Louisa M. Alcott (1)
Moods. By Louisa M. Alcott, author of "Hospital Sketches." Boston: Loring, 1865.
Under the above title, Miss Alcott has given us her version of the old story of the husband, the wife, and the lover. This story has been told so often that an author's only pretext for telling it again is his consciousness of an ability to make it either more entertaining or more instructive; to invest it with incidents more dramatic, or with a more pointed moral. Its interest has already been carried to the furthest limits, both of tragedy and comedy, by a number of practised French writers: under this head, therefore, competition would be superfluous. Has Miss Alcott proposed to herself to give her story a philosophical bearing? We can hardly suppose it.
We have seen it asserted that her book claims to deal with the "doctrine of affinities." What the doctrine of affinities is, we do not exactly know; but we are inclined to think that our author has been somewhat maligned. Her book is, to our perception, innocent of any doctrine whatever.
The heroine of "Moods" is a fitful, wayward, and withal most amiable young person, named Sylvia. We regret to say that Miss Alcott takes her up in her childhood. We are utterly weary of stories about precocious little girls. In the first place, they are in themselves disagreeable and unprofitable objects of study; and in the second, they are always the precursors of a not less unprofitable middle-aged lover. We admit that, even to the middle-aged, Sylvia must have been a most engaging little person. One of her means of fascination is to disguise herself as a boy and work in the garden with a hoe and wheelbarrow; under which circumstances she is clandestinely watched by one of the heroes, who then and there falls in love with her. Then she goes off on a camping-out expedition of a week's duration, in company with three gentlemen, with no superfluous luggage, as far as we can ascertain, but a cockle-shell stuck "pilgrim-wise" in her hat. It is hard to say whether the impropriety of this proceeding is the greater or the less from the fact of her extreme youth. This fact is at any rate kindly overlooked by two of her companions, who become
Mr. Warwick is plainly a great favorite with the author. She has for him that affection which writers entertain, not for those figures whom they have well known, but for such as they have much pondered. Miss Alcott has probably mused upon Warwick so long and so lovingly that she has lost all sense of his proportions. There is a most discouraging good-will in the manner in which lady novelists elaborate their impossible heroes. There are, thank Heaven, no such men at large in society. We speak thus devoutly, not because Warwick is a vicious person, -- on the contrary, he exhibits the sternest integrity; but because, apparently as a natural result of being thoroughly conscientious, he is essentially disagreeable. Women appear to delight in the conception of men who shall be insupportable to men. Warwick is intended to be a profoundly serious person. A species of prologue is prefixed to the tale, in which we are initiated into his passion for one Ottila, a beautiful Cuban lady. This chapter is a literary curiosity. The relations of the two lovers are illustrated by means of a dialogue between them. Considering how bad this dialogue is, it is really very good. We mean that, considering what nonsense the lovers are made to talk, their conversation
Before the picnic above mentioned is over, Warwick and
Miss Alcott tries to persuade us that her hero does neither; but we maintain that he adopts the latter course, and, what is worse, does it like an arrant hypocrite. He proceeds to lay down the law of matrimonial duty to Sylvia in a manner which, in our opinion, would warrant her in calling in her husband to turn him out of the house. He declares, indeed, that he designs no "French sentiment nor sin," whatever these may be; but he exerts the utmost power of his "masterful soul" to bully her into a protest against her unnatural union. No man with any sense of decency, no man of the slightest common-sense, would presume to dogmatize in this conceited fashion upon a matter with which he has not the least
In all this matter it strikes us that Sylvia's husband is the only one to be pitied. His wife, while in a somnambulistic state, confesses the secret of her illicit affection. Moor is, of course, bitterly outraged, and his anger is well described. Sylvia pities him intensely, but insists with sweet inflexibility that she cannot continue to be his wife, and dismisses him to Europe, with a most audacious speech about the beautiful eternity and the immortality of love. Moor, who for a moment has evinced a gleam of natural passion, which does something towards redeeming from ludicrous unreality the united efforts of the trio before us, soon recovers himself, and submits to his fate precisely like a morbidly conscientious young girl who is engaged in the formation of her character under the direction of her clergyman. From this point accordingly the story becomes more and more unnatural, although, we cheerfully add, it becomes considerably more dramatic, and is much better told. All this portion is, in fact, very pretty; indeed, if it were not so essentially false, we should call it very fine. As it is, we can only use the expression in its ironical sense. Moor consents to sacrifice himself to the beautiful ethical abstraction which his wife and her lover have concocted between them. He will go to Europe and await the dawning of some new abstraction, under whose starry influence he may return. When he does return, it will not be, we may be sure, to give his wife the thorough rating she deserves.
At the eleventh hour, when the vessel is about to start, Warwick turns up, and thrusts himself, as a travelling companion, upon the man he has outraged. As Warwick was destined to die a violent death, we think Miss Alcott might have here appropriately closed her book by making Moor pitch Adam into the water for his impertinence. But as usual, Warwick has his own way.
During their absence, Sylvia sinks into a rapid decline. After a certain interval they start homeward. But their ship is wrecked; Warwick is lost in trying to save Moor's life; and Moor reaches home alone. Sylvia then proceeds to put him and every one else in the wrong by dying the death of the righteous.
The two most striking facts with regard to "Moods" are the author's ignorance of human nature, and her self-confidence in spite of this ignorance. Miss Alcott doubtless knows men and women well enough to deal successfully with their every-day virtues and temptations, but not well enough to handle great dramatic passions. The consequence is, that her play is not a real play, nor her actors real actors.
But beside these facts are others, less salient perhaps, upon which it is pleasanter to touch. Chief among these is the author's decided cleverness; that quality to which we owe it that, in spite of the absurdities of the action, the last half of her book is replete with beauty and vigor. What shall we call this quality? Imagination does not seem to us too grand a word. For, in the absence of knowledge, our authoress has derived her figures, as the German derived his camel, from the depths of her moral consciousness. If they are on this account the less real, they are also on this account the more unmistakably instinct with a certain beauty and grace. If Miss Alcott's experience of human nature has been small, as we should suppose, her admiration for it is nevertheless great. Putting aside Adam's treatment of Ottila, she sympathizes throughout her book with none but great things. She has the rare merit, accordingly, of being very seldom puerile. For inanimate nature, too, she has a genuine love, together with a very pretty way of describing it. With these qualities there is no reason why Miss Alcott should not write a very good novel, provided she will be satisfied to describe only that
North American Review, July 1865
It is sometimes affirmed by the observant foreigner, on visiting these shores, and indeed by the venturesome native, when experience has given him the power of invidious comparison, that American children are without a certain charm usually possessed by the youngsters of the Old World. The little girls are apt to be pert and shrill, the little boys to be aggressive and knowing; both the girls and boys are accused of lacking, or of having lost, the sweet, shy bloom of ideal infancy. If this is so, the philosophic mind desires to know the reason of it, and when in the course of its enquiry the philosophic mind encounters the tales of Miss Alcott, we think it will feel a momentary impulse to cry Eureka! Miss Alcott is the novelist of children -- the Thackeray, the Trollope, of the nursery and the school-room. She deals with the social questions of the child-world, and, like Thackeray and Trollope, she is a satirist. She is extremely clever, and, we believe, vastly popular with infant readers. In this, her latest volume, she gives us an account of a little girl named Rose, who has seven boisterous boy-cousins, several grotesque aunts, and a big burly uncle, an honest seaman, addicted to riding a tilt at the shams of life. He finds his little niece encompassed with a great many of these, and Miss Alcott's tale is chiefly devoted to relating how he plucked them successively away. We find it hard to describe our impression of it without appearing to do injustice to the author's motives. It is evidently written in very good faith, but it strikes us as a very ill- chosen sort of entertainment to set before children. It is unfortunate not only in its details, but in its general tone, in the constant ring of the style. The smart satirical tone is the last one in the world to be used in describing to children
Nation, October 14, 1875
William Rounseville Alger (2)
The Friendships of Women. By William Rounseville Alger. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1868.
Mr. Alger has already made himself favorably known as a scholar, a writer, and a connoisseur in matters of sentiment. He seems to have an especial fondness for certain outlying departments, as one may call them, of human feeling; and he treats them with a kind of lyrical enthusiasm and an exhaustive fulness of detail. He recently published a monograph on the taste -- or the passion -- for solitude; and he now reappears with a treatise on the friendships of women. Both of these topics strike us as nearly akin to that class of subjects which one may call, in a literary sense, only half-legitimate -- that is, they are in their essence so volatile and impalpable that, in order to arrest and fix them, and submit them to critical examination, one must run the risk of giving them an artificial rigidity, and robbing them of their natural grace and perfume. It is true that Mr. Alger eludes this peril in a great measure, from the fact that nothing is less critical than his manner; and that the intellectual instrument with which he handles, in either case, the delicate tissue of his theme, has nothing of dogmatic or scientific harshness. His subjects and his discourse possess an equal vagueness and fluidity. He is, to our perception, a purely sentimental writer; a fact which, under the circumstances, carries with it several aids, and as many impediments, to a happy execution of his aim. It ensures a sympathetic treatment and guards him against important errors, but it detracts seriously from the value of his book and from its weight and dignity. It diminishes its literary merit and gives it a shapelessness, a diffuseness, a light and superficial air, very much at variance with the solid character of the information from which it springs, and with the genuine love of letters and of human nature which has apparently fostered its growth. The truth is, we suppose, Mr. Alger is an optimist. He prefers the pleasant side of human nature. He abounds in that tepid gentleness of charity which has an instinctive aversion to the critical spirit. The critical spirit finds its way into so many dingy places, delights
Mr. Alger, with an intensity of fancy to which he is rather too compliant, speaks somewhere, in the volume before us, of the "vitriolic Swift." We will leave him to devise in his next work an epithet for that intellectual temper which he deems most dissimilar to that of the great satirist, and then we will respectfully apply it to his own genius. It is just this vitriolic -- or, to call things by their right names, this satiric -- element that is so fatally absent from Mr. Alger's manner. He may, indeed, object that it was designedly excluded at the outset, and that he has been studiously, religiously careful not to cast the faintest shadow of ridicule upon attachments and even, if one pleases, infatuations, which in their day must in
Mr. Alger, plainly, is so fond of French models that we do not feel as if it were unfair to suggest comparisons between his own fashion of dealing with the characteristics of women and that of the good French critics. We speak, of course, only of the spirit. He would probably disclaim having his execution forced into a comparison which it is so little calculated to endure. M. Sainte-Beuve has written about women as almost
But in spite of these defects we should be very sorry not to add that Mr. Alger's book is a work of no small beauty and richness. It has the qualities which accompany these very defects -- a singular elevation and purity of tone, a profound and consistent sense of the noble possibilities of human character, and, in default of perfection of manner, an immense fulness of matter. It is, perhaps, no such great fault to be somewhat weak on these terms, especially the last clause of them. It is very gratifying to see a writer in these cynical, sceptical, and, indeed, we may add, critical days, willing to make a book about pure sentiment, and to write with exquisite gravity the complete history of a matter whose very existence has always been a subject half of doubt and half of ridicule. And, moreover, we have derived from Mr. Alger's work an impression which alone repays us for having read it, an impression as delightful as it is unique -- the impression of the beauty of that kindliness and courage which can execute so great a labor without the stimulus of the critical and sceptical faculty, but under the simple inspiration of an implicit belief and homage. The fragment we have quoted from Sainte-Beuve is in its nature more or less of an epigram. Mr. Alger does not reward himself with epigrams. Even if we were able, therefore, we should be sorry to criticise him in epigrams, or to write of him in any other but the frank and cordial spirit in which he writes of his heroines.
Nation, December 26, 1867
H. Willis Baxley (3)
Spain. Art Remains and Art Realities: Painters, Priests, and Princes, etc. By H. Willis Baxley, M. D. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1875.
The remark one first feels obliged to make about this singular book is that it is, after all, not so bad as it seems. We confess that we had left it lying on our table for many weeks, with no expectation of ever bestowing a second glance upon it. The first had been sufficient; it seemed to us that the presumption was wholly against a couple of stout volumes written in a style so bristling with barbarisms. But we were recommended to take it up again, and we have been, to a certain extent, fairly thankful for the advice. Dr. Baxley puts his worst foot foremost and does himself elaborate injustice. His book is, in form and manner, as we have said, simply barbarous. If Mr. Matthew Arnold could be put into possession of it, we are sure he would consider it of great value to his famous plea in behalf of the literary influence of academies. The matter of Dr. Baxley's shapeless and ponderous production is not of the first merit, but it is quite good enough to be better presented. It is hard to imagine how a man of so much general vivacity of mind, and who appears to have read and observed to such good purpose, should have remained so exempt from the civilizing influences of culture. He lately spent three years in Spain, apparently for his health, and he seems to have kept copious journals and memoranda of his travels and observations. These he has worked over into a narrative of the most intolerable clumsiness and diffuseness, shovelling into it as he goes interminable digressions and disquisitions on everything that comes into his head, especially on what he calls "religionism." Though he is an inveterate theologian and confronts us with Scripture texts at every turn, the venerable word religion seems unknown to him, and to the best of our knowledge the adjective belonging to it never once occurs throughout the work. Its place is invariably occupied by the singular term "religionist." His digressions are in all cases very tedious and in extremely bad taste, and his reflections on Spanish social phenomena of all kinds are evidently founded on very superficial observation. But as regards
Nation, May 20, 1875
John Burroughs (4)
Winter Sunshine. By John Burroughs, author of Wake-Robin. New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1876.
This is a very charming little book. We had noticed, on their appearance in various periodicals, some of the articles of which it is composed, and we find that, read continuously, they have given us even more pleasure. We have, indeed, enjoyed them more than we perhaps can show sufficient cause for. They are slender and light, but they have a real savor of their own. Mr. Burroughs is known as an out-of-door observer -- a devotee of birds and trees and fields and aspects of weather and humble wayside incidents. The minuteness of his observation, the keenness of his perception of all these things, give him a real originality which is confirmed by a style sometimes indeed idiomatic and unfinished to a fault, but capable of remarkable felicity and vividness. Mr. Burroughs is also, fortunately for his literary prosperity in these days, a decided "humorist"; he is essentially and genially an American, without at all posing as one, and his sketches have a delightful oddity, vivacity, and freshness. The first half of his volume, and the least substantial, treats of certain rambles taken in the winter and spring in the country around Washington; the author is an apostle of pedestrianism, and these pages form a prolonged rhapsody upon the pleasures within the reach of any one who will take the trouble to stretch his legs. They are full of charming touches, and indicate a real genius for the observation of natural things. Mr. Burroughs is a sort of reduced, but also more humorous, more available, and more sociable Thoreau. He is especially intimate with the birds, and he gives his reader an acute sense of how sociable an affair, during six months of the year, this feathery lore may make a lonely walk. He is also intimate with the question of apples, and he treats of it in a succulent disquisition which imparts to the somewhat trivial theme a kind of lyrical dignity. He remarks, justly, that women are poor apple- eaters. But the best pages in his book are those which commemorate a short visit to England and the rapture of his first impressions. This little sketch, in spite of its extreme
Nation, January 27, 1876
George H. Calvert (5)
George H. Calvert, Essays -- Aesthetical. Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1875.
Mr. Calvert occasionally puts forth a modest volume of prose or verse which attracts no general attention, but which, we imagine, finds adequate appreciation among scattered readers. We prefer his prose to his verse, and we can frankly recommend this little collection of essays on subjects connected with art and letters. The author's fault, as a general thing, is in his vagueness, and in a tendency to judgments a trifle too ethereal and to a style considerably too florid. We prefer him, therefore, when he is treating of concrete rather than abstract matters, and we have found more edification in the volume before us in the papers on the translators of Dante, on Sainte-Beuve, and on Carlyle, than in the accompanying disquisitions on the Beautiful, on the Nature of Poetry, and on Style. To offer us off-hand, at the present hour, an article on the Beautiful, implies an almost heroic indifference to the tyranny of fashion. Mr. Calvert cares for letters for their own sake, he is a disinterested scholar, and his writing has the aroma of genuine culture. Even the occasional awkwardness and amateurishness of his manner are an indication of that union, so rare in this country, of taste and leisure which allows culture an opportunity to accumulate. The best thing in the volume is the article on Sainte-Beuve, in which the author shows that he had studied the great critic to very good purpose. It is very intelligent and, much of it, very felicitous, and it is filled, moreover, with excellent brief citations. But the best thing in it is the charming note from Sainte-Beuve which the author gives in an addendum, and of which we transcribe the greater part. Mr. Calvert had sent Sainte-Beuve the copy of the magazine in which the article originally appeared, but this miscarried, and the author sent a second copy. Whereupon Sainte-Beuve, writing December 6, 1868, six months before his death:
"Cher Monsieur: -- Oh! cette fois je reois bien dcidment le tr s-aimable et tr s-tudi portrait du critique. Comment exprimer comme je le sens ma gratitude pour
The reader will see that the art of saying things well did not desert the great critic, even in his moments of extreme relaxation. Every epistolary scrap from his hand that has come before us has quickened the impatience with which we await the promised publication of his correspondence. The perusal of the latter, if we are not mistaken, will be an extreme intellectual luxury. Mr. Calvert's volume further contains a reprinted paper, entitled "Errata" -- an attempt to enumerate some of the common grammatical errors and literary vulgarisms of the day. The attempt is commendable, and the attack in some cases well- directed, but there is more than one expression that Mr. Calvert seems to us to condemn too trenchantly. "By no manner of means" is pronounced a "vulgar pleonasm." "By reason of" is called an "ugly, ill-assorted phrase." "I am free to confess" is declared "an irredeemable vulgarism," and "subject-matter" a "tautological humpback." We share Mr. Calvert's extreme enmity with regard to none of these phrases. Each of them, to our sense, will bear cross-examining. Of another -- "to ventilate, applied to a subject or a person" -- he affirms that "the scholar who uses this vilest of vulgarisms deserves to have his right thumb taken off."
Nation, June 3, 1875
William Ellery Channing (6)
Correspondence of William Ellery Channing, D.D., and Lucy Aikin, from 1826 to 1842. Edited by Anna Letitia Le Breton. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1874.
It is rather odd that while most of us, in these days of diminished leisure, spend many sighs over our own letter-writing, we should yet be very willing to read the correspondence of other people. The letters we write and the letters we receive consume an unconscionable portion of our time, and yet we extend a welcome to epistolary matter with which it would appear, logically, that we might thank our stars we had nothing to do. There is a permanent charm in the epistolary form, when it has been managed with any grace, and people find in it a sort of mixture of the benefits of conversation and of literature. This applies, of course, especially to the epistolary form as it was practiced in those spacious, slow-moving days, when a swinging mail-coach offered to a complacent generation the brightest realization of the rapid and punctual, and the penny-post, in its infancy, an almost perplexing opportunity for alertness of wit; days which, although not chronologically distant, seem as distinctly severed from our own as the air of an old-fashioned quadrille, played by an orchestra, from the rattling galop which follows it. There were doubtless many dull letters written in those days, and indeed the railway and the telegraph have not now made all letters brilliant; but we incline to think that the average of letter-writing was higher. The telegraph, now, has made even our letters telegraphic, and we imagine the multiplication of occasions for writing to have acted upon people's minds very much as it has done on their hands, and rendered them dashy and scrappy and indistinct. In fact, it may be questioned whether we any longer write letters in the real sense at all. We scribble off notes and jot down abbreviated dispatches and memoranda, and at last the postal card has come to seem to us the ideal epistolary form.
Dr. Channing's and Miss Aikin's letters belong to the ante- telegraphic period, and to an epistolary school diametrically opposed to the postal card manner. They have a sort of perfume of leisure; you feel that the writers could hear the
He made Miss Aikin's acquaintance during a short visit to England prior to 1826, when the correspondence opened. She was a literary lady, a niece of Mrs. Barbauld, and member of a Unitarian and liberal circle in which Dr. Channing's writings were highly prized. She felt strongly the influence of his beautiful genius, and found it a precious privilege to be in communication with him. In a letter written in 1831 she returns him almost ardent thanks for all that his writings have been to her. "I shudder now to think how good a hater I was in the days of my youth. Time and reflection, a wider range of acquaintance, and a calmer state of the public mind, mitigated by degrees my bigotry; but I really knew not what it was to open my heart to the human race until I had drunk deeply into the spirit of your writings." They continued to exchange letters until the eve of Dr. Channing's death in 1842, and their correspondence offers a not incomplete reflection of the public events and interests of these sixteen years. It deals hardly at all with personal matters, and has nothing for lovers of gossip. Except for alluding occasionally to his feeble health, Dr. Channing writes like a disembodied spirit, and defines himself, personally, almost wholly by negatives. Politics and banks are his principal topics, and in Miss Aikin he found an extremely robust interlocutor. The letters were presumably published for the sake, mainly, of Dr. Channing's memory, but their effect is to throw his correspondent into prominent relief. This lady's extremely sturdy and downright personality is the most entertaining thing in the volume. Clever, sagacious, shrewd, a student, a blue-stocking, and an accomplished writer, one wonders why her vigorous intellectual temperament has not attracted independent notice. She wrote a Life of Charles I. and a Life and Times of Addison (which Macaulay praises in his Essay); but she did a great deal of lively thinking which is not represented by her literary performances. Much of it (as of that of her correspondent) is of a rather old-fashioned sort, but it is very lucid and respectable, and, in a certain way, quite edifying. Both she and Dr. Channing were strongly interested in their times and the destiny of their respective countries, and there is a sort of antique dignity in the way they exchange convictions and theories upon public affairs and the tendencies of the age. Many of these
Dr. Channing's letters are briefer and undeniably less entertaining. But they are characteristic, and will be found interesting by those who know the writer otherwise. He was a moral genius, he had a passion (within the rather frigid form of his thought) for perfection, and he believed that we are steadily tending to compass it here below. One feels that his horizon is narrow, that his temperament is rather pale and colorless, and that he lacked what is called nowadays general culture, but everything he says has an exquisite aroma of integrity. His optimism savors a trifle of weakness; it seems rather sentimental than rational, and Miss Aikin, secluded spinster as she is, by virtue of living simply in the denser European atmosphere, is better aware of the complexity of the data on which any forecast of the future should rest; but he holds his opinions with a firmness and purity of faith to which his correspondent's less facile Old-World liberalism must have seemed not a little corrupt and cynical. Even his personal optimism is great. "What remains to me of strength becomes more precious for what is lost. I have lost one ear, but was never so alive to sweet sounds as now. My sight is so far impaired that the brightness in which nature was revealed to me in my youth is dimmed, but I never looked on nature with such pure joy as now. My limbs soon tire, but I never felt it such a privilege to move about in the open air, under the sky, in sight of the infinity of creation, as at this moment. I almost think that my simple food, eaten by rule, was never relished so well. I am grateful, then, for my earthly tabernacle, though it does creak and shake not a little." There is something almost ascetic in the rule he had made to be satisfied with a little. "A fine climate! What a good those words contain
Atlantic Monthly, March
1875
Rebecca Harding Davis (7)
Waiting for the Verdict. By Mrs. R. H. Davis. New York: Sheldon & Co., 1868.
