Chapter C: A B (1)

After two days he came

B A C

He then went to Cambridge on a three years’ course by taking
electives which didn’t require him to repeat the alphabet.

He learned to smoke

B A C C A

and at the end of the time the College made him

A B

His friends then sent him to the Cuban War, and he came out a
Field Marshal, so that he was able to become a member of the

A B C F M

This was all I knew about him till this morning I have learned
that after publishing his military memoirs he became a member
of the

B A C
[Boston Authors’ Club]

I am sorry to say that he already drank the Lager which was
furnished him by the AMERICAN BOTTLING COMPANY

So no more at present from your old companion in arms,

EDWARD E HALE
A B 1839.

These letters give a glimpse at the more impetuous and sunny aspects of his life. Turning again to its severer duties, it is interesting to notice that in conducting the funeral services of Mr. F. A. Hill, the Secretary of the State Board of Education, Dr. Hale said in warm praise of that able man: “He lived by the spirit; I do not think he cared for method.” The same was Hale’s own theory also, or, at any rate, his familiar practice. He believed, for instance, that the school hours of a city should be very much shortened, yet never made it clear what pursuits should take their places; for it was the habit of his fertile brain to formulate schemes and allow others to work them out. Many of his suggestions fell to the ground, but others bore rich fruit. Among these latter are the various “Lend a Hand” clubs which have sprung up all over the country, not confining themselves to sect or creed, and having as their motto a brief verse of his writing. He went to no divinity school to prepare himself for preaching, and at one time did not see clearly the necessity of preliminary training for those who were to enter the pulpit. If his friends undertook laboriously to correct any inaccuracies in his published writings, he took every such correction with imperturbable and sunny equanimity, and, taxed with error, readily admitted it. His undeniable habit of rather hasty and inaccurate statement sprang from his way of using facts simply as illustrations. They served to prove his point or exemplify the principle for which he was contending. To verify his statements would often have taken too much time, and from his point of view was immaterial. It is hard for the academic mind, with its love of system, to accept this method of working, and his contemporaries sometimes regretted that he could not act with them in more business-like ways. They were tempted to compare his aims and methods to those of Eskimo dogs, each of which has to be harnessed separately to the sledge which bears the driver, or else they turn and eat each other up. When it came to the point, all of yesterday’s shortcomings were forgotten next morning by him and every one else, in his readiness to be the world’s errand-boy for little kindnesses. But in the presence, we will not say of death, but of a life lived for others, which is deathless, the critic’s task seems ungenerous and unmeaning. This man’s busy existence may not always have run in the accepted grooves, but its prevailing note was Love. If the rushing stream sometimes broke down the barriers of safety, it proved more often a fertilizing Nile than a dangerous Mississippi.

Followed and imitated by multitudes, justly beloved for his warmth of heart and readiness of hand, he had a happy and busy life, sure to win gratitude and affection when it ended, as it did at Roxbury on June 10, 1909. The children and the aged loved him almost to worshiping, and is there, after all, a better test?

XIII

A MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL, RUFUS SAXTON

A MASSACHUSETTS GENERAL, RUFUS SAXTON

Complaint has sometimes been made of Massachusetts that the state did not provide a sufficient number of officers of high grade for the regular army during the Civil War. Be that as it may, one of the most eminent of such officers has just died, being indeed one whose actual fame may yet outlast that of all the others by reason of its rare mingling of civil and military service.

General Rufus Saxton was born at Greenfield, Massachusetts, on October 19, 1824, graduated at the military academy in 1849, was made brevet second lieutenant, Third United States Artillery, July 1, 1849, second lieutenant, Fourth Artillery, September 12, 1850, and captain and assistant quartermaster, May 13, 1861. He was chief quartermaster on the staff of General Lyon in Missouri and subsequently on that of General McClellan in western Virginia, and was on the expeditionary corps to Port Royal, South Carolina. In May and June, 1862, he was ordered north and placed in command of the defenses at Harper’s Ferry, where his services won him a medal of honor; after which he was military governor of the Department of the South, his headquarters being at Beaufort, South Carolina; this service extended from July, 1862, to May 18, 1865, when he rose to be colonel and brevet brigadier-general of volunteers. He was mustered out of the volunteer service January 15, 1866, but rose finally to be colonel and assistant quartermaster-general in the regular army, March 10, 1882. He retired from active service October 19, 1888, having been made on that date a brigadier-general on the retired list. This is the brief summary of what was, in reality, a quite unique career.

The portion of this honorable life upon which his personal fame will doubtless be founded is that from 1862 to 1865, when he was military governor of the Department of the South. In this capacity he first proved possible the distribution of the vast body of free or fugitive slaves over the Sea Islands, which had been almost deserted by their white predecessors. This feat was accompanied by what was probably in the end even more important,—the creation of black troops from that centre. The leadership in this work might have belonged under other circumstances to Major-General Hunter, of Washington, District of Columbia, who had undertaken such a task in the same region (May 3, 1862); but General Hunter, though he had many fine qualities, was a thoroughly impetuous man; whimsical, changeable, and easily influenced by his staff officers, few of whom had the slightest faith in the enterprise. He acted, moreover, without authority from Washington, and his whole enterprise had been soon disallowed by the United States government. This was the position of things when General Saxton, availing himself of the fact that one company of this Hunter regiment had not, like the rest, been practically disbanded, made that the basis of a reorganization of it under the same name (First South Carolina Infantry). This was done under express authority from the War Department, dated August 25, 1862, with the hope of making it a pioneer of a whole subsequent series of slave regiments, as it was. The fact that General Saxton was a Massachusetts man, as was the colonel whom he put in charge of the first regiment,—and as were, indeed, most of the men prominent from beginning to end in the enlistment of colored troops,—gave an unquestioned priority in the matter to that state.

