Cambridge Neighbors

W >> William Dean Howells >> Cambridge Neighbors

LITERARY FRIENDS AND ACQUAINTANCES--Cambridge Neighbors

by William Dean Howells



CAMBRIDGE NEIGHBORS

Being the wholly literary spirit I was when I went to make my home in
Cambridge, I do not see how I could well have been more content if I had
found myself in the Elysian Fields with an agreeable eternity before me.
At twenty-nine, indeed, one is practically immortal, and at that age,
time had for me the effect of an eternity in which I had nothing to do
but to read books and dream of writing them, in the overflow of endless
hours from my work with the manuscripts, critical notices, and proofs of
the Atlantic Monthly. As for the social environment I should have been
puzzled if given my choice among the elect of all the ages, to find poets
and scholars more to my mind than those still in the flesh at Cambridge
in the early afternoon of the nineteenth century. They are now nearly
all dead, and I can speak of them in the freedom which is death's
doubtful favor to the survivor; but if they were still alive I could say
little to their offence, unless their modesty was hurt with my praise.




I.

One of the first and truest of our Cambridge friends was that exquisite
intelligence, who, in a world where so many people are grotesquely
miscalled, was most fitly named; for no man ever kept here more perfectly
and purely the heart of such as the kingdom of heaven is of than Francis
J. Child. He was then in his prime, and I like to recall the outward
image which expressed the inner man as happily as his name. He was of
low stature and of an inclination which never became stoutness; but what
you most saw when you saw him was his face of consummate refinement: very
regular, with eyes always glassed by gold-rimmed spectacles, a straight,
short, most sensitive nose, and a beautiful mouth with the sweetest smile
mouth ever wore, and that was as wise and shrewd as it was sweet. In a
time when every other man was more or less bearded he was clean shaven,
and of a delightful freshness of coloring which his thick sunny hair,
clustering upon his head in close rings, admirably set off. I believe he
never became gray, and the last time I saw him, though he was broken then
with years and pain, his face had still the brightness of his
inextinguishable youth.

It is well known how great was Professor Child's scholarship in the
branches of his Harvard work; and how especially, how uniquely, effective
it was in the study of English and Scottish balladry to which he gave so
many years of his life. He was a poet in his nature, and he wrought with
passion as well as knowledge in the achievement of as monumental a task
as any American has performed. But he might have been indefinitely less
than he was in any intellectual wise, and yet been precious to those who
knew him for the gentleness and the goodness which in him were protected
from misconception by a final dignity as delicate and as inviolable as
that of Longfellow himself.

We were still much less than a year from our life in Venice, when he came
to see us in Cambridge, and in the Italian interest which then commended
us to so many fine spirits among our neighbors we found ourselves at the
beginning of a life-long friendship with him. I was known to him only by
my letters from Venice, which afterwards became Venetian Life, and by a
bit of devotional verse which he had asked to include in a collection he
was making, but he immediately gave us the freedom of his heart, which
after wards was never withdrawn. In due time he imagined a home-school,
to which our little one was asked, and she had her first lessons with his
own daughter under his roof. These things drew us closer together, and
he was willing to be still nearer to me in any time of trouble. At one
such time when the shadow which must some time darken every door, hovered
at ours, he had the strength to make me face it and try to realize, while
it was still there, that it was not cruel and not evil. It passed, for
that time, but the sense of his help remained; and in my own case I can
testify of the potent tenderness which all who knew him must have known
in him. But in bearing my witness I feel accused, almost as if he were
present; by his fastidious reluctance from any recognition of his
helpfulness. When this came in the form of gratitude taking credit to
itself in a pose which reflected honor upon him as the architect of
greatness, he was delightfully impatient of it, and he was most amusingly
dramatic in reproducing the consciousness of certain ineffectual alumni
who used to overwhelm him at Commencement solemnities with some such
pompous acknowledgment as, "Professor Child, all that I have become, sir,
I owe to your influence in my college career." He did, with delicious
mockery, the old-fashioned intellectual poseurs among the students, who
used to walk the groves of Harvard with bent head, and the left arm
crossing the back, while the other lodged its hand in the breast of the
high buttoned frock-coat; and I could fancy that his classes in college
did not form the sunniest exposure for young folly and vanity. I know
that he was intolerant of any manner of insincerity, and no flattery
could take him off his guard. I have seen him meet this with a cutting
phrase of rejection, and no man was more apt at snubbing the patronage
that offers itself at times to all men. But mostly he wished to do
people pleasure, and he seemed always to be studying how to do it; as for
need, I am sure that worthy and unworthy want had alike the way to his
heart.

