Facsimile letter from Hunt to Fields
When the English painter, Lowes Dickinson, the father of G. Lowes Dickinson, was visiting the Fieldses in Boston, a photograph of Hunt’s portrait of Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw so impressed him that he asked to be taken to the painter’s studio. In Miss Helen M. Knowlton’s “Art Life of William Morris Hunt” this circumstance is related, together with its sequel, which was the publication of Hunt’s “Talks on Art” from notes made by Miss Knowlton herself. It is a surmise but slightly hazardous that a characteristic note found among the Fields papers was written apropos of Dickinson’s visit to Hunt: “Send ’em along—I mean Painters,” he wrote to Fields. “I have had a delightful day with your friend—and I know he is a painter—why? because he likes what I do well and hates what I do that ain’t worth....”
It has been seen that, as early as November, 1868, James Parton suggested that “a writer named Mark Twain” be engaged to contribute to the “Atlantic.”[32] In October, 1868, “F. Bret Harte” wrote to the editor of the “Atlantic” from San Francisco: “As the author of ‘The Luck of Roaring Camp,’ I have to thank you for an invitation to contribute to the ‘Atlantic Monthly,’ but as editor of ‘The Overland,’ my duties claim most of my spare time outside of the Government office in which I am employed.... But I am glad of this opportunity to thank someone connected with the ‘Atlantic’ for its very gracious good-will toward me and my writings, particularly the book which G. W. Carleton of New York malformed in its birth. There was an extra kindness in your taking the deformed brat by the hand, and trying to recognize some traces of a parent so far away.”
It was in the discharge of his work as editor of the “Atlantic” that Fields, hospitable to practitioners of all the arts, entered especially into relations with writers whose paths might not otherwise have crossed his, and his wife’s. Of all the young Lochinvars of the pen who came out of the West while Mrs. Fields was keeping her diary, Bret Harte and Mark Twain were the daring and dauntless gallants who most captured the imagination and have longest held it. To each of them Mrs. Fields devoted a number of pages in her diary. We shall see first what she had to say about Bret Harte.
Friday, March 10, 1871.—Too many days full of interest have passed unrecorded. Chiefly I should record what I can recall of Francis Bret Harte, who has made his first visit to the East just now, since he went to San Francisco in his early youth. He is now apparently about 35 years old. His mind is full of the grand landscape of the West, and filled also with sympathetic interest in the half-developed natives who are to be seen there, nearer to the surface than in our Eastern cities. He told me of a gambler who had a friend lying dead in the upper room of a gambling house. The man went out to see about having services performed. “Better have it at the grave,” said the parson to whom he applied. Jim shook his head as if he feared the proper honors would not be paid his friend. The other then suggested they should find the minister and leave it to him. “Well,” said Jim, “yes, I wish you’d do just that, for I ain’t much of a funeral ‘sharp’ myself.” He told me also, as a sign of the wonderful recklessness which had pervaded San Francisco, that at one time there was a glut of tobacco in the market and, a block of houses going up at the same period, the foundations of those houses were laid of boxes of tobacco. Bret Harte, as the world calls him, is natural, warm-hearted, with a keen relish for fun, disposed to give just value to the strong language of the West, which he is by no means inclined to dispense with; at ease in every society, quick of sense and sight. Jamie, who saw him more than I, finds him lovable above all. We liked his wife too,—not handsome but with good honest sense, appreciative of him,—and two children. She is said to sing well, but poor woman! the fatigues of that most distressing journey across the continent, the fêtes, the heat (for the weather is unusually warm), have been almost too much for her and she is not certainly at her best. They dined and took tea here last Friday.
Facsimile page from an early letter of Bret Harte’s