IV: the young pedagogue
Shortly before graduation, Wentworth Higginson began looking about for employment, and in June, 1841, was engaged by Mr. Samuel Weld, of Jamaica Plain, as assistant in his school for boys, at six hundred dollars per year. In August he wrote Parker, ‘I succeeded in getting a good room [at Jamaica Plain] for $25 the year and board from $3 to $4 [per month].’ Settled in this new room, he began at once another journal. He was at first in a quandary as to whom it should be dedicated to, but finally decided on three girl friends and added, ‘Now to business.’ Homesickness assailed him at first, but after a few days he ‘got rather more comfortable, reading “The Flirt” and those beautiful poetical passages in the “Devil's Progress.” ’ Apparently the ‘young pedagogue,’ as he calls himself, had no trouble in teaching the boys or making friends with them. He took them with him on his long rambles in search of flowers, and describes a tramp around Jamaica Pond in cloth boots in ‘a pouring rain and furious cold gale,’ adding, ‘these [42] walks are nothing.’ But he was criticized by Mr. Weld for being on too informal terms with his pupils, and the necessary school discipline proved a hard problem. School began at half-past 6, with an interval for breakfast, and then continued until eleven. There was also an evening session from seven to eight, described in the journal as the ‘cursed evening school,’ which prevented other more attractive plans. His favorite pupil, out of school hours, was Daniel Curtis, whose brilliant witticisms were often quoted in after years. Although Curtis was studious, he gave a great deal of trouble to his boyish preceptor. He was probably the author of this clever description of the young teacher which the latter captured as it was going the rounds of the school:—Our tutor feeds[43] The friendly teacher sometimes took Curtis with him to make evening calls on young ladies. Returning quite late on one occasion the daring pupil reached his room by way of the waterspout, for which adventure his tutor was reprimanded. Another imprudent action on the part of the boyish teacher which naturally aroused criticism was riding on horseback with one of the girls from the opposite boarding-school, this damsel quietly climbing out of the window to take these rides in the early morning, while her schoolmates were still asleep. In these years Wentworth Higginson seems to have been somewhat of a dandy, rejoicing in what bits of fine apparel his scanty means allowed him to lay hands on. For he reported himself once as ‘strutting’ after church to display the ‘combination of gaiters and high heels’; and said also that he had his hair cut and curled which improved it. He sometimes went to parties and was fond of playing whist. After one of these gatherings he wrote, ‘By the way, nudity was rather the rage.’ He also recorded the possession of ‘a sudden entire confidence’ in his conversing powers; and on the arrival of visitors he ‘talked with calm miscellaneousness till tea-time.’ His family were a little uneasy about him at this time, and his sisters found fault with him for being frivolous, whereupon he wrote in his journal: ‘I had [44] never thought of it before—but I think it is so. . . . How I prize every moment taken from my occupation which I believe I shall be perfectly sick of before the year is out.’ To add to his discomfort, he once when in Boston missed the omnibus on account of having spent ten minutes in a bookstore, and walking rapidly to school, he arrived late and recorded that Mr. Weld received his apology in ominous silence. The next day he wrote, ‘Sleepy and homesick all day.’ The young teacher continued ineffectual efforts to like smoking, which he had decided in college days was a necessary accomplishment. His diary says, ‘Got quite enthusiastic in reading about Student Life in Germany, got a pipe and smoked it as well as I could, and determined to get a meerschaum.’ But the experiment was a failure and later smoking was wholly abandoned. He added, ‘Read Italian, having brought over [from Cambridge] my books and resolved to set about it resolutely. Read poetry by a moonlit window.’ Another evening after the pangs of toothache, genius burned, and he sat up until three in the morning writing blank verse. He read one of his poetical effusions to his family and ‘they laughed at its sentimentality, which enraged me . . . went to bed angry and feeling unappreciated. Resolved to show them no more poetry.’ [45] The youth's imagination was as vivid as a child's, and after reading ‘Undine’ he wrote, ‘Just now I heard a noise outside the window and looked up in hopes it was Kuhleborn—oh, how dreadful it is to be in a land where there are no supernatural beings visible—not even any traditions of them!’ Christmas evening of that year was spent in serenading a Cambridge belle; but his companion, Levi Thaxter, escaping at a critical point, Wentworth, according to his journal, broke down in the song ‘Love wakes and weeps,’ and ‘made an absurd exit, scrambling over fences.... Home and gladly took off my horridly pinching boots—spent the evening sociably, reading Brother Jonathan and eating burnt almonds.’ In addition to school perplexities, the unfortunate tutor's serenity was sometimes disturbed by the state of his purse, for he wrote, ‘Grumbled over my accounts. My affairs'll go to the devil if I don't economize.’ After six months in this unsatisfactory position, Higginson decided to leave the school and to become a private tutor in the family of his cousin, Stephen H. Perkins, of Brookline. The last days at Jamaica Plain he thus describes:—
At Madam Leeds,
And is none the thinner
Postquam dinner
Est semper clever,
Morosus never.