It must be remembered that this was long before Governor Andrew had received permission to recruit a colored regiment, the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts, whose first colonel was Robert Gould Shaw, a young hero of Boston birth. The fact that this was the first black regiment enlisted at the North has left a general impression in Massachusetts that it was the first colored regiment; but this is an error of five months, General Saxton’s authority having been dated August 25, 1862, and that of Governor Andrew January 26, 1863. The whole number of black soldiers enlisted during the war was 178,975 (Heitman’s “Historical Register,” page 890), whose whole organization may fairly be attributed, in a general way, to the success of General Saxton’s undertaking. In making this claim, it must be borne in mind that the enlistments made by General Butler at almost precisely the same time in New Orleans consisted mainly of a quite exceptional class, the comparatively educated free colored men of that region, the darkest of these being, as General Butler himself once said, “of about the same complexion as the late Daniel Webster.” Those New Orleans regiments would hardly have led to organizing similar troops elsewhere, for want of similar material. Be this as it may, the fact is that these South Carolina regiments, after their number was increased by other colored regiments from various sources, were unquestionably those who held the South Carolina coast, making it possible for Sherman to lead his final march to the sea and thus practically end the war. As an outcome of all this, General Saxton’s name is quite sure to be long remembered.

It is fair now to recognize the fact that this combination of civil and military authority was not always what Saxton himself would have selected. There were times when he chafed under what seemed to him a non-military work and longed for the open field. It is perhaps characteristic of his temperament, however, that at the outset he preferred to be where the greatest obstacles were to be encountered, and this he certainly achieved. It must be remembered that the early organizers and officers of the colored troops fought in a manner with ropes around their necks, both they and their black recruits having been expressly denied by the Confederate government the usual privileges of soldiers. They had also to encounter for a long time the disapproval of many officers of high rank in the Union army, both regular and volunteer, this often leading to a grudging bestowal of supplies (especially, strange to say, of medical ones), and to a disproportionate share of fatigue duty. This was hard indeed for Saxton to bear, and was increased in his case by the fact that he had been almost the only cadet in his time at West Point who was strong in anti-slavery feeling, and who thus began with antagonisms which lasted into actual service. To these things he was perhaps oversensitive, and he had to be defended against this tendency, as he was, by an admirable wife and by an invaluable staff officer and housemate, Brevet Major Edward W. Hooper, of Massachusetts, who was his volunteer aide-de-camp and housemate. The latter was, as many Bostonians will remember, of splendid executive ability, as shown by his long subsequent service as steward and treasurer of Harvard University; a man of rare organizing power, and of a cheerfulness which made him only laugh away dozens of grievances that vexed General Saxton.

As an organizer of troops General Saxton’s standard was very high, and he assumed, as was proper, that a regiment made out of former slaves should not merely follow good moral examples, but set them. As all men in that day knew, there was a formidable variation in this respect in different regiments, some of the volunteer officers whose military standard was the highest being the lowest in their personal habits. General Saxton would issue special orders from time to time to maintain a high tone morally in the camp, as he did, indeed, in the whole region under his command. He was never in entire harmony with General Gillmore, the military commander of the department, whose interest was thought to lie chiefly in the artillery service; and while very zealous and efficient in organizing special expeditions for his own particular regiments, Saxton kept up, as we thought at the time, a caution beyond what was necessary in protecting the few colored regiments which he had personally organized. When the Florida expedition was planned, which resulted in the sanguinary defeat at Olustee, he heartily disapproved of the whole affair. This he carried so far that when my own regiment was ordered on the expedition, as we all greatly desired, when we had actually broken camp and marched down to the wharf for embarkment in high exultation, we were stopped and turned back by an order, just obtained by General Saxton from headquarters, countermanding our march and sending us back to pitch our tents again. It was not until some days later had brought the news of the disastrous battle, and how defective was the judgment of those who planned it, that General Saxton found himself vindicated in our eyes. The plain reason for that defeat was that the Confederates, being on the mainland and having railway communications, such as they were, could easily double from the interior any force sent round by water outside. This was just what had been pointed out beforehand by General Saxton, but his judgment had been overruled.

