Barrett Wendell Frontispiece
Photogravure with autograph signature
Barrett Wendell at about Eight (1863)
Barrett Wendell at about Seventeen (1872) .
The "Lampoon" Board, 1877
Barrett Wendell at Thirty-Five, in "Grays 18"
Barrett Wendell in "Ralegh in Guiana" .
The Wendell Bookplate
Official Notice of the Naming of "Salle Barrett-Wendell"
"Le Professeur Americain, M. Barrett-Wendell". 160
"Uncle Blunt," with Autograph Christmas Greetings
Autographed Menu at Dinner of Chinese Princes
Barrett Wendell and His First Grandchild
The Jacob Wendell House, Portsmouth, New
Hampshire 294
12
18
24 42
82
118
132
ibS 223 228
BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
INTRODUCTORY
Nearly thirty years after Barrett Wendell published his biography of Cotton Mather, he had occasion to write to a friend who had recently read the book with pleasure. Touching, in the course of the letter, upon what this early piece of work had taught him, he stated a theory of biography in general which his own biographer — if one who intends rather to act as an editor of letters may so be called — seizes upon as a statement not only sound in itself but also peculiarly applicable to the undertaking now invitingly, if somewhat bewilderingly, at hand. Thus he wrote: —
What I learned first, and most lastingly, is that whoever would tell the truth about any man must be, in the literal sense, his apologist. I do not mean that one should make apologies, or indeed write history as Mather did, to emphasize his own opinion. I mean that the first and perhaps the only duty of an honest biographer is, so far as may be, to set forth the man of whom he writes as that man saw himself, and to explain him on his own terms. Then judgment may best be left to those who read.
"To set forth the man of whom he writes as that man saw himself," to explain Barrett Wendell "on his own terms" — there hes the challenge. In the memoir of Wendell which his college classmate and lifelong friend. President Lowell, of Harvard University, prepared for the Massachusetts Historical Society, these significant words are found: "James Russell Lowell said of Words-
4 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
worth that he was two men, and this Is, perhaps, peculiarly the case with men of letters. It was true of Barrett Wendell. There was the real man, and what he thought himself to be; and the former was the larger of the two." There will be many occasions in the pages that follow to bear these words in mind. With them the other true words, written soon after his death, may well be joined: "A certain playful exaggeration of speech, born of his innate detestation of pedantry, often tended to obscure the sound common-sense which underlay his most decided opinions; but those who knew him best did not take long to recognize the simplicity, unselfishness, and high sense of honor, which formed the basis of his character."
Accepting the task of presenting Barrett Wendell as he saw himself, his biographer, then, would have the reader constantly aware that what the subject of this book really was, and what he thought himself and wished others to think him, were frequently at variance. Throughout his life, which covered the time when dual, and even multiple, personalities were becoming objects of special scrutiny, he was appearing in the guises — sometimes disguises — which made him the "character" he was; yet, with all his propensity to the astonishing utterances which seemed to delight him in proportion to their capacity to make his hearers **sit up," he never succeeded in blinding those who really knew him to the essential "simplicity, unselfishness, and high sense of honor" which were his salient personal traits.
It is no wonder that confusion sometimes arose. A letter written to Barrett Wendell in 1906 by a graduate of Harvard then teaching history at Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut, relates a significant incident: —
"The recent discovery here of a man who thought George Eliot was President of Harvard, found an added interest in the answer made by a man of the same class
on my American History exam paper, which may be of interest to you. The man has been well drilled in English, in which your name is frequently mentioned, and writes:— 'The Abolition movement increased ... by the orations and agitations of such men as Wm. Lloyd Garrison,
Barrett Henry Ward Beecher, and Barrott Wendell Phillipo.'
"You will note he hesitated, but that you finally received the credit."
Nothing could have given Wendell himself more amusement than to find himself bracketed with the abolitionists. If he had lived in Boston — at least as an older man — at the time when Garrison was making himself peculiarly obnoxious to the more conservative elements of society, he would probably have joined the "mob of gentlemen" who tried to hang the reformer. If he had lived in Boston before the Revolution, it would have been entirely in keeping with the role of his maturer years to ally himself with the Tories, as a defender of the established order. But in whatever century or circumstances his incarnation might have fallen, he would still have been the same faithful, penetrating student and interpreter of letters and life, as he saw their interrelations, the same warm-hearted human being, often misunderstood, — partly, it may be, because he did not by any means always understand himself or greatly care that others should see beneath the contradictory surface, — the same constant exponent of all the loyalties which most nearly concern a man's life.
I
BACKGROUND, BOYHOOD, AND YOUTH
1855-1874
Barrett Wendell was born at 41 West Cedar Street, Boston, August 23, 1855, the eldest of the four sons of Jacob Wendell and Mary Bertodi (Barrett) Wendell. To **explain him on his own terms" it is as necessary to record his ancestry as to relate the experiences of his own existence, for he was intensely aware of the background which he shared with New Englanders of his own kind. In his books — notably the Literary History of America — he constantly spoke of Americans of "the better sort," meaning those upon whom the advantages of breeding and education had bestowed a position of social superiority less obvious to-day than it was in the three American centuries that have gone before. Conspicuously possessed of the historic sense, and therefore much given to identifying a living past with a living present, he brought to the past, as it concerned his own inheritances, a frankly personal interest. It would have been an affectation of a sort quite foreign to him to make any pretense to the contrary. Democracy, in the latest meanings of the word, made but a scant appeal to him. He was fond of using the word ''gentleman," and prepared to accept equally the privileges and the responsibilities implied in the term.
Nearing the end of his life, Barrett Wendell wrote, in 1918, for his children, a memoir of his father, Jacob Wendell, the opening pages of which present the family history with a detail significant of its meaning to him. Those to whom it will mean much less may read the passage with a cursory eye. It runs as follows: —
BACKGROUND, BOYHOOD, AND YOUTH 7
My family was of Dutch origin. The first of them in this country. Evert Jansen Wendel, came from Emden, in East Friesland, to New York, about 1640, when some twenty-five years of age; his widowed mother was then living in a village called Upleward, where she died in the year 1657. In New York, Evert Jansen married Susanna du Trieux, who was probably descended from a Gascon Protestant, recorded as having taken refuge in Holland after condemnation by the Parliament of Bordeaux in the reign of Charles IX. Evert Jansen soon moved to Albany, where he passed the rest of his long life. There, in 1656, he was made ruling elder of the church, in honor of which dignity he had painted in one of the windows a probably assumed coat-of-arms, complacently borne by his descendants ever since. His eldest son, John, married Elizabeth, daughter of Abraham Staats, of Albany; flourished as a trader with Indians; was once mayor of Albany, — I think in Leisler's time, — and died rather prematurely, in 1691, leaving considerable landed property and ten or eleven children. His widow subsequently married John Schuyler, by whom she became the mother of the "American lady" recorded by Mrs. Grant of Laggan, and grandmother of the Revolutionary general, Philip Schuyler. Abraham Wendell was sent in boyhood to New York, where he lived for more than forty years, a merchant and a magistrate, of genially convivial habit and frequent carelessness of obligation. His wife was Catherine, daughter of Teinis and Catherine (Van Brugh) Dekey, through whom the family became kinsfolk of certain Bayards, Livingstons, and other remembered names. Meanwhile, Jacob Wendell, the youngest brother of Abraham, and in every sense a substantial man, had moved to Boston, where he flourished until after 1760, marrying an Oliver and becoming ancestor of Mr. Wendell Phillips and Dr. Holmes.
As early as 1714, he persuaded his brother Abraham to entrust his eldest son, John, to his care, convinced that educational opportunity in Boston was better than in New York. Though this John never entered Harvard College, after all, he lived comfortably in Boston from the age of eleven until his death, in 1762, at fifty-nine. He was convivial, like his father, he became a
8 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
partner in his uncle's business, he was once in command of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery, and he married Elizabeth, daughter of the third Edmund Quincy, of Braintree. Her elder brother, the fourth Edmund Quincy, was father of Mrs. John Hancock; her younger brother, Josiah, was the ancestor of that line which preserved the distinction of the name throughout the nineteenth century;her younger sister, Dorothy, married Edward Jackson, and their descendants, under the names of Jackson, Lee, Higginson, Holmes, and more, continue to this day the most sturdy traditions of ancestral Massachusetts.
The eldest surviving son of John and Elizabeth (Quincy) Wendell, who bore his father's name, was born in Boston, in 1731. He took his degree at Harvard in 1750, and soon went to Portsmouth, where he married a Wentworth, cousin of Benning Wentworth, Governor of New Hampshire. There he lived all his life, a lawyer of speculative disposition, much concerned with the development of the unsettled regions of New Hampshire and Vermont, and patriarchally prolific. His second wife, who was akin to his first, was Dorothy, daughter of Henry Sherburne of Portsmouth. By the two he had some twenty children. My grandfather, Jacob Wendell, born in-1788, was his youngest surviving son. By that time, the family fortunes were pretty well ruined.
This record of family origin therefore becomes significant. My grandfather was akin to many notable families not only in New Hampshire but in both Massachusetts and New York as well. His circumstances, however, were those of the conventional poor boy, with his own way to make. He did his best to do so, meanwhile cherishing ancestral traditions with a fervor which he transmitted to his children. The War of 1812 seems to have brought him his first prosperity. He was successful in privateering ventures; and by 1816, when twenty-eight years old, he found himself in condition to marry. His wife was Mehitable, only child of Mark Rogers of Portsmouth; her father was first cousin, on the mother's side, of Sir John Wentworth, last royal governor of New Hampshire, and traced his descent, through the Reverend Nathanial Rogers of Portsmouth, John Rogers, President of Harvard, whose wife, born Denison,
BACKGROUND, BOYHOOD, AND YOUTH 9
was grand-daughter of Thomas Dudley, and the Reverend Nathaniel Rogers of Ipswich, to the redoubtable Puritan divine, the Reverend John Rogers of Dedham in Essex, who died there the year when Harvard College was founded. Mark Rogers, however, had died young and poor. At the time of her marriage, the fortunes of my grandmother's family were as far from prosperous as those of the Wendells.
The next twelve years had a different story. My grandfather was engaged not only in shipping but in an attempt to establish on the Piscataqua such manufactures as were then founding the fortunes of the Merrimac. By the time of my father's birth, he was more than well-to-do and his affairs promised a fortune ample enough to restore the family to its traditional dignity. Two years later, he was completely ruined. The manufacturing venture proved beyond his resources. Of all his property he retained only the house where he lived; and that, for years, was heavily encumbered. He survived until 1865; but, though he never lost the personal respect won in his prosperous days, he was a broken man. I can clearly remember him — a small man, slight of figure, baldish but with a shock of strong, dark hair, with a tinge of chestnut which queerly contrasted with the white beard on his cheeks and under his chin. Pie was very quiet in manner, yet alert; he had a contagiously hearty laugh, never loud; and all his children loved him dearly.
My father, Jacob, was born on July 24, 1826. My father's earliest memories were of actual poverty. For a while the family could not afford a servant. In consequence, he sometimes had to get up before daylight, split wood, light fires from a tinder-box, and drive the cow to its pasture, a mile or more away, before breakfast and school. His school was good, however.
Accordingly, in the late summer of 1843, when a little past his seventeenth birthday, he secured some small employment in Boston where he literally knew no human being, and started out in search of fortune. His reward came; after some years in the employ of J. C. Howe & Co., selling agents for some of the principal cotton and woollen mills in New England, he was admitted to the firm as a junior partner, in 1853 or 1854. The business relations thus began lasted through all the rest of his
lo BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
life. He had taken about ten years to make good; and he was about twenty-eight years old.
Once secure of something like a reasonable income, my father, on October 24, 1854, married Mary Bertodi Barrett, under conditions which may fairly be called surprisingly happy. What is more, though neither he nor my mother was blessed with tranquil placidity of temper, nor ever quite ignored the inevitable annoyances of daily existence, they loved each other as dearly and as simply at the end of their forty-four years together as they had at the beginning.
They had met at Mr. Coolidge's church, when my mother was still a young girl. When Mr. Ripley's exodus to Brook Farm had threatened to break the church to pieces, one of the few men who stuck staunchly by the wreck and most helped to bring her safe to port was my grandfather, Nathaniel Augustus Barrett, then about forty years old. His grandfather, who had been a considerable man of business in Boston a century before, had been ruined by the Revolution. His father, the youngest of a large family whose few remaining letters show engaging traces of eighteenth-century pleasantry, had not married until well past the age of forty-five; his wife, a Newport Brown, was twenty-two years his junior. She had died with her fifth child, in 1802, when my grandfather was only two years old; and in 1810, when he was only ten, his father had died in turn, leaving four children, a very modest property, and some admirable family portraits, four of which are now in my possession. So, though related to many well-to-do people in both Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the little family was remarkably lonely; for their own cousins in Massachusetts were mostly old enough to be their parents, and as they lived in that part of Braintree now called Quincy, they had never seen much of their Boston relations.
My grandmother was Sally, fourth daughter and sixth of the nineteen children of John and Esther (Goldthwaite) Dorr, of Boston. The Dorrs came from Roxbury, where they had -been respectable citizens for some generations; their fortune was based on trade in furs with China, after 1790, in more or less intimate relations with Mr. John Jacob As tor. As a family
BACKGROUND, BOYHOOD, AND YOUTH ii
they were not intellectually powerful, nor unusually strong in character; but they were remarkably handsome, and all of them whom I remember had an extraordinary air of personal distinction. In the matter of character, too, my grandmother's father, John Dorr, seems to have been exceptional; he was extremely self-willed and dominant; yet his children not only respected and rather timidly feared him, but were genuinely fond of him. He died a month or so before I was born.
