Biography
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From
The Condition of Woman in the United States (1895 )
by
Marie Thérèse de Solms Blanc / Th. Bentzon
pp. 122-130.
From -- BOSTON (pp. 91-4).
I SPENT more time in Boston than in any other city of the Union; and the longer I lived there, the fonder I became of it. But this required no great effort, -- the first impression was enough; and even now, when I try to recall my memories, the thought of Boston is all predominant! Before it dawned upon me as the most polished city in America, Boston dazzled me as a dream of beauty. This may perhaps be due to the circumstances of my arrival. It was evening; and next morning, when I woke, I saw from my window, the blinds being open, a panorama which I can never forget. Beneath a cloudless sky, deeply tinged with rose, -- one of those American skies which seem so much loftier than those of France, -- stretched the wonderful Charles River, sparkling as if sprinkled with diamonds, broad as an arm of the sea. No passing steamer disturbed its solitude at that early hour; it was not the season when it is covered with pleasure boats; not a sloop, or a schooner on the horizon, -- only a dredging-machine cast its black shadow on that sun-flecked sheet. The water, which is subject to the influence of the tide, flowed up to the wall of the garden beneath my window, washing on one side the semicircular quay bordered by straight, red, lofty roofs and on the other, one of the Cambridge bridges. Opposite, beyond the long bridge, flung boldly between the two sister cities which are in constant communication, wooded hills were outlined in the atmosphere of crystalline purity. The factories and warehouses built on piles, to my right, looked like great monuments with their square towers, their massive silhouettes. The telegraph poles, whose quivering shadows were reflected in the water, -- sea, stream, great canal or lagoon, -- seemed waiting for some one to moor up a fleet of gondolas to them. I could almost fancy myself in Venice; and the peaceful aspect of the scene completed the illusion. But Charles River sunrises are as nothing compared to the sunsets. I remember, in winter, certain opaline thaws, -- the sky becoming a vivid red towards four o'clock, then gradually brightening and passing through every shade of orange and greenish yellow, into the clearest blue, the calm and almost somnolent water serving as a mirror for this magic show. Still frozen along the shore, its cakes of ice glimmered in the light of the earliest street lamps. I remember too, in seasons of remorseless cold, the aurora-borealis -- like tones of sky and water, -- houses, boats and naked trees standing out against that crimson in black relief whose slightest details were most clearly marked; then the conflagration, growing smoky, died out by degrees, leaving ashes only, after the disappearance of a large red rayless ball, the strange Northern sun. The wavy line of the hills faded into that expiring gray. And twilight once fallen, the Charles River looked like a lake of quivering steel, in which the lines of fire lighted along the wharves and on the long bridge were extended into infinity; as each car passed, invisible in the darkness, showers of sparks lit up all the windows in the great buildings on the Cambridge shore, which in this intermittent illumination more than ever assumed the aspect of fairy palaces, commonplace though they might actually be.
The very variable climate, with its sudden changes from one extreme to another, explains the infinite variety of the sky, so different from that of France, still more from the English sky. I gazed from that window by day and by night upon a spectacle ever changing, ever splendid, save when one of those endless tempests of snow, of which those living in Europe can form no idea, was raging. How can I describe the moonlight which suddenly followed those storms flecking the half-frozen river in which pillars of fire were bathed? I was only separated from it by the narrow garden covered with a white sheet. Every idea of earth vanished; I seemed to soar above that silver flood as freely as the gulls who appeared in flocks with the first rays of dawn.
These effects produced by the changing season and the varying atmosphere are inseparable in my memory from the delicious hospitality which lent them a festal character; and when people tell me that after all Boston is only a city of five hundred thousand inhabitants, merely the capital of Massachusetts, I find it hard to believe them, in view of the royal phastasmagoria of the Charles River. Those who love contrasts cannot do better than to visit Boston after Chicago, without a break. They will abruptly breathe the atmosphere of the past.
From -- MRS. J. T. FIELDS. -- DRAWING-ROOMS AND INTERIORS (pp. 122-130).
