Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend

CHAPTER VIII

1900-1906

THE diary during the early months of the year which opened the new century records as often before many kindnesses in the form of reading for various objects:

"Went in evening to read for the Rev. Mr. Shields, of South Boston."

"In the evening read for the College Club. Mrs. Howe presided. The other readers were Dr. Hale, Dr. Ames, Colonel Higginson, J.T. Trowbridge, Judge Grant, and Nathan Haskell Dole."

"Read for the Young Men's Christian Association. I read 'In Arcady,' 'The Name on a Door,' and 'A June Song,' of my own verses; then my paper on the Marstons, entitled 'Five Friends.' People seemed pleased."

Among her numerous generous acts were to be reckoned the many times when, without regard to herself, she assisted at readings or gave a reading entirely by herself.

On February 19, the entry is:

"Two years ago this day Mr. Moulton passed out of life. It was my first thought this morning, and the sadness of it has been with me all day."

Mr. Moulton had always been to her a tower of strength. Few men were more highly esteemed by those who knew him, or were more deserving of esteem. He was a man of flawless integrity and the highest sense of honor; a man of vigorous intellect, of clear and definite intellectual grasp, and of a generous and kindly nature. He was not himself fond of society, but he was proud of his wife's success, and ministered to her tastes for travel and social life. His sympathy with the literary life was genuine and strong, and his service to clean and wholesome journalism in his editorial work gave him a lasting claim upon public gratitude, had he chosen to assert it. Upon his sterling worth and fine character Mrs. Moulton had always been able to depend, and life without the consciousness of his presence in the home was a thing different and sadder.

In a letter written about this time Mrs. Moulton again touches upon the old question of social struggle:

"I agree with you as to the inanity of struggle for social prominence. How fine is the passage you quote from Emerson: 'My friends come to me unsought. The great God Himself gave them to me.' That is the way I feel. Any social struggle seems to me so little worth while. It is worth while to know the people who really interest one,—but the others! It is always climbing ladders, and there are always other ladders to climb, and one never gets to the top. And then, what will it be if there is an 'after death'? I wonder? Will there be social ambitions,—the desire to get ahead there? It almost seems as if there must be, if there is the continuity of individual existences, for what could change people's desires and tendencies all at once?"

From various letters to the friend to whom this is written, to whom she wrote often, may be put together here a few extracts. The letters were seldom dated, and it is hardly possible to tell exactly when each was written, but the exact sequence is not of importance.

"And what do you think (entre nous) I have been asked to do? To go to Cambridge, England, with a party of friends who have included Mme. Blavatsky, and they are to have some brilliant receptions given them there by the occult folk, or those interested. But I declined."

"Mr. – goes about asking every one if he has read 'The Story of My Heart,' by Jeffries, which is his latest enthusiasm. After being asked till I was ashamed of saying no, I got the book and read it, finding it the most haunting outcry of pessimism imaginable. When one has read it one feels in the midst of a Godless, hopeless world, where nature is hostile, and the animal kingdom alien, and man alone with his destiny,—a destiny that menaces and appalls him. It is a too powerful book. Jeffries makes one feel, for the moment, that all the happy people are happy only because insensate, and are madly dancing on volcanoes."

"Austin Dobson says: 'I have always admired your sonnets,—a thing I can never manage; but how you do take all Gallometry to be your province!! What are we, poor slaves to canzonets and serenades, to do next?' Very pleasant of him."

"Last Saturday the Boyle O'Reilly monument was unveiled, and I was chosen to crown it with a laurel wreath. It was a wonderful occasion; and President Capen, of Tufts College, gave the most eloquent eulogy to which I ever listened."

"My life is not the beautiful life you think, but it is my soul's steadfast purpose to make it all that you believe it already is. Nothing is of any real consequence save to live up to your very highest ideal. In criticism I made up my mind, long ago, that one should be like Swedenborg's angels, who sought to find the good in everything. Of course, really poor things must be condemned—or what I think is better—boycotted; but I do not like what is harsh, prejudiced, one-sided. I would see my possible soul's brother in every man—which all means that I am an optimist."

"Can you tell me what Henry James means by his story, 'The Private Life'? Is it an allegory or what? I never saw anything so impossible to understand."

"You speak of the 'close and near friendships' you have made in your few weeks in Florence,—'friendships for a lifetime.' That is delightful, only I can't make friendships with new people easily; so if I went I should not have that pleasure."

