The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I

by William James Stillman

CHAPTER XII

CAMBRIDGE

I gave up my studio in New York and went to Boston, and, my commissions executed, moved from there to Cambridge, where I made my home, returning thenceforward to the Adirondacks in the late summer and autumn of every year while I remained in America. The following springtime I spent making studies in that classic neighborhood, especially in a favorite haunt of Lowell's,—the "Waverley Oaks,"—a curious group of large white oaks, which had taken root some hundreds of years ago on the foot of a moraine of one of the offsets of the great glacier which, countless thousands of years ago, had covered New England. They were beautiful trees and greatly beloved by Lowell, for whom I painted the principal group, with Beaver Brook, another of his favorite studies, and he lying by its bank in the foreground, a little full-length portrait, not the length of my finger. I painted also a similar portrait of Longfellow, under the most beautiful of the oaks, on an eight-by-ten-inch canvas. It was a good portrait, but Lowell deterred me from finishing it as I wished, saying that if I touched it again I should destroy the likeness. I am half inclined to think that his insistence was mainly intended to abbreviate the martyrdom of Longfellow, whom I conducted every day to the Oaks, to insure pre-Raphaelite fidelity, making him sit on a huge boulder under the tree and even forgetting to carry a cushion for him, so that he sat on the bare stone until at last the discomfort was evident to me, when I folded my coat to cushion his stone seat. So kindly was his nature that he had submitted to the inconvenience with the docility and delicacy of a child, without a sign of impatience.

This absolute unselfishness and extreme consideration for others was characteristic of the man. I saw much of him in the years following, and found in him the most exquisitely refined and gentle nature I have ever known,—one to which a brutal or inconsiderate act was positive pain, and any aggression on the least creature, cause of intense indignation. My recollection of his condescension to my demands on his time and physical comfort remain in my memory as the highest expression of his social beneficence. Longfellow was not expansive, nor do I remember his ever becoming enthusiastic over anything or anybody. One who knew nothing of his domestic life might have fancied that he was cold, and certainly he did not possess that social magnetism which made Lowell the loadstone of so many hearts, and made the exercise of that attraction necessary to his own enjoyment of existence. Longfellow adored his wife and children; but beyond that circle, it seemed to me, he had no imperious longing to know or be known. He had likes and dislikes; but so far as I understood him, no strong antipathies or ardent friendships. He had warm friendships for Lowell, the Nortons, and Agassiz, for example, but I think he had but a mild regard for Emerson, and I remember his saying one day that Emerson used his friends like lemons,—squeezing them till they were dry, and then throwing them away. This showed that he misunderstood Emerson, but perhaps intelligibly, for Longfellow had few of those qualities which interested Emerson, and there could not have been much in common to both. Emerson liked men who gave him problems to solve,—something to learn,—while Longfellow was transparent, limpid as a clear spring reflecting the sky and showing all that was in its depths; and to Emerson he offered no problem. I never saw him angry but once, and that was at his next-door neighbor shooting at a robin in a cherry-tree that stood near the boundary between the two gardens. The small shot carried over and rattled about us where we sat on the verandah of the old Washington house, but showed the avicidal intent, and Longfellow went off at once to protest against the barbarity, not at all indignant at the personal danger, if he thought of any.

His adoration of his wife was fully justified, for rarely have I seen a woman in whom a Juno-like dignity and serenity were so wedded to personal beauty and to the fine culture of brain and heart, which commanded reverence from the most ordinary acquaintance, as in her. No one who had seen her at home could ever forget the splendid vision, and the last time I ever saw her, so far as I remember, was in summer time, when she and her two daughters, all in white muslin, like creatures of another world, evanescent, translucent, stood in the doorway to say good-by to me. In the same costume, a little later, she met death. She was making impressions in sealing-wax, to amuse her daughters, when a flaming drop fell on the inflammable stuff, and in an instant she was in flames, burned to death before help could come. It was then that they found that Longfellow was not the cold man they had generally believed him. He never recovered from the bereavement, and shortly after he became a Spiritualist, and, until he in his glad turn passed the gates of death, he lived in what he knew to be the light of her presence. And certainly if such a thing as communion across that grim threshold can be, this was the occasion which made it possible. There was something angelic about them both, even in this life,—a natural innocence and large beneficence and equanimity which, in the chance and contradiction of life, could rarely be found in wedded state.

