Chapter V: Part 5

Ste. Beuve, the most felicitous of critics, wishes to know a man in order to understand his work. I hardly think the demand a fair one; there ought to be enough in every piece of good work to stand for itself, and its maker ought to have the right to be judged at the level that the work represents, rather than in his personal situation, which may often be even mean or ridiculous. Nevertheless, if it be desired, I know of no one more capable of standing the test than William Dean Howells. Perhaps I incline to a certain friendly bias--though possibly even a little extreme in this may be pardoned, for surely no one is more unreasonably carped at than he nowadays,--but he impresses me as corresponding to the ideal of what greatness ought to be; how it ought to look and act. He not only is, but appears, really great. In the personal conduct of his life, too, he confirms what is best in his books. Thus, there are no obscurities to be cleared up; no stories to be heard of egotism, selfishness or greed towards his contemporaries; there is nothing to be passed over in discreet silence. He has an open and generous nature, the most polished yet unassuming manners, and an impressive presence, which is deprived of anything formidable by a rare geniality. In looks, he is about the middle height, rather square built, with a fine, Napoleonic head, which seems capable of containing any thing. I have seen none of his many portraits that does him justice. Few men with his opportunities have done so much, or been so quick to recognize original merit and struggling aspiration. There is no trace in him of uneasiness at the success of others, of envy towards rivals--though, indeed, it would be hard to say, from the very beginning of his career, where any rivals in his own peculiar vein were to be found. Such a largeness of conduct is surely one of the indications of genius, a part of the serene calm which is content to wait for its own triumph and forbear push or artifice to hasten it.

To write of Howells “at home” seems to write particularly of Howells. There is a great deal of the homely and the home-keeping feeling in his books, which has had to do with making him the chosen novelist of the intelligent masses. To one who knows this and his personal habits, it would not seem most proper to look for him in courts or camps, in lively clubs, at dinners, on the rostrum, or in any of the noisier assemblages of men. (Even in his journeyings, in those charming books, “Venetian Life” and “Florentine Mosaics,” he is a saunterer and gentle satirist, without the fire and zeal of the genuine traveler.) All these he enjoys, no one more so, at the proper time and occasion, but one would seek him most naturally in the quiet of his domestic circle. And even there the most fitting place seems yonder desk, where the work awaits him over which but now his thoughtful brow was bending. He is a novelist for the genuine love of it, and not in the way of arrogance or parade, nor even for its rewards, substantial for him though they are. One would say that the greatest of his pleasures was to follow, through all their ramifications, the problems of life and character he sets himself to study. In a talk I had with him some time ago, he said, incidentally: “Supposing there were a fire in the street, the people in the houses would run out in terror or amazement. All finer shades of character would be lost; they would be merged, for the nonce, in the common animal impulse. No; to truly study character, you must study men in the lesser and more ordinary circumstances of their lives; then it is displayed untrammeled.”

This may almost serve as a brief statement of his theory in literature, which has been the cause, of late, of such heated discussion in two hemispheres. And if a man is to be judged by the circumstances of his daily life, surely it is no more than fair to apply the method to its advocate himself. There is nothing cobwebby, no dust of antiquity, nor medievalism, in this study and library; it is almost as modern in effect as Silas Lapham’s famous warehouse of mineral paints. Howells has “let the dead past bury its dead”; he is intensely concerned with the present and the future. The strong light from the windows shows in the cases only a random series of books in ephemeral-looking bindings. There are Baedecker’s guides, dictionaries, pamphlets, and current fiction. The only semblance of a “collection” in which he indulges is some literature of foreign languages, which he uses as his tools. He has done lately the great service of introducing to us many of the masterpieces of modern Italian and Spanish fiction, in his Editor’s Study in _Harper’s Magazine_ also. He was long preparing, and has lately published, a series of papers on the modern Italian poets. He cares nothing for bindings, or the rarities of the bibliophile’s art. The only feeling he is heard to express toward books, as such, is that he does not like to see even the humblest of them abused. In his house you find no noticeable blue china or Chippendale, no trace of the bric-à-brac enthusiasm, of which we had occasion to speak at the home of Aldrich. In his parlor are tables and chairs, perfectly proper and comfortable, but worthy of no attention in themselves. On the walls are some few old paintings from Florence, a pleasing photograph or two, an original water-color by Fortuny, which has a little history, and an engraving after Alma Tadema, presented by the painter to the author. These are a concession to the fine arts, not a surrender to them. Perhaps we may connect this as an indication with the strong moral purpose of his books, his resolute refusal to postpone the essential and earnest in conduct to the soft and decorative. He proposes, at times, as the worldly will have it, ideals that seem almost fantastically impracticable.