General Saxton was a man of fine military bearing and a most kindly and agreeable face. Social in his habits, he was able to go about freely for the rest of his life in the pleasant circle of retired military men and their families in Washington. He and his wife had always the dream of retiring from the greater gayety of the national metropolis to his birthplace at Deerfield, Massachusetts. Going there one beautiful day in early summer, with that thought in mind, they sat, so he told me, on the peaceful piazza all the morning and looked out down the avenue of magnificent elms which shade that most picturesque of village streets. During the whole morning no wheels passed their place, except those belonging to a single country farmer’s wagon. Finding the solitude to be somewhat of a change after the vivacity of Washington, they decided to go down to Greenfield and pass the afternoon. There they sat on a hotel piazza under somewhat similar circumstances and saw only farmers’ wagons, two or three. Disappointed in the reconnoissance, they went back to Washington, and spent the rest of their days amid a happy and congenial circle of friends. He died there February 23, 1908. To the present writer, at least, the world seems unquestionably more vacant that Saxton is gone.

XIV

ONE OF THACKERAY’S WOMEN

ONE OF THACKERAY’S WOMEN

Some years since, there passed away, at Newport, Rhode Island, one who could justly be classed with Thackeray’s women; one in whom Lady Kew would have taken delight; one in whom she would have found wit and memory and audacity rivaling her own; one who was at once old and young, poor and luxurious, one of the loneliest of human beings, and yet one of the most sociable. Miss Jane Stuart, the only surviving daughter of Gilbert Stuart, the painter, had dwelt all her life on the edge of art without being an artist, and at the brink of fashion without being fashionable. Living at times in something that approached poverty, she was usually surrounded by friends who were rich and generous; so that she often fulfilled Motley’s famous early saying, that one could do without the necessaries of life, but could not spare the luxuries. She was an essential part of the atmosphere of Newport; living near the “Old Stone Mill,” she divided its celebrity and, as all agreed, its doubtful antiquity; for her most intimate friends could not really guess within fifteen years how old she was, and strangers placed her anywhere from sixty to eighty. Her modest cottage, full of old furniture and pictures, was the resort of much that was fashionable on the days of her weekly receptions; costly equipages might be seen before the door; and if, during any particular season, she suspected a falling off in visitors, she would try some new device,—a beautiful girl sitting in a certain carved armchair beneath an emblazoned window, like Keats’s Madeline,—or, when things grew desperate, a bench with a milk-pan and a pumpkin on the piazza, to give an innocently rural air. “My dear,” she said on that occasion, “I must try something: rusticity is the dodge for me”; and so the piazza looked that summer like a transformation scene in “Cinderella,” with the fairy godmother not far off.

She inherited from her father in full the Bohemian temperament, and cultivated it so habitually through life that it was in full flower at a time when almost any other woman would have been repressed by age, poverty, and loneliness. At seventy or more she was still a born mistress of the revels, and could not be for five minutes in a house where a charade or a mask was going on without tapping at the most private door and plaintively imploring to be taken in as one of the conspirators. Once in, there was nothing too daring, too grotesque, or too juvenile for her to accept as her part, and successfully. In the modest winter sports of the narrowed Newport circle, when wit and ingenuity had to be invoked to replace the summer resources of wealth and display, she was an indispensable factor. She had been known to enact a Proud Sister in “Cinderella,” to be the performer on the penny whistle in the “Children’s Symphony,” to march as the drum major of the Ku-Klux Klan with a muff for a shako, and to be the gorilla of a menagerie, with an artificial head. Nothing could make too great a demand upon her wit and vivacity, and her very face had a droll plainness more effective for histrionic purposes than a Grecian profile. She never lost dignity in these performances, for she never had anything that could exactly be described by that name; that was not her style. She had in its stead a supply of common sense and ready adaptation that took the place, when needed, of all starched decorum, and quite enabled her on serious occasions to hold her own.

But her social resources were not confined to occasions where she was one of an extemporized troupe: she was a host in herself; she had known everybody; her memory held the adventures and scandals of a generation, and these lost nothing on her lips. Then when other resources were exhausted, and the candles had burned down, and the fire was low, and a few guests lingered, somebody would be sure to say, “Now, Miss Jane, tell us a ghost story.” With a little, a very little, of coy reluctance, she would begin, in a voice at first commonplace, but presently dropping to a sort of mystic tone; she seemed to undergo a change like the gypsy queen in Browning’s “Flight of the Duchess”; she was no longer a plain, elderly woman in an economical gown, but she became a medium, a solemn weaver of spells so deep that they appeared to enchant herself. Whence came her stories, I wonder? not ghost stories alone, but blood-curdling murders and midnight terrors, of which she abated you not an item,—for she was never squeamish,—tales that all the police records could hardly match. Then, when she and her auditors were wrought up to the highest pitch, she began to tell fortunes; and here also she seemed not so much a performer as one performed upon,—a Delphic priestess, a Cassandra. I never shall forget how she once made our blood run cold with the visions of coming danger that she conjured around a young married woman on whom there soon afterwards broke a wholly unexpected scandal that left her an exile in a foreign land. No one ever knew, I believe, whether Miss Stuart spoke at that time with knowledge; perhaps she hardly knew herself; she always was, or affected to be, carried away beyond herself by these weird incantations.