The memoir of Jacob Wendell from which this passage is taken does not record the fact that when Barrett Wendell was only eight years old, in 1863, his father's business, which had caused frequent visits to New York, led to the removal of his family from Boston to that city, where he became the representative of his firm. His characteristics have been summarized by President Lowell: "A quiet retiring man without the brilliance of his son, he had business capacity, sterling integrity, and commanded the confidence and respect of those who met him. Not himself a scholar, he believed in the value of scholarship, and of his own motion established a foundation for the highest scholar in the freshman class at Harvard College." Much of the value of his son's memoir of him lies in the self-revelations of its author. The following passage, for example, shows forth the Barrett Wendell of childhood as he saw himself in advancing years: —
As for me, for nearly four years an only child, and on my mother's side an only grandchild, and so perhaps fairly well spoilt before my memory begins, I must have been a rather disturbing puzzle to them both — as well as to my not naturally amiable self. So far as I can now discern, I was in one sense a good child — neither mischievous nor vicious, fairly conscientious and perhaps unusually pure of impulse. On the other hand, my nervous system was always a bit erratic — I can trace the trouble now through my father and his mother to hers, who had a startling experience of interrupted personality about 1800; I was morbidly self-conscious and pettily ill-tempered; I
12 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
disliked physical exercise; my most nearly favorite pastime — I seldom got absorbingly interested in anything — was the writing of far from poetic or imaginative plays. The first which I remember completing was composed v/hen I was eight years old. It was clearly founded on the libretto oiLucia di Lammer-moor, which I had once been taken to hear; it got along all right to the very end — when I discovered with dismay that one character, named Sally, had somehow survived; so with what then seemed to me inspiration, I added some such words as: "Enter Sally, who looks about her, and says,'I die,'and dies." Harmless as this literary propensity may have been, it was not quite intelligible to parents whose own preoccupations, apart from domesticity, were mostly concerned with matters of business or religion, and who assumed — quite sensibly — that normal children ought to like playing out of doors. And I never consoled them by delight in religious exercises. To this day I detest hymns — except the Dies Ira; and I was never graced with the engaging vice of pretending to like, for the gratification of others, anything which has excited my displeasure.
A letter which Barrett Wendell, not quite six years old, wrote (June 27, 1861) to his uncle, George Wendell, came to light when its writer was nearing sixty. It was a child's request for the building of a toy "sailing vessel, steamer, or schooner." His desires were definite: "I wish it to be about middle size and very perfect. If I have to pay you, in your answer to this you can tell me how much you want, but as you are my uncle and say that you do not need any pay, it will be most convenient for me. What do you think about the times?" His own thoughts appear in statements about troops he had seen in Boston, before they went South. Commenting upon the letter, in 1912, when he acknowledged its receipt from his cousin, Arthur R. Wendell, he recalled the pleasant summers of his childhood passed with his family at West Needham — now Wellesley — Massachusetts, and remarked of himself, ** I must have been a funny little prig at five years old.
Barrett Wendell at about Eight (1863)
BACKGROUND, BOYHOOD, AND YOUTH 13
That I was dreadfully self-conscious, and therefore far from happy in personal feeling, I am sure. It took me thirty years at least to get an objective view of anything." The autobiographic pages of the memoir already drawn upon contain another illuminating passage. It relates to a visit which Barrett Wendell, not quite eight years old, paid to New York with his father and mother, apparently shortly before their final removal from Boston in 1863. He had then never been further from Boston than Portsmouth, and never anywhere in a steamboat. "I was vastly impressed," he writes, "by the importance of the journey, which revealed to me my lifelong taste for travel"; and he proceeds:—"
New York I found interesting but disconcerting. I have always been over-sensitive to the solitude of strangers in a great city; and even then New York was comparatively metropolitan. It still kept, to be sure, what now seem unimaginable traces of its Dutch origin; the little hand-carts of the ash-men and scavengers, for example, were drawn by dogs harnessed to the axle, and there was distinctly specialized street-cries — that of strawberries, with its shrill prolongation of the final syllable still echoes in my ears. The older houses, too, traces of which even now linger about Washington Square, had such spacious stolidity that to call their "stoops" steps would have been barbarous. At that time, besides, business still lurked downtown. Union Square, with its bronze equestrian Washington in one corner, was a shady, fenced, oval park surrounded by substantial brick dwellings of the better sort. Madison Square, where the Worth monument already kept an otherwise extinct memory safe behind an iron fence of sheathed swords, was at once more or less impressive; it was enclosed in shabby wooden palings painted a dingy brown, but the houses about it had risen in what I then supposed the supreme glory of brown-stone, and on the corner of 23d Street reposed in all its white marble dignity the solid Fifth Avenue Hotel, unaltered to the eye until more than a generation later they pulled it down. In
T4 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
a small two-story structure, I think, wooden, where the Flat-iron building has long replaced it, was a bookshop, subsequently fascinating to me from the fact that its bibulous proprietor a few years later got into newspaper notoriety by shooting a now forgotten man of letters for undue sympathy with his wife. Fifth Avenue itself started, as I think it starts to this day, in the guise of Washington Square; but almost from 14th Street, blooming into brownstone fronts — as like one another as eggs. It seemed utterly secure from the intrusion of trade.
It was all very splendid; there was something depressingly monotonous, though, in the unbroken vistas of the rectangular streets, and something inhuman in the fact that they were not named but numbered. Compared with Boston, I can now see, it was surging with growth, which means incessant change; and change I have never found instantly sympathetic. At any rate, the nervous effect of it on small me must have filled my parents with dismay; for I vividly remember sitting down on a curbstone in 30th Street one evening and loudly bawling, because very sensibly they would not take me with them to Wallack's, at that time the most fashionable of American theatres. To do them justice, they delayed their start until they had condemned me to punitive bed, and made sure that I was miserably there. I soon went to sleep. I was given to understand the next morning that they had greatly enjoyed the play, which had been " too old " for me.
As Barrett Wendell's first memories of New York, which he never came to like, were closely knit with those of his father, so were his first memories of Europe, which he came to love. The following paragraph from the memoir should therefore be read at this point: —
The summer of 1868, now just fifty years ago, long remained the most delightful I could remember. Exactly why my father decided to take his first vacation from business I do not know. Very likely, our shaven, serene, jocose Doctor Crane had advised a long rest; and very possibly he had thought my mother, too, in need of relief from domestic monotony. At
BACKGROUND, BOYHOOD, AND YOUTH 15
any rate, so far as I knew, they rather suddenly decided to go to Europe, and take me with them. Then my wonder-year of three months began. I can describe it no better than by saying that, although I knew little of Longfellow, I saw Longfellow's Europe — which still seems to me the most purely beautiful of all. My readiness for it, I rather think, had been preparing all my short life, for I cannot remember a time when my Aunt Sarah Barrett was not eagerly willing to tell me inexhaustible stories and legends of the Old World we all came from. The charm of Europe — its beauty, its variety, its fathomless humanity, its immemorial habit of life, its boundless wealth of historic and fantastic tradition, glorious fine art — is really there; and no one ever felt this charm more genuinely than I, even at the age of twelve. The evil of Europe, its sins, its crimes, its baseness, is really there too; but somehow they left me untouched. At worst, they were the fleeting shadows which made clearer the beautiful outlines of what seemed to me — as they seemed to Longfellow and his time — the true features. It was a dream world, suddenly real for a little while.
An old bit of memory rises. At home I thought theatregoing the height of earthly delight; in Paris, one evening, I heard someone say that he was going to the theatre, and found myself indignantly surprised that anybody should so waste time when Europe was there to enjoy.
Learning thus early that "Europe was there to enjoy," and profiting greatly from his own early enjoyment of it, Barrett Wendell was meanwhile undergoing more formal instruction in New York. There is an amusing memento of one of the private schools he attended in the form of a letter, written before he was nine years old, and addressed to "Mr. Sanford, 204 5th Ave., N. Y." In the painstaking script of early boyhood it reads: —
,, c New York, Feb. 26th, 1869
Mr. Sanford ' ^
Dear Sir, — You wanted us to give you our different opinions about gentlemen, and how to distinguish them from other persons.
16 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
I think that any one can be a gentleman if he tries to be.
Gentlemen are not always to be judged by their manners. Lord Byron once said that he once had his pocket picked by the most gentlemanly person he ever met with.
Once in the country while we were taking tea, a man with a sword in his hand walked into our yard. We were surprised because we did not know him. Father and Uncle Frank went out to meet him, and Uncle Frank asked him what kind of a sword he had, and he handed it to him. He proved to be a man named Lynch. He was not a gentleman. Gentlemen are judged by their actions and not by their manners, always, as I said before. Gentlemanly actions and manners arise from a good heart. That man who picked Lord Byron's pocket had only much civility.
This is my opinion of Gentlemen.
Your pupil,
Barrett Wendell
The "man named Lynch," intruding upon the domestic scene, armed with a sword, and the insouciance of "Uncle Frank" in asking what kind of sword it was, suggest a pleasing element of imagination in a child whose heart, with respect to gentlemen, was evidently in the right place. A suggestive bit of evidence that it remained there is found in a maturer reference to gentlemen in Wendell's discussion of the variable meaning of words, in his English Composition: —
What does a man mean, for example, who asserts that another is or is not a gentleman? To one the question turns on clothes; to another on social position gauged by the subtle standards of fashion; to another on birth; to another on manners; to another on those still more subtle things, the feelings which go to make up character; to another still on a combination of some or all of these things. Last winter a superannuated fisherman died in a little Yankee village. He was rough enough in aspect to delight a painter; if he could read and write it was all he could do. But there was about the man a certain dignity and self-respect which made him at ease with whoever spoke to him.
BACKGROUND, BOYHOOD, AND YOUTH 17
which made whoever spoke to him at ease with him. I have heard few more fitting epitaphs than a phrase used by a college friend of mine who knew the old fellow as well as I: "What a gentleman he was!" But one who heard this alone would never have guessed that it applied to an uncouth old figure, not over-clean, that until a few months ago was visibly trudging about the paths of our New England coast.
Of the schooling which immediately preceded Barrett Wendell's admission to Harvard College, he has himself written in the memoir of his father. After mentioning his "nervous over-sensitiveness," he says: —
It was thought best that I should no longer be exposed to the vexatious discipline of a large school. So, after, a short period of private tuition by my mother's cousin John Adams, I joined a small class which he was preparing for college. He had taken what used to be the parlors of a pleasant old brick house on the Fourth Avenue side of Union Square, near 17th Street; and there I resorted daily, with Sam and Arthur Sherwood, and John du Fais — all three editors of the Harvard Lampoon when I was — and a few more. Yet he was not only a first-rate coach for examinations; he actually could manage to teach more than I ever quite believed that he knew. Under him, for one thing instead of copying the /Eneid^ as a punitive task, I read every line of it and of the Bucolics and the Georgics too. Though he may not much have cared for his classics, he recognized that they were literature.
In considering the boyhood which preceded Barrett Wendell's maturity, the notably significant point is that he appears clearly to have derived more from his informal than from his formal instruction. That he was far from robust in his physical and nervous equipment, that his father was able and ready to deal with this condition by supplementing his schooling with much travel, and that the boy had the wit and the character to make the most of the opportunities thus afforded — these facts provide the true link between his boyhood and his maturity.
18 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
The remarkably careful and competent diaries which he set himself to keeping, even in his most youthful jour-neyings, bear witness to this process of self-improvement. Journals of sightseeing, particularly of the young, are the most tiresome things in the world to quote, and young Wendell's shall not be quoted here. But his European diaries of the summer of 1868, when he was thirteen, and of 1871, when he was sixteen, are none the less extraordinary documents. They reveal to an uncommon degree, not only a capacity for close observation but also an appreciation of the significance of historical, artistic, and literary associations. Here was a notable foundation for future building. Here, too, is a clear suggestion that in his own early practice of daily writing he discovered the value of the "daily theme" as the exercise in English composition with which his work as a teacher was peculiarly associated. It is pleasant to think of what he might himself have done in later life by extending to the length of a daily theme the brief record of his visit to the Blarney Stone: — "I contented myself with touching it with Mr. Hitchcock's umbrella and then kissing that." His pupils might then have accounted for his chariness of meaningless praise.
In addition to the journals of travel there are documents of self-improvement in the shape of lurid manuscript plays, under such titles as "Raymond of Caen," "Redwing the Pirate," and "The Moor's Revenge." The most ambitious of them, "The Oubliette, a Story of the Black Forest," written in the year following the summer travels of 1868, bears an obvious relation to the diary-page recording a visit to the Alte Schloss near Baden-Baden. It should be mentioned merely in token of the fact that what the boy was seeing was both extending his knowledge and feeding his imagination, an endowment with which these crude juvenilia show at least that he was liberally equipped.
Of the summer travels of 1871 there is a characteristic
BARRErr Wendell at about Seventeen (1872)
BACKGROUND, BOYHOOD, AND YOUTH 19
reminiscence in a letter written by Barrett Wendell in 1917, apropos of the Reverend Dr. Edward A.Washburn, rector of Calvary Church, New York: —
In '71 he took me abroad with him for three or four months. By that time he was a "rueful Christian," but the best of fellows and the wisest of old friends. He taught me on principle that one should never open a botde that won't keep, without finishing it; and, dear old boy, never ordered more than a pint between us. On one thirsty occasion I insisted on a quart; he stuck to his half pint, made me drink the rest, and put me to bed. There was never better lesson for a youngster.
To the success of the summer as a whole the final page of the diary bears enthusiastic witness. It has, besides, in its self-appraisal, an autobiographic value which warrants its quotation:
So ended the pleasantest journey I have ever taken, and I very much doubt if I shall ever enjoy one so much again. I was just at the right age to be enthusiastic over what I saw, without being too critical — to see all the beauties and hardly any of the impurities of the lands I visited. And I can feel too how much older and more mature I have grown in many ways since I left home. I really think that mentally — and physically too for that matter, for I have not felt so strong for several years — I was a different Barrett Wendell who sailed away in June.
Well, those three months have wrought a change in me that will never be undone; and besides their efect^ every memory of them is perfectly delightful. I am inclined to think that, live as long as I may, I shall never look back to any other period of my life with half the pleasure with which I shall remember this perfect summer of 1871.
