YESTERDAYS WITH AUTHORS.*
THERE is no doubt whatever as to the readableness of this enter- taining volume. Literary gossip about authors whose faces were recently seen amongst us must be dull indeed if it fail altogether * Yesterdays with Authors. By James T. Fields. London: Sampson Low and Co. 1872: in gratifying public curiosity. People like to be admitted behind the scenes, to see popular writers in their dressing-gowns and slippers, to learn how they talked and lived, and what opinions they entertained of literary rivals. Any small chit-chat of this kind is received with avidity, and if a bit of scandal be added, the story, it is to be feared, will be all the more acceptable. Mr. Fields is well known as an honourable American publisher, and it is scarcely necessary to say that his pages are wholly free from detraction. He writes of Thackeray, Hawthorne, and Dickens, of Wordsworth and Miss Mitford, with affection, with enthusiasm, and with a liberal recognition of his friends' merit. No one can complain that Mr. Fields' praise of these authors is stinted, or that his estimate of them is ungenerous ; but it may be questioned whether, in the publication of his reminiscences, and of letters written in the freedom of close and private intercourse, he has not in a few instances been somewhat too communicative. The author tells us little that is not worth telling, but he does, we think, occasionally relate more than it was expedient to tell ; yet it is hard to say this, when the feeling of the volume is so wholly excellent, and it may be well to remember that Mr. Fields wrote primarily for American readers, and that his chapters appeared in an American magazine.
It is curious that Hawthorne, the most sensitive and reserved of men, the most fastidious of authors, should have belonged by birth and by political predilections to the States. His prejudices against England, honest though they were, seem sometimes to spring from a regret that he was not born upon her soil. How dearly he loved the old country, what a tender, filial regard he entertained for her, how alive he ever was to all that is beautiful in her scenery and venerable in her associations, how easy it is to see that he felt for her as a lover even when scornful words rose to his lips ; how evident it is that his exquisite genius was stimulated and quickened by her legendary and historical lore, must be obvious to every one familiar with his writings. Hawthorne endeavoured to avoid one of the greatest evils attendant on a fame like his by making it an express desire that his biography should not be written. His friends have adhered to the letter, if not quite to the spirit, of the request, by the publication of the "Note-Books," and now Mr. Fields relates a few particulars of his life which will be new to most readers. Like Walter Scott, he was in early boyhood a cripple, and his lame- ness, caused by an accident, compelled him to use crutches for more than a year. Three years elapsed before he was thoroughly restored. "The boy used to lie flat upon the carpet and read and study the long days through. Some time after he had recovered from his lameness he had an illness causing him to lose the use of his limbs, and he was obliged to seek again the aid of his old crutches, which were then pieced out at the ends to make them longer." It is interesting to read that the first book he bought with his own money was Spenser's Rtery Queen. At fourteen, he grew tall and strong, and became a good shot and an excellent fisherman ; at seventeen, he entered Bowdoin College, and "after his graduation returned again to live at Salem." When a student at the College his Latin compositions attracted special attention, and his English compositions received high commendations. A lady of Mr. Fields' acquaintance re- members that when she was a child, and before Hawthorne had printed any of his stories, "she used to sit on his knee and lean her head on his shoulder, while by the hour he would fascinate her with delightful legends much more wonderful and beautiful than any she has ever read since in printed books." Mr. Fields became acquainted with Hawthorne after the publication of the Twice-Told Tales, and when he was about thirty-five years old. Strange to think that his occupation at that time was that of a gauger in the Boston Custom House ; but he lost his post when his political friends went out of office. After the ejectment Mr. Fields called on him at Salem, and offered to take anything he wrote and to print an edition of two thousand copies. The original manuscript of the Scarlet Letter was produced, and the publisher's admiration was unbounded. "it is either very good or very bad,—I don't know which," exclaimed Hawthorne, as he presented the manuscript. Mr. Fields adds that the plan of .the work was altered at his suggestion. Some of the writer's statements about Hawthorne are especially interesting. He was a great reader, and found delight in all kinds of publica- tions. He even said that he had passed delicious hours in reading the old advertisements in the newspaper files. Walter Scott's novels "he continued almost to worship ;" and Anthony Trollope's, "written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale," and "as English as a beefsteak," precisely suited his taste: The manly, wholesome genius of Trollope, direct, forcible, and realistic, had a charm for the imaginative and subtle romance- writer, all the greater, perhaps, that it was so utterly different from his own. He had a passion for the sea, and " was constantly saying in his quiet, earnest way, 'I should like to sail on and for ever, and never touch the shore again. ' " Yet this love of the ocean did not prevent him from finding a happy home after his return from Europe at the Wayside in Concord. "Never was poet or romancer more fitly ahrined. Drummond at Haw- thornden, Scott at Abbotsford, Dickens at Gad's Hill, Irving at Sunnyside were not more appropriately sheltered. Shut up in his tower, he could escape from the tumult of life, and be alone, with only the bees and birds in concert outside his casement. The view from his apartment on every side was lovely, and Haw- thorne enjoyed the charming prospect as I have known few men to enjoy nature."