Children were always his friends, and they repaid with adoration the
affection which he divided with them and with his flowers. I recall him
in no moments so characteristic as those he spent in making the little
ones laugh out of their hearts at his drolling, some festive evening in
his house, and those he gave to sharing with you his joy in his
gardening. This, I believe, began with violets, and it went on to roses,
which he grew in a splendor and profusion impossible to any but a true
lover with a genuine gift for them. Like Lowell, he spent his summers in
Cambridge, and in the afternoon, you could find him digging or pruning
among his roses with an ardor which few caprices of the weather could
interrupt. He would lift himself from their ranks, which he scarcely
overtopped, as you came up the footway to his door, and peer purblindly
across at you. If he knew you at once, he traversed the nodding and
swaying bushes, to give you the hand free of the trowel or knife; or if
you got indoors unseen by him he would come in holding towards you some
exquisite blossom that weighed down the tip of its long stem with a
succession of hospitable obeisances.

He graced with unaffected poetry a life of as hard study, of as hard
work, and as varied achievement as any I have known or read of; and he
played with gifts and acquirements such as in no great measure have made
reputations. He had a rare and lovely humor which could amuse itself
both in English and Italian with such an airy burletta as "Il Pesceballo"
(he wrote it in Metastasian Italian, and Lowell put it in libretto
English); he had a critical sense as sound as it was subtle in all
literature; and whatever he wrote he imbued with the charm of a style
finely personal to himself. His learning in the line of his Harvard
teaching included an early English scholarship unrivalled in his time,
and his researches in ballad literature left no corner of it untouched. I
fancy this part of his study was peculiarly pleasant to him; for he loved
simple and natural things, and the beauty which he found nearest life.
At least he scorned the pedantic affectations of literary superiority;
and he used to quote with joyous laughter the swelling exclamation of an
Italian critic who proposed to leave the summits of polite learning for a
moment, with the cry, "Scendiamo fra il popolo!" (Let us go down among
the people.)




II.

Of course it was only so hard worked a man who could take thought and
trouble for another. He once took thought for me at a time when it was
very important to me, and when he took the trouble to secure for me an
engagement to deliver that course of Lowell lectures in Boston, which I
have said Lowell had the courage to go in town to hear. I do not
remember whether Professor Child was equal to so much, but he would have
been if it were necessary; and I rather rejoice now in the belief that he
did not seek quite that martyrdom.

He had done more than enough for me, but he had done only what he was
always willing to do for others. In the form of a favor to himself he
brought into my fife the great happiness of intimately knowing Hjalmar
Hjorth Boyesen, whom he had found one summer day among the shelves in the
Harvard library, and found to be a poet and an intending novelist. I do
not remember now just how this fact imparted itself to the professor, but
literature is of easily cultivated confidence in youth, and possibly the
revelation was spontaneous. At any rate, as a susceptible young editor,
I was asked to meet my potential contributor at the professor's two
o'clock dinner, and when we came to coffee in the study, Boyesen took
from the pocket nearest his heart a chapter of 'Gunnar', and read it to
us.

Perhaps the good professor who brought us together had plotted to have
both novel and novelist make their impression at once upon the youthful
sub-editor; but at any rate they did not fail of an effect. I believe it
was that chapter where Gunnar and Ragnhild dance and sing a 'stev'
together, for I associate with that far happy time the rich mellow tones
of the poet's voice in the poet's verse. These were most characteristic
of him, and it is as if I might put my ear against the ethereal wall
beyond which he is rapt and hear them yet.