Et nunquam hollers
At the scholars,
But whenever they caper
Transcribes them to paper.
Wentworth now went to his mother's in Cambridge for a few weeks, whence he wrote, ‘An exquisite soft spring day which would have cheered the soul of a lobster–and it did mine.’ A few days later he added, ‘Assumed my Cambridge state of mind. . . . I certainly intend to try—and not give way to the causeless melancholy I have occasionally fallen into heretofore,’ and ‘resolved to wake up from my dreams and work.’ All through these early years, one finds allusions to a habit of indulging in occasional despondent moods, when silence and sadness cast their spell over him. These visitations lasted into middle life, but were eventually outgrown. In a letter written a year after leaving Jamaica Plain, Wentworth said:—
You will be glad that I got hold of a stock of spirits this evening that may last me throa some days, who knows. But that's always the way with me— the grasshopper is a burden to me, but I can carry a hippopotamus and dance and sing.[47] He wrote his mother:—
I always must envy these thoroughly intellectual men who go on so regularly with neither passions nor feelings to interrupt them—I shall never be so, I fear—for every now and then comes something and upsets me. Either a cloud that will pursue me—or sunbeam that I must pursue . . . and I sometimes sigh to see that I do not become calmer as I grow older.Even at this early age he declared, ‘My great intellectual difficulty has been having too many irons in the fire.’ This was a trouble with which he was destined to contend always. A month later, in April, 1842, about the time that his mother and sisters removed to Brattleboro, Vermont, Wentworth transferred his belongings to Brookline where he was to teach the three sons of Mr. Perkins. He took with him a quantity of books which were throughout life inseparable companions in his wanderings. In preparation for this new position he had purchased a new ‘flash vest!’ and reports, ‘Promenaded the [Boston] streets in my silk attire till 7.’ Again, ‘Took a walk after church— my new pants perfect. ... Walked out from Boston to Cambridge. My new boots pinched my feet so I could hardly walk. What did I do thereupon! Stopped at the Port, sat down, pulled them off, and walked home barefoot. It was dark, remember.’ [48] As to his school duties, the tutor wrote:—
I am getting on nicely in my parental relations. Order of performances thus. Rise 6 1/2-7, bathe, dress and see that the boys have dittoed by 7 1/2— up stairs till breakfast at 8—school 9-11 . .. dine at 3. From 4 to 8 1/2 my own master—8 1/2 to 10 three-handed whist with the venerable, and to bed 10 1/2– 11 regularly. Thus you see our life is systematic and simple—the aforesaid three-handed whist is as great a blessing as Homeopathy.The Brookline stay was eventful, because under new influences Wentworth Higginson rapidly developed and matured. There was a large circle of relatives within a radius of a few miles, and he took part in their frequent meetings and merrymakings. It was in Brookline that he first met his second cousin, Mary Channing, daughter of Dr. Walter Channing, and sister of the Concord poet, Ellery Channing. A few years older than himself, unworldly, intellectual, and brilliant in conversation, she proved a congenial companion. She was a frequent visitor at the Perkins homestead, and after an acquaintance of a few months the cousins became engaged, Higginson being then a youth of nineteen. One of the absorbing interests of his little world at this time was magnetism, various members of the circle trying experiments upon each other. ‘Nothing [49] is spoken of here,’ he wrote, ‘but the Community and Magnetism.’ The group of Brookline cousins often exchanged visits with the young people at the Community, or Brook Farm, in Roxbury, where in modern parlance the experiment of the simple life was being tried. Wentworth thus describes his first drive thither:—
I had to ask the way to the Community—but we came in sight of it at last, and a pleasant looking place it was. We passed some young men belonging there with long hair, who had just been gathering flowers and looked happy as possible. . . . I was delighted with the appearance of everything—and was especially aroused by hearing that young Dana [later editor of the New York Sun] formerly of the Junior class, was a great gun there. . . . We saw genteel looking men too, painting a boat outsideand altogether the combination of gentlemen and laborers was perfect.At another time, he spoke of again meeting ‘Community Dana, the handsomest fellow I know and an excellent, cultivated one too.’ A later visit seems to have given a somewhat different impression, as he wrote, ‘At the Community we saw a variety of dirty men, boys and girls; and one or two clean ones.’ It was during the Brookline stay that Wentworth wrote and published what he called his first poem, [50] the one on the Sistine Madonna, and he now began to feel some of the thrills of successful authorship. He quotes from a friend's letter: ‘Ma wishes me to enquire with more remarks than I have room for who wrote the Madonna and Child. It is much admired and copied here and is said to be by some one of the name of Higginson.’ The young poet adds, ‘It's quite exciting, is n't it?’ Some months later, Rev. Samuel Johnson, then a divinity student, said in reference to these verses, ‘Then you did write that beautiful thing.’ Going to the Craigie house one day he saw Mrs. H. W. Longfellow, who ‘said more things about the Madonna,’ and looked ‘things unutterable out of her unfathomable eyes’; and when Mr. Longfellow included the poem in his volume called ‘The Estray,’ the youth's cup was full. In Brookline, the young man had plenty of leisure for his favorite pursuits, for he wrote:—
