George William Curtis

Front matter

American Ken of LEfiERs I

Charles Dudley \^/A.RNERl

1 ^ -<^

Chapter I. Family And Youth

The " Elizabeth and Ann " sailed from the port of London on the 6th of May, 1635, for New- England. In Hotten's "List of Emigrants to America"^ the names and ages of her seven "passingers" are given, and it is stated that they " brought certificates from the Ministers where their abodes were, and from the Justices of Peace, of their conform itie to the orders and discipline of the Church of England, and y* they are no subsidy men." It is added that they had taken the oaths of allegiance and supremacy. Of these names the last is that of Henry Curtis, and his age

^ " (Regi)ster of the names of all ye Passingers wcli Passed from ye Port of London for on whole year Ending-e X mas 1635.

6 May 1635.

Theis under- written names are to be transported to New England, imbarqued in the Elizabeth and Ann, Roger Coop (Cooper) Mr. the p-ties have brought Cert : from the Ministers where their abodes were and from the Justices of Peace of their conformitie to the orders and discipline of the Church of England and yt they are no subsidy men. They have taken the oaths of alleg : and Suprem : "

is given as twenty-seven. This was the founder of the family ^ of which George William Curtis was a descendant in the sixth generation. Henry Curtis ^ settled at Watertown, in Massachusetts, having had five " lots " granted to him, and having bought two. Later he removed to Sudbury, where his eldest son, Ephraim, was born in 1642, he having married Mary Guy, the daughter of Nicholas Guy, a carpenter who had emigrated from Upton Gray, near Southampton, England. Ephraim appears in the colonial history of his time as a man of energy, courage, and a strong will. In 1675, when he was thirty-three years old, it is recorded of him that, because he was " noted for his intimate

1 The genealogy of Mr. Curtis, as traced by his son, is as follows : —

CURTIS. BURRILL.

Henry-Mary Guy George

1608-1678 1630-1683

Ephraim John-Lois Ivory

1642-1734 1651-1703

1731-1768 1701-1778

David-Susanna Stone James-Elizabeth Rawson

1763-1813 1743-1825 George-Mary Elizabeth Burril James-Sally Arnold

1796-1856 1772-1820

George William Mary Elizabeth

1824-1892 1798-1826

^ James Savage, in his Genealogical Dictionary of the First Settlers of New England, showing Three Generations, notes (vol. i. p. 485) : *' Curtis, Henry, Watertown 1636, an orig. propr. of Sudbury, m. Mary, d. of Nicholas Guy, had Ephraim, b. 31 Mai., 1643; John, 1644 ; & Joseph, 1747; nam. in their gr.mo's will 1666 ; & d. 8 May 1678."

knowledge of the country, his quickness of comprehension and cool courage, and his large acquaintance with the Indians, whose language he spoke fluently," the court sent him as an interpreter with an embassy which started from Cambridge, July 28, with an escort of twenty men under Captains Edward Hutchinson and Thomas Wheeler. On the 2d of August they were attacked from ambush. Eight of the little force were killed and five were wounded. The remainder took refuge in a house in Brookfield, and Ephraim Curtis, with a companion, was sent toward the nearest post to report their plight and secure relief. He returned before leaving the town, having learned that the Indians were in force and intended a night attack. A second time he " readily assented to adventure forth again on that service " alone, his companion having been killed meanwhile. Again he was forced to return. " But towards morning," says Captain Wheeler, " said Ephraim adventured forth for the third time, and was fain to creep on his hands and knees for some space of ground, that he might not be discerned by the enemy. But by God's mercy, he escaped their hands and got safely to Marlborough, tho' very much spent and ready to faint by reason of want of sleep before he left us, and his sore travel night and day in the hot season till he got thither." For his gallant services in this year he was made a lieutenant, accredited as in the *^ direct service " of the council, paid the sum of " 2X,"

and given the right to gather the corn of "our enemies, the Indians that are fled." Later in the year the English were withdrawn from Worcester, the place was burned, and Lieutenant Curtis returned to Sudbury.