In the following year young Wendell was admitted to Harvard College, a freshman in the Class of 1876. This, however, proved an untimely start, and after about six months his fragile health brought his first connection with the University to a premature end. The result of this
20 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
break in his studies was in reality an important contribution to his equipment for the continuous pursuit of his college course which began in the autumn of 1874 with the Class of 1877. In the memoir of his father, already so freely drawn upon, his enriching experiences of 1873 and 1874 are summarized in his own words: —
A recurrence, in April if I remember, of my probably hysterical paralysis had sent me invalid home, where medical advice had forbidden study and recommended open air for some time to come. We passed the summer in a cottage at that part of Swampscott called Beach Bluff, the name of the pleasant and hospitable house of my grandmother Barrett's cousins, the Addison Childs, who then owned the whole neighborhood.
The following year was therefore probably the most important in my life. My New York friend, George Allen, the nephew of Doctor Bellows, had also been out of condition, and had been made purser on the Pacific Mail liner Colima, bound without passengers for San Francisco by way of the Straits of Magellan. He managed to arrange that I should be taken along, and thus have a voyage of six or eight weeks. This was to be supplemented by a voyage across the Pacific, and so around the world. We left New York about the first of October. The Colima broke her propeller somewhere off the coast of Brazil. We put into Rio de Janeiro for repairs; and there, having found conditions at sea other than had been expected, — the captain, for one thing, had tried to bully me into signing over to him a letter of credit for five hundred pounds, — I took myself into my own hands, and went to my beloved Europe.
There I travelled alone for nine or ten months; I visited southern Spain, — with an excursion to Tangiers and Tetuan, I went on to Malta, — in which voyage I accidentally met my dearest of English friends. Sir Robert White-Thomson, who died at eighty-seven, only a few months ago.^ By February I
^ The name of this friend, first as Colonel Thomson, then as Sir Robert White-Thomson, will frequently recur in the ensuing pages. For about forty years, from the late seventies till the end of 1917, shortly before Sir Robert's death, Wendell maintained a steadfast correspondence with him. Sir Robert preserved the letters from Wendell, bound in two volumes, from 1879 to 1912, and carefully arranged thereafter. When
BACKGROUND, BOYHOOD, AND YOUTH 21
had got to Rome, where I stayed for weeks, absorbing the delights I later tried to set forth in my first book. The Duchess Emilia. I passed most of May in Paris. Thence I started on an indefinite summer journey northward, in the course of which I went up the whole length of the Gulf of Bothnia, and saw the midnight sun from the top of Ava Saxa, on the Arctic Circle, and subsequently drove across Scandinavia, and made an excursion to St. Petersburg and Moscow, coming back by way of Warsaw and Berlin. I reached England in time to make my first visit to Sir Robert White-Thomson — then still Colonel Thomson — at Broomford in Devon, and another with his wife's parents, Sir Henry and Lady Ferguson-Davie, at their greater Devonshire house of Creedy. And finally I returned home, in mid-September, by the last side-wheel steamship — the Scotia — which ever carried passengers across the Atlantic, and reentered Harvard with the Class of 1877.
The young traveller's journal of this wanderjahr is no more to be quoted than its predecessors, but its many pages abound in convincing evidence that an American youth, rapidly maturing, and inalienably American at heart, was educating himself to become, in a measure quite uncommon then or since, a genuine citizen of the larger world. This he did become, and in so doing grew to occupy a place that was quite his own among American teachers, thinkers, and writers.
If the temptation to quote must be resisted, there are a few pages in the journal of this period which may at least be paraphrased. They are sharply, even physically, separated from all the other pages by having been cut out of the book in which they were written and enclosed in an envelope marked "Not to be opened except by Barrett
Wendell went to England, as youth and man, a visit to Sir Robert at Broomford Manor, Exbourne, Devon, served periodically to cement the friendship, which grew to include the families of both friends. Sir Robert's eldest son was the late Remington Walter White-Thomson, master and head of a house at Eton. Younger sons were Leonard Jauncey White-Thomson, now Bishop of Ely, and Brigadier-General Sir Hugh Davie White-Thomson. His only daughter, Ada, is the Hon. Mrs. Edward St. Aubyn.
22 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
Wendell." In a somewhat maturer handwriting their author inscribed the words, "otherwise to be burned," and "over." On the back of the envelope he wrote: "By way of avoiding melodramatic legends, in case this packet should fall into the hands of an imaginative person, I shall state that the contents are certain leaves cut out of my journal, written while in Malta in January, 1874. They are of rather a religious nature, and so ridiculous that I did not dare leave them where anybody could get at them; and I keep them only with the hope of having a good laugh over them some time or other."
A biographer, finding the envelope already opened, owes it both to his subject and to his readers to touch upon these pages. They relate, with transparent honesty and admirably straightforward and thoughtful expression, the revolt of a sensitive youth of eighteen against the traditional Deity of New England theology, seen even through the tempered austerities of the Anglican forms in which the youth was reared; his acknowledgment of a God of his childhood, "a dear, kind, gentle, loving God, to whom I could always go for aid and consolation"; the impossibility of reconciling the public and the private Deity; his scorn of the hypocrisy he would have to show in any pretense to this end, and of his contemporaries ruled by no such scruples; his abhorrence of forcing his disbelief or belief, In which he was not happy, on others; his realization that his mind was "still in its teens," and that the pages represented no settled opinions.
Fifty years after they were written they do represent an Intellectual and spiritual candor. In which the later workings of Barrett Wendell's mind and spirit had their roots.
COLLEGE AND LAW STUDY
1874-1880
If the two preceding chapters have accomplished their purpose, the reader will have seen that Barrett Wendell came to his college and law studies with a preparation for them quite unlike that of most x'\merican youths of his own or later days. The impression he made upon his undergraduate contemporaries at Harvard is clearly preserved in President Lowell's memoir of him^: —
"At college he stood high in his studies, though not among those at the top of his class, for his interest was rather literary than learned, and he had no ambition for rank as such. He was strongly individual, striking out for himself instead of following the conventional track. Partly perhaps from delicate health, partly from his experience in travel, he was more mature than his fellows. At this time also he appeared to them somewhat radical, or rather iconoclastic, in temperament. That was a period when American taste was very crude, uncongenial to people who, like himself, were familiar with the more mellow traditions of an older world; and a revolt was beginning against the tone of thought which they termed 'Philistine' and Xhromo-civillzed.' One outlet for his energy he found in the group of men who founded the Lampoon^ said at the time to be the best product of student life in the University, and certainly the most original. To that publication he contributed freely while in college and the Law School."
1 Proceedingsy Massachusetts Historical Society, Dec. 1921
24 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
The early volumes of the Lampoon^ begun In February 1876 by a small group of students which included several of Barrett Wendell's closest friends, may be scrutinized both as social documents and for what they reveal in Wendell himself. The paper owed its origin to the refusal of the Advocate^ another undergraduate journal, to print an ironic picture and communication on the Art Club by R. W. Curtis, an Advocate editor, and J. T. Wheelwright, each of the Class of 1876. They joined to themselves Wheelwright's brother, E. M. Wheelwright, later a distinguished architect, Samuel and A. M. Sherwood, who had been schoolmates of Wendell's in New York, E. S. Martin, of Wendell's college class, 1877, now the wise and witty editor of Lije^ and, as business editor, W. S. Otis, then of the sophomore class.
The first issue of the Lampoon was dated February 10, 1876. The Art Club skit seems mild enough, after nearly half a century, yet fairly prophetic in its tone of much that the Lampoon was to print in later years. It might have happened last week, for example, that an imaginary archaeologist should write in a letter from Crete: "I have a rare piece of frieze from an ancient ice-chest." But in general the pages of the early Lampoons^ both in text and in picture, speak for a past remote enough to be taking on an historic aspect. The current crudities of American life, especially as revealed at Harvard College, became fruitful objects of humorous scorn, offset by admiration of Eastlake furniture, London clothing, and all the contemporary symbols of " the correct." Young men wearing incredibly long belted ulsters, with Incredibly large plaids and Incredibly winged wing-collars, stalk through the pages of the journal. With its second volume, beginning October, 1876, that admirable Illustrator, F. G. Attwood, afterwards Identified with Lije^ became a contributor of drawings and an editor. At the same time Barrett
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Wendell, who had contributed to the second and ninth numbers of the first volume, joined the staff. From that time forth, through his senior year, his year in the Law School, and the two following years of his law studies in New York and Boston, he remained a contributor and intermittently an editor.
The tone of his contributions is illuminating. They reveal a somewhat world-weary young man, both consciously and unconsciously clever, evidently fond of saying smart, "snobbish," and — to the more conventionally minded — irritating things, indulging himself freely in the venerable cynicism of youth, and obviously enjoying it all to the full. While still a junior in college, he imagines a young graduate spending his summer vacation with his family, and exclaiming, "I felt as if I had on a tight coat — I never dared to let myself out, for fear of making a split." Out of college himself he produces, in "A Want Supplied," an amusing outline of a "Boston peerage," prophetic of his own interest in genealogical matters. A paragraph from "Some Considerations concerning Shop and the Talk Thereof," which appeared during his year in the Harvard Law School, is characteristic enough to be quoted: —
Shop, in short, is the thing we devote our lives to. We come into the world in the shape of eight or nine pounds of red, squirming, squalling, ugly flesh, with no apparent object beyond squirming and squalling. We squirm and squall with infantile frankness for some years in pretty much the same fashion, whether we be high or low, rich or poor, European, Asiatic, African, or American. By and by we grow old enough to be circumspect. We exercise our powerful will. We make ourselves squirm more or less obstreperously, in the fashion most suited to our taste or our condition. We teach ourselves to squall as a habit on a single note. In short, unless we are happy enough to have our minds made up for us, we make up our minds as to what we shall be. We settle down into our shops; we talk about them with delicious unconsciousness that
26 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
everybody has not as much interest in them as ourselves. We laugh at the shop-talk of more enterprising shopmen; and because we do not happen to do a very thriving business, we amuse ourselves with the idea that we are not in trade.
By no means a negligible bit of youthful social philosophy! Many others might be cited to exhibit a genuine though sometimes a rather desperate interest in life. The Lampoon served Wendell an excellent purpose as a medium for characteristic self-expression. It also bore a close relation to his lifelong friendships, for among its editors were his academic seniors, Robert Grant, of the Class of 1873, and Frederic Jesup Stimson, of the Class of 1876, each destined to distinction in letters and affairs, each close to Wendell through all his years. Of his many contributions to the Lajnpoon, none other has endured so long at Harvard as his invention of the generic student-name of "Hollis Holworthy."
Since Harvard College became Barrett Wendell's "shop," it is worth while to pause a moment more and look at him as an undergraduate. Not at all given to athletics, — which then as now afforded a passport to general prominence, — marked by peculiarities of manner and temperament which at a time of life when human beings are most ruled by conventions set him apart from his fellows, he made the social and intellectual affiliations pertaining to the larger clubs, a place on the editorial staff of the Crimson before his association with the Lampoon, and membership in the now defunct *'0. K.," a society of "literary" proclivities; but attained the distinction neither of undergraduate election to Phi Beta Kappa nor of membership in one of the more rigorously selective social clubs. Near the end of his sophomore year, in May 1875, prompted whether by the lure of congenial companionship or by military ardor, he joined the First Corps of Cadets in Boston. In this relation Wendell
must have come nearer than in any other to participation in vigorous physical exercise. During his young manhood an injury to his back brought on a lameness, observable only to the most watchful, yet sufficient to cause his habitual use of a cane in walking. Throughout his life he was seldom far from the limits of his physical and nervous strength.
Of all his teachers at Harvard there was none whose influence appears to have counted more permanently with him than James Russell Lowell, the discursive scholar, also a man of the world, who cared much more for the spirit than for the letter of the books which formed the subjects of his teaching. In a little volume, Stelligeri and Other Essays Concerniyjg America^ published by Wendell in 1893, and named for "those that bear the stars" (the asterisks denoting death in the old Latin catalogues of Harvard graduates), there is an essay on "Mr. Lowell as a Teacher," which made its first, anonymous appearance in Scribners Magazine for November 1891. In this paper Wendell tells of the prompting that came to him in his junior year, through a lecture of Norton's, to read Dante under Lowell. He knew not a word of Italian, and was firmly resolved to waste no more time on elementary grammar. Nevertheless, he applied to Lowell for admission to his course. His plea was kindly, though quizzically, heard; "and finally," says Wendell, "with a gesture that I remember as very like a stretch, [he] told me to come into the course and see what I could do with Dante." In the paragraph that ensues it is not fantastic to find a clue to much of Wendell's own later teaching: —
To that time my experience of academic teaching had led me to the belief that the only way to study a classic text in any language was to scrutinize every syllable with a care undisturbed by consideration of any more of the context than was grammatically related to it. Any real reading I had done,
28 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
I had had to do without a teacher. Mr. Lowell never gave us less than a canto to read; and often gave us two or three. He never, from the beginning, bothered us with a particle of linguistic irrelevance. Here before us was a great poem — a lasting expression of what human life had meant to a human being, dead and gone these five centuries. Let us try, as best we might, to see what life had meant to this man; let us see what relation his experience, great and small, bore to ours; and, now and then, let us pause for a moment to notice how wonderfully beautiful his expression of this experience was. Let us read, as sympathetically as we could make ourselves read, the words of one who was as much a man as we, only vastly greater in his knowledge of wisdom and beauty. That was the spirit of Mr. Lowell's teaching. It opened to some of us a new world. In a month, I could read Dante better than I ever learned to read Greek, or Latin, or German.
Thus it was not only what Barrett Wendell learned about Dante from Lowell, — and through that he became a lifelong reader and lover of Dante, — but also what he learned about teaching, that made this course of study a truly formative influence. He must have learned also the value of a close personal relation between teacher and pupil, for his remembrances of encounters with Lowell in his study at Elmwood are recorded with warm appreciation. When the Class of 1877 graduated, Lowell stepped at once into public office as United States Minister to Spain, but not until the class, torn with dissensions over its senior elections and threatened with the loss of all its Class Day pleasures, availed of the departing professor's hospitality in the use of Elmwood and its grounds for the time-honored festival. The Smith Professor of the French and Spanish Languages and Literatures and Professor of Belles-Lettres had provided the later Professor of English with a standard of relationships, individual and collective, to be applied in what was then a distant future.
