Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend

CHAPTER IV

1876-1880

MRS. MOULTON made her first visit to Europe in January, 1876. She remained abroad for nearly two years. From that date until the summer of 1907, inclusive, she passed every summer but two on the other side of the Atlantic. London became her second home. Her circle of friends, not only in England but on the Continent, became very wide. Her poems were published in England, and she was accorded in London society a place of distinction such as had not before been given to any American woman of letters. She enjoyed her social opportunities; but she prized most the number of sincere and interesting friendships which resulted from them. It is not difficult to understand how her charm and kindliness won those she met, or how her friendliness and sympathy endeared her to all who came to know her well.

Mrs. Moulton's first glimpse of London was simply what could be had in a brief pause on her way to Paris. She was, however, present in the House of Lords when the Queen opened Parliament in person for the first time after the death of the Prince Consort. She stayed but a few days in Paris, and then hastened on to Rome. Mrs. Harriet Prescott Spofford thus describes this first visit to the Immortal City:

"Paris over, came Rome, and twelve weeks of raptures and ruins, of churches and galleries, old palaces and almond-trees in flower, the light upon the Alban Hills, the kindly, gracious Roman society, all like a dream from which might come awaking. Certainly no one was ever made to feel the ancient spell, or to enjoy its beauty more than this sensitive, sympathetic, and impressible spirit. Stiff Protestant as she is, she was touched to tears by the benignant old pope's blessing; and she abandoned herself to the carnival, as much a child as 'the noblest Roman of them all.'"

Mrs. Moulton entered into the artistic life of Rome with characteristic ardor. She knew many artists, and became an especial friend of Story's, a visitor at his studio, and an admirer of his sculpture.

"I had greatly liked many of his poems," she said later, "and I was curious to see if his poems in marble equalled them. I was more than charmed with his work; and I suppose I said something which revealed my enthusiasm, for I remember the smile—half of pleasure, half of amusement—with which he looked at me. He said: 'You don't seem to feel quite as an old friend of mine from Boston felt, when he went through my studio, and, at least, I showed him the best I had. We are all vain, you know; and I suppose I expected a little praise, but my legal friend shook his head. "Ah, William," he said, "you might have been a great lawyer like your father; you had it in you; but you chose to stay on here and pinch mud!"' Another American sculptor whom Rome delighted to honor is Mr. Richard S. Greenough, whose 'Circe' has more fascination for me than almost anything else in modern art; but my acquaintance with him came later. I had a letter of introduction to William and Mary Howitt from Whittier; they made me feel myself a welcome guest."

She was interested also in the work of a young sculptor who had then lately arrived in Rome, Franklin Simmons; and of him she told this incident:

"Mr. Simmons had almost completed a statue, for which he had received an order from one of the States, had spent a great deal of time and money, when a conception came to him higher than his original idea. Without hesitation he sacrificed his time, his labor, and his marble—no small loss this—and began again. It was an act of simple heroism, of which not every one would have been capable; and there is little doubt that a man who unites to his talent a criticism so unsparing, and a spirit so conscientious, will do work well worthy the attention of the world."

Mrs. Moulton's real introduction to London did not come this year, but in the summer of 1877, when a breakfast was given in her honor by Lord Houghton (Richard Monckton Milnes), at which the guests included Browning, Swinburne, George Eliot, Jean Ingelow, Gustave Doré, and others of only less distinction. The breakfast was followed by a reception at which, in the society phrase, the guest of honor met everybody.

