Carlyle's laugh, and other surprises

by Thomas Wentworth Higginson

There was the Reverend Charles T. Brooks, a man of angelic face and endless German translations, who made even Jean Paul readable and also unbelievable. There was Professor George Lane, from Harvard, a man so full of humor that people bought his new Latin Grammar merely for the fun to be got out of its notes. There was La Farge, just passing through the change which made a great artist out of a book-lover and a student of languages. He alone on this list made Newport his home for years, and reared his gifted and attractive children there, and it was always interesting to see how, one by one, they developed into artists or priests.

There was George Boker, of Philadelphia, a young man of fortune, handsome, indolent, as poetic as a rich young man could spare time to be, and one whose letters now help to make attractive that most amusing book, the “Memoirs of Charles Godfrey Leland.” There was my refined and accomplished schoolmate and chum, Charles Perkins, who trained himself in Italian art and tried rather ineffectually to introduce it into the public schools of Boston and upon the outside of the Art Museum. There was Tom Appleton, the man of two continents, and Clarence King, the explorer of this one, and a charming story-teller, by the way. Let me pause longer over one or two of these many visitors.

One of them was long held the most readable of American biographers, but is now being strangely forgotten,—the most American of all transplanted Englishmen, James Parton, the historian. He has apparently dropped from our current literature and even from popular memory. I can only attribute this to a certain curious combination of strength and weakness which was more conspicuous in him than in most others. He always appeared to me the most absolutely truthful being I had ever encountered; no temptation, no threats, could move him from his position; but when he came in contact with a man of wholly opposite temperament, as, for instance, General Benjamin F. Butler, the other seemed able to wind Parton round his fingers. This would be the harder to believe had not Butler exerted something of the same influence on Wendell Phillips, another man of proud and yet trustful temperament. Furthermore, Parton was absolutely enthralled in a similar way through his chief object of literary interest, perhaps as being the man in the world most unlike him, Voltaire. On the other hand, no one could be more devoted to self-sacrifice than Parton when it became clear and needful. Day after day one would see him driving in the roads around Newport, with his palsy-stricken and helpless wife, ten years older than himself and best known to the world as Fanny Fern,—he sitting upright as a flagstaff and looking forward in deep absorption, settling some Voltairean problem a hundred years older than his own domestic sorrow.

I find in my diary (June 25, 1871) only this reference to one of the disappointing visitors at Newport:—

“Bret Harte is always simple and modest. He is terribly tired of ‘The Heathen Chinee,’ and almost annoyed at its popularity when better things of his have been less liked”—the usual experience of authors.

I find again, May 15, 1871: “I went up last Wednesday night to the Grand Army banquet [in Boston] and found it pleasant. The receptions of Hooker and Burnside were especially ardent. At our table we were about to give three cheers for Bret Harte as a man went up to the chief table. It turned out to be Mayor Gaston.” This mistake, however, showed Harte’s ready popularity at first, though some obstacles afterwards tended to diminish it. Among these obstacles was to be included, no doubt, the San Francisco newspapers, which were constantly showered among us from the Pacific shores with all the details of the enormous debts which Bret Harte had left behind him, and which he never in his life, so far as I could hear, made a serious effort to discharge. Through some distrust either of my friendship or of my resources, he never by any chance even offered, I believe, to borrow a dollar of me; but our more generous companion, George Waring, was not so fortunate.

Another person, of nobler type, appears but imperfectly in my letters, namely, Miss Charlotte Cushman. I find, to be sure, the following penetrating touches from a companion who had always that quality, and who says of Miss Cushman, in her diary: “She is very large, looks like an elderly man, with gray hair and very red cheeks—full of action and gesture—acts a dog just as well as a man or woman. She seems large-hearted, kind, and very bright and quick—looks in splendid health. She will be here for this month, but may take a house and return.” This expectation was fulfilled, and I find that the same authority later compared Miss Cushman in appearance to “an old boy given to eating apples and snowballing”; and, again, gave this description after seeing Miss Cushman’s new house: “The wildest turn of an insane kaleidoscope—the petrified antics of a crazy coon—with a dance of intoxicated lightning-rods breaking out over the roof.” This youthful impulsiveness was a part of her, and I remember that once, as we were driving across the first beach at Newport, Miss Cushman looked with delight across the long strip of sand, which the advancing waves were rapidly diminishing, as the little boys were being driven ashore by them, and exclaimed, “How those children have enjoyed running their little risk of danger! I know I did when I was a boy,” and there seemed nothing incongruous in the remark, nor yet when she turned to me afterwards and asked, seriously, whether I thought suicide absolutely unpardonable in a person proved to be hopelessly destined to die of cancer,—a terror with which she was long haunted. Again, I remember at one fashionable reception how Miss Cushman came with John Gilbert, the veteran actor, as her guest, and how much higher seemed their breeding, on the whole, than that of the mere fashionables of a day.

Kate Field, who has been somewhat unwisely canonized by an injudicious annotator, was much in Newport, equally fearless in body and mind, and perhaps rather limited than enlarged by early contact with Italy and Mrs. Browning. She would come in from a manly boating-trip and fling herself on the sofa of the daintiest hostess, where the subsequent arrival of the best-bred guests did not disturb her from her position; but nothing would have amused her more than the deification which she received after death from some later adorers of her own sex.