For the three years that followed Wendell's graduation
from Harvard College he was a student of law, and not at all a happy one. He began his legal studies through no desire on his own part to become a lawyer but — the prospect of a business career being abhorrent to him — in conformity with his father's wish that he should prepare himself for some useful employment. In 1877-78 he attended the Harvard Law School; in 1878-79 he was a student in the New York law office of Anderson and How-land; in 1879-80 in the Boston office of Shattuck, Holmes (now Mr. Justice Holmes of the United States Supreme Court), and Munroe. At the end of these three years he presented himself in Boston for examination for the bar — and failed. "At that time," President Lowell has written, "he remarked that while all his friends whose judgment he respected thought he ought not to accept a defeat, but try again, he did not himself see why he should do so. Nor did he; and he was right. His friends had not appreciated capacities not fully revealed, or the future that lay before him in quite a different line."
For the two years between his graduation from Harvard College (1877) and his engagement in marriage (May 1879) to Edith Greenough of Quincy, Massachusetts, Barrett Wendell suffered a frankly miserable existence. The winter of 1878-79, spent in a New York law office, was perhaps the worst time of all. But all the available letters of this period — and a considerable number, addressed to F. J. Stimson, have been preserved — reveal clearly the writer's deeply discouraged outlook upon the world: this is equally true whether they are written from New York or from the Isles of Shoals, where his family was then wont to spend the summer, or from Florida, which he visited In the spring of 1879 In company with another lifelong friend, John Templeman Coolidge. These letters to Mr. Stimson are, however, so charged with personal flavor and so significant as documents of
30 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
sensitive youth, discouraged to the point of despair, yet unknowingly on the very threshold of satisfying achievement, that some passages from them may profitably be cited. Since many of them are but partially dated, their chronological sequence cannot be guaranteed.
8 East 38TH Street, New York
... I can find no words to express the dulness of life here; and the devil of it is that I am yielding to it completely. In Gath I am becoming a Philistine. Nunc de me tacendum.
My cousin Lilly Wendell is staying here — having what she describes as a pleasant time. All I know about it is that I have in no way contributed to her pleasure. The Upham girls dined here the other night. . . . Miss 011a . . . talked about Matthew Arnold, and I became feebly interested in that poet and bought a volume of his effusions. They are horribly pedantic and priggish, to my mind; but the fellow means something and knows what he means. I don't like his way of putting things as a rule, but I understand the things he means to put better than I expected to. I have come across several ideas of my own — not original, but favorite — badly embalmed in artificial poetry, but still recognizable. So on the whole I am rather glad that I bought him — particularly as the book happens to be bound in cloth of a most delightful color — a rich dark peacock blue-green — and is extremely ornamental and correct upon a somewhat chromatic library table.
I am deep in the Divine Comedy again. After all, Dante is the only book which carries me away. I manage to lose myself in the smoky depths of hell for half an hour or so every evening; and I am beginning to incline to the opinion that, whatever my own views may be on the existence of that locality, it is a matter of congratulation that the people of the Old World entertained strong convictions upon the subject. Hell has certainly given me more pleasure during the past two years than Heaven and Earth combined. . . .
8 East 38TH Street, Sunday ... I was greatly amused yesterday at the contrast between
your letter and some remarks addressed to me by the boss. You accused me, as of a crime, of being able, after all, to become excited from time to time. The boss stated with deploring gravity that he had never seen a person of my age who showed so little power of caring for anything. On the whole, I might as well keep on with law; he did n't know that anything else would bore me less; but unless I roused myself to a little more enthusiasm than I at present showed for anything, he did not promise me any great chance of success in life. Then he said some civil things about no need of work and the management of family estates, that were mildly amusing, and our tete-a-tete ended. . . .
49 Nassau St., New York, January 7,1879
Dear Fred, — I have tried with utter lack of success to do the writing you ask for. You can form no idea, in your present Kingsley state of mind, of the utterly ruinous condition of my character. I have lost every atom of self-control I ever had. I am growing duller, and stupider, and weaker, and more of a Philistine every day. I shall not be surprised if you do not answer this note for a dozen reasons. It is rude to write on office paper. It is contemptible to leave Lampy in the lurch after having pledged myself to help him. It is doubly contemptible to see a sane, healthy-looking man of three-and-twenty who ought to be a gentleman, and as a gentleman to have something approaching a respectable amount of character and determination, fading out into a miserable limp paper-doll, which has not even the recommendation of being dressed in the fashion.
Believe me, Fred, I do not know how to help myself. My life is a succession of fits of indignation at my own weakness, and of fits of complete abandon to that weakness, in which I grow weaker and weaker. I will try to do something for you, and for myself; I am beginning to fear — I have been beginning to fear for some years, I believe — that while man proposed that I should be something, God in his infinite wisdom is disposing of me as a mere copyist in a bad hand— with an ultimate view to the fertilization of the soil.
32 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS [/f/ the end of an undated letter from Appledore^ Isles of Shoals]
LA TRISTEZZA DI APPLIDORO Opera Tragica
PERSONE
IMMORTALI
Mr. Barrett Wendell: handsome, accomplished, genial, beautiful, foolish, studious, literary, sentimental, and unhappy.
Mr. : ugly, ponderous, intellectual, appalling, bugbear
pro tern, to B. W.
: musical, smiling, slightly under the influence of liquor.
H. 1. BowDiTCH, M.D.: elderly, dovelike, fresh from an operation on the 1-g of a young woman from parts unknown. Santa Celia: patron goddess of the island.
MORTALI
White men: none.
Miss : dark-eyed. Oriental, voluptuous beauty from New
York. Bad musician, goodish flirt. Slow mother and fast brother.
Miss : jolly, noisy, and at a loss for somebody to flirt with.
La Marchesa di Inferno e Fiamme: sister to the foregoing. Misses Bowditch and Sister, Long, Kate Wendell, Jones, Almy, and Weiss: walking ladies.
DiABOLi POVERi (i.e., cads)
A family named , and a whole lot of people with other
names.
Old women, old men, young women, young men, noisy children, etc., by a large company, which for a wonder is destitute both of accomplishment and talent.
Jacksonville, February 27
. . . No one can know better than I the damning sense of uselessness which saddens the lives of men like you and me when we find ourselves, as we find ourselves too often, with leisure to think and nothing in particular to think about. Life for its own sake is not to us worth living. Whether it be our national dyspepsia, or our unused muscles, or a hateful
fact makes very little difference. To us eating, drinking, living, and breathing — even if we breathe this delicious Florida air — are delights which we shall not be very sorry to say good-bye to. Yet something or other deters us from being the first to speak the farewell word. In my own case, it is half a regard for the feelings of people whose lives I do not help to make happy, and yet who have a certain fondness for me which can be explained upon no rational ground; and half a feeling that it would be a confession of weakness at which men whom I think not so strong as I would laugh. If other people can bear life until its end comes, I ought to be able to bear it too. At any rate, if I can carry through the world these wretched nerves of mine, that quiver with pain at things which make other men's nerves vibrate with pleasure, I can at least feel that I may leave the world without the fear that it will pry into my secrets. As a cynical character in one of my comedies says, "All men are fools. Those only are wise who succeed in concealing their folly." The removal of oneself from the world is a confession of folly which sets all the world which knows us to picking our follies to pieces. We are not allowed to rest in peace without a psychological post-mortem performed by very unskillful doctors. And Heaven grant that when our time for rest comes, it may come at last as peacefully and be as peaceful as our world will let it be. . . .
8 East 38TH Street, [Good] Friday
... I went to Trinity Church this morning with Ned. The great altar, with the white reredos rising behind and a flaming window full of saints and angels above it, was draped in heavy black. A great white cross stood out against the draperies. The church was full of people of every rank in life, standing side by side with that wonderful Christian equality that we see in the old churches of the Old World. And the most glorious floods of solemn music came rolling down the dim Gothic aisles. It was a morning to be remembered for a lifetime. Ned was sorry that he could not sympathize. I did sympathize, and it was all that I could do to help myself from falling on my
34 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
knees when that grim old prig of a gave a benediction
as solemn as a Pope's.
The frame of mind represented in these letters, written chiefly from New York, was obviously due in large measure to imperfect health, uncongenial prospects, and a general lack of incentive to satisfactorily directed effort. Two of these three difficulties vanished with his engagement. The tone of his letters immediately underwent an extraordinary change, the reasons for which are not far to seek. Miss Greenough's father was William Whitwell Greenough, a Boston man of affairs, for many years a resident of Quincy, who enriched the life of his community by a long and valuable service as president of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library. Through her mother, Catherine Scollay (Curtis) Greenough, her New England lineage was identical at points of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries with that of Barrett Wendell. To all the congenialities of ancestral and immediate background, there was added that fortunate divergence of temperament upon which the happiness of one so constituted, emotionally, as Wendell may depend.
The more significant passages in Wendell's letters to Stimson in the years between his engagement and his marriage are too intimate for print. To his older English friend. Colonel Robert Thomson, he wrote, apropos of his engagement and his prospects, more appropriately for the present purpose.
Quincy, September 28, 1879
Dear Colonel Thomson, — Your welcome present has just been sent to me from 38th Street, where Mr., Gray left it a few days ago. I am sure that I need not tell you how much it pleased me; and indeed did I feel that there were such a need, I should not know how to do so. I have begun to learn this summer that there are real feelings in the world that conven-
tional expressions were Invented to describe, and yet which they fail to describe for the very reason that they are conventional. And so when I thank you most heartily for your kind remembrance, I am sure that you will understand that I appreciate and value your sympathy in my happiness and your kind hopes for my future.
How soon my future will assume a definite form I cannot yet say. My father does not wish me to be married until I am admitted to the bar; and Miss Greenough is an only daughter and is only twenty years old, so her people are unwilling to lose her; and although I have a hope of being married in the spring, I hardly dare to breathe it abroad and nothing is settled as yet. I have already begun my studies. I read law for four or five hours every day in a Boston office, with one of the most charming men I ever met — young Wendell Holmes, a son of the Autocrat of whom you have probably heard — and a distant kinsman of mine, although I never happened to know him until a few weeks ago. Quincy is so near Boston that I can come out every evening, however; and here I shall stay for a few weeks longer. Then I am going into lodgings in Boston for the winter, I have taken a suite of rooms with my most intimate college friend [F. J. Stimson] and we are looking forward to some delightful evenings over a great wood fire ....
But instead of turning to letters at this point, we may better resort to one of Wendell's own principles of composition and bring this record of his student years to a close with something like a summary of the preceding pages. This is found In his own words, written In the memoir of his father which has already proved its value to the present purpose: —
So in the autumn [of 1877] I returned to Cambridge, and began the study of law. The year was disappointing. Though I have since found that the discipline of legal study strengthened my mental habit for life, the work at the time was both detestable and depressing. An accidental physical fact probably had something to do with this. The muscles of my back have
always been rather weak, so that I habitually walked with a cane ever since I was an undergraduate. The hard chairs of the Law School library therefore combined with the constant need of going to bookshelves and handling heavy volumes to keep me constantly tired. Even now, in consequence, I am aware of instinctive displeasure when I see a book bound in legal calf. The fact that my courtship looked unpromising did not help things; and in the early winter a not serious illness resulted in a permanent scar on one cheek. At the end of the year I did not take the trouble to present myself at the annual examinations, so got no credit for what work I had reluctantly done. Hardly any line of conduct could have been more disconcerting to a parent; yet I do not remember that the letters sent me by my father contained even a syllable of reproach. Instead, he found no fault with my suggestion that I had been devoting myself too long to abstract study, and might possibly find the more responsible duties of studying in an office less repugnant; and he proceeded, with no help on my part, to find a place for me.
My months of professional study in a Nassau Street office gave little relief. The surroundings there, nevertheless, were friendly. The head of the firm, Mr. Henry Anderson, had become, as he always stayed, an affectionately intimate friend of my father; they had met, I believe, as vestrymen of Calvary Church. His wife's friendship with my mother was just as close.
My work in the office was mostly the searching of titles and the indexing, with cross references, of the published reports of the New York courts — the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals. Though an admirable discipline in the matter of accuracy, it was solitary and far from stimulating to the imagination. Some time in February or March I got to a point of nervous depression which I imagined serious. As usual when even the shadow of real trouble appeared, my father was instantly kind, and let me go for two or three weeks to Florida with my college friend, Templeman Coolidge. Called to Boston, not very long after my return, by the funeral of a classmate, I found my personal affairs taking a wonderful turn for the
better, and came home engaged. In every way this happily altered the outlook.
In the frequent and prolonged intervals of my office I read, as conscientiously as I could, the subjects requisite for admission to the Suffolk bar. When the examinations came in April or May, I presented myself. Greatly to my chagrin, I failed to pass them. On general principles, I should have expected my father to be furious, and Mr. Shattuck — whose office had never before produced an unsuccessful candidate — to be resentful. Instead, though both confessed regret, neither spoke an unkind word. Just as if I deserved it, the preparations for my wedding went on. I was married at Quincy, on the first of June, 1880, to Edith Greenough.
The next week my wife and I passed together in the old family home at Portsmouth, which was destined years later to become our own, and where I am writing now. Already fond of it, I had asked Aunt Carry to lend it to me; and, doubtless at my father's suggestion, she had cordially done so, going away for some family visits. I can now see that my wish to begin my new life in his old home touched him deeply; however we might unmeaningly have jarred on one another, our hearts proved at one.
His real wedding present was a letter of credit for five hundred pounds, which gave us three months of travel in Europe. On our return, while we were still staying for a few days in 38th Street, came from a clear sky the telegram which decided my future career. Months before, I had chanced to meet in the street my college teacher of English, Professor Adams Hill. We had hardly come across each other since I graduated. He asked me what I was doing. I told him that I was reading law. He asked whether I liked it; I said no. And on his duly inquiring what kind of job I should prefer, I am said to have answered, "Even yours." Somehow the incident stuck in his memory. So early in October, finding himself in need of some one to read sophomore themes, he proposed my name to President Eliot, who was always fond of experiments with inexperienced teachers. The result was a telegram, inviting me to come on and discuss the matter. It arrived, I think, on
38 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
the evening when Doctor Washburn came to dine, and I saw him for the last time; he died a few months later — some years younger than I am now. The telegram decided my career; it also gratified my father as indicating, for the first time, that somebody thought me conceivably useful. Though I began teaching at Harvard thus fortuitously and with no notion of keeping it up long, and though more than once I came near dropping the work, I was actually on the rolls there as a teacher for thirty-seven years; and a few months before my father died he was gratified by my promotion to a full professorship.