One of the most notable personages of that little world, whom I knew in connection with Longfellow, was his brother-in-law,—Thomas G. Appleton,—a most distinguished amateur of art; a subtle, if sometimes vagarious, critic, poet, and thinker: the wit to whom most of the clever things said in Boston came naturally in time to be attributed. The famous saying that "Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris," is generally supposed to be his, though Oliver Wendell Holmes told me one day that he himself was really the author of it; but, if a keen witticism was floating about fatherless in the Boston circles it drifted to Tom Appleton as putative parent. His, too, was a kindly nature, and many a rising artist found his way to a larger recognition by Appleton's unobtrusive aid. He, like Longfellow, was a sincere Spiritualist. One of the most remarkable of this group of men was Professor Peirce, mathematician, of whose flights into the higher regions of the science of numbers and quantities many interesting things were told. He had written a book to show, if I remember right after so many years, that the square root of minus one was a right angle

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which was said to have been read only by a mathematician who presided over an observatory in the Ural Mountains. He had an extraordinary power of making his abstruse results clear to the ordinary intellect, and was in various directions a brilliant conversationalist. One day, going into Boston in the omnibus with him, I questioned him as to the famous problem. To my astonishment he went through a demonstration adapted to my intelligence which made me understand the nature of the substitution and the solution before our half hour's transit was ended. I did not understand the mathematical statement, but he put it in common-sense terms, which I apprehended perfectly, though I never could repeat them.

My Adirondack experiences and studies having excited the desire on the part of several Cambridge friends to visit the Wilderness, I made up a party which comprised Lowell and his two nephews, Charles and James Lowell (two splendid young New Englanders afterwards killed during the Civil War), Dr. Estes Howe, Lowell's brother-in-law, and John Holmes, the brother of Oliver Wendell, considered by many of the Cambridge set the wittier and wiser of the two, but who, being extremely averse to publicity, was never known in literature. We made a flying journey of inspection through the Saranac Lakes and down the Raquette River to Tupper's Lake, and then across a wild and at that day a little explored section to the head of Raquette Lake, and down the Raquette River back to the Saranacs; the party returning home and I back to the headwaters of the Raquette to spend the summer painting. I built a camp on a secluded bay, which still bears my name amongst the men of the section, and there I worked in a solitude sometimes complete and sometimes shared by my guide, who passed his time between the camp and the settlement at Saranac, whence I drew all my supplies beyond those which the lake and the forest furnished us with. The solitude of the Wilderness at that time can be no longer found anywhere in the vast woodland which, much mutilated and scarred by fires and clearings, still covers the district between the springs of the Mohawk and the rivers which empty into the St. Lawrence. There was one settler on the lake, from whom I could, when necessary, get a loaf of bread, but the solitude for nine days out of ten was not broken by a strange footfall. My camp was a shelter of bark, raised on poles, open in front to the morning sun, just sufficing to shed the rain, while my bed was a layer of the branches of the fir-trees that grew around. Trout from the lake, broiled on the coals of the camp-fire, with a piece of bread, was the usual and sufficient fare, though we now and then killed a deer when Steve, my guide, was with me; at other times the dog was my only company, and in this monotonous life I found the most complete content that my experience has given me. Here wolves abounded, but only on one occasion did they attempt to disturb me, which was when I had left by the lake shore a deer we had killed in the morning, and they came at night to steal the meat. Bears were abundant, but even shyer than the wolves; and though we heard, now and then, the cry of a panther (puma), we never saw one.

Here the morbid passion of solitude grew on me. The serene silence was seldom broken save by the cry of an eagle or an osprey, high overhead, the chirping of the chickadee flitting about the camp to find a crumb, or the complaining note of the Canada jay, most friendly of all wild birds, seeking for the scraps of venison we used to throw out for him. No other birds came to us, and one of the most striking features in the Wilderness was the paucity of bird life and voice. As I sat painting, I would see the gray eagle come down, with his long cycloidal swoop, skimming along the surface of the water, and catch, as he passed, the trout that sunned itself on the surface; or the osprey seizing it with his direct plunge into the lake, from which, after a struggle that lasted sometimes a minute, the only sign of his presence being the agitated water, he would emerge with the fish in his claws and sail aloft, hurrying to escape to the forest with his prey lest the eagle, always watching from the upper air, should rob him of his hard-earned booty. Once I saw the eagle make the mighty plunge from far above, the frightened osprey dropping the fish to escape the shock, and the eagle catching it in midair as it fell. The little incidents of woodland life took the place of all other diversions and left no hour void of interest. I broke up the camp only when the autumn was so far advanced that it was uncomfortable to live in the open air. It is difficult for one who has not had the experience to understand the fascination of this absolute solitude, or the impressiveness of the silence, unbroken sometimes through whole days. I had absolutely no desire for human society, and I broke camp with reluctance, to return to my studio at Cambridge.

