January 11, 1911. J. went to see Henry James, whom he found in bed, very poorly. He is nervously ill and looks badly. Before the visit was over he jumped up and went about the house in his pyjamas and slippers, showing J. some pictures by his nephew, William James, son of the elder William. He brightened up wonderfully during the visit and seemed almost himself, J. says, before he left.
January 12, 1911. This morning I had a “bust of feeling” and wrote a note to Theodore Roosevelt, sending with it a volume of Mother’s poems and my “Sicily in Shadow and in Sun.” J. took them and found “Rosy” at Judge Lowell’s. He was most cordial and said he would try and look in on me that afternoon. He came, bringing Kermit, at four o’clock. Bridget the cook opened the door and said I was “out”! I heard a roar; “I am Theodore Roosevelt,” and flying to the head of the stairs I begged him to come up. He came roaring and magnificent into the room, looking, J. says, twenty years younger than the day he last saw him at Messina.
March 24, 1911. To-day, at long last was produced “Hippolytus”, the play Mama wrote for Edwin Booth, and that he and Charlotte Cushman were rehearsing when the jealousy of the stage manager’s wife, who had a part she did not like, prevented the production. This was a lifelong disappointment to Mother! The play, thanks to Margaret Anglin, was given at the Tremont Theatre with Walter Hampden in Booth’s part of Hippolytus and Margaret Anglin in Charlotte Cushman’s part of Phedra. The play was splendidly produced; Miss Anglin’s rendering of Phedra was admirable and Hampden was a perfect Hippolytus. The audience was deeply moved. The beauty of the lines is consummate. The play has pulse, passion, and dramatic climax. The youth and romance of it all impressed everybody. It has been a long hard struggle to have this play produced but I am rewarded. Miss Anglin is an angel, and Isabel Anderson and Betty Wiggins archangels, for having worked like Trojans for this. Miss Anglin is one of the serious and inspired actresses of the day, with temperament, beauty, charm, and that steadiness of character without which dramatic talent is so ineffectual.
The Box, Contoocook, New Hampshire. March 1, 1911. Being rather run down, came up with Isabel Anderson to breathe the elixir of this New Hampshire air instead of going, as some friends advised, to the South. Davos cannot be more exhilarating than Contoocook. Went for a four-mile tramp. The walking good, the snow crisp and hard enough to bear. Saw hardly a person moving. The loneliness is appalling. No children, no young people coasting or frolicking! Farm after farm silent and lifeless; had it not been for the smoke from the chimneys they might be abandoned, like those farms I saw in Maine a few years ago. These eight days have built me up wonderfully. The wide waste of the snow world outside, lonely and wild as the Russian steppes, with the contrast of the cozy interior of the Box where not a crumpled rose-leaf hurts, is piquant enough. Isabel is in her loveliest mood. We went over a story of hers and she sketched in a children’s play that seems to have real possibilities for a merry Christmas frolic. Some of the pictures of this visit will remain with me long: Isabel with her white fox furs leading me for a tramp through the snow. J. and Isabel warming the butterflies to life before the mammoth fireplace up at the bungalow, where the fire of white birch logs roared on the hearth bringing out the perfume of the green balsam branches that covered the roof. Outside the wide circle of hills topped by distant Mt. Kearsarge seen through the thick veil of a violent snowstorm—the bare brown and purple hills with the frozen lake at their feet—what a panorama! Why, O why, do we have to go to Switzerland when we have New Hampshire?
Washington. January 23, 1912. Talked with Count Von Bernstorff, the German Ambassador. He said, à propos of Mr. Roosevelt’s possible election:
“Every body seems to want him, but we in Washington are so faithful to the Administration.”
January 27, 1912. Lydia Loudon’s dinner for me. Thomas Nelson Page, Senator Newlands and Edith, Miss Mabel Boardman. The talk was largely political, the general drift, of course, towards the absorbing subject, “Taft or Roosevelt”? Miss Boardman reported that Mr. Taft had said,
“I can never forget what Roosevelt has done for me, but his conduct has seared my soul.”
John Loudon’s summing up is the wisest I have heard:
“Roosevelt is really a great man; it seems a pity not to use him while you have him.”