I am speaking too much, perhaps, of this latest home, occupied for so brief a time. It is not the only one in which he has ever dwelt. Howells was born in Ohio in 1837. He was the son of a country editor. He saw many hardships in those days, but there was influence enough to have him appointed consul to Venice, under Lincoln. He married, while still consul, a lady of a prominent Vermont Family. The newspapers will have it from time to time that Mrs. Howells is a great critic of and assistant in his works. I shall only say of this, that she is of an agreeable character, and an intelligence and animation that seem fully capable of it. On returning to this country he took up his residence for a while in New York, and brightened the columns of _The Nation_ with some of its earliest literary contributions. He had for some time written poems. These attracted the attention of Lowell, who was editor of _The Atlantic_. He became Mr. Field’s assistant in 1866, when the latter assumed the editorship, and in 1872 succeeded to the chief place, in which he continued till 1881, when he resigned it to be followed by Aldrich. During this time of editorship, he lived mainly at Cambridge, first in a small house he purchased on Sacramento Street, and later, for some years, in one on Concord Avenue, which he built and still owns. This latter was a pleasant, serviceable cottage, a good place to work, but with nothing particularly striking about it. It was there I first saw him, having brought him, with due fear and awe, my first novel, “Detmold.” But how little reason for awe it proved there really was! Nobody was ever more courteous, unaffected and reassuring than he. I remember we took a short walk afterwards, a part of my way homeward. He pretended, as we reached Harvard College, that it would not be safe for me to entertain any opinions differing from his own, on the mooted question of the heavy roof of the new Memorial Hall, since the fate of my manuscript was in his dictatorial hands!

From Cambridge he removed to the pretty suburb of Belmont, some five miles out of Boston, to a house built for him by Mr. Charles Fairchild, on that gentleman’s own estate. This house, called Red Top, from its red roof and the red timothy grass in the neighborhood, was described and pictured some years ago in _Harper’s Magazine_, in Mr. Lathrop’s article on Literary and Social Boston. As I recollect it, this was the most elaborate of his several abodes. There were carried out many of the luxurious decorative features so essential according to the modern ideal. He had a study done in white in the colonial taste, and a square entrance-hall with benches and fire-place; but I fancy, even here, he enjoyed most the wide view from his windows, and his walks in the hilly country. It was the eye of the imagination rather than of the body that with him most sought gratification. He lived on the hillside at Belmont four years. His moving away from there about coincides with the time of his giving up the editing of _The Atlantic_. He went abroad with his family, remained a year, and then returned to Boston. It will be seen that he has not shown much more than the usual American fixity of residence, and perhaps we need not despair of his finally coming to New York, to which many of his later interests would seem to call him.

With his retirement from the burden of editing begins, as many think, a new and larger period in his literary work. I am not to touch upon his original theories of literary art, or to interpret the much talked-of _mot_ on Dickens and Thackeray. As to the latter, I know that so magnanimous and appreciative a nature as his could never have really intended to cast a slur upon exalted merit. He has an intense delight in human life, as it is lived, and not as represented by historians or antiquarians, or colored by conventional or academic tradition of any kind. He is still so young a man and so powerful a genius that it may well be a yet grander period is opening before him. For my own part, I never quite get over the liking for the “Robinson Crusoe” touch, the “once upon a time,” the poem, as it were, in the fiction I read, and I think shall continue to like best of his stories “The Undiscovered Country,” in which the feeling of romance--together with all the reality of life--most prevails. However this may be, I cannot always repress a certain impatience that there should be any who fail to see his extraordinary ability; it seems to me it can only be because there is some veil before their eyes, because they have not put themselves in the way of taking the right point of view. Whether we like it best of all fiction or not, where are we to find another who works with such power? Where, if we deny him the first place, zealously look up all his defects, and take issue with him on a dozen minor points, are we to find another so original and creative a writer?

He writes only in the morning, his work being done conscientiously and with painstaking. After that he devotes himself to his family, to whom he is greatly attached, and of whom he is justly proud. Besides a son, who is to be an architect, there is a daughter, who inclines to the literary taste; and another, a sweet-faced little maid, known to fame through the publication of a series of her remarkable, naïve, childish drawings, in the volume entitled “A Little Girl Among the Old Masters.” Their father is not a voluble talker; he does not aspire to shine; there is little that is Macaulayish, there are few _tours de force_ in his conversation. On the other hand, he has what some one has described as the dangerous trait of being an excellent listener. It might be said of him, as it was of Mme. Récamier, that he listens with _séduction_. He is not bent upon displaying his own resources, but possibly upon penetrating the mind and heart before him. Perhaps this is the natural, receptive mood of the true student of character. And then it is all so gracefully done, with such a sympathy and tact, that when, afterwards, you come to reflect that you have been talking a great deal too much for your own good, there comes, too, with the flush, the reassuring fancy that perhaps, after all, you have done it pretty well. His own conversation I should call marked by sincerity of statement and earnestness in speculation, at the same time that it is brightened by the most genial play of humor. His humor warms like the sunshine; we all know how steely cold may be the brilliancy of mere wit. He is a humorist, I sometimes think, almost before everything else. He takes to the humorists (even those of the broader kind) with a kindred feeling. Both Mark Twain and Warner have been his intimate friends. He wanted to know Stockton and Gilbert before he had met them. In this connection, I may close, apropos of him, with one of the slighter _bons mots_ of Gilbert. On the first visit of that celebrity to this country, in company with his collaborator, Sullivan, he chanced to ask me something about the works of Howells. In reply, I mentioned among others “Their Wedding Journey”--a book that every young couple put into their baggage when starting off on the tour. “Sullivan and I are not such a very young couple,” returned Gilbert, “but I think we’ll have to put one into our baggage, too.”

