Representative women of New England/Louise Chandler Moulton
LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON. The picture of Louise Chandler Moulton as she was described to me by one who saw her on her Wwdding-day, standing on the church porch, in the magic moment that is neither sunset nor twilight, like Helen's, her beautv shadowed in white veils, a bride blooming, blushing, full of life and love and joy, has always been a radiant vision to my mind's eye.
Hardly more than a child though she was—her school-days just six weeks over—she had then printed one book, and had written another, "Juno Clifford," a novel, issued anonymously a few months after her marriage to William Topham Moulton, the publisher of a weekly paper to which she had been a contributor.
From the beginning she was a child of genius: it was only through the intuitive force of genius that she was able to know the hearts of men and women as she did at that very early period of her life — a genius that has ever since grown steadily as day grows out of dawn, and that reached its culmination in lyrics and in sonnets that have few superiors in our language.
[The daughter of Lucius L. and Louisa R. (Clark) Chandler, she was born in Pomfret, Conn. Her father was son of Charles and Hannah (Cleveland) Chandler, and was descended from William^ Chandler, an early settler of Roxbury, Mtuss., through his son John, who was about two years of age when the family came from F^ngland. John^ Chandler in 1686 removed from Roxbury, Mass., to Woodstock, Conn. He was one of the twelve Roxbury men who bought the territory known as Mashamoquet (now Pomfret), he being one of the six grant(*es in May, 16K6. His wife, Elizabeth Doughis, was the daughter of William Douglas, who was born in 1610, "without doubt in Scotland," came to New England in 1640, and in 1660 settled in New London, Conn., where he was a deacon of the church.
Mrs. Hannah Cleveland Chandler was born at Pomfret in 1783, daughter of Solomon and Hannah (Sharpe) Cleveland. Her father was a soldier in the war of the Revolution. Her mother (great-grandmother of Mrs. Moulton), described as "a woman of rare intelligence and wonderful gift of language," was a notable student of Greek literature. Solomon^ Cleveland was a descendant in^the fifth generation of Moses Cleveland, of Woburn, Mass., the immigrant progenitor of the New England family of this surname, the line being Moses,* Edward,^ Silas,^ Solomon.' Edward^ Cleveland's wife was Rebecca Paine, daughter of Elisha and Rebecca (Doane) Paine and granddaughter of Thomas and Mary^ (Snow) Paine. Mary Snow was a daughter of Nicholas^ Snow, who came over in the "Ann" in 1623, and his wife Constance, who came with her father, Stephen* Hopkins, in the "Mayflower" in 1620. See Snow, Paine, Doane, Cleveland, Chandler, and Douglas Genealogies.]
The childhood of Mrs. Moulton was one that fostered her imaginative power. Her parents still clung to the strictest Calvinistic principles. Games, dances, romances, w^ere things forbidden; and, as playmates were few, the child lived in a world of fancy. "I was lonely," she has said, "and I sought companions. What was there to do but to create them?"
Indeed, before her eighth year her active mind was creating a world of its own in a little unwritten play, which it pleased her fancy to call a Spanish drama, and with which she beguiled all the summer, filling it with personages as real and as dear to her as those she met every day. Dwelling in such surroundings, her existence and her powers were as anomalous as if a nightingale or a tropic bird of paradise were found in the nest of our home-keeping birds. Yet in her lovely mother's heart there must have been the delicate music of the song-sparrow's strain ; and never could she have carried her power so triumphantly but for the strength she inherited from her father.
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LOUISE CHANDLER MOULTON undoubtedly a very stimulating effect on the emotions of the sensitive child, and to its far-reaching influence may be ascribed the tinge of melancholy found in many of her pages. Not that they are not often illuminated with all the joy of being, but that, whenever the sun is bright, she has seen and felt the shadow. "One would not ignore," she says, "the gladness of the dawn, the strong splendor of the midday sun; but, all the .same, the shadows lengthen, and the day wears late. And yet the dawn comes again after the night; and one has faith—or is it hope rather than faith?—that the new world, which swims into the ken of the spirit to whom death gives wings, may be fairer even than the dear familiar earth, . . . this mocking sphere, where we have never been quite at home, because, after all, we are but travellers, and this is our hostelry, and not our permanent abode."