The next summer the party was formed which led to the foundation of the Adirondack Club, and the excursion it made is commemorated by Emerson in his poem "The Adirondacs." The company included Emerson, Agassiz, Dr. Howe, Professor Jeffries Wyman, John Holmes,—who became as fond as I was of this wild life,—Judge Hoar (later Attorney-General in the cabinet of President Grant), Horatio Woodman, Dr. Binney, and myself. Of this company, as I write, I am the only survivor. I did my best to enroll Longfellow in the party, but, though he was for a moment hesitating, I think the fact that Emerson was going with a gun settled him in the determination to decline. "Is it true that Emerson is going to take a gun?" he asked me; and when I said that he had finally decided to do so, he ejaculated, "Then somebody will be shot!" and would talk no more of going.

Perhaps the final reason, or that which would in any case have indisposed him to join the company, was his want of sympathy with Emerson. Emerson and he were in fact of antagonistic intellectuality, both in the quality of the exquisite courtesy which distinguished them equally, and in the fibre of intellectual working and the quality of mental activity. Longfellow was of the most refined social culture, disciplined to self-control under all circumstances and difficulties; sensitive in the highest degree to the forms of courtesy, and incapable by nature as by training of an act or word which could offend the sensibilities of even a discourteous interlocutor,—capable at worst of an indignant silence, but incapable of invading the personality of another; not serene, but of an invincible tranquillity; with no sympathy for mystery or obscurity; supremely above the general and commonplace by the exquisite refinement to which he carried the expression of what the general and commonplace world felt and thought; remote from roughness in the form or the substance of his thought; in short, the ne plus ultra of refinement as man and poet. Emerson was too serene ever to be discourteous, and was capable of the hottest antagonism without rudeness, and the most intense indignation without quickening his speech or raising his tone; grasping and exhausting with imaginative activity whatever object furnished him with matter for thought, and throwing to the rubbish heap whatever was superficial; indifferent to form or polish if only he could find a diamond; reveling in mystery, and with eyes that penetrated like the X-ray through all obscurities, and found at the bottom of them what there was to find; arrested by no surfaces, inflexible in his devotion to truth, and indifferent to all personalities or artificial conditions of men or things. Nothing but the roots of things, their inmost anatomy, attracted him; he brushed away contemptuously the beauties on which Longfellow spent the tenderness of his character, and threw aside like an empty nutshell the form to which an artist might have given the devotion of his best art, for the art's sake. In his temper there was no patience with shams, little toleration of forms. It would, I should think, be clear to one who was well acquainted with both men, that there was little in common between them beyond culture, but I never heard Emerson speak of Longfellow, and can only judge by induction that he never occupied himself much with him.

We tried also to get Dr. Holmes to join us; but the Doctor was devoted to Boston, and could not have lived long out of its atmosphere, and with the woods and savagery he had no sympathy. He loved his Cambridge friends serenely, Lowell, Agassiz, and Wyman, I think, above others; but he enjoyed himself most of all, and Boston more than any other thing on earth. He was lifted above ennui and discontent by a most happy satisfaction with the rounded world of his own individuality and belongings. Of the three men whom I have personally known in the world who seemed most satisfied with what fate and fortune had made them,—viz., Gladstone, Professor Freeman, and Holmes,—I think Holmes enjoyed himself the most. There was a tinge of dandyism in the Doctor; not enough to be considered a weakness, but enough to show that he enjoyed his personal appearance and was content with what he had become, and this in so delightful a way that one accepted him at once at his own terms. The Doctor stood for Boston as Lowell for Cambridge, the archetype of the Hub. Nobody represented it as he did. Tom Appleton was nearest him, but Tom loved Paris better, and was a "globe-trotter," as often in Europe as in Massachusetts, while the Doctor hardly left the Hub even for a vacation; there was nothing beyond it that was of great import to him. He was the sublimation of Yankee wit as Lowell was of Yankee humor and human nature, and he made of witticism a study; polished, refined, and prepared his "bons mots", and, at the best moment, led the conversation round to the point at which it was opportune to fire them off. He had a large medical knowledge of human nature and intellectual pathology, but I could never realize that he was a physician; I should not have trusted myself to his doctoring. As with Longfellow, his family affections were absorbing, and his love for his son, the present Mr. Justice Holmes, and his pride in him, were very pleasant to see, and they ran on the surface of his nature like his love for Boston; but I could never feel that his feeling for his outside friends was more than a mild, sunny glow of kindliness and vivid intellectual sympathy. Of course I judge him from a difficult standard, that of the Cambridge circle, in which the personal relations were very warm, and especially comparing him with Lowell and the Nortons, with whom friendship was a religion.

