P. S. Who did contrive the comical title for his lecture—“Philosophy of the People”? I suspect it was a joke of J. T. F. It would be no less absurd for Emerson himself to think of philosophizing than it would be for the rose to think of botanizing. Emerson is the Divinely pompous rose of the philosophic garden, gorgeous with colour and fragrance. What a sad lookout there would be for tulip and violet and lily and the humble grape, if the rose should turn out philosophic gardener as well! Philosophy of the people, too! But that was Fields, or else it was only R. W. E. after dining with F. at the Union Club and becoming demoralized.
The final paragraph of a single other note suggests in sum the relation between James and his Charles Street friends:—
Speaking of Mr. Fields always reminds me of various things so richly endowed in the creature in all good gifts; but the dominant consideration in my mind associated with him is his beautiful home and there chiefly that atmosphere and faultless womanly worth and dignity which fills it with light and warmth and makes it a real blessing to one’s heart every time he falls within its precincts. Please felicitate the wretch for me, and believe me, my dear Mrs. Fields,
Your true friend and servant,
H. J.
July 8.
Though not related either to Alcott or to Henry James, the following entry, on October 16, 1863, should be preserved—and as well in this place as in another. It refers to the second of the three Josiah Quincys who were mayors of Boston in the course of the nineteenth century.
Mr. Josiah Quincy dropped in to see J. T. F. He had lately been traveling in the West, he said. People complimented him upon his youthful appearance and his last letter to the President. “I am glad you liked the letter,” he said, “but my father wrote it.” At the next town people pressed his hand, and thanked him for his staunch adherence to the Anti-slavery cause as expressed in the “Liberator.” “Oh,” his reply was, “that was my brother Edmund Quincy”; a little farther on a friend complimented his brilliant story in the last “Atlantic” magazine. “That was by my son J. P. Quincy,” he was obliged to answer. Finally, when his exploits in the late wars at the head of the 20th Regiment were recounted, he grew impatient, said it was his son Colonel Quincy, but he thought it high time he came home, instead of travelling about to receive the compliments of others.
In giving the title, “Glimpses of Emerson,” to one of the chapters in her “Authors and Friends,” Mrs. Fields described accurately the use she made of her records and remembrances of that serene Olympian who glided in and out of Boston to the awe and delight of those with whom he came into personal contact. “Olympian” must be the word, since “Augustan” connotes something quite too mundane to suggest the effect produced by Emerson upon his sympathetic contemporaries. Did they realize, I wonder, how fitting it was that this prophet of the harmonies of life should live in a place the name of which is spoken by all but New Englanders as if it signified not a despairing Væ victis, but the very bond of peace? All the adjectives of benignity have been bestowed upon Emerson. Mrs. Fields’s “Glimpses” of him suggest that atmosphere, as of mountain solitudes, in which he moved; that air of the heights which those who moved beside him were fain to breathe. His “Conversations” in public and private places, a form of intellectual refreshment suggested by Mrs. Fields and conducted, to Emerson’s large material advantage, by her husband, appear to-day as highly characteristic of their time,—the sixties and seventies,—and the light thrown upon them by her journal illuminates not only him and her, but the whole society of “superior persons” in which Emerson was so dominating a figure. By no means all of that light escaped from her manuscript journals to the printed page of “Authors and Friends.” In the hitherto unprinted passages now given there are further shafts of it, sometimes slender in themselves, but joining to show the very Emerson that came and went in Charles Street.