Our meeting was on a lovely afternoon of summer, and the odor of the
professor's roses stole in at the open windows, and became part of the
gentle event. Boyesen walked home with me, and for a fortnight after I
think we parted only to dream of the literature which we poured out upon
each other in every waking moment. I had just learned to know Bjornson's
stories, and Boyesen told me of his poetry and of his drama, which in
even measure embodied the great Norse literary movement, and filled me
with the wonder and delight of that noble revolt against convention, that
brave return to nature and the springs of poetry in the heart and the
speech of the common people. Literature was Boyesen's religion more than
the Swedenborgian philosophy in which we had both been spiritually
nurtured, and at every step of our mounting friendship we found ourselves
on common ground in our worship of it. I was a decade his senior, but at
thirty-five I was not yet so stricken in years as not to be able fully to
rejoice in the ardor which fused his whole being in an incandescent
poetic mass. I have known no man who loved poetry more generously and
passionately; and I think he was above all things a poet. His work took
the shape of scholarship, fiction, criticism, but poetry gave it all a
touch of grace and beauty. Some years after this first meeting of ours I
remember a pathetic moment with him, when I asked him why he had not
written any verse of late, and he answered, as if still in sad
astonishment at the fact, that he had found life was not all poetry. In
those earlier days I believe he really thought it was!

Perhaps it really is, and certainly in the course of a life that
stretched almost to half a century Boyesen learned more and more to see
the poetry of the everyday world at least as the material of art. He did
battle valiantly for that belief in many polemics, which I suppose gave
people a sufficiently false notion of him; and he showed his faith by
works in fiction which better illustrated his motive. Gunnar stands at
the beginning of these works, and at the farthest remove from it in
matter and method stands 'The Mammon of Unrighteousness'. The lovely
idyl won him fame and friendship, and the great novel added neither to
him, though he had put the experience and the observation of his ripened
life into it. Whether it is too late or too early for it to win the
place in literature which it merits I do not know; but it always seemed
to me the very spite of fate that it should have failed of popular
effect. Yet I must own that it has so failed, and I own this without
bitterness towards Gunnar, which embalmed the spirit of his youth as 'The
Mammon of Unrighteousness' embodied the thought of his manhood.




III.

It was my pleasure, my privilege, to bring Gunnar before the public as
editor of the Atlantic Monthly, and to second the author in many a
struggle with the strange idiom he had cast the story in. The proofs
went back and forth between us till the author had profited by every hint
and suggestion of the editor. He was quick to profit by any hint, and he
never made the same mistake twice. He lived his English as fast as he
learned it; the right word became part of him; and he put away the wrong
word with instant and final rejection. He had not learned American
English without learning newspaper English, but if one touched a phrase
of it in his work, he felt in his nerves, which are the ultimate arbiters
in such matters, its difference from true American and true English. It
was wonderful how apt and how elect his diction was in those days; it
seemed as if his thought clothed itself in the fittest phrase without his
choosing. In his poetry he had extraordinary good fortune from the
first; his mind had an apparent affinity with what was most native, most
racy in our speech; and I have just been looking over Gunnar and
marvelling anew at the felicity and the beauty of his phrasing.

I do not know whether those who read his books stop much to consider how
rare his achievement was in the mere means of expression. Our speech is
rather more hospitable than most, and yet I can remember but five other
writers born to different languages who have handled English with
anything like his mastery. Two Italians, Ruffini, the novelist, and
Gallenga, the journalist; two Germans, Carl Schurz and Carl Hillebrand,
and the Dutch novelist Maarten Maartens, have some of them equalled but
none of them surpassed him. Yet he was a man grown when he began to
speak and to write English, though I believe he studied it somewhat in
Norway before he came to America. What English he knew he learned the
use of here, and in the measure of its idiomatic vigor we may be proud of
it as Americans.

He had least of his native grace, I think, in his criticism; and yet as a
critic he had qualities of rare temperance, acuteness, and knowledge. He
had very decided convictions in literary art; one kind of thing he
believed was good and all other kinds less good down to what was bad; but
he was not a bigot, and he made allowances for art-in-error. His hand
fell heavy only upon those heretics who not merely denied the faith but
pretended that artifice was better than nature, that decoration was more
than structure, that make-believe was something you could live by as you
live by truth. He was not strongest, however, in damnatory criticism.
His spirit was too large, too generous to dwell in that, and it rose
rather to its full height in his appreciations of the great authors whom
he loved, and whom he commented from the plenitude of his scholarship as
well as from his delighted sense of their grandeur. Here he was almost
as fine as in his poetry, and only less fine than in his more fortunate
essays in fiction.