The child Louise had a great vitality, and, when free from the burdens and terrors of "election" and "damnation," she exulted in the breath she drew. Running in the face of a great wind was one of her joys, feeling how alive she was; and she realizeil the reverse of such emotion in listening to the sountl of the wind through an outer keyhole, which seemed to her the calling of trumpets, the crying of lost souls. She lived all this time so nuieh in a world of her own that when, in her fifteenth year, she first sent some verses to a ncwspaper she felt it a guilty secret.
Her home in Boston, after her marriage, was a delightful one. Her house was soon a centre of attraction; and, surrounded by friends, she exercised there a gracious hosjjitality, and met the brilliant men and women who made the Boston of that epoch famous. Here was born her daughter, the golden-hairetl Florence, who is now the wife of Mr. William Schaefer, of South Carolina. Here her husband died, and here she has remained through the days of her widowhood till the house has become historic.
She continued her literary work through all these years. Besides writing her stories and essays and poems, she sent to the New York Tribune a series of interesting anil brilliant letters concerning the literary life of Boston, giving advance reviews of new tjooks and telling of the affairs of the Radical Club, of which Mr. Emerson, Colonel Higginson, Jolin Weiss, Mrs. Julia Ward Howe, and others of eminence were members. In all the six years , during which these letters appeared she never made in them any unkind statement, or wrote a sen- tence that could cause pain. Through all her critical work, indeed, she has exercisetl a tender regard for the feelings of others, as well as great generosity of praise, preferring rather to be silent than to utter an unkindness.
Contributing poems and stories of power and grace to the leading magazines. Harper's, the Atlantic, the Galaxy, the first Scribner's, she also published a half-dozen very successful books for children, "Bedtime Stories," "Firelight Stories," "Stories Told at Twilight," and others that have always held the popular taste; and she collectetl a few of her many atlult tales into volumes, "Miss Eyre of Boston" and "Some Women's Hearts."
Her first voyage across the sea was made in the January of 1876. Pausing in London long enough to see the Queen open Parliament in person for the first time after the Prince Consort's death, she hastened through Paris on her way to Rome and to raptures of old palaces and gardens and galleries, touched to tears b)' the Pope's benediction, abandoned to the gayety of the Carnival, enjoying the hospitality of the studios of 'edder, Story, Rollin Tilton, anil others, and of the gracious and charming social life of Rome. Her descriptions of all this, overflowing with the sensitiveness to beauty which is a part of her nature, make her "Random Rambles" most enchanting reading. After Rome she visited Florence, and then Venice, feeling to the quick its mysterious and elusive spell, and then again Paris, and again London and the London season.
Entertained by Lord Houghton, she met Browning and Swinburne, George Eliot, Kinglake, Theodore Watts-Dunton, and a host of others, seeing especially a great deal of Brownhig—her personal beauty and charm, her exquisite manners and modest self-possession, her unerring tact, her voice, of which an English poet said, "Her voice, wherein all sweet nesses abide," having as much to do with all this as her hterary excellence.
It was the next winter that the Macmillans brought out her first volume of poems, "Swallow Flights"; and, although she had trembled to think of its fate at the hands of alien critics, she betrayed no elation at the chorus of praise with which it was received. The Examiner spoke of the power and originality of the verses, of the music and the intensity as surpassing any verse of George Eliot's, declaring that the sonnet entitled "One Dread" might have been written by Sir Philip Sidney.
"No depth, dear Love, for thee is too iirofound,
There is no farthest height thou mayst not dare,
Nor shall thy wings fail in the upper air :
In funeral robe and wreath my past lies bound :
No old-time voice assails me with its sound
When thine I hear — no former joy seems fair,
Since now one only thing could bring despair.
One grief, like compassing seas, my life surround,
One only terror in my way be met.