WILLIAM HENRY BISHOP.

[Mr. Howells now lives in apartments in New York, where he is editor of “The Easy Chair” in _Harper’s Monthly_ and a contributor to various magazines.--EDITORS.]

CHARLES GODFREY LELAND

CHARLES GODFREY LELAND

IN PHILADELPHIA AND LONDON

To describe the home of a homeless man is not over easy. For the last sixteen or eighteen years Mr. Leland has been as great a wanderer as the gypsies of whom he loves to write. During this time he has pitched his tent, so to speak, in many parts of America and Europe and even of the East. He has gone from town to town and from country to country, staying here a month and there a year, and again in some places, as in London and Philadelphia, he has remained several years. But, as he himself graphically says, it is long since he has not had trunks in his bedroom.

However, if to possess a house is to have a home, then Mr. Leland must not be said to be homeless. He owns a three-storied, white-and-green-shuttered, red-brick house with marble steps, of that conventional type which is so peculiarly a feature of Philadelphia--his native town. It is in Locust Street above Fifteenth--one of the eminently respectable and convenient neighborhoods for which Philadelphia is famous, with St. Mark’s Church near at hand and a public school not far off. But besides this respectability which Philadelphians in general hold so dear, Locust Street boasts of another advantage of far more importance to Mr. Leland in particular. Just here it is without the horse-car track which stretches from one end to the other of almost all Philadelphia streets, and hence it is a pleasant, quiet quarter for a literary man. Here Mr. Leland lived for just six months, surrounded by all sorts of quaint ornaments and oddities (though it was then years before the mania for bric-à-brac had set in), and by his books, these including numbers of rare and racy volumes from which he has borrowed so many of the quotations which give an Old World color and piquancy to his writings. It was while he was living in his Locust Street home that his health broke down. His illness was the result of long, almost uninterrupted newspaper work. He had worked on the _Bulletin_ and on New York and Boston papers, and he had edited _Vanity Fair_, _The Continental Monthly_, _Grahams Magazine_ and Forney’s _Press_. In addition to this regular work, he had found time to translate Heine, to write his “Sunshine in Thought,” his “Meister Karl’s Sketch-book,” and his “Breitmann Ballads,” which had made him known throughout the English-speaking world as one of the first living English humorists. But now he was obliged to give up all literary employments, and, having inherited an independent fortune from his father, he was able to shut up his house and go on a pleasure-trip to Europe, where he began the wanderings which have not yet ceased.

Nowadays, therefore, one might well ask, “Where is his home?--in a Philadelphia hotel or lodgings, or at the Langham, in London--in a gypsy tent, or in an Indian wigwam?--on the road, or in the town?” But, _ubi bene, ibi patria_; where a man is happy, there is his country; and his home too, for that matter; and Mr. Leland, if he has his work, is happy in all places and at all times; and furthermore, ever since his health was re-established, he has found or made work where-ever he has been. He is a man who is never idle for a minute, and he counts as the best and most important work of his life that which has occupied him during the last few years. Consequently, paradoxical as it may sound, even in his wanderings he has always been at home. During the eleven years he remained abroad he lived in so many different places it would be impossible to enumerate them all. He spent a winter in Russia; another in Egypt; he summered on the Continent, and in the pretty villages or gay seashore towns of England. At times his principal headquarters were in London, now at the Langham and now at Park Square. It was at this latter residence that he gave Saturday afternoon receptions, at which one was sure to meet the most eminent men and women of the literary and artistic world of London, and which will not soon be forgotten by those who had the pleasure to be bidden to them. The first part of his last book about the gypsies is a pleasant, but still imperfect, guide to his wanderings of this period. There, in one paper, we find him spending charming evenings with the fair Russian gypsies in St. Petersburg; in another, giving greeting to the Hungarian Romanies who played their wild _czardas_ at the Paris Exposition. Or we can follow his peaceful strolls through the English meadows and lanes near Oatlands Park, or his adventures with his not over-respectable but very attractive friends at the Hampton races. One gypsy episode carries him to Aberistwyth, a second to Brighton, a third to London streets or his London study. Thus he tells the tale, as no one else could, of his life on the road.

