dinner. After this lapse of time, +I cannot tell how the affair ended, but I feel sure of the liking with +which Mrs. Stowe inspired me. There was something very simple, very +motherly in her, and something divinely sincere. She was quite the +person to take 'au grand serieux' the monstrous imaginations of Lady +Byron's jealousy and to feel it on her conscience to make public report +of them when she conceived that the time had come to do so. + +In Francis Parkman I knew much later than in some others a +differentiation of the New England type which was not less +characteristic. He, like so many other Boston men of letters, was of +patrician family, and of those easy fortunes which Clio prefers her sons +to be of; but he paid for these advantages by the suffering in which he +wrought at what is, I suppose, our greatest history. He wrought at it +piecemeal, and sometimes only by moments, when the terrible head aches +which tormented him, and the disorder of the heart which threatened his +life, allowed him a brief respite for the task which was dear to him. +He must have been more than a quarter of a century in completing it, and +in this time, as he once told me, it had given him a day-laborer's wages; +but of course money was the least return he wished from it. I read the +regularly successive volumes of 'The Jesuits in North America, The Old +Regime in Canada', the 'Wolfe and Montcalm', and the others that went to +make up the whole history with a sufficiently noisy enthusiasm, and our +acquaintance began by his expressing his gratification with the praises +of them that I had put in print. We entered into relations as +contributor and editor, and I know that he was pleased with my eagerness +to get as many detachable chapters from the book in hand as he could give +me for the magazine, but he was of too fine a politeness to make this the +occasion of his first coming to see me. He had walked out to Cambridge, +where I then lived, in pursuance of a regimen which, I believe, finally +built up his health; that it was unsparing, I can testify from my own +share in one of his constitutionals in Boston, many years later. + +His experience in laying the groundwork for his history, and his +researches in making it thorough, were such as to have liberated him to +the knowledge of other manners and ideals, but he remained strictly a +Bostonian, and as immutably of the Boston social and literary faith as +any I knew in that capital of accomplished facts. He had lived like an +Indian among the wild Western tribes; he consorted with the Canadian +archaeologists in their mousings among the colonial archives of their +fallen state; every year he went to Quebec or Paris to study the history +of New France in the original documents; European society was open to him +everywhere; but he had those limitations which I nearly always found in +the Boston men, I remember his talking to me of 'The Rise of Silas +Lapham', in a somewhat troubled and uncertain strain, and interpreting +his rise as the achievement of social recognition, without much or at all +liking it or me for it. I did not think it my part to point out that I +had supposed the rise to be a moral one; and later I fell under his +condemnation for certain high crimes and misdemeanors I had been guilty +of against a well-known ideal in fiction. These in fact constituted +lese-majesty of romanticism, which seemed to be disproportionately dear +to a man who was in his own way trying to tell the truth of human nature +as I was in mine. His displeasures passed, however, and my last meeting +with our greatest historian, as I think him, was of unalloyed +friendliness. He came to me during my final year in Boston for nothing +apparently but to tell me of his liking for a book of mine describing +boy-life in Southern Ohio a half-century ago. He wished to talk about +many points of this, which he found the same as his own boylife in the +neighborhood of Boston; and we could agree that the life of the Anglo- +Saxon boy was pretty much the same everywhere. He had helped himself +into my apartment with a crutch, but I do not remember how he had fallen +lame. It was the end of his long walks, I believe, and not long +afterwards I had the grief to read of his death. I noticed that perhaps +through his enforced quiet, he had put on weight; his fine face was full; +whereas when I first knew him he was almost delicately thin of figure and +feature. He was always of a distinguished presence, and his face had a +great distinction. + +It had not the appealing charm I found in the face of James Parton, +another historian I knew earlier in my Boston days. I cannot say how +much his books, once so worthily popular, are now known but I have an +abiding sense of their excellence. I have not read the 'Life of +Voltaire', which was the last, but all the rest, from the first, I have +read, and if there are better American biographies than those of Franklin +or of Jefferson, I could not say where to find them. The Greeley and the +Burr were younger books, and so was the Jackson, and they were not nearly +so good; but to all the author had imparted the valuable humanity in +which he abounded. He was never of the fine world of literature, the +world that sniffs and sneers, and abashes the simpler-hearted reader. +But he was a true artist, and English born as he was, he divined American +character as few Americans have done. He was a man of eminent courage, +and in the days when to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast, he +had the heart to say of the Mysteries, that he did not know. He outlived +the condemnation that this brought, and I think that no man ever came +near him without in some measure loving him. To me he was of a most +winning