I have taken up reading very strong,—am much interested in Carlyle's Miscellanies and have quite a fancy for German—have begun to dabble a little in the study of it—next winter I shall go into languages wholesale.And in one evening he perpetrated ‘four sonnets to Longfellow, Motherwell, Tennyson, and Sterling,— good—the best things perhaps I've written.’ [51] From Ellery Channing he gleaned some items about the profits of literature:—
Ellery has just been telling me about Hawthorne whom he thinks the only man in the country who supports himself by writing. He is enabled to do this as his expenses are very small. Ellery says he [Hawthorne] might live for $300, as he does at Concord —there his farm gives apples enough to pay his rent, $75. He sells these and fishes in the river in summer. His magazine articles are paid higher than any one's except Willis who gets $5 a page. He could get what he chooses, probably $30, $40 or $50 an article. He is to be a regular contributor to three magazines—the Pioneer, Sargent's, and the Democratic Review. This of course would give him $1000 to $1500 a year. He writes very slowly and elaborately. Willis probably can get $50 for an article.In planning his future, the young tutor wrote:—
Spent the whole morning at home—reading Richter's Life and meditating and made the day an era in my life by fixing the resolution of not studying a profession. . . . The resolve is perfectly settled and perfectly tranquil with me, that I will come as near starving as Richter did—that I will labor as intensely and suffer as much—sooner than violate my duty toward my Spiritual Life and to do my duty to the world at large, in whatever manner I can best use my talents. . . . For myself I believe and trust that I have got above following Ambition as [52] the leading motive. . . . For neither Wealth nor Fame will, I trust, make me happy or satisfy me.He exclaimed that summer, ‘Give me books and nature—and leisure and means to give myself up to them and some one to share my ideas with, and I think I should be perfectly happy.’ And later, ‘I feel overflowing with mental energies—I will be Great if I can.’ While in Brookline, Higginson tried to live freely and simply like the birds and squirrels, declaring that ‘The only true free man is he who can live on a little.’ In after years, he called this stay the Maytime of his life, which he, however, qualified by adding, ‘The present is not beautiful until overhung with the mosses and veiled in the shadows of the Past. . . . I think the free communion with Nature in past years has done much for my mental health. Those long afternoons in the woods with no care, no solicitude as to time and place, no companion but my tin box. . . . That Bigelow's Botany of mine is the most precious book I have—not a page of it but is redolent of summer sounds, senses and images.’ But he never became reconciled to his work, and wrote in November: ‘To Teaching I have an utter and entire aversion—I love children passionately and am able to attach them and to discipline them, but I am not fitted for an intellectual guide and I hate [53] the office’; and added ‘I read the Theory of Teaching (which put me in despair).’ The school was often held out of doors, and one of the features was a course of talks to the boys on animals. In 1852, Higginson wrote to Harriet Prescott:—
When I was of your age and had scholars like you,—or as you will,—I used to take them long walks and teach them to use their senses. We used sometimes to have school in a wood beside the house or in a great apple tree; and once on a rock in the wood there came to us a new scholar, a little weasel who glided among us with his slender sinuous body and glittering eyes, while we sat breathless to watch him. I fancy the boys will remember that little visitor longer than any of their Natural History Lessons.But in the Brookline period Wentworth was still a boy himself as this note from his journal shows:—
I made an Excursion (about 1/4 12) & attacked the 4 steel signs in the neighborhood—no one suspecting but the girls. No danger—in spite of the $50 reward.Truly history repeats itself, for a few years ago, Colonel Higginson's doorbell was tremblingly rung by a young relative, then a Harvard student, who confessed that he also had been ‘attacking signs’ and in consequence had just passed the night in the police station. [54] Mr. Perkins, whose three sons were under Wentworth's care, was absent part of the time, leaving the young tutor in charge, and then his duties included tending fires and pumping water. He never objected to manual labor, but wrote, ‘I always love to do any work—digging paths or chopping wood. I think I should always like to do both for myself, and feel thus far at least independent of other's hands.’ In the spring of 1843, he was urged by his employer to stay another year, at a salary of $250 including board and lodging. In the letter which Mr. Perkins wrote about this project, he praised him highly, and said that his devotion to the boys was only equalled by theirs to him. But the young man could not be induced to remain longer and wrote:—
Much as I am interested in the boys. . . and sorry as I shall be to part with them, my removal from the responsibility of their intellectual Education will be a very great relief to me. I shall never love teaching—anybody.