In December, 1878, he returned to Philadelphia, where he established himself in large and pleasant rooms in Broad Street, not knowing how long he might stay in America, and unwilling, because of this uncertainty, to settle down in his own house. He lived there, however, for four years and a half, travelling but little save in the summer, when, to escape from the burning brick-oven which Philadelphia becomes at that season, he fled to Rye Beach or to the White Mountains, to Mount Desert or to far Campobello, in New Brunswick, where, in the tents almost hidden by the sweet pine woods, he listened to the Algonkin legends which he published in book form three or four years ago. The house in which he made his home for the time being is a large red brick mansion on the left side of Broad Street, between Locust and Walnut streets. His apartments were on the ground floor, and the table at which he worked, writing his Indian book or making the designs for the series of art manuals he was then editing, was drawn close to one of the windows looking out upon the street. There, between the hours of nine and one in the morning, he was usually to be found. From the street one could in passing catch a glimpse of the fine strong head which so many artists have cared to draw, and which Le Gros has etched; of the long gray beard, and of the brown velveteen coat--not that famous coat to which Mr. Leland bade so tender a farewell in his gypsy book, but another, already endeared to him by many a lively recollection of gypsy camps and country fairs. Here there was little quiet to be had. Broad Street is at all times noisy, and it is moreover the favorite route for all the processions, military or political, by torchlight or by daylight, that ever rejoice the hearts of Philadelphia’s children. It is a haunt, too, of pitiless organ-grinders and importunate beggars. Well I remember the wretched woman who set up her stand, and her tuneless organ, but a few steps beyond Mr. Leland’s window, grinding away there day after day, indifferent to expostulations and threats, until at last the civil authorities had to be appealed to. For how much unwritten humor, for how many undrawn designs, she is responsible, who can say? But then, on the other hand, the window had its advantages. Stray gypsies could not pass unseen, and from it friendly tinkers could be easily summoned within. But for this post of observation I doubt if Owen Macdonald, the tinker, would have paid so many visits to Mr. Leland’s rooms, and hence if he would have proved so valuable an assistant in the preparation of the dictionary of _shelta_, or tinker’s talk, a Celtic language lately discovered by Mr. Leland. “Pat” (or Owen) was a genuine tinker, and “no tinker was ever yet astonished at anything.” He never made remarks about the room into which he was invited, but I often wondered what he thought of it, with its piles of books and drawings and papers, and its walls covered with grotesquely decorated placques and strange musical instruments, from a lute of Mr. Leland’s own fashioning to a Chinese mandolin, its mantel-shelf and low book-cases crowded with Chinese and Hindu deities, Venetian glass, Etruscan vases, Indian birch-bark boxes, and Philadelphia pottery of striking form and ornament. It had been but an ordinary though large parlor when Mr. Leland first moved into it, but he soon gave it a character all its own, surrounding himself with a few of his pet household gods, the others with his books being packed away in London and Philadelphia warehouses waiting the day when he will collect them together and set them up in a permanent home.

The reason Mr. Leland remained so long in the Broad Street house was because he was interested in a good work which detained him year after year in Philadelphia. While abroad he had seen and studied many things besides gypsies, and he had come home with new ideas on the subject of education, to which he immediately endeavored to give active expression. His theory was that industrial pursuits could be made a part of every child’s education, and that they must be comparatively easy. The necessity of introducing some sort of hand-work into public school education had long been felt by the Philadelphia School Board, and indeed by many others throughout the country. It had been proved that to teach trades was an impossibility. It remained for Mr. Leland to suggest that the principles of industrial or decorative art could be readily learned by even very young children at the same time that they pursued their regular studies. He laid his scheme before the school directors, and they, be it said to their credit, furnished him with ample means for the necessary experiment. This was so successful, that before the end of the first year the number of children sent to him increased from a mere handful to one hundred and fifty. Before he left America there were more than three hundred attending his classes. It is true that Pestalozzi and Fröbel had already arrived at the same theory of education. But, as Carl Werner has said, Mr. Leland was the first person in Europe or America who seriously demonstrated and proved it by practical experiment.

These classes were held at the Hollingsworth schoolhouse in Locust Street above Broad, but a few steps from where he lived. It is simply impossible not to say a few words here about it, since Mr. Leland was as much at home in the schoolhouse as in his own rooms. Four afternoons every week were spent there. On Tuesdays and Thursdays he himself gave lessons in design to the school children, going from one to the other with an interest and an attention not common even among professional masters. When, after the rounds were made, there were a few minutes to spare--which did not often happen--he went into the next room, where other children were busy under teachers, working out their own designs in wood or clay or leather. I think in many of the grotesques that were turned out from that modeling table--in the frogs and the serpents and sea-monsters twining about vases, and the lizards serving as handles to jars--Mr. Leland’s influence could be easily recognized. On Saturdays he was again there, superintending a smaller class of _repoussé_ workers. In England he had found what could really be done by cold hammering brass on wood, and in America he popularized this discovery. When he first began to teach the children, this sort of work being as yet little known, I remember there was one boy, rather more careless but more businesslike than his fellow-hammerers, who during his summer holidays made over two hundred and eighteen dollars by beating out on placque after placque a few designs (one an Arabic inscription), which he had borrowed from Mr. Leland. But after the children’s class was enlarged and a class was started at the Ladies’ Decorative Art Club established by Mr. Leland, work had to be more careful and original to be profitable. On Mondays the Decorative Art Club engaged Mr. Leland’s time, many of its members meeting to learn design in the Hollingsworth school-rooms, which were larger and better lighted than those in their club-house. This club, which in its second year had no less than two hundred members, also owes its existence entirely to Mr. Leland, who is still its president. When it is remembered that both in the school and in the club he worked from pure motives of interest in his theory and its practical results, and with no other object in view but its ultimate success, the extent of his earnestness and zeal may be measured.