He had been the first settler of Worcester. Indeed, he was so emphatically the first, and was so solidly settled, that when a committee of the General Court visited the place to lay out a town there, they found Ephraim Curtis established, and so resolved to assert his rights that it took extended legal proceedings, all of which are recorded in the quaint language of the time, to dislodge him. Nor was this finally accomplished until there had been made over to him other lands, which seem, by the description of them, to have been compensation in ample measure for those which his enterprise had laid hold upon. I have said this much of the life of Ephraim Curtis, because he is the only one of the earliest members of the family of whom there is a clear record, and because it makes plain the nature of the stock from which George William Curtis was derived. It was not the usual Puritan or Pilgrim type, but apparently that of the smaller gentry of England, whose " conformitie to the orders and discipline of the Church of England " was duly acknowledged, and who were " no subsidy men." The men of this class had independence and self-reliance in plenty ; were full of resource, quick of wit, eager to seize every opportunity ; resolute, even daring ; faithful to duty, — good as friends, formidable as foes. It was a good stock. In the life of George William Curtis some of these qualities will reappear ; and if they are not generally associated with his name by his contemporaries, it is because in part they were rendered less prominent by the radiance of gentler and rarer qualities ; but, as will I hope be seen, the better of them were not absent, and in the phrase of the physiologist " persisted," and were very strong.

One other figure in the Curtis family attracts attention, — that of John Curtis, the eldest son of Ephraim. He was born (1707) in Worcester, and up to the outbreak of the Revolution was an active and noted citizen, — selectman, surveyor of the highways, captain in the French and Indian War. He was also a tavern-keeper and a leading member of the church, and his house was much frequented by the clergymen of the day. But he was a sturdy and open loyalist. In 1774 he signed a protest against what he regarded as the revolutionary action of the town, whereupon the town, premising that he was one of those on whom it had " Conferred many favours and Consequently might expect their Kindest and best Services," resolved that he and his fellow-signers be " Deemed unworthy of holding any Town office of Profit or Honour until they have made satisfaction for this offence to the acceptance of the town which ought to be made as public as their Protest was." He declined at this time to make any retraction, and in the next year he was declared a public enemy, disarmed, and forbidden to leave the town. But in 1777 he seems to have made his peace, as it was voted to receive him and others "into the Town's favour, and that further prosecution against them as enemies of the United States of America shall cease, they paying the costs that has arisen already by means of their being prosecuted as Enemies to the United States, agreeable to their petition." Here was a strain of practical independence in the Curtis blood not inconsistent with a disposition to make the best of facts that could not be changed.

The great-grandson of this John Curtis was George Curtis, the father of George William. He was born in Worcester in 1796, but removed to Providence, R. I. There he married Mary Elizabeth Burrill, daughter of James Burrill, Jr., who was Chief Justice of Rhode Island, and at one time a member of the United States Senate from that State, an opponent of the Missouri Compromise, and a man of marked ability and high character. Of this marriage were born James Burrill Curtis, in 1822, and George William Curtis, February 24, 1824. Mrs. Curtis died in 1826 when George was but two years old. In 1835 Mr. Curtis married, as his second wife, a daughter of Samuel W. Bridgham, of Providence. Of Mr. Curtis his eldest son (now living in England) writes that he was of " high integrity, sound, practical judgment, and excellent business talents, together with political and literary taste. He was popular among his associates — leading business and professional men — in Providence and New York. He was most affectionate and beloved in his family, and extremely kind and indulgent to his children, though sharp and severe in his demands as to manners and morals. He valued truthfulness and honesty above all other qualities, and his example and influence in these respects early impressed both George and me very deeply. In a letter of 1860 George, replying to a question of mine about his religious views, writes thus (the italics are George's) : ' I believe in God, who is love ; that all men are brothers ; and that the only essential duty of every man is to be honesty by which I understand his absolute following of his conscience when duly enlightened. I do not believe that God is anxious that men should believe this or that theory of the Godhead, or of the Divine Government, but that they should live purely, justly, and lovingly.' These, I take it, were the essential articles of his creed to the end ; and, whatever may be thought of them, at least the paramount value, or his estimation, of honesty and practical goodness, is conspicuous." - To this instructive glimpse of the influence of the father I am happily able to add one equally instructive, from the same source, as to the influence of the second mother. Mr. J. B. Curtis writes of her : '" She was a woman of much good sense and practical energy, of strong and generous sympathies, and of high public spirit and piety ; and she added to these things literary cultivation decidedly above the average. She wrote with ease, whether in letters or other compositions, a full, graceful, flowing, delightful English style. She once wrote to us in high girlish spirits that she believed she loved her ready-made children the best. Certainly she made herself to a very unusual degree our intimate friend and companion, becoming mother and sister (we never had an actual sister) in one ; and she was thus able to encourage in George and me, in the most genial and natural way, everything that was good."

