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MRS. JAMES T. FIELDS IN BOSTON

Louise Imogen Guiney

The Critic 29 (4 June 1898) pp. 367-9.

IT WILL BE written of Boston, once so full of intellectual glory, and of grave regard for "the things that are more excellent," how she held out, for a long time, against the Goths and Vandals of merely material progress; and how, all of a sudden, somewhere between 1888 and 1898, she threw herself into their arms with a brio which made her elder hearts stand still with dismay. The invasion of the sacred Common, too, meant more than it said. One feels instinctively that everything immemorial in the town, the literary shrine especially, goes for less than it did, even three years ago. The time may soon arrive, when the degenerate New Englander, or uninstructed pilgrim from the West, can pass No. 148 Charles Street without blinking; but it is well to add, that so far the hypothesis is incredible. Though only a solid item in a red brick block, it is a very thrilling doorway: dominated by no one association, it can "flash upon the inward eye" many great blending colors. On that knob Emerson's hand has been, how many, many times: the steps keep the spirit-print of Longfellow's feet; Thackeray's tender voice haunts the porch: the whole tall dwelling, from its sombre front to its exquisite windows commanding the broad river, is astir and sparkling with the memories of men of genius, poets, wits, familiars; Hawthorne, who went long ago, as real there as Kipling, who came yesterday, and will come again to-morrow. Mr. Fields, as all the world knows, was a partisan of the gods upon the earth. So keen and right was his apprehension, that he, at least, would have known at sight what sunburnt hind was keeping the flocks of Admetus; in point of fact, it was he who gave De Quincey, and not De Quincey alone, the due laurel, the lamp, and the pedestal. Since his lamented death, the tradition of open house to the immortals has been kept up, by his old hearth-stone. To dine there is to have aureoled company; to sleep there is to see spirits. This indoor atmosphere does more than retain the impress of the great, as gallery or inn, by favor, might do: it is charged with intimate talk and aspiration, and written all over with runes of friendship heartening to recall. Dickens is most palpably present; so is Lowell; your silences count for worship, and exhale meekly,

"In praise of ladies dead, and lovely knights."

M. Ferdinand Brunetière wrote the other day upon his portrait, given at parting to Mrs. Fields: "Souvenir d'un court séjour. d'une longue reconnaissance." Those of us who feel the perspective of the place, and find the one figure in its foreground nobly and graciously worthy of it, have always more to be mindful of, and thankful for, after the "short sojourn," than can be put into a formal acknowledgment to the living.

    From the din of trolley cars, in what was once the statelier highway to Cambridge (debouching upon the Craigie Bridge, "that justly celebrated structure," as it is set down in the epitaph of its architect, decent body! at Concord), you may cross the house at every landing, towards a stretch of water, and towards a view which has been proclaimed "Venetian" for generations. The sapphire tidal basin of the Charles, always full of sound and motion, is particularly enchanting from the green-carpeted, autumn-tinted drawing-room, which it seems to fill. The outlook is much finer than from the better-known Beacon Street waterside; for here you escape the massy dulness of the Cambridgeport shores, and have a clear sweep to Parker Hill. The nearest object, between that and you is a long garden, simple and monastic; the only garden left in the neighborhood; lawn, vines, a graceful tree or two, and a bench at the end, over the sea-wall, facing the sunset. Photographic views of the back of the house, taken from that vantage-point, have disclosed in it a quaint manorial English aspect; something which Mr. Pennell or Mr. Railton would delight to draw. Every western chamber gives on the bay, and on its delicately-ranged lights, after dark. The charm of the scene, civic yet wild, is perennial. One might defy Charles Lamb himself, though "The Matchless Orinda" of 1678 lay under the candle, to keep his face anywhere but against the evening pane. Yet, to the lover of the English classics, it is a most exciting interior. I remember being taken there, very long ago, by an old friend of Mrs. Fields (then absent) and suffering several never-forgotten joyous shocks in rapid succession, as if stepping unawares within a tingling fairy-ring. The earlier of these came from the glanced-at title-page of a casual book in a rack on the table; a first edition of " Paradise Lost!" The other, the next moment, came from the glowing and pathetic Pope, painted by Richardson, over the mantel where it has always hung; and to one who had inherited a particular love of Pope, and knew in what melancholy times the canvas was begun at Twickenham, it brought a childish emotion hardly to be borne.