It may be easily understood that this work, together with his literary occupations, left him little time for recreation. But still there were leisure hours; and in the fresh springtime it was his favorite amusement to wander from the city to the Reservoir, with its pretty adjoining wood beyond Camden, or to certain other well-known, shady, flowery gypseries in West Philadelphia or far-out Broad Street, where he knew a friendly _Sarshan?_ (“How are you?”) would be waiting for him. Or else on cold winter days, when sensible Romanies had taken flight to the South or were living in houses, he liked nothing better than to stroll through the streets, looking in at shop-windows; exchanging a few words in their vernacular with the smiling Italians selling chestnuts and fruit at street corners, or stray Slavonian dealers (Slovak or Croat) in mouse- and rat-traps, or with other “interesting varieties of vagabonds”; stopping in bric-à-brac shops and meeting their German-Jew owners with a brotherly “_Sholem aleichem!_” and bargaining with unmistakable familiarity with the ways of the trade; or else, perhaps, ordering tools and materials, buying brass and leather for his classes. Indeed, he was scarcely less constant to Chestnut Street than Walt Whitman or Mr. Boker. But while Walt Whitman in his daily walks seldom went above Tenth Street, Mr. Leland seldom went below it, turning there to go to the Mercantile Library, which he visited quite as often as the Philadelphia Library, of which he has long been a shareholder; while Mr. Boker seemed to belong more particularly to the neighborhood of Thirteenth or Broad Street, where he was near the Union League and the Philadelphia Club. Almost everybody must have known by sight these three men, all so striking in personal appearance. Mr. Leland rarely went out in the evenings. Then he rested and was happy in his large easy chair, with his cigar and his book. There never was such an insatiable reader, not even excepting Macaulay. It was then, and is still, his invariable custom to begin a book immediately after dinner and finish it before going to bed, never missing a line; and he reads everything, from old black-letter books to the latest volume of travels or trash, from Gaboriau’s most sensational novel to the most abstruse philosophical treatise. His reading is as varied as his knowledge.

I have thus dwelt particularly on his life in Philadelphia, because, during the four and a half years he spent there--a long period for him to give to any one place--he had time to fall into regular habits and to lead what may be called a home life; and also because his way of living since he has been back in England has changed but slightly. He now has his headquarters at the Langham. He still devotes his mornings to literary work and many of his afternoons to teaching decorative art. He is one of the directors of the Home Arts Society, which but for him would never have been; Mrs. Jebb, one of its most zealous upholders, having modeled the classes which led to its organization wholly upon his system of instruction, and in coöperation with him. The society has its chief office in the Langham chambers, close to the hotel; there Mr. Leland teaches and works just as he did in the Hollingsworth school-rooms. Lord Brownlow is the president of this association, Lady Brownlow, his wife, taking an active interest in it; and Mr. Walter Besant is the treasurer. Mr. Leland is also the father or founder of the famous Rabelais Club, in which the chair was generally taken by the late Lord Houghton. For amusement, the Philadelphian now has all London, of which he is as true a lover as either Charles Lamb or Leigh Hunt was of old; and for reading purposes he has the British Museum and Mudie’s at his disposal; so in these respects it must be admitted he is better off than he was in Philadelphia. He knows, too, all the near and far gypsy haunts by English wood and wold, and he is certain he will be heartily welcomed to the Derby or any country fair. But he has many friends and admirers in England outside of select gypsy circles. Unfortunately he has lost the two friends with whom he was once most intimate, Prof. E. H. Palmer, the Arabic scholar, having been killed by the Arabs, and Mr. Trubner, the publisher, having died while Mr. Leland was in America. Of his other numerous English acquaintances, he is most frequently with Mr. Walter Besant, the novelist, and Mr. Walter Pollock, the editor of _The Saturday Review_, for whom he occasionally writes a criticism or a special paper. However, despite the many inducements that can be offered him, he goes seldom into society. He prefers to give all his energies to the writing by which he amuses so many readers, and to his good work in the cause of education.

ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL

AT “ELMWOOD”

