Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend

CHAPTER IV

1876-1880

For I dipt into the future, far as human eye could see,

Saw the Vision of the world, and all the wonder that would be.

Tennyson.

The winds to music strange were set;

The sunsets glowed with sudden flame.—L.C.M.

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:

Mr. Swinburne to Mrs. Moulton

December 19, 1877.

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.

Yours sincerely,

Algernon Charles Swinburne.

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 EMBALMING OF A DAY

Tuesday: September 11: 1877. To Louise

A Day hath Lived! So let him fall asleep.

A Day is Dead—Days are not born again.

Only his Spirit shall for Us remain

Who found Him dear: His Hours in Balm to steep

Of all sweet Thoughts that may in Freshness keep

The beauty of a Day forever slain—

Of Wishes, for the bitter Herbs of Pain:

Of Looks that meet and smile, though Hearts may weep.

So shall our Night to come not wholly prove

An Egypt's Feast, where bids the Silent Guest

"In Joy remember Death."—"Remember Love

In Death," thy dead Day breathes from Breast to Breast.

Embalm Him thus, Heart's Love, that he may lie

Untombed and unforgotten, though he die.

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?'"

It would be a pleasure to record that Mrs. Moulton accepted the gift. The doll presented by the leader of the Symbolists would have been not only historic, but it might have been regarded as signifying in the language of symbolism things unutterable; but she could only say: "Oh, no; please. I should be laughed at. Please let it be something else." And the guests retired pensive, to return next day with a handsome Japanese cabinet as their offering. "And I have pined ever since," Mrs. Moulton added smilingly, when she told the story, "for the Mallarmé doll that might have been mine."

In 1877 the Macmillans brought out Mrs. Moulton's first volume of poems under the title "Swallow Flights," the name being taken from Tennyson's well known lines:

Short swallow-flights of song, that dip

Their wings in tears, and skim away.

The American edition, which followed soon after from the house of Roberts Brothers, was entitled simply "Poems." The success of the book was a surprise to the author. Professor William Minto wrote in the

Examiner

:

"We do not, indeed, know where to find, among the works of English poetesses, the same self-controlled fulness of expression with the same depth and tenderness of simple feeling.... 'One Dread' might have been penned by Sir Philip Sidney."

The

Athenæum

, always chary of overpraise, declared:

"It is not too much to say of these poems that they exhibit delicate and rare beauty, marked originality, and perfection of style. What is still better, they impress us with a sense of subtle and vivid imagination, and that spontaneous feeling which is the essence of lyrical poetry.... A poem called 'The House of Death' is a fine example of the writer's best style. It paints briefly, but with ghostly fidelity, the doomed house, which stands blind and voiceless amid the light and laughter of summer. The lines which we print in italics show a depth of suggestion and a power of epithet which it would be difficult to surpass.

"THE HOUSE OF DEATH

"Not a hand has lifted the latchet,

Since she went out of the door,—

No footsteps shall cross the threshold,

Since she can come in no more.

"There is rust upon locks and hinges,

And mould and blight on the walls,

And silence faints in the chambers

,

And darkness waits in the halls

,—

"Waits, as all things have waited,

Since she went, that day of spring,

Borne in her pallid splendour,

To dwell in the Court of the King;

"With lilies on brow and bosom,

With robes of silken sheen,

And her wonderful frozen beauty

The lilies and silk between

....

"

The birds make insolent music

Where the sunshine riots outside

;

And the winds are merry and wanton,

With the summer's pomp and pride.

"But into this desolate mansion,

Where Love has closed the door,

Nor sunshine nor summer shall enter,

Since she can come in no more."

Philip Bourke Marston wrote a long review of the volume in

The Academy

, London, in the course of which he admirably summarized the merits of the work when he said:

"The distinguishing qualities of these poems are extreme directness and concentration of utterance, unvarying harmony between thought and expression, and a happy freedom from that costly elaboration of style so much in vogue.... Yet, while thus free from elaboration, Mrs. Moulton's style displays rare felicity of epithet.... The poetical faculty of the writer is in no way more strongly evinced than by the subtlety and suggestiveness of her ideas."

The reviewers of note on both sides of the Atlantic were unanimous in their praise. In a time of æsthetic imitation she came as an absolutely natural singer. She gave the effect of the sudden note of a thrush heard through a chorus of mocking-birds and piping bullfinches. She was able to put herself into her work and yet to keep her poetry free from self-consciousness; and to be at once spontaneous and impassioned is given to few writers of verse. When such a power belongs to an author the verse becomes poetry.