"… Before I rose this morning, a special messenger came from the Secretary of the Women Writers' Club (which is giving a magnificent dinner to-night at which Mrs. Humphry Ward presides). Miss Blackburne, the 'Hon. Secretary,' had only heard of my being in London this morning, so she at once sent a messenger to invite me. She entreated me to come; said she wanted me to sit at the head of one of the tables, and preside over that table, etc., etc. She sent a most distinguished list of guests, and oh, I did want to go—but I felt so ill I dared not try to go, and I sent an immediate refusal. Many of the authors whom I would like to meet will be among the guests...."

"Here is the little screed … about Mrs. Browning. The description was given me by an English lady who saw Mrs. Browning very often during Mrs. B.'s last visit to Rome. To her such rumors as (falsely, I am persuaded) have connected Mr. Browning's name with that of another marriage would have seemed an impossible impertinence. Indeed, when one knows—as I happen to know—that Mr. Browning was asked to furnish some letters and some data about Mrs. Browning's life for Miss Zimmern (who had been requested to write about her for the Famous Women Series of Biographies) and refused because he could not bring himself to speak in detail of the past which had been so dear, or to share the sacred letters of his wife with the public, it hardly seems that he can be contemplating the offer of the place she, his 'moon of poets,' held in his life, to another."

In the "little screed" alluded to was this description of Mrs. Browning, given in the words of the friend:

"No, she was not what people call beautiful; but she was more and better. I can see her now, as she lay there on her sofa. I never saw her sitting up. She was always in white. She wore white dresses, trimmed with white lace, with white, fleecy shawls wrapped round her, and her dark brown hair used to be let down and fall all about her like a veil. Her face used to seem to me something already not of the earth—it was so pale, so pure, and with great dark eyes that gleamed like stars. Then her voice was so sweet you never wanted her to stop speaking, but it was also so low you could only hear it by listening carefully."

"'Was Mr. Browning there?'

"Oh, yes, and he used to watch her as one watches who has the most precious object in the whole world to keep guard over. He looked out for her comfort as tenderly as a woman.

"I think there never was another marriage like that; a marriage that made two poet souls one forever. Don't you notice how Browning always speaks of finding again the 'soul of his soul'? It was easy enough to see that that was just what she was. And the boy was there, too, a little fellow, with long golden hair, and I remember how quietly he used to play, how careful he was not to disturb his mother. Sometimes he used to stand for a long time beside her, with her 'spirit-small hand,' as her husband called it, just playing with his curls. I wonder if he can have known that she was going away from him so soon."

From various letters of this time of and to Mrs. Moulton may be taken such bits as these:

"It was such a pleasure to me in my present loneliness to have a good talk with you last night, and I have been thinking of what you said. You would like a big fortune that you might have leisure to fulfil your dreams, but what if you had the fortune and not the dreams? I would a million times rather be you than any capitalist alive. It seems to me that to do work as the few great men in the world have, that must live, is the supreme joy. When you are dust the world will adore the wonder and majesty and beauty of your pictures. It seems to me that I would starve willingly in an attic, like Chatterton, to leave to the wide future one such legacy."

"I read very little contemporary poetry, finding a good deal of it a little falsetto. I found, however, in your elegant and musical volume a sincerity, a simplicity, which stand you as constituting a cachet, a distinct note."

"I am reading, with very unusual interest, 'Blake of Oriel,' by Adeline Sargent. It is a story of fate and of heredity, which sets one thinking and questioning.... Is fate also to be complicated by the curse of evil inheritance? Oh, is it fair to give life to one with such an inheritance of evil, and then condemn the sinner for what he does? Is it?… Is it a loving God who creates men foreknowing that they will commit spiritual suicide?… Are people sinners who are doomed by heredity to sin?"

"Thank you for what you say of my 'Arthur Hamilton.' It is deeply gratifying to me that the book has ever so slightly interested you. As for the difficulties of the hero, I suppose they are the eternal difficulties. It was like my impudent youth to think that to no one else had the same problem been so unjustly presented before, and to rush wildly into a tourney."