Unfortunately, Mr. Lowell is not at home. He is in his own country and among his own people; but he is not at Elmwood. For nearly a decade now his friends have ceased to pass under the portal of those great English trees and find him by the chimney-fire, “toasting his toes,” or engaged in less meditative tasks amid the light and shadow of his books. Loss to them has been gain to us; for in the more open life of a man of the world and of affairs, at Madrid and London, the public has seemed to see him more intimately, and has been pleased to feel some share in his honor as a representative American gentleman of what must be called an ageing, if not the old, school. But for lovers of the author, as for his neighbors and acquaintances and his contemporaries in literature, Lowell is indissolubly set in Elmwood, and is not to be thought of elsewhere except as in absence. There, sixty-seven years ago, when Elmwood was but a part of the country landscape of old Cambridge, he was born of an honorable family of the colonial time, and learned his alphabet and accidence, and imbibed from the cultivated and solid company that gathered about his father the simplicity of manners and severe idealism of mind of which he continues the tradition; there, in college days, he “read everything except his text-books,” and with his _æquales_ of the class of 1838 won a somewhat reluctant sonship from a displeased _Alma Mater_; being in his youth, as he once remarked to the rebellious founders of _The Harvard Advocate_, “something of a revolutionist myself”; and it was from there he went out as far as Boston, to begin that legal career which was not to end in the glory of a justice’s wig. And after the early volume of poems was published and a kindly fire had exhausted the edition, and when _The Pioneer_--what a name that was to gather into its frontiersman-stroke Hawthorne, Story, Poe, Very and the brawny Mrs. Browning!--had gone down in the first financial morass, still the pleasant upper room at Elmwood, looking off over the sweep of the Charles and the lines of the horizon-hills, was as far from being the scene of forensic discussion as it was from taking its conversational tone from the ancient clergymen who, with their long pipes, looked down on the poet’s friends from an old panel over the fireplace. The Bar has lost many a deserter to the Muses, and it was a settled thing with the birds of Elmwood--and the place is still a woodland city of them--that although they “half-forgave his being human,” they would not forgive his being a lawyer. So, Lowell kept to his walks in the country and confided the knowledge of his haunts to the readers of his verses, and from the beginning rhymed the nobler human tone with the notes of nature; and he married, and many reminiscences remain, among the men of that day of that brief happiness, one bright episode of which was his Italian journey. The first series of “The Biglow Papers” appeared, and so his literary life began definitely to share in public affairs and to take on the _quasi_-civic character which was to become more and more his distinction, until it should reach its development, on the side of his genius, in the patriotic odes, and its acknowledgment, on the part of the people, in his offices of national trust. Seldom, indeed, has the peculiar privacy of a poet’s life passed by so even and natural a growth into the publicity and dignity of the great citizen’s.

But, in the narrow space of this sketch, one must not crowd the lines; and in the way of biography, of which little can be novel to the reader, it is enough to recall to mind the general course of Lowell’s life; how he founded _The Atlantic_, which was to prove a diary of the contemporary literary age; and in the Lowell Institute first displayed on a true scale the solidity and acuteness of his critical scholarship, and gave material aid to the national cause and the war on slavery, as he had always done, by his brilliant satire, his ambushing humor and more marvelous pathos; and became the Harvard professor, succeeding Longfellow; and after a residence in Leipsic settled again at Elmwood to give fresh books to the world, and to be, perhaps, the most memorable figure in the minds of several generations of Harvard students. Nor can one leave unmentioned the more familiar features of the social life in these years of his second marriage--a life somewhat retired and quiet but filled full of amiability, wit and intellectual delight, led partly in Longfellow’s study, or in the famous Saturday Club, or in the weekly whist meetings, and partly in Elmwood itself. That past lives in tradition and anecdotage, and in it Lowell appears as the life and spirit of the wine, with a conversational play so rich in substance and in allusion that, it is said, one must have heard and seen with his own eyes and ears, before he can realize that what seems the studied abundance and changeableness of his essays is in fact the spontaneity of nature, the mother-tongue of the man.

It will be expected, however, that the writer of this notice will take the reader to the privacy of Elmwood itself, not in this general way, but at some particular time before its owner discontinued his method of fire-side traveling under the care of safe and comfortable household gods, and tempted the real ocean to find an eight-years’ exile. The house--an old-fashioned, roomy mansion, set in a large triangular wooded space, with grassy areas, under the brow of Mount Auburn--has been familiarized through description and picture; and the author himself, of medium height, well set, with a substantial form and a strikingly attractive face, of light complexion, full eyes, mobile and expressive features, with the beard and drooping mustache which are so marked a trait of his picture, and now, like the hair, turning gray,--he, too, is no stranger. Some ten years ago this figure, in the “reefer” which he then wore, was well known in the college yard, giving an impression of stoutness, and almost bluffness, until one caught sight of the face with its half-recognition and good-will to the younger men; and in his own study or on the leafy veranda of the house, one perceived only the simplest elements of unconscious dignity, the frankness of complete cultivation, and the perfect welcome. If one passed into his home at that time he would have found a hall that opened out into large rooms on either hand, the whole furnished in simple and solid fashion, with a look that betokened long inhabitancy by the family; and on the left hand he would have entered the study with its windows overlooking long green levels among the trees on the lawn--for though the estate is not very extensive in this direction, the planting has been such that the seclusion seems as inviolable as in the more distant country. The attachment of its owner to these “paternal acres” is sufficient to explain why when others left Cambridge in summer--and then it is as quiet as Pisa--he still found it “good enough country” for him; but besides this affection for the soil, the landscape itself has a charm that would content a poet. To the rear of this room, or rather of its chimney, for there was no partition, was another, whose windows showed the grove and shrubbery at the back toward the hill; and this view was perhaps the more peaceful.