The portrait Mr. Fields draws of Thackeray is not wholly flatter- ing. His motto, we are told, was to avoid performing to-day, if possible, what can be postponed till to-morrow ; he is represented as often keeping his expenditures in advance of his receipts, and although it was one of his exaggerations to accuse himself of being a snob past all cure, Mr. Fields thinks there was a grain of truth in the remark. The following is a characteristic passage :—
" During Thackeray's first visit to America his jollity knew no bounds, and it became necessary often to repress him when he was walking in the streets. I well remember his uproarious shouting and dancing when he was told that the tickets to his first course of readings were all sold, and when we rode together from his hotel to the lecture-hall, he insisted on thrusting both his long legs out of the carriage-window, in deference, as he said, to his magnanimous ticket-holders."
And here is another significant anecdote :— "I happened to be one of a large company whom he had invited to a six-o'clock dinner at Greenwich one summer afternoon, several years ago. We were all to go down from London, assemble in a particular room at the hotel, where he was to meet us at 6 o'clock sharp When the clock struck six our host had not fulfilled his part of the con- tract. His burly figure was yet wanting among the company assem- bled. As the guests were nearly all strangers to each other, and as there was no one present to introduce us, a profound silence fell upon the room, and we anxiously looked out of the window hoping every moment that Thackeray would arrive. This untoward state of things went on for one hour, still no Thackeray and no dinner. English reticence would not allow any remark as to the absence of our host. Everybody felt serious, and a gloom fell upon the assembled party. Still no Thackeray. The landlord, the butler, and the waiters rushed in and of out the room shrieking for the master of the feast, who as yet had not arrived. It was confidentially whispered by a fat gentleman with a hungry look that the dinner was utterly spoiled twenty minutes ago, when we heard a cheery shout in the entry, and Thackeray bounced into the room. He had not changed his morning dress, and ink was still visible on his fingers. Clapping his hands, and pirouetting briskly on one leg, he cried out, 'Thank Heaven, the last sheet of the Virginians has just gone to the printer.' He made no apology for his late appearance, introduced nobody, shook hands heartily with every- body, and begged us all to be seated as quickly as possible.
A number of very interesting letters by Charles Dickens appear in Mr. Fields' memories of that novelist, for whom his admiration is unbounded. Indeed he praises him all round, and will scarcely admit of any defects in his character. It is generally thought, for example, that Dickens was a little too fond of what is blunder- ingly called good living, but Mr. Fields declares he has rarely seen a man eat and drink lees :—
"He liked to dilate in imagination over the brewing of a bowl of punch, but I always noticed that when the punch was ready he drank less of it than any one who might be present. It was the sentiment of the thing and not the thing itself that engaged his attention. He liked to have a little supper every night after a reading, and have three or four friends round the table with him, but he only pecked at the viands as a bird might do, and I scarcely saw him eat a hearty meal during his -whole stay in the country."
The country was, we need scarcely say, America, and as Dickens had an influenza cold hanging about him all the time he was in the States, it is not surprising that he "only pecked at" his food. The exuberant mirth of the man and his enormous physical energy excite the author's wonder. Mr. Fields is a good pedestrian him- self, but he says he never met with any walker with whom he found it such hard work to keep up. At noon he was ready for ' a walk,—
" Twelve, fifteen, even twenty miles were not too much for Dickens, and many a long tramp we have had over the hop-country together. Chatham, Rochester, Cobham Park, Maidstone, anywhere out under the open sky and into the free air ! Then Dickens was at his 'best, and talked. Swinging his blackthorn etick, his lithe figure sprang forward over the ground, and it took a practised pair of legs to keep alongside of his voice."
Pleasant, too, it is to read of his helpful, kindly nature, ready at all times for manly acts of charity. Mr. Fields relates how that one night he was walking with the novelist in a drifting snow-storm, when the air was so thick with the tempest that it was scarcely
possible to see across the street :— "All at once I missed Dickens from my side. What bad become of him ? Had he gone down in the drift utterly exhausted, and was the, snow burying him out of sight ? Very soon the sound of his cheery voice was beard on the other side of the way. With great difficulty, over the piled-up snow, I struggled across the street, and there found him lifting up, almost by main force, a blind old man who had got bewildered by. the storm, and had fallen down unnoticed, quite unable to proceed. Dickens, a long distance away from him, with that tender, sensitive, and penetrating vision ever on the alert for suffering in any form, had rushed' at once to the rescue, comprehending at a glance the situation of the sightless man."
We have not space to linger with Mr. Fields over his pleasing- portrait and affectionate reminiscences of Miss Mitford, with. which the volume closes, and this is the less necessary, since the reader's attention has been called to this graceful writer more- than once recently in our columns. Mr. Fields observes, by the way, and the remark is perfectly true, that Miss Mitford's criticisms, though always piquant, are not always the wisest. Occasionally, however, she hits the mark exactly, as when writing of Alexander's Smith's Life Drama, she says, "The whole book
is like a quantity of extracts put together without any sort of connection, a mass of powerful metaphor with scarce any lattice- work for the honeysuckles to climb upon." Neither have we- mentioned the first paper in the volume, a very insignificant one, and altogether out of place in such a series, on Alexander Pope._ Mr. Fields has nothing to say on the subject that is worth saying, and it would seem as if his sole object in writing the article were to inform the world that he possessed the original portrait of the, poet.
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