Mrs. Davis intimates in her dedication that her book treats of "the weak and wronged among God's creatures," and that it is written in their behalf. It can hardly be said, however, that the persons she has brought upon the scene have, with perhaps one or two exceptions, any great wrongs to complain of or any extraordinary weakness to contend with -- unless it be that their grievances may be resolved into the fact that Mrs. Davis has undertaken to write about them. The exceptions, of course, are in the case of certain individuals of negro blood. The story moves on two distinct lines, each with its separate hero and heroine. To begin with, there is Ross Burley -- Miss Rosslyn Burley; "the name," we are told, "had a clean, clear ring in it which became her." This young lady is introduced to us at the age of nine years, as a little market-huckster in Philadelphia, living alone in the country with her grandfather, and raising vegetables and poultry for town consumption. We gather from the first that a mystery hangs about her birth. She turns out to be the daughter of a Southern planter of aristocratic tastes, a reader of "the rare old dramatists of Anne's time," whoever they were, who has seduced a Pennsylvania country girl. Her father flits through the story at intervals as a representative of the old effete Southern society, in contrast with the buoyant freshness and vigor of that section of our own dominion in which abolitionists, emancipated Quakers, and reformers of things in general stand surging in glorious fermentation. From the childhood of the young girl in question to the epoch of her maturity we take a long leap and find her, in the first year of the war -- through a process of which we confess we have derived but a very vague notion -- reclaimed from her vulgar associations, and a perfect young lady, with "the manners of a princess of the blood," a "rose-flush in her palms," and a dozen more fine qualities. She encounters at this moment a certain Garrick Randolph, a young Kentucky gentleman, a professor in a college, an amateur of the fine arts, and a person of aristocratic sympathies. He is vastly impressed
This wooing has, of course, its ups and downs, especially when Rosslyn plucks up courage to tell him of her shameful childhood and of her having kept a vegetable-stand in the market-place. But the young man bears the shock bravely and assures her that it makes no difference. The young couple is thus happily disposed of. With the second couple the relation of the parties is ingeniously reversed, and the issue is far less satisfactory. Miss Margaret Conrad is a young lady of Kentucky, a cousin of Garrick Randolph, for whom she has a sort of penchant, and a prodigiously fine woman. The author has intended to effect a strong contrast between Miss Conrad and Ross Burley, and if she has not succeeded, it is not from a failure to emphasize the peculiarities of each. Miss Conrad is a tall and statuesque person, slow of utterance, calm of eye, dressing in heavy corded silks, and keeping her feelings to herself. She is encumbered with a very eccentric and vulgar person in the way of a father, a Methodist minister by profession, who is suffering from an affection of the eyes, and whom she accompanies to Philadelphia to ask the advice of an eminent surgeon, one Doctor Broderip. Upon Dr. Broderip the author has lavished the most precious resources of her pen, and he is indeed the most ambitiously conceived figure in the story. A gambler, a betting-man, a dilettante, a mauvais sujet, a clever surgeon, now practising for nothing, now refusing to practise, a mystery, an enigma -- Dr. Broderip is all these and a great deal more which we have no time
Such is a rapid outline of Mrs. Davis's story. The subject -- the leading idea -- strikes us as a very good one. It was a happy thought to attempt to contrast certain phases of the distinctively Northern and Southern modes of life and of feeling, and to bring two intelligent Southerners, such as Miss Conrad and Garrick Randolph, into contact with Northern manners in such a way as to try their patience and their courage. The chief fault, artistically, in working out this idea is that she has made two complete plots with no mutual connection. The story balances in an arbitrary manner from Ross Burley to Margaret Conrad and from Randolph to Dr. Broderip. The authoress might have strengthened the links between the two parties by making more than she has done of the relations between Randolph and Miss Conrad. This young lady's rich allurements would have formed a very valuable item in the associations from which the young professor detaches himself for Rosslyn Burley's sake. Nevertheless, we say, the idea is good, and if the execution had been on a level
Mrs. Davis has written a number of short stories, chiefly of country life in Virginia and Pennsylvania, all distinguished by a certain severe and uncultured strength, but all disfigured by an injudicious straining after realistic effects which leave nature and reality at an infinite distance behind and beside them. The author has made herself the poet of poor people -- laborers, farmers, mechanics, and factory hands. She has attempted to reproduce in dramatic form their manners and habits and woes and wants. The intention has always been good, but the execution has, to our mind, always been monstrous. The unfortunate people whom she transfers into her stories are as good material for the story-teller's art as any other class of beings, but not a bit better. They come no nearer doing the work for themselves and leaving the writer to amuse himself than the best-housed and the best- fed and the best-clad classes in the community. They are worth reading about only so long as they are studied with a keen eye versed in the romance of human life, and described in the same rational English which we exact from writers on other subjects. Mrs. Davis's manner is in direct oppugnancy to this truth. She drenches the whole field beforehand with a flood of lachrymose sentimentalism, and riots in the murky vapors which rise in consequence of the act. It is impossible to conceive of a method of looking at people and things less calculated to elicit the truth -- less in the nature of a study or of intelligent inspection. The author is oppressed with the conviction that there exists in the various departments of human
Nation, November 21, 1867
This new novel of Mrs. Harding Davis is better than her last, which we had occasion to notice a year ago. Certain offensive peculiarities of style which we then attempted to indicate have not, indeed, disappeared, but they
These few words merely touch upon a question about which there is a great deal more to be said. We write them here because the book before us is one with regard to which it especially becomes the critic to remember that duty of which we have spoken -- the duty of being clear and emphatic. About such novels as Mrs. Davis's it is very easy to talk a great deal of plausible nonsense. Miss Anna E. Dickinson, the famous lecturer -- whom we have not heard -- has just published a novel, which we have not read. We are, therefore, in no position to qualify Miss Dickinson's work. But Mrs. H. B. Stowe comes promptly to the front, and allows her name to be printed in large characters in the publishers' advertisements as authority for the assertion that Miss Dickinson's novel is "a brave, noble book." This is in no sense the language of criticism. And yet it is made with very little trouble to do duty as criticism -- and criticism of weight. Mrs. Stowe and Miss Dickinson probably each regard it as such, and are very far from suspecting that they have done anything unwise -- the latter in writing a book which compels the appreciative mind to take refuge in language such as we have quoted as Mrs. Stowe's dictum, and the former in yielding to such injurious compulsion. And yet we scarcely find it in our heart to condemn Mrs. Stowe. It is just these vague random utterances and all this counterfeit criticism that make the rational critic the more confident of his own duties.
Mrs. Davis, in her way, is an artist. And yet, as we say, "Dallas Galbraith" is a book about which it is very easy to make talk which is not too valuable, to divaguer, as the French say -- to leave the straight road and go over to Mrs. Stowe. The attentive reader in these days has become familiar with a number of epithets under cover of which literary weakness and incompetency manage to find it a very merry world. When the best thing that can be said of a novel is that it is brave or noble or honest or earnest, you may be sure that although it may be, as Mrs. Stowe pronounces Miss Dickinson's tale, a very good deed, it is a very bad book. Mrs. Davis's stories are habitually spoken of as "earnest" works, and it is not hard to detect in reading them a constant effort to deserve the epithet. Their pretensions are something very different
Dallas Galbraith is the son of a reckless and dissipated father who has quarrelled with his family and turned his back on a rich inheritance. He dies early and leaves his wife and child penniless. The former marries again in such a way as to make it advisable for her boy to go out into the world. In the course of his youthful adventures Dallas encounters a certain George Laddoun, a plausible villain, who makes use of him in the committal of a forgery, and then subsequently establishes
Such is a rapid outline of a story which is told with a good deal of amplitude of detail and considerable energy of invention. But whatever interest attaches to it as the recital of certain events, we feel bound to say that this interest is wholly independent of the characters. These characters seem to us, one and all, essentially false. The hero himself is a perfectly illogical conception. He is too unreal to take hold of; but if he were more palpable, and, as it were, responsible, we should call him a vapid sentimentalist. He is worse than a woman's man -- a woman's boy. Active and passive, he is equally unnatural, irrational, and factitious. He is built, to begin with, on an impossibility. Dallas Galbraith would never in the world have sacrificed himself at the outset to the reputation of Laddoun. All his young nature would have burned in a fever of resentment against the rascal who had already compromised his weakness and innocence. He would have clung to the letter proving his innocence with a most unheroic but most manly tenacity. His subsequent conduct has in it as little of the real savory stuff of nature. He conducts himself on his return among his people, like -- like nothing in trousers. If we can conceive of his having immured himself, we can conceive of it only on condition of the deed having been followed by the bitterest and most violent reaction. A young fellow who had done as Dallas did would feel that he had done his duty, once for all, to the magnanimous and the superfine. His mind would be possessed by a resolute desire for justice. Having exposed himself to so cruel a wrong, he would entertain an admirable notion of his rights; and instead of hovering about his paternal home like a hysterical school-girl, moaning over his coarseness and inelegance, he would have walked straight into the midst of it, with a very plain statement of his position and his wishes. George Laddoun, the villain of the tale, is scarcely a more successful portrait. The author has confused two distinct types of character, and she seems never quite to have made up her mind whether this person is a native gentleman, demoralized by vice and whiskey, or a blackguard, polished and elevated by prosperity.
Nation, October 22,
1868
John W. De Forest (8)
Honest John Vane. A Story. By J. W. De Forest, author of Kate Beaumont, The Wetherel Affair, etc. New Haven: Richmond & Patten, 1875.
Mr. de Forest, who has written several entertaining novels, offers us in this volume a political satire. His tale was published more than a year ago, we believe, in the Atlantic Monthly, and he has judged it worthy after this considerable interval of being resuscitated. Mr. De Forest is capable of writing a story which holds the attention, but we should not have said, from our acquaintance with his works, that he possessed the cunning hand of a satirist. We have heard him called an American Charles Reade, and, mutatis mutandis, the analogy might stand. We know that when Mr. Charles Reade shows up a public abuse, his irony does not suffer from being drawn too fine, nor his moral go a- begging for want of being vigorously pointed. Mr. De Forest's colors are laid on not exactly with a camel's-hair pencil, and he has the drawback of pleading for political purity in a phraseology which is decidedly turbid. "The lobby proved to be every way more imposing and potent than he had imagined it. True, some of its representatives were men whom it was easy for him to snub -- men of unwholesome skins, greasy garments, brutish manners, filthy minds, and sickening conversation; men who so reeked and drizzled with henbane tobacco and cockatrice whiskey that a moderate drinker or sucker would recoil from them as from a cesspool; men whose stupid, shameless boastings of their trickeries were enough to warn away from them all but the very elect of Satan." This is painting black black with a good will, and the most heedless reader will know whither he is being led. His hero's "pulpy pink face," the author tells us, when the wages of sin seem falling due for this recreant functionary, "wore an air of abiding perplexity which rivalled that of his Dundrearyish friend Ironman. At times it seemed as if its large watery features would decompose entirely with irresolution, and come to resemble a strawberry-ice which has been exposed to too high a temperature." The work contains an unclean and unscrupulous lobbyist, Darius Dorman by name, of whom it is told us, in like
`Honest John Vane,' however, may pass as a tract for popular distribution, and the important thing with tracts is that they be printed in big letters and be adapted for a plain man's comprehension. Mr. De Forest's cause is so good and his temper apparently so fervid that, as matters stand with us, it will be no harm if they make their way even at the cost of a good deal of loose writing and coarse imagery. The work records the career of a (presumably) Republican Representative in Congress from the town of Slowburgh, and traces his progress from primitive integrity to corruption inevitable for an irresponsible barbarian. As a portrait of one of our average "self-made men" and usual legislators, the picture has a good deal of force, and will renew the familiar blush in the cheek of the contemplative citizen of this unwieldy Republic. John Vane, who has begun life as a country joiner, and risen to local eminence as a manufacturer of refrigerators, is a large, bland, cautious, and unsophisticated personage, whose benevolent visage and pastoral simplicity have earned him his honorable sobriquet. His intellectual culture is limited to the arts of writing and ciphering, but he is a promising national legislator, from the caucus point of view, and his election to Congress is triumphantly carried. He marries the showy and belated daughter of the mistress of a students' boarding-house, and repairs to Washington to breast the mingled political and social tide. Of how little use to him, under direct pressure, his uninstructed, mechanical, empirical probity turns out to be, and of how he goes into the great Sub-Fluvial Tunnel swindle and becomes shrewder in his turpitude than he ever was in his virtue, the volume offers a sufficiently lively
Nation, December 31,
1874
Ralph Waldo Emerson (9)
The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson. 1834-1872. 2 vols. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1883.
In the deluge of "new books," in which so many of us at present are occupied in swimming for our lives, it is not often that there floats toward us a pair of volumes so well deserving to be arrested in their passage as this substantial record of a beautiful and distinguished friendship. The book has a high interest, and we have found it even more absorbing than we expected. It is only superficially, indeed, that it may be spoken of as new; for the persons and things it commemorates have already receded -- so fast we move to- day -- into a kind of historical perspective. The last letter that passed between the correspondents is of the date only of 1872; Carlyle died nine and Emerson ten years later. But we seem to see them from a distance; the united pair presents itself in something of the uplifted relief of a group on canvas or in marble. They have become, as I say, historical: so many of their emotions, their discussions, their interests, their allusions belong to a past which is already remote. It was, in fact, in the current of an earlier world that the Correspondence began. The first letter, which is from Emerson as the last is from Carlyle, is of the date of 1834. Emerson was the voice of New England in those days, and New England has changed not a little. There is something peculiarly young and tender in the social scene in which we see him engaged; for, in the interval that separates us from the period included in the whole of the first of these volumes and in the greater part of the second, a great many things have come and gone. The questions of those years are not the questions of these. There were more questions then, perhaps; at least, they made more show. It may seem to the reader of Emerson's early letters that at that time there was nothing in New England but questions. There were very few things, and even few persons. Emerson's personal references are rare. Bronson Alcott, W. E. Channing, Margaret Fuller, Thoreau, an occasional American about to go to Europe, carrying a letter or a book to Carlyle, constitute in this direction the chief objects of mention. Transcendentalism
There was something almost dramatic in the beginning of their friendship. Emerson, a young Bostonian, then unknown, went to Europe for the first time in 1833. He had read Carlyle's contributions to the "Edinburgh Review," and on his return from Italy, spending the summer in England, had no greater care than to become acquainted with the author. Carlyle, hardly better known then than Emerson, -- poor, struggling, lonely, discouraged, but pregnant with all his future eloquence, -- was spending at the farm of Craigenputtock, in the south of Scotland, those melancholy, those almost savage years of which we have so rich a report in the letters and journals published by Mr. Froude. "I found the house amid desolate, heathery hills, where the lonely scholar nourished his mighty heart." So writes Emerson in the first chapter of the "English Traits." The two spent a day of early autumn together, walking over the moors, and when they separated it was with a presentiment of the future and a conviction on the part of each that he had made a rare acquisition. Carlyle has commemorated in several places the apparition of the generous young American, -- "one of the most lovable creatures in himself that we had ever looked upon," he wrote to his mother; and toward the end of his life, in one of these letters, he glances back at it in the tenderest manner, across the years. "I shall never forget the visitor," at a later date, too, Mrs. Carlyle wrote, "who years ago, in the desert, descended on us out of the clouds, as it were, and made one day there look like enchantment for us, and left me weeping that it was only one day." Emerson went back to America, and the first letter in this collection is of the date of nine months later -- May, 1834. This letter contains, by the way, an allusion to Carlyle's situation at that time, which, in the light thrown upon his state of mind and circumstances at Craigenputtock by the "lonely scholar's" own letters, journals, and reminiscences, may provoke a smile. "I remembered with joy the favored condition of my lonely philosopher, his happiest wedlock, his fortunate temper, his steadfast simplicity, his all means of happiness -- not," Emerson indeed adds, "that I had the remotest hope that he should so far depart
They pass with frequency for the following fifteen years, when there is an interruption of a twelvemonth. They begin again in 1850, and continue at the rate of two or three a year, till 1856. After this they are less frequent, though the mutual regard of the writers evidently knew no diminution. In 1872, Emerson went abroad again (he had visited England for a second time in 1847); and after his return the letters cease. Many of the early ones are occupied with the question of the republication of Carlyle's writings in America. Emerson took upon himself to present "Sartor Resartus" and some of its successors to the American public, and he constantly reports to the author upon the progress of this enterprise. He transmits a great many booksellers' accounts as well as a considerable number of bills of exchange, and among the American publishers is a most faithful and zealous representative of his friend. Some of these details, which are very numerous, are tedious; but they are interesting at the same time, and Mr. Norton has done well to print them all. In the light of the present relations of British authors to the American public, they are curious reading. There appears to have been a fortunate moment (it was not of long duration) when it was possible for the British author to reap something of a harvest here. It would appear that, between 1838 and 1847, Emerson sent Carlyle some five hundred and thirty pounds, the proceeds of the sale of several of his works in this country. The sum is not large, but it must be measured by the profit that he had up to that time derived in England. It was in Boston that "Sartor Resartus," with which the English publishers would have so little to do, first made its way into the light, after a precarious and abbreviated transit through "Fraser's Magazine." "It will be a very brave day," Carlyle wrote in
Emerson, indeed, throughout had no hesitations on this score, and talked of the New England culture to his lurid correspondent without the least fear that his delicate specimens would be scorched. He sends him Mr. Alcott, he sends him Margaret Fuller, and others besides, who have a varying fortune at the little house in Cheyne Walk. It is true that Carlyle gave him constantly the encouragement of a high and eloquent esteem for his own utterances. He was evidently a great and genuine admirer of the genius, the spirit of his American friend, and he expresses this feeling on a dozen occasions.
"My friend! you know not what you have done for me there [in the oration of `The American Scholar']. It was long decades of years that I had heard nothing but the infinite jangling and jabbering, and inarticulate twittering and screeching, and my soul had sunk down sorrowful and said there is no articulate speaking then any more, and thou art solitary among stranger-creatures; and lo, out of the West comes a clear utterance, clearly recognizable as a man's voice, and I have a kinsman and brother: God be thanked for it! I could have wept to read that speech; the clear high melody of it went tingling through my heart; I
That is from a letter of 1837, and though at a later date (in 1850) he speaks of seeing "well enough what a great deep cleft divides us in our ways of practically looking at this world"; though, too (in 1842), he had already uttered a warning against Emerson's danger (with his fellow-transcendentalists) of "soaring away * * * into perilous altitudes, beyond the curve of perpetual frost * * * and seeing nothing under one but the everlasting snows of Himmalayah" -- the danger of "inanity and mere injuring of the lungs!" -- though, as I say, he threw out his reflections upon certain inevitable disparities, his attitude toward the Concord philosopher remained (I have already noted it) an eminently hospitable one. "The rock-strata, miles deep, unite again; and the two poor souls are at one," he adds in the letter written in 1850, from which I have just quoted. When "English Traits" came out, Carlyle wrote, "Not for seven years and more have I got hold of such a Book; -- Book by a real man, with eyes in his head; nobleness, wisdom, humor, and many other things in the heart of him. Such Books do not turn up often in the decade, in the century." He adds, indeed, rather unexpectedly: "In fact, I believe it to be worth all the Books ever written by New England upon Old." Carlyle speaks as if there had been an appreciable literature of that kind. It is faint praise to say that "English Traits" was the authority on the subject. He declares in another letter that "My Friend Emerson, alone of all voices out of America, has sphere-music in him for me." These words, written in 1843, are part of a paragraph in which Carlyle expresses his feelings with regard to the American "reforming" class at large. The high esteem in which he held his correspondent did not impel him to take an enthusiastic view
"Poor Margaret, that is a strange tragedy that history of hers, and has many traits of the Heroic in it, though it is wild as the prophecy of a Sybil. Such a predetermination to eat this big Universe as her oyster or her egg, and to be absolute empress of all height and glory in it that her heart could conceive, I have not before seen in any human soul. Her `mountain me' indeed: -- but her courage too is high and clear, her chivalrous nobleness indeed is great; her veracity, in its deepest sense, toute preuve."
It is difficult to resist quoting, where so much is quotable; but the better way is to urge the reader to go straight to the book. Then he will find himself interested, even more than in the happy passages of characterization in which it abounds,
"I have sometimes fancied I was to catch sympathetic activity from contact with noble persons," Emerson writes in a letter from which I have already quoted; "that you would come and see me; that I should form stricter habits of love and conversation with some men and women here who are already dear to me." That is the tone in which he speaks, for the most part, of his own life; and that was the tone which doubtless used to be natural in Concord. His letters are especially interesting for the impression they give us of what we may call the thinness of the New England atmosphere in those days -- the thinness, and, it must be added, the purity.
Emerson's views of the world were what the world at all times thought highly peculiar; he neither believed nor thought nor spoke in the most apprehensible manner. He says himself (in 1840) that he is "gently mad" -- surrounded, too, by a number of persons in the same condition. "I am gently mad myself and am resolved to live cleanly. George
All this, of course, is a very incomplete account of him. So large a genius is full of interest of detail, and in the application in special cases of that doctrine of his which seems so simple there is often the greatest suggestiveness. When he does look through his own manner into the vivid spots of history, then he sees more in them than almost any one else. We may add that no account of him would have even a slight completeness which should fail to cite him as a signal instance of the force of local influences, of the qualities of race and soil. Carlyle was intensely of the stock of which he sprang, and he remained so to the end. No man of equal genius was probably ever less of a man of the world at large -- more exclusively a product of his locality, his clan, his family. Readers of his "Reminiscences" and of Mr. Froude's memoir will remember how the peasant-group in which he was born -- his parents, his brothers and sisters -- appeared to constitute one of the great facts of the universe for him; and we mean not as a son and a brother simply, but as a student of human affairs. He was impressed, as it were, with the historical importance of his kinsfolk. And as one finds a little of everything in a man of genius, we find a great deal of tenderness even in the grimness of Carlyle; so that we may say, as the last word of all (for it qualifies our implication that he was narrow), that his tenderness was never greater than when, in spite of the local limitation, he stretched across the ocean, in gratitude for early sympathy, for early services, and held fast to the friendship of Emerson. His family was predominant for him, as we say, and he cleaved to his relations, to his brothers. But it was as a brother that he addressed Emerson.
Century Magazine, June 1883
Mr. Elliot Cabot has made a very interesting contribution to a class of books of which our literature, more than any other, offers admirable examples: he has given us a biography intelligently and carefully composed. These two volumes are a model of responsible editing -- I use that term because they consist largely of letters and extracts from letters: nothing could resemble less the manner in which the mere bookmaker strings together his frequently questionable pearls and shovels the heap into the presence of the public. Mr. Cabot has selected, compared, discriminated, steered an even course between meagreness and redundancy, and managed to be constantly and happily illustrative. And his work, moreover, strikes us as the better done from the fact that it stands for one of the two things that make an absorbing memoir a good deal more than for the other. If these two things be the conscience of the writer and the career of his hero, it is not difficult to see on which side the biographer of Emerson has found himself strongest. Ralph Waldo Emerson was a man of genius, but he led for nearly eighty years a life in which the sequence of events had little of the rapidity, or the complexity, that a spectator loves. There is something we miss very much as we turn these pages -- something that has a kind of accidental, inevitable presence in almost any personal record -- something that may be most definitely indicated under the name of colour. We lay down the book with a singular impression of paleness -- an impression that comes partly from the tone of the biographer and partly from the moral complexion of his subject, but mainly from the vacancy of the page itself. That of Emerson's personal history is condensed into the single word Concord, and all the condensation in the world will not make it look rich. It presents a most continuous surface. Mr. Matthew Arnold, in his Discourses in America, contests Emerson's complete right to the title of a man of letters; yet letters surely were the very texture of his history. Passions, alternations, affairs, adventures had absolutely no part in it. It stretched itself out in enviable quiet -- a quiet in which we hear the jotting of the pencil in the notebook. It is the very life for literature (I mean for one's own,
If the interest of Mr. Cabot's pencilled portrait is incontestable and yet does not spring from variety, it owes nothing either to a source from which it might have borrowed much and which it is impossible not to regret a little that he has so completely neglected: I mean a greater reference to the social conditions in which Emerson moved, the company he lived in, the moral air he breathed. If his biographer had allowed himself a little more of the ironic touch, had put himself once in a way under the protection of Sainte-Beuve and had attempted something of a general picture, we should have felt that he only went with the occasion. I may over-estimate the latent treasures of the field, but it seems to me there was distinctly an opportunity -- an opportunity to make up moreover in some degree for the white tint of Emerson's career considered simply in itself. We know a man imperfectly until we know his society, and we but half know a society until we know its manners. This is especially true of a man of letters, for manners lie very close to literature. From those of the New England world in which Emerson's character formed itself Mr. Cabot almost averts his lantern, though we feel sure that there would have been delightful glimpses to be had and that he would have been in a position -- that is that he has all the knowledge that would enable him -- to help us to them. It is as if he could not trust himself, knowing the subject only too well. This adds to the effect of extreme discretion that we find in his volumes, but it is the cause of our not finding certain things, certain figures and scenes, evoked. What is evoked is Emerson's pure spirit, by a copious, sifted series of citations and comments. But we must read as much as possible between the lines, and the picture of the transcendental time (to mention simply one corner) has yet to be painted -- the lines have yet to be bitten in. Meanwhile we are held and charmed by the image of Emerson's mind and the extreme appeal which his physiognomy makes to our art of discrimination. It is so fair, so uniform and impersonal, that its features are simply fine shades, the gradations of tone of a surface whose proper quality was of the smoothest and on
We seem to see the circumstances of our author's origin, immediate and remote, in a kind of high, vertical moral light, the brightness of a society at once very simple and very responsible. The rare singleness that was in his nature (so that he was all the warning moral voice, without distraction or counter-solicitation), was also in the stock he sprang from, clerical for generations, on both sides, and clerical in the Puritan sense. His ancestors had lived long (for nearly two centuries) in the same corner of New England, and during that period had preached and studied and prayed and practised. It is impossible to imagine a spirit better prepared in advance to be exactly what it was -- better educated for its office in its far-away unconscious beginnings. There is an inner satisfaction in seeing so straight, although so patient, a connection between the stem and the flower, and such a proof that when life wishes to produce something exquisite in quality she takes her measures many years in advance. A conscience like Emerson's could not have been turned off, as it were, from one generation to another: a succession of attempts, a long process of refining, was required. His perfection, in his own line, comes largely from the non- interruption of the process.
As most of us are made up of ill-assorted pieces, his reader, and Mr. Cabot's, envies him this transmitted unity, in which there was no mutual hustling or crowding of elements. It must have been a kind of luxury to be -- that is to feel -- so homogeneous, and it helps to account for his serenity, his power of acceptance, and that absence of personal passion which makes his private correspondence read like a series of beautiful circulars or expanded cards pour prendre cong. He had the equanimity of a result; nature had taken care of him and he had only to speak. He accepted himself as he accepted others, accepted everything; and his absence of eagerness, or in other words his modesty, was that of a man with whom it is not a question of success, who has nothing invested or at stake. The investment, the stake, was that of the race, of all the past Emersons and Bulkeleys and Waldos. There is much that makes us smile, to-day, in the commotion produced by
Of the three periods into which his life divides itself, the first was (as in the case of most men) that of movement, experiment and selection -- that of effort too and painful probation. Emerson had his message, but he was a good while looking for his form -- the form which, as he himself would have said, he never completely found and of which it was rather characteristic of him that his later years (with their growing refusal to give him the word), wishing to attack him in his most vulnerable point, where his tenure was least complete, had in some degree the effect of despoiling him. It all sounds rather bare and stern, Mr. Cabot's account of his youth and early manhood, and we get an impression of a terrible paucity of alternatives. If he would be neither a farmer nor a trader he could "teach school"; that was the main resource and a part of the general educative process of the young New Englander who proposed to devote himself to the things of the mind. There was an advantage in the nudity, however, which was that, in Emerson's case at least, the things of the mind did get themselves admirably well considered. If it be his great distinction and his special sign that he had a more vivid conception of the moral life than any one else, it is probably not fanciful to say that he owed it in part to the limited way in which he saw our capacity for living illustrated. The plain, God-fearing, practical society which
The genius itself it seems to me impossible to contest -- I mean the genius for seeing character as a real and supreme thing. Other writers have arrived at a more complete expression: Wordsworth and Goethe, for instance, give one a sense of having found their form, whereas with Emerson we never lose the sense that he is still seeking it. But no one has had so steady and constant, and above all so natural, a vision of what
"All these great and transcendent properties are ours. . . . Let us find room for this great guest in our small
We feel, or suspect, that Milton is thrown in as a hint that the London streets are no such great place, and it all sounds like a sort of pleading consolation against bleakness.
The beauty of a hundred passages of this kind in Emerson's pages is that they are effective, that they do come home, that they rest upon insight and not upon ingenuity, and that if they are sometimes obscure it is never with the obscurity of paradox. We seem to see the people turning out into the snow after hearing them, glowing with a finer glow than even the climate could give and fortified for a struggle with overshoes and the east wind.