Holmes and Lowell were the antitheses of the New England intellect, and this more in their personality than in their writing. If Lowell could have acquired Holmes's respect for his work, he would have left a larger image in the American Walhalla; but he never gave care to the perfection of what he wrote, for his mind so teemed with material that the time to polish and review never came. Holmes, like a true artist, loved the limae labor. He was satisfied, it seemed to me, to do the work of one lifetime and then rest, while Lowell looked forward to a succession of lifetimes all full of work, and one can hardly conceive him as ever resting or caring to stop work. Lowell's was a generous, widely sympathizing nature, from which radiated love for humanity, and the broadest and most catholic helpfulness for every one who asked for his help, with a special fund for his friends. Holmes drew a line around him, within which he shone like a winter sun, and outside of which his care did not extend. The one was best in what he did, the other in what he was. Holmes always seemed to me cynical to the general world; Lowell to have embodied the antique sentiment, "I am a man, and hold nothing human as indifferent to me." Both were adored by those around them, and the adoration kindled Holmes to a warmer reflection to the adorers; Lowell felt it as the earth feels sunshine, which sinks into the fertile soil and bears its fruit in a richer harvest.

Excepting Holmes, Norton, and Longfellow, our company included most of what was most distinct in the world in which we lived, with some who were eminent only in their social relations, and who neither cared to be nor ever became of interest to the general world. The care of arranging the details of the excursion was left to me, and I had, therefore, to precede the company to the Wilderness, and so missed what must have been to the others a very amusing experience. The rumor of the advent of the party spread through the country around Saranac, and at the frontier town where they would begin the journey into the woods the whole community was on the qui vive to see, not Emerson or Lowell, of whom they knew nothing, but Agassiz, who had become famous in the commonplace world through having refused, not long before, an offer from the Emperor of the French of the keepership of the Jardin des Plantes and a senatorship, if he would come to Paris and live. Such an incredible and disinterested love for America and science in our hemisphere had lifted Agassiz into an elevation of popularity which was beyond all scientific or political dignity, and the selectmen of the town appointed a deputation to welcome Agassiz and his friends to the region. A reception was accorded, and they came, having taken care to provide themselves with an engraved portrait of the scientist, to guard against a personation and waste of their respects. The head of the deputation, after having carefully compared Agassiz to the engraving, turned gravely to his followers and said, "Yes, it's him;" and they proceeded with the same gravity to shake hands in their order, ignoring all the other luminaries.

I had in the mean time been into the Wilderness and selected a site for the camp on one of the most secluded lakes, out of the line of travel of the hunters and fisherfolk,—a deep cul de sac of lake on a stream that led nowhere, known as Follansbee Pond. There, with my guide, I built a bark camp, prepared a landing-place, and then returned to Saranac in time to meet the arriving guests. I was unfortunately prevented from accompanying them up the lakes the next morning, because a boat I had been building for the occasion was not ready for the water, and so I missed what was to me of the greatest interest,—the first impressions of Emerson of the Wilderness, absolute nature. I joined them at night of the first day's journey, in a rainstorm such as our summer rarely gives in the mountains, and we made the unique and fascinating journey down the Raquette River together; Agassiz taking his place in my boat, each other member of the party having his own guide and boat.

The scene, like the company, exists no longer. There is a river which still flows where the other flowed; but, like the water that has passed its rapids, and the guests that have gone the way of all those who have lived, it is something different. Then it was a deep, mysterious stream, meandering through unbroken forests, walled up on either side in green shade, the trees of centuries leaning over to welcome and shelter the voyager, flowing silently in great sweeps of dark water, with, at long intervals, a lagoon setting back into the wider forest around, enameled with pond lilies and sagittaria, and the refuge of undisturbed waterfowl and browsing deer. Our lake lay at the head of such a lagoon, a devious outlet of the basin of which the lake occupied the principal expanse, reached through three miles of no-man's route, framed in green hills forest-clad up to their summits. The camp was a shelter of spruce bark, open wide in front and closed at the ends, drawn on three faces of an octohedron facing the fireplace. The beds were made of layers of spruce and other fir branches spread on the ground and covered with the fragrant twigs of the arbor vitae. Two huge maples overhung the camp, and at a distance of twenty feet from our lodge we entered the trackless, primeval forest. The hills around furnished us with venison, and the lake with trout, and there we passed the weeks of the summer heats. We were ten, with eight guides, and while we were camping there we received the news that the first Atlantic cable was laid, and the first message sent under the sea from one hemisphere to the other,—an event which Emerson did not forget to record in noble lines.