She was not so much to be called affectionate or lovable as good-natured and kindly; and with an undisguised relish for the comfortable things of this world, and a very frank liking for the society of the rich and great, she was yet constant, after a fashion, to humbler friends, and liked to do them good turns. Much of her amiability took the form of flattery,—a flattery so habitual that it lost all its grossness, and became almost a form of good deeds. She was sometimes justly accused of applying this to the wealthy and influential, but it was almost as freely exercised where she had nothing to gain by it; and it gave to the humblest the feeling that he was at least worth flattering. Even if he had a secret fear that what she said of him behind his back might be less encouraging, no matter: it was something to have been praised to his face. It must be owned that her resources in the other direction were considerable, and Lord Steyne himself might have applauded when she was gradually led into mimicking some rich amateur who had pooh-poohed her pictures, or some intrusive dame who had patronizingly inspected her humble cot. It could not quite be said of her that her wit lived to play, not wound; and yet, after all, what she got out of life was so moderate, and so many women would have found her way of existence dreary enough, that it was impossible to grudge her these trifling indulgences.

Inheriting her father’s love of the brush, she had little of his talent; her portraits of friends were generally transferred by degrees to dark corners; but there existed an impression that she was a good copyist of Stuart’s pictures, and she was at one time a familiar figure in Boston, perched on a high stool, and copying those of his works which were transferred for safe-keeping from Faneuil Hall to the Art Museum. On one occasion, it was said, she grew tired of the long process of copying and took home a canvas or two with the eyes unpainted, putting them in, colored to please her own fancy, at Newport. Perhaps she invented this legend for her own amusement, for she never spared herself, and, were she to read this poor sketch of her, would object to nothing but the tameness of its outlines.

XV

JOHN BARTLETT

JOHN BARTLETT

In every university town such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, there is an outside circle, beyond the institution itself, of cultivated men who may or may not hold its degrees, but who contribute to the intellectual atmosphere. One of the most widely known and generally useful of these at Cambridge—whether in his active youth or in the patient and lonely seclusion of his later years—was John Bartlett, best known as the author of the dictionary entitled “Familiar Quotations.”

He was born in Plymouth, June 14, 1820, was educated in the public schools of that town, and in 1836 entered the bookbinding establishment connected with the University bookstore in Cambridge, under John Owen, who was Longfellow’s first publisher. In the next year Bartlett became a clerk in the bookstore, and soon showed remarkable talent for the business. In 1846 Mr. Owen failed, and Bartlett remained with his successor, George Nichols, but became himself the proprietor in 1849. He had shown himself in this position an uncommonly good publisher and adviser of authors. He had there published three editions of his “Familiar Quotations,” gradually enlarging the book from the beginning. In 1859 he sold out to Sever & Francis. In 1862 he served as volunteer naval paymaster for nine months with Captain Boutelle, his brother-in-law, on board Admiral DuPont’s dispatch-boat. In August, 1863, he entered the publishing house of Little, Brown & Co., nominally as clerk, but with the promise that in eighteen months, when the existing partnership would end, he should be taken into the firm, which accordingly took place in 1865. The fourth edition of his “Familiar Quotations,” always growing larger, had meanwhile been published by them, as well as an _édition de luxe_ of Walton’s “Complete Angler,” in the preparation of which he made an especial and exceptionally fine collection of works on angling, which he afterwards presented to the Harvard College Library. His activity in the Waltonian sport is also commemorated in Lowell’s poem, “To Mr. John Bartlett, who had sent me a seven-pound trout.” He gave to the Library at the same time another collection of books containing “Proverbs,” and still another on “Emblems.”

After his becoming partner in the firm, the literary, manufacturing, and advertising departments were assigned to him, and were retained until he withdrew altogether. The fifth and sixth editions of his “Quotations” were published by Little, Brown & Co., the seventh and eighth by Routledge of London, the ninth by Little, Brown & Co. and Macmillan & Co. of London, jointly; and of all these editions between two and three hundred thousand copies must have been sold. Of the seventh and eighth editions, as the author himself tells us, forty thousand copies were printed apart from the English reprint. The ninth edition, published in 1891, had three hundred and fifty pages more than its predecessor, and the index was increased by more than ten thousand lines. In 1881 Mr. Bartlett published his Shakespeare “Phrase-Book,” and in February, 1889, he retired from his firm to complete his indispensable Shakespeare “Concordance,” which Macmillan & Co. published at their own risk in London in 1894.

All this immense literary work had the direct support and coöperation of Mr. Bartlett’s wife, who was the daughter of Sidney Willard, professor of Hebrew in Harvard University, and granddaughter of Joseph Willard, President of Harvard from 1781 to 1804. She inherited from such an ancestry the love of studious labor; and as they had no children, she and her husband could pursue it with the greatest regularity. Both of them had also been great readers for many years, and there is still extant a manuscript book of John Bartlett’s which surpasses most books to be found in these days, for it contains the life-long record of his reading. What man or woman now living, for instance, can claim to have read Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall” faithfully through, four times, from beginning to end? We must, however, remember that this was accomplished by one who began by reading a verse of the Bible aloud to his mother when he was but three years old, and had gone through the whole of it at nine.

