Literary Boston of that day revolved around Mr. and Mrs. James T. Fields, at whose house often assembled such distinguished men and women as Emerson, Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Lowell, Anthony Trollope, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Julia Ward Howe. Mr. Fields was the editor of The Atlantic Monthly, and his sense of humour was always a delight.
"A lady came in from the suburbs to see me this morning," he once remarked to me. "'Well, Mr. Fields,' she said, with great impressiveness, 'what have you new in literature to-day? I'm just thusty for knowledge!'"
Your true New Englander always says "thust" and "fust" and "wust," and Mr. Fields had just the intonation—which reminds me somehow—in a roundabout fashion—of a strange woman who battered on my door once after I had appeared in Faust, in Boston, to tell me that "that man Mephisto-fleas was just great!"
It was a wonderful privilege to meet Longfellow. He was never gay, never effusive, leaving these attributes to his talkative brother-in-law, Tom Appleton, who was a wit and a humourist. Indeed, Longfellow was rather noted for his cold exterior, and it took a little time and trouble to break the ice, but, though so unexpressive outwardly, his nature was most winning when one was once in touch with it. His first wife was burned to death and the tragedy affected him permanently, although he made a second and a very successful marriage with Tom Appleton's sister. The brothers-in-law were often together and formed the oddest possible contrast to each other.
Longfellow and I became good friends. I saw him many times and often went to his house to sing to him. He greatly enjoyed my singing of his own Beware. It was always one of my successful encore songs, although it certainly is not Longfellow at his best. But he liked me to sit at the piano and wander from one song to another. The older the melodies, the sweeter he found them. Longfellow's verses have much in common with simple, old-fashioned songs. They always touched the common people, particularly the common people of England. They were so simple and so true that those folk who lived and laboured close to the earth found much that moved them in the American writer's unaffected and elemental poetry. Yet it seems a bit strange that his poems are more loved and appreciated in England than in America, much as Tennyson's are more familiar to us than to his own people. Some years later, when I was singing in London, I heard that Longfellow was in town and sent him a box. He and Tom Appleton, who was with him, came behind the scenes between the acts to see me and, my mother being with me, both were invited into my dressing-room. In the London theatres there are women, generally advanced in years, who assist the prima donna or actress to dress. These do not exist in American theatres. I had a maid, of course, but there was this woman of the theatre, also, a particularly ordinary creature who contributed nothing to the gaiety of nations and who, indeed, rarely showed feeling of any sort. I happened to say to her:
"Perkins, I am going to see Mr. Longfellow."
Her face became absolutely transfigured.
"Oh, Miss," she cried in a tone of awe and curtseying to his name, "you don't mean 'im that wrote Tell me not in mournful numbers? Oh, Miss! 'im!"
Lowell I knew only slightly, yet his distinguished and distinctive personality made a great impression on me. Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a blond, curly-headed young man, whose later prosperity greatly interfered with his ability, I first met about this same time. He was too successful too young, and it stultified his gifts, as being successful too young usually does stultify the natural gifts of anybody. On one occasion I met Anthony Trollope at the Fields', the English novelist whose works were then more or less in vogue. He had just come from England and was filled with conceit. English people of that time were incredibly insular and uninformed about us, and Mr. Trollope knew nothing of America, and did not seem to want to know anything. Certainly, English people when they are not thoroughbred can be very common! Trollope was full of himself and wrote only for what he could get out of it. I never, before or since, met a literary person who was so frankly "on the make." The discussion that afternoon was about the recompense of authors, and Trollope said that he had reduced his literary efforts to a working basis and wrote so many words to a page and so many pages to a chapter. He refrained from using the actual word "money"—the English shrink from the word "money"—but he managed to convey to his hearers the fact that a considerable consideration was the main incentive to his literary labour, and put the matter more specifically later, to my mother, by telling her that he always chose the words that would fill up the pages quickest.