"Look to it first and only, that fashion, custom, authority, pleasure, and money, are nothing to you, are not as bandages over your eyes, that you cannot see; but live with the privilege of the immeasurable mind. Not too anxious to visit periodically all families and each family in your parish connection, when you meet one of these men or women be to them a divine man; be to them thought and virtue; let their timid aspirations find in you a friend; let their trampled instincts be genially tempted out in your atmosphere; let their doubts know that you have doubted, and their wonder feel that you have wondered."
When we set against an exquisite passage like that, or like the familiar sentences that open the essay on History ("He that is admitted to the right of reason is made freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought, he may think; what a saint has felt, he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand"); when we compare the letters, cited by Mr. Cabot, to his wife from Springfield, Illinois (January 1853)
"Here I am in the deep mud of the prairies, misled I fear into this bog, not by a will-of-the-wisp, such as shine in bogs, but by a young New Hampshire editor, who over-estimated the strength of both of us, and fancied I should glitter in the prairie and draw the prairie birds and waders. It rains and thaws incessantly, and if we step off the short street we go up to the shoulders, perhaps, in mud. My chamber is a cabin; my fellow-boarders are legislators. . . . Two or three governors or ex-governors live in the house. . . . I cannot command daylight and solitude for study or for more than a scrawl." . . .
And another extract: --
"A cold, raw country this, and plenty of night-travelling and arriving at four in the morning to take the last and worst bed in the tavern. Advancing day brings mercy and favour to me, but not the sleep. . . . Mercury 15x below zero. . . . I find well-disposed, kindly people among these sinewy farmers of the North, but in all that is called cultivation they are only ten years old."
He says in another letter (in 1860), "I saw Michigan and its forests and the Wolverines pretty thoroughly;" and on another page Mr. Cabot shows him as speaking of his engagements to lecture in the West as the obligation to "wade, and freeze, and ride, and run, and suffer all manner of indignities." This was not New England, but as regards the country districts throughout, at that time, it was a question of degree. Certainly never was the fine wine of philosophy carried to remoter or queerer corners: never was a more delicate diet offered to "two or three governors, or ex-governors," living in a cabin. It was Mercury, shivering in a mackintosh, bearing nectar and ambrosia to the gods whom he wished those who lived in cabins to endeavour to feel that they might be.
I have hinted that the will, in the old New England society, was a clue without a labyrinth; but it had its use, nevertheless, in helping the young talent to find its mould. There were few or none ready-made: tradition was certainly not so oppressive
These ladies, however, were very private persons and not in the least of the reforming tribe: there are others who would have peopled Mr. Cabot's page to whom he gives no more than a mention. We must add that it is open to him to say that their features have become faint and indistinguishable to-day without more research than the question is apt to be worth: they are embalmed -- in a collective way -- the apprehensible
So he remained always, reading his lectures in the winter, writing them in the summer, and at all seasons taking wood-walks and looking for hints in old books.
"Delicious summer stroll through the pastures. . . . On the steep park of Conantum I have the old regret -- is all this beauty to perish? Shall none re-make this sun and wind; the sky-blue river; the river-blue sky; the yellow meadow, spotted with sacks and sheets of cranberry-gatherers; the red bushes; the iron-gray house, just the colour of the granite rocks; the wild orchard?"
His observation of Nature was exquisite -- always the direct, irresistible impression.
"The hawking of the wild geese flying by night; the thin note of the companionable titmouse in the winter day; the fall of swarms of flies in autumn, from combats high in the air, pattering down on the leaves like rain; the angry hiss of the wood-birds; the pine throwing out its pollen for the benefit of the next century." . . . (Literary Ethics.)
I have said there was no familiarity in him, but he was familiar with woodland creatures and sounds. Certainly, too, he was on terms of free association with his books, which were numerous and dear to him; though Mr. Cabot says, doubtless with justice, that his dependence on them was slight and that he was not "intimate" with his authors. They did not feed him but they stimulated; they were not his meat but his
In truth, by this term he means simply the cultivated man, the man who has had a liberal education, and there is a voluntary plainness in his use of it -- speaking of such people as the rustic, or the vulgar, speak of those who have a tincture
If a picture of that singular and very illustrative institution the old American lecture-system would have constituted a part of the filling-in of the ideal memoir of Emerson, I may further say, returning to the matter for a moment, that such a memoir would also have had a chapter for some of those Concord-haunting figures which are not so much interesting in themselves as interesting because for a season Emerson thought them so. And the pleasure of that would be partly that it would push us to inquire how interesting he did really think them. That is, it would bring up the question of his inner reserves and scepticisms, his secret ennuis and ironies, the way he sympathised for courtesy and then, with his delicacy and generosity, in a world after all given much to the literal, let his courtesy pass for adhesion -- a question particularly attractive to those for whom he has, in general, a fascination. Many entertaining problems of that sort present themselves for such readers: there is something indefinable for them in the mixture of which he was made -- his fidelity as an interpreter of the so-called transcendental spirit and his freedom from all wish for any personal share in the effect of his ideas. He drops them, sheds them, diffuses them, and we feel as if there would be a grossness in holding him to anything so temporal as a responsibility. He had the advantage, for
His detachment is shown in his whole attitude toward the transcendental movement -- that remarkable outburst of Romanticism on Puritan ground, as Mr. Cabot very well names it. Nothing can be more ingenious, more sympathetic and charming, than Emerson's account and definition of the matter in his lecture (of 1842) called "The Transcendentalist"; and yet nothing is more apparent from his letters and journals than that he regarded any such label or banner as a mere tiresome flutter. He liked to taste but not to drink -- least of all to become intoxicated. He liked to explain the transcendentalists but did not care at all to be explained by them: a doctrine "whereof you know I am wholly guiltless," he says to his wife in 1842, "and which is spoken of as a known and fixed
"It is a sort of maxim with me never to harp on the omnipotence of limitations. Least of all do we need any suggestion of checks and measures; as if New England were anything else. . . . Of so many fine people it is true that being so much they ought to be a little more, and missing that are naught. It is a sort of King Ren period; there is no doing, but rare thrilling prophecy from bands of competing minstrels."
That is his private expression about a large part of a ferment in regard to which his public judgment was that
"That indeed constitutes a new feature in their portrait, that they are the most exacting and extortionate critics. . . . These exacting children advertise us of our wants. There is no compliment, no smooth speech with them; they pay you only this one compliment of insatiable expectation; they aspire, they severely exact, and if they only stand fast in this watch-tower, and stand fast unto the end, and without end, then they are terrible friends, whereof poet and priest cannot but stand in awe; and what if they eat clouds and drink wind, they have not been without service to the race of man."
That was saying the best for them, as he always said it for everything; but it was the sense of their being "bands of competing minstrels" and their camp being only a "measure and check," in a society too sparse for a synthesis, that kept him from wishing to don their uniform. This was after all but a misfitting imitation of his natural wear, and what he would have liked was to put that off -- he did not wish to button it tighter. He said the best for his friends of the Dial, of Fruitlands and Brook Farm, in saying that they were fastidious and critical; but he was conscious in the next breath that what there was around them to be criticised was mainly a negative.
Emerson was not moved to believe in their fastidiousness as a productive principle even when they directed it upon abuses which he abundantly recognised. Mr. Cabot shows that he was by no means one of the professional abolitionists or philanthropists -- never an enrolled "humanitarian."
"We talk frigidly of Reform until the walls mock us. It is that of which a man should never speak, but if he have cherished it in his bosom he should steal to it in darkness, as an Indian to his bride. . . . Does he not do more to abolish slavery who works all day steadily in his own garden, than he who goes to the abolition meeting and makes a speech? He who does his own work frees a slave."
I must add that even while I transcribe these words there comes to me the recollection of the great meeting in the Boston Music Hall, on the first day of 1863, to celebrate the signing by Mr. Lincoln of the proclamation freeing the Southern slaves -- of the momentousness of the occasion, the vast excited multitude, the crowded platform and the tall, spare figure of Emerson, in the midst, reading out the stanzas that were published under the name of the Boston Hymn. They are not the happiest he produced for an occasion -- they do not compare with the verses on the "embattled farmers," read at Concord in 1857, and there is a certain awkwardness in some of them. But I well remember the immense effect with which his beautiful voice pronounced the lines --
"Pay ransom to the owner
And fill the bag to the brim.
Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
And ever was. Pay him!"
And Mr. Cabot chronicles the fact that the gran' rifiuto -- the great backsliding of Mr. Webster when he cast his vote in Congress for the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 -- was the one thing that ever moved him to heated denunciation. He felt Webster's apostasy as strongly as he had admired his genius. "Who has not helped to praise him? Simply he was the one American of our time whom we could produce as a finished work of nature." There is a passage in his journal (not a rough jotting, but, like most of the entries in it, a finished piece of writing), which is admirably descriptive of the wonderful orator and is moreover one of the very few portraits, or even personal sketches, yielded by Mr. Cabot's selections. It shows that he could observe the human figure and "render" it to good purpose.
"His splendid wrath, when his eyes become fire, is good to see, so intellectual it is -- the wrath of the fact and the cause he espouses, and not at all personal to himself. . . . These village parties must be dish-water to him, yet he shows himself just good- natured, just nonchalant enough; and he has his own way, without offending any one or losing any ground. . . . His expensiveness seems necessary to him; were he too prudent a Yankee it would be a sad deduction from his magnificence. I only wish he would not truckle [to the slave-holders]. I do not care how much he spends."
I doubtless appear to have said more than enough, yet I have passed by many of the passages I had marked for transcription from Mr. Cabot's volumes. There is one, in the first, that makes us stare as we come upon it, to the effect that Emerson "could see nothing in Shelley, Aristophanes, Don Quixote, Miss Austen, Dickens." Mr. Cabot adds that he rarely read a novel, even the famous ones (he has a point of contact here as well as, strangely enough, on two or three other sides with that distinguished moralist M. Ernest Renan, who, like Emerson, was originally a dissident priest and cannot imagine why people should write works of fiction); and thought Dante "a man to put into a museum, but not into your house; another Zerah Colburn; a prodigy of imaginative function, executive rather than contemplative or wise." The confession of an insensibility ranging from Shelley to Dickens
It has not, however, been the ambition of these remarks to account for everything, and I have arrived at the end without even pointing to the grounds on which Emerson justifies the honours of biography, discussion and illustration. I have assumed his importance and continuance, and shall probably not be gainsaid by those who read him. Those who do not will hardly rub him out. Such a book as Mr. Cabot's subjects a reputation to a test -- leads people to look it over and hold it up to the light, to see whether it is worth keeping in use or even putting away in a cabinet. Such a revision of Emerson has no relegating consequences. The result of it is once more the impression that he serves and will not wear out, and that indeed we cannot afford to drop him. His instrument makes him precious. He did something better than any one else; he had a particular faculty, which has not been surpassed, for speaking to the soul in a voice of direction and authority. There have been many spiritual voices appealing, consoling, reassuring, exhorting, or even denouncing and terrifying, but none has had just that firmness and just that purity. It penetrates further, it seems to go back to the roots of our feelings, to where conduct and manhood begin; and moreover, to us to-day, there is something in it that says that it is connected somehow with the virtue of the world, has wrought and achieved, lived in thousands of minds, produced a mass of character and life. And there is this further sign of Emerson's singular power, that he is a striking exception to the general rule that writings live in the last resort by their form; that they owe a large part of their fortune to the art with which they have been composed. It is hardly too much, or too little, to say of Emerson's writings in general that they were not composed at all. Many and many things are beautifully said; he had felicities, inspirations, unforgettable phrases; he had frequently an exquisite eloquence.
"O my friends, there are resources in us on which we have not yet drawn. There are men who rise refreshed on
None the less we have the impression that that search for a fashion and a manner on which he was always engaged never really came to a conclusion; it draws itself out through his later writings -- it drew itself out through his later lectures, like a sort of renunciation of success. It is not on these, however, but on their predecessors, that his reputation will rest. Of course the way he spoke was the way that was on the whole most convenient to him; but he differs from most men of letters of the same degree of credit in failing to strike us as having achieved a style. This achievement is, as I say, usually the bribe or toll-money on the journey to posterity; and if Emerson goes his way, as he clearly appears to be doing, on the strength of his message alone, the case will be rare, the exception striking, and the honour great.
Macmillan's Magazine, December 1887
Reprinted under the title "Emerson"
in Partial Portraits, 1888
(note-ch9-1) See THE CENTURY for May, June, and July 1882.
Henriette (Deluzy-Desportes) Field (10)
Home Sketches in France, and Other Papers. By the late Mrs. Henry M. Field. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1875.
This little work will have a value to many persons as a memento of a woman of much social eminence -- a woman who introduced into quarters where they would otherwise (and regrettably) have been little known, those gifts and graces which we are taught to attribute to the social and conversational play of the French mind. This will be its chief value, for the papers of which it is composed are of a slight and unpretending sort. They are agreeable, however, and indicate the multiplicity of the author's interests. Some of them, at least -- the private letters from Europe -- were originally written in French, and we are sorry that the editor should have thought it necessary to translate them. Easily, apparently, as Mrs. Field handled English, it is probable that in her own tongue her style had a stronger savor -- a savor of which her many friends would have relished a literary memorial. If the letters contributed directly to the press were written by Mrs. Field in the excellent English in which they now appear, this seems to us a remarkable literary feat. But even if they suffered certain corrections, it is perhaps not fanciful to see in them, slight and amateurish as they confess themselves to be, a trace of that natural neatness of style, that instinctive sense of shapeliness, which is perhaps the most characteristic sign of the charming race to which Mrs. Field belonged, and so many of whose virtues (even the incongruous ones) she apparently contrived to reconcile with so many of ours.
Nation, June 10,
1875
Julia Constance Fletcher (11)
Kismet. Boston: Roberts Bros., 1877.
There is something unusually clever and graceful in this little novel, which is decidedly superior to the ordinary specimens of American fiction. It strikes us as very unequal, but even in its feeblest portions it does not cease to be readable. This inequality is so great as almost to suggest that the book may be the work of two persons -- one of whom has written the descriptive portions, the other of whom has written the "talk." There is a great deal both of description and of talk; too much of each, we think, in proportion to the amount of action and of narrative. The talk is often clever, sometimes witty; but it is inferior to the description, which is usually excellent and frequently charming. The weakness of the book is that the author has given herself too little of a story to tell, and that she has told that little inartistically. The tale is altogether feminine, whether it be by one person or two. We say this in spite of the pretty passage near the close about the Emperor Hadrian and the suicide of the beautiful Antinous, which appears rather to have been written by a young lady who had not a definite idea what she was saying than by a young man who had such an idea, and who was still determined to say it. `Kismet' is the history of a voyage up the Nile, and of certain love-passages on dahabeahs and in Pharaonic tombs, between Miss Bell Hamlyn and Mr. Arthur Livingston. The dahabeahs and the tombs, the scenery and incidents of the usual Nile voyage, are very agreeably and vividly sketched; there is much reality and definiteness of detail about the author's pictures of the Egyptian landscape; but Miss Hamlyn's love- affair strikes us as lacking interest -- it is too small a kernel for so large a husk. She is a young girl of nineteen, who gives such an impression of juvenility that the hero begins to call her "Bell" and "my dear child" immediately after he makes her acquaintance. This hero is that rara avis, the American young man of the world and gentleman of leisure, who finds his native country a disagreeable place to live in and spends his melancholy prime in foreign lands -- the most beautiful and fascinating type in modern fiction. His
Nation, June 7, 1877
We had occasion, some months since, to speak of `Kismet' as a clever and promising novel, and we are happy to be able to say that the author of `Kismet' has redeemed the pledge of that work with even greater promptness than was to be expected. `Mirage' strikes us as very clever indeed, and as a decided advance upon its predecessor. Its faults are the same -- excessive slightness of subject and an unbusiness-like way of telling the story, which is put before the reader too much by mere allusion and rather redundant dialogue -- but they are much less striking. On the other hand, the merits of the book -- great charm of description, a great deal of fineness of observation, a great deal of wit in the conversations, a constant facility and grace of style -- these good points are decidedly more noticeable. Like `Kismet,' `Mirage' is a slight love-story interwoven in the account of a journey in the East. In the former tale the author set her characters afloat upon the Nile (we say "her" characters, for, in spite of the name upon the title-page, the tone of these pages is irremediably feminine), and in the present performance she conducts them on horseback through the charming incidents of a tour in Syria and Palestine. A large portion of her narrative is given over to description, which is always very well done -- very vivid and real; so that the book comes under the perilous head of that class of literature which is vulgarly known as "scenery novels." But she escapes the danger of dulness by the success with which she usually renders a fresh, personal
A more serious danger with the author of `Mirage' seems to be a disposition to content herself with altogether too slender a dramatic pivot. The donne of the present tale is a very insubstantial foundation for a long story. There is a Miss Constance Varley, who has been invited to travel in Syria with Mr. and Mrs. Thayer. She is in love with Denis Lawrence, supposedly "unbeknown," as the comic writers say, to the gentleman. She has left him in America, but he turns up unexpectedly at Damascus, and proves also to be in love with her. The young lady has another devotee in the person of Mr. Jack Stuart, who has been travelling in her company, and for whom she can bring herself to entertain no sentiment more tender than friendly esteem. But Lawrence supposes that she is in love with Stuart, and therefore, though he spends much time in sitting with Miss Varley, in great intimacy, among the Damascene orchards in springtime, he never declares his passion. The young girl, on her side, is dying of love for him, and yet she gratuitously and unnaturally allows him to rest in his error. He takes an abrupt leave of her, and she then marries young Stuart, while Lawrence (who is a very clever artist) paints her portrait from memory, and gives it the title of "Mirage." Even if a larger amount of motive were attributed to Miss Varley's conduct, the incident would be rather slight for the author's purpose; and, as the case stands -- the reader being quite unable to conceive why she should not take the simple and natural course of resenting, almost with indignation (a highly probable impulse in a girl, given the circumstances), the imputation of being "engaged" to Stuart -- as the case stands, we say, the theme is reduced to the level of one of those little romances which adorn the weekly "story-papers." The heroine is very gracefully sketched, though the author is to a certain extent guilty of the regrettable tendency, common among American writers of fiction, of making her utter those "smart" comicalities which are the note of the "lady-correspondents" of certain journals. The prosaic, yet manly, personality of the accepted lover is very clearly indicated; but the aesthetic young man who fails so awkwardly to
Nation, March 7,
1878
William C. Gannett (12)
Ezra Stiles Gannett, Unitarian Minister in Boston, 1824-1871. Memoir, by his son, William C. Gannett. Boston: Roberts Bros., 1875.
This extremely voluminous memoir deserves attention, not because Dr. Gannett was a man of remarkable force, but because there is something rather strikingly typical both in his character and career and in the execution of the work. Mr. William Gannett has evidently determined to be readable -- to make as far as the subject permits a "picturesque" biography. From his own point of view, we should say he had succeeded even brilliantly. His book is elaborate, and yet clear and vivacious, and it comes as near as possible to being an entertaining account of a man whose intellectual character was singularly monotonous and colorless. Considering that it is written from the filial standpoint, it is even curiously candid and impartial; it seems to us, in fact, to carry contemplative frankness to rather painful lengths. If we call such a work, written in such a way, typical, it is not that we find it easy to express the various strange things it suggests. Mr. William Gannett looks at things in a larger way than his father; he is, in literature and theology, eminently of the period, as the phrase is; and there is something very odd, and, to one who reads between the lines, rather melancholy, in seeing Dr. Gannett's subdued and shrinking personality converted into a theme for a regular high-colored "story," with picturesque headings to the chapters. The whole work belongs to the class of "intimate" biography, and Dr. Gannett was so stubborn a conservative that there is a certain irreverence in the application of the process to him. It is a process by which some of his most familiar and most valued canons of taste are rather rudely handled. Dr. Gannett, for instance, had the misfortune to be lame, and to be obliged to use in walking two sticks with crutch-handles. It is not speaking harshly to say that this idiosyncrasy has been made a pretext for picturesque touches -- used by the biographer as a pigment, an "effect." It is repeatedly alluded to, in a sketchy manner, to enliven the narrative; it constitutes the subject of two engraved vignettes. This is the sort of thing one looks for
Dr. Gannett was a Unitarian minister in Boston from 1824 to 1871, and an account of his life involves a somewhat detailed history of New England Unitarianism during that long period. Mr. Gannett has treated of this subject in two interesting chapters -- the best, perhaps, in his book. In the first he sketches the formation, early in the century, of the sect as a sect: "The Girding" he characteristically calls his narrative. In the second he depicts, with effective strokes, the great Transcendental and Radical schism of which Mr. Emerson, first, and Theodore Parker, later, were the most eminent apostles. The presiding spirit at the outset of Dr. Gannett's career had been Dr. Channing, and it was under his untarnished wing that he took his first steps in the ministry. He was Dr. Channing's colleague in the pulpit from the year 1824 until the latter's death in 1842. He then assumed the sole charge of the congregation, and kept it till his own sad death, by a railway accident, in 1871. He was purely and simply a minister, and in the practical rather than the intellectual sense. He produced nothing but his weekly sermons, and treated none but religious topics. He was a man, we should say, of an extreme simplicity of organization. He was a born minister; he stepped straight from his school days into the pulpit, and looked at the world, ever afterwards, from the pulpit alone.
Nation, April 1,
1875
Henry Harland (13)
The Story-Teller at Large: Mr. Henry Harland. Comedies and Errors. London and New York: J. Lane, 1898.
We receive now and then an impression that seems to hint at the advent of a time for looking more closely into the old notion that, to have a quality of his own, a writer must needs draw his sap from the soil of his origin. The great writers of the world have, as a general thing, struck us so as fed by their native air and furnished forth with things near and dear to them, that an author without a country would have come long ago -- had any one ever presumed to imagine him -- to be a figure as formless as an author without a pen, a publisher or a subject. Such would have been especially, to the inner vision, and for the very best reasons, the deep incongruity of the novelist at large. We are ridden by the influence of types established, and as the novelist is essentially a painter we assign him to his climate and circumstances as confidently as we assign Velasquez and Gainsborough to their schools. Does he not paint the things he knows? and are not the things he knows - - knows best, of course -- just the things for which he has the warrant of the local, the national consciousness? We settle the question easily -- have settled it, that is, once for all; nothing being easier than to appeal for proof, with a fond and loyal glance, to Dickens, to Scott, to Balzac, to Hawthorne, respectively so English, so Scotch, so French, so American, particularly in the matter of subject, to which part of the business an analysis not prone to sin by excess of penetration has mainly found itself confined.
But if our analysis limps along as it may, the elements of the matter and the field of criticism so change and so extend themselves that an increase of refreshment will practically perhaps not be denied us even by the pace obtained. If it was perfectly true earlier in the century and in a larger world -- I speak of the globe itself -- that he was apt to paint best who painted nearest home, the case may well be, according to some symptoms, in course of modification. Who shall say, at the rate things are going, what is to be "near" home in the future and what is to be far from it? London, in the time of
The prospect, surely, therefore, is already interesting, and while it widens and the marks of it multiply we may watch the omens and wonder if they have a lesson for us. I find myself much prompted to some such speculation by Mr. Henry Harland's new volume of Comedies and Errors; though I confess that in reading into the influences behind it the idea of dispatriation I take a liberty for which, on its face, it opens no door. To speak of a writer as detached, one must at least know what he is detached from, and in this collection of curiously ingenious prose pieces there is not a single clear sound of the fundamental, the native note, not the tip of a finger held out indeed to any easy classifying. This very fact in itself perhaps constitutes the main scrap of evidence on behalf of a postulate of that particular set of circumstances -- those of the trans-atlantic setting -- that lends itself to being most unceremoniously, as it were, escaped from. There is not a single direct glance at American life in these pages, and only two or three implied; but the very oddity of the case is in our gradual impression, as we read, that conclusive proof resides most of all in what is absent, in the very quality that has dropped out. This quality, when it is present, is that of the bird in the cage
To put it less indirectly, I have found half the interest of Comedies and Errors to be the peculiar intensity of that mark of the imagination that may best be described as the acute sense of the "Europe" -- synthetic symbol! -- of the American mind, and that therefore, until Asia and Africa shall pour in their contingent of observers, we are reduced to regarding as almost the sharpest American characteristic. If it be not quite always the liveliest of all, it is certainly the liveliest on the showing of such work as I here consider, the author's maturest -- work which probably gives quite the best occasion the critic in quest of an adventure can find to-day for sounding, by way of a change, the mystery of what nutrition may eventually be offered to those artistic spirits for whom the "countries" are committed to the process, that I have glanced at, of overlapping and getting mixed. A special instance is illuminating, and Mr. Harland is a distinguished one. He is the more of one that he has clearly thought out a form -- of great interest and promise, a form that tempers the obscurity of our question by eliminating one danger. If we are to watch the "cosmopolitan" painter on trial, it will always be so much to the good for him that he has mastered a method and learned how to paint. Then we may, with all due exhilaration, set down all his shipwrecks to his unanchored state.