THE YOUNG INSTRUCTOR AND WRITER
1880-1:
Though the year 1880 marks the beginning of Barrett Wendell's definite work in the world, no excuse is needed for having devoted so much space to the years preceding that date: they were the years that determined what he was just as much as what he was not to be. His personal stars in their courses fought against the law and practical affairs quite as clearly as on the side of letters and their pursuit. The obvious means to this end was an academic post, and — for Wendell — at Harvard. His own apprehension of the grounds on which his appeal as a teacher began to be felt, was frankly expressed on an autobiographic page relating to his early years of teaching: "The work at Harvard kept me pretty busy; I did it conscientiously, and my oddities of temper and of manner chanced to interest my pupils." There can be no doubt that his marked individuality counted in his favor.
One who came to know him when he had been teaching only six years out of the thirty-seven devoted primarily to this work may be permitted to recall himi, not as he appeared at any one period, as a younger or an older man, but in the singular unity of impression produced by his personality throughout his life. He stands, then, before the eye of memory, well-proportioned of figure, of moderate height, shapely of head, tawny-bearded, with quick blue eyes, alert and responsive in personal encounter, the man of the world rather than the professor In general appearance. Ready of tongue, addicted to repartee, he expressed himself in a staccato and much-inflected speech
40 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
that was eminently his own — not the utterance of Oxford, yet much more English In its effect than American. Add to this distinctive characteristic such an easily Imltable habit as the twirling of a watch-chain while addressing an audience, and It Is no wonder that Barrett Wendell offered an Irresistible temptation to the mimic In successive college generations.
It Is a sure token of poverty when a college does not possess In Its teaching force one or more "characters," the " taking off" of whom becomes a recognized accomplishment. These are generally the men who Impress themselves most strongly upon the undergraduate. The superficial things about them can be, and are. Imitated with mirthful results. As a rule, however, the personal peculiarities of a teacher are interesting in proportion to his own value as an Instructor and stimulator of youth. The real things, — the fruits of study and thought, the expressions of intellectual and personal friendship, the intimate concern for the welfare of pupils, — these are not objects of mimicry, however they may enhance its appeal. In the case of Barrett Wendell — as many of his letters will show — such realities stood throughout his career at the foundation of his teaching and of its far-spreading Influence.
In October 1885, as in February 1876, almost exactly ten years before, a new periodical came Into existence at Harvard through a secession from the Advocate. This was the Harvard Monthly, in the origin of which Barrett Wendell was even more involved than in that of the Lampoon. An editorial article in the first issue declared, "There can be no doubt that the study of English composition at Harvard has come out of the second and into the first rank of the studies now offered," and referred particularly to Wendell's course, "English XII," started only the year before and already enrolling about a hun-
THE YOUNG INSTRUCTOR AND WRITER 41
dred and fifty men. The purpose of the Monthly was to establish "a magazine which shall contain the best literary work done here at Harvard, and represent the strongest and soberest undergraduate thought." The editor-in-chief of the first volume was Alanson B. Houghton, now United States Ambassador to Germany, and on the editorial board were the late George Rice Carpenter, who became a distinguished professor of English at Columbia, William Morton Fullerton, afterwards Paris correspondent of the London Times^ and George Santayana. Carpenter was the second editor-in-chief; George P. Baker, now professor of dramatic literature at Harvard, the third; and Bernhard Berenson, the fourth. With these men, their colleagues, and their successors, — of whom the maker of this volume happened to be one, — Wendell stood in a stimulating relation of counselor and friend. The Monthly^ an ambitious infant, needed all the help he could give it, in continuance of his sound advice to its parents before its birth, and all this help Wendell gave, without stint. He contributed the first article to its first number — a New England sketch, ** Draper," based directly upon a passage in one of his diaries recording a driving trip with his brother Gordon from New York to Boston in the summer of 1885. His interest in the magazine might indeed have been taken for granted, since the Monthly was merely the student expression of the very concern for letters which Wendell as a teacher had begun to quicken. The immediate result was a publication which after nearly forty years bears with astonishing credit the test of critical examination. No doubt its editors — and perhaps Wendell himself—thought it more remarkable than it really was. What neither they nor he may have realized is that the teachers who throw themselves as heartily into an undergraduate enterprise as Wendell did in this instance are few. Their ultimate reward is suggested by
42 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
Professor Baker, in his reminiscence of Barrett Wendell, printed in the Harvard Graduates^ Magazine for June 1921:
"Mine was the day when the Harvard Monthly was founded. It might almost be said that Grays 18, the room his name made famous, was its editorial office, for he was intensely interested in the magazine from the first day of its founding. In its second year I never knocked in vain at Grays 18 for counsel as to policy, available undergraduate work, or searching criticism. Immediately after the appearance of each number, at least a postcard and often a detailed letter of criticism would be on my desk. Nothing ever did so much to give me a sense that an art is far greater than any of its servants as Wendell's praise and blame of those successive numbers.'*
In the period covered by the dates above this chapter, Wendell made and abandoned his attempts to become a novelist. His juvenile efforts as a playwright, his continuance in this direction through the authorship of plays for college and private theatricals,* bore witness to a strong bent towards creative writing. It was but natural, therefore, that while other nascent professors of English were delving into Anglo-Saxon roots, and pressing the dry leaves of higher scholarship, Wendell was trying his best to deal with human life and character through the medium of fiction. As it turned out, his best was not so good as to establish him among the younger novelists of his time, from whom much better things were to be expected. Two published novels. The Duchess Emilia: A Romance (1885) and RankelVs Remains: An American Novel (1887), were the public fruits of this effort. There is besides an unpublished novel. Plaster of Paris, begun in 1881, when for a time there was a break in what was to
* A farce, "Poison," written by Wendell and J. T. Wheelwright and acted by the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard was booked for a benefit production at the Boston Museum in the spring of 1881, but never acted there.
Barrett Wexdell at Thirtv-five, ix "Grays i8'
THE YOUNG INSTRUCTOR AND WRITER 43
prove the long continuity of Wendell's teaching at Harvard. The occasion of this break was characteristic enough to be recorded. Near the end of his first year of teaching, it was made known to him that the finances of the College did not warrant the reappointment of two instructors in English, of whom he was one. To the other the salary attaching to the post was of far more immediate importance than to W^endell. Without hesitation, and, one may well imagine, somewhat to the consternation of his family, he accordingly resigned his instructorship. His formal reappointment was dated October 11, 1882. The writing of Plaster of Paris had proved, however valuable as an exercise in composition, a frail substitute for teaching as a means of support.
The Duchess Emilia is a story of nineteenth-century Rome before the temporal power of the popes came to an end. For its difficult theme it has the Roman experiences of a strange young New Englander, into whose body at birth passed the soul of a great but maculate Roman lady whose life ended at the moment his began. The critics of course called it "Hawthornesque." As a work of art it suffers sorely from its author's attempt to tell a complicated tale from a variety of angles, to the notable sacrifice of a sustained dramatic effect. In relation to Wendell's own life it is significant as showing to what good purpose, in his admirable descriptions of Roman scenes, he could turn observations fully recorded in his diary of 1874. But this does not make a novel, and The Duchess Emilia^ creditable as the work of a beginner, must be regarded as an object rather of personal than of permanent public interest.
Two years later came RankelVs Remains^ a more realistic endeavor to portray contemporary American life. The Republican National Convention of 1884, which nominated James G. Blaine for the presidency. Is
44 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
thinly veiled in many pages of description. In the robbing of the grave of the hard-hearted — yet romantic — merchant, Rankell, whose sinister figure dominates the story, there is an obvious reflection of the outrage, then comparatively recent, upon the grave of the New York merchant, A. T. Stewart, in St. Mark's churchyard. In RankelTs Remains there is something of the same element of the macabre as in The Duchess Emilia; there is also the same unfortunate resort to a method of divided narration. But there is a definite gain in directness and effectiveness — whether enough to guarantee a further improvement in later novels, had they been written, it were idle to conjecture.
In passing, it ought to be noted that, although Barrett Wendell did not attend the Republican Convention which nominated Blaine, he was present, a month later in Chicago, at the Democratic Convention which nominated Cleveland. At this time indeed he served as a correspondent of the Boston Daily Advertiser under the signature, "A Looker-on in Chicago." In the ensuing campaign he became a pronounced "mugwump," with scant sympathy for those who placed party regularity first in their political considerations. This was an attitude which could not escape its penalties. They are suggested in an editorial note, under the title, "A Tabooed Novel," printed in the Boston Herald o{ 'November 21, 1886: —
"Mr. Barrett Wendell, the author of the clever story, RankeWs Remains, published by Messrs. Ticknor & Co. a few weeks since, has the honor of being brought under the ban of certain party newspapers in this city. The 'Journal ^2i^ put into a frame of agitation by his manner of making a sketch of a political convention, which impelled it to publish a leading editorial, in which it assumed that Mr. Wendell must have meant to describe a Republican convention here, and went into an argument to prove that
THE YOUNG INSTRUCIOR AND WRilER 45
the latest Republican national convention was no such body as was represented in his depiction. The Advertiser^ it is stated, has been similarly disturbed, and the edict is said to have gone out in that office that the book shall not be noticed at all in its columns. Is this the beginning of an Index Expurgatorius to deal with mugwump literature? If carried out, we suppose that it will be necessary, in the future, to have all books of mugwump authorship examined, to see that no heresies which conflict with the party standard are contained in them; and, as all the authors of the country are largely infected with lack of faith on this point, the work of these censors is likely to be no light one. In the mean time, this tabooing of Mr. Wendell's book will be likely to invite curiosity to it, and should prove a valuable advertisement to its publishers."
Possibly prodded by these expressions, the Advertiser two days later printed a review of the book, beginning, "There is advantage frequently in delay," and, after some praise of the purely fictitious elements of the story, declaring, *'If, indeed, Mr. Wendell intended an accurate portrayal of historic scenes and situations in the national republican convention of 1884, he has been grossly misinformed . . . No such convention ever did take place in this country and none probably ever will." In the light of Wendell's later politicial views the idea of placing one of his books on a conservative Index Expurgatorius has an aspect almost comic.
The occasion of his visit to Chicago in 1884 was the prosaic mission of supervising the local entrance-examinations of candidates for admission to Harvard College — a task which before the days of the College Board was assigned to young instructors. Two years later, in 1886, a similar mission took Wendell to San Francisco. His capacity for intelligent travel, of which he
46 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
always made ample record in letters and journals, gave to each of these expeditions the value of a broadening experience. Apart from all the impressions of places and persons so recorded, his written words give a clear impression of himself—significantly, for a single instance, in a penciled note at the end of his Chicago Convention diary of 1884: *'Moonlight night on the seashore with news of death. The infinite spaces of peace into which the dead man expands open before one's eyes." The whole man appears more distinct when one thinks of him, returned from the turmoil of crowded halls and trains, rejoining his little family at New Castle, New Hampshire, where his father had a summer house, and moved to expression by the poetry of night and death.
During the years to which this chapter is devoted the first two of Barrett Wendell's four children were born — Barrett, Jr., April 19, 1881; Mary Barrett, February 17, 1883. His two younger children were born in the next period to be considered — William Greenough, November 11, 1888; Edith, September 5, 1893. His entire family life, of singular felicity, was centred in the Boston house, 358 Marlborough Street, in which he and his wife went to housekeeping in the autumn of 1880. "We had two servants," Wendell wrote long afterwards, "who were sisters, of spotless character and little skill. My wife nevertheless displayed her talent for hospitality"; and so it began, the long happy domestic scene, the background of friendships, industry, and fruitful service to the intellectual life of his time. Not that his nature underwent any such change as to ensure him unbroken satisfaction in life and circumstance. On the contrary, there were the inevitable ups and downs of a sensitive temperament. A passage in a page-a-day diary, written in May 1884, apropos of a friend who had just taken his own life, indicated, however, the frame of mind which by
that time had replaced the steady depression of five years before: —
Certainly suicide is an unhandsome proceeding, if you have near relatives to be troubled, and disgraced too •— for people always look doubtfully at a suicide's kinsman and wonder if he will not do it too. And again, as Mr. Norton once observed, even if there were nobody to whom you owed the civility of living as long as forbearing Nature will let you, it is very bad taste to leave so nasty a mess as your body on the hands of your friends. I wonder if anybody ever reached thirty-five in New England without wanting to kill himself. Really, it rather surprises me to see how few do so — though for my part I am past the critical stage, and find life pleasanter every year.
In this chapter, as in those that will follow, the plan of assembling the chosen portions of letters and journals after introductory pages applying to the period under consideration, will be followed. To these selections themselves only such words of explanation as may seem imperatively needed will be added.
To F. J. Stimson
[Written while Wendell was housed^ on his wedding journey^ with a depressing cold.\
Verona, August 15, [1880]
... I grieve that law cuts into G. G. We could get along better without law. But this infernal Yankee prejudice in favor of something that brings in cash — as if one cared for money when one could find decent amusement without it — makes law the thing to do, I suppose. In fact, a man who wants to do serious literary work, nowadays, must sacrifice not only his best hours to it, but shocking to say, he must sacrifice that still more useful thing, the general respect of other people. It is maddening to have to do one's best work in an amateurish way, if not actually on the sly — at the risk of having fingers pointed at you if you are found out. . . .
48 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
I think you have enough in your new book to feel sure that somebody will always remember your work, though. As for me, I am like a prosaic, uncourageous hero of a prosaic "Madonna of the Future" — see H. James's story. When I die of a cough or something else, perhaps some amiable fool may imagine that my empty blank books might have contained something worth having.