One great eclipse change my glad day to night,
One phantom only turn from red to white
The lips whereon thy lips have once been set:
Thou knowest well, dear Love, what that must be —
The dread of some dark day unshared by thee."
The Athenceum also dwelt on the vivid and subtle imagination and delicate loveliness of these verses and their perfection of technique. The Academy spoke warndy of their felicity of epithet, their healthiness, their suggestiveness, their imaginative force pervaded by the depth and sweetness of perfect womanhood; and the Tattler pronounced her a mistress of form and of artistic j)erfection, saying also that England had no ppet in such full sympathy with woods and winds and waves, finding in her the one truly natural singer in an age of s'sthetic imitation. " She gives the effect of the sudden note of the thrush," it said. "She is as spontaneous as Walter von Vogelweide." The Timea, the Mornhuj Po.^t, the Literary World, all welcomed the book with eciually warm praise, and the Pall Mall Gazette spoke of her lyrical feeling as like that which gave a unique charm to Heine's songs. Very few of these critics had she ever met, and their cordial recognition was as surprising to her as it was delightful. Among the innumerable letters which she .received, filled with admiring warmth, were some from Matthew Arnold, Austin Dobson, Frederick Locker, William Bell Scott, and, in fine, most of the world of letters of the London of that day. Her songs were set to music by Francesco Berger and Lady Charlcsmont, as the^ have been later on by Margaret Lang, Arthur Foote, Ethelbcrt Nevin, and many others. Philip Bourke Marston wrote her, "Much as we all love and admire your work, it seems to me we have not yet fully realized the unostentatious loveliness of your lyrics, as fine for lyrics as your best sonnets are for son- nets. 'How Long' struck me more than ever. The first verse is eminently characteristic of you, exhibiting in a very marked degree what runs through nearly all of your poems, the most exquisite and subtle blending of strong emotion with the sense of external nature. It seems to me this perfect poem is possessed by the melancholy yet tender music of winds sighing at twilight, in some churchyard, through okl trees that watch beside silent graves. Then nothing can be more subtly beautiful than the closing lines of the sonnet, 'In Time to Come':—
"'Which was it spoke to you, the wind or I?
I think you, musing, scarcely will have heard.'
"There can be no doubt that, measuring by quality, not quantity, your place is in the very foremost rank of poets. The divine simplicity, strength and subtlety, the intense, fragrant, genuine individuality of your poems will make them imperishable. And as they are of no school they will be fresh, as the old delights of earth are ever fresh." And again the same poet wrote her concerning "The House of Death" that it was one of the most beautiful, the most powerful poems he knew. "No poem gives me such an idea of the heartlessness of Nature. The poem is Death within and Summer without—light girdling darkness — and it leaves a picture and impression on the mind never to be effaced."
{{block center|"Not a hand has lifted the latchet
Since siie went out of the door —
No footstep 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 splendor
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.
"Red roses she left behind her,
But they died long, long ago :
'Twas the odorous ghost of a blossom
That seemed through the dusk to glow.
"The garments she left mocked the shadows
With hints of womanly grace,
And her image swims in the mirror
That was so used to her face.
"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."
}}
The reader must agree with the critic that this poem of "The House of Death" is unequalled in its tragic beauty and sweetness. It was apropos of this volume that in one of his letters to her Robert Browning said he had closed the book with music in his ears and flowers before his eyes, and not without thoughts across his brain. And it was concerning a later poem, "Laus Veneris," inspired by a painting of his own, that Burne-Jones said it made him work all the more confidently and was a real refreshment.
" Pallid with too much longing,
White with passion and prayer,
Goddess of love and beauty.
She sits in the picture there —
"Sits with her dark eyes seeking
Something more subtle still
Than the old delights of loving
Her measureless days to fill.
"She has loved and been loved so -often
In her long immortal years
That she tires of the worn-out rapture,
Sickens of hopes and fears.
"No joys or sorrows move her,
Done with her ancient pride;
For her head she found too heavy
The crown she has cast aside.