Of this breakfast an amusing reminiscence has been given by Mrs. Moulton herself:

"Shortly after I came into the room, Lord Houghton, whose voice was very low, brought a gentleman up to me whose name I failed to hear. My fellow-guest had a pleasant face, and was dressed in gray; he sat down beside me, and talked in a lively way on everyday topics until Lord Houghton came to take me in to table. Opposite to us sat Miss Milnes, now Lady Fitzgerald, between two gentlemen, one of whom was the man in gray. Presently Lord Houghton asked me if I thought Browning looked like his pictures. 'Browning?' I asked. 'Where is he?' 'Why, there, sitting beside my daughter,' he replied. But, as there were two gentlemen sitting beside Miss Milnes, I sat during the remainder of the breakfast with a divided mind, wondering which of these two men was Browning. After going back to the drawing-room my friend in gray again came and sat beside me, so I plucked up courage and said, 'I understand Mr. Browning is here; will you kindly tell me which he is?' He looked half puzzled, half amused, for a moment; then he called out to some one standing near, 'Look here, Mrs. Moulton wants to know which one of us is Browning. C'est moi!' he added with a gay gesture; and this is how my friendship with the author of 'Pippa Passes' began."

This introduction may be said to have "placed" Mrs. Moulton in English literary society, and there was hardly a person of intellectual distinction in London whom she did not meet. She came to know the Rossettis, William Sharp, Theodore Watts (later known as Watts-Dunton), Herbert E. Clarke, Mrs. W.K. Clifford, A. Mary F. Robinson (afterward Mme. Darmesteter), Olive Schreiner, Lewis Morris, William Bell Scott, the Hon. Roden Noel, Iza Duffus Hardy, Aubrey de Vere, the Marstons, father and son, and in short almost every writer worth knowing. She came, indeed, to belong almost as completely to the London literary world as to that of America.

Philip Bourke Marston, the blind poet, whose friend and biographer she in time became, she first met on the first day of July of this year. She has recorded the meeting:

"It was just six weeks before his twenty-sixth birthday. He was tall, slight, and, in spite of his blindness, graceful. He seemed to me young-looking even for his twenty-six years. He had a noble and beautiful forehead. His brown eyes were perfect in shape, and even in color, save for a dimness like a white mist that obscured the pupil, but which you perceived only when you were quite near to him. His hair and beard were dark brown, with warm glints of chestnut; and the color came and went in his cheeks as in those of a sensitive girl. His face was singularly refined, but his lips were full and pleasure-loving, and suggested dumbly how cruel must be the limitations of blindness to a nature hungry for love and for beauty. I had been greatly interested, before seeing him, in his poems, and to meet him was a memorable delight.

"He and the sister, who was his inseparable companion, soon became my close friends, and with them both this friendship lasted till the end."

The poetry of Swinburne had for her a fascination from the first, and she was attracted also by the personality of the poet. Writing an article upon a new volume of his, she submitted the copy to him before publishing it in the Athenæum. His acknowledgment was as follows:

Dear Madame: I am sincerely obliged for the kindness and courtesy to which I am indebted for the sight of the MS. herewith returned. Of course my only feeling of hesitation as to the terms in which I ought to acknowledge and answer the application which accompanied it arises merely from a sense of delicacy in seeming to accept, if not thereby to endorse, an estimate altogether too flattering to the self-esteem of its object.

But even at the risk of vanity or self-complacency, I will simply express my gratitude for your too favourable opinion, and my grateful sense of the delicacy and thoughtfulness which has permitted me a sight of the yet unprinted pages which convey it.

Leaving London in August, 1876, Mrs. Moulton went with Kate Field to visit Lawrence Hutton and his mother, who had a house for the summer in Scotland. In September, in company with Dr. Westland Marston, his son and daughter, and Miss Hardy, she made a visit to Étretat. The place and the company made a combination altogether delightful. An entry in her diary for this time, of which the date is merely "Midnight of September 1," records her enthusiasm.

"I want to remember this evening which has been so beautiful. I had worked all day to six o'clock dinner, after which I sat and talked awhile with Cecily and Iza, and then took a long moonlight walk with them and Dr. Marston. I think I never saw such a wonderful sky. The blue of it was so intensely blue and great masses of white clouds, hurried and driven on by the wind, met each other and retreated and put on all sorts of fantastic shapes, while among them the moon walked, visible sometimes, and at others hiding her pale face behind some veiled prophet of a cloud, who was mocking the fair night with the gloom of his presence. I never saw such grand effects.

