Well, well, I am always astonished at the good nature of folks, and how much boring they will stand from authors. As I told Howells once, the day will come when a wiser generation will drive all its literary men into a corner and make a battue of the whole lot. However, “after me, the deluge,” as Nero said, and I suppose they’ll stand another essay or two yet, if I can divine, or rather if I have absorbed enough of the general feeling about something to put a point on it.
It’s a mercy I’m not conceited! I should like to be, and try to be, and have fizzes of it now and then, but they soon go out and leave a fogo behind them I don’t like. But if I only were for a continuance I should be as grand a bore as ever lived—as grand as Wordsworth, by Jove! I would come into town once a week to read you over one of my old poems (selecting the longest, of course), and point out its beauties to you. You would flee to Tierra del Fuego (ominous name!) to escape me. You would give up publishing. You would write an epic and read a book just to me every time I came. But no, it is too bright a dream. Let me [be] satisfied with my class, who have to hear me once a week, and with just enough conceit to read my lectures as if I had not stolen ’em, as I am apt to do now. Look out for an essay that shall [make] Montaigne and Bacon cross as the devil—when they come to read it! It will come ere you think.
Yours ever,
Fabius C. Lowell
A few weeks later Lowell was writing again to Fields, on January 12, 1869, about a fiftieth birthday party at Elmwood:—
I am going to celebrate my golden wedding with Life, on the 22nd of next month, by a dinner or a supper or something of the kind, and I want you to jine. I shall get together a dozen or so of old friends, and it will be a great satisfaction for you and me to see how much grayer the rest of ’em are than we. I shall fit my invitations to this end, and the bald and hoary will have the chance of the lame, the halt, and the blind in the parable. If it should be a dinner, it won’t matter, but if a supper, be sure and forget your night-key and then you won’t have any anxiety, nor Mrs. Fields either. Of course, I shall have an account of the affair in the papers with a list of the gifts (especially in money) and the names of all who donate. You will understand by what I have said that it is to be one of those delightful things they call a “surprise party,” and I expect to live on it for a year—one friend for every month.
A week later, in the course of a letter accepting the invitation of Mr. and Mrs. Fields for Lowell’s daughter to accompany them to Europe, he wrote: “Do you see that —— is to commence his autobiography in ‘Putnam’s Magazine’? At least, I take it for granted from the title—The Ass in Life and Literature? If sincerely done, it will be interesting.”
For all the transcendentalism of the circle to which Mrs. Fields bore so intimate a relation, there emanated from Lowell and others an atmosphere of sincerity which helped to preserve the equilibrium of the more easily swayed. Mrs. Fields herself was not immune to the appeal of some of the “isms” of the time and place, but an entry in her journal for January 18, 1870, shows her in no great peril of being swept away by them:—
Attended yesterday a meeting of what is called the Radical Club. Mr. Channing spoke, Mr. Higginson, Wendell Phillips, Mrs. Howe, Mrs. Lucy Stone, Mr. Bartol, Wasson, J. F. Clarke, Edna Cheney. Mr. Whittier was present and a room full of “come-outers.” Mr. Channing and Mr. Phillips were reverent, though I think Mr. Phillips more definite, and perhaps consequently more conservative, in what he said. Certainly Mr. Phillips’s speech was highly satisfactory. On the whole there was much vague talk and restless expression of self without any high end being furthered. I thought much of Mr. Higginson’s talk and Mr. Wasson’s irreverent answer were untrue. Perhaps I am wrong in saying no good end is attained by such a meeting. Perhaps a closer understanding of what we do believe is the result. But there is much unpleasant in the unnatural and excited view of the inside ring.[19]