Mrs. Moulton had already come to regard Robert Browning as, in her own phrase, "king of contemporary poets." She sent to him a copy of "Swallow Flights," with a timid, graceful note asking for his generosity. In his acknowledgment he said:

Mr. Browning to Mrs. Moulton

19 Warwick Crescent, W.

February 24, '78.

My dear Mrs. Moulton: Thank you for the copy of the poems. They need no generosity.... I close it only when needs I must at page the last, with music in my ears and flowers before my eyes, and not without thoughts across the brain. Pray continue your "flights," and be assured of the sympathetic observation of

Yours truly,

Robert Browning.

In acknowledgment of a copy of "In the Garden of Dreams" William Winter wrote:

Mr. Winter to Mrs. Moulton

"It is a beautiful book, Louise, and the spirit of it is tender, dreamlike and sorrowful.... The pathos of it affects me strongly. Life appeals more strongly to you than the pageantry. There is more fancy in your poems and more alacrity and variety of thought, but the quality that impresses me is feeling. I am not a critic, but somehow I must feel that I know a good thing when I see it, and I am sure that no one but a true artist in poetry could have written those stanzas called 'Now and Then.' The music has been running in my mind for days and days,

"And had you loved me then, my dear.

I think you are very kind to remember me and to send such a lovely offering to me at Christmas. God bless you! and may this new year be happy for you, and the harbinger of many happier years to follow."

Some years later the Scotch critic, Professor Meiklejohn, sent to Mrs. Moulton a series of comments which he had made while reading "Swallow Flights," "in the intervals of that fearful kind of business called Examination;" and some of these may be quoted before the book is passed for other matters.

"The word 'waiting' in the line

'White moons made beautiful the waiting night,'

is full of emotional and imaginative memory.

"In 'A Painted Fan' the line

'The soft, south wind of memory blows,'

is another instance of a perfect poetical thought, perfectly expressed.

"Two lines of an unforgettable beauty are

'The flowers and love stole sweetness from the sun;

The short, sweet lives of summer things are done.'

"And a line Shelley himself might have been proud to own is

'No bird-note quivers on the frosty air.'

"The lines

'He must, who would give life,

Be lord of death:'

and

'Shall a life which found no sun

In death find God?'

express musically a mystic thought.

"The sonnet 'In Time to Come' is one of astonishing crescendo. The lines

'And you sit silent in the silent place, …

You will be weary then for the dead days,

And mindful of their sweet and bitter ways,

Though passion into memory shall have grown.'

"This is very poetry of very poetry. You must look for your poetic brethren among the noble lyrists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Your insight, your subtlety, your delicacy, your music, are hardly matched, and certainly not surpassed, by Herrick or Campion or Carew or Herbert or Vaughan."

The success of this first volume of poems naturally contributed not a little toward establishing Mrs. Moulton firmly in the place she had won already in the literary society of London. Among other celebrities she met at this time Lady Wilde, who, as the poet "Speranza" in the

Dublin Nation

 in 1848 had been a figure really heroic, and who was by no means disinclined to magnify her own virtues. Taking Mrs. Moulton to task as a poet of mere emotion, Lady Wilde said to her reprovingly: "You're full of your own feelin's, me dear; but when I was young and your age, too, only the Woes of Nations got utterance in me pomes."

Mrs. Moulton heard Cardinal Newman and Mr. Spurgeon. Of them she wrote:

"You see straight into his mind and heart. You feel the glow of his thought, the action of his conscience; you feel the inherent excellence of the man you are dealing with.

"Mr. Spurgeon's style is admirable—strong, vigorous Saxon, short sentences, simple in structure, and full of earnestness. His first prayer was brief and earnest, and extremely simple in phraseology. It gave one a sense of intimacy with God, in which was no irreverence. The sermon commenced at 12 m., and lasted three-quarters of an hour. I thought John Bunyan might have preached just such a discourse."