personality, which his strong, gentle face expressed, and a cast +in the eye which he could not bring to bear directly upon his vis-a-vis, +endeared. I never met him without wishing more of his company, for he +seldom failed to say something to whatever was most humane and most +modern in me. Our last meeting was at Newburyport, whither he had long +before removed from New York, and where in the serene atmosphere of the +ancient Puritan town he found leisure and inspiration for his work. +He was not then engaged upon any considerable task, and he had aged and +broken somewhat. But the old geniality, the old warmth glowed in him, +and made a summer amidst the storm of snow that blinded the wintry air +without. A new light had then lately come into my life, by which I saw +all things that did not somehow tell for human brotherhood dwarfish and +ugly, and he listened, as I imagined, to what I had to say with the +tolerant sympathy of a man who has been a long time thinking those +things, and views with a certain amusement the zeal of the fresh +discoverer. + +There was yet another historian in Boston, whose acquaintance I made +later than either Parkman's or Parton's, and whose very recent death +leaves me with the grief of a friend. No ones indeed, could meet John +Codman Ropes without wishing to be his friend, or without finding a +friend in him. He had his likes and his dislikes, but he could have had +no enmities except for evil and meanness. I never knew a man of higher +soul, of sweeter nature, and his whole life was a monument of character. +It cannot wound him now to speak of the cruel deformity which came upon +him in his boyhood, and haunted all his after days with suffering. His +gentle face showed the pain which is always the part of the hunchback, +but nothing else in him confessed a sense of his affliction, and the +resolute activity of his mind denied it in every way. He was, as is well +known, a very able lawyer, in full practice, while he was making his +studies of military history, and winning recognition for almost unique +insight and thoroughness in that direction, though I believe that when he +came to embody the results in those extraordinary volumes recording the +battles of our civil war, he retired from the law in some measure. He +knew these battles more accurately than the generals who fought them, and +he was of a like proficiency in the European wars from the time of +Napoleon down to our own time. I have heard a story, which I cannot +vouch for, that when foreknowledge of his affliction, at the outbreak of +our civil war, forbade him to be a soldier, he became a student of +soldiership, and wreaked in that sort the passion of his most gallant +spirit. But whether this was true or not, it is certain that he pursued +the study with a devotion which never blinded him to the atrocity of war. +Some wars he could excuse and even justify, but for any war that seemed +wanton or aggressive, he had only abhorrence. + +The last summer of a score that I had known him, we sat on the veranda of +his cottage at York Harbor, and looked out over the moonlit sea, and he +talked of the high and true things, with the inextinguishable zest for +the inquiry which I always found in him, though he was then feeling the +approaches of the malady which was so soon to end all groping in these +shadows for him. He must have faced the fact with the same courage and +the same trust with which he faced all facts. From the first I found him +a deeply religious man, not only in the ecclesiastical sense, but in the +more mystical meanings of the word, and he kept his faith as he kept his +youth to the last. Every one who knew him, knows how young he was in +heart, and how he liked to have those that were young in years about him. +He wished to have his house in Boston, as well as his cottage at York, +full of young men and young girls, whose joy of life he made his own, and +whose society he preferred to his contemporaries'. One could not blame +him for that, or for seeking the sun, wherever he could, but it would be +a false notion of him to suppose that his sympathies were solely or +chiefly with the happy. In every sort, as I knew him, he was fine and +good. The word is not worthy of him, after some of its uses and +associations, but if it were unsmutched by these, and whitened to its +primitive significance, I should say he was one of the most perfect +gentlemen I ever knew. + + + + +ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS: + +Celia Thaxter +Charles F. Browne +Dawn upon him through a cloud of other half remembered faces +Edmund Quincy +Ethical sense, not the aesthetical sense +Few men last over from one reform to another +Francis Parkman +Generous lover of all that was excellent in literature +Got out of it all the fun there was in it +Greeting of great impersonal cordiality +Grieving that there could be such ire in heavenly minds +His remembrance absolutely ceased with an event +Julia Ward Howe +Looked as if Destiny had sat upon it +Man who may any moment be out of work is industrially a slave +Pathos of revolt from the colorless rigidities +Plain-speaking or Rude Speaking +Pointed the moral in all they did +Sometimes they sacrificed the song to the sermon +Tired themselves out in trying to catch up with him +True to an ideal of life rather than to life itself +Wasted face, and his gay eyes had the death-look +When to be an agnostic was to be almost an outcast +Whitman's public use of his privately written praise + + + + +End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Literary Boston +by William Dean Howells + diff --git a/old/whbos11.zip b/old/whbos11.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..399b370 --- /dev/null +++ b/old/whbos11.zip |