Mr. Harland's method is that of the "short story" which has of late become an object of such almost extravagant dissertation. If it has awaked to consciousness, however, it has doubtless only done what most things are doing in an age of organized talk. It took itself, in the comparatively silent years, less seriously, and there was perhaps a more general feeling that you both wrote and read your short story best when you did so in peace and patience. To turn it out, at any rate, as well as possible, by private, and almost diffident, instinct and reflection, was a part of the general virtue of the individual,
Are there not two quite distinct effects to be produced by this rigour of brevity -- the two that best make up for the many left unachieved as requiring a larger canvas? The one with which we are most familiar is that of the detached incident, single and sharp, as clear as a pistol-shot; the other, of rarer performance, is that of the impression, comparatively generalised -- simplified, foreshortened, reduced to a particular perspective -- of a complexity or a continuity. The former is an adventure comparatively safe, in which you have, for the most part, but to put one foot after the other. It is just the risks of the latter, on the contrary, that make the best of the sport. These are naturally -- given the general reduced scale -- immense, for nothing is less intelligible than bad foreshortening, which, if it fails to mean everything intended, means less than nothing. It is to Mr. Harland's honour that he always "goes in" for the risks. The Friend of Man, for instance, is an attempt as far removed as possible from the snap of the pistol-shot; it is an excellent example of the large in a small dose, the smaller form put on its mettle and trying to do -- by sharp selection, composition, presentation and the sacrifice of verbiage -- what the longer alone is mostly supposed capable of. It is the picture of a particular figure -- eccentric,
Yet, in the actual and prospective flood of fiction, the greatest of all the streams that empty into the sea of the verbose, the relief may still be immense that comes even from escapes for which we pay by incidental losses. We are often tempted to wonder if almost any escape is not better than mere submersion. Petit-Bleu, in this volume, Cousin Rosalys, Tirala-Tirala, Rooms, all show the same love of evocation for evocation's sake, if need be: the successful suggestion of conditions, states, circumstances, aspects; the suggestion of the feeling of things in youth, of the remembrance of this feeling in age; the suggestion, above all, of that most difficult of all things for the novelist to render, the duration of time, the drag and friction of its passage, the fact that things have not taken place, as the fashionable fables of our day, with their terrific abuse of dialogue and absence of composition, seem to have embraced the mission of representing, just in the hour or two it may take to estimate the manner of the book. The feeling of things -- in especial of the particular place, of the lost and regretted period and chance, always, to fond fancy, supremely charming and queer and exquisite -- is, in fact, Mr. Harland's general subject and most frequent inspiration. And what I find characteristic and curious in this is that the feeling is, in the most candid way in the world, but with new infatuations
It is a very wonderful thing, this Europe of the American in general and of the author of Comedies and Errors in particular -- in particular, I say, because Mr. Harland tends, in a degree quite his own, to give it the romantic and tender voice, the voice of fancy pure and simple, without the disturbance of other elements, such as comparison and reaction, either violent or merciful. He is not even "international," which is, after all, but another way, perhaps, of being a slave to the "countries," possibly twice or even three times a jingo. It is a complete surrender of that province of the mind with which registration and subscription have to do. Thus is presented a disencumbered, sensitive surface for the wonderful Europe to play on. The question for the critic is that of the value of what this surface, so liberally, so artfully prepared, may give back. What strikes me as making the author of the volume before me a case to watch, as I have said, is that fact that he has a form so compact and an execution so light and firm. He is just yet, I think, a little too much everywhere, a trifle astray, as regards his inspiration, in the very wealth of his memories and the excess, even, of his wit -- specimens of which I might gather, had I space, from the charming Invisible Prince, from The Queen's Pleasure, from Flower o' the Clove, from each indeed, I have noted as I read, of these compositions.
He is lost in the vision, all whimsical and picturesque, of palace secrets, rulers and pretenders and ministers of bewilderingly light comedy, in undiscoverable Balkan States, Bohemias of the seaboard, where the queens have platonic friendships with professional English, though not American, humourists; in the heavy, many-voiced air of the old Roman streets and of the high Roman saloons where cardinals are part of the furniture; in the hum of prodigious Paris, heard in corners of old cafs; in the sense of the deep English background as much as that of any of these; in a general facility of reference, in short, to the composite spectacle and the polyglot doom. Most of his situations are treated in the first person, and as they skip across frontiers and pop up in parks and palaces they give us the impression that, all suffused with
Fortnightly Review, April
1898
James Albert Harrison (14)
A Group of Poets and their Haunts. By James Albert Harrison. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1875.
Mr. Harrison dates his preface from "Randolph-Macon College," Virginia, from which we infer that his volume has, intellectually, a Southern pedigree, as it were, and was originally addressed to Southern readers. Indeed, without this indication, we should have arrived at some such conclusion, for the author's style, on its face, reflects the fervors of a high temperature. It seems proper to give Mr. Harrison the benefit of his circumstances, and to observe that there are good reasons why he should write as he does; but it is fair, on the other hand, to remember that Southern literature is not, by an absolutely invincible necessity, pitched in the uncomfortably high key of these essays. It is desirable, in other words, both that the Southern view of intellectual things should not seem to an author (especially if he is making his first experiments) the most felicitous and profitable one, and that the Southern mind should not accept such performances as those of Mr. Harrison for more than they are worth. Their value seems to us quite relative. Just what the Southern view of things consists of we should, ourselves, be at loss to explain: read Mr. Harrison, and you will get a notion. Roughly speaking, it consists very much more of words than ideas -- of sound than of substance. Mr. Harrison handles words with a certain natural vocation for the task; but he is a clever conjuror rather than a real magician. He does not always make the best use of his cleverness, either; he is liable to grievous slips and mishaps; the same thing, with more care, could be better done. We say with more care -- with a better use of the same material; for Mr. Harrison's book is good enough to make it a pity it is not much better. He has an excellent selection of subjects -- subjects which are a proof of his having real literary and aesthetic predilections. He has apparently made a long stay in Europe, and spent his time there in a sufficiently scholarly manner. Heine, Byron (viewed in connection with his places of residence in Italy), Tasso, Boccaccio; the picturesque aspects of Copenhagen; Bellmann,
The whole article upon Byron is extremely bad; both the sentiment and the style are in the highest degree sophomorical. Mr. Harrison's judgments seem to us throughout of singularly little value, and his whole manner of criticism extremely flimsy and erratic. His characterizations have neither head nor tail, neither beginning nor end; he has an extraordinary
Nation, June 10,
1875
Gilbert Haven (15)
Our Next-Door Neighbor: A Winter in Mexico. By Gilbert Haven. New York: Harper & Bros., 1875.
Mr. Haven takes his reader upon an interesting journey, but he is an insufferable travelling-companion. We have read many narratives of travel in which the manner has been cruelly detrimental to the subject; but we remember none in which this has been so fatally the case as in Mr. Haven's singularly diffuse, ill-written, and vulgar record of his observations and opinions. He went to Mexico, as an agent of the Methodist Episcopal Church, to arrange for the establishment of a mission in the capital, and he informs us that he was successful, in so far as that a building suitable for a meeting-house was purchased and opened, in spite of much perfidious counter-plotting on the part of the Catholic authorities. This establishment is now in operation, and with "its dear, delightful prayer-meetings," as the author has it, is hastening on that immediate millennium which he promises the depraved Mexicans at the end of each chapter -- "a city holy unto the Lord, with sanctuaries filled with grateful, joyful, holy, intelligent, prosperous worshippers. No rags, no beggary, no Sabbath-breaking, no superstition." In gathering literary materials, Mr. Haven's success was by no means proportionate. His work is mere crude, unconsidered, unrevised scribbling. Its diffuseness exceeds all tolerable bounds, and a good half of it, we should say, might have been suppressed without our knowledge of Mexico suffering a jot. There is page upon page of incoherent chatter about wholly irrelevant things thrust at us without rhyme, reason, or grammar, interspersed with witticisms of a style peculiar to the author, and garnished with his views upon Darwinism, Tyndallism, the lager-beer question, the tobacco question, the female suffrage, the tombs in Mount Auburn Cemetery, and the opinion of the "Misses Warner" regarding them, the stability of the Prussian army, the merits of "Mr. George L. Brown" the artist, the criminality of Mr. Bryant in not leaving Homer to Mr. Longfellow to translate, and other topics equally interesting in themselves but equally wide of the reader's actual care. If
He entered Mexico at Vera Cruz, spent, apparently, the greater part of the winter at the capital, and then journeyed northward past Queretaro, the scene of Maximilian's execution, through the silver mines of Guanajuato, to San Luis Potosi, and thence to Matamoras, by a three- weeks' stage-drive, which, for reasons of the author's own, figures in his pages as a sea-voyage, the long chapters devoted to it being entitled "Out at Sea," "Mid-Ocean," "Nearing Shore," and "Into Port." For a serious book of travel this is misleading, but it is a specimen of Mr. Haven's irrepressible humor. Here is another: "It is a baby landscape, and all the more charming for its infantile littleness. The sun goes down as we go up, and by the time the top is reached the baby, in its cradle of lofty hills, has gone into shadow and approaching sleep." Here is yet another: "You have heard of the silver mines of Mexico? Who has not? Curiosity and churchianity led our first steps to these treasures." The following should perhaps also be interpreted as a genial pleasantry addressed to that large and respectable section of the community who confess to a relish for malt liquor: "I tasted it [the pulqui], and was satisfied. It is only not so villanous a drink as lager, and London porter, and Bavarian beer, and French vinegar-wine, and Albany ale. It is hard to tell which of these is stinkingest of the stinking kind." It is true that here is another passage which seems to re-establish Mr. Haven's gravity at the expense of his politeness: "How glad I was to read in Monterey last Saturday that Massachusetts had repealed the Beer Act, and by such a grand majority. The fall of '66 is the rising again of '73. Though she may fall again, it will only be to a perpetual struggle until she shall attain a permanent deliverance. How far shines that good deed in this naughty world! Away across the country and into this land, that no more dreams of prohibition than it does of Protestantism, burns this ray of the coming sun that shall renew the face of all the land and of all lands." Here is a touch which the reader may interpret as he chooses: "I think some of the most scared anti-agrarians would be almost as
Mr. Haven was apparently an active traveller; he used his eyes sharply and saw what there was to be seen. He appreciates ungrudgingly the extraordinary beauty of the great Mexican table-land and its extreme charm of climate -- though he judges the people from that exclusively hostile and contemptuous standpoint which sacrifices discrimination to self-complacency. Mr. Haven does not appear to have come in contact with Mexican society and manners at any point whatever -- an unfortunate shortcoming in a missionary. But were his merits as a traveller very much greater than they are, they would be quite swallowed up in the unqualifiable vulgarity and flippancy of his narrative. We do not think with him that the Mexicans are going to leap into civilization through the forswearing of beer or the erection of Methodist conventicles; but we nevertheless have the cause of civilization at heart, and we should feel as if we were rendering it a very poor service if we recommended any one to read Mr. Haven's thoroughly ill-made book.
Nation, July 8,
1875
Julian Hawthorne (16)
Julian Hawthorne, Idolatry: A Romance. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1874.
It has been more than once remarked that, on the whole, the penalties attached to bearing an eminent name are equal to the privileges. To be the son of a man of genius is at the best to be born to a heritage of invidious comparisons, and the case is not bettered if one attempts to follow directly in the paternal footsteps. One's name gets one an easy hearing, but it by no means guarantees one a genial verdict; indeed, the kinder the general sentiment has been toward the parent, the more disposed it seems to deal out rigid justice to the son. The standard by which one is measured is uncomfortably obtrusive; one is expected ex officio to do well, and one finally wonders whether there is not a certain felicity in having so indirect a tenure of the public ear that the report of one's experiments may, if need be, pass unnoticed. These familiar reflections are suggested by the novel lately published by Mr. Julian Hawthorne, a writer whose involuntary responsibilities are perhaps of an exceptionally trying kind. The author of The Scarlet Letter and Twice-Told Tales was a genius of an almost morbid delicacy, and the rough presumption would be that the old wine would hardly bear transfusion into new bottles; that, the original mold being broken, this fine spirit had better be left to evaporate. Mr. Julian Hawthorne is already known (in England, we believe, very favorably) as author of a tale called Bressant. In his own country his novel drew forth few compliments, but in truth it seemed to us to deserve neither such very explicit praise nor such unsparing reprobation. It was an odd book, and it is difficult to speak either well or ill of it without seeming to say more than one intends. Few books of the kind, perhaps, that have been so valueless in performance have been so suggestive by the way; few have contrived to impart an air of promise to such an extraordinary tissue of incongruities. The sum of Bressant's crimes was, perhaps, that it was ludicrously young, but there were several good things in it in spite of this grave error. There was force and spirit, and the suggestion of a perhaps obtrusively individual temper, and various signs of a
After a due interval, Mr. Hawthorne has made another experiment, and here it is, rather than as applied to Bressant, that our remarks on the perils of transmitted talent are in place. Idolatry, oddly enough, reminds the perspicacious reader of the late Mr. Hawthorne's manner more forcibly than its predecessor, and the author seems less to be working off his likeness to his father than working into it. Mr. Julian Hawthorne is very far from having his father's perfection of style, but even in style the analogy is observable. "Suppose two sinners of our daylight world," he writes, "to meet for the first time, mutually unknown, on a night like this. Invisible, only audible, how might they plunge profound into most naked intimacy, read aloud to each other the secrets of their deepest hearts! Would the confession lighten their souls, or make them twice as heavy as before? Then, the next morning, they might meet and pass, unrecognizing and unrecognized. But would the knot binding them to each other be any the less real, because neither knew to whom he was tied? Some day, in the midst of friends, in the brightest glare of the sunshine, the tone of a voice would strike them pale and cold." And elsewhere: "He had been accustomed to look at himself as at a third person, in whose faults or successes he was alike interested; but although his present mental attitude might have moved him to smile, he, in fact, felt no such impulse. The hue of his deed had permeated all possible forms of himself, thus barring him from any stand-point whence to see its humorous aspect. The sun would not shine on it!" Both the two ideas, here, and the expression, will seem to the reader like old friends; they are of the family of those arabesques and
Atlantic Monthly, December 1874
Mr. Hawthorne is decidedly disappointing. He strikes us as having inherited a certain portion of his father's genius. He writes with vigor and vivacity, and his style has a charm of its own; but he perpetually suggests more than he performs, and leaves the reader waiting for something that never comes. There is something masculine and out of the common way in his manner of going to work, but the use he makes of his talent is not characterized by a high degree of wisdom, and the reader's last impression is of a strange immaturity of thought. `Saxon Studies' is such a book as a very young man might write in a season of combined ill-humor and conscious cleverness; but it is a book which most young men would very soon afterwards be sorry to have written. We suspect that this intelligent compunction will never be Mr. Hawthorne's portion, and the feeling makes us judge his volume with a certain harshness. The author fairly convinces us that he is not likely ever to understand why the tone in which he has chosen to talk about the worthy inhabitants of Dresden is not a rational, or a profitable, or a philosophic, or a really amusing one. Mr. Hawthorne spins his thread out of his own fancy, and at the touch of reality it would very soon snap. He had a perfect right, of course, to produce a fanciful book about Dresden; but such a book, as it gives our imagination some trouble, is more than usually bound to justify
He declares, in an amusing preface, that "his interest in Saxony and the Saxons is of the most moderate kind -- certainly not enough to provoke a treatise upon them. They are as dull and featureless a race as exists in this century, and the less one has to do with them, the better. But the plan of his work requiring some concrete nucleus round which to group such thoughts and fancies as he wished to ventilate, and the Saxon capital chancing to have been his residence of late years, he has used it rather than any other place to serve his turn in this respect." This strikes us as an explanation after the fact. In so far as `Saxon Studies' had a "plan," we suspect it consisted of the simple desire on the author's part to pour forth his aversion to a city in which, for several years, he had not been able to guard himself against being regrettably irritable and uncomfortable. Dresden has served his turn, and enabled him to write his book; he ought at least in fairness to admit that there was something to say about her. But in truth, of what there was to say about her, even for ill, Mr. Hawthorne strikes us as having made but little. Of "plan" his volume contains less than the pardonable minimum; it has little coherency and little definiteness of statement. It is taken for granted in the first few pages, in an off-hand, allusive manner, that the Saxons are an ignoble and abominable race, and this note is struck at desultory intervals, in the course of a good deal of light, rambling talk about nothing in particular, through the rest of the volume; but the promise is never justified, the aversion is never explained, the story is never told. Before we know it we have Mr. Hawthorne talking, as of a notorious fact, about "the cold, profound selfishness which forms the foundation and framework of the national and individual character in every walk of life, the wretched chill of which must ultimately annul the warmth of the most fervent German eulogist," etc. This is a sweeping but an interesting
In spite of Mr. Hawthorne's six years' residence in Dresden, his judgments appear to be formed only upon those matters which limit the horizon of a six weeks' sojourner -- the tramways, the cabmen, the policemen, the beer-saloons. When he invites us to penetrate into a Dresden house, we find he means only to gossip rather invidiously about the parties, and to talk about the way the doors open and the rooms are distributed. The most successful pages in his volume are an extremely clever and amusing supposititious report, from a local newspaper, of the appearance of the first street-car, and a charming sketch of a beer- maiden, or waitress in a saloon, who invites the author and his friend to be her partners at a ball. These are the only cases we can recall in which Mr. Hawthorne's humor is not acrid and stingy. For the rest, he gives us no report of his social observations proper, of his impressions of private manners and morals; no examples of sentiments, opinions, conversations, ways of living and thinking.
Nation, March 30, 1876
It is difficult to know how to speak of Mr. Julian Hawthorne, and it may certainly be said that this hesitation and perplexity are a practical compliment. They prove, at least, that he is not commonplace. He is not, indeed; and, in addition to this negative merit, the work before us may lay claim to several positive ones in a much higher degree than its predecessors. `Garth' strikes us as a decided improvement upon `Bressant' and `Idolatry'; it is a very much riper and wiser work. We must add that we use these terms in a strictly relative sense; for Mr. Hawthorne's standing fault seems to be a certain incurable immaturity and crudity. Even about `Garth'
Nation, June 21,
1877
Nathaniel Hawthorne (17)
Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1872.
Mr. Hawthorne is having a posthumous productivity almost as active as that of his lifetime. Six volumes have been compounded from his private journals, an unfinished romance is doing duty as a "serial," and a number of his letters, with other personal memorials, have been given to the world. These liberal excisions from the privacy of so reserved and shade-seeking a genius suggest forcibly the general question of the proper limits of curiosity as to that passive personality of an artist of which the elements are scattered in portfolios and table-drawers. It is becoming very plain, however, that whatever the proper limits may be, the actual limits will be fixed only by a total exhaustion of matter. There is much that is very worthy and signally serviceable to art itself in this curiosity, as well as much that is idle and grossly defiant of the artist's presumptive desire to limit and define the ground of his appeal to fame. The question is really brought to an open dispute between this instinct of self- conservatism and the general fondness for squeezing an orange dry. Artists, of course, as time goes on, will be likely to take the alarm, empty their table-drawers, and level the approaches to their privacy. The critics, psychologists, and gossip-mongers may then glean amid the stubble.
Our remarks are not provoked by any visible detriment conferred on Mr. Hawthorne's fame by these recent publications. He has very fairly withstood the ordeal; which, indeed, is as little as possible an ordeal in his case, owing to the superficial character of the documents. His journals throw but little light on his personal feelings, and even less on his genius per se. Their general effect is difficult to express. They deepen our sense of that genius, while they singularly diminish our impression of his general intellectual power. There can be no better proof of his genius than that these common daily scribblings should unite so irresistible a charm with so little distinctive force. They represent him, judged with any real critical rigor, as superficial, uninformed, incurious, inappreciative;
These volumes of Italian notes, charming as they are, are on the whole less rich and substantial than those on England. The theme, in this case, is evidently less congenial. "As I walked by the hedges yesterday," he writes at Siena, "I could have fancied that the olive trunks were those of apple-trees, and that I were in one or other of the two lands that I love better than Italy." There are in these volumes few sentences so deeply sympathetic as that in which he declares that "of all the lovely closes that I ever beheld, that of Peterborough Cathedral is to me the most delightful; so quiet is it, so solemnly
It was in midwinter of 1858 that Mr. Hawthorne journeyed from England to Italy. He went by sea from Marseilles to Civita Vecchia, and arrived at Rome weary, homeless, dejected, and benumbed. "Ah! that was a dismal time!" he says with a shudder, alluding to it among the happier circumstances of his second visit. His imagination, dampened and stiffened by that Roman cold of which he declares himself unable to express the malignity, seems to have been slow to perceive its opportunities. He spent his first fortnight shivering over his fire, venturing out by snatches, and longing for an abode in the tepid, stagnant, constant climate -- as one may call it -- of St. Peter's. There seems from the first to have been nothing inflammable in his perception of things; there was a comfortable want of eagerness in his mind. Little by little, however, we see him thaw and relent, and in his desultory strolls project a ray of his gentle fancy, like a gleam of autumnal American sunshine, over the churches, statues, and ruins. From the first he is admirably honest. He never pretends to be interested unless he has been really touched; and he never attempts to work himself into a worshipful glow because it is expected of a man of fancy. He has the tone of expecting very little of himself in this line, and when by chance he is pleased and excited, he records it with modest surprise. He confesses to indifference, to ignorance and weariness, with a sturdy candor which has far more dignity, to our sense, than the merely mechanical heat of less sincere spirits. Mr. Hawthorne would assent to nothing that he could not understand; his understanding on the general aesthetic line was not comprehensive; and the attitude in which he figures to the mind's eye throughout the book is that of turning away from some dusky altar-piece with a good-humored shrug, which is not in the least a condemnation of the work, but simply an admission of personal incompetency. The pictures
Mr. Hawthorne left Rome late in the spring, and travelled slowly up to Florence in the blessed fashion of the days when, seen through the open front of a crawling vettura, with her clamorous beggars, her black-walled mountain-towns, the unfolding romance of her landscape, Italy was seen as she really needs and deserves to be seen. Mr. Hawthorne's minute and vivid record of this journey is the most delightful portion of these volumes, and, indeed, makes well-nigh as charming a story as that of the enchanted progress of the two friends in the Marble Faun from Monte Beni to Perugia. He spent the summer in Florence -- first in town, where he records many talks with Mr. Powers, the sculptor, whom he invests, as he is apt to do the persons who impress him, with a sort of mellow vividness of portraiture which deepens what is gracious in his observations, and gains absolution for what is shrewd; and afterwards at a castellated suburban villa -- the original of the dwelling of his Donatello. This last fact, by the way, is a little of a disenchantment, as we had fancied that gentle hero living signorial-wise in some deeper Tuscan rurality. Mr. Hawthorne took Florence quietly and soberly -- as became the summer weather; and bids it farewell in the gravity of this sweet-sounding passage, which we quote as one of many:
"This evening I have been on the tower-top star-gazing and looking at the comet which waves along the sky like an
Mr. Hawthorne returned to Rome in the autumn, spending some time in Siena on his way. His pictures of the strange, dark little mountain-cities of Radicofani and Bolsena, on his downward journey, are masterpieces of literary etching. It is impossible to render better that impression as of a mild nightmare which such places make upon the American traveller. "Rome certainly draws itself into my heart," he writes on his return, "as I think even London, or even Concord itself, or even old sleepy Salem never did and never will." The result of this increased familiarity was the mature conception of the romance of his "Marble Faun." He journalizes again, but at rarer intervals, though his entries retain to the last a certain appealing charm which we find it hard to define. It lies partly perhaps in what we hinted at above -- in the fascination of seeing so potent a sovereign in his own fair kingdom of fantasy so busily writing himself simple, during such a succession of months, as to the dense realities of the world. Mr. Hawthorne's, however, was a rich simplicity. These pages give a strong impression of moral integrity and elevation. And, more than in other ways, they are interesting from their strong national flavor. Exposed late in life to European influences, Mr. Hawthorne was but superficially affected by them -- far less so than would be the case with a mind of the same temper growing up among us to-day. We seem to see him strolling through churches and galleries as the last pure American -- attesting by his shy responses to dark canvas and cold marble his loyalty to a simpler and less encumbered civilization.
Nation, March 14,
1872
HAWTHORNE
Early Years (18)
It will be necessary, for several reasons, to give this short sketch the form rather of a critical essay than of a biography. The data for a life of Nathaniel Hawthorne are the reverse of copious, and even if they were abundant they would serve but in a limited measure the purpose of the biographer. Hawthorne's career was probably as tranquil and uneventful a one as ever fell to the lot of a man of letters; it was almost strikingly deficient in incident, in what may be called the dramatic quality. Few men of equal genius and of equal eminence can have led on the whole a simpler life. His six volumes of Note-Books illustrate this simplicity; they are a sort of monument to an unagitated fortune. Hawthorne's career had few vicissitudes or variations; it was passed for the most part in a small and homogeneous society, in a provincial, rural community; it had few perceptible points of contact with what is called the world, with public events, with the manners of his time, even with the life of his neighbours. Its literary incidents are not numerous. He produced, in quantity, but little. His works consist of four novels and the fragment of another, five volumes of short tales, a collection of sketches, and a couple of story-books for children. And yet some account of the man and the writer is well worth giving. Whatever may have been Hawthorne's private lot, he has the importance of being the most beautiful and most eminent representative of a literature. The importance of the literature may be questioned, but at any rate, in the field of letters, Hawthorne is the most valuable example of the American genius. That genius has not, as a whole, been literary; but Hawthorne was on his limited scale a master of expression. He is the writer to whom his countrymen most confidently point when they wish to make a claim to have enriched the mother-tongue, and, judging from present appearances, he will long occupy this honourable position. If there is something very fortunate for him in the way that he borrows an added relief from the absence of competitors in his own line and from the
His very simplicity has been in his favour; it has helped him to appear complete and homogeneous. To talk of his being national would be to force the note and make a mistake of proportion; but he is, in spite of the absence of the realistic quality, intensely and vividly local. Out of the soil of New England he sprang -- in a crevice of that immitigable granite he sprouted and bloomed. Half of the interest that he possesses for an American reader with any turn for analysis must reside in his latent New England savour; and I think it no more than just to say that whatever entertainment he may yield to those who know him at a distance, it is an almost indispensable condition of properly appreciating him to have received a personal impression of the manners, the morals, indeed of the very climate, of the great region of which the remarkable city of Boston is the metropolis. The cold, bright
This could hardly fail to be the case, when the man himself
"The figure of that first ancestor, invested by family tradition with a dim and dusky grandeur, was present to my boyish imagination as far back as I can remember. It still haunts me, and induces a sort of home-feeling with the past, which I scarcely claim in reference to the present, phase of the town. I seem to have a stronger claim to a residence here on account of this grave, bearded, sable- cloaked and steeple-crowned progenitor -- who came so early, with his Bible and his sword, and trod the unworn street with such a stately port, and made so large a figure as a man of war and peace -- a stronger claim than for myself, whose name is seldom heard and my face hardly known. He was a soldier, legislator, judge; he was a ruler
William Hathorne died in 1681; but those hard qualities that his descendant speaks of were reproduced in his son John, who bore the title of Colonel, and who was connected, too intimately for his honour, with that deplorable episode of New England history, the persecution of the so-called Witches of Salem. John Hathorne is introduced into the little drama entitled The Salem Farms in Longfellow's New England Tragedies. I know not whether he had the compensating merits of his father, but our author speaks of him, in the continuation of the passage I have just quoted, as having made himself so conspicuous in the martyrdom of the witches, that their blood may be said to have left a stain upon him. "So deep a stain, indeed," Hawthorne adds, characteristically, "that his old dry bones in the Charter Street burial-ground must still retain it, if they have not crumbled utterly to dust." Readers of The House of the Seven Gables will remember that the story concerns itself with a family which is supposed to be overshadowed by a curse launched against one of its earlier members by a poor man occupying a lowlier place in the world, whom this ill-advised ancestor had been the means of bringing to justice for the crime of witchcraft. Hawthorne apparently found the idea of the history of the Pyncheons in his own family annals. His witch-judging ancestor was reported to have incurred a malediction from one of his victims, in consequence of which the prosperity of the race faded utterly away. "I know not," the passage I have already quoted goes on, "whether these ancestors of mine bethought themselves to repent and ask pardon of Heaven for their cruelties, or whether they are now groaning under the heavy consequences of them in another state of being. At all events, I, the present writer, hereby take shame upon myself for their sakes, and pray that any curse incurred by them -- as I have heard, and as the dreary and unprosperous condition of the
"Either of these stern and black-browed Puritans would have thought it quite a sufficient retribution for his sins that after so long a lapse of years the old trunk of the family tree, with so much venerable moss upon it, should have borne, as its topmost bough, an idler like myself. No aim that I have ever cherished would they recognise as laudable; no success of mine, if my life, beyond its domestic scope, had ever been brightened by success, would they deem otherwise than worthless, if not positively disgraceful. `What is he?' murmurs one grey shadow of my forefathers to the other. `A writer of story-books! What kind of a business in life, what manner of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation, may that be? Why, the degenerate fellow might as well have been a fiddler!' Such are the compliments bandied between my great grandsires and myself across the gulf of time! And yet, let them scorn me as they will, strong traits of their nature have intertwined themselves with mine."
