The family crated their household goods, auctioned much of their furniture, and took up residence on the far side of Cambridge Common, where Mrs. Higginson could support her brood with boarders in a house built by her eldest son, Francis, now a physician. Another son began to tutor, and yet Stephen Higginson sank deeper into debt, squandering what remained of his own father’s legacy until, at age sixty-four, he suddenly died.
“In works of Love he found his happiness,” read his double-edged epitaph, hinting at promises left unfulfilled. By this time, Wentworth was ten.
HIS HEALTH HAD IMPROVED, he learned to read and recite at four, and as a docile child, good-natured and by many accounts good-looking, he soaked up the scholarly, status-minded standards of the neighborhood, which happened to be Harvard College. Boyhood memories were bookish: he recalled a good set of Dr. Johnson’s works, an early edition of Boswell, the writing of Fanny Burney, and his mother reading Walter Scott. Harvard professors brought by volumes of Collins, Goldsmith, and Campbell to woo his brilliant aunt, Ann Gilliam Storrow, who lived with them; Jared Sparks, later Harvard’s president, entertained the family with portfolios of Washington’s letters to his mother; John G. Palfrey, dean of the divinity school and the historian of New England subsequently adored by Henry Adams, recited aloud all of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales.
At the private school run by William Wells, a place to “fit” for Harvard College, Wentworth hopefully memorized the list of undergraduate classes and at thirteen, well versed in Latin grammar and something of a prodigy, entered the freshman class. “Born in the college, bred to it,” as he later said. (His three elder brothers had also attended Harvard, and each remained involved with it during their lives.) But Wentworth was a lonely, awkward boy who had spurted up to six feet and, desperate to excel, worried lest he be fated for second place.
He studied Greek with the poet Jones Very, French literature with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and chemistry with John Webster, soon notorious for the gruesome murder of George Parkman. He enrolled in a class in entomology, which he adored, and he helped form a makeshift natural history society. He long remembered Edward Tyrrel Channing’s courses in rhetoric. “I rarely write for three hours without half consciously recalling some caution or suggestion of his,” Higginson later recollected of Channing, who also taught Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Charles Sumner, Wendell Phillips, and Charles Eliot Norton.
At Harvard his friend Levi Thaxter (future husband of the poet Celia Laighton Thaxter) introduced him to the writings of Emerson, Browning, and Hazlitt. Another acquaintance, if not quite a friend, was James Russell Lowell, with whom he felt rivalrous, particularly since he adored Lowell’s fiancée, Maria White, a grand woman flushed with consumption, poetry, and abolition. (Years later Higginson would print her poems whenever he could.) Mainly, though, in the presence of women outside the family, Wentworth was clumsy and tongue-tied until, fed up, he scribbled out topics of conversation on scraps of paper, which he would pull out of his pocket whenever the banter between him and a pretty young woman lagged. Even in flirtation he was something of a pedant.
Emotionally unprepared for college, in 1841 he was equally unready to leave it. Though he toyed with the idea of growing peaches—the communal living experiment at Brook Farm, then in its halcyon days, stirred his suggestible imagination—he took a job teaching in nearby Jamaica Plain, his mother and two sisters having decamped to Vermont, where his brother Francis had opened a medical practice. Wentworth lasted just six months in Jamaica Plain. Fortunately, a rich older cousin, Stephen Perkins, rescued him with an offer to tutor his three sons, one of whom would be cut down at Cedar Mountain in the summer of 1862.
At the Perkins estate in rural Brookline, Higginson entered a world of cultured, self-conscious wealth. Cousin Perkins owned paintings by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West, eventually bequeathed to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts; he avidly read Continental literature and talked volubly about the need for social change. For this was the period of what Higginson would call the Newness, when the skies of New England rained reform. The estimable Ralph Waldo Emerson had himself resigned the pulpit in 1832, yearning for a more humane form of belief, one that squarely put divinity in the soul of the individual. Four years later, when Higginson was an impressionable twelve-year-old, Emerson published the very bible of Newness, Nature, which asked, “Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” (“God incarnates himself in man,” Emerson declared at the Harvard Divinity School in 1838 and was not to be invited back for thirty years.) In 1840, Elizabeth Peabody opened her atom of a foreign bookshop (Higginson’s description) on West Street in Boston, where she talked up Brook Farm and in the back room printed the transcendentalist organ, The Dial, while so-called transcendentalists—like Emerson and Bronson Alcott—snatched French or German volumes from her shelves. And Higginson’s sister Anna was friends with the peerless Margaret Fuller, the bookstore’s resident sibyl, who organized a series of “Conversations” for Boston women. Fuller sat on a tripod in a velvet gown, demanding no less of herself than of the women assembled before her: What are we, as women, born to do, she asked, and how do we intend to do it?