From the age of six to that of eleven, George, with his elder brother, attended the school of C. W. Greene at Jamaica Plain, near Boston ; but on his father's second marriage he was brought again to Providence and placed in school there, until he was fifteen, when (1839) his father removed to New York. Of the school days at Jamaica Plain I know nothing save that they left pleasant and tender memories, and furnished some of the detail for the earlier chapters of "Trumps.'' There is in " Sea from Shore," one of the chapters of " Prue and I," a picture of the Providence wharves that is worth citing for its delightful local color, and its suggestion of the influence of the seaside town and of the sensitiveness of the boyish mind : —

" My earliest remembrances are of a long range of old, half -dilapidated stores ; red-brick stores with steep wooden roofs and stone window-frames and door-frames, which stood upon docks built as if for immense trade with all quarters of the globe.

" Generally there were only a few sloops moored to the tremendous posts, which I fancied could easily hold fast a Spanish Armada in a tropical hurricane. But sometimes a great ship, an East Indiaman, with rusty, seamed, blistered sides and dingy sails, came slowly moving up the harbor, with an air of indolent self-importance and consciousness of superiority, which inspired me with profound respect. If the ship had ever chanced to run down a row-boat, or a sloop, or any specimen of smaller craft, I should only have wondered at the temerity of any floating thing in crossing the path of such supreme majesty. The ship was leisurely chained and cabled to the old dock, and then came the disemboweling. Long after the confusion of unloading was over, and the ship lay as if all voyages were ended, I dared to creep timorously along the edge of the dock, and, at great risk of falling in the black water of its huge shadow, I placed my hand upon the hot hulk, and so established a mystic and exquisite connection with Pacific Islands ; with palm groves and all the passionate beauties they embower ; with jungles, Bengal tigers, pepper, and the crushed feet of Chinese fairies. I touched Asia, the Cape of Good Hope, and the Happy Islands, I would not believe that the heat I felt was of our Northern sun ; to my finer sympathy, it burned with equatorial fervor,

" The freight was piled in the old stores. I believe that many of them remain, but they have lost their character. When I knew them, not only was I younger, but partial decay had overtaken the town ; at least the bulk of its India trade had drifted to New York and Boston. But the appliances remained. There was no throng of busy traffickers ; and after school, in the afternoon, I strolled by and gazed into the solemn interiors.

" Silence reigned within, — silence, dimness, and piles of foreign treasures. Vast coils of cable, like tame boa-constrictors, served as seats for men with large stomachs and heavy watch-seals, and nankeen trousers, who sat looking out of the door toward the ships, with little other sign of life than an occasional low talking, as if in their sleep. Huge hogsheads, perspiring brown sugar, and oozing slow molasses, as if nothing tropical could keep within bounds, but must continuously expand and exude and overflow, stood against the walls, and had an architectural significance, for they darkly reminded me of Egyptian prints, and in the duskiness of the low-vaulted store seemed cyclopean columns incomplete. Strange festoons and heaps of bags ; square piles of boxes cased in mats, bales of airy summer stuffs which even in winter scoffed at cold, and shamed it by audacious assumption of eternal sun ; little specimen boxes of precious dyes, that even now shine through my memory like old Venetian schools unpainted, — these were all there in rich confusion.

"The stores had a twilight of dimness; the air was spicy with mingled odors. I liked to look suddenly in from the glare of sunlight outside, and then the cool sweet dimness was like the palpable breath of the far-off island groves ; and if onlysome parrot or macaw hung within would flaunt with glistening plumage in his cage, and, as the gay hue flashed in a chance sunbeam, call in his hard, shrill voice, as if thrusting sharp sounds upon a glistening wire from out that grateful gloom, then the enchantment was complete, and without moving I was circumnavigating the globe.

"From the old stores and the docks slowly crumbling, touched, I knew not why or how, by the pensive air of past prosperity, I rambled out of town on those well-remembered afternoons to the fields that lay upon hillsides over the harbor, and there sat looking out to sea, fancying some distant sail, proceeding to the glorious ends of the earth, to be my type and image, who would so sail, stately and successful, to all the glorious ports of the Future."

These are passages both of memory and imagination, and date fifteen years later than the life to which they relate. But the memories of a man of thirty are not dim, and the imagination owns the spell of memory when it plays upon the time of boyhood. I take the picture to be a true one.

In these early days, and until Curtis was twenty-five years old, there was one person whose influence, strong and continuous and intimate, was always remembered as " a great debt," — his brother Burrill. During this quarter of a century, and for more than a third of Mr. Curtis's life, they were constantly together, occupying the same room at home, at school, at Brook Farm, at Concord, and during much of the journeying abroad. He is the model from which was drawn the portrait of '' Our Cousin the Curate " in " Prue and I." It does not concern me or my readers to know how far the story embraced in that sketch is based on the brothers' experience, but it will throw light on the springtime of Mr. Curtis's life, when the sap coursed free and strong and the force and direction of aftergrowth were being determined, to cite here a few passages from the sketch : —

" There is no subject which does not seem to lead naturally to our Cousin the Curate. As the soft air steals in and envelops everything in the world, so that the trees and the hills and the rivers, the cities, the crops, and the sea, are made remote and delicate and beautiful by its pure baptism, so over all the events of our little lives, comforting, refining, and elevating, falls like a benediction the remembrance of our cousin the curate.