After Gunnar he was a long while in striking another note so true. He
did not strike it again till he wrote 'The Mammon of Unrighteousness',
and after that he was sometimes of a wandering and uncertain touch. There
are certain stories of his which I cannot read without a painful sense of
their inequality not only to his talent, but to his knowledge of human
nature, and of American character. He understood our character quite as
well as he understood our language, but at times he seemed not to do so.
I think these were the times when he was overworked, and ought to have
been resting instead of writing. In such fatigue one loses command of
alien words, alien situations; and in estimating Boyesen's achievements
we must never forget that he was born strange to our language and to our
life. In 'Gunnar' he handled the one with grace and charm; in his great
novel he handled both with masterly strength. I call 'The Mammon of
Unrighteousness' a great novel, and I am quite willing to say that I know
few novels by born Americans that surpass it in dealing with American
types and conditions. It has the vast horizon of the masterpieces of
fictions; its meanings are not for its characters alone, but for every
reader of it; when you close the book the story is not at an end.

I have a pang in praising it, for I remember that my praise cannot please
him any more. But it was a book worthy the powers which could have given
us yet greater things if they had not been spent on lesser things.
Boyesen could "toil terribly," but for his fame he did not always toil
wisely, though he gave himself as utterly in his unwise work as in his
best; it was always the best he could do. Several years after our first
meeting in Cambridge, he went to live in New York, a city where money
counts for more and goes for less than in any other city of the world,
and he could not resist the temptation to write more and more when he
should have written less and less. He never wrote anything that was not
worth reading, but he wrote too much for one who was giving himself with
all his conscience to his academic work in the university honored by his
gifts and his attainments, and was lecturing far and near in the
vacations which should have been days and weeks and months of leisure.
The wonder is that even such a stock of health as his could stand the
strain so long, but he had no vices, and his only excesses were in the
direction of the work which he loved so well. When a man adds to his
achievements every year, we are apt to forget the things he has already
done; and I think it well to remind the reader that Boyesen, who died at
forty-eight, had written, besides articles, reviews, and lectures
unnumbered, four volumes of scholarly criticism on German and
Scandinavian literature, a volume of literary and social essays, a
popular history of Norway, a volume of poems, twelve volumes of fiction,
and four books for boys.

Boyesen's energies were inexhaustible. He was not content to be merely a
scholar, merely an author; he wished to be an active citizen, to take his
part in honest politics, and to live for his day in things that most men
of letters shun. His experience in them helped him to know American life
better and to appreciate it more justly, both in its good and its evil;
and as a matter of fact he knew us very well. His acquaintance with us
had been wide and varied beyond that of most of our literary men, and
touched many aspects of our civilization which remain unknown to most
Americans. When he died he had been a journalist in Chicago, and a
teacher in Ohio; he had been a professor in Cornell University and a
literary free lance in New York; and everywhere his eyes and ears had
kept themselves open. As a teacher he learned to know the more fortunate
or the more ambitious of our youth, and as a lecturer his knowledge was
continually extending itself among all ages and classes of Americans.

He was through and through a Norseman, but he was none the less a very
American. Between Norsk and Yankee there is an affinity of spirit more
intimate than the ties of race. Both have the common-sense view of life;
both are unsentimental. When Boyesen told me that among the Norwegians
men never kissed each other, as the Germans, and the Frenchmen, and the
Italians do, I perceived that we stood upon common ground. When he
explained the democratic character of society in Norway, I could well
understand how he should find us a little behind his own countrymen in
the practice, if not the theory of equality, though they lived under a
king and we under a president. But he was proud of his American
citizenship; he knew all that it meant, at its best, for humanity. He
divined that the true expression of America was not civic, not social,
but domestic almost, and that the people in the simplest homes, or those
who remained in the tradition of a simple home life, were the true
Americans as yet, whatever the future Americans might be.

When I first knew him he was chafing with the impatience of youth and
ambition at what he thought his exile in the West. There was, to be
sure, a difference between Urbana, Ohio, and Cambridge, Massachusetts,
and he realized the difference in the extreme and perhaps beyond it. I
tried to make him believe that if a man had one or two friends anywhere
who loved letters and sympathized with him in his literary attempts, it
was incentive enough; but of course he wished to be in the centres of
literature, as we all do; and he never was content until he had set his
face and his foot Eastward. It was a great step for him from the
Swedenborgian school at Urbana to the young university at Ithaca; and I
remember his exultation in making it. But he could not rest there, and
in a few years he resigned his professorship, and came to New York, where
he entered high-heartedly upon the struggle with fortune which ended in
his appointment in Columbia.