To Colonel Robert Thoynson
QuiNCY, October 19, 1880
. . . My habits of travel are too far confirmed to be broken; and a very pleasant thing has just happened to me which seems to offer me a chance of continuing them from year to year. Almost immediately after my arrival in New York I was invited to teach Rhetoric at Harvard; and in case the experiment is satisfactory to the University people and to me too, there is a very fair chance that I may stay there permanently. In this case I shall have a good three months of vacation every year. And I think that I shall very often pass them in Europe. . . .
To his Father
Boston, y^^r//3, 1881
... I do not believe that any two human lives ever had fewer things to trouble them than ours have had this year. From the day that we were married to this day that I write to you, everything has been as bright and as happy as it could be. And really it seems to me that in this past year I have had happiness enough to make life worth living, even though the future were as black throughout as the gloomiest dreams of my most despondent moments ever painted it.
And I feel that I owe all this to you, and that I can in no way repay you except by telling you over and over again that I realize every day more and more what you have done for me and are doing for me.
For myself I can do little, so far as I can tell. I have worked hard at Cambridge, with what success I do not know. I have
done nothing else, beyond my work on the farce which will probably appear at the Museum in the course of two or three weeks.'
Whether I shall keep my Cambridge place I cannot tell until the end of the year. In the summer I may try to prepare myself for the bar again; but in spite of the advice of all friends for whose opinion I have any respect, I cannot bring myself to approve of the plan.
Practice is pretty much out of the question. I am hardly strong enough to stand it. If I were brought face to face with the necessity of money-making, I should much rather venture myself in some business than in a profession overcrowded with stronger and abler men than I — a profession in which all but the very highest work is underpaid to an appalling extent. And from anything but the purely practical point of view, I cannot bring myself to regard the work which admission to the bar would cost me as worth doing. However, for two months more I cannot seriously think of it.
On the other hand, it is just possible that there may be something in this play-writing business. If our farce is successful, Jack and I intend to try our hand at a more pretentious comedy. If that is successful, we shall probably have received a market for our wares and an incentive to produce them. If I don't study law this summer, I mean to give the morning of every day to systematic writing, which may result in something. My Cambridge work will help me there.
If I keep my place at college, I shall continue to make something, to which T may add a little by writing. I can see no other prospect of helping myself. . . .
To F. J. Stinison
QuiNCY, October 7, [1881]
Dear Fred, — Your letter from Santander asks me what young American wives should be allowed to read. In my opinion they should be allowed to read whatever they want to. Perhaps I am too unreserved in my ways of talking and of
^ See antCy p. 42.
50 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
thinking, too; but I like to say to Edith whatever comes into my head, and I like to have her talk to me in the same way. For the rest, I don't know why a married girl should not read whatever she pleases. In foreign life, which you and I are apt to read about, family relations are so different from what they are with us that unless we stop to think, we are apt to draw inaccurate conclusions about the world in which we ourselves live. To a French woman with a French husband, and the peculiar surroundings of Continental life, certain sorts of books might be pretty dangerous. They might take a serious hold on her imagination, and without really altering her character they might fill her open thoughts with hateful images, not devoid of fascination.
But it seems to me that the nature of our women is too high and pure easily to be lowered, or corrupted, or even injured. From things they ought not to think of— I mean things that you and I would not like them to think of— they turn away of themselves. Seriously, my dear fellow — for I take it for granted that you wrote seriously — it would be better if we followed their advice in our reading — or rather their example. I think we can trust them with anything with which they are willing to trust themselves. Can we say as much for one another? . . .
As for staying away, I think you do well. Conventional America says a young man should be on hand and keep looking out for a job. Of some men this view would be the only true one; but I admire you enough to believe you to be capable of setting to work with a real will, even after you have been doing nothing but hunt pleasure for some time. And such periods of life as you are now enjoying don't happen every day. As the delightful man in "Engaged" says, "Yovi're only married once a year, you know — that is — I mean — only every now and then". . . .
To the same
November lo, [1881]
... I am trying to write a novel, but with little success. When you come here you can write one about me, entitled
THE YOUNG INSTRUCTOR AND WRITER 51
"A Study of a Failure." A good motto for it would be the epitaph I have lately composed for myself; "He lacked the courage to do good or evil,"
To Colonel Robert Thomson
Boston, February 8, 1882
. . . We have been living along very quietly. We passed a month with the Greenoughs — my wife's people — at Quincy; and we were at my father's in New York through most of December. Then we came back here, where we are so perfectly comfortable that my old rambHng instincts are disappearing. Owing to a rather disagreeable complication of circumstances I resigned my place at Harvard, with which I was more than satisfied last year. And at present I am ashamed to say that I am without any particular occupation — a state of affairs regarded in this part of the world with stern disfavor. Still I am as comfortable and as happy as mortal man can be; and I am not quite idle. I have read a good deal, and I have indulged my old fancy for writing as far as to write a short novel, which I 'm thinking of sending to a publisher. If it ever sees the light, I '11 send you a copy. I remember a civil speech of yours at a table d'hote at Naples, when you expressed a hope that you might some day hear of me as a writer. Now I feel a little encouraged to hope that you may. The book I have finished does not altogether please me, though. It is a little gloomy, and tinged with a cynicism that I really don't feel. Then there are one or two incidents that I could wish out of it. But I had an idea, and the idea worked itself out in its own way. Have you ever tried your hand at fiction? I believe that your novel-writer is almost as much hampered by imaginary facts as your historian is by real ones. Things turn up unexpectedly; and you can't get away from them. . . .
Your compatriot, Oscar Wilde, has been here lecturing, and has rather puzzled good Americans. Some lion-hunters went wild over him and behaved like fools. Some respectable people, among whom is my mother, think his poems dreadfully improper, and say that he should n't be received. He is caricatured so constantly in Punch, and we see his name so often in
52 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
print, that he must be a well-known figure in London. What do people think of him there? Is he somebody, or only a conspicuous guy? Or is he a man who has had his day — a dying lion, lacking the dignity of Thorwaldsen's? . . .
To his Wije
[On office paper of Shattuck^ Holmes and Munroe]
Boston, October 3, 1882
Eliot offers me an annual appointment at twelve hundred — with rather more work than I had before. After all, there may be a chance of reappointment.
My father advised me to accept whatever Eliot offered. I thought it might be well to see Mr. Shattuck first, so I came here, only to find him closeted with some other legal swell, and inaccessible for God knows how long. I am waiting in hopes of a chance to ask him whether the Advertiser could possibly make it worth my while not to go back to Cambridge. . . .
I shall write Eliot a definite answer to-night — undoubtedly accepting, I think. Work will then begin immediately. Love to all at Quincy. I wish I could be there too.
To Colonel Robert Thomson
Boston, January 10, 1884
. . . Greek has been in my head of late almost all the time. In America it has always been the custom to prepare boys for college by teaching them Latin, Greek, and the simpler forms of mathematics. Of late there has been much discussion about changing all this. Scientific people, and people who are deep in modern languages, declare that their own fields of study offer quite as good ground for cultivating young minds as do the older fields where all minds have perforce been cultivated. And now we have before us at Harvard a proposition that we shall receive in future students who prepare themselves in science or in modern languages instead of in Greek. There are many arguments on both sides, besides the "practical" arguments with which I do not find myself in much sympathy. The great thing in education, some say, is that the student
THE YOUNG INSTRUC FOR AND WRITER S3
shall be taught to master something, and it is better that each man should master something which he cares about than something which he finds odious. This is plausible; at times I am almost inclined to think that it is true. Yet, whatever the reason may be, there is no doubt that the schools that I have seen where the classics are not insisted upon have not had the tone that one wishes a school to have. And then, we Americans, with strange inconsistency, hate novelty in any form with a hatred as deep as we know how to feel. We shall vote on the subject before long. I will write you how the vote goes.
Life has treated me gently this year, though it has kept me very busy. Indeed, this is the first letter that I have found time to write for a month. I have worked, and read; and I have gone out very little. I have met two countrymen of yours who have interested me — Mr. Matthew Arnold and Mr. Irving. Mr. Arnold I saw several times, with much pleasure — Mr. Irving only once, but he said so much about Shakespere in ten minutes that I have been thinking about it ever since. His acting I found very interesting; I had never seen him before. Mr. Arnold will carry home curious ideas of America. He has been seized upon by rich lion-hunters whom nobody ever heard of, and has been fed and flattered to the last degree. He capped the climax by going to visit Barnum, who tried to persuade him to give a course of lectures on "Personal Reminiscences of Eminent People I have Known." . . .
To the same
KiLBOURN, Wisconsin, 3 July^ 1884
Dear Colonel Thomson: — For the first time in four years I am on my travels, or something very like it. I have been to Chicago on some business for the college. I have slipped away from there for a few days, to see something of this Northwestern country of ours. In a day or two I go back again, to see the National Convention of the Democratic Party. You do not follow our politics, I suppose. At present they interest me a good deal. The Republicans have been in office since i860. Their original policy — the preservation of the Union — was successfully carried out. For years they have had no fixed policy
54 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
at all. Naturally they have been growing very corrupt. . . .
The Democrats — the Opposition — have not yet made their nomination. If they make a good one, so many men who have hitherto voted with the Republicans will support it that their candidate will almost certainly be elected. But the Democrats have a positive genius for blundering. They have had chance after chance in past years; they have always let them pass. At present, when unanimity and respectability are the two things they want, there are some signs that they are squabbling among themselves, and that men equally unfit with Blaine have a very fair chance of the nomination. . . .
In view of all this, the Convention which meets next week to nominate the Democratic candidate is distinctly the most interesting that has been held since I can remember. I think myself very lucky in being able to be on hand. I have left my wife and the babies with my people at New Castle. When I last heard from them — now a week or more ago — they were in capital condition. I have not been away from them so long since the babies have been in existence; and I am quite appalled at my own domesticity. I am as homesick as the Swiss of fiction. The truth is that this Western rountry of ours is terribly uninteresting. It is very fertile, but very flat. The landscape is as monotonous as landscape can be. The towns are brand new, and very ugly. The cities are the colossal works of men who as a rule know how to make money but not how to spend it. And though here and there you find oases in this desert, — such as a small club in Chicago, which is in every respect all that a club should be, — the whole atmosphere is very depressing to a man who is not too busy to stop and think. Accordingly, I am rather depressed.
To-night I am at a small town on the Wisconsin River whither I came over some hundred miles of railway because the scenery is said to be the finest in this part of the world. It is fair to say that I have not seen the scenery in question as yet. For when I arrived here it was raining cats and dogs, and when it stopped raining it was after dark. But the place is not promising in general aspect. It is fairly clean; to-night I perceive no other engaging quality.
THE YOUNG INSTRUCTOR AND WRITER SS
On the whole, though, I fear that I am a little unfair to what we call the Northwest. The Great Lakes, which I have seen for the first time, are very beautiful. The tints of the water are marvelous; they are like the finest tints that you see on the Mediterranean. Unhappily, I have seen them chiefly from cities. And in the lake cities so much coal is burned that they are buried in smoke-clouds as heavy as those that hang over London. Imagine the Bay of Naples mixed with a London fog. Then you will have some notion of what Lake Michigan looks like at Chicago.
Well, I have rambled on until I find my paper almost full. I have not said much, I fancy; but I have said enough to express to you how much I prize our friendship — now ten years old. Let me hear from you when you can, how the world goes with you and yours. . . .
[A few passages from a journal of WendelVs Chicago experiences supplement the preceding letter\
June 26, 1884. — Blaine will be hard to beat here. My present points against him are (i) The bloody shirt, which is pure disunion in thin disguise; (2) His foreign policy, which I hold to be purely British; i.e., aggressive, blustering, and expensive; (3) His proposal to divide the surplus among the states; (4) The Maine machine, as shown at Kittery; (5) The total barrenness of his career in any great public movement; (6) The political company he keeps. His personal character, for honesty, etc., I hold for the moment to be irrelevant. Webster was hardly honest, though he never sold his vote. But I do not know that Blaine would actually sell his vote on a public question. And those who hold that private legislation is purely a matter of business, and legislators in so far forth pure attorneys, are too common to be damned utterly. Hideous as such morality is, it is morality of a certain kind. . . .
June 28. — I slipped out of the examination room for a while, and called on Sumner, of Yale, who is examining people in a neighboring street. He tells me that the independent movement in Connecticut has real strength among the better classes of the people, as well as among the college men. In
regard to the nomination, he says that in all probability there was a preliminary bargain between Blaine and Logan that each should throw his following into the other's line, if the chances turned in favor of either. (Heaven forgive me, an instructor in English, for writing a sentence like that!) What I mean is this: if either Blaine or Logan showed strength enough to warrant hopes of success, the other was to support him. The Illinois delegates, personally offered to Blaine, had been voting for him for reasons of policy. Finding that there was some danger of his nomination, they came to the Logan manager and offered to cast their votes for Logan. This would have given him the whole vote of Illinois, and at the same time would have taken their votes from Blaine, who hitherto had lost none. Smaller things turn political tides. But Logan's followers would have none of it. Logan had telegraphed that they should vote for Blaine, and for Blaine they voted. I think that I have the story as Sumner told it. Possibly the state may have been Ohio. The main facts I am sure of. . . .
June 29. — ... Later to the club. There I found Emmons Blaine, who was very cordial. I was really glad to see him, and he wanted to hear all about his Boston friends. All of a sudden he asked if I was engaged for luncheon to-morrow. Taken by surprise, I told him the truth — that I was not. Then he invited me. This put me in as uncomfortable a position as possible. No one can more earnestly oppose his father than I do; and though I like and respect Emmons very heartily, it seems almost unworthy of a gentleman to accept the hospitality of a man whose father you are bound to speak ill of. Yet to decline when an invitation is put in such a way, with all the frankness of old friendship, needs more courage than I can quite summon up. The dilemma is painful. . . .