There came an event in Bartlett’s life, however, which put an end to all direct labors, when his wife and co-worker began to lose her mental clearness, and all this joint task had presently to be laid aside. For a time he tried to continue his work unaided; and she, with unwearied patience and gentleness, would sit quietly beside him without interference. But the malady increased, until she passed into that melancholy condition described so powerfully by his neighbor and intimate friend, James Russell Lowell,—though drawing from a different example,—in his poem of “The Darkened Mind,” one of the most impressive, I think, of his poems. While Bartlett still continued his habit of reading, the writing had to be surrendered. His eyesight being erelong affected, the reading also was abandoned, and after his wife’s death he lived for a year or two one of the loneliest of lives. He grew physically lame, and could scarcely cross the room unaided. A nervous trouble in the head left him able to employ a reader less and less frequently, and finally not at all. In a large and homelike parlor, containing one of the most charming private libraries in Cambridge,—the books being beautifully bound and lighting up the walls instead of darkening them,—he spent most of the day reclining on the sofa, externally unemployed, simply because employment was impossible. He had occasional visitors, and four of his old friends formed what they called a “Bartlett Club,” meeting at his house one evening in every week. Sometimes days passed, however, without his receiving a visitor, he living alone in a room once gay with the whist-parties which he and Lowell had formerly organized and carried on.

His cheerful courage, however, was absolutely unbroken, and he came forward to meet every guest with a look of sunshine. His voice and manner, always animated and cheerful, remained the same. He had an inexhaustible store of anecdotes and reminiscences, and could fill the hour with talk without showing exhaustion. Seldom going out of the house, unable to take more than very short drives, he dwelt absolutely in the past, remembered the ways and deeds of all Cambridge and Boston literary men, speaking genially of all and with malice of none. He had an endless fund of good stories of personal experience. Were one to speak to him, for instance, of Edward Everett, well known for the elaboration with which he prepared his addresses, Bartlett would instantly recall how Everett once came into his bookstore in search of a small pocket Bible to be produced dramatically before a rural audience in a lecture; but in this case finding none small enough, he chose a copy of Hoyle’s “Games” instead, which was produced with due impressiveness when the time came. Then he would describe the same Edward Everett, whom he once called upon and found busy in drilling a few Revolutionary soldiers who were to be on the platform during Everett’s famous Concord oration. These he had drilled first to stand up and be admired at a certain point of the oration, and then to sit down again, by signal, that the audience might rather rise in their honor. Unfortunately, one man, who was totally deaf, forgot the instructions and absolutely refused to sit down, because the “squire” had told him to stand up. In a similar way, Bartlett’s unimpaired memory held the whole circle of eminent men among whom he had grown up from youth, and a casual visitor might infer from his cheery manner that these comrades had just left the room. During his last illness, mind and memory seemed equally unclouded until the very end, and almost the last words he spoke were a caution to his faithful nurse not to forget to pay the small sum due to a man who had been at work on his driveway, he naming the precise sum due in dollars and cents.

He died at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on the morning of December 3, 1905, aged eighty-five. Was his career, after all, more to be pitied or envied? He lived a life of prolonged and happy labor among the very choicest gems of human thought, and died with patient fortitude after all visible human joys had long been laid aside.

XVI

HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER

HORACE ELISHA SCUDDER

It has been generally felt, I think, that no disrespect was shown to John Fiske, when the New York “Nation” headed its very discriminating sketch of him with the title “John Fiske, Popularizer”; and I should feel that I showed no discourtesy, but on the contrary, did honor to Horace Elisha Scudder, in describing him as Literary Workman. I know of no other man in America, perhaps, who so well deserved that honorable name; no one, that is, who, if he had a difficult piece of literary work to do, could be so absolutely relied upon to do it carefully and well. Whatever it was,—compiling, editing, arranging, translating, indexing,—his work was uniformly well done. Whether this is the highest form of literary distinction is not now the question. What other distinction he might have won if he had shown less of modesty or self-restraint, we can never know. It is true that his few thoroughly original volumes show something beyond what is described in the limited term, workmanship. But that he brought such workmanship up into the realm of art is as certain as that we may call the cabinet-maker of the Middle Ages an artist.

Mr. Scudder was born in Boston on October 16, 1838, the son of Charles and Sarah Lathrop (Coit) Scudder, and died at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on January 11, 1902. He was a graduate of Williams College, and after graduation went to New York, where he spent three years as a teacher. It was there that he wrote his first stories for children, entitled “Seven Little People and their Friends” (New York, 1862). After his father’s death he returned to Boston, and thenceforward devoted himself almost wholly to literary pursuits. He prepared the “Life and Letters of David Coit Scudder,” his brother, a missionary to India (New York, 1864); edited the “Riverside Magazine” for young people during its four years’ existence (from 1867 to 1870); and published “Dream Children” and “Stories from My Attic.” Becoming associated with Houghton, Mifflin, and Company, he edited for them the “Atlantic Monthly” from 1890 to 1898, preparing for it also that invaluable Index, so important to bibliographers; he also edited the “American Commonwealths” series, and two detached volumes, “American Poems” (1879) and “American Prose” (1880). He published also the “Bodley Books” (8 vols., Boston, 1875 to 1887); “The Dwellers in Five Sisters’ Court” (1876); “Boston Town” (1881); “Life of Noah Webster” (1882); “A History of the United States” for schools (1884); “Men and Letters” (1887); “Life of George Washington” (1889); “Literature in School” (1889); “Childhood in Literature and Art” (1894), besides various books of which he was the editor or compiler only. He was also for nearly six years (1877-82) a member of the Cambridge School Committee; for five years (1884-89) of the State Board of Education; for nine years (1889-98) of the Harvard University visiting committee in English literature; and was at the time of his death a trustee of Williams College, Wellesley College, and St. John’s Theological School, these making all together a quarter of a century of almost uninterrupted and wholly unpaid public service in the cause of education. After May 28, 1889, he was a member of the American Academy, until his death. This is the simple record of a most useful and admirable life, filled more and more, as it went on, with gratuitous public services and disinterested acts for others.