After what I have said of the resources of Boston society, to which the university town of Cambridge lends efficient aid, my readers must have reasoned correctly that in that city of old European traditions there must be interesting drawing-rooms. I would fain describe the one which, from many points of view, most resembles the drawing-rooms of France at its best, -- the drawing-room of Mrs. J. T. Fields. To speak of Mrs. Howe, Mrs. Agassiz, Miss Ticknor, and Mrs. Fields is to speak of the social movement, -- of culture, pedagogy, poetry, and philanthropy in Boston. They are the representatives of these things, and as such they must accept the publicity which clings to their personality. I therefore hope that I may not be reproached with indiscretion if I introduce the French public to a registry office for wits of the most refined originality, -- a house unique in its way. Everything in it seems to be dedicated to literature. This is not surprising, Mrs. Annie Fields being the widow of the well-known publisher, James T. Fields, who was the friend of the most famous writers of his time in France and England, and who left behind him precious proofs of his intimacy with them all, -- biographical notes, sketches, letters, conversations. Their portraits cover the walls of this little temple of memory, where a woman of the utmost distinction carefully preserves all which represents to her a past of pure intellectual happiness. The riches of the library, which invade two floors of her small but delightful home, may be numbered, with an almost endless collection of autographs, among the treasures of which she is justly proud. As for her own works, she often shows excessive modesty in concealing them. These occasional works, which are like a rare embroidery on the woof of the charitable tasks to which she is particularly devoted, lead Mrs. Fields by preference towards Greek antiquity. Indeed, we might note. some curious analogies between the bent of her talent and the character of her beauty, which years have merely spiritualized without destroying. This Athenian of Boston lives in the company of Sophocles and Eschylus, translates the Pandora of Gæthe, that other Greek of Northern climes; and the “Centaur " by Maurice de Guérin, who also partook in France of Attic honey; and she will figure on her own account in future anthologies, were it only for her poem of “Theocritus,” to say nothing of the recollections of her dead friends which she writes. Thus, last year, she published an animated and charming biography of Whittier, the Quaker poet. Prose and verse seem to be carelessly flung off by Annie Fields, when the inspiration seizes her, upon loose leaves covering the desk in the tiny study, which is wholly unpretending, and is only divided by a curtain from the parlor where so many illustrious writers have been seated, and where such brilliant converse has been held with friends like Hawthorne, Emerson, Longfellow, and Holmes. The latter, old in years, but not in spirit, till very recently survived the elect group to which he belonged. His visits were always considered a genuine treat. He brought with him the lively sallies, the amusing digressions, which abound in those essays so ingeniously brought together in the Autocrat, the Professor, and the Poet at the Breakfast Table. Paris was ever present to him through the charm of his youthful years; he talked of it with as much gayety as if he were still a medical student in the Latin Quarter. It was a pleasure to find in the vivid and brilliant little person of that amazing old man a combination of the perfect gentleman of Old England with those qualities of animation, sympathy, wholly cosmopolitan comprehension of things, and a wealth of amiability which, we must admit, belong far more to New England. The existence of Dr. Holmes must have been both enviable and fatiguing. He was at the same time venerated like a grandfather, and treated like a spoiled child. Hospitable dames contended for his presence. Passing strangers requested permission to call on him, owners of autograph albums, whose name is legion, begged for a sentiment or a sonnet in his beautiful, distinct handwriting. At every public ceremony a speech was expected from him; at every banquet he was requested to offer a toast; and ladies combined to send him exquisite symbolic gifts, to which he could only reply by invoking at any cost the Muse of his best days to answer in a fashion no less exquisite. This was putting the powers of an octogenarian to a rude test; but he did not seem to suffer from it, and gallantly quaffed the nectar of adulation poured into the loving cup, in the bottom of which are engraved the names of his fair and learned friends.
Miss Sarah Jewett, whose life is divided between the Maine village which she has made immortal, in tales which emanate from the very soil itself, and Boston which claims her as its own, is almost always present at Mrs. Fields's Saturday afternoon receptions.