In this last observation we may imagine that there was not a little truth. Poet and novelist as Hawthorne was, sceptic and dreamer and little of a man of action, late-coming fruit of a tree which might seem to have lost the power to bloom, he was morally, in an appreciative degree, a chip of the old block. His forefathers had crossed the Atlantic for conscience' sake, and it was the idea of the urgent conscience that haunted the imagination of their so-called degenerate successor. The Puritan strain in his blood ran clear -- there are passages in his Diaries, kept during his residence in Europe, which might almost have been written by the grimmest of the
The "dreary and unprosperous condition" that he speaks of in regard to the fortunes of his family is an allusion to the fact that several generations followed each other on the soil in which they had been planted, that during the eighteenth century a succession of Hathornes trod the simple streets of Salem without ever conferring any especial lustre upon the town or receiving, presumably, any great delight from it. A hundred years of Salem would perhaps be rather a dead-weight for any family to carry, and we venture to imagine that the Hathornes were dull and depressed. They did what they could, however, to improve their situation; they trod the Salem streets as little as possible. They went to sea, and made long voyages; seamanship became the regular profession of the family. Hawthorne has said it in charming language. "From father to son, for above a hundred years, they followed the sea; a grey-headed shipmaster, in each generation, retiring from the quarter-deck to the homestead, while a boy of fourteen took the hereditary place before the mast, confronting the salt spray and the gale which had blustered against his sire and grandsire. The boy also, in due time, passed from the forecastle to the cabin, spent a tempestuous manhood, and returned from his world-wanderings to grow old and die and mingle his dust with the natal earth." Our author's grandfather, Daniel Hathorne, is mentioned by Mr. Lathrop, his biographer and son-in-law, as a hardy privateer
In quiet provincial Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne passed the greater part of his boyhood, as well as many years of his later life. Mr. Lathrop has much to say about the ancient picturesqueness of the place, and about the mystic influences it would project upon such a mind and character as Hawthorne's. These things are always relative, and in appreciating them everything depends upon the point of view. Mr. Lathrop writes for American readers, who in such a matter as this are very easy to please. Americans have as a general thing a hungry passion for the picturesque, and they are so fond of local colour that they contrive to perceive it in localities in which the amateurs of other countries would detect only the most neutral tints. History, as yet, has left in the United States but so thin and impalpable a deposit that we very soon touch the hard substratum of nature; and nature herself, in the western world, has the peculiarity of seeming rather crude and immature. The very air looks new and young; the light of the sun seems fresh and innocent, as if it knew as yet but few of the secrets of the world and none of the weariness of shining; the vegetation has the appearance of not having reached its majority. A large juvenility is stamped upon the face of things, and in the vividness of the present, the past, which died so young and had time to produce so little, attracts but scanty attention. I doubt whether English observers would discover any very striking trace of it in the ancient town of Salem. Still, with all respect to a York and a Shrewsbury,
"The old town of Salem," he writes, -- "my native place, though I have dwelt much away from it, both in boyhood and in maturer years -- possesses, or did possess, a hold on my affections, the force of which I have never realized during my seasons of actual residence here. Indeed, so far as the physical aspect is concerned, with its flat, unvaried surface, covered chiefly with wooden houses, few or none of which pretend to architectural beauty; its irregularity, which is neither picturesque nor quaint, but only tame; its long and lazy street, lounging wearisomely through the whole extent of the peninsula, with Gallows Hill and New Guinea at one end, and a view of the almshouse at the other -- such being the features of my native town it would be quite as reasonable to form a sentimental attachment to a disarranged chequer- board."
But he goes on to say that he has never divested himself of the sense of intensely belonging to it -- that the spell of the continuity of his life with that of his predecessors has never been broken. "It is no matter that the place is joyless for him;
The Salem of to-day has, as New England towns go, a physiognomy of its own, and in spite of Hawthorne's analogy of the disarranged draught-board, it is a decidedly agreeable one. The spreading elms in its streets, the proportion of large, square, honourable-looking houses, suggesting an easy, copious material life, the little gardens, the grassy waysides, the open windows, the air of space and salubrity and decency, and above all the intimation of larger antecedents -- these things compose a picture which has little of the element that painters call depth of tone, but which is not without something that they would admit to be style. To English eyes the oldest and most honourable of the smaller American towns must seem in a manner primitive and rustic; the shabby, straggling, village-quality appears marked in them, and their social tone is not unnaturally inferred to bear the village stamp. Village-like they are, and it would be no gross incivility to describe them as large, respectable, prosperous, democratic villages. But even a village, in a great and vigorous democracy, where there are no overshadowing squires, where the "county" has no social existence, where the villagers are conscious of no superincumbent strata of gentility, piled upwards into vague regions of privilege -- even a village is not an institution to accept of more or less graceful patronage; it thinks extremely well of itself, and is absolute in its own regard. Salem is a sea-port, but it is a sea-port deserted and decayed. It belongs to that rather melancholy group of old
Of his childish years there appears to be nothing very definite to relate, though his biographer devotes a good many graceful pages to them. There is a considerable sameness in the behaviour of small boys, and it is probable that if we were acquainted with the details of our author's infantine career we should find it to be made up of the same pleasures and pains as that of many ingenuous lads for whom fame has had nothing in keeping.
The absence of precocious symptoms of genius is on the whole more striking in the lives of men who have distinguished themselves than their juvenile promise; though it must be added that Mr. Lathrop has made out, as he was
In 1819 he was sent back to Salem to school, and in the following year he wrote to his mother, who had remained at Raymond (the boy had found a home at Salem with another uncle), "I have left school and have begun to fit for college under Benjm. L. Oliver, Lawyer. So you are in danger of having one learned man in your family. . . . I get my lessons at home and recite them to him (Mr. Oliver) at seven o'clock in the morning. . . . . Shall you want me to be a Minister, Doctor, or Lawyer? A Minister I will not be." He adds, at the close of this epistle -- "O how I wish I was again with you, with nothing to do but to go a-gunning! But the happiest days of my life are gone." In 1821, in his seventeenth year, he entered Bowdoin College, at Brunswick, Maine. This institution was in the year 1821 -- a quarter of a century after its foundation -- a highly honourable, but not a very elaborately organized, nor a particularly impressive, seat of learning. I say it was not impressive, but I immediately remember that impressions depend upon the minds receiving them; and that to a group of simple New England lads, upwards of sixty years ago, the halls and groves of Bowdoin, neither dense nor lofty though they can have been, may have seemed replete with Academic stateliness. It was a homely, simple, frugal, "country college," of the old-fashioned American stamp; exerting within its limits a civilizing influence, working, amid the forests and the lakes, the log-houses and the clearings, toward the amenities and humanities and other collegiate graces, and offering a very sufficient education to the future lawyers, merchants, clergymen, politicians, and editors, of the very active and knowledge-loving community that supported it. It did more than this -- it numbered poets and statesmen among its undergraduates, and on the roll-call of its sons it
He appears to have been a fair scholar, but not a brilliant one; and it is very probable that as the standard of scholarship at Bowdoin was not high, he graduated none the less comfortably on this account. Mr. Lathrop is able to testify to the fact, by no means a surprising one, that he wrote verses at college, though the few stanzas that the biographer quotes are not such as to make us especially regret that his rhyming mood was a transient one.
"The ocean hath its silent caves,
Deep, quiet and alone.
Though there be fury on the waves,
Beneath them there is none."
That quatrain may suffice to decorate our page. And in connection with his college days I may mention his first novel, a short romance entitled Fanshawe, which was published in Boston in 1828, three years after he graduated. It was probably also written after that event, but the scene of the tale is laid at Bowdoin (which figures under an altered name), and Hawthorne's attitude with regard to the book, even shortly after it was published, was such as to assign it to this
"`Alas, youth, these are strange times,' observed the President, `when a doctor of divinity and an undergraduate set forth, like a knight-errant and his squire, in search of a stray damsel. Methinks I am an epitome of the church militant, or a new species of polemical divinity. Pray Heaven, however, there be no such encounter in store for us; for I utterly forgot to provide myself with weapons.'
"`I took some thought for that matter, reverend knight,' replied Edward, whose imagination was highly tickled by Dr. Melmoth's chivalrous comparison.
"`Aye, I see that you have girded on a sword,' said the divine. `But wherewith shall I defend myself? my hand being empty except of this golden-headed staff, the gift of Mr. Langton.'
"`One of these, if you will accept it,' answered Edward, exhibiting a brace of pistols, `will serve to begin the conflict before you join the battle hand to hand.'
"`Nay, I shall find little safety in meddling with that deadly instrument, since I know not accurately from which end proceeds the bullet,' said Dr. Melmoth. `But were it not better, since we are so well provided with artillery, to betake ourselves, in the event of an encounter, to some stone wall or other place of strength?'
"`If I may presume to advise,' said the squire, `you, as being most valiant and experienced, should ride forward, lance in hand (your long staff serving for a lance), while I annoy the enemy from afar.'
"`Like Teucer, behind the shield of Ajax,' interrupted Dr. Melmoth, `or David with his stone and sling. No, no, young man; I have left unfinished in my study a learned treatise, important not only to the present age, but to posterity,
On leaving college Hawthorne had gone back to live at Salem.
(note-ch18-1) It is proper that before I go further I should
acknowledge my large obligations to the only biography of our author, of
any considerable length, that has been written -- the little volume
entitled A Study of Hawthorne, by Mr. George Parsons Lathrop, the son-
in-law of the subject of the work. (Boston, 1876.) To this ingenious
and sympathetic sketch, in which the author has taken great pains to
collect the more interesting facts of Hawthorne's life, I am greatly
indebted. Mr. Lathrop's work is not pitched in the key which many
another writer would have chosen, and his tone is not to my sense the
truly critical one; but without the help afforded by his elaborate essay
the present little volume could not have been prepared.
Early Manhood (19)
1 The twelve years that followed were not the happiest or most brilliant phase of Hawthorne's life; they strike me indeed as having had an altogether peculiar dreariness. They had their uses; they were the period of incubation of the admirable compositions which eventually brought him reputation and prosperity. But of their actual aridity the young man must have had a painful consciousness; he never lost the impression of it. Mr. Lathrop quotes a phrase to this effect from one of his letters, late in life. "I am disposed to thank God for the gloom and chill of my early life, in the hope that my share of adversity came then, when I bore it alone." And the same writer alludes to a touching passage in the English Note-Books, which I shall quote entire: --
2 "I think I have been happier this Christmas (1854) than ever before -- by my own fireside, and with my wife and children about me -- more content to enjoy what I have, less anxious for anything beyond it, in this life. My early life was perhaps a good preparation for the declining half of life; it having been such a blank that any thereafter would compare favourably with it. For a long, long while, I have occasionally been visited with a singular dream; and I have an impression that I have dreamed it ever since I have been in England. It is, that I am still at college, or, sometimes, even, at school -- and there is a sense that I have been there unconscionably long, and have quite failed to make such progress as my contemporaries have done; and I seem to meet some of them with a feeling of shame and depression that broods over me as I think of it, even when awake. This dream, recurring all through these twenty or thirty years, must be one of the effects of that heavy seclusion in which I shut myself up for twelve years after leaving college, when everybody moved onward and left me behind. How strange that it should come now,
2 The allusion here is to a state of solitude which was the young man's positive choice at the time -- or into which he drifted at least under the pressure of his natural shyness and reserve. He was not expansive, he was not addicted to experiments and adventures of intercourse, he was not, personally, in a word, what is called sociable. The general impression of this silence-loving and shade-seeking side of his character is doubtless exaggerated, and, in so far as it points to him as a sombre and sinister figure, is almost ludicrously at fault. He was silent, diffident, more inclined to hesitate, to watch and wait and meditate, than to produce himself, and fonder, on almost any occasion, of being absent than of being present. This quality betrays itself in all his writings. There is in all of them something cold and light and thin, something belonging to the imagination alone, which indicates a man but little disposed to multiply his relations, his points of contact, with society. If we read the six volumes of Note-Books with an eye to the evidence of this unsocial side of his life, we find it in sufficient abundance. But we find at the same time that there was nothing unamiable or invidious in his shyness, and above all that there was nothing preponderantly gloomy. The qualities to which the Note-Books most testify are, on the whole, his serenity and amenity of mind. They reveal these characteristics indeed in an almost phenomenal degree. The serenity, the simplicity, seem in certain portions almost child-like; of brilliant gaiety, of high spirits, there is little; but the placidity and evenness of temper, the cheerful and contented view of the things he notes, never belie themselves. I know not what else he may have written in this copious record, and what passages of gloom and melancholy may have been suppressed; but as his Diaries stand, they offer in a remarkable degree the reflection of a mind whose development was not in the direction of sadness. A very clever French critic, whose fancy is often more lively than his observation is deep, M. Emile Montgut, writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes, in the year 1860, invents for our author the appellation of "Un Romancier Pessimiste." Superficially speaking, perhaps, the title is a
2 His innocent reserve, then, and his exaggerated, but by no means cynical, relish for solitude, imposed themselves upon him, in a great measure, with a persistency which helped to make the time a tolerably arid one -- so arid a one indeed that we have seen that in the light of later happiness he pronounced it a blank. But in truth, if these were dull years, it was not all Hawthorne's fault. His situation was intrinsically poor -- poor with a poverty that one almost hesitates to look into. When we think of what the conditions of intellectual life, of taste, must have been in a small New England town
2 He was poor, he was solitary, and he undertook to devote himself to literature in a community in which the interest in literature was as yet of the smallest. It is not too much to say that even to the present day it is a considerable discomfort in the United States not to be "in business." The young man who attempts to launch himself in a career that does not belong to the so-called practical order; the young man who has not, in a word, an office in the business-quarter of the town, with his name painted on the door, has but a limited place in the social system, finds no particular bough to perch upon. He is not looked at askance, he is not regarded as an idler; literature and the arts have always been held in extreme honour in the American world, and those who practise them are received on easier terms than in other countries. If the tone of the American world is in some respects provincial, it is in none more so than in this matter of the exaggerated homage rendered to authorship. The gentleman or the lady who has written a book is in many circles the object of an admiration too indiscriminating to operate as an encouragement to good writing. There is no reason to suppose that this was less the case fifty years ago; but fifty years ago, greatly more than now, the literary man must have lacked the comfort and inspiration of belonging to a class. The best things come, as a general thing, from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation. Great things of course have been done by solitary workers; but they have usually been done with double the pains they would have cost if they had been produced in more genial circumstances. The solitary worker loses the profit of example and discussion; he is apt to make awkward experiments; he is in the nature of the case more or less of an empiric. The empiric may, as I say, be treated by the world as an expert; but the drawbacks and discomforts of empiricism remain to him, and are in fact increased by the suspicion that is mingled with his gratitude, of a want in the public taste of a sense of the proportions of things. Poor Hawthorne, beginning to write subtle short tales at Salem, was
2 Hawthorne's early attempt to support himself by his pen appears to have been deliberate; we hear nothing of those experiments in counting-houses or lawyers' offices, of which a permanent invocation to the Muse is often the inconsequent sequel. He began to write, and to try and dispose of his writings; and he remained at Salem apparently only because his family, his mother and his two sisters, lived there. His mother had a house, of which during the twelve years that elapsed until 1838, he appears to have been an inmate. Mr. Lathrop learned from his surviving sister that after publishing Fanshawe he produced a group of short stories entitled Seven Tales of my Native Land, and that this lady retained a very favourable recollection of the work, which her brother had given her to read. But it never saw the light; his attempts to get it
2 There is probably something autobiographic in the striking little tale of The Devil in Manuscript. "They have been offered to seventeen publishers," says the hero of that sketch in regard to a pile of his own lucubrations.
3 "It would make you stare to read their answers. . . . . One man publishes nothing but school-books; another has five novels already under examination; . . . . another gentleman is just giving up business, on purpose, I verily believe, to avoid publishing my book. In short, of all the seventeen booksellers, only one has vouchsafed even to read my tales; and he -- a literary dabbler himself, I should judge -- has the impertinence to criticise them, proposing what he calls vast improvements, and concluding, after a general sentence of condemnation, with the definitive assurance that he will not be concerned on any terms. . . . . But there does seem to be one righteous man among these seventeen unrighteous ones, and he tells me, fairly, that no American publisher will meddle with an American work -- seldom if by a known writer, and never if by a new one -- unless at the writer's risk."
4 But though the Seven Tales were not printed, Hawthorne proceeded to write others that were; the two collections of the Twice-Told Tales, and the Snow Image, are gathered from a series of contributions to the local journals and the annuals of that day. To make these three volumes, he picked out the things he thought the best. "Some very small part," he says of what remains, "might yet be rummaged out (but it would not be worth the trouble), among the dingy pages of fifteen or twenty-years-old periodicals, or within the shabby morocco covers of faded Souvenirs." These three volumes represent no large amount of literary labour for so long a period, and the author admits that there is little to show "for the thought and industry of that portion of his life." He attributes the paucity of his productions to a "total lack of sympathy at the age when his mind would naturally have been most effervescent." "He had no incitement to literary effort in a reasonable prospect of reputation or profit; nothing but the
2 It is very true, however, that during this early period he seems to have been very glad to do whatever came to his hand. Certain of his tales found their way into one of the annuals of the time, a publication endowed with the brilliant
2 There is something pitiful in this episode, and something really touching in the sight of a delicate and superior genius obliged to concern himself with such paltry undertakings. The simple fact was that for a man attempting at that time in America to live by his pen, there were no larger openings; and to live at all Hawthorne had, as the phrase is, to make himself small. This cost him less, moreover, than it would have cost a more copious and strenuous genius, for his modesty was evidently extreme, and I doubt whether he had any very ardent consciousness of rare talent. He went back to Salem, and from this tranquil standpoint, in the spring of 1837, he watched the first volume of his Twice-Told Tales come into the world. He had by this time been living some ten years of his manhood in Salem, and an American commentator may be excused for feeling the desire to construct, from the very scanty material that offers itself, a slight picture of his life there. I have quoted his own allusions to its dulness and blankness, but I confess that these observations serve rather to quicken than to depress my curiosity. A biographer
2 I have said that Hawthorne was an observer of small things, and indeed he appears to have thought nothing too trivial to be suggestive. His Note-Books give us the measure of his perception of common and casual things, and of his habit of converting them into memoranda. These Note-Books, by the way -- this seems as good a place as any other to say it -- are a very singular series of volumes; I doubt whether there is anything exactly corresponding to them in the whole body of literature. They were published -- in six volumes, issued at intervals -- some years after Hawthorne's death, and no person attempting to write an account of the romancer could afford to regret that they should have been given to the world. There is a point of view from which this may be regretted; but the attitude of the biographer is to desire as many documents as possible. I am thankful, then, as a biographer, for the Note-Books, but I am obliged to confess that, though I have just re-read them carefully, I am still at a loss to perceive how they came to be written -- what was Hawthorne's purpose in carrying on for so many years this
2 I know not at what age he began to keep a diary; the first entries in the American volumes are of the summer of 1835. There is a phrase in the preface to his novel of Transformation, which must have lingered in the minds of many Americans who have tried to write novels and to lay the scene of them in the western world. "No author, without a trial, can conceive of the difficulty of writing a romance about a country where there is no shadow, no antiquity, no mystery, no picturesque and gloomy wrong, nor anything but a commonplace prosperity, in broad and simple daylight, as is happily the case with my dear native land." The perusal of Hawthorne's American Note-Books operates as a practical commentary upon this somewhat ominous text. It does so at least to my own mind; it would be too much perhaps to say that the effect would be the same for the usual English reader. An
2 But in helping us to measure what remains, our author's Diaries, as I have already intimated, would give comfort rather to persons who might have taken the alarm from the brief sketch I have just attempted of what I have called the negative side of the American social situation, than to those reminding themselves of its fine compensations. Hawthorne's entries are to a great degree accounts of walks in the country, drives in stage-coaches, people he met in taverns. The minuteness of the things that attract his attention and that he deems worthy of being commemorated is frequently extreme, and from this fact we get the impression of a general vacancy in the field of vision. "Sunday evening, going by the jail, the setting sun kindled up the windows most cheerfully; as if there were a bright, comfortable light within its darksome stone wall." "I went yesterday with Monsieur S------ to pick raspberries. He fell through an old log-bridge, thrown over a hollow; looking back, only his head and shoulders appeared through the rotten logs and among the bushes. -- A shower coming on, the rapid running of a little barefooted boy, coming up unheard, and dashing swiftly past us, and showing us the soles of his naked feet as he ran adown the path and up the opposite side." In another place he devotes a page to a description of a dog whom he saw running round after its
2 But even if he had had, personally, as many pretensions as he had few, he must in the nature of things have been more or less of a consenting democrat, for democracy was the very key-stone of the simple social structure in which he played his part. The air of his journals and his tales alike are full of the genuine democratic feeling. This feeling has by no means passed out of New England life; it still flourishes in perfection in the great stock of the people, especially in rural communities; but it is probable that at the present hour a writer of
2 Hawthorne appears on various occasions to have absented himself from Salem, and to have wandered somewhat through the New England States. But the only one of these episodes of which there is a considerable account in the Note-Books is a visit that he paid in the summer of 1837 to his old college-mate, Horatio Bridge, who was living upon his father's property in Maine, in company with an eccentric young Frenchman, a teacher of his native tongue, who was looking for pupils among the northern forests. I have said that there was less psychology in Hawthorne's Journals than might have been looked for; but there is nevertheless a certain amount of it, and nowhere more than in a number of pages relating to this remarkable "Monsieur S." (Hawthorne, intimate as he apparently became with him, always calls him "Monsieur," just as throughout all his Diaries he invariably speaks of all his friends, even the most familiar, as "Mr." He confers the prefix upon the unconventional Thoreau, his fellow-woodsman at Concord, and upon the emancipated brethren at Brook Farm.) These pages are completely occupied with Monsieur S., who was evidently a man of character, with the full complement of his national vivacity. There is an elaborate effort to analyse the poor young Frenchman's disposition, something conscientious and painstaking, respectful, explicit, almost solemn. These passages are very curious as a reminder of the absence of the off-hand element in the manner in which many Americans, and many New Englanders especially, make up their minds about people whom they meet. This, in turn, is a reminder of something that may be called the importance of the individual in the American world; which is a result of the newness and youthfulness of society and of the absence of keen competition. The individual counts for more, as it were, and, thanks to the absence of a
Early Writings (20)
The second volume of the Twice-Told Tales was published in 1845, in Boston; and at this time a good many of the stories which were afterwards collected into the Mosses from an Old Manse had already appeared, chiefly in The Democratic Review, a sufficiently flourishing periodical of that period. In mentioning these things I anticipate; but I touch upon the year 1845 in order to speak of the two collections of Twice-Told Tales at once. During the same year Hawthorne edited an interesting volume, the Journals of an African Cruiser, by his friend Bridge, who had gone into the Navy and seen something of distant waters. His biographer mentions that even then Hawthorne's name was thought to bespeak attention for a book, and he insists on this fact in contradiction to the idea that his productions had hitherto been as little noticed as his own declaration that he remained "for a good many years the obscurest man of letters in America," might lead one, and has led many people, to suppose. "In this dismal chamber FAME was won," he writes in Salem in 1836. And we find in the Note-Books (1840), this singularly beautiful and touching passage: --
"Here I sit in my old accustomed chamber, where I used to sit in days gone by. . . . . Here I have written many tales -- many that have been burned to ashes, many that have doubtless deserved the same fate. This claims to be called a haunted chamber, for thousands upon thousands of visions have appeared to me in it; and some few of them have become visible to the world. If ever I should have a biographer, he ought to make great mention of this chamber in my memoirs, because so much of my lonely youth was wasted here, and here my mind and character were formed; and here I have been glad and hopeful, and here I have been despondent. And here I sat a long, long time, waiting patiently for the world to know me, and sometimes
There is something exquisite in the soft philosophy of this little retrospect, and it helps us to appreciate it to know that the writer had at this time just become engaged to be married to a charming and accomplished person, with whom his union, which took place two years later, was complete and full of happiness. But I quote it more particularly for the evidence it affords that, already in 1840, Hawthorne could speak of the world finding him out and calling him forth, as of an event tolerably well in the past. He had sent the first of the Twice-Told series to his old college friend, Longfellow, who had already laid, solidly, the foundation of his great poetic
"You tell me you have met with troubles and changes. I know not what these may have been; but I can assure you that trouble is the next best thing to enjoyment, and that there is no fate in the world so horrible as to have no share in either its joys or sorrows. For the last ten years I have not lived, but only dreamed of living. It may be true that there may have been some unsubstantial pleasures here in the shade, which I might have missed in the sunshine, but you cannot conceive how utterly devoid of satisfaction all my retrospects are. I have laid up no treasure of pleasant remembrances against old age; but there is some comfort in thinking that future years may be more varied, and therefore more tolerable, than the past. You give me more credit than I deserve in supposing that I have led a studious life. I have indeed turned over a good many books, but in so desultory a way that it cannot be called study, nor has it left me the fruits of study. . . . . I have another great difficulty in the lack of materials; for I have seen so little of the world that I have nothing but thin air to concoct my stories of, and it is not easy to give a life-like semblance to such shadowy stuff. Sometimes, through a peephole, I have caught a glimpse of the real world, and the two or three articles in which I have portrayed these glimpses please me better than the others."