As a literary workman, his nicety of method and regularity of life went beyond those of any man I have known. Working chiefly at home, he assigned in advance a certain number of hours daily as due to the firm for which he labored; and he then kept carefully the record of these hours, and if he took out a half hour for his own private work, made it up. He had special work assigned by himself for a certain time before breakfast, an interval which he daily gave largely to the Greek Testament and at some periods to Homer, Thucydides, Herodotus, and Xenophon; working always with the original at hand and writing out translations or commentaries, always in the same exquisite handwriting and at first contained in small thin note-books, afterwards bound in substantial volumes, with morocco binding and proper lettering. All his writings were thus handsomely treated, and the shelves devoted to his own works, pamphlet or otherwise, were to the eye a very conservatory and flower garden of literature; or like a chamberful of children to whom even a frugal parent may allow himself the luxury of pretty clothes. All his literary arrangements were neat and perfect, and represented that other extreme from the celebrated collection of De Quincey in Dove Cottage at Grasmere, where that author had five thousand books, by his own statement, in a little room ten or twelve feet square; and his old housekeeper explained it to me as perfectly practicable “because he had no bookcases,” but simply piled them against the walls, leaving here and there little gaps in which he put his money.

In the delicate and touching dedication of Scudder’s chief work, “Men and Letters,” to his friend Henry M. Alden, the well-known New York editor, he says: “In that former state of existence when we were poets, you wrote verses which I knew by heart and I read dreamy tales to you which you speculated over as if they were already classics. Then you bound your manuscript verses in a full blue calf volume and put it on the shelf, and I woke to find myself at the desk of a literary workman.” Later, he says of himself, “Fortunately, I have been able for the most part to work out of the glare of publicity.” Yet even to this modest phrase he adds acutely: “But there is always that something in us which whispers _I_, and after a while the anonymous critic becomes a little tired of listening to the whisper in his solitary cave, and is disposed to escape from it by coming out into the light even at the risk of blinking a little, and by suffering the ghostly voice to become articulate, though the sound startle him. One craves company for his thought, and is not quite content always to sit in the dark with his guests.”

The work in which he best achieves the purpose last stated is undoubtedly the collection of papers called by the inexpressive phrase “Men and Letters”; a book whose title was perhaps a weight upon it, and which yet contained some of the very best of American thought and criticism. It manifests even more than his “Life of Lowell” that faculty of keen summing up and epigrammatic condensation which became so marked in him that it was very visible, I am assured, even in the literary councils of his publishers, two members of which have told me that he often, after a long discussion, so summed up the whole situation in a sentence or two that he left them free to pass to something else. We see the same quality, for instance, in his “Men and Letters,” in his papers on Dr. Mulford and Longfellow. The first is an analysis of the life and literary service of a man too little known because of early death, but of the rarest and most exquisite intellectual qualities, Dr. Elisha Mulford, author of “The Nation” and then of “The Republic of God.” In this, as everywhere in the book, Mr. Scudder shows that epigrammatic quality which amounted, whether applied to books or men, to what may be best described as a quiet brilliancy. This is seen, for instance, when, in defending Mulford from the imputation of narrowness, his friend sums up the whole character of the man and saves a page of more detailed discussion by saying, “He was narrow as a cañon is narrow, when the depth apparently contracts the sides” (page 17). So in his criticism called “Longfellow and his Art,” Scudder repeatedly expresses in a sentence what might well have occupied a page, as where he says of Longfellow, “He was first of all a composer, and he saw his subjects in their relations rather than in their essence” (page 44). He is equally penetrating where he says that Longfellow “brought to his work in the college no special love of teaching,” but “a deep love of literature and that unacademic attitude toward his work which was a liberalizing power” (page 66). He touches equally well that subtle quality of Longfellow’s temperament, so difficult to delineate, when he says of him: “He gave of himself freely to his intimate friends, but he dwelt, nevertheless, in a charmed circle, beyond the lines of which men could not penetrate” (page 68). These admirable statements sufficiently indicate the rare quality of Mr. Scudder’s work.