The summer of 1900 Mrs. Moulton passed abroad, going before her London visit for the spring in Italy. She revisited familiar haunts in Rome and Florence, and again was steeped in the enchantment of Italy. In Rome she loved especially the gardens of the Villa Ludovisi; and indeed, something in the solemn spell she felt in the Eternal City appealed especially to her nature. The roses and the ruins, the antique and the modern; churches and altars and temples, and modern studios and society,—each, in turn, attracted her. She passed hours in the Vatican galleries; she was fond of driving on the Pincian in the late afternoon; she took a child's joy in the festas; she found delight in the works growing under the hand of artists. Of a visit to the studio of Mr. Story she related: "I was looking at a noble statue of Saul, and this, recalling to me the 'Saul' of Browning, led me to speak of the dead poet. Mr. Story then told me of his own last meeting with Browning, which was at Asolo. It was but a short time before Browning's death, and the two old friends were talking over all sorts of intimate things, and finally Mr. Story entered his carriage to drive away. Browning, who had bade him good-bye and turned away, suddenly came back, and reached his hand into the carriage, grasping that of Story, and looking into the sculptor's eyes exclaimed, 'Friends for forty years! Forty years without a break.' Then with a last good-bye he turned away, and the two friends never met again."

After the London visit, Mrs. Moulton went for the cure at Aix-les-Bains, perhaps as much for the delightful excursions of the neighborhood as in any hope of help for her almost constant ill-health. Thence she went in September to Paris, still in the full glory of its Exposition year. While in Paris she received from Professor Meiklejohn the comments upon her latest volume, "At the Wind's Will." He had fallen into the custom of going over her poems carefully, and of sending her his notes of admiration. "I still maintain," he wrote her on this occasion, "that your brothers are the Elizabethan lyrists, Shakespeare, Fletcher, Vaughan." Some of the comments were these:

"In 'When Love is Young,' the line

is in the strong style of the sixteenth century.

"I think the 'Dead Men's Holiday' martial and glorious.

is the kind of line when Nature has taken the pen into her own hand.

"What an exquisite stanza is this in 'The Summer's Queen':

"The line

in the sonnet entitled 'At Rest' is as good as anything of Drayton's. You know his sonnet,

in the sonnet called 'The New Year Dawns,' is the very truth in the strong simplicity of the Elizabethan age.

"What a wonderful line is the last one of the sonnet, 'The Song of the Stars':

The serenity and sweetness of Longfellow's verse are the natural expression of a life sweet and serene; and in the work of Mrs. Moulton the beauty of her work was in no less a measure the inevitable outcome of her character. She wrote so spontaneously that her poems seemed, as she used to say, "to come to her," and although she never spared the most careful polishing, yet her song seemed to spring without effort and almost without conscious prevision.

The literary life was to her in its outward aspect chiefly a matter of fit and harmonious companionship. She declared that she thought "the great charm of a literary life was that it made one acquainted with so many delightful people." Her warm sense of the personality and characteristics of the writers whom she met in London has been alluded to already, and some of her words about them have been quoted in a former chapter. Those who enjoyed the privilege of chatting with her in her morning-room were never tired of hearing her give her impressions of distinguished authors.

"George Meredith's talk," she said on one occasion, "is like his books, it is so scintillating, so epigrammatic. In talking with him you have to be swiftly attentive or you will miss some allusion or witticism, and seem disreputably inattentive."

"Thomas Hardy," she said again, "has the face, I think, which one would expect from his books. His forehead is so large and so fine that it seems to be half his face. His blue eyes are kindly, but they are extremely shrewd. You feel that he sees everything, and that because he would always understand he would always forgive. I have heard him called the shyest man in London, but he never impressed me so."

"I did not find George Eliot so plain a person as she is ordinarily represented," she replied to a question about that author. "To me she seemed to have a singularly interesting face and a lovely smile; and one distinctive trait, one peculiarly her own, was a very gentle and sweet deference of manner. In any difference of opinion, she always began by agreeing with the person with whom she was conversing, as 'I quite see that, but don't you think—' and then there would follow a statement so supremely convincing, so comprehensive, so true, so sweetly suggestive, that one could not help being convinced. It was like a fair mist over a background of the greatest strength."

Christmas was always a season of much activity at No. 28 Rutland Square. The tokens which Mrs. Moulton sent to friends kept her and Katy busy long in arranging and sending; and in turn came gifts from far and near. With her generous and friendly spirit she was fully in sympathy with the spirit of the time. Among her Christmas gifts on this year, was one from Louise Imogen Guiney, with these charming and delicately humorous verses:

On January 1, 1901, Mrs. Moulton records in her diary:

"Wrote a sonnet, the first in nearly or quite two years, beginning, 'Once more the New Year mocks me with its scorn.'"