It is more particularly for the sake of the concluding lines that I have quoted this passage; for evidently no portrait of Hawthorne at this period is at all exact which fails to insist upon the constant struggle which must have gone on between his shyness and his desire to know something of life; between what may be called his evasive and his inquisitive tendencies. I suppose it is no injustice to Hawthorne to say that on the whole his shyness always prevailed; and yet, obviously, the struggle was constantly there. He says of his Twice-Told Tales, in the preface, "They are not the talk of a secluded man with his own mind and heart (had it been so they could hardly have failed to be more deeply and permanently valuable,) but
Among these shorter things (it is better to speak of the whole collection, including the Snow Image, and the Mosses from an Old Manse at once) there are three sorts of tales, each one of which has an original stamp. There are, to begin with, the stories of fantasy and allegory -- those among which the three I have just mentioned would be numbered, and which on the whole, are the most original. This is the group to which such little masterpieces as Malvin's Burial, Rappaccini's Daughter, and Young Goodman Brown also belong -- these two last perhaps representing the highest point that Hawthorne reached in this direction. Then there are the little tales of New England history, which are scarcely less admirable, and of which The Grey Champion, The Maypole of Merry Mount, and the four beautiful Legends of the Province House, as they are called, are the most successful specimens. Lastly come the
It will be seen that I am far from being struck with the justice of that view of the author of the Twice-Told Tales, which is so happily expressed by the French critic to whom I alluded at an earlier stage of this essay. To speak of Hawthorne,
Hawthorne was a man of fancy, and I suppose that in speaking of him it is inevitable that we should feel ourselves confronted with the familiar problem of the difference between the fancy and the imagination. Of the larger and more potent faculty he certainly possessed a liberal share; no one can read The House of the Seven Gables without feeling it to be a deeply imaginative work. But I am often struck, especially in the shorter tales, of which I am now chiefly speaking, with a kind of small ingenuity, a taste for conceits and analogies, which bears more particularly what is called the fanciful stamp. The finer of the shorter tales are redolent of a rich imagination.
"Had Goodman Brown fallen asleep in the forest and only dreamed a wild dream of witch-meeting? Be it so, if you will; but, alas, it was a dream of evil omen for young Goodman Brown! a stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate, man, did he become from the night of that fearful dream. On the Sabbath-day, when the congregation were singing a holy psalm, he could not listen, because an anthem of sin rushed loudly upon his ear and drowned all the blessed strain. When the minister
There is imagination in that, and in many another passage that I might quote; but as a general thing I should characterise the more metaphysical of our author's short stories as graceful and felicitous conceits. They seem to me to be qualified in this manner by the very fact that they belong to the province of allegory. Hawthorne, in his metaphysical moods, is nothing if not allegorical, and allegory, to my sense, is quite one of the lighter exercises of the imagination. Many excellent judges, I know, have a great stomach for it; they delight in symbols and correspondences, in seeing a story told as if it were another and a very different story. I frankly confess that I have as a general thing but little enjoyment of it and that it has never seemed to me to be, as it were, a first-rate literary form. It has produced assuredly some first-rate works; and Hawthorne in his younger years had been a great reader and devotee of Bunyan and Spenser, the great masters of allegory. But it is apt to spoil two good things -- a story and a moral, a meaning and a form; and the taste for it is responsible for a large part of the forcible feeble writing that has been inflicted upon the world. The only cases in which it is endurable is when it is extremely spontaneous, when the analogy presents itself with eager promptitude. When it shows signs of having been groped and fumbled for, the needful illusion is of course absent and the failure complete. Then the machinery alone is
His little historical stories all seem to me admirable; they are so good that you may re-read them many times. They are not numerous, and they are very short; but they are full of a vivid and delightful sense of the New England past; they have, moreover, the distinction, little tales of a dozen and fifteen pages as they are, of being the only successful attempts at historical fiction that have been made in the United States. Hawthorne was at home in the early New England history; he had thumbed its records and he had breathed its air, in whatever odd receptacles this somewhat pungent compound still lurked. He was fond of it, and he was proud of it, as any New Englander must be, measuring the part of that handful of half-starved fanatics who formed his earliest precursors, in laying the foundations of a mighty empire. Hungry for the picturesque as he always was, and not finding any very copious provision of it around him, he turned back into the two preceding centuries, with the earnest determination that the primitive annals of Massachusetts should at least appear picturesque. His fancy, which was always alive, played a little
I have said that Hawthorne had become engaged in about his thirty-fifth year; but he was not married until 1842. Before this event took place he passed through two episodes which (putting his falling in love aside) were much the most important things that had yet happened to him. They interrupted the painful monotony of his life, and brought the affairs of men within his personal experience. One of these was moreover in itself a curious and interesting chapter of observation, and it fructified, in Hawthorne's memory, in one of his best productions. How urgently he needed at this time to be drawn within the circle of social accidents, a little anecdote related by Mr. Lathrop in connection with his first acquaintance with the young lady he was to marry, may serve as an example. This young lady became known to him through her sister, who had first approached him as an admirer of the Twice-Told Tales (as to the authorship of which she had been so much in the dark as to have attributed it first, conjecturally, to one of the two Miss Hathornes); and the two Miss Peabodys, desiring to see more of the charming writer, caused him to be invited to a species of conversazione at the house of one of their friends, at which they themselves took care to be punctual. Several other ladies, however, were as punctual as they, and Hawthorne presently arriving, and seeing a bevy of admirers where he had expected but three or four, fell into a state of agitation, which is vividly described by his biographer. He "stood perfectly motionless, but with the look of a sylvan creature on the point of fleeing away . . . . He was stricken with dismay; his face lost colour and took on a warm
At the beginning of the year 1839 he received, through political interest, an appointment as weigher and gauger in the Boston Custom-house. Mr. Van Buren then occupied the Presidency, and it appears that the Democratic party, whose successful candidate he had been, rather took credit for the patronage it had bestowed upon literary men. Hawthorne was a Democrat, and apparently a zealous one; even in later years, after the Whigs had vivified their principles by the adoption of the Republican platform, and by taking up an honest attitude on the question of slavery, his political faith never wavered. His Democratic sympathies were eminently natural, and there would have been an incongruity in his belonging to the other party. He was not only by conviction, but personally and by association, a Democrat. When in later years he found himself in contact with European civilisation,
"I have been measuring coal all day," he writes, during the winter of 1840, "on board of a black little British schooner, in a dismal dock at the north end of the city. Most of the time I paced the deck to keep myself warm; for the wind (north-east, I believe) blew up through the dock as if it had been the pipe of a pair of bellows. The vessel lying deep between two wharves, there was no more delightful prospect, on the right hand and on the left, than the posts and timbers, half immersed in the water and covered
A worse man than Hawthorne would have measured coal quite as well, and of all the dismal tasks to which an unremunerated imagination has ever had to accommodate itself, I remember none more sordid than the business depicted in the foregoing lines. "I pray," he writes some weeks later, "that in one year more I may find some way of escaping from this unblest Custom-house; for it is a very grievous thraldom. I do detest all offices; all, at least, that are held on a political tenure, and I want nothing to do with politicians. Their hearts wither away and die out of their bodies. Their consciences are turned to india-rubber, or to some substance as black as that and which will stretch as much. One thing, if no more, I have gained by my Custom-house experience -- to know a politician. It is a knowledge which no previous thought or power of sympathy could have taught me; because the animal, or the machine rather, is not in nature." A few days later he goes on in the same strain: --
"I do not think it is the doom laid upon me of murdering so many of the brightest hours of the day at the Custom-house that makes such havoc with my wits, for here I am again trying to write worthily . . . . yet with a sense as if all the noblest part of man had been left out of my composition, or had decayed out of it since my nature was given to my own keeping. . . . . Never comes any bird of
He says, writing shortly afterwards, that "when I shall be free again, I will enjoy all things with the fresh simplicity of a child of five years old. I shall grow young again, made all over anew. I will go forth and stand in a summer shower, and all the worldly dust that has collected on me shall be washed away at once, and my heart will be like a bank of fresh flowers for the weary to rest upon."
This forecast of his destiny was sufficiently exact. A year
later, in April 1841, he went to take up his abode in the socialistic
community of Brook Farm. Here he found himself among fields and flowers
and other natural products -- as well as among many products that could
not very justly be called natural. He was exposed to summer showers in
plenty; and his personal associations were as different as possible from
those he had encountered in fiscal circles. He made acquaintance with
Transcendentalism and the Transcendentalists.
IV
Brook Farm and Concord (21)
The history of the little industrial and intellectual association which formed itself at this time in one of the suburbs of Boston has not, to my knowledge, been written; though it is assuredly a curious and interesting chapter in the domestic annals of New England. It would of course be easy to overrate the importance of this ingenious attempt of a few speculative persons to improve the outlook of mankind. The experiment came and went very rapidly and quietly, leaving very few traces behind it. It became simply a charming personal reminiscence for the small number of amiable enthusiasts who had had a hand in it. There were degrees of enthusiasm, and I suppose there were degrees of amiability; but a certain generous brightness of hope and freshness of conviction pervaded the whole undertaking and rendered it, morally speaking, important to an extent of which any heed that the world in general ever gave to it is an insufficient measure. Of course it would be a great mistake to represent the episode of Brook Farm as directly related to the manners and morals of the New England world in general -- and in especial to those of the prosperous, opulent, comfortable part of it. The thing was the experiment of a coterie -- it was unusual, unfashionable, unsuccessful. It was, as would then have been said, an amusement of the Transcendentalists -- a harmless effusion of Radicalism. The Transcendentalists were not, after all, very numerous; and the Radicals were by no means of the vivid tinge of those of our own day. I have said that the Brook Farm community left no traces behind it that the world in general can appreciate; I should rather say that the only trace is a short novel, of which the principal merits reside in its qualities of difference from the affair itself. The Blithedale Romance is the main result of Brook Farm; but The Blithedale Romance was very properly never recognised by the Brook Farmers as an accurate portrait of their little colony.
Nevertheless, in a society as to which the more frequent
"After leaving the book at Mr. Emerson's, I returned through the woods, and, entering Sleepy Hollow, I perceived a lady reclining near the path which bends along its verge. It was Margaret herself. She had been there the whole afternoon, meditating or reading, for she had a book in her hand with some strange title which I did not understand and have forgotten. She said that nobody had broken her solitude, and was just giving utterance to a theory that no inhabitant of Concord ever visited Sleepy Hollow, when we saw a group of people entering the sacred precincts. Most of them followed a path which led them away from us; but an old man passed near us, and smiled to see Margaret
It is safe to assume that Hawthorne could not on the whole have had a high relish for the very positive personality of this accomplished and argumentative woman, in whose intellect high noon seemed ever to reign, as twilight did in his own. He must have been struck with the glare of her understanding, and, mentally speaking, have scowled and blinked a good deal in conversation with her. But it is tolerably manifest, nevertheless, that she was, in his imagination, the starting- point of the figure of Zenobia; and Zenobia is, to my sense, his only very definite attempt at the representation of a character. The portrait is full of alteration and embellishment; but it has a greater reality, a greater abundance of detail, than any of his other figures, and the reality was a memory of the lady whom he had encountered in the Roxbury pastoral or among the wood-walks of Concord, with strange books in her hand and eloquent discourse on her lips. The Blithedale Romance was written just after her unhappy death, when the reverberation of her talk would lose much of its harshness. In fact, however, very much the same qualities that made Hawthorne a Democrat in politics -- his contemplative turn and absence of a keen perception of abuses, his taste for old ideals, and loitering paces, and muffled tones -- would operate to keep him out of active sympathy with a woman of the so-called progressive type. We may be sure that in women his taste was conservative.
It seems odd, as his biographer says, "that the least gregarious of men should have been drawn into a socialistic community;" but although it is apparent that Hawthorne went to
A biographer of Hawthorne might well regret that his hero had not been more mixed up with the reforming and free-thinking class, so that he might find a pretext for writing a chapter upon the state of Boston society forty years ago. A needful warrant for such regret should be, properly, that the biographer's own personal reminiscences should stretch back to that period and to the persons who animated it. This would be a guarantee of fulness of knowledge and, presumably, of kindness of tone. It is difficult to see, indeed, how the generation of which Hawthorne has given us, in Blithedale, a few portraits, should not at this time of day be spoken of very tenderly and sympathetically. If irony enter into the allusion, it should be of the lightest and gentlest. Certainly, for a brief and imperfect chronicler of these things, a writer just touching them as he passes, and who has not the advantage of having been a contemporary, there is only one possible tone. The compiler of these pages, though his recollections date only from a later period, has a memory of a certain number of persons who had been intimately connected, as Hawthorne was not, with the agitations of that interesting time. Something of its interest adhered to them still -- something of its aroma clung to their garments; there was something about them which seemed to say that when
In the United States, in those days, there were no great things to look out at (save forests and rivers); life was not in the least spectacular; society was not brilliant; the country was given up to a great material prosperity, a homely bourgeois activity, a diffusion of primary education and the common luxuries. There was therefore, among the cultivated classes, much relish for the utterances of a writer who would help one to take a picturesque view of one's internal possibilities, and to find in the landscape of the soul all sorts of fine sunrise and moonlight effects. "Meantime, while the doors of the temple stand open, night and day, before every man, and the oracles of this truth cease never, it is guarded by one stern condition; this, namely -- it is an intuition. It cannot be received at second hand. Truly speaking, it is not instruction but provocation that I can receive from another soul." To make one's self so much more interesting would help to make life interesting, and life was probably, to many of this aspiring congregation, a dream of freedom and fortitude. There were faulty parts in the Emersonian philosophy; but the general tone was magnificent; and I can easily believe that, coming when it did and where it did, it should have been drunk in by a great many fine moral appetites with a sense of intoxication. One envies, even, I will not say the illusions, of that keenly sentient period, but the convictions and interests -- the moral passion. One certainly envies the privilege of having heard the finest of Emerson's orations poured forth in their early newness. They were the most poetical, the most beautiful productions of the American mind, and they were thoroughly local and national. They had a music and a magic, and when one remembers the remarkable charm of the speaker, the beautiful modulation of his utterance, one regrets in
Hawthorne appears, like his own Miles Coverdale, to have arrived at Brook Farm in the midst of one of those April snow-storms which, during the New England spring, occasionally diversify the inaction of the vernal process. Miles Coverdale, in The Blithedale Romance, is evidently as much Hawthorne as he is any one else in particular. He is indeed not very markedly any one, unless it be the spectator, the observer; his chief identity lies in his success in looking at things objectively and spinning uncommunicated fancies about them. This indeed was the part that Hawthorne played socially in the little community at West Roxbury. His biographer describes him as sitting "silently, hour after hour, in the broad old-fashioned hall of the house, where he could listen almost unseen to the chat and merriment of the young people, himself almost always holding a book before him, but seldom turning the leaves." He put his hand to the plough and supported himself and the community, as they were all supposed to do, by his labour; but he contributed little to the hum of voices. Some of his companions, either then or afterwards, took, I believe, rather a gruesome view of his want of articulate enthusiasm, and accused him of coming to the place as a sort of intellectual vampire, for purely psychological purposes. He sat in a corner, they declared, and watched the inmates when they were off their guard, analysing their characters, and dissecting the amiable ardour, the magnanimous illusions, which he was too cold-blooded to share. In so far as this account of Hawthorne's attitude was a complaint, it was a singularly childish one. If he was at Brook Farm without being of it, this is a very fortunate circumstance from the point of view of posterity, who would have preserved but a slender memory of the affair if our author's fine novel had not kept the topic open. The complaint is indeed almost so ungrateful a one as to make us regret that the author's fellow-communists came off so easily. They certainly
There must have been something pleasantly bucolic and pastoral in the habits of the place during the fine New England summer; but we have no retrospective envy of the denizens of Brook Farm in that other season which, as Hawthorne somewhere says, leaves in those regions, "so large a blank -- so melancholy a deathspot -- in lives so brief that they ought to be all summer-time." "Of a summer night, when the moon was full," says Mr. Lathrop, "they lit no lamps, but sat grouped in the light and shadow, while sundry of the younger men sang old ballads, or joined Tom Moore's songs to operatic airs. On other nights there would be an original essay or poem read aloud, or else a play of Shakspeare, with the parts distributed to different members; and these amusements failing, some interesting discussion was likely to take their place. Occasionally, in the dramatic season, large delegations from the farm would drive into Boston, in carriages and waggons, to the opera or the play. Sometimes, too, the young women sang as they washed the dishes in the Hive; and the youthful yeomen of the society came in and helped them with their work. The men wore blouses of a checked or plaided stuff, belted at the waist, with a broad collar folding down about the throat, and rough straw hats; the women, usually, simple calico gowns and hats." All this sounds delightfully Arcadian and innocent, and it is certain that there was something peculiar to the clime and race in some of the features of such a life; in the free, frank, and
"All Saturday I was off in the woods. In the evening we had a general conversation, opened by me, upon Education, in its largest sense, and on what we can do for ourselves and others. I took my usual ground: -- The aim is perfection; patience the road. Our lives should be considered as a tendency, an approximation only. . . . . Mr. R. spoke admirably on the nature of loyalty. The people showed a good deal of the sans-culotte tendency in their manners, throwing themselves on the floor, yawning, and going out when they had heard enough. Yet as the majority differ with me, to begin with -- that being the reason this subject was chosen -- they showed on the whole more interest and deference than I had expected. As I am accustomed to deference, however, and need it for the boldness and animation which my part requires, I did not speak with as much force as usual. . . . . Sunday. -- A glorious day; the woods full of perfume; I was out all the morning. In the afternoon Mrs. R. and I had a talk. I said my position would be too uncertain here, as I could not work. ------ said `they would all like to work for a person of genius.' . . . . `Yes,' I told her; `but where would be my repose when they were always to be judging whether I was worth it or not? . . . . Each day you must prove yourself anew.' . . . . We talked of the principles of the community. I said I had not a right to come, because all the confidence I had in it was as an experiment worth trying, and that it was part of the great wave of inspired thought. . . . . We had valuable discussion on these points. All Monday morning in the woods again. Afternoon, out with the drawing party; I felt the evils of the want of conventional refinement, in the impudence with which one of the girls treated me. She has since thought of it with regret, I notice; and by every day's
The young girl in question cannot have been Hawthorne's charming Priscilla; nor yet another young lady, of a most humble spirit, who communicated to Margaret's biographers her recollections of this remarkable woman's visits to Brook Farm; concluding with the assurance that "after a while she seemed to lose sight of my more prominent and disagreeable peculiarities, and treated me with affectionate regard."
Hawthorne's farewell to the place appears to have been accompanied with some reflections of a cast similar to those indicated by Miss Fuller; in so far at least as we may attribute to Hawthorne himself some of the observations that he fathers upon Miles Coverdale. His biographer justly quotes two or three sentences from The Blithedale Romance, as striking the note of the author's feeling about the place. "No sagacious man," says Coverdale, "will long retain his sagacity if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people, without periodically returning to the settled system of things, to correct himself by a new observation from that old standpoint." And he remarks elsewhere that "it struck me as rather odd that one of the first questions raised, after our separation
But if he returned to solitude, it was henceforth to be as the French say, a solitude deux. He was married in July 1842, and betook himself immediately to the ancient village of Concord, near Boston, where he occupied the so-called Manse
"Here once the embattled farmers stood,
And fired the shot heard round the world."
The battle was a small one, and the farmers were not destined individually to emerge from obscurity; but the memory of these things has kept the reputation of Concord green, and it has been watered, moreover, so to speak, by the life-long presence there of one of the most honoured of American men of letters -- the poet from whom I just quoted two lines. Concord is indeed in itself decidedly verdant, and is an excellent specimen of a New England village of the riper sort. At the time of Hawthorne's first going there it must have been an even better specimen than to-day -- more homogeneous, more indigenous, more absolutely democratic. Forty years ago the tide of foreign immigration had scarcely begun to break upon the rural strongholds of the New England race; it had at most begun to splash them with the salt Hibernian spray. It is very possible, however, that at this period there was not an Irishman in Concord; the place would have been a village community operating in excellent conditions. Such a village community was not the least honourable item in the sum of New England civilisation. Its spreading elms and plain white houses, its generous summers and ponderous winters,
Hawthorne had a little society (as much, we may infer, as he desired), and it was excellent in quality. But the pages in the Note- Books which relate to his life at the Manse, and the introduction to the Mosses, make more of his relations with vegetable nature, and of his customary contemplation of the incidents of wood-path and way-side, than of the human elements of the scene; though these also are gracefully touched upon. These pages treat largely of the pleasures of a kitchen- garden, of the beauty of summer-squashes, and of the mysteries of apple- raising. With the wholesome aroma of apples (as is indeed almost necessarily the case in any realistic record of New England rural life) they are especially pervaded; and with many other homely and domestic emanations; all of which derive a sweetness from the medium of our author's colloquial style. Hawthorne was silent with his lips; but he talked with his pen. The tone of his writing is often that of charming talk -- ingenious, fanciful, slow-flowing, with all the lightness of gossip, and none of its vulgarity. In the preface to the tales written at the Manse he talks of many things and just touches upon some of the members of his circle -- especially upon that odd genius, his fellow- villager, Henry Thoreau. I said a little way back that the New England Transcendental movement had suffered in the estimation of the world at large from not having (putting Emerson aside) produced any superior talents. But any reference to it would be ungenerous which should omit to pay a tribute in passing to the author of Walden. Whatever question there may be of his talent, there can be none, I think, of his genius. It was a slim and crooked one; but it was eminently personal. He was imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; he was worse than provincial - - he was parochial; it is only at his best that he is readable.
"As to the daily course of our life," the latter writes in the spring of 1843, "I have written with pretty commendable diligence, averaging from two to four hours a day; and the result is seen in various magazines. I might have written more if it had seemed worth while, but I was content to earn only so much gold as might suffice for our immediate wants, having prospect of official station and emolument which would do away with the necessity of writing for bread. These prospects have not yet had their fulfilment; and we are well content to wait, for an office would inevitably remove us from our present happy home -- at least from an outward home; for there is an inner one that will accompany us wherever we go. Meantime, the magazine people do not pay their debts; so that we taste some of the inconveniences of poverty. It is an annoyance, not a trouble." And he goes on to give some account of his usual habits. (The passage is from his Journal, and the account is given to himself, as it were, with that odd, unfamiliar explicitness which marks the tone of this record throughout.) "Every day I trudge through snow and slosh to the village, look into the post-office, and spend an hour at the reading-room; and then return home, generally without having spoken a word to any human being. . . . . In the way of exercise I saw and split wood, and physically I was never in a better condition than now." He adds a mention of an absence he had lately made. "I went alone to Salem, where I resumed all my bachelor habits for nearly a fortnight, leading the same life in which ten years of my youth flitted away like a dream. But how much changed was I! At last I had got hold of a reality which never could be taken from me. It was good thus to get apart from my happiness for the sake of contemplating it."