James Russell Lowell and William Story quit the legal profession to give their all to art, and women writers from George Sand to Lydia Maria Child sympathized with the downtrodden poor. And the slaves. In 1833, Child published her abolitionist Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, and in 1834, Wentworth’s brother Francis published Remarks on Slavery and Emancipation, a rational argument demolishing any and all excuses for chattel slavery. In 1841 the courts ruled that the Africans who had staged a revolt aboard the Amistad were but kidnapped people unlawfully traded, and Frederick Douglass spoke at the antislavery convention in Nantucket about the abominations he himself had endured.
Buoyed by the Newness, Higginson disdained the predictable professions of law and medicine, and though shaken by the phrenologist who told him he had “splendid talents but no application,” he dreamed of the ideal, inchoate as it was. “I feel overflowing with mental energies,” he told his mother; “I will be Great if I can.” But the only thing he knew how to do was study, so in 1843 he returned to Harvard, where he could dabble in an institutionally sanctioned way, letting greatness find him. (The college permitted resident graduates to take courses without working toward a degree.) “If I have any genius, I must have a fair chance to cherish it,” he pleaded with his dubious mother. “The point I wish to insist upon about all this you see is that it is sensible & rational—not at all utopia.” For money, he applied for a proctorship, and when denied he earned a pittance by tutoring and copying. “I have been brought up poor & am not afraid to continue so,” he declared, more vehement than ever, “and certainly I shall be glad to do it, if it is a necessary accompaniment to a life spent as I wish to spend it.”
Renting a room with a view on the third floor of the College House, he could see pigs and cows meandering on the muddy streets. He was nineteen. He was free. Living on his own, he could redo his college years with no mother waiting up nights for the sound of the latch. And he had at last decided on a profession. He would be a poet. There was no higher calling.
The Higginson household had for years consumed Byron with delight, and the great Emerson had himself said that “all the argument and all the wisdom is not in the encyclopaedia, or the treatise on metaphysics, or the Body of Divinity, but in the sonnet or the play.” Poets unfix the world, banish our habits, dwell in possibilities of change and daring action. They make the world whole; they allow us to catch what we ordinarily miss. “What I would not give to know whether I really have that in me which will make a poet,” he mused, “or whether I deceive myself and only possess a mediocre talent.”
But the latter seemed the case. When the boy’s verses had been summarily rejected by The Dial, Emerson let him down with a thud. “They have truth and earnestness,” the Concord philosopher told him, “and a happier hour may add
that external perfection which can neither be commanded nor described.”
Reading De Quincey and Coleridge, Wentworth experimented with opium, hoping for a New England version of “Kubla Khan,” but with no visions forthcoming, he threw himself back into his books, sowing intellectual wild oats, as he later said: Newton, Homer, Hesiod, Chaucer, George Sand, Linnaeus, and more Emerson. He learned German in order to read Jean Paul Richter, whom he worshipped, and Goethe, whom everyone did; he kept up his Greek, and one of his first projects after the Civil War would be a translation of Epictetus, the Stoic philosopher, born a slave, who taught that all souls were equal.
“I did not know exactly what I wished to study in Cambridge,” Higginson would later reminisce. “Indeed, I went there to find out.” At the time, though, he figured his scheme of promiscuous apprenticeship would take ten to fifteen years. “I think I have a fair right to expect, in the then state of my powers, to make my living as a literary man without a profession,” he calculated. Yet something was missing. “I cannot live alone,” he informed his family. “Solitude may be good for study sometimes, but not solitude in a crowd for a social-hearted person like me.”