"We climbed a long hill, and from thence we looked down on little Étretat lying below us, with the lights in its many windows, and the sea tossing beyond it white with spray and with moonlight. The trees were quivering at the whispers of a low wind, and still above all the clouds held strange conclave, keeping up their swift march and counter-march. All this time Dr. Marston talked as we sauntered on, and talked superbly. I think the electricity in the air inspired him. He talked of the soul's destiny, of immortality, and expressed, with matchless eloquence, that strong-winged faith which bears him on toward that end that will be, he feels sure, the new life's beginning. From time to time he interrupted himself to point out something that we might not else have seen,—some wonderful phantom of moonlight, some cottage-lamp shining at the end of a long lane, some Rembrandt contrast of light and shade.

"We walked far, but I knew no weariness. I could have walked on forever watching that strange and fitful sky, and listening to such talk as I have seldom heard. Here is an affluent poet, who affords to scatter his riches broadcast, and does not save them all for his printed pages. We went home at last and sat for a while in Dr. Marston's house, and then Philip and Cecily and I went down to the long terrace overlooking the sea, and sat for an hour or more to watch the moonlight on the breaking waves. How happy we were, that little while! We talked of the fitful clouds, the wild, hurrying sea, the white, sweet moon. Then something brought back to me visions of the white statues at Rome, and I tried to show them how fair these old gods stood in my memory. Ah! shall I ever forget this so lovely night? The strange, changeful, wind-swept sky, the waves swollen with the passion of yesterday's storm, marching in like a strong army upon the shore and overwhelming it. Behind us the casino, with its many lights, and down there between the moonlight and the sea, we three who did not know each other three months ago but hold each other so closely now.

"Nothing can ever take from me the fitful splendor, the wild rhythm, the divine mystery of this happy night. I can always close my eyes and see again sea and sky and dear faces; hear again the waves break on this wild coast of Normandy, with the passion of their immortal pain and longing."

This stay in Étretat was further commemorated in her poem of that title. Dr. Marston, too, felt the spell of the place and company, and addressed to her this sonnet:

The succeeding winter Mrs. Moulton passed in Paris. Here as in London she met many of the most interesting people of the day. With Stéphane Mallarmé especially she formed a close friendship, and through him she came to know the chief men of the group called at that time the "Décadents" of which he was the leader. Mallarmé was at this time professor of English in a French college, and his use of that language afforded Mrs. Moulton some amusement. "He always addressed me in the third person," she related, "and he made three syllables of 'themselves.' He spoke of useless things as 'unuseful.' He was, however, a great comfort and pleasure to me, and I saw a great deal of him and of his wife that winter. I used to dine with them at their famous Tuesdays, and meet the adoring throng that came in after dinner. Often he and Madame Mallarmé would saunter with me about the streets of Paris. It was then that I first made acquaintance with the French dolls,—those wonderful creations which can bow and courtesy and speak, and are so much better than humans that they always do the thing they should. Whenever we came to a window where one of these lovely creatures awaited us, I used to insist upon stopping to make her dollship's acquaintance, until I fear the Mallarmés really believed that these dolls were the most alluring things in life to me. But the winter,—crowded for me with the deepest interests and delights in meeting the noted men of letters and many of the greatest artists, and of studying that new movement in art, Impressionism, which was destined to be so revolutionary in its influence,—at last this wonderful winter came to an end, and I was about to cross the Channel once more. Full of kindly regrets came Monsieur and Madame Mallarmé to pay me a parting call. 'We have wishéd,' began the poet, mustering his best English in compliment to the occasion, 'Madame and I have wishéd to make to Madame Moulton a souvenir for the good-bye, and we have thought much, we have consideréd the preference beautiful of Madame, so refinéd; and we do reflect that as Madame is pleaséd to so graciously the dolls of Paris like, we have wishéd to a doll present her. Will Madame do us the pleasure great to come out and choose with us a doll, très jolie, that may have the pleasure to please her?'"