New York is a mart and not a capital, in literature as well as in other
things, and doubtless he increasingly felt this. I know that there came
a time when he no longer thought the West must be exile for a literary
man; and his latest visits to its summer schools as a lecturer impressed
him with the genuineness of the interest felt there in culture of all
kinds. He spoke of this, with a due sense of what was pathetic as well
as what was grotesque in some of its manifestations; and I think that in
reconciling himself to our popular crudeness for the sake of our popular
earnestness, he completed his naturalization, in the only sense in which
our citizenship is worth having.

I do not wish to imply that he forgot his native land, or ceased to love
it proudly and tenderly. He kept for Norway the fondness which the man
sitting at his own hearth feels for the home of his boyhood. He was of
good family; his people were people of substance and condition, and he
could have had an easier life there than here. He could have won even
wider fame, and doubtless if he had remained in Norway, he would have
been one of that group of great Norwegians who have given their little
land renown surpassed by that of no other in the modern republic of
letters. The name of Boyesen would have been set with the names of
Bjornson, of Ibsen, of Kielland, and of Lie. But when once he had seen
America (at the wish of his father, who had visited the United States
before him), he thought only of becoming an American. When I first knew
him he was full of the poetry of his mother-land; his talk was of fjords
and glaciers, of firs and birches, of hulders and nixies, of housemen and
gaardsmen; but he was glad to be here, and I think he never regretted
that he had cast his lot with us. Always, of course, he had the deepest
interest in his country and countrymen. He stood the friend of every
Norwegian who came to him in want or trouble, and they, came to him
freely and frequently. He sympathized strongly with Norway in her
quarrel with Sweden, and her wish for equality as well as autonomy; and
though he did not go all lengths with the national party, he was decided
in his feeling that Sweden was unjust to her sister kingdom, and
strenuous for the principles of the Norwegian leaders.

But, as I have said, poetry, was what his ardent spirit mainly meditated
in that hour when I first knew him in Cambridge, before we had either of
us grown old and sad, if not wise. He overflowed with it, and he talked
as little as he dreamed of anything else in the vast half-summer we spent
together. He was constantly at my house, where in an absence of my
family I was living bachelor, and where we sat indoors and talked, or
sauntered outdoors and talked, with our heads in a cloud of fancies, not
unmixed with the mosquitoes of Cambridge: if I could have back the
fancies, I would be willing to have the mosquitoes with them. He looked
the poetry he lived: his eyes were the blue of sunlit fjords; his brown
silken hair was thick on the crown which it later abandoned to a
scholarly baldness; his soft, red lips half hid a boyish pout in the
youthful beard and mustache. He was short of stature, but of a stalwart
breadth of frame, and his voice was of a peculiar and endearing quality,
indescribably mellow and tender when he read his verse.

I have hardly the right to dwell so long upon him here, for he was only a
sojourner in Cambridge, but the memory of that early intimacy is too much
for my sense of proportion. As I have hinted, our intimacy was renewed
afterwards, when I too came to live in New York, where as long as he was
in this 'dolce lome', he hardly let a week go by without passing a long
evening with me. Our talk was still of literature and life, but more of
life than of literature, and we seldom spoke of those old times. I still
found him true to the ideals which had clarified themselves to both of us
as the duty of unswerving fealty to the real thing in whatever we did.
This we felt, as we had felt it long before, to be the sole source of
beauty and of art, and we warmed ourselves at each other's hearts in our
devotion to it, amidst a misunderstanding environment which we did not
characterize by so mild an epithet. Boyesen, indeed, out-realisted me,
in the polemics of our aesthetics, and sometimes when an unbeliever was
by, I willingly left to my friend the affirmation of our faith, not
without some quaking at his unsparing strenuousness in disciplining the
heretic. But now that ardent and active soul is Elsewhere, and I have
ceased even to expect the ring, which, making itself heard at the late
hour of his coming, I knew always to be his and not another's. That
mechanical expectation of those who will come no more is something
terrible, but when even that ceases, we know the irreparability of our
loss, and begin to realize how much of ourselves they have taken with
them.