The Offending Dedication
All this takes one back into a past sufficiently remote. The 1859-60 diary of travel achieves the more remarkable spectacle of Mrs. Fields in conversation with Leigh Hunt less than two months before he died, and reporting the very words of Shelley to this friend of his. They may be found in the “Biographical Notes” published by Mrs. Fields after her husband’s death. Shelley says, “Hunt, we write love-songs; why shouldn’t we write hate-songs?” And Hunt, recalling the remark, adds, “He said he meant to some day, poor fellow.” Perhaps one of his subjects would have been the second Mrs. Godwin, for, according to Hunt, he disliked her particularly, believing her untrue, and used to say that when he was obliged to dine with her “he would lean back in his chair and languish into hate.” Then, wrote Mrs. Fields, “he said no one could describe Shelley. He always was to him as if he came from the planet Mercury, bearing a winged wand tipped with flame.” It is now an even century since the death of Shelley, and here we find one of the older generation of our own time talking, as it were, with him at but a single remove. Almost the reader is persuaded to ask of Mrs. Fields herself, “Ah, did you once see Shelley plain?”
Thus from the records of bygone years many remembered figures might be summoned; but the evocations already made will suffice to indicate the point of vantage at which Mrs. Fields stood as a diarist, and to set the scene for the display of separate friendships.
III
DR. HOLMES, THE FRIEND AND NEIGHBOR[3]
If any familiar face should appear at the front of the procession that constantly crossed the threshold of 148, Charles Street, it should be that of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, for many years a near neighbor, and to the end of his life a devoted visitor and friend. Here, then, is an unpublished letter written from his summer retreat while Fields was still actively associated with the “Old Corner Bookstore” of Ticknor, Reed, and Fields, and in the year before his marriage with Annie Adams:—
Pittsfield, Sept. 6th, 1853
My dear Mr. Fields:—
Thank you for the four volumes, and the authors of three of them through you. You did not remember that I patronized you to the extent of Aleck before I came up; never mind, I can shove it round among the young farmeresses and perhaps help to work off the eleventh thousand of the most illustrious of all the Smiths.