When the poem was published, "New Year" had been changed to "morning."

The summer of this year found her again in London. Her health was seriously affected, and at times she was a great sufferer; but when she was able to go about among her friends she was as full of spirit as ever. Indeed, the diary gives a surprising list of festivities which she attended.

"Went to Lady Wynford's charming luncheon."

"Went to Edward Clifford's to see pictures, and had the loveliest evening."

"Went to Archdeacon Wilberforce's, Mrs. Meynell's, and Mrs. Clifford's, and dined at Annie Lane's."

"Lunch at Sir Richard Burton's at Hampstead Heath. Lady Burton, who can never sit up, because of spinal trouble, was charming."

"Some one—a lady who left no name—brought me charming roses. A good many guests—Lady Wynford, Mrs. Sutherland Orr, Canon Bell, and George Moore among them."

"Went to Lord Iddesleigh's. He gave me his first book, 'Belinda Fitzwarren.'"

To this summer belongs the following letter, which is interesting not only in itself, but also as illustrating how the old questions of religion followed Mrs. Moulton through life:

"… This place is a paradise. The Thames, from Windsor to Henley, is a beautiful dream, sailing up and down—no churches, no responsibilities. Consequently we New Englanders need not urge that it is dangerous to linger long upon its bosom. If there be no physical miasma rising from these waters, I fear there is an ethical one.... You are very kind and very generous. Your gift is very acceptable to us, and in my own name and that of those whom the Church is trying to help, I thank you with all my heart. What you have told me of the perplexities that beset you is more than simply interesting,—it is also revelatory of what, I fancy, is not uncommon among the thoughtful folk. But why not fall back deliberately on worship as distinguished from satisfactory precision of opinion or belief? I should not be surprised to learn that prayer has tided many people over the bar of intellectual perplexity into the harbor of a reasonable faith. Indeed, I know it has. The instinct of humanity is to worship and fall down before the Lord, our Maker. Why should we insist on having a precisely formulated proposition as respects the nature of that Lord before we worship? Prayer and praise form the sole common meeting-ground of humanity. Why not come back to the Church, not as a thoroughly satisfied holder of accurately stated formulas, but as a soul eager to gain whatever of help, hope, or comfort the Church has to give? You would never repent this, I am confident. My strong wish, never stronger than to-day, is that all of us may be receiving from God what God is only ready to give. For our reasoned opinions we must be intellectually intrepid and industrious. For our possession of the peace that passeth understanding we must be spiritually receptive and responsive."

After Mrs. Moulton's return to Boston in the autumn, the diary shows the old round of engagements, of visits from friends, of interest in the new books, and the writing and receiving of innumerable letters. Mrs. Alice Meynell came to Boston in the winter as the guest of Mrs. James T. Fields, and to her Mrs. Moulton gave a luncheon. The Emerson-Browning club gave a pleasant reception in Mrs. Moulton's honor, at which by request she read "The Secret of Arcady"; at one of Mrs. Mosher's "Travel-talks" she read by invitation "The Roses of La Garraye"; and with occasions of this sort the winter was dotted.

In a note written that spring to Mrs. John Lane is this pleasant passage:

"Frances Willard's mother was in her eighties,—she was on her death-bed—it was, I think, the day before she died, and her daughter said to her, 'Well, mother, if you had your life to live over again, I don't think you would want to do anything differently from what you have done.' The dear old lady turned her gray head on the pillow, and smiled, and said, 'Oh, yes; if I had my life to live over again, I would praise a great deal more and blame a great deal less.' I always thought it lovely to have felt and said."

In London in this summer of 1902 she notes in her diary that she went to the dinner of the Women Writers. Later, she was given a luncheon by the Society of American Women in London. She sat, of course, on the right of the president, Mrs. Griffin, and next to her was placed Lady Annesley, "who seemed to me," she said afterward, "the most beautiful woman I had ever seen." She gave a little dinner to which she invited Whistler, who accepted in the following terms:

Dear Louise: I accept your invitation with great pleasure, and how kind and considerate of you to make it eight-thirty. I really believe I shall reach you, not only in good time, but in the unruffled state of mind and body that is utterly done away with in the usual scramble across country, racing hopelessly for the "quarter to."…