" He was my only early companion. He had no brother, I had none, and we became brothers to each other. He was alwavs beautiful. His face was symmetrical and delicate ; his figure was slight and graceful. He looked as the sons of kings ought to look, — as I am sure Philip Sidney looked when he was a boy. His eyes were blue, and as you looked at them they seemed to let you gaze out into a June heaven. The blood ran close to the skin, and his complexion had the rich transparency of light. There was nothing gross or heavy in his expression or texture ; his soul seemed to have mastered his body. But he had strong passions, for his delicacywas positive, not negative; it was not weakness, but intensity.

" Often, when I returned panting and restless from some frolic which had wasted almost all the night, I was rebuked as I entered the room in which he lay peacefully sleeping. There was something holy in the profound repose of his beauty ; and as I stood looking at him, how many a time the tears have dropped from my hot eyes upon his face, while I vowed to make myself worthy of such a companion ! for I felt my heart owning its allegiance to that strong and imperial nature.

" My cousin was loved by the boys, but the girls worshiped him. His mind, large in grasp and subtle in perception, naturally commanded his companions, while the lustre of his character allured those who could not understand him. The asceticism occasionally showed itself a vein of hardness, or rather of severity, in his treatment of others. He did what he thought it his duty to do, but he forgot that few could see the right so closely as he, and very few of those few could so calmly obey the least command of conscience. I confess I was a little afraid of him, for I think I never could be severe.

" In the long winter evenings I often read to Prue the story of some old father of the church, or some quaint poem of George Herbert's ; and every Christmas Eve I read to her Milton's ' Hymn on the

Nativity.' Yet when the saint seems to us most saintly, or the poem most pathetic or sublime, we find ourselves talking of our cousin the curate. I have not seen him for many years ; but when we parted, his head had the intellectual symmetry of Milton's, without the Puritanic stoop, and with the stately grace of a cavalier."

CHAPTEK II.

EMERSON AND BROOK FARM.

With the evidence afforded in the passages quoted in the last chapter, written some six years after parting with his brother in Europe, of the place that brother held in his heart and life, I venture to give some notes by Mr. Burrill Curtis of their life together from 1835, when they returned from school to Providence, to 1846, when they sailed for Europe : —

" Not long after (1835), another powerful* influence reached us, which prevailed in our lives for seven or eight years. This was the influence of E. W. Emerson. It was then first beginning to extend itself in New England, and not only the United States, but Great Britain also, have since become indebted to it. He was the sympathizing leader and moderating patron, so to speak, of that ferment and stir after all kinds of reform which, according to his own account, had taken possession of so many men and women around him from about the year 1820 onward. His large endowment of cheerful humor, of intellectual acuteness, and of sober common-sense did not prevent his holding persistently aloft, in an exceptional degree, the torch of the ideal in everything ; and though liis thought was usually characterized by profundity, comprehensiveness, and severe balance, — albeit it was often too fine-spun and mystical, — he was so sanguine, and so optimistically enamored of his ideals, as not unfrequently to overlook the exorbitancy and impracticability of some of them. He was an ardent apostle of *^ liberty ' even to the apparent obeying of one's ' whims ; ' but he was an equally ardent and strenuous apostle of ' law ' in its highest or most stringent senses. Nature's law (which includes the moral law) ordains liberty, it is true, but it ordains the ' regulation ' of liberty also; and while Emerson stands on the one hand stoutly for freedom, independence, self-reliance, heroism, — nay, even inconsistency and nonconformity, — he stands on the other hand as piously and immovably, like a rapt saint, for obedience to natural and moral law. Our coming into contact with this New England ' movement ' (called in our time ' Transcendentalism '), and especially with its leader and moderator, proved to be the cardinal event of our youth ; and I cannot but think that the seed then sown took such deep root as to flower continuously in our later years, and make us both the confirmed ' Independents ' that we were and are, whilst fully conscious at the same time of the obligation of living in all possible harmony with our fellows,

" I still recall the impressions produced by Emerson's delivery of his address on the ' Over-Soul ' in Mr. Hartshorn's semicircular school -room in

