The immortal passed beyond the earth’s control.
For the rest, her writings may be said to have grown out of the life which the pages of her diary have pictured. The successive volumes were these: “Whittier: Notes of his Life and of his Friendship” (New York, 1893); “A Shelf of Old Books” (New York, 1894); “Letters of Celia Thaxter” (edited with Miss Rose Lamb, Boston, 1895); “Authors and Friends” (Boston, 1896); “Life and Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe” (Boston, 1897); “Nathaniel Hawthorne” (in the “Beacon Biographies,” Boston, 1899); “Charles Dudley Warner” (New York, 1909); and, after the death of the friend whose name appears above this chapter, “Letters of Sarah Orne Jewett” (Boston, 1911).
An autograph copy of Mrs. Fields’s “Flammantis Mœnia Mundi” before its final revision
This catalogue of publications is in itself a dry bit of reading, and to add the titles of all the books produced by Miss Jewett after 1881 would not enliven the record. But the lists, explicit and implicit, will serve at least to suggest the range and nature of the activities of mind and spirit in which the two friends shared for many years. It is no wonder that Mrs. Fields, who abandoned the regular maintenance of her diary in the face of her husband’s failing health, resumed it in later years only under the special provocations of travel. In its place she took up the practice of writing daily missives—sometimes letters, more often the merest notes—to Miss Jewett whenever they were separated. These innumerable little messages of affection contained frequent references to persons and passing events, but rather as memoranda for talk when the two friends should meet than as records at all resembling the earlier journals. Such local friends as Mrs. Pratt and Mrs. Bell, in whom the spirit and wit of their father, Rufus Choate, shone on for later generations; Mrs. Whitman, mistress of the arts of color and of friendship; Miss Guiney, figuring always as “the Linnet,” even as Mrs. Thaxter was “the Sandpiper”; Dr. Holmes, Phillips Brooks, “dear Whittier”—these and scores of others, young and old, known and unknown to fame, people the scene which the little notes recall. There are, besides, such visitors from abroad as Matthew Arnold and his wife, Mrs. Humphry Ward and her daughter, M. and Mme. Brunetière, and Mme. Blanc (“Th. Bentzon”), whose article, “Condition de la Femme aux États-Unis,” in the “Revue des Deux Mondes” for September, 1894, could not have been written but for the knowledge of Boston acquired through a long visit to the house in Charles Street. Of the salon of her hostess she wrote: “Je voudrais essayer de peindre celui qui se rapproche le plus, par beaucoup de côtés, les salons de France de la meilleure époque, le salon de Mrs. J. T. Fields.” She goes on to paint it, and from the picture at least one fragment—apropos of the portraits in the house—should be rescued, if only for the piquancy conferred by Mme. Blanc’s native tongue upon a bit of anecdote: “Emerson réalise bien, en physique, l’idée d’immatérialité que je me faisais de lui. Mrs. Fields me conte une jolie anecdote: vers la fin de sa vie, il fut prit d’un singulier accès de curiosité; il voulut savoir une fois ce que c’était le whisky et entra dans un bar pour s’en servir:—Vous voulez un verre d’eau, Mr. Emerson? dit le garçon, sans lui donner le temps d’exprimer sa criminelle envie. Et le philosophe but son verre d’eau, ... et il mourut sans connaître le goût du whisky.”
MRS. FIELDS ON HER MANCHESTER PIAZZA
But if the notes of Mrs. Fields to Miss Jewett, and Miss Jewett’s own letters to her friend in Boston, do not provide any counterpart to the diaries which make up the greater portion of this book, there are, in the journals kept by Mrs. Fields on special occasions of travel, records of experiences shared by the two friends which should be given here.
When they went to Europe together, as early as 1882, the two travellers were happily characterized by Whittier in a sonnet, “Godspeed,” as
her in whom