This incident presented Mrs. Wister as well as Mr. Emerson under a keen light. They could never understand each other.
From October, 1872, until the following May, Emerson and his daughter Ellen were traveling abroad. On their return Mrs. Fields wrote in her journal:—
Thursday, May 27, 1873.—The Nortons came home with the Emersons day before yesterday. Emerson came to pass an hour with J. T. F. before going to Concord. His son Edward had come down to meet him and was full of excitement over the reception his father was to receive and of which he was altogether ignorant. He was overjoyed to be on the old ground again and comes back to value the old friends even more than ever. He must have been much pleased by the joy testified in Concord, but we have only the newspaper account of that. He has been fêted more than ever in England, and Ellen was rather worn out by the ovations; but her general health is much improved. The Nortons, who returned in the same steamer, tell me Miss Emerson was fêted for her own sake and was his rival! Her “American manners” became all the rage in that world of novelty. One night a gentleman sitting next her at dinner introduced the word “æsthetic.” She said she did not understand what he meant by that word!
On the voyage Emerson was devoted to his daughter and full of fun in all his talk with her. He would tuck her up in blanket shawls and go up and down, hither and yon, to make her comfortable—then he would laugh at her for being such an exacting young lady and would be very ironical about the manner in which she would allow him to wait on her. “And yet,” he said, turning to the Nortons, “Ellen is the torch of religion at home.”
Throughout the journals Mrs. Fields’s references to meetings of the Saturday Club, and the records of conversation reported by her husband after these lively gatherings, are frequent. In one brief entry Parkman, Lowell, and Emerson appear in a conjunction that could hardly have been happy at the moment, but the concluding words of the passage may well stand, for their appreciation of Emerson, at the end of these pages concerned chiefly with him.
August 26, 1874.— ... Parkman said to Lowell, and a more strange evidence of lapse of tact could hardly be discovered, “Lowell, what did you mean by ‘the land of broken promise’?” Emerson, catching at this last, said, “What is this about the land of broken promise?” clearly showing he had never read Lowell’s Ode upon the death of Agassiz—whereat Lowell answered not at all, but dropped his eyes and silence succeeded, although Parkman made some kind of futile attempt to struggle out of it. Emerson said, “We have met two great losses in our Club since you were last here—Agassiz and Sumner.” “Yes,” said Lowell, “but a greater than either was that of a man I could never make you believe in as I did—Hawthorne.” This ungracious speech silenced even Emerson, whose warm hospitality to the thought and speech of others is usually unending.
Facsimile of autograph inscription on a photograph of Rowse’s crayon portrait of Lowell given to Fields
In “Authors and Friends” Mrs. Fields concerned herself with Longfellow and Whittier at even greater length than with Holmes and Emerson. The Whittier paper, besides, was printed as a small separate volume; and in Samuel T. Pickard’s “Life of Whittier,” as in Samuel Longfellow’s biography of his brother, the letters from Whittier, as from Longfellow, to Mrs. Fields, and to her husband, bear witness to valued intimacies. Neither to Whittier nor to Longfellow, therefore, does it seem desirable to devote a special section of these papers; nor yet to Lowell, who never became the subject of published reminiscences by Mrs. Fields, perhaps for the very reason that he figures somewhat less frequently than the others in her journal. Yet there are many allusions to him, and in addition to the letters to Fields which Norton selected for his “Letters of James Russell Lowell,” and Scudder for his biography of Lowell, a surprising number of unprinted, characteristic communications, both to Fields and to his wife, testify to their friendship. The remainder of this chapter cannot be more profitably employed than by drawing from Mrs. Fields’s journal passages relating to these and other local guests of the Charles Street house, and supplementing the diary especially with a few of Lowell’s sprightly letters to his successor in the editorship of the “Atlantic Monthly.” It may be remarked, as fairly indicative of the relations between Lowell and the Fieldses through many years, that when they visited England in 1869 their traveling companion was Lowell’s daughter Mabel.
