IV
CONCORD AND CAMBRIDGE VISITORS

The volumes in which Mrs. Fields brought to light many passages from her journals stand as red and black buoys marking the channel through which the navigator of these pages must steer his course if he is to avoid the rocks and shoals of the previously published. In her books it was but natural that she should deal most freely with those august figures in American letters who so towered above their contemporaries as to attach the longer and more portentous adjective “Augustan” to the circle formed by the joining of their hands. If it has become the fashion to look back upon the American Augustans and the English Victorians with similarly mingled feelings, in which tolerance stands in a growing proportion to the admiration and respect which formerly ruled supreme, it is the unaltered fact that the figures of the American group dominated both the local and the national scene of letters in their day, and that their historic significance is undiminished. But it is rather as human beings than as literary figures that they reveal themselves in the sympathetic records of Mrs. Fields—human beings who typified and embodied a state of thought and society so remote in its characteristic qualities from the prevailing conditions of this later day as to be approaching steadily that “equal date with Andes and with Ararat” of which one of them wrote in words quite unmistakably his own.

Perhaps no single member of the group is represented in Mrs. Fields’s journals so often as Dr. Holmes by illuminating pages which she herself left unprinted. For this reason, and because Concord and Cambridge visitors to Charles Street were in fact so much a “group,” it has seemed wise to assemble in this place passages that relate to one after another of the “Augustan” friends in turn. Sometimes they appear as separate subjects of record, sometimes in company with their fellows. That majestic figure, Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose death in 1864 made the earliest gap in the circle of figures most memorable, shall be first to step forth, like one of his own personages of the Province House, from the shadows in which indeed he lived.

HAWTHORNE IN 1857

The long chapter on Hawthorne in “Yesterdays with Authors,” and that small volume about him which Mrs. Fields contributed in 1899 to the “Beacon Biographies,” constitute the more finished portraits of the man as his host and hostess in Charles Street saw him. His letters to Fields are quoted at length in “Yesterdays with Authors,” and contribute an autobiographic element of much importance to any study of Hawthorne. But there are illuminating passages that were left unpublished. In one of them, for example, Hawthorne, in a letter of September 21, 1860, after lamenting the state of his daughter’s health, exclaimed: “I am continually reminded, nowadays, of a response which I once heard a drunken sailor make to a pious gentleman who asked him how he felt: ‘Pretty d——d miserable, thank God!’ It very well expresses my thorough discomfort and forced acquiescence.” In another, of July 14, 1861, after the calamity that befell Longfellow in the tragic death of his wife through burning, Hawthorne wrote to Fields:—

“How does Longfellow bear this terrible misfortune? How are his own injuries? Do write and tell me all about him. I cannot at all reconcile this calamity to my sense of fitness. One would think that there ought to have been no deep sorrow in the life of a man like him; and now comes this blackest of shadows, which no sunshine hereafter can ever penetrate! I shall be afraid ever to meet him again; he cannot again be the man that I have known.”

In the words, “I shall be afraid ever to meet him again,” the very accent of Hawthorne is clearly heard. Still another manuscript letter, preserved in the Charles Street cabinet, should now be printed to round out the story of Hawthorne’s reluctant omission from his “Atlantic” article—“Chiefly about War Matters”—that personal description of Abraham Lincoln which Fields was unwilling to publish in his magazine in 1862, but afterwards included in his “Yesterdays with Authors.”[7] In that place, however, he used but a few words from the following letter.

Concord, May 23, ’62