June 30. — ... Blaine called . . . and took me to a queer little restaurant not far from the hotel. It was apparently a wineshop. Wine boxes were piled higher than your head on all sides, with narrow paths between them. At one end of the labyrinth are a few cabinets with sliding doors. In one of these Stevens met us; and there we had a luncheon of cold beef, salad, and Pontet Canet, with cigarettes to top it. After
THE YOUNG INSTRITCTOR AND WRITER 57
luncheon Blaine began to speak of politics. I answered him as frankly as I could. He dilated a little on the iniquity and imbecility of Arthur's administration. With no policy, he said, the President had used all the patronage in his power to run himself in. I was unable to contradict him, and free to admit that the independent movement, in which I believed, had more earnestness in it than horse sense. On the other hand, I stated as clearly as I could my feelings about the civil service, the foreign policy, and the revenue. About the Kittery Navy Yard I spoke with more detail. I disclaimed, as I really meant to disclaim, any intention of publicly attacking the personal honesty of Mr. Blaine, who after all may have done little more than anybody would have done in his place. When acting president of the Pudding, I remember once so managing my voting that by tactics that were technically fair I managed to get Jack Brown elected — on the whole against the will of the majority. This I did because I rather liked Brown. My conduct afterwards appeared to me and to others unprincipled. At the same time it was not really so; at worst it was thoughtless. And if thoughtlessness can run away with a boy in a small matter, without really affecting his character, I do not see why it should not misguide a man in a great one. Well: Brown has thrown light on Little Rock.
However, as I wrote a day or two ago, my feeling about Mr. Blaine has stronger foundation than mere personal distrust in private matters. I hold him to be — as Everett put it — politically profligate. And though I would not say this in so many words to Emmons, I told him as plainly as I could how and why I disagreed with the policy that his father has been known by.
His rejoinder was curious. With much apparent good fellowship, he regretted the bolt in Massachusetts and in New York, because it alienated from his father just the sort of men whom he would have liked to recognize. To this I had no reply. In fact, I do not think that until this moment, when I write it down, I had any full understanding of the real meaning of it.
And so we parted. He invited me, I think, to pump me. So I am glad to have gone — I feel quite absolved from any
58 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
obligation. For I told him what he wished me to tell him as frankly as I could, yet said nothing, so far as I know, which could commit anybody. And, half unmeaningly, I gave him to understand that the movement of the independents in Massachusetts was less serious than on the whole I really think it. We are not as yet practical^ but we have determination enough to make proselytes. The brain is started; the nerves are beginning to quiver; if we do not stir the limbs before we are done with it, then we are no true men. . . .
July II. — North Carolina changes her whole vote from Bayard to Cleveland. Much enthusiasm. The New York delegation now waves its flag; but arouses little applause. Georgia now gives Cleveland nine more votes. Virginia gives him ten. My figures grow doubtful. Certainly, amid vast uproar, rather of confusion than of enthusiasm, the tide is setting toward Cleveland. Missouri, I think, in the midst of great confusion, gives Cleveland her vote. This nominates him, apparently. Tremendous shouts. "Hail to the Chief!" Profusion of flags. Everybody on his legs, cheering, waving anything he can get hold of. This outburst seems genuine. Barrett' has prophesied this nomination all day; and is pleased, though a good Blaine Republican. Now come the cannon, speaking to the heavens, etc.
A rush about town, a dinner at Cousin S's; and off at 5 in the limited express for New York. Gov. Carroll, Robb, and P. Dana on board. Bearded New Yorker, fresh from Colorado, dines with me and orders three meats at once. He goes to Europe twice a year and believes in Blaine. I bring forward facts which shake his faith. Smoke with Mr. Carroll, who talks of his sons and of Mr. R. Phelps's dangerous illness. The Cleveland men, he says, were wonderfully organized. Poor Mr. Belmont, a staunch Bayard man, is in despair. He is a hot-tempered, kind-hearted man, politically absurd, used by Kelly as a money-mine. Passionately fond of his children. Mr. Carroll has impressed upon his sons that no gentleman drinks before dinner. A delightfully high-bred man, with bold head, grizzled mustache, and well-bred smile. To bed early,
^ A Chicago cousin, Samuel Barrett.
THE YOUNG INSTRUCTOR AND WRITER 59
shortly after the cars left Fort Wayne. Here a crowd was on the platform, waiting for the County Democracy which followed us in a special train. News was there that Hendricks had been nominated for Vice-President. A thin youth, of humorous inclinations, kept popping his head out of a car window, like a jack-in-the-box, and making incoherent speeches which were cheered. A compartment full of politicians, who looked their trade, played poker, and smoked cigars out of a common pile on one of the seats,
July 11. — A bad night. Somebody has trodden on my bag and bent the frame so that it will not shut; and having been open all night it is full of cinders. I feel rather seasick. At Pittsburgh between six and seven o'clock. Grimly smoky like towns in the Midland Counties. Commercial gent, affably disposed, tells of what Pittsburgh looked like in the riots of '77. I was too uncomfortable to attend to him; so he departed in a dudgeon. Breakfast with Mr. Carroll. Fair coffee, shaken by movement of cars like the champagne of Mansfield in the Union Square play. We pass into rather effective hill-scenery, following the course of a middle-sized stream. At places the valley is quite narrow, between hills covered with deciduous trees, notably dark in color. Occasional farms. Daisies, which I have not noticed in the West. The roadbed looks remarkably good, but the train, perhaps because of its speed, is very unsteady. I have a slight misunderstanding with the man who sleeps above me, because I ask him whether it was he who stepped on my bag. Later he is mollified by an apology for opening a window, on the plea that I felt unwell; and he goes so far as to give me a telegraph blank. I get some good brandy, of which I drink rather more than I mean to. It diminishes my sickness.
To Lindsay Swift
New Castle, N. H., 30 Juncy 1885
My dear Swift: — I can't criticize Richard Feverel, but really I feel half inclined to repeat Woodberry's word and have done. I don't know when I have been so stirred by a book — hatefully, horribly stirred. Hatefully, I say, because somehow
6o BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
I feel that the whole thing is too dreadful, that there is no real need of all the tragedy. There is cause and effect enough, logic enough for anybody; yet there are just those unlucky accidents which an artist may cast aside. And without them there might have been in this great symphony a final harmony. Why must the last note be so harsh a discord?
Yet, after all, my very protests show the power that this book has. These people live and breathe, and this they do in an atmosphere almost as vast as the real one. Life is a broader thing when we have known them. And life is a fairer thing for knowing such a woman as Lucy. I cannot tell where in our fiction to find her mate. I shall look to Meredith for more. I shall not leave his other books unread.
For such power as I feel in his work I cannot neglect. I don't like it, any more than I like his style, which seems full of crabbed affectation, caught, I fancy, from Carlyle. But I simply acknowledge it.
My wife wishes to read the book. When she has finished it, I will send it back, with many thanks to you.
I have sent to Turin for Malombra^ by the way. It is not to be had nearer. If it turns out to be as like Emilia as your reviewer makes it, I shall be tempted to send a copy of my book to Fogazzaro.
This is a very unsatisfactory kind of a letter, I fear. Perhaps when I grow cooler I can write you a better. Now I am simply upset by the book you have given me. Let this be my claim to pardon for incoherence.
To the same
New Castle, N. H., 13 August^ 1885
Dear Swift: — I have to thank you for another literary treat — Malombra^ which has been sent me from Italy and which I have just finished. Fogazzaro's method is as unlike mine as Howells's; but in his chief motive there is certainly a curious analogy, though hardly a likeness, to Emilia.
I have had the impudence to send him a copy of my book, chiefly for curiosity to know what, if anything, he will say in return.
THE YOUNG INSTRUCTOR AND WRITER 6i
Have you gone into modern Italian literature at all? I know little of it; but what I have read has a flavor distinctly its own. There is a boldness about it — a clearness of form allied with a certain tentative indefiniteness of thought which I think very promising. They have none of the over-ripeness of the French, none of the commonplace everyday literary decency of the rather canting English. If you want to get off a new monograph, why not take this subject?
I have just received the Class Report. It makes me feel like an animalcula. What a procession of jurists, and medical discoverers, and mayors, and active supporters of Blaine and Logan, and other great men flits before one! And here am I, a beggarly little tutor, with a limited knowledge of his subject and a bad temper — so bad that I said Da?nn when I read that you were not a Mugwump. But then a man can't be all good on earth; otherwise there would be no call for Heaven, and our pulpiteering classmates would find their occupation gone.
To Colonel Robert Thomson
Boston, 31 January, 1886
Time flies with me nowadays faster than I can tell you. And though I meant to have written weeks ago, your answer to my last letter has come before my next. I have never been so busy as now. All day long I am at Cambridge with nearly twice as many pupils as I have ever had before. And just now the season is at its height here. I come home to a round of dinners and parties which take every moment of time that is not given to my work. Writing is nowhere. At this rate I shall be five or more years at my next novel.
The other night I was at a dinner where for the first time, and perhaps the last, I sat near my kinsman, Dr. Holmes. He is not a very near relative, and though I have known him in a way for years I have never seen much of him. And now that he is seventy-six I doubt whether any of us will see him long. But I am sure that, hereabouts at least, it will be long before we hear such another talk again. Two things are worth repeating: One of the men who were there told of a marriage between a spinster of eighty-five and a bachelor of eighty. "I need not
62 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
ask," said Holmes, "if there were any children; but were there any grandchildren?" The other was very different: to him, he said, the most perfect stanza in our language is one that his mother repeated to him when past ninety-one, which nothing but old age can reveal in all its perfect beauty. It is this stanza in Gray's Elegy: —
For who, to dumb forgetfulness a prey, This pleasing, anxious being e'er resigned,
Left the warm precincts of the cheerful day. Nor cast one longing, lingering look behind?
Pleasing and anxious, he said, are to him the final epithets for human life. Somehow, this gave the words more meaning for me than they have ever had before. And what fine human optimism such words tell of in the mouth of a man past his allotted time!
As I have said already, I have little time for writing; but as I go back and forth between Boston and Cambridge, I find odd moments for reading. And, of all things in the world, I am deep in Clarissa Harlowe. Do you know the book at first hand? I have heard of it for years as interminable, and the copy that was given me in a dear old set of Richardson at Christmas, has seven volumes of more than four hundred pages apiece. But I do not know in all our literature so lovely a woman as Clarissa. You grow to love her, to care for every little detail of her life, until prolixity vanishes. Now and then my heart is in my mouth as I read her letters; and I am beginning to wonder not that the world raved over her a century ago, but that it has ever ceased to rave. Lovelace, on the other hand, seems to me absurd; just as Clarissa is beyond all things human, so Lovelace is a novelist's invention of no very fresh kind. Yet his name is a part of the language, and hers is half forgotten.
Another book, of a very different kind, has delighted me of late — Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean, The beauty of the style, and of what I call the atmosphere of the book is exquisite; it deepens and broadens and strengthens all that Italy means to me. And, as Emilia must have shown you, Italy is to me more than any other part of the earth. . . .
[Of the many letters written to Mrs. Wendell in lieu of a diary during WendelVs journey to California^ in the summer of 1886^ a typical specimen^ prefaced by a shorter letter to F. J. Stimson, must suffice. The companionship of his brother Evert, in San FranciscOj arjd in many excursions thence and from their westward and eastward routes of travel, played a large part in the expedition.]
To F. J. Stimson
San Francisco, 2 July, 1886
A telegram of my election to the ^ B K came yesterday afternoon. It was signed "Brigs Tausig Co Lidgo Orlidt." Whether or no you are "Orlidt" I am unable to determine.^ But at any rate I want to tell you how thoroughly pleased I am at the news, in bringing which to pass — if that's English
— I know you did so much.
I have a few enlarged ideas of America, and a genuine respect for the memory of Brigham Young. Apart from this, — and a growing suspicion that some rich men are only fools instead of all being thieves, — I am unchanged. San Francisco is apparently a more possible kind of place than any other to the west of the Hudson. Still, its architecture — mostly ornamented by the jig-saw — is depressing enough almost to counteract very good cookery, better wine than I expected, and the best fruit-market I ever came across. — Here Evert, who is acting as proctor for me at |i.oo per hour, leans over and whispers a polite message to you, which resolves itself into a hope that you are having a pleasant summer, and a statement that he means to look you up the moment he gets to New York.
— To go on with San Francisco: they smoke frightfully strong tobacco here, and are said to have fewer morals to the block than are common in America — but then the blocks are rather longer than in the East.
Hospitality prevails. My first glimpse of California was in a Pullman car, where a quiet little grey-haired woman with
*The other names were taken, apparently with reason, for those of LeB. R. Briggs, F. W. Taussig, and J. T, Coolidge.
64 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
whom I had fallen to talking, suddenly produced from her travelling bag a couple of bottles of champagne, with which she proceeded to regale the company — in large tumblers. Then everybody you meet asks you to dine, or to visit him in the country, or in general to do something that involves financial expense for him and temporal for you.
I have fallen in, of course, rather with the literary crowd here than with the world of fashion. Stringham — who is professor at the University — and Harold Wheeler have been as kind as possible. To-night 1 am going to do Chinatown with Shafter Howard. To-morrow I dine with the master of the school where I am engaged in examining five Christian youths and seven Israelite. Next week we go to the Yosemite. The week after we start for home. I am looking out for the July Lippincott^ but do not yet find it at either of the clubs when I am down. When I read it, if I like the play, I shall write again; if I don't, I shall preserve grim silence.
To his Wife
San Francisco, i6 'July^ 1886
Dearest Edith: — This letter, I think, is the last I shall write here. To-morrow we start for the North, feeling at last that we begin our journey home. To-day we are resting after the hurry of travel and the demoralization of the Harvard dinner, which I digested a good deal better than I expected to, possibly because I took a fine hot bath before I went to bed, and read myself to sleep over the battle of Borodino. Tolstoi is certainly the greatest realist of modern literature. With none of Zola's brutality and none of Howells's timidity, he has all the qualities of both — save humor — and a power of presenting individuals which seems to me unequaled. There is more unity in the book, too, than I had looked for; the apparent confusion comes, I think, from a failure to see that his hero is not an individual or a group, but the whole nation of Russia. This cannot be presented save in such detail as we find in War and Peace. It is never lost sight of. As a work of art, the book seems to me far more skillful than it is called. . . .