So far as especial passages go, Mr. Scudder never surpassed the best chapters of “Men and Letters,” but his one adequate and complete work as a whole is undoubtedly, apart from his biographies, the volume entitled “Childhood in Literature and Art” (1894). This book was based on a course of Lowell lectures given by him in Boston, and is probably that by which he himself would wish to be judged, at least up to the time of his excellent biography of Lowell. He deals in successive chapters with Greek, Roman, Hebrew, Mediæval, English, French, German, and American literary art with great symmetry and unity throughout, culminating, of course, in Hawthorne and analyzing the portraits of children drawn in his productions. In this book one may justly say that he has added himself, in a degree, to the immediate circle of those very few American writers whom he commemorates so nobly at the close of his essay on “Longfellow and his Art,” in “Men and Letters”: “It is too early to make a full survey of the immense importance to American letters of the work done by half-a-dozen great men in the middle of this century. The body of prose and verse created by them is constituting the solid foundation upon which other structures are to rise; the humanity which it holds is entering into the life of the country, and no material invention, or scientific discovery, or institutional prosperity, or accumulation of wealth will so powerfully affect the spiritual well-being of the nation for generations to come” (page 69).

If it now be asked what prevented Horace Scudder from showing more fully this gift of higher literature and led to his acquiescing, through life, in a comparatively secondary function, I can find but one explanation, and that a most interesting one to us in New England, as illustrating the effect of immediate surroundings. His father, so far as I can ascertain, was one of those Congregationalists of the milder type who, while strict in their opinions, are led by a sunny temperament to be genial with their households and to allow them innocent amusements. The mother was a Congregationalist, firm but not severe in her opinions; but always controlled by that indomitable New England conscience of the older time, which made her sacrifice herself to every call of charity and even to refuse, as tradition says, to have window curtains in her house, inasmuch as many around her could not even buy blankets. Add to this the fact that Boston was then a great missionary centre, that several prominent leaders in that cause were of the Scudder family, and the house was a sort of headquarters for them, and that Horace Scudder’s own elder brother, whose memoirs he wrote, went as a missionary to India, dying at his post. Speaking of his father’s family in his memoir, he says of it, “In the conduct of the household, there was recognition of some more profound meaning in life than could find expression in mere enjoyment of living; while the presence of a real religious sentiment banished that counterfeit solemnity which would hang over innocent pleasure like a cloud” (Scudder’s “Life of David Coit Scudder,” page 4). By one bred in such an atmosphere of self-sacrifice, that quality may well be imbibed; it may even become a second nature, so that the instinctive demand for self-assertion may become subordinate until many a man ends in finding full contentment in doing perfectly the appointed work of every day. If we hold as we should that it is character, not mere talent, which ennobles life, we may well feel that there is something not merely pardonable, but ennobling, in such a habit of mind. Viewed in this light, his simple devotion to modest duty may well be to many of us rather a model than a thing to be criticised.

XVII

EDWARD ATKINSON

EDWARD ATKINSON

Edward Atkinson, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since March 12, 1879, was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, on February 10, 1827, and died in Boston on December 11, 1905. He was descended on his father’s side from the patriot minute-man, Lieutenant Amos Atkinson, and on the maternal side from Stephen Greenleaf, a well-known fighter of Indians in the colonial period; thus honestly inheriting on both sides that combative spirit in good causes which marked his life. Owing to the business reverses of his father, he was prevented from receiving, as his elder brother, William Parsons Atkinson, had received, a Harvard College education, a training which was also extended to all of Edward Atkinson’s sons, at a later day. At fifteen he entered the employment of Read and Chadwick, Commission Merchants, Boston, in the capacity of office boy; but he rapidly rose to the position of book-keeper, and subsequently became connected with several cotton manufacturing companies in Lewiston, Maine, and elsewhere. He was for many years the treasurer of a number of such corporations, and in 1878 became President of the Boston Manufacturers’ Mutual Insurance Company. Such business was in a somewhat chaotic state when he took hold of it, but he remained in its charge until his death, having during this time organized, enlarged, and perfected the mutual insurance of industrial concerns. In 1855 he married Miss Mary Caroline Heath, of Brookline, who died in December, 1907. He is survived by seven children,—Mrs. Ernest Winsor, E. W. Atkinson, Charles H. Atkinson, William Atkinson, Robert W. Atkinson, Miss C. P. Atkinson, and Mrs. R. G. Wadsworth.

This gives the mere outline of a life of extraordinary activity and usefulness which well merits a further delineation in detail. Mr. Atkinson’s interest in public life began with a vote for Horace Mann in 1848. Twenty years after, speaking at Salem, he described himself as never having been anything else than a Republican; but he was one of those who supported Cleveland for President in 1884, and whose general affinities were with the Democratic party. He opposed with especial vigor what is often called “the imperial policy,” which followed the Cuban War, and he conducted a periodical of his own from time to time, making the most elaborate single battery which the war-party had to encounter.

From an early period of life he was a profuse and vigorous pamphleteer, his first pamphlet being published during the Civil War and entitled “Cheap Cotton by Free Labor,” and this publication led to his acquaintance with David R. Wells and Charles Nordhoff, thenceforth his life-long friends. His early pamphlets were on the cotton question in different forms (1863-76); he wrote on blockade-running (1865); on the Pacific Railway (1871); and on mutual fire insurance (1885), this last being based on personal experience as the head of a mutual company. He was also, during his whole life, in print and otherwise, a strong and effective fighter for sound currency.

