MRS. FIELDS
From a crayon portrait made by Rowse in 1863
On Monday, February 25, 1867, Mrs. Fields made note of the Saturday Club dinner of two days before, at which the guests were George William Curtis, “Petroleum V. Nasby,” and Dr. Hayes of Arctic fame, of whom Mrs. Fields had written a few days before: “He wears a corrugated face, and his slender spirited figure shows him the man for such resolves and expeditions. We were carried away like the hearers of an Arabian tale with his vivid pictures of Arctic life.” But apparently he was not the chief talker at the Saturday Club meeting, for Mrs. Fields wrote of it: “Dr. Holmes was in great mood for talk, but Lowell was critical and interrupted him frequently. ‘Now, James, let me talk and don’t interrupt me,’ he once said, a little ruffled by the continual strictures on his conversation.” But by the time that Longfellow’s sixtieth birthday came round on the following Wednesday, Dr. Holmes was ready for it with the verses, “In gentle bosoms tried and true,” recorded in Longfellow’s diary, and for another encounter with Lowell, who also celebrated the day with a poem, beginning “I need not praise the sweetness of his song.” Mrs. Fields’s diary records her husband’s account of the evening:—
February 28, 1867.—Thursday morning. Jamie had a most brilliant evening at Longfellow’s. A note came in from O. W. H. towards night, saying he was full of business and full of his story, but he must go to L.’s. Lowell’s poem in the morning had helped to stir him. J. reached his door punctually at eight. There stood the little wonder with hat and coat on and door ajar, his wife beside him. “I wouldn’t let him go with anybody else,” she said. “Mr. Fields, he ought not to go out tonight; hear him, how he wheezes with the asthma. Now, Wendell, when will you get home?” “Oh,” said he, “I don’t know. I put myself into Mr. Fields’s hands.” “Well, Mr. Fields, how early can you get him home?” “About twelve,” was the answer. “Now that’s pretty well,” said the Doctor. “Amelia, go in and shut the door. Mr. Fields will take care of me.” So between fun and anxiety they chatted away until they were fairly into the street and in the car. “I’ve been doing too much lately between my lectures and my story, and the fine dinners I have been to, and I ought not to go out tonight. Why, it’s one of the greatest compliments one man ever paid another, my going out to Longfellow’s tonight. By the way, Mr. Fields, do you appreciate the position you hold in our time? There never was anything like it. Why, I was nothing but a roaring kangaroo when you took me in hand, and I thought it was the right thing to stand up on my hind legs, but you combed me down and put me in proper shape. Now I want you to promise me one thing. We’re all growing old, I’m near sixty myself; by and by the brain will begin to soften. Now you must tell me when the egg begins to look addled. People don’t know of themselves.”
He had been to two large dinners lately, one at G. W. Wales’s, which he said was the finest dinner he had ever seen, the most perfect in all its appointments, decorated with the largest profusion of flowers, in as perfect taste as he had ever seen. “Why, even the chair you sat in was so delicately padded as to give pleasure to that weak spot in the back which we all inherit from the fall of Adam.” The other was at Mrs. Charles Dorr’s, where there were sixteen at table and the room “for heat was like the black hole at Calcutta,” but the company was very brilliant. Mr. and Mrs. Winthrop, Mrs. Parkman, Dr. Hayes, etc. He sat next Mrs. ——; says she is a thorough-bred woman of society, the daughter of a politician, the wife, first of a millionaire and now of a man of society. “I like such a woman now and then; she never makes a mistake.” Mrs. —— was thoroughly canvassed at the table, “picked clean as any duck for the spit and then roasted over a slow fire,” as O. W. H. afterward remarked to Mrs. Parkman, who is a very just woman and who weighed her well in the balances.
When they arrived at L.’s, my basket of flowers stood, surrounded by other gifts, and Longfellow himself sat crowned with all the natural loveliness of his rare nature. The day must have been a happy one for him.... O. W. H. had three perfect verses of a little poem in his hand which he read, and then Lowell talked, and they had great merriment and delight together.
FIELDS, THE MAN OF BOOKS AND FRIENDSHIPS