    But the spacious drawing-room is full of these electric delights. Everything is not only beautiful, but an original, a token at firsthand; pictures, autographs, books, are almost too precious to breathe upon. Many papers have been written of Mr. Fields's unique library, in which treasures have their sentimental value beyond price. One meets plenty of magnificent tooling and need not be a bibliophile to be glad to see it adorning a Blake, a Ruskin, a Gray, or a Warton which was Horace Walpole's own copy, and says so, in his elegant hand. The linked names of Shelley and Leigh Hunt are upon the fly-leaf of the brown "Diogenes Laertius," their joint property; Byron's private "Don Juan" contains his text-correction after publication, with wrathfully ironic remarks to his dear Murray, and his dear Murray's faithless printers. The chief modern glory of the incomparable collection is between the plain, much-worn covers where marginal notes are scrawled: some of them by "such an one as S. T. C."! The seventeenth century is here in folio after folio, and the eighteenth in morocco and ornate borders. The shelves have a human fragrance: many a volume tacitly tells that it has not seen a shop since its birth, or that it has been passed along, from one loving hand to another, enriched by every ownership.

    The great room is a nave of books, broken only by a piano of pedigree, the stack of priceless Cameron photographs, the few curios, and the pictures; and also by the fireplace. Near that, hangs Severn's sweet watercolor head of Keats, with a lock of Keats's fine bronze hair framed under the glass. On the wall opposite, is the Hancock Lamb, and beneath, the holograph of the immortal invitation to "puns at nine." Mary Russell Mitford smiles close by, in her big cap; and Dickens, in Alexander's large canvas, looks up from the manuscript of "David Copperfield," with the most alert eyes in the world, as if listening to the talk of those about the burning log, and enjoying again its rose-red glow. Even the tall carven chairs, disposed here and there, with an air of aristocratic indifference, in key with the surroundings, have a heroic history. They bear the arms of the ducal house of Ormonde, to which they belonged, while they inhabited the gray romantic Kilkenny castle which bred a Norman-Irish race of fair renown: men ever loyal to the right, as they saw it. Between the good Earl of Charles the First's time, and the other good Earl of Charles the Second's time, the chairs and the rest of the household effects came to grief; for the Puritan-star was up, and the Butlers were loyal and luckless. We read that in 1652, my lady the Countess of Ormonde traveled from Caen to London, to claim, under promise, from Cromwell, her sequestrated properly. But the old chairs, at least, were not restored, and after falling to the auctioneer, came happily to anchor by the banks of an American river named for the very King for whose sake they and their masters had suffered a hard fate. There are thirteen of them, and they are useful and used. Since they have so often harbored illustrious mortality in the latter age, one respectfully hopes that they do not miss too bitterly the lace and lovelocks, and the Cavalier scabbards, of the stormier days at home.

    Two little rooms flank the drawing-room, lined from floor to ceiling with more books. The less frequented of these looks across the garden to the passing gulls, and the waves

"Heard seldom in the busy day,
But oh, divine at night."