Actually, with statements like these Wentworth was trying to brace his family for news of his precipitous and wholly unexpected engagement to Mary Channing. A second cousin two years his senior (she was twenty-one) and neither wealthy nor submissive, Miss Channing was not the woman Mrs. Higginson would have chosen for her gilded boy. Intelligent and tart—a real conversational gymnast—she was also pert, churlish, and frequently abrupt. “Whatever be her faults of manner,” Higginson gallantly defended her, “I do like her very much.”
Perhaps Mary Channing was his first rescue mission. Her mother had died when Mary was two, and though her father, an obstetrician esteemed in Boston, had happily remarried, his second wife died in childbirth when Mary was but twelve. This second loss and her father’s inadvertent hand in it devastated her, and as Higginson would later learn, Mary had concluded then and there not to have children herself. The decision predated the onset of a chronic malady that would grip her in her twenties, never to let her go, crippling her limbs and scarring her soul. “Mrs. Higginson is very queer, a great invalid from rheumatism,” an acquaintance once remarked, “a perfect mistress in the art of abuse, in which she indulges frequently with peculiar zest & enthusiasm.”
If Higginson’s mother had not been pleased by her son’s precipitous engagement, the name of Channing had calmed her. Channings occupied the upper reaches of Brahmin Boston, their intellectual and cultural influence radiating from the golden dome of the new State House to the clatter at Quincy Market—and this despite their commitment to such outré causes as women’s rights, prison reform, and abolition. Mary’s own uncle was the celebrated Unitarian preacher William Ellery Channing, who had liberated an entire generation from old-line Congregationalism, and Mary’s brother (William) Ellery, the poet with the orange shoes, had married Margaret Fuller’s sister. Then there was William Henry Channing (who happened to be Higginson’s cousin), the Christian socialist with the honeyed voice who dared scold Emerson for his asocial individualism. (Ironically Channing served as one of the models for Hawthorne’s Hollingsworth, the egomaniacal reformer in The Blithedale Romance.)
As for Higginson, it was Mary herself and her prickliness that pleased him. Besides, he might help with her grief. Hadn’t he lost his own father at a tender age? Certainly both of them were lonely. But Higginson sheepishly admitted that while he could dally at Harvard, picking and choosing courses of study, women were slated for marriage, caretaking, and the so-called domestic arts. Yet his sisters, his mother, and his exceptional aunt demonstrated every day that there was no distinction of sex in intellect, and his sister Anna, as he noted, had written the part of his commencement speech that received the most applause.
“I don’t care about outside show, but I do go for the Rights of Women,” he bolstered Mary, “as far as an equal education & an equal share in government goes.” He meant every word.
He and Mary attended James Freeman Clarke’s liberal Church of the Disciples, the ecumenical congregation that she had helped organize, and together they discussed religion and reform. But Higginson referred to Theodore Parker, not Freeman Clarke, as his spiritual guide. A polymath contemptuous of the status quo, a transcendentalist long before the group rated a name, and the most blasphemous of all preachers in the public’s eye, Parker had the audacity to doubt miracles and champion the enslaved, a bad combination. “God’s fanatic,” Higginson later called him, “pompous, annoying, and eminently good.” (A book by Parker was given to Emily Dickinson, though not by Higginson, some years after the preacher’s untimely death. “I heard that he was ‘poison,’” Dickinson thanked her donor. “Then I like poison very well.”) In old age, Higginson still dreamed about hearing him preach.
Parker’s fire-and-brimstone sermons damning the sin of slavery; William Henry Channing’s dulcet oratory sketching out the shape of a better world; Margaret Fuller, intrepidly insisting it belonged to woman; the cantankerous tongue of Mary Channing taking nothing for granted; and in the Concord distance, Emerson counseling self-trust, self-reliance, and the triumph of good—together they swept Higginson forward into the Newness. He might become Great after all.
POETRY ASIDE, he still needed a paying profession.