These compositions, which were so unpunctually paid for, appeared in the Democratic Review, a periodical published at
We have seen that when he went into the village he often came home without having spoken a word to a human being. There is a touching entry made a little later, bearing upon his mild taciturnity. "A cloudy veil stretches across the abyss of my nature. I have, however, no love of secrecy and darkness. I am glad to think that God sees through my heart, and if any angel has power to penetrate into it, he is welcome to know everything that is there. Yes, and so may any mortal who is capable of full sympathy, and therefore worthy to come into my depths. But he must find his own way there; I can neither guide nor enlighten him." It must be acknowledged, however, that if he was not able to open the gate of conversation, it was sometimes because he was disposed to slide the bolt himself. "I had a purpose," he writes, shortly before the entry last quoted, "if circumstances would permit, of passing the whole term of my wife's absence without speaking a word to any human being." He beguiled these incommunicative periods by studying German, in Tieck and Brger, without apparently making much progress; also in reading French, in Voltaire and Rabelais. "Just now," he writes, one October noon, "I heard a sharp tapping at the window of my study, and, looking up from my book (a volume
The Three American Novels (22)
1 The prospect of official station and emolument which Hawthorne mentions in one of those paragraphs from his Journals which I have just quoted, as having offered itself and then passed away, was at last, in the event, confirmed by his receiving from the administration of President Polk the gift of a place in the Custom-house of his native town. The office was a modest one, and "official station" may perhaps appear a magniloquent formula for the functions sketched in the admirable Introduction to The Scarlet Letter. Hawthorne's duties were those of Surveyor of the port of Salem, and they had a salary attached, which was the important part; as his biographer tells us that he had received almost nothing for the contributions to the Democratic Review. He bade farewell to his ex-parsonage and went back to Salem in 1846, and the immediate effect of his ameliorated fortune was to make him stop writing. None of his Journals of the period from his going to Salem to 1850 have been published; from which I infer that he even ceased to journalise. The Scarlet Letter was not written till 1849. In the delightful prologue to that work, entitled The Custom-house, he embodies some of the impressions gathered during these years of comparative leisure (I say of leisure because he does not intimate in this sketch of his occupations that his duties were onerous). He intimates, however, that they were not interesting, and that it was a very good thing for him, mentally and morally, when his term of service expired -- or rather when he was removed from office by the operation of that wonderful "rotatory" system which his countrymen had invented for the administration of their affairs. This sketch of the Custom-house is, as simple writing, one of the most perfect of Hawthorne's compositions, and one of the most gracefully and humorously autobiographic. It would be interesting to examine it in detail, but I prefer to use my space for making some remarks upon the work which was the ultimate result of this period of Hawthorne's residence in his native town; and I shall, for convenience' sake,
2 "I might, for instance, have contented myself with writing out the narratives of a veteran shipmaster, one of the inspectors, whom I should be most ungrateful not to mention; since scarcely a day passed that he did not stir me to laughter and admiration by his marvellous gift as a story-teller. . . . . Or I might readily have found a more serious task. It was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age; or to insist on creating a semblance of a world out of airy matter. . . . . The wiser effort would have been, to diffuse thought and imagination through the opaque substance of to-day, and thus make it a bright transparency . . . . to seek resolutely the true and indestructible value that lay hidden in the petty and wearisome incidents and ordinary characters with which I was now conversant. The fault was mine. The page of life that was spread out before me was dull and commonplace, only because I had not fathomed its deeper import. A better book than I shall ever write was there. . . . . These perceptions came too late. . . . . I had ceased to be a writer of tolerably poor tales and essays, and had become a tolerably good Surveyor of the Customs. That was all. But,
2 His publisher, Mr. Fields, in a volume entitled Yesterdays with Authors, has related the circumstances in which Hawthorne's masterpiece came into the world. "In the winter of 1849, after he had been ejected from the Custom-house, I went down to Salem to see him and inquire after his health, for we heard he had been suffering from illness. He was then living in a modest wooden house. . . . I found him alone in a chamber over the sitting-room of the dwelling, and as the day was cold he was hovering near a stove. We fell into talk about his future prospects, and he was, as I feared I should find him, in a very desponding mood." His visitor urged him to bethink himself of publishing something, and Hawthorne replied by calling his attention to the small popularity his published productions had yet acquired, and declaring that he had done nothing and had no spirit for doing anything. The narrator of the incident urged upon him the necessity of a more hopeful view of his situation, and proceeded to take leave. He had not reached the street, however, when Hawthorne hurried to overtake him, and, placing a roll of MS. in his hand, bade him take it to Boston, read it, and pronounce upon it. "It is either very good or very bad," said the author; "I don't know which." "On my way back to Boston," says Mr. Fields, "I read the germ of The Scarlet Letter; before I slept that night I wrote him a note all aglow with admiration of the marvellous story he had put into my hands, and told him that I would come again to Salem the next day and arrange for its publication. I went on in such an amazing state of excitement, when we met again in the little house, that he would not believe I was really in earnest. He seemed to think
2 The work has the tone of the circumstances in which it was produced. If Hawthorne was in a sombre mood, and if his future was painfully vague, The Scarlet Letter contains little enough of gaiety or of hopefulness. It is densely dark, with a single spot of vivid colour in it; and it will probably long remain the most consistently gloomy of English novels of the first order. But I just now called it the author's masterpiece, and I imagine it will continue to be, for other generations than ours, his most substantial title to fame. The subject had probably lain a long time in his mind, as his subjects were apt to do; so that he appears completely to possess it, to know it and feel it. It is simpler and more complete than his other novels; it achieves more perfectly what it attempts, and it has about it that charm, very hard to express, which we find in an
2 It is beautiful, admirable, extraordinary; it has in the highest degree that merit which I have spoken of as the mark of Hawthorne's best things -- an indefinable purity and lightness of conception, a quality which in a work of art affects one in the same way as the absence of grossness does in a human being. His fancy, as I just now said, had evidently brooded over the subject for a long time; the situation to be represented had disclosed itself to him in all its phases. When I say in all its phases, the sentence demands modification; for it is to be remembered that if Hawthorne laid his hand upon the well-worn theme, upon the familiar combination of the wife, the lover, and the husband, it was after all but to one period of the history of these three persons that he attached himself. The situation is the situation after the woman's fault has been committed, and the current of expiation and repentance has set in. In spite of the relation between Hester Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale, no story of love was surely ever less of a "love story." To Hawthorne's imagination the fact that these two persons had loved each other too well was of an interest comparatively vulgar; what appealed to him was the idea of their moral situation in the long years that were to follow. The story indeed is in a secondary degree that of Hester Prynne; she becomes, really, after the first scene, an accessory figure; it is not upon her the dnoment depends. It is upon her guilty lover that the author projects most frequently the cold, thin rays of his fitfully-moving lantern, which makes here and there a little luminous circle, on the edge of which hovers the livid and sinister figure of the injured and retributive husband. The story goes on for the most part between the lover and the husband -- the tormented young Puritan minister, who carries the secret of his own lapse from pastoral purity locked up beneath an exterior that commends itself to the reverence of his flock, while he sees the softer partner of
2 The faults of the book are, to my sense, a want of reality and an abuse of the fanciful element -- of a certain superficial symbolism. The people strike me not as characters, but as representatives, very picturesquely arranged, of a single state of mind; and the interest of the story lies, not in them, but in
2 Adam Blair, like Arthur Dimmesdale, is a Calvinistic minister who becomes the lover of a married woman, is overwhelmed with remorse at his misdeed, and makes a public confession of it; then expiates it by resigning his pastoral office and becoming a humble tiller of the soil, as his father had been. The two stories are of about the same length, and each is the masterpiece (putting aside of course, as far as Lockhart is concerned, the Life of Scott) of the author. They deal alike with the manners of a rigidly theological society, and even in certain details they correspond. In each of them, between the guilty pair, there is a charming little girl; though I hasten to say that Sarah Blair (who is not the daughter of the heroine but the legitimate offspring of the hero, a widower) is far from being as brilliant and graceful an apparition as the admirable little Pearl of The Scarlet Letter. The main difference between the two tales is the fact that in the American story the husband plays an all-important part, and in the Scottish plays almost none at all. Adam Blair is the history of the passion, and The Scarlet Letter the history of its sequel; but nevertheless, if one has read the two books at a short interval, it is impossible to avoid confronting them. I confess that a large portion of the interest of Adam Blair, to my mind, when once I had perceived that it would repeat in a great measure the situation of The Scarlet Letter, lay in noting its difference of tone. It threw into relief the passionless quality of Hawthorne's novel, its element of cold and ingenious fantasy, its
2 In The Scarlet Letter there is a great deal of symbolism; there is, I think, too much. It is overdone at times, and becomes mechanical; it ceases to be impressive, and grazes triviality. The idea of the mystic A which the young minister finds imprinted upon his breast and eating into his flesh, in sympathy with the embroidered badge that Hester is condemned to wear, appears to me to be a case in point. This suggestion should, I think, have been just made and dropped; to insist upon it and return to it, is to exaggerate the weak side of the subject. Hawthorne returns to it constantly, plays with it, and seems charmed by it; until at last the reader feels tempted to declare that his enjoyment of it is puerile. In the admirable scene, so superbly conceived and beautifully executed, in which Mr. Dimmesdale, in the stillness of the night, in the middle of the sleeping town, feels impelled to go and stand upon the scaffold where his mistress had formerly enacted her dreadful penance, and then, seeing Hester pass along the street, from watching at a sick-bed, with little Pearl at her side, calls them both to come and stand there beside him -- in this masterly episode the effect is almost spoiled by the introduction of one of these superficial conceits. What leads up to it is very fine -- so fine that I cannot do better than quote it as a specimen of one of the striking pages of the book.
3 "But before Mr. Dimmesdale had done speaking, a light gleamed far and wide over all the muffled sky. It was doubtless caused by one of those meteors which the night-watcher may so often observe burning out to waste in the vacant regions of the atmosphere. So powerful was its radiance that it thoroughly illuminated the dense medium of cloud, betwixt the sky and earth. The great vault brightened, like the dome of an immense lamp. It showed the familiar scene of the street with the distinctness of mid-day, but also with the awfulness that is always imparted to
2 That is imaginative, impressive, poetic; but when, almost immediately afterwards, the author goes on to say that "the minister looking upward to the zenith, beheld there the appearance of an immense letter -- the letter A -- marked out in lines of dull red light," we feel that he goes too far and is in danger of crossing the line that separates the sublime from its intimate neighbour. We are tempted to say that this is not moral tragedy, but physical comedy. In the same way, too much is made of the intimation that Hester's badge had a scorching property, and that if one touched it one would immediately withdraw one's hand. Hawthorne is perpetually looking for images which shall place themselves in picturesque correspondence with the spiritual facts with which he is concerned, and of course the search is of the very essence of poetry. But in such a process discretion is everything, and when the image becomes importunate it is in danger of seeming to stand for nothing more serious than itself. When Hester meets the minister by appointment in the forest, and sits talking with him while little Pearl wanders away and plays by the edge of the brook, the child is represented as at last making her way over to the other side of the woodland stream, and disporting herself there in a manner which makes her mother feel herself, "in some indistinct and tantalising manner,
2 I had not meant, however, to expatiate upon his defects, which are of the slenderest and most venial kind. The Scarlet Letter has the beauty and harmony of all original and complete conceptions, and its weaker spots, whatever they are, are not of its essence; they are mere light flaws and inequalities of surface. One can often return to it; it supports familiarity and has the inexhaustible charm and mystery of great works of art. It is admirably written. Hawthorne afterwards polished his style to a still higher degree, but in his later productions -- it is almost always the case in a writer's later productions -- there is a touch of mannerism. In The Scarlet Letter there is a high degree of polish, and at the same time a charming freshness; his phrase is less conscious of itself. His biographer very justly calls attention to the fact that his style was excellent from the beginning; that he appeared to have passed through no phase of learning how to write, but was in possession of his means from the first of his handling a pen. His early tales, perhaps, were not of a character to subject his faculty of expression to a very severe test, but a man who had not Hawthorne's natural sense of language would certainly have contrived to write them less well. This natural sense of language -- this turn for saying things lightly and yet touchingly,
2 "Hester Prynne, gazing steadfastly at the clergyman, felt a dreary influence come over her, but wherefore or whence she knew not, unless that he seemed so remote from her own sphere and utterly beyond her reach. One glance of recognition she had imagined must needs pass between them. She thought of the dim forest with its little dell of solitude, and love, and anguish, and the mossy tree-trunk, where, sitting hand in hand, they had mingled their sad and passionate talk with the melancholy murmur of the brook. How deeply had they known each other then! And was this the man? She hardly knew him now! He, moving proudly past, enveloped as it were in the rich music, with the procession of majestic and venerable fathers; he, so unattainable in his worldly position, and still more so in that far vista in his unsympathising thoughts, through which she now beheld him! Her spirit sank with the idea that all must have been a delusion, and that vividly as she had
2 The House of the Seven Gables was written at Lenox, among the mountains of Massachusetts, a village nestling, rather loosely, in one of the loveliest corners of New England, to which Hawthorne had betaken himself after the success of The Scarlet Letter became conspicuous, in the summer of 1850, and where he occupied for two years an uncomfortable little red house which is now pointed out to the inquiring stranger. The inquiring stranger is now a frequent figure at Lenox, for the place has suffered the process of lionisation. It has become a prosperous watering-place, or at least (as there are no waters), as they say in America, a summer-resort. It is a brilliant and generous landscape, and thirty years ago a man of fancy, desiring to apply himself, might have found both inspiration and tranquillity there. Hawthorne found so much of both that he wrote more during his two years of residence at Lenox than at any period of his career. He began with The House of the Seven Gables, which was finished in the early part of 1851. This is the longest of his three American novels, it is the most elaborate, and in the judgment of some persons it is the finest. It is a rich, delightful, imaginative work, larger and more various than its companions, and full of all sorts of deep intentions, of interwoven threads of suggestion. But it is not so rounded and complete as The Scarlet Letter; it has always seemed to me more like a prologue to a great novel than a great novel itself. I think this is partly owing to the fact that the subject, the donne, as the French say, of the story, does not quite fill it out, and that we get at the same time an impression of certain complicated purposes on the author's part, which seem to reach beyond it. I call it larger and more various than its companions, and it has indeed a greater richness of tone and density of detail. The colour, so to speak, of
2 The House of the Seven Gables comes nearer being a picture of contemporary American life than either of its companions; but on this ground it would be a mistake to make a large claim for it. It cannot be too often repeated that Hawthorne was not a realist. He had a high sense of reality -- his Note-Books super-abundantly testify to it; and fond as he was of jotting down the items that make it up, he never attempted to render exactly or closely the actual facts of the society that surrounded him. I have said -- I began by saying -- that his pages were full of its spirit, and of a certain reflected light that springs from it; but I was careful to add that the reader must look for his local and national quality between the lines of his writing and in the indirect testimony of his tone, his accent, his temper, of his very omissions and suppressions. The House of the Seven Gables has, however, more literal actuality than the others, and if it were not too fanciful an account of it, I should say that it renders, to an initiated reader, the impression of a summer afternoon in an elm-shadowed New England town. It leaves upon the mind a vague correspondence
2 "But we strive in vain to put the idea into words. No adequate expression of the beauty and profound pathos with which it impresses us is attainable. This being, made only for happiness, and heretofore so miserably failing to be happy -- his tendencies so hideously thwarted that some unknown time ago, the delicate springs of his character, never morally or intellectually strong, had given way, and he was now imbecile -- this poor forlorn voyager from the Islands of the Blest, in a frail bark, on a tempestuous sea, had been flung by the last mountain-wave of his shipwreck, into a quiet harbour. There, as he lay more than half lifeless on the strand, the fragrance of an earthly rose-bud had come to his nostrils, and, as odours will, had summoned up reminiscences or visions of all the living and breathing beauty amid which he should have had his home. With his native susceptibility of happy influences, he inhales the slight ethereal rapture into his soul, and expires!"
3 I have not mentioned the personage in The House of the Seven Gables upon whom Hawthorne evidently bestowed most pains, and whose portrait is the most elaborate in the book; partly because he is, in spite of the space he occupies, an accessory figure, and partly because, even more than the others, he is what I have called a picture rather than a character. Judge Pyncheon is an ironical portrait, very richly and
2 After the publication of The House of the Seven Gables, which brought him great honour, and, I believe, a tolerable share of a more ponderable substance, he composed a couple of little volumes for children -- The Wonder-Book, and a small collection of stories entitled Tanglewood Tales. They are not among his most serious literary titles, but if I may trust my own early impression of them, they are among the most charming literary services that have been rendered to children in an age (and especially in a country) in which the exactions of the infant mind have exerted much too palpable an influence upon literature. Hawthorne's stories are the old Greek myths, made more vivid to the childish imagination by an infusion of details which both deepen and explain their marvels. I have been careful not to read them over, for I should be very sorry to risk disturbing in any degree a recollection of them that has been at rest since the appreciative period of life to which they are addressed. They seem at that period enchanting, and the ideal of happiness of many American children is to lie upon the carpet and lose themselves in The
2 I have said that Lenox was a very pretty place, and that he was able to work there Hawthorne proved by composing The House of the Seven Gables with a good deal of rapidity. But at the close of the year in which this novel was published he wrote to a friend (Mr. Fields, his publisher,) that "to tell you a secret I am sick to death of Berkshire, and hate to think of spending another winter here. . . . . The air and climate do not agree with my health at all, and for the first time since I was a boy I have felt languid and dispirited. . . . . O that Providence would build me the merest little shanty, and mark me out a rood or two of garden ground, near the sea-coast!" He was at this time for a while out of health; and it is proper to remember that though the Massachusetts Berkshire, with its mountains and lakes, was charming during the ardent American summer, there was a reverse to the medal, consisting of December snows prolonged into April and May. Providence failed to provide him with a cottage by the sea; but he betook himself for the winter of 1852 to the little town of West Newton, near Boston, where he brought into the world The Blithedale Romance.
3 This work, as I have said, would not have been written if Hawthorne had not spent a year at Brook Farm, and though it is in no sense of the word an account of the manners or the inmates of that establishment, it will preserve the memory of the ingenious community at West Roxbury for a generation unconscious of other reminders. I hardly know what to say about it save that it is very charming; this vague, unanalytic epithet is the first that comes to one's pen in treating of Hawthorne's novels, for their extreme amenity of form invariably suggests it; but if on the one hand it claims to be uttered, on the other it frankly confesses its inconclusiveness. Perhaps, however, in this case, it fills out the measure of appreciation more completely than in others, for The Blithedale Romance is the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest, of this company of unhumorous fictions.
4 The story is told from a more joyous point of view -- from
2 Of Miles Coverdale I have already spoken, and of its being natural to assume that in so far as we may measure this lightly indicated identity of his, it has a great deal in common with that of his creator. Coverdale is a picture of the contemplative, observant, analytic nature, nursing its fancies, and yet, thanks to an element of strong good sense, not bringing them up to be spoiled children; having little at stake in life, at any given moment, and yet indulging, in imagination, in a good many adventures; a portrait of a man, in a word, whose passions are slender, whose imagination is active, and whose happiness lies, not in doing, but in perceiving -- half a poet, half a critic, and all a spectator. He is contrasted, excellently, with the figure of Hollingsworth, the heavily treading Reformer, whose attitude with regard to the world is that of the hammer to the anvil, and who has no patience with his friend's indifferences and neutralities. Coverdale is a gentle sceptic, a mild cynic; he would agree that life is a little worth living -- or worth living a little; but would remark that, unfortunately, to live little enough, we have to live a great deal. He confesses to a want of earnestness, but in reality he is evidently an excellent fellow, to whom one might look, not for any personal performance on a great scale, but for a good deal of generosity of detail. "As Hollingsworth once told me,
2 The finest thing in The Blithedale Romance is the character of Zenobia, which I have said elsewhere strikes me as the nearest approach that Hawthorne has made to the complete creation of a person. She is more concrete than Hester or Miriam, or Hilda or Ph;oebe; she is a more definite image, produced by a greater multiplicity of touches. It is idle to inquire too closely whether Hawthorne had Margaret Fuller in his mind in constructing the figure of this brilliant specimen of the strong-minded class and endowing her with the genius of conversation; or, on the assumption that such was the case, to compare the image at all strictly with the model. There is no strictness in the representation by novelists of persons who have struck them in life, and there can in the nature of things be none. From the moment the imagination takes a hand in the game, the inevitable tendency is to divergence, to following what may be called new scents. The original gives hints, but the writer does what he likes with them, and imports new elements into the picture. If there is this amount of reason for referring the wayward heroine of Blithedale to Hawthorne's impression of the most distinguished woman of her day in Boston, that Margaret Fuller was the only literary lady of eminence whom there is any sign of his having known, that she was proud, passionate, and eloquent, that she was much connected with the little world of Transcendentalism out of which the experiment of Brook Farm sprung, and that she had a miserable end and a watery grave -- if these are facts to
2 "Hollingsworth scarcely said a word, unless when repeatedly and pertinaciously addressed. Then indeed he would glare upon us from the thick shrubbery of his meditations, like a tiger out of a jungle, make the briefest reply possible, and betake himself back into the solitude of his heart and mind . . . . His heart, I imagine, was never really interested in our socialist scheme, but was for ever busy with his strange, and as most people thought, impracticable plan for the reformation of criminals through an appeal to their higher instincts. Much as I liked Hollingsworth, it cost me many a groan to tolerate him on this point. He ought to have commenced his investigation of the subject by committing some huge sin in his proper person, and examining the condition of his higher instincts afterwards."
3 The most touching element in the novel is the history of the grasp that this barbarous fanatic has laid upon the fastidious and high-tempered Zenobia, who, disliking him and shrinking from him at a hundred points, is drawn into the gulf of his omnivorous egotism. The portion of the story that
2 After writing it, Hawthorne went back to live in Concord, where he had bought a small house in which, apparently, he expected to spend a large portion of his future. This was in fact the dwelling in which he passed that part of the rest of his days that he spent in his own country. He established himself there before going to Europe, in 1853, and he returned to the Wayside, as he called his house, on coming back to the United States seven years later. Though he actually occupied the place no long time, he had made it his property, and it was more his own home than any of his numerous provisional abodes. I may therefore quote a little account of the house which he wrote to a distinguished friend, Mr. George Curtis.
3 "As for my old house, you will understand it better after spending a day or two in it. Before Mr. Alcott took it in hand, it was a mean-looking affair, with two peaked gables; no suggestiveness about it, and no venerableness, although from the style of its construction it seems to have survived beyond its first century. He added a porch in front, and a central peak, and a piazza at each end, and painted it a rusty olive hue, and invested the whole with a modest picturesqueness; all which improvements, together with its situation at the foot of a wooded hill, make it a place that one notices and remembers for a few moments after passing. Mr. Alcott expended a good deal of taste and some money (to no great purpose) in forming the hillside behind the house into terraces, and building arbours and summer-houses of rough stems and branches and trees, on a system of his own. They must have been very pretty in their day, and are so still, although much decayed, and shattered more and more by every breeze that blows. The hillside is covered chiefly with locust trees, which come into luxuriant blossom in the month of June, and look and smell very
2 As Mr. Lathrop points out, this allusion to a man who believed he should never die is "the first intimation of the story of Septimius Felton." The scenery of that romance, he adds, "was evidently taken from the Wayside and its hill." Septimius Felton is in fact a young man who, at the time of the war of the Revolution, lives in the village of Concord, on the Boston road, at the base of a woody hill which rises abruptly behind his house, and of which the level summit supplies him with a promenade continually mentioned in the course of the tale. Hawthorne used to exercise himself upon this picturesque eminence, and, as he conceived the brooding Septimius to have done before him, to betake himself thither when he found the limits of his dwelling too narrow. But he had an advantage which his imaginary hero lacked; he erected a tower as an adjunct to the house, and it was a jocular tradition among his neighbours, in allusion to his attributive tendency to evade rather than hasten the coming guest, that he used to ascend this structure and scan the road for provocations to retreat.
3 In so far, however, as Hawthorne suffered the penalties of celebrity at the hands of intrusive fellow-citizens, he was soon to escape from this honourable incommodity. On the 4th of March, 1853, his old college-mate and intimate friend, Franklin
2 "It was while in the lower house of Congress that Franklin Pierce took that stand on the Slavery question from which he has never since swerved by a hair's breadth. He
2 This last invidious allusion is to the disposition, not infrequent at the North, but by no means general, to set a decisive limit to further legislation in favour of the cherished idiosyncrasy of the other half of the country. Hawthorne takes the license of a sympathetic biographer in speaking of his hero's having incurred obloquy by his conservative attitude on the question of Slavery. The only class in the American world that suffered in the smallest degree, at this time, from social persecution, was the little band of Northern Abolitionists, who were as unfashionable as they were indiscreet -- which is saying much. Like most of his fellow-countrymen, Hawthorne had no idea that the respectable institution which he contemplated in impressive contrast to humanitarian "mistiness," was presently to cost the nation four long years of bloodshed and misery, and a social revolution as complete as any the world has seen. When this event occurred, he was therefore proportionately horrified and depressed by it; it cut from beneath his feet the familiar ground which had long felt so firm, substituting a heaving and quaking medium in which his spirit found no rest. Such was the bewildered sensation of that earlier and simpler generation of which I have spoken; their illusions were rudely dispelled, and they saw the best of all possible republics given over to fratricidal carnage. This affair had no place in their scheme, and nothing was left for them but to hang their heads and close their eyes. The subsidence of that great convulsion has left a different tone from the tone it found, and one may say that the Civil War marks an era in the history of the American mind. It introduced into the national consciousness a certain sense of proportion and
2 The least that General Pierce could do in exchange for so liberal a confidence was to offer his old friend one of the numerous places in his gift. Hawthorne had a great desire to go abroad and see something of the world, so that a consulate seemed the proper thing. He never stirred in the matter himself, but his friends strongly urged that something should be done; and when he accepted the post of consul at Liverpool there was not a word of reasonable criticism to be offered on the matter. If General Pierce, who was before all things good-natured and obliging, had been guilty of no greater indiscretion than to confer this modest distinction upon the most honourable and discreet of men of letters, he would have made a more brilliant mark in the annals of American statesmanship. Liverpool had not been immediately selected, and Hawthorne had written to his friend and publisher, Mr. Fields, with some humorous vagueness of allusion to his probable expatriation.
3 "Do make some inquiries about Portugal; as, for instance, in what part of the world it lies, and whether it is an empire, a kingdom, or a republic. Also, and more particularly, the expenses of living there, and whether the Minister would be likely to be much pestered with his own
2 It would seem from this that there had been a question of
offering him a small diplomatic post; but the emoluments of the
place were justly taken into account, and it is to be supposed
that those of the consulate at Liverpool were at least as great
as the salary of the American representative at Lisbon.
Unfortunately, just after Hawthorne had taken possession of the
former post, the salary attached to it was reduced by Congress,
in an economical hour, to less than half the sum enjoyed by his
predecessors. It was fixed at 7,500 dollars ( 1,500); but the
consular fees, which were often copious, were an added resource.
At midsummer then, in 1853, Hawthorne was established in England.