There too I met T. B. Aldrich, best known in France as a novelist, through the translations which have appeared in the "Revue des Deux Mondes, but whose poetic work -- which has won him a place apart in the loftiest regions of the American Parnassus -- is as inaccessible to translation as Gautier's “ Èmaux et Camées "could possibly be. And he excels not only in carving on hard stone, with singular technical skill, some tiny poem, perfect in all its parts, like his “Intaglio of a Head of Minerva,” which the most experienced artists of the Old World might envy him. No one has so strong a feeling for Nature as he, that American Nature which is so unlike any other. Dr. Holmes was quite right to say, “ You may search elsewhere in vain for a Boston sunset." American skies have nothing in common with those of Europe; birds, rocks, earth, trees, grass, all are different. Well, though he has travelled so far, it is yet to the New England spring, to the rivers decked with Indian names, to the snows, the rains, the twilights of Boston that Thomas Bailey Aldrich owes his truest and best inspirations. Perhaps his flights are somewhat short: we should not complain of this; the brevity of his pieces is a warrant of perfection. Neither should we regret that the elegance and ease of his existence have limited the possibility of his effort; if fruitful poverty had borne him company, he might never have written that enchanting and humorously melancholy piece, “The Flight of The Goddess."
Cambridge sends to Mrs. Fields's parlors, with young and brilliant professors, one of the notabilities of the academic town, whose name has crossed the seas, ---he who was first the Reverend, then Colonel, Wentworth Higginson. Madame de Gasparin once translated his “Military Life in a Black Regiment,” and his “History of the United States for Young People" is popular in France. Possibly the nations of conventional old Europe are less able to understand some of the ideas which he expresses under the title “Common Sense about Women;" and Colonel Higginson would be the last to wonder at this, fully aware as he is of the lamentable situation of woman in countries where the Salic law flourishes, where the masculine sex is still called the “noble sex.” His advice in regard to progress in the condition of woman is this: “Let us first remove all artificial restrictions; it will then be easy, for men as well as women, to acquiesce in the natural limits imposed.”
In the drawing-room to which I have introduced you, -- a green drawing-room, long and narrow, with windows at either end, and a matchless view over the Charles River, -- a wood fire, such as we have in France, burns on the hearth, but does not prevent the gentle warmth of a furnace, which permits of the absence of doors, for which drawn curtains are substituted, so that visitors pass in quietly and unceremoniously from the staircase, which is in full sight, taking their place at once in the conversation. Busts and portraits of famous friends seem to form a part of the circle, -- Wordsworth, the Brownings; Miss Mitford, with her fresh bright face, the face of an elderly English spinster; Charles Dickens, painted by Alexander in his youth with long hair and a coat of feminine cut, which make him look like George Sand. Mr. Fields and his wife visited Europe more than once. Thackeray as well as Dickens was their guest in Boston: here is his friendly face, with its flat features and his broad shoulders. Often an autograph letter is framed with the picture; this is the case with Mrs. Cameron's marvellous photograph of Carlyle, with its intense, pathetic expression. Emerson thoroughly realizes in his appearance the idea of immateriality which I had formed of him. Mrs. Fields tells me a pretty story of him. In his later life, he was seized with a violent fit of curiosity; he wanted to know for once what rum was, and he went to the tavern to ask for it. “Would you like a glass of water, Mr. Emerson?" said the barkeeper, without giving him time to express his guilty desire; and the philosopher drank his glass of water -- and died without knowing the taste of rum.
Hawthorne, on the contrary, is superbly handsome, a substantial beauty, moustachioed and long-haired, which somewhat disconcerts us on the part of that sharp analyst of spiritually morbid and almost intangible things. Longfellow has the head of a mild Jupiter; Lowell has the face of an English aristocrat. Portraits of Dickens at various ages, and as utterly unlike as possible, hang in all directions. Mrs. Fields gives us most curious accounts of his readings in America, where he was immensely successful. The description of a huge gold chain which he fastened to his watch to hypnotize the attention of his hearers, went further than anything else to show me a certain vein of quackery which was combined with the novelist's undeniable talent; but I kept my opinion to myself, for it would not be well to meddle with the idols in the sanctuary which is sacred to them.
Edited by Terry Heller, Coe College.
March 2022