Providence, our native town. He seemed to speak as an inhabitant of heaven, and with the inspiration and authority of a prophet. Although a large part of the matter of that discourse, when reduced to its lowest terms, does not greatly differ from the commonplaces of piety and religion, yet its form and its tone were so fresh and vivid that they made the matter also seem to be uttered for the first time, and to be a direct outcome from the inmost source of the highest truth. We heard Emerson lecture frequently, and made his personal acquaintance. My enthusiastic admiration of him and his writings soon mounted to a high and intense ' heroworship,' which, when it subsided, seems to have left me ever since incapable of attaching myseH as a follower to any other man. How far George shared such feelings, if at all, I cannot precisely say ; but he so far shared my enthusiastic admiration as to be led a willing captive to Emerson's attractions, and to the incidental attractions of the movement of which he was the head ; and Emerson always continued to command from us both the sincerest reverence and homage.

" I do not remember that George ever committed himself to any important extravagance of ' reform.' I, for my part, was at first carried away into personal experiments of disusing money and animal food ; but I was soon convinced of my errors and abandoned them. Comparatively unimportant vagaries about dress we both partook of. The ' movement ' affected and modified our aims and ideas in various respects as individuals, but did not enlist us as permanent and well-drilled soldiers in social schemes and causes. It awakened our interest in the reforming ideas of others around us ; but neither the anti-slavery cause (which af terw^ards aroused in George an heroic zeal and devotion), nor the temperance cause, nor any other, however apparently important, then secured from us anything more than a reasonable speculative consideration. We were intent mainly, not on reforming others, or reforming society at large, but on the ordering of our own individual lives."

In 1839, when George was fifteen, his father removed from Providence to New York, and became connected with the Bank of Commerce, first as cashier and afterwards as president. His home was on the north side of Washington Place, then the centre of the most desirable residence quarter of the city. It is a pleasure to note that the fine old house has remained for more than half a century in the Curtis family, and is one of the few in which has been amassed a fund of those associations, glad or sad, but with the lapse of time always and uniquely sweet, which make a house, in a far deeper than the technical sense, " real " estate. Mr. George Curtis, by his personal qualities, tastes, and attainments, as by his business relations and ability, became naturally a member of what was in truth, if not by its own claim, the best society of the city of that time, and in this society both he and his wife were fitted to get and to give the best.

They were members, first, of Dr. Orville Dewey's Unitarian congregation, and afterwards of that of Dr. Bellows. Young Curtis was surrounded by influences that awakened and developed in him the remarkable social gifts which afterwards distinguished him, and trained his active and adventurous mind in healthy ways. I do not learn much of the details of his life at this time, further than that he devoted a good deal of time to study at home, partly under the guidance of tutors, partly under that of his father and mother, and that there was a brief experience in the counting-room of a German importing and shipping house, which was abandoned, for w^hat reason I cannot say, but with happy result. Mr. Burrill Curtis writes : " As I, while at college, had fallen so much under the influence of the New England ' Transcendental Movement ' as to have been led by it into a practical vagary about money and its use, it was probably something of a relief to our father that, a while after my having come to my senses, George and I proposed nothing worse than to become boarders, and boarders only, with the Community at Brook Farm." This was in 1842, and about two years were passed by the brothers at West Roxbury, — for George, the years from eighteen to twenty. As he and his brother were " boarders, and boarders only," it is hardly worth while to describe here the purposes of the founders of this peculiar home. Mr. Emerson, in his " Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," sums them up sufficiently : —

" The founders of Brook Farm should have this praise, that they made what all people try to make, an agreeable place to live in. All comers, even the most fastidious, found it the pleasantest of residences. It is certain that freedom from household routine, variety of character and talent, variety of work, variety of means of thought and instruction, art, music, poetry, reading, masquerade, did not permit sluggishness or despondency, broke up routine. There is agreement in the testimony that it was, to most of the associates, education ; to many the most important period of their life, the birth of valued friendships, their first acquaintance with the riches of conversation, their training in behavior. The art of letter-writing, it is said, was immensely cultivated ; letters were always flying, not only from house to house, but from room to room. It was a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an Age of Reason in a patty-pan."

Unfortunately, Mr. Emerson, like many smaller men, was not wholly free from the temptation of phrase-making, and the last sentence is more amusing than clear. So far as I can trace the influence of the life at Brook Farm on young Curtis, he escaped pretty well the element of the " French Revolution " and the " Age of Reason," unquestionably made close and valuable friendships, and had (as well as contributed) his full share of the " picnic." I find that he studied, with apparently much application, German, agricultural chemistry, and music, the last with great zest under the instruction of Mr.