Maybe he could be a preacher. Yet as one of his biographers observes, though Higginson assumed the goodness of people, he was far less certain about the nature of God. To him Jesus was a brother, the Bible a book, and all religion an activity shared by all humans regardless of creed; the latter belief he traced to an event in his boyhood, when in 1834 he watched flames demolish the Ursuline convent, on Mount Benedict in Charlestown, torched by an anti-Catholic mob. The rioters were acquitted of arson, and the ringleader, also acquitted, later became head of the anti-Catholic Know-Nothing party. Higginson never got over it.
Warmed by an inner light “not infallible but invaluable,” Higginson read Emerson as if the Concord sage wrote to him alone, and he staked his future on a democracy of perfectible love, what Emerson had called a “just and even fellowship, or none.” “The career of man has grown large, conscious, cultivated, varied, full,” Higginson wrote in later years. “He needs India and Judaea, Greece and Rome; he needs all types of spiritual manhood, all teachers.”
In 1844 he enrolled halfheartedly in the Harvard Divinity School, a court of last resort, but within months scoffed at his teachers, whose theology he considered as weak as the spines of his fellow students. “Any man with some Yes in him would be a blessing,” Higginson loudly complained, feeling belated once again. Gone, he feared, was the heyday of the divinity school, when his father had charge of a crop of superior young men, like Emerson himself.
And besides, events taking place outside the cloistered halls of Harvard concerned him more: Texas, for instance, and its possible admission to the Union as a slave state. “In Cambridge we are in peace,” he wrote in some relief, “since the Texas petition—764 names, 13 ft. long, double column—went off.” Abolition had rapidly become the focus of his frustration, his sense of injustice, his desire to accomplish something tangible. “I crave action…, unbounded action,” he burst out. “I love men passionately, I feel intensely their sufferings and short-comings and yearn to make all men brothers.”
Years later Higginson traced his abolitionist leanings not just to Emerson or his brother’s book (which he hardly mentioned) or Lydia Child’s treatise, all formative, but to his mother and an incident in her life, which trifling though it seems, also associates the abolition of slavery with the emancipation of women, as he and many others would do. Mrs. Higginson had visited cousins in Virginia, who provided her with a male slave to drive her about, and as she’d never encountered a slave before, she asked him if he was satisfied with his life, since, it seemed, he was well fed, well treated, well cared for. Life is good, she prompted. Without hesitation he shot back, “Free breat
h is good.” So it was, for her too.
Dissatisfied and impatient, Higginson withdrew from divinity school within a year of his enrollment, for despite his failure at getting The Dial to recognize him as a writer, he still guiltily craved literature. “I have repented of many things,” he justified himself to his mother, “but I never repented of my first poetical Effusion.” Again he presented his verse to various magazines but this time chose more hospitable editors. “La Madonna di San Sisto” went to his activist cousin William Henry Channing, who published it in The Present in 1843; Channing then published Wentworth’s poem “Tyrtaeus” in his Brook Farm magazine, The Harbinger.
Tyrtaeus appealed to Higginson: his martial poems had allegedly inspired Spartan soldiers during the Second Messenian War, and Higginson himself hoped to sing on the barricades:
Times change,
And duties with them; now no longer
We summon brothers to take brothers’ lives;
But rouse to conflict higher, holier, stronger
…Against the seeds of ruin now upsurging
Here in this sunny land we call the Free.
Poetry: one might take up the pen for a cause and infuse “a higher element” (Higginson’s term) into, say, the entire antislavery movement, much as the abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier had done. Isn’t this what Emerson meant by a just and even fellowship—though Emerson’s antislavery views were as yet ill-formed. And although antislavery verse encumbered Whittier’s literary career, at least initially (he was scolded by the important literary magazine The North American Review), by lashing poetry to politics, Higginson might still be a poet and yet take action, use himself, say something that could move or change people. In 1846 he dedicated a sonnet to William Lloyd Garrison, abolitionist editor of the staunch antislavery paper The Liberator, and composed a hymn for an antislavery picnic in Dedham. “The land our fathers left to us / Is foul with hateful sin,” the crowd sang; “When shall, O Lord, this sorrow end, / And hope and joy begin?”
White Heat Page 3