To her great regret she missed meeting Tennyson. Long afterward she wrote:

"I never met Tennyson, but I just lost him by an accident. I shall never get over the regret of it. I had been invited to various places where he was expected as a guest; but you know how elusive he was, even his best friends could get at him but rarely. One day I had gone out for some idiotic shopping—shopping is always idiotic to me—and when I came back at late dinner time Lord Houghton met me with the question, 'Where have you been? I've been sending messengers all over the city for you. I got hold of Tennyson, and he waited for half an hour to see you.' The fates were never kind enough to bring me within the poet's range again."

On the death of Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman in 1878, Mrs. Moulton wrote of her in the London

Athenæum

. The admiration of Poe which exists in England, the romance of his relations with the "Helen" of his most beautiful poem, made the article especially timely; and from her acquaintance and her warm friendship for Mrs. Whitman, Mrs. Moulton was able to speak with authority. Her description of the personality of Mrs. Whitman is noteworthy:

"There was a singular attraction in the personal presence of this woman. The rooms where she lived habitually were full of her. They were dim, shadowy rooms, rich in tone, crowded with objects of interest, packed with the memorials of a lifetime of friendships; but she herself was always more interesting than her surroundings. When she died, her soft brown hair was scarcely touched with gray. Her voice retained to the last its music, vibrating at seventy-five with the sympathetic cadences of her youth. She was singularly shy. I remember that when I persuaded her to repeat to me one of her poems, she always insisted on going behind me. She could not bring herself to confront eye and ear at the same time."

The letters of Mrs. Whitman to Mrs. Moulton have been published in the biography of the former, but the following is so unusual—"the lady's gentle vexation at having been made out younger than she was," commented the recipient of the letter; "is so exceptional among women as to be amusing"—that it may be quoted.

Mrs. Whitman to Mrs. Moulton

"I will speak of one or two points suggested by the expression, 'true to her early love for Edgar Poe.' Now I was first

seen

 by Edgar Poe in the summer of 1845, when I was forty-two years old, and my earliest introduction to him was in 1848, when I was forty-five. You will see, therefore, that it was rather a

late

 than an

early

 love. I was born on the 19th of January, 1803—Edgar Poe was born on the 19th of January, 1809, being six years, to a day, my junior. Soon after the last edition of Griswold's 'Female Poets' was issued, I happened to be turning over some of the new Christmas books at a bookseller's, when I unwittingly opened a copy of that work, at the very page where an alert, enterprising woman sits perched on a marble pedestal. Glancing at the foot of the page, I read, in blank amazement, my own name. Turning to the preceding page, I found that the lady in question was born in 1813! I began seriously to doubt my own identity. I had never, to the best of my recollection, been modelled in plaster; I had never been 'interviewed' on the delicate point of age. Everybody knows that a lady's age after forty is proverbially uncertain; still it is as well to draw a line somewhere, and so, dear, if you should be called upon to write my obituary, and should consent to do so, here is a faithful transcript from the family Bible:—

"'Sarah Helen Power, born Jan. 19—10 o'clock p.m., 1803.'

"That was the same year that gave birth to Emerson."

Mr. Longfellow wrote to thank Mrs. Moulton for her paper on Mrs. Whitman, and at no great interval he wrote again in acknowledgment of an article upon his own poetry also in the

Athenæum

.

Mr. Longfellow to Mrs. Moulton

Cambridge, May 17, 1879.

Dear Mrs. Moulton: For your kind words in the

Athenæum

, how shall I thank you? Much, certainly, and often,—but more and more for your kind remembrance, and the pleasant hours we passed together before your departure.

… A charming country place in England is the thatched-roofed Inn at Rowsley in Derbyshire, one mile from Haddon Hall. Go there. And do not forget to write to me.

Truly yours,

Henry W. Longfellow.

In October, 1879, Mr. Chandler died, and Mrs. Moulton's grief was sincere and deep. It was the beginning of the breaking of the relations which had been closest in her life. Her love for her father had been always tender and fine, and both her journal and her letters show how much she felt the loss.

She was in America at the time of her father's death, and in correspondence with many of the friends she had made abroad. Among her Christmas gifts this year came a sonnet from Dr. Westland Marston.

To L.C.M

Take thou, as symbol of thyself, this rose

Which blooms in our world's winter.

Dank and prone

Lie rose-stems now, by sleety gales o'erthrown,

But still thy flower in hall and chamber glows,

Fed, like thee, not by airs the garden knows,

But by a subtler climate. Thus the zone

Of Summer binds the seasons, one to one,

And links the beam which dawns with that which goes.

Hail, Human