THE YOUNG INSTRUCTOR AND WRITER 65
And now, to take up my journal where I really dropped it, I want to write a little of Monterey. This is an old town, on a slightly indented bay lined with such sand-hills as you see on the coast of Holland. At this season incessant fogs float about the Pacific, now rising into clouds, now slinking ofi^ to the horizon, now coming creeping over everything. You remember, perhaps, some of the beautiful studies of mist-effects in the Japanese paintings that Percy Lowell brought home. There is a strangely fascinating faintness of line and color — a delicacy of gradation — that I used to say our paintings lacked. Here I see the reason why — our painters have not seen the Nature that on this coast of the Pacific, as on the other, affords men a chance to create such art. Well, amid this softly drifting fog and mist, full of infinite delicate variety, lies Monterey, whose buildings still, with adobe walls, red-tiled roofs, and queerly rambling balconies, give the place a Spanish look, and even an Oriental — for the characteristic Spanish building is more than half Moorish. The town is not all Spanish, though. There are many of the small gable-roofed wooden saloons, with perfectly square false fronts facing the street, that pervade the whole West. . . .
In Monterey, too, are one or two vestiges of New England architecture. I saw one real New Hampshire lean-to tacked on a crumbling adobe house. In short, the place shows, like none other I have seen, the transition from Spanish California to this enormous American shop.
At the Hotel del Monte I saw a human example of this transition — a grave white-bearded, beautifully well-bred old Don Something Ortez, who won't learn English, and his fine black-eyed daughter, a very promising specimen of the more respectable variety of piazza girl, who tried to make me buy some tickets to some tableaux she knew I could not attend. Her brother, aged perhaps two-and-twenty, was too callow to be quite a cad, but looked in danger of ripening into one. . . .
The Howards, who were unending in their kindness, took us to drive in the afternoon. The fog came in more thickly than usual, and the roads, like all here at this season, are horribly dusty; but we had charming glimpses of the ocean, about which
66 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
grew fine old weatherbeaten cypresses, and the rocks, and flocks of sea birds as thick as those in Japanese painting, and queer piles of weatherbeaten boards, where Chinamen live, who hunt the rocks for those great pearly shells such as used to lie about my grandmother's parlor in West Cedar Street.
I must hurry on, for the morning draws to a close, and I have no more paper within a couple of stories. The Howards introduced us to no end of people, including Mr. Crocker, "the millionaire," and the Chief Justice of California. Crocker resembles Silas Lapham; Judge Morrison has a gray chin beard, a lineless, pink-and-white face, and a paralyzed arm. . . .
We came to town yesterday with Mr. Howard, and a most invigorating journalist named Mills, the President of the Associated Press here. I have rarely met a more delightful American, of the most national and attractive kind. He reminded me a little, in his manner, of my uncle Baker; and his range of information, while not infinitely deep, was amazingly wide. Yesterday, Mr. Howard took us through some wine-cellars here, which reminded me of Rheims. As I wrote you, we tried to shop, too, but with little success. I shall bring you no great gifts, I fear, simply because I can find nothing that seems the thing to buy. . . .
To Robert Grant
29 September J 1886
. . . And this suggests a conundrum that I might perhaps ask myself. Why don't you try an out-and-out love story? I have an idea that the times are ripe for one. I want a heroine that I can want to marry; and a hero good enough for her; and real life about them. And I have a mistily growing idea that the real cue of a good many of us who try to write nowadays lies in the simple old traditions.
My new book, by the way, is aggressively eccentric, I fear. It is a development of the body-snatching that I once read the S.S.V.^ The few who have seen it speak kindly; I hope the world will. . . .
1 A small club, pleasantly named the "Society for the Suppression of Vice."
THE YOUNG INSTRUCTOR AND WRITER 67
To Colonel Robert Thomson
New York, 29 December^ 1886
Dear Colonel Thomson, — Arthur Hamilton^ has thoroughly interested us — for my wife read it as eagerly as I. And yet, when we came to talk of it, we found that to both of us it proved one of the hardest things to talk about imaginable. For all its vividness, if I may say so without contradiction, the impression it leaves is strangely indefinable. There is no doubt that the character of Hamilton is among the most vital I have met in fiction. Indeed, were it not for the rather aggressively impossible nature of the Persian episode, I should never have dreamt that the book was not true; and even now incline to think that the hero is not make-believe, but rather a slightly veiled portrait either of the author or of someone he has studied almost as one studies himself. There is no doubt, either, of the great cleverness and suggestiveness of much that is in the book. There are dozens of phrases that set you thinking. Yet for all this, I think, the style is, like the story, not perfectly lucid.
Matthew Arnold, you remember, rang the changes on "lucidity" through a whole essay, and a very good one. If I recall this, the gist of it was that lucidity — the characteristic note of French writing — was characteristically lacking in English. We want it in America quite as much as you in England. As my efi^orts to write have perhaps shown you, I am passionately fond of it. Here, then, I find in Arthur Hamilton something wanting; but the want is characteristic of our literature rather than of the book.
In another respect the book is intensely English. The earnestness, the seriousness of the tone puts it, for all its religious breadth, in distinctively Puritan literature. The fastidious virginity of Hamilton's mind is so impossible in any people but ours that no language but ours has ever come near expressing such a quality. And frankly, I do not personally like it. Sexual sin I can deplore as heartily as anyone. Such stories as the papers have brought of recent causes celehres in London shock and pain me as heartily as they can you. But
1 Memoirs of Arthur Hamilton, the first of the many books of Arthur Christopher Benson, published in 1886.
68 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
that a man grown should not recognize and feel the full force of human temptation makes him to me a little lacking in the human part of manhood. To say that the flesh should be kept down is one thing; to work to keep it down, to shrink from any other view of life, is another. Such a criticism of feeling does not belong to a normal period of human development. In a way, it seems to me as monstrous as what I am told the papers have printed of Dilke and Campbell.
I trust I do not permit myself to write too freely. You asked me to tell you just what I thought, and so I do. And so doing, I come to the last observation I have to make about the book. It is intensely modern; the fastidious over-refinement that I have been talking about is after all only a phase of the whole life it pictures. I feel this the more because of late I have been reading a little of the Elizabethans, and thinking of them a great deal. I have some idea of lecturing on that period of our literature. What typifies the period in my fancy is the old motto of the arms of Spain: "Plus Ultra.'' The road through the Pillars of Hercules leads to unmeasured things beyond.^ The exuberance that passes on towards these throbs through all our literature of the sixteenth century. To come from this to the self-analytic inaction of the nineteenth is shocking. And I, for one, cannot quite feel, at all events in this great, growing America of ours, that this introspection, this idealistic inaction, is really a necessity; and certainly it is not to me an ideal. A man who goes through life without playing an active part is a failure. He may be a noble one; but his life is a real tragedy. To me there seems to be more and more truth in what I used to think the vulgar commonplaces of Philistia. The Philistines, to be sure, mouth their precepts with so little knowledge of their inner meaning that we may be forgiven for thinking them meaningless. But, just as truly as ever, action is the ideal that we should keep before us — an active struggle with the life we are born to, a full sense of all its temptations, of all its earthly significance as well as of its spiritual. To sum up in a word the place where I should put such a figure as
^Wendell afterwards elaborated this idea in his Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge. See The Temper of the Seventeenth Century in English Literature (1904).
I
THE YOUNG INSTRUCTOR AND WRITER 69
Hamilton's, I group him in my mind with the Dudley of whom I said a little in RankelFs Remains^ and of whom I may some day say some more.
I have written longer than I meant to, saying just as they came to me whatever thoughts your book has suggested. If Mr. Benson is a friend of yours, and you think he would like to see them, I am quite willing that he should. I like to know how what I write impresses anybody who takes the trouble to read it. And perhaps he may not disdain the impressions of an unknown Yankee. I will add just two words more. From this book I cannot convince myself that he has in him the making of a creative writer; interesting as it is, it is a book of but one character, and wanting in dramatic power. And in certain details, which catch my professional eye, the style is wretchedly careless. I found a singular verb with a plural subject, etc. He alludes somewhere to the "gift of expression," or of style, or some such thing. He does not appreciate, I think, the fineness, the delicacy of the technical art of writing, which is no more a gift than that of painting or of counterpoint.
But lastly — for I feel as if I had been fault-finding — I want to repeat that I think the book among the most interesting that I have read for years. . . .
And now I have written more than enough for once. I have delayed this letter longer than I expected, for my work is really appalling in its demands. It has grown so that I rarely have a minute to myself; and whenever I am not at it, I am generally too tired for anything but unmitigated loafing. . . .
To the same
358 Marlborough St.,i Boston, 31 January^ 1887
Dear Colonel Thomson, — The winter is fiying away so fast in this corner of the world, where one day is just like the last, that more than a month has gone by since I sent you from New York a letter that promised a sequel. Yet hardly a day has come without the intention of writing you. For what I wrote then dissatisfies me in memory.
New York is — and always has been — to me the most
1 This was the superECripticn cf nearly all cf Wendell's letters from Boston.
70 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
depressing spot in the world. The air has a touch of fever in it, you know, not unlike the Roman; and I can hardly believe the strangely bewildering effect the city produces on me to be other than a definitely physical one. But the phenomena — the symptoms — are mental and moral. My character there is a different one from my character anywhere else. From the moment I set foot in the place I am morbid to a degree that when I am away from it seems almost inconceivable. And so I cannot help feeling that what I wrote of Arthur Hamilton was tinged with a morbidness that is not quite true to me. I will try in a few words to repeat what impression the book has left on me.
In brief it was this — that the writer had given us as an ideal a life of exquisitely fastidious, over-refined inaction. And just this kind of life is to my thinking a very dangerous one to think of with admiration. Over-refinement is the curse of the century — in virtue as in vice. Virility — the broad human courage that takes the world and the tasks of life as they are given to us, that knows temptations and pleasures and duties, that fights and struggles and wins and fails — is more to seek than it used to be. And the ideal we need most to keep before us is that of the man who does the real work of life as truly as he can. There is no calling so mean that it cannot be followed with a firm purpose to follow it well. And one condition of sanely vigorous life is that there shall not be too much preliminary thinking. So, in the end, Hamilton typifies to me one side of the characteristic tragedy of our times. I hardly put the matter clearly now, I fear. But if I have made you understand that what I meant to say was that the book seemed to make a heroic ideal out of what seemed to me a pitifully honorable failure, I have come somewhere near what I have wished to.
Now for a few words about my Rankell. Of course his church and his love were material and selfish; for such a nature as his could not rise above materialism and selfishness. But in them, I thought, the selfishness and materialism were less gross. In them he came nearer to the better man that under other circumstances he might have been. And so they were
THE YOUNG INSTRUCTOR AND WRITER 71
really to him the most precious and the best things he knew; and by consecrating to them all he left, he did the pitifully little he could to give to the world the best things he knew. And one of these things at least — his church — had a meaning far greater than he could give it. In time to come it will speak not of the founder of its stones, but of the founder of its creed. Most of the great religious structures in the world, I fancy, have sprung from beginnings and motives as base as any Rankell's. Yet what they mean to us, who know nothing of the builders, is as pure as if they had sprung like wild flowers. In short, there is in all the evil I see about me some latent germ of good; and it is the good that fructifies the most after all — even though it bear what seems but sorry fruit. And this is the motive I have striven to work out. I do not feel satisfied with my work; but I do feel what satisfaction comes from the knowledge that I did it as well as I could.
Now for an answer to your kind question about the Duchess Emilia. Triibner had some copies of it a few years ago, with his own imprint; and as I have no reason to believe that the book has had any sale in England, I think that he may very likely have them still. The Saturday Review damned it in a way that seemed to me a little unfair; and no other reviews touched it at all. . . .
To the same
New Castle, 30 August^ 1887
... I have been most wretchedly out of sorts all summer long. If I remember aright, my last note was rather plaintive, but hoped for better things before long. The better things have hardly come. A dull sore throat and exquisitely irritable nerves have greeted me almost every morning until very lately. And during this whole vacation I have read nothing, written nothing, thought very little; and altogether nowhere. At last I begin to feel the benefit of the idleness that has been so extreme. Overwork, I fancy, was really the matter with me; and I have had to pay for it by what to us Yankees is the most detestable of pastimes — absolute inaction.
I wonder whether the feverish ebb and flow of energy that
72 BARRETT WENDELL AND HIS LETTERS
makes up our lives here is human or only trans-Atlantic. Calm, steady, regular, healthy, normal progress from day to day seems almost out of the question. Temperance in life is a virtue almost unknown. Over-action and crushing reaction seem the rule. For all this lesson I dare say I shall be doing twice as much as I ought to as soon as the college term begins again. If so, I shall certainly do next summer what I ought to have done this year — go abroad for two or three weeks. The absolute change forced upon one by foreign surroundings is a better tonic than all the bottled remedies in the world.
Just now there is a curious craze very prevalent in New England. People who have been for years invalids are recovering full strength by what they call the Mind-Cure. The process consists in sitting still in company with a practitioner who silently thinks all kinds of benevolent things about you. The result in hysterical cases — and a great deal of modern illness is in some degree hysterical — is so extraordinary that a good many really intelligent people are quite carried away. The sanest theory is that all physical — or rather muscular — states affect the nervous system specifically; and that the nerves affect thought, whatever that may be. Every thought, many psychologists urge, is accompanied by a chemical change in the brain. Well, say the Mind-Cure people, if a muscular contraction can cause a chemical change in the brain, why can not the process be reversed? Grant this, and the other modern hypothesis of Thought-Transference, which the English Society of Psychical Research thinks it has proven, and the whole matter is clear common-sense. All of which impresses me as contrary to the common-sense which the elect declare to be Philistine prejudice.
However, I know two or three really educated people whose whole lives have been made happy and useful, instead of miserably invalid, by what seems such palpable quackery. And these cases have begun to call to the matter the attention of educated people in general. The most curious case is this: a lady well on in life was discovered to have a cancer. Her regular physician pronounced the case indubitable, and told her she might try any means of alleviating pain she chose.