Louise Chandler Moulton, Poet and Friend. Lilian Whiting
larger opportunities of life opened to her by her marriage. To English literature she gives herself in serious study. She writes copious analyses of the history of different periods, and critical studies of various writers. It was perhaps at this period that she began to respond to the work of the Elizabethan lyricists with a sympathy which marked the kinship which English critics found so evident in her poetic maturity.
The list of books noted in these records during the next ten years is large and varied. Mrs. Gaskell, Bishop Butler, Dr. Martineau, Miss Mulock (Mrs. Craik), Anthony Trollope, and later George Eliot and George Meredith, are among the writers whom she mentions; and from the "Self-Help" of Samuel Smiles in 1860 she makes copious extracts. Her taste was catholic, and her attitude toward literature always one of genuine seriousness.
Mrs. Moulton's memoranda for her own stories are both interesting and suggestive. To see as it were the mind of the creative writer at work is always fascinating, and here, as in the "American Notebooks" of Hawthorne, the reader seems to be assisting in the very laboratory of the imagination. Some of these notes are as follows:
"Have the story written by a man. Have him go all his life worshipping one woman, even from boyhood. He wins her,—she is cold but he is satisfied and believes she will grow to love him. After three years she leaves him. He gives his life to seeking her. At last finds her just as she is attempting to drown herself, and takes her home."
And again:
"Have a wealthy family travelling in Egypt, and a child born to them there who shall bear the name of the country. This child, Egypt Sunderland, seems to be strangely influenced by her name, and develops all the peculiar characteristics of the Egyptian women."
She conceives the outline plots for numerous stories,—among the titles for which are "The Sculptor's Model," "The Unforgiven Sin," "The River Running Fast," "The Embroidered Handkerchief," "A Wife's Confession," "The Widow's Candle and How It Went Out." For one projected story her outline runs:
"Show that there is punishment for our sins lying in the consequence of them, which no repentance can avert, or forgiveness condone,—which must be suffered to the uttermost. Make it clear that passive goodness is not enough. We must do something for humanity. That a man who has no moral fibre or practical wisdom has a claim on us for help. For energy and good judgment are as much a gift as are eyes to see and ears to hear. The very lack of practical wisdom gives the one so lacking a special claim on our sympathies."
Perhaps no one ever lived more in accord with this little gospel of human duty than did Mrs. Moulton, and this fact invests the note with a peculiar interest.
The fiction of the day was little concerned with character-drawing or mental analysis, but was largely occupied with a certain didactic embodiment of ideals of conduct. In such fiction a writer of Mrs. Moulton's genuine sincerity of temperament could not but show clearly her true attitude toward the deeper problems of life. The opening of one of her stories, "Margaret Grant," will illustrate this fact.
"The love of life, the love of children, the love of kin—these constrain all of us; but it was another kind of love that constrained Margaret Grant. Curiously enough the first awakening came to her soul from a book written by an unbeliever, a book meant to bring Christianity to the final test of final obedience, and to prove its absurdity, thereby prove that to be a Christian as Christ taught, would overthrow the uses of the world, and uproot the whole system of things. 'Let the uses of the world go, and the system of things take care of itself,' Margaret Grant said when she laid the book down. 'This same religion of Christ is the best thing I know, and I will go where it leads me.' And then she waited for the true Guide, that Holy Spirit which shall be given to every honest soul that seeks—waited for her special work, but not idly, since every day and all the days were the little offices of love that make life sweeter for whatever fellow-pilgrim comes in our way.
"Margaret read to her half-blind grandmother—taught the small boy that ran the family errands to read—helped her mother with the housekeeping, all on the lines of 'godly George Herbert,' who wrote:
Who sweeps a room as for God's laws,
Makes that and the action fine.
But all the time she felt that these were not the real work of her life, that work which was on its way."
With the earnestness of spirit which is shown in this and which so continually sounded in her poems, Mrs. Moulton lived her rich life in the congenial atmosphere which surrounded her. Mrs. Spofford, writing of Mrs. Moulton from personal memory, says of her in 1860:
"She was now in her twenty-fifth year, fully launched upon the literary high-seas, contributing to Harper's, the Galaxy, and Scribner's as they came into existence, and to the Young Folks, the Youth's Companion, and other periodicals for children. Her life seemed a fortunate one. She had a charming home in Boston where she met and entertained the most pleasant people; her housekeeping duties were fulfilled to a nicety, and no domestic detail neglected for all her industrious literary undertakings. A daughter had been born to her, Florence, to whom 'Bed-time Stories' were dedicated in some most tender and touching verses, and, somewhat later, a son whose little life was only numbered by days."
Life was deepening and offering ever wider horizons. With Emily Dickinson she might have said of the complex interweaving of event, influence, and inspiration:
Ah! the bewildering thread!
The tapestries of Paradise
So notelessly are made.
CHAPTER III
1860-1876
But poets should
Exert a double vision; should have eyes
To see near things as comprehensively
As if afar they took their point of sight;
And distant things as intimately deep
As if they touched them....
I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his time.
Mrs. Browning.—Aurora Leigh.
… there are divine things, well envelop'd;
I swear to you, there are divine things more beautiful than
words can tell.—Walt Whitman, Song of the Open Road.
The morning skies were all aflame.—L.C.M.
POETRY with Mrs. Moulton was a serious art and an object of earnest pursuit. It was not for mere pastime that she had steeped herself, so to speak, in
… The old melodious lays
Which softly melt the ages through;
The songs of Spenser's golden days,
Arcadian Sidney's silver phrase;
for in her poetic work she recorded her deepest convictions and her most intimate perceptions of the facts of life. To her life was love; its essence was made up of the charm of noble and sincere friendships, of happy social intercourse, of sympathetic devotion. To this joy of love and friendship, there was in her mind opposed one sorrow—death, and not all the assurances of faith or philosophy could eliminate this dread, this all-pervading fear, that haunted her thoughts. In some way the sadness of death, as a parting, had been stamped on her impressionable nature, and it inevitably colored her outlook and made itself a controlling factor in her character. It took the form, however, of deepening her tenderness for every human relation and widening her charity for all human imperfection. The vision of
Cold hands folded over a still heart,
touched her as it did Whittier, with the pity of humanity's common sorrow, and with him she could have said that such vision
Swept all my pride away, and trembling I forgave.
Writing in later years of Stephen Phillips she said:
"Is