Here in these two rooms were the usual furnishings of a scholar’s study--tables and easy-chairs, pictures and pipes, the whole lending itself to an effect of lightness and simplicity, with the straw-matting islanded with books and (especially in the further room) strewn with scholar’s litter, from the midst of which one day the poet, in search of “what might be there,” drew from nearly under my feet the manuscript of Clough’s “Amours de Voyage.” The books filled the shelves upon the wall, everywhere, and a library more distinctly gathered for the mere love of literature is not to be found. It is not large as libraries go--some four thousand volumes. To tell its treasures would be to catalogue the best works of man in many languages. Perhaps its foundation-stone, in a sense, is a beautiful copy of the first Shakspeare folio; Lord Vernon’s “Dante” is among the “tallest” volumes, and there are many rare works in much smaller compass. The range in English is perhaps the most sweeping, but the precious part to the bibliophile is the collection, a very rich one, of the old French and other romantic poetry. More interesting in a personal way are the volumes one picks up at random, which are mile-stones of an active literary life--old English romances, where the rivulet is not of the text but of the blue-pencil, the preliminary stage of a trenchant essay on some Halliwell, perhaps; or possibly some waif of a useless task, like a reëdited “Donne,” to whose _manes_ the unpoetic publisher was unwilling to make a financial sacrifice. But the limit is reached. That time in which the scene of this brief description is set, was the last long summer that Lowell spent in Elmwood.

GEORGE E. WOODBERRY.

[Mr. Lowell died August 12, 1891.--EDITORS.]

DONALD G. MITCHELL (IK MARVEL)

DONALD G. MITCHELL (IK MARVEL)

AT “EDGEWOOD”

Mr. Mitchell is eminently an “author at home.” There are many of our popular writers--both citizens and country dwellers--whose environment is a matter of comparative indifference to their readers. But the farmer of Edgewood has taken the public so pleasantly into his confidence, has welcomed them so cordially to his garden, his orchard and his very hearthstone, that--in a literary sense--we are all his guests and inmates. In the consulship of Plancus--as Thackeray would say--we Freshmen, after our pilgrimage to that shrine of liberty, the Judges’ Cave on West Rock, with its kakographic inscription,--“Oposition [_sic_] to tyrants is obedience to God,”--used to turn our steps southward to burn our youthful incense upon the shrine of literature, and see whether the burs had begun to open on the big chestnut trees that fringed Ik Marvel’s domain. In those days the easiest approach was through the little village of Westville, which nestles at the foot of the rock and seems, from a distance, to lay its church-spire, like a white finger, against the purple face of the cliff. The rustic gate at the northern corner of Edgewood, whence a carriage road led to the ridge behind the house, stood then invitingly open, and a printed notice informed the wayfarer that the grounds were free to the public on Wednesday and Saturday afternoons.

Now, as then, the reveries and dreams of Mr. Mitchell’s early books continue to charm the fireside musings of many a college dreamer; and successive generations of Freshmen still find their footsteps tending, in the golden autumn afternoons of first term, toward the Edgewood gates. But nowadays the pilgrim may take the Chapel Street horse-car at the college fence, and after a ten minutes’ ride, dismounting at the terminus of the line and walking a block to westward, he finds himself at the brink of what our geologists call “the New Haven terrace.” Thence the road descends into the water meadows, and, crossing on a new iron bridge the brackish sluice known as West River, leads straight on across a gravelly level, till it strikes, at a right angle, the foot of the Woodbridge hills and the Old Codrington Road (now Forest Street). On this road lies Edgewood, sloping to the east and south, lifted upon a shelf of land above the river plain, while behind it the hill rises steeply to the height of some hundred feet, and shuts off the west with the border of overhanging woods which gives the place its name.

From his library window Mr. Mitchell can look across a little foreground of well-kept dooryard, with blossoming shrubs and vines and bright parterres of flowers set in the close turf; across a hemlock hedge and a grass-bank sloping down to the road; across the road itself and the flat below it, checkered with his various crops, to the spires and roofs and elm-tops of New Haven and the green Fair Haven hills in the eastern horizon. Southward, following the line of the river, he sees the waters of the harbor, bounded by the white lighthouse on its point of rock. Northward is the trap “dyke” or precipice of West Rock, and northeastward, beyond the town, and dim with a violet haze, the sister eminence, East Rock. From the driveway which traverses the ridge behind the homestead the view is still wider and more distinct, taking in the salt marshes through which West River flows down to the bay, the village of West Haven to the south, and, beyond, the sparkling expanse of the Sound and the sandhills of Long Island. Back of the ridge, westward, stretches for miles a region which used to be known to college walkers as “The Wilderness,” from its supposed resemblance to the scene of Grant’s famous campaign: a region of scrubby woodland, intersected with sled roads and cut over every few years for fire-wood: a region--it may be said incidentally--dear to the hunters of the fugacious orchid.