"Clothed in her scarlet splendor.
Bright with her glory of hair,
Sad that she is not mortal —
Eternally sad and fair —
"Longing for joys she knows not,
Athirst with a vain desire,
There she sits in the picture.
Daughter of foam and fire! "
Could anything be in stronger or more glorious contrast to the "House of Death" or to "Arcady" or to that great sonnet, "At War," or show more varied power?
Few people could have met such praise and appreciation as Mrs. Moulton received, so calmly, so sedately and gently, without one flutter of gratified vanity. Indeed, she is to-day the most modest and most humble-minded of women.
With the exception of the two years immediately following Mr. Moulton's death, when she remained at home and in seclusion, Mrs. Moulton has every summer sailed away for the foreign shores where she is so welcomed and so loved. Although possibly few Americans have had such a social as well as literary success abroad, the hospitality she has received has never been violated by her in pen or word: she has printed no letters and uttered no gossip concerning the houses in which she has been a guest. She has been, through all and everything, a woman of unerring sense of right and courtesy, of whom all other Americans may be proud. Every winter sees her back in Boston, where her house is a centre of literary life, and where one is sure to find every stranger of distinction. For her acquaintance among English people of prominence is as extensive as among those of our own country. The friend of Longfellow and Whittier and Holmes in their lifetime, the acquaintance of Boker, and Emerson, and Lowell, and Boyle O'Reilly, and of Sarah Helen Whitman (the fiancee of Edgar Allan Poe), of Rose Terry and Nora Perry, as she is still of Stedman and Stoddard, Mrs. Howe, Arlo Bates, Edward Everett Hale, Howells, William Winter, Anne Whitney, Alice Brown, Louise Guiney, and, in fact, of almost every one of any interest or achievement here, her English acquaintance was and is equally extensive, as she has been on pleasant terms with Sir Walter Besant, Wiliiam Sharp, Dr. Honler, Mathilde Blind, Holman Hunt, Mrs. Clifford, Mrs. Campbell-Praed, Coulson Kernahan, John Davidson, Kenneth Grahame, Richard Le Gallienne, Anthony Hope, Robert Hichens, William Watson, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy, and Alice Meynell, not to speak of Christina Rossetti, William Morris, Jean Ingelow, William Black, and many another of both the living and the dead.
It is in Boston that she has done the greater part of her work, collated and collected a few of her many stories and of her essay's into volumes, written her books of travel, "Random Rambles" and "Lazy Tours," books full of interest, published her four volumes of poetry, and edited and prefaced with biographies "A Last Harvest" and "Garden Secrets," and the "Collected Poems" of Philip Bourke Marston, and also a selection from Arthur O'Shaughnessy's verses, generous with her time, her effort, her money, and her praise.
Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote Mrs. Moulton that he was touched with the passionate sincerity of her poems. "I cannot see," he added, "that the life of ardent youth is dying out of you, or like to." Sincerity, indeed, is the keynote both of her nature and her work. She is not methodical in her processes, never finding herself able to work through mere intellectual endeavor, unless some strong emotion stirs her to the deeps. Thomas Hardy speaks of the poems in "The Garden of Dreams" as being penetrated "by the supreme quality, emotion." "It is not art but nature that gave her," said William Minto, "the spontaneity and directness which are so marked characteristics of most of her poems, or that epigrammatic concision which enables her often to express in a sentence a whole problem or experience."