A large part of his attention from 1889 onward was occupied by experiments in cooking and diet, culminating in an invention of his own called “The Aladdin Oven.” This led him into investigations as to the cost of nutrition in different countries, on which subject he also wrote pamphlets. He soon was led into experiments so daring that he claimed to have proved it possible to cook with it, in open air, a five-course dinner for ten persons, and gave illustrations of this at outdoor entertainments. He claimed that good nutrition could be had for $1 per week, and that a family of five, by moderate management, could be comfortably supported on $180 per year (Boston “Herald,” October 8, 1891). These surprising figures unfortunately created among the laboring-class a good deal of sharp criticism, culminating in the mistaken inquiry, why he did not feed his own family at $180 a year, if it was so easy? I can only say for one, that if the meals at that price were like a dinner of which I partook at his own house with an invited party, and at which I went through the promised five courses after seeing them all prepared in the garden, I think that his standard of poverty came very near to luxury.

Mingled with these things in later years was introduced another valuable department of instruction. He was more and more called upon to give addresses, especially on manufactures, before Southern audiences, and there was no disposition to criticise him for his anti-slavery record. Another man could hardly be found whose knowledge of manufacturing and of insurance combined made him so fit to give counsel in the new business impulse showing itself at the South. He wrote much (1877) on cotton goods, called for an international cotton exposition, and gave an address at Atlanta, Georgia, which was printed in Boston in 1881.

Looking now at Atkinson’s career with the eyes of a literary man, it seems clear to me that no college training could possibly have added to his power of accumulating knowledge or his wealth in the expression of it. But the academic tradition might have best added to these general statements in each case some simple address or essay which would bring out clearly to the minds of an untrained audience the essential points of each single theme. Almost everything he left is the talk of a specially trained man to a limited audience, also well trained,—at least in the particular department to which he addresses himself. The men to whom he talks may not know how to read or write, but they are all practically versed in the subjects of which he treats. He talks as a miner to miners, a farmer to farmers, a cook to cooks; but among all of his papers which I have examined, that in which he appears to the greatest advantage to the general reader is his “Address before the Alumni of Andover Theological Seminary” on June 9, 1886. Here he speaks as one representing a wholly different pursuit from that of his auditors; a layman to clergymen, or those aiming to become so. He says to them frankly at the outset, “I have often thought [at church] that if a member of the congregation could sometimes occupy the pulpit while the minister took his place in the pew, it might be a benefit to both. The duty has been assigned to me to-day to trace out the connection between morality and a true system of political or industrial economy.”

He goes on to remind them that the book which is said to rank next to the Bible toward the benefit of the human race is Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” and that the same Adam Smith wrote a book on moral philosophy, which is now but little read. He therefore takes the former of Smith’s books, not the latter, as his theme, and thus proceeds:—

“I wonder how many among your number ever recall the fact that
it has been the richest manufacturers who have clothed the
naked at the least cost to them; that it is the great bonanza
farmer who now feeds the hungry at the lowest price; that
Vanderbilt achieved his great fortune by reducing the cost of
moving a barrel of flour a thousand miles,—from three dollars
and fifty cents to less than seventy cents. This was the great
work assigned to him, whether he knew it or not. His fortune
was but an incident,—the main object, doubtless, to himself,
but a trifling incident compared to what he saved others.”[18]

He then goes on to show that whatever may be the tricks or wrongs of commerce, they lie on the surface, and that every great success is based upon very simple facts.

“The great manufacturer [he says] who guides the operations
of a factory of a hundred thousand spindles, in which fifteen
hundred men, women, and children earn their daily bread,
himself works on a narrow margin of one fourth of a cent on
each yard of cloth. If he shall not have applied truth to every
branch of construction and of the operation of that factory, it
will fail and become worthless; and then with toilsome labor a
hundred and fifty thousand women might try to clothe themselves
and you, who are now clothed by the service of fifteen hundred
only.

“Such is the disparity in the use of time, brought into
beneficent action by modern manufacturing processes.

“The banker who deals in credit by millions upon millions
must possess truth of insight, truth of judgment, truth of
character. Probity and integrity constitute his capital, for
the very reason that the little margin which he seeks to gain
for his own service is but the smallest fraction of a per cent
upon each transaction. I supervise directly or indirectly the
insurance upon four hundred million dollars’ worth of factory
property. The products of these factories, machine-shops, and
other works must be worth six hundred million dollars a year.
It isn’t worth fifty cents on each hundred dollars to guarantee
their notes or obligations, while ninety-nine and one half per
cent of all the sales they make will be promptly paid when
due.”[19]

He elsewhere turns from viewing the factory system with business eyes alone to the consideration of it from the point of view of the laborer. There is no want of sympathy, we soon find, in this man of inventions and statistics. He thus goes on:—

“The very manner in which this great seething, toiling, crowded
mass of laboring men and women bear the hardships of life leads
one to faith in humanity and itself gives confidence in the
future. If it were not that there is a Divine order even in
the hardships which seem so severe, and that even the least
religious, in the technical sense, have faith in each other,
the anarchist and nihilist might be a cause of dread.