The weather-stained old farmhouse described in “My Farm of Edgewood” made way some dozen years ago for a tasteful mansion of masonry and wood-work. The lower story of this is built of stone taken mostly from old walls upon the farm. The doors and windows have an edging of brick which sets off the prevailing gray with a dash of red. The upper story is of wood. There are a steep-pitched roof with dormer-windows, a rustic porch to the east, a generous veranda to the south, and vines covering the stone. The whole effect is both picturesque and substantial, graceful and homely at once. The front door gives entrance to a spacious hall, flanked upon the south by the double drawing-rooms and upon the north by the library, with its broad, low chimney opening, its book-shelves and easy-chairs, its tables and desk and wide mantel, covered and strewn in careless order with books, photographs, manuscripts, and all the familiar litter of a scholar’s study. At the rear of the hall is the long dining-room, running north and south, its windows giving upon the grassy hillside to the west. A conspicuous feature of this apartment is the full-length portrait, on the end wall, of Mr. Mitchell’s maternal grandfather, painted about the beginning of the century, and representing its subject in the knee-breeches and silk stockings of the period. Half-length portraits of Mr. Mitchell’s grandparents, painted about 1830, by Morse, the electrician, hang upon the side wall of the dining-room, and an earlier portrait of his mother surmounts the library mantel-piece. Mr. Mitchell’s culture, it will be seen, does not lack that ancestral background which Dr. Holmes thinks so important to the New England Brahmin. Three generations of the name adorn the pages of the Yale Triennial. His grandfather, Stephen Mix Mitchell, graduated in 1763, was a Representative and Senator in Congress and Chief Justice of Connecticut. His father, the Rev. Alfred Mitchell, graduated in 1809, was a Congregational minister at Norwich, in which city Mr. Mitchell was born, April 12, 1822. The statement has been made that “Doctor Johns” was a sketch from the Rev. Alfred Mitchell; but this is not true. Mr. Mitchell’s father died when his son was only eight years old, and though his theology was strictly Calvinistic, his personality made no such impression upon the boy as to enable him to reproduce it so many years after. Some features in the character of “Dr. Johns” were suggested by Dr. Hall, of Ellington, at whose once famous school Mr. Mitchell was for some time a pupil. The name of Donaldus G. Mitchell also appears on the Triennial Catalogue for the year 1792 as borne by a great-uncle of the present “Donaldus,” who took his bachelor’s degree in 1841. Mr. Mitchell’s mother was a Woodbridge, and some four years since he completed an elaborate and sumptuously-printed genealogy of that family, undertaken by his brother but left unfinished at his death.

The French windows of the drawing-room open upon the veranda to the south, and this upon a lawny perspective which is at once an example of Mr. Mitchell’s skillful landscape-gardening and a surprise to the stranger, who from the highway has caught only glimpses of sward and shrubbery through the hedge and the fringe of trees. The Edgewood lawn is a soft fold between the instep of the hill and the grassy bank that hangs over the road and carries the hedgerow. It is not very extensive, but the plantations of evergreens and other trees on either side are so artfully disposed, advancing here in capes and retiring there in bays and recesses, that the eye is lured along a seemingly interminable vista of gentle swales and undulations, bordered by richly-varied foliage, along the hillside farms beyond, and far into the heart of the south. Here and there on the steep slope to the right, and high above the lawn itself, are coppices of birch, hazel, alder, dogwood and other native shrubs, brought together years ago and protected by little enclosures, but now grown into considerable trees. North of the house is the neatly-kept garden, with its beds of vegetables and flowers, its rows of currant and gooseberry bushes, its box-edged alleys, and back of all a tall hedge of hemlock, clipped to a dense, smooth wall of dark green, starred with the lighter needles of this year’s growth. Mr. Mitchell tells, with a pardonable pride, how he brought from the woods, in two baskets, all the hemlocks which compose this beautiful screen. He has two workshops,--his library and his garden; and of the two he evidently loves the latter best, and works there every day before breakfast in the cool hours of the morning.

Edgewood has been identified with its present owner for a generation. He was not always a farmer; but farming was his early passion, and after several years of writing and wandering, he settled down here in 1855 and returned to his first love. On leaving college he went to work on his grandfather’s farm near Norwich. He gained at this time the prize of a silver cup from the New York Agricultural Society, for plans of farm buildings. He became a correspondent of _The Albany Cultivator_ (now _The Country Gentleman_), contributing letters from Europe during his first visit abroad, in 1844-6. This was undertaken in search of health. He was threatened with consumption, and winter found him at Torquay in the south of England, suffering from a distressing and persistent cough. From this he was relieved after a violent fit of sea-sickness, while crossing the Channel to the island of Jersey, where he spent half a winter. Another half-winter was passed in tramping about England, and eighteen months on the continent. These experiences of foreign travel furnished the material for his first book, “Fresh Gleanings” (1847). After his return to this country he studied law in New York, but the confinement was injurious to his health, and in 1848 he went abroad a second time, traveling in England and Switzerland and residing for a while in Paris. France was on the eve of a revolution, and Mr. Mitchell’s impressions of the time were recorded in his second book, “The Battle Summer” (1850). Again returning to America, he took up his residence in New York, and issued in weekly numbers “The Lorgnette; or, Studies of the Town, by an Opera-Goer.” This was a series of satirical sketches, something after the plan of Irving’s “Salmagundi” papers. They were signed by an assumed name, and even the publisher was not in the secret of their authorship. The intermediary in the business was William Henry Huntington, who lately died in Paris, and who was known for many years to all Americans sojourning in the French capital as an accomplished gentleman and man of letters. The “Lorgnette” provoked much comment, and among Mr. Mitchell’s collection of letters are many from his publisher, detailing the guesses of eminent persons who called at his shop to ascertain the authorship.