One of Mrs. Moulton's most appreciative, scholastic, and discriminating critics was Professor Meiklejohn, who for twenty-seven years occupied a chair in the University of St. Andrews, Scotland, and who was the author of a translation of Kant, of "The Art of Writing English," and other books of importance. He has said with authority that she deserved to be classed with the best Elizabethan lyrists in her lyrics, — with Herrick and Campion and Shakespeare,—while in her sonnets she might rightly take a place with Milton and Wordsworth and Rossetti. "I cannot tell you how keen and great enjoyment (sometimes even rapture)," he wrote her, "I have got out of your exquisite lyrics." In a series of "Notes," following the poems, line by line, he asserted that the poet won her success by the simplest means and plainest words, as true genius always does, and that her pages were full of emotional and imaginative meaning. Nature and Poetry uniting in an indissoluble whole; and Shelley himself, he said, would have been proud to own certain of the lines. The poem "Quest" he found so beautiful that, in his own words, it was "difficult to speak of it in perfectly measured and unexaggerated language." Of the poem "Wife to Husband" he said that "the tenderness, the sweet and compelling rhythm, are worthy of the best Elizabethan days." The sonnet, "A Summer's Growth," "unites," he says, the "passion of such Italian poets as Dante with the imagination of modern English." This was in relation to her first volume, "Swallow Flights"; and in conclusion he said: "This poet must look for her brothers in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries among the noble and intense lyrists. Her insight, her subtlety, her delicacy, her music, are hardly matched, and certainly not surpassed by Herrick or Campion or Crashaw or Carew or Herbert or Vaughan."
Of poems in the next volume, "The Garden of Dreams," Professor Meiklejohn affirmed that the perfect little gem, "Roses," was worthy of Goethe, and that "As I Sail" had the firmness and imaginativeness of Heine, the perfect simplicity containing magic. "Wordsworth never wrote a stronger line," he said of one in "Voices on the Wind."
In "At the Wind's Will" again the same critic recognized the strong style of the sixteenth century, noble and daring rhythms, the "quintessence of passion," successes gained by the "courage of simplicity," rare specimens of compression as well as of sweetness. "The Gentle Ghost of Joy" he thought "a wonderful voluntary in the best style of Chopin." In a line of one of the sonnets, "Yet done with striving and foreclosed of care," he finds something as good as anything of Drayton's. He pronounced the two sonnets called "Great Love" worthy of a "place among Dante's and Petrarch's sonnets," and of the sonnet, "Were but my Spirit loosed upon the Air," he wrote, "It is one of the greatest and finest sonnets in the English language."
I think every one who knows and loves poetry in its highest form and expression will agree with all this, and will feel that the critic spoke of very great verse. Many other critics have been to the full as appreciative, and have felt, as I do, the constant delight of splendid phrase and Shakespearian vigor and utterance in Louise Chandler Moulton's sonnets, and the atmosphere of warmth and beauty that bathes the thought and fancy of each page.
But in spite of the largeness and high quality of her work it is quite as much the woman as the poet who is to be loved and admired. Large-hearted and large-souled, of a religious spirit unfettered by dogma, most tender, most true, most compassionate, genial, ingenuous, of an absolute integrity and an absolute unworldliness, she has the warm affection of all who are fortunate enough to know her at all closely. Men and women, young and old, come to her for the pleasure of the passing hour, for advice, for sympathy in joy or trouble. From all over the country people write to her, confiding their perplexities and sorrows, craving intellectual or spiritual comfort, and always receiving it. Her words of cheer are given from the heart, and she has the satisfaction of knowing the support and strength some of her written words have been to those like the young girl who, confined to her bed for three years and too weak to listen to prayers, could be helped by murmuring to herself:—
"We lay us down to sleep.
And leave to God the rest,
Whether to wake and weep
Or wake no more be best."
Mrs. Moulton's home in Boston is full of interesting souvenirs, autographs, signed pictures, and sculptures given Ijy the artists. At every turn there is association with famous or cherished names, and here her guests find their welcome generous and delightful, her manner gracious, her directness reassuring, her conversation full of sparkle, and her presence full of charm. In her youth of a remarkable beauty, a wild-rose bloom, biack-lashed and black- browed hazel eyes, bright hair, fine features, and the oval lines of the antique in the outline of cheek and chin, much of that charm of her youth she still retains, the same soft yet fearless glance, the same heart-warming smile, the same grace of manner, always the same grace of nature, the same confident assurance of the goodness of every one in the world, loving God in humanity, and spending herself for others.
Harriet Prescott Spofford.