In its middle,very effectively placed against the quadrangular dark ground, stands Miss Anne Whitney's bust of Keats; and below its bracket, the perfectly posed Listening Narcissus of everybody's admiration. The sister room, across the hall, is brightened, in its turn, by engravings and a jar of fresh jonquils. Here, also, is Mrs. Fields's ordinary desk, sacred to the minor matters which fill more than half of her disinterested life; pictures of Emerson, Thackeray, Rogers, Coleridge and Scott, serve to cheer a pen which works there daily.    Her scriptorium is riverward and skyward: an odd-shaped, homelike convent cell, where dust finds its sole asylum, and Dante, in plaster, severely dominates the long shelf under the roof: a place secure from interruption, fruitful in calm Virgilian verse, and, much oftener, in various harmoniously-proportioned biographies, which no one does so well outside of France. In the generous house of many chambers, the study, the library, is, nevertheless, amazingly ubiquitous. Each repository has its trophies of taste and  civilization; hundreds of books, which  call  for jealous guardianship, are ranged along the more secluded walls. Any of these retreats would be an unparalleled Limbus Patrum for reading spirits not ripe for heaven! Though the small upstairs rooms, too, remember all the crowned sons of New England, for some fifty years, they, like their mistress, are disposed  to welcome poeticules of good moral  standing, and to shed upon respectful budding scholars a truly Bodleian smile.

    At her Boston home Mrs. Fields is always to be found, when she is not traveling in search of kind weather and mental refreshment, or established in her beloved and love-worthy summer nest at Manchester-by-the-Sea. In both idyllic abodes, in town and country, as also on happy journeyings, she has for companion, a great part of the year, her friend Miss Sarah Orne Jewett. To say this is to record the unabated fortune of a fortunate old house. The honey of pure literature is always fresh there in the hive, and one more reason is in the making, why No. 148 Charles Street will hereafter be dear and famous. Miss Jewett's study is, so to speak, on the inland side; the city's roar must fall soft as Pan's pipes on so humane, so urbane an ear. Thus, in the heart of the town, yet also in a sort of abbatial solitude, among her plants, her books, her memories, and the faces of affectionately-cared-for guests, Mrs. Fields lives. It is not the busiest person who sounds the loud timbrel, and fills the morning newspaper. Here is one, who with energetic capacity, and in unruffled peace, fulfils an immense number of self-imposed duties.

    Mrs. Fields's forethought touches not only the conduct of a perfectly ordered household, but every side of co-operative charity, and public welfare. Her pleasure, her strict enthusiasm, is, of course, literature. Her work in letters is impersonal, as only a strong personality dares to make it. Never having written a line of fiction, she has forfeited the wider recognition of our day, and instead of it, goes on winning the approval, -- and the quotation, of "the blessed few." Though an idealist and a precisian through and through, neither her art, nor her presence, would deter; with infinite tact, on a fund of quiet, she is the most cordial of comrades and playmates, and a catholic lover of good new things. Some philosopher has reminded us that we acquiesce by processes more intellectual than our doubting and scoffing, and it is a joy to find that "those who know," in Dante's packed phrase, are ever the most indulgent in their whole attitude towards life. Mrs. Fields liberally sustains all that is best in the spirit of the community which so much admires her. Something in her ordered choice, her exclusions, her taste (austere only because its familiar standard is the best), reminds one of Mrs. Meynell, rather than of any other contemporary. Like Mrs. Meynell, too, she has a charming play of humor: a high light in a fastidious and reticent character. With so sure a poise, she can afford to be conservative; no railer in the teeth of anything that is, she yet keeps up a byplay of exquisite protest against the feverish, the uncontrolled. Let it stand as a small but full indication of this quality, that she still wears her hair in the loose, low-drawn coiffure of gentlewomen in the years of her youth: a coiffure dear to artists, and possible, with grace, only to pensive faces.

    Fashions come and fashions go, even in Boston; but one comely head, its dark gloss threaded with silver, is always the same, and maintains everywhere a shy but positive influence in behalf of simplicity, self-knowledge and repose. It is Annie Fields. For the rest, her portrait in black-and-white is a bit difficult. She should be painted by a master like George Fuller, who never feared to throw a mother-o'-pearl mist around his favorite sitter, and so helped to baffle those who were not born to find out her beauty and her meaning, through all seeming withdrawal, by the light of something in themselves.   

Edited by Terry Heller, Coe College