VI
England and Italy (23)
Hawthorne was close upon fifty years of age when he came to Europe -- a fact that should be remembered when those impressions which he recorded in five substantial volumes (exclusive of the novel written in Italy), occasionally affect us by the rigidity of their point of view. His Note-Books, kept during his residence in England, his two winters in Rome, his summer in Florence, were published after his death; his impressions of England, sifted, revised, and addressed directly to the public, he gave to the world shortly before this event. The tone of his European Diaries is often so fresh and unsophisticated that we find ourselves thinking of the writer as a young man, and it is only a certain final sense of something reflective and a trifle melancholy that reminds us that the simplicity which is on the whole the leading characteristic of their pages, is, though the simplicity of inexperience, not that of youth. When I say inexperience, I mean that Hawthorne's experience had been narrow. His fifty years had been spent, for much the larger part, in small American towns -- Salem, the Boston of forty years ago, Concord, Lenox, West Newton -- and he had led exclusively what one may call a village-life. This is evident, not at all directly and superficially, but by implication and between the lines, in his desultory history of his foreign years. In other words, and to call things by their names, he was exquisitely and consistently provincial. I suggest this fact not in the least in condemnation, but, on the contrary, in support of an appreciative view of him. I know nothing more remarkable, more touching, than the sight of this odd, youthful-elderly mind, contending so late in the day with new opportunities for learning old things, and on the whole profiting by them so freely and gracefully. The Note-Books are provincial, and so, in a greatly modified degree, are the sketches of England, in Our Old Home; but the beauty and delicacy of this latter work are so interwoven with the author's air of being remotely outside of everything he describes, that they count for more, seem more
I shall not attempt to relate in detail the incidents of his residence in England. He appears to have enjoyed it greatly, in spite of the deficiency of charm in the place to which his duties chiefly confined him. His confinement, however, was not unbroken, and his published journals consist largely of minute accounts of little journeys and wanderings, with his wife and his three children, through the rest of the country; together with much mention of numerous visits to London, a city for whose dusky immensity and multitudinous interest he professed the highest relish. His Note-Books are of the same cast as the two volumes of his American Diaries, of which I have given some account -- chiefly occupied with external matters, with the accidents of daily life, with observations made during the long walks (often with his son), which formed his most valued pastime. His office, moreover, though Liverpool was not a delectable home, furnished him with entertainment as well as occupation, and it may almost be said that during these years he saw more of his fellow-countrymen, in the shape of odd wanderers, petitioners, and inquirers of every kind, than he had ever done in his native land. The paper entitled "Consular Experiences," in Our Old Home, is an admirable recital of these observations, and a proof that the novelist might have found much material in the opportunities of the consul. On his return to America, in 1860, he drew from his journal a number of pages relating to his observations in England, re-wrote them (with, I should suppose, a good deal of care), and converted them into articles which he published in a magazine. These chapters were afterwards collected, and Our Old Home (a rather infelicitous title), was issued in 1863. I prefer to speak of the book now, however, rather than in touching upon the closing years of his life, for it is a kind of deliberate rsum of his impressions of the land of his ancestors. "It is not a good or a weighty book," he wrote to his publisher, who had sent him some reviews of it, "nor does it deserve any great amount of praise or censure. I don't care about seeing any more notices of it." Hawthorne's appreciation of his own productions was always
"The people, for several days, have been in the utmost anxiety, and latterly in the highest exultation, about Sebastopol -- and all England, and Europe to boot, have been fooled by the belief that it had fallen. This, however, now turns out to be incorrect; and the public visage is somewhat grim in consequence. I am glad of it. In spite of his actual sympathies, it is impossible for an American to be otherwise than glad. Success makes an Englishman intolerable, and already, on the mistaken idea that the way was open to a prosperous conclusion of the war, the Times had begun to throw out menaces against America. I shall never love England till she sues to us for help, and, in the meantime, the fewer triumphs she obtains, the better for all parties. An Englishman in adversity is a very respectable character; he does not lose his dignity, but merely comes to a proper conception of himself. . . . . I seem to myself like a spy or traitor when I meet their eyes, and am conscious that I neither hope nor fear in sympathy with them, although they look at me in full confidence of sympathy. Their heart `knoweth its own bitterness,' and as for me, being a stranger and an alien, I `intermeddle not with their joy.'"
This seems to me to express very well the weak side of Hawthorne's work -- his constant mistrust and suspicion of the society that surrounded him, his exaggerated, painful, morbid national consciousness. It is, I think, an indisputable fact that Americans are, as Americans, the most self-conscious
"The street is an emblem of England itself. What seems new in it is chiefly a skilful and fortunate adaptation of what such a people as ourselves would destroy. The new things are based and supported on sturdy old things, and derive a massive strength from their deep and immemorial foundations, though with such limitations and impediments as only an Englishman could endure. But he likes to feel the weight of all the past upon his back; and moreover the antiquity that overburdens him has taken root in his being, and has grown to be rather a hump than a pack, so that there is no getting rid of it without tearing his whole structure to pieces. In my judgment, as he appears to be sufficiently comfortable under the mouldy accretion, he had better stumble on with it as long as he can. He presents a spectacle which is by no means without its charm for a disinterested and unincumbered observer."
There is all Hawthorne, with his enjoyment of the picturesque, his relish of chiaroscuro, of local colour, of the deposit of time, and his still greater enjoyment of his own dissociation from these things, his "disinterested and unincumbered" condition. His want of incumbrances may seem at times to give him a somewhat naked and attenuated appearance, but on the whole he carries it off very well. I have said that Our Old Home contains much of his best writing, and on turning over the book at hazard, I am struck with his frequent felicity of phrase. At every step there is something one would like to quote -- something excellently well said. These things are often of the lighter sort, but Hawthorne's charming diction lingers in the memory -- almost in the ear. I have always remembered a certain admirable characterisation of Doctor Johnson, in the account of the writer's visit to Lichfield -- and I will preface it by a paragraph almost as good, commemorating the charms of the hotel in that interesting town.
"At any rate I had the great, dull, dingy, and dreary coffee- room, with its heavy old mahogany chairs and tables, all to myself, and not a soul to exchange a word with except
The whole chapter entitled "Lichfield and Uttoxeter" is a sort of graceful tribute to Samuel Johnson, who certainly has nowhere else been more tenderly spoken of.
"Beyond all question I might have had a wiser friend than he. The atmosphere in which alone he breathed was dense; his awful dread of death showed how much muddy imperfection was to be cleansed out of him, before he could be capable of spiritual existence; he meddled only with the surface of life, and never cared to penetrate further than to ploughshare depth; his very sense and sagacity were but a one-eyed clear-sightedness. I laughed at him, sometimes standing beside his knee. And yet, considering that my native propensities were toward Fairy Land, and also how much yeast is generally mixed up with the mental sustenance of a New Englander, it may not have been altogether amiss, in those childish and boyish days, to keep pace with this heavy- footed traveller and feed on the gross diet that he carried in his knapsack. It is wholesome food even now! And then, how English! Many of the latent sympathies that enabled me to enjoy the Old Country so well, and that so readily amalgamated themselves with the American ideas that seemed most adverse to them, may have been derived from, or fostered and kept alive by, the great
And for mere beauty of expression I cannot forbear quoting this passage about the days in a fine English summer: --
"For each day seemed endless, though never wearisome. As far as your actual experience is concerned, the English summer day has positively no beginning and no end. When you awake, at any reasonable hour, the sun is already shining through the curtains; you live through unnumbered hours of Sabbath quietude, with a calm variety of incident softly etched upon their tranquil lapse; and at length you become conscious that it is bedtime again, while there is still enough daylight in the sky to make the pages of your book distinctly legible. Night, if there be any such season, hangs down a transparent veil through which the bygone day beholds its successor; or if not quite true of the latitude of London, it may be soberly affirmed of the more northern parts of the island that To-morrow is born before its Yesterday is dead. They exist together in the golden twilight, where the decrepit old day dimly discerns the face of the ominous infant; and you, though a mere mortal, may simultaneously touch them both, with one finger of recollection and another of prophecy."
The Note-Books, as I have said, deal chiefly with the superficial aspect of English life, and describe the material objects with which the author was surrounded. They often describe them admirably, and the rural beauty of the country has never been more happily expressed. But there are inevitably a great many reflections and incidental judgments, characterisations of people he met, fragments of psychology and social criticism, and it is here that Hawthorne's mixture of subtlety and simplicity, his interfusion of genius with what I have ventured to call the provincial quality, is most apparent. To an American reader this later quality, which is never grossly manifested, but pervades the Journals like a vague natural perfume, an odour of purity and kindness and integrity, must always, for a reason that I will touch upon, have a considerable
"I have found him here in Rome, the whole of my early friend, and even better than I used to know him; a heart as true and affectionate, a mind much widened and deepened by the experience of life. We hold just the same relation to one another as of yore, and we have passed all the turning-off places, and may hope to go on together, still the same dear friends, as long as we live. I do not love him one whit the less for having been President, nor for having done me the greatest good in his power; a fact that speaks eloquently in his favour, and perhaps says a little for myself. If he had been merely a benefactor, perhaps I might not have borne it so well; but each did his best for the other, as friend for friend."
The Note-Books are chiefly taken up with descriptions of the regular sights and "objects of interest," which we often feel to be rather perfunctory and a little in the style of the traditional tourist's diary. They abound in charming touches, and every reader of Transformation will remember the delightful colouring of the numerous pages in that novel, which are devoted to the pictorial aspects of Rome. But we are unable to rid ourselves of the impression that Hawthorne was a good deal bored by the importunity of Italian art, for which his taste, naturally not keen, had never been cultivated. Occasionally, indeed, he breaks out into explicit sighs and groans, and frankly declares that he washes his hands of it. Already, in England, he had made the discovery that he could easily feel overdosed with such things. "Yesterday," he wrote in 1856, "I went out at about twelve and visited the British Museum; an exceedingly tiresome affair. It quite crushes a person to see so much at once, and I wandered from hall to hall with a weary and heavy heart, wishing (Heaven forgive me!) that the Elgin marbles and the frieze of the Parthenon were all burnt into
The plastic sense was not strong in Hawthorne; there can be no better proof of it than his curious aversion to the representation of the nude in sculpture. This aversion was deep-seated; he constantly returns to it, exclaiming upon the incongruity of modern artists making naked figures. He apparently quite failed to see that nudity is not an incident, or accident, of sculpture, but its very essence and principle; and his jealousy of undressed images strikes the reader as a strange, vague, long-dormant heritage of his straight-laced Puritan ancestry. Whenever he talks of statues he makes a great point of the smoothness and whiteness of the marble -- speaks of the surface of the marble as if it were half the beauty of the image; and when he discourses of pictures, one feels that the brightness or dinginess of the frame is an essential part of his impression of the work -- as he indeed somewhere distinctly affirms. Like a good American, he took more pleasure in the productions of Mr. Thompson and Mr. Brown, Mr. Powers and Mr. Hart, American artists who were plying their trade in Italy, than in the works which adorned the ancient museums of the country. He suffered greatly from the cold, and found little charm in the climate, and during the weeks of winter that followed his arrival in Rome, he sat shivering by his fire and wondering why he had come to such a land of misery. Before he left Italy he wrote to his publisher -- "I bitterly detest Rome, and shall rejoice to bid it farewell for ever; and I fully acquiesce in all the mischief and ruin that has happened to it, from Nero's conflagration downward. In fact, I wish the very site had been obliterated before I ever saw it." Hawthorne presents himself to the reader of these pages as the last of the old-fashioned Americans -- and this is the interest which I just now said that his compatriots would find in his very limitations. I do not mean by this that there are not still many of his fellow-countrymen (as there are many natives of every land under the sun,) who are more susceptible of being irritated than of being soothed by the influences of the Eternal City. What I mean is that an American of equal value with Hawthorne, an American of equal genius, imagination, and, as our forefathers said, sensibility, would at
Out of his mingled sensations, his pleasure and his weariness, his discomforts and his reveries, there sprang another beautiful work. During the summer of 1858, he hired a picturesque old villa on the hill of Bellosguardo, near Florence, a curious structure with a crenelated tower, which, after having in the course of its career suffered many vicissitudes and played many parts, now finds its most vivid identity in being pointed out to strangers as the sometime residence of the celebrated American romancer. Hawthorne took a fancy to the place, as well he might, for it is one of the loveliest spots on earth, and the great view that stretched itself before him contains every element of beauty. Florence lay at his feet with her memories and treasures; the olive-covered hills bloomed around him, studded with villas as picturesque as his own; the Apennines, perfect in form and colour, disposed themselves opposite, and in the distance, along its fertile valley, the Arno wandered to Pisa and the sea. Soon after coming hither he wrote to a friend in a strain of high satisfaction: --
"It is pleasant to feel at last that I am really away from America -- a satisfaction that I never really enjoyed as long as I stayed in Liverpool, where it seemed to be that the quintessence of nasal and hand-shaking Yankeedom was
This romance was Transformation, which he wrote out during the following winter in Rome, and re-wrote during the several months that he spent in England, chiefly at Leamington, before returning to America. The Villa Montauto figures, in fact, in this tale as the castle of Monte-Beni, the patrimonial dwelling of the hero. "I take some credit to myself," he wrote to the same friend, on returning to Rome, "for having sternly shut myself up for an hour or two every day, and come to close grips with a romance which I have been trying to tear out of my mind." And later in the same winter he says -- "I shall go home, I fear, with a heavy heart, not expecting to be very well contented there. . . . If I were but a hundred times richer than I am, how very comfortable I could be! I consider it a great piece of good fortune that I have had experience of the discomforts and miseries of Italy, and did not go directly home from England. Anything will seem like a Paradise after a Roman winter." But he got away at last, late in the spring, carrying his novel with him, and the book was published, after, as I say, he had worked it over, mainly during some weeks that he passed at the little watering-place
It has a great deal of beauty, of interest and grace; but it has to my sense a slighter value than its companions, and I am far from regarding it as the masterpiece of the author, a position to which we sometimes hear it assigned. The subject is admirable, and so are many of the details; but the whole thing is less simple and complete than either of the three tales of American life, and Hawthorne forfeited a precious advantage in ceasing to tread his native soil. Half the virtue of The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables is in their local quality; they are impregnated with the New England air. It is very true that Hawthorne had no pretension to pourtray actualities and to cultivate that literal exactitude which is now the fashion. Had this been the case, he would probably have made a still graver mistake in transporting the scene of his story to a country which he knew only superficially. His tales all go on more or less "in the vague," as the French say, and of course the vague may as well be placed in Tuscany as in Massachusetts. It may also very well be urged in Hawthorne's favour here, that in Transformation he has attempted to deal with actualities more than he did in either of his earlier
Allowing for this, however, some of the finest pages in all Hawthorne are to be found in it. The subject, as I have said, is a particularly happy one, and there is a great deal of interest in the simple combination and opposition of the four actors. It is noticeable that in spite of the considerable length of the story, there are no accessory figures; Donatello and Miriam, Kenyon and Hilda, exclusively occupy the scene. This is the more noticeable as the scene is very large, and the great Roman background is constantly presented to us. The relations of these four people are full of that moral picturesqueness which Hawthorne was always looking for; he found it in perfection in the history of Donatello. As I have said, the novel is the most popular of his works, and every one will remember the figure of the simple, joyous, sensuous young Italian, who is not so much a man as a child, and not so much a child as a charming, innocent animal, and how he is brought to self-knowledge and to a miserable conscious manhood, by the commission of a crime. Donatello is rather vague and impalpable; he says too little in the book, shows himself too little, and falls short, I think, of being a creation. But he is enough of a creation to make us enter into the situation, and the whole history of his rise, or fall, whichever one chooses to call it -- his tasting of the tree of knowledge and finding existence complicated with a regret -- is unfolded with a thousand
Like all of Hawthorne's things, it contains a great many light
threads of symbolism, which shimmer in the texture of the tale, but
which are apt to break and remain in our fingers if we attempt to handle
them. These things are part of Hawthorne's very manner -- almost, as
one might say, of his vocabulary; they belong much more to the surface
of his work than to its stronger interest. The fault of
Transformation is that the element of the unreal is pushed too far,
and that the book is neither positively of one category nor of another.
His "moonshiny romance," he calls it in a letter; and, in truth, the
lunar element is a little too pervasive. The action wavers between the
streets of Rome, whose literal features the author perpetually sketches,
and a vague realm of fancy, in which quite a different verisimilitude
prevails. This is the trouble with Donatello himself. His companions
are intended to be real -- if they fail to be so, it is not for want of
intention; whereas he is intended to be real or not, as you please. He
is of a different substance from them; it is as if a painter, in
composing a picture, should try to give you an impression of one of his
figures by a strain of music. The idea of the modern faun was a
charming one; but I think it a pity that the author should not have made
him more definitely modern, without reverting so much to his
mythological properties and antecedents, which are very gracefully
touched upon, but which belong to the region of picturesque conceits,
much more than to that of real psychology. Among the young Italians of
to-day there are still plenty of models for such an image as Hawthorne
appears to have wished to present in the easy and natural Donatello.
And since I am speaking critically, I may go on to say that the art of
narration, in Transformation, seems to me more at fault than in the
author's other novels. The story straggles and wanders, is dropped and
taken up again, and towards the close lapses into an almost fatal
vagueness.
VII
Last Years (24)
Of the four last years of Hawthorne's life there is not much to tell that I have not already told. He returned to America in the summer of 1860, and took up his abode in the house he had bought at Concord before going to Europe, and of which his occupancy had as yet been brief. He was to occupy it only four years. I have insisted upon the fact of his being an intense American, and of his looking at all things, during his residence in Europe, from the standpoint of that little clod of western earth which he carried about with him as the good Mohammedan carries the strip of carpet on which he kneels down to face towards Mecca. But it does not appear, nevertheless, that he found himself treading with any great exhilaration the larger section of his native soil upon which, on his return, he disembarked. Indeed, the closing part of his life was a period of dejection, the more acute that it followed directly upon seven years of the happiest opportunities he was to have known. And his European residence had been brightest at the last; he had broken almost completely with those habits of extreme seclusion into which he was to relapse on his return to Concord. "You would be stricken dumb," he wrote from London, shortly before leaving it for the last time, "to see how quietly I accept a whole string of invitations, and, what is more, perform my engagements without a murmur. . . . . The stir of this London life, somehow or other," he adds in the same letter, "has done me a wonderful deal of good, and I feel better than for months past. This is strange, for if I had my choice I should leave undone almost all the things I do." "When he found himself once more on the old ground," writes Mr. Lathrop, "with the old struggle for subsistence staring him in the face again, it is not difficult to conceive how a certain degree of depression would follow." There is indeed not a little sadness in the thought of Hawthorne's literary gift, light, delicate, exquisite, capricious, never too abundant, being charged with the heavy burden of the maintenance of a family. We feel that
The brightness of the outlook at home was not made greater by the explosion of the Civil War in the spring of 1861. These months, and the three years that followed them, were not a cheerful time for any persons but army-contractors; but over Hawthorne the war-cloud appears to have dropped a permanent shadow. The whole affair was a bitter disappointment to him, and a fatal blow to that happy faith in the uninterruptedness of American prosperity which I have spoken of as the religion of the old-fashioned American in general, and the old-fashioned Democrat in particular. It was not a propitious time for cultivating the Muse; when history herself is so hard at work, fiction has little left to say. To fiction, directly, Hawthorne did not address himself; he composed first, chiefly during the year 1862, the chapters of which Our Old Home was afterwards made up. I have said that, though this work has less value than his purely imaginative things, the writing is singularly good, and it is well to remember, to its greater honour, that it was produced at a time when it was painfully hard for a man of Hawthorne's cast of mind to fix his attention. The air was full of battle-smoke, and the poet's vision was not easily clear. Hawthorne was irritated, too, by the sense of being to a certain extent, politically considered, in a false position. A large section of the Democratic party was not in good odour at the North; its loyalty was not perceived to be of that clear strain which public opinion required. To this wing of the party Franklin Pierce had, with reason or without, the credit of belonging; and our author was conscious of some sharpness of responsibility in defending the illustrious friend of whom he had already made himself the advocate. He defended him manfully, without a grain of concession, and described the ex-President to the public (and to himself), if not as he was, then as he ought to be. Our Old Home is dedicated to him, and about this dedication there was some little difficulty. It was represented to Hawthorne that as General Pierce was rather out of fashion, it might injure the success, and, in plain terms, the sale of
"I find that it would be a piece of poltroonery in me to withdraw either the dedication or the dedicatory letter. My long and intimate personal relations with Pierce render the dedication altogether proper, especially as regards this book, which would have had no existence without his kindness; and if he is so exceedingly unpopular that his name ought to sink the volume, there is so much the more need that an old friend should stand by him. I cannot, merely on account of pecuniary profit or literary reputation, go back from what I have deliberately felt and thought it right to do; and if I were to tear out the dedication I should never look at the volume again without remorse and shame. As for the literary public, it must accept my book precisely as I think fit to give it, or let it alone. Nevertheless I have no fancy for making myself a martyr when it is honourably and conscientiously possible to avoid it; and I always measure out heroism very accurately according to the exigencies of the occasion, and should be the last man in the world to throw away a bit of it needlessly. So I have looked over the concluding paragraph and have amended it in such a way that, while doing what I know to be justice to my friend, it contains not a word that ought to be objectionable to any set of readers. If the public of the North see fit to ostracise me for this, I can only say that I would gladly sacrifice a thousand or two dollars, rather than retain the good-will of such a herd of dolts and mean- spirited scoundrels."
The dedication was published, the book was eminently successful, and Hawthorne was not ostracised. The paragraph under discussion stands as follows: -- "Only this let me say, that, with the record of your life in my memory, and with a sense of your character in my deeper consciousness, as among the few things that time has left as it found them, I need no assurance that you continue faithful for ever to that grand idea of an irrevocable Union which, as you once told me, was the earliest that your brave father taught you. For other men there may be a choice of paths -- for you but one; and it rests
"I tried to imagine how very disagreeable the presence of a Southern army would be in a sober town of Massachusetts; and the thought considerably lessened my wonder at the cold and shy regards that are cast upon our troops, the gloom, the sullen demeanour, the declared, or scarcely hidden, sympathy with rebellion, which are so frequent here. It is a strange thing in human life that the greatest errors both of men and women often spring from their sweetest and most generous qualities; and so, undoubtedly, thousands of warm-hearted, generous, and impulsive persons have joined the Rebels, not from any real zeal for the cause, but because, between two conflicting loyalties, they chose that which necessarily lay nearest the heart. There never existed any other Government against which treason was so easy, and could defend itself by such plausible arguments, as against that of the United States. The anomaly of two allegiances, (of which that of the State comes nearest home to a man's feelings, and includes the altar and the hearth, while the General Government claims his devotion only to an airy mode of law, and has no symbol but a flag,) is exceedingly mischievous in this point of view; for it has converted crowds of honest people into traitors, who seem to themselves not merely innocent but patriotic, and who die for a bad cause with a quiet conscience as if it were the best. In the vast extent of our country -- too vast by far to be taken into one small human heart -- we inevitably limit to our own State, or at farthest, to our own little section,
To this paragraph a line of deprecation from the editor is attached; and indeed from the point of view of a vigorous prosecution of the war it was doubtless not particularly pertinent. But it is interesting as an example of the way an imaginative man judges current events -- trying to see the other side as well as his own, to feel what his adversary feels, and present his view of the case.
But he had other occupations for his imagination than putting himself into the shoes of unappreciative Southerners. He began at this time two novels, neither of which he lived to finish, but both of which were published, as fragments, after his death. The shorter of these fragments, to which he had given the name of The Dolliver Romance, is so very brief that little can be said of it. The author strikes, with all his usual sweetness, the opening notes of a story of New England life, and the few pages which have been given to the world contain a charming picture of an old man and a child.
The other rough sketch -- it is hardly more -- is in a manner complete; it was unfortunately deemed complete enough to be brought out in a magazine as a serial novel. This was to do it a great wrong, and I do not go too far in saying that poor Hawthorne would probably not have enjoyed the very bright light that has been projected upon this essentially crude piece of work. I am at a loss to know how to speak of Septimius Felton, or the Elixir of Life; I have purposely reserved but a small space for doing so, for the part of discretion seems to be to pass it by lightly. I differ therefore widely from the author's biographer and son-in-law in thinking it a work of the greatest weight and value, offering striking analogies with Goethe's Faust; and still more widely from a critic whom Mr. Lathrop quotes, who regards a certain portion of it as "one
The year 1864 brought with it for Hawthorne a sense of weakness and depression from which he had little relief during the four or five months that were left him of life. He had his engagement to produce The Dolliver Romance, which had been promised to the subscribers of the Atlantic Monthly (it was the first time he had undertaken to publish a work of fiction in monthly parts), but he was unable to write, and his consciousness of an unperformed task weighed upon him, and did little to dissipate his physical inertness. "I have not yet had courage to read the Dolliver proof-sheet," he wrote to his publisher in December, 1863; "but will set about it soon, though with terrible reluctance, such as I never felt before. I am most grateful to you," he went on, "for protecting me from that visitation of the elephant and his cub. If you happen to see Mr. ------, of L------, a young man who was here last summer, pray tell him anything that your conscience will let you, to induce him to spare me another visit, which I know he intended. I really am not well, and cannot be disturbed by strangers, without more suffering than it is worth while to endure." A month later he was obliged to ask for a further postponement. "I am not quite up to writing yet, but shall make an effort as soon as I see any hope of success. You ought to be thankful that (like most other broken-down authors) I do not pester you with decrepit pages, and insist upon your accepting them as full of the old spirit and vigour.
But he was not to go to England; he started three months later upon a briefer journey, from which he never returned. His health was seriously disordered, and in April, according to a letter from Mrs. Hawthorne, printed by Mr. Fields, he had been "miserably ill." His feebleness was complete; he appears to have had no definite malady, but he was, according to the common phrase, failing. General Pierce proposed to him that they should make a little tour together among the mountains of New Hampshire, and Hawthorne consented, in the hope of getting some profit from the change of air. The northern New England spring is not the most genial season in the world, and this was an indifferent substitute for the resource for which his wife had, on his behalf, expressed a wish -- a visit to "some island in the Gulf Stream." He was not to go far; he only reached a little place called Plymouth, one of the stations of approach to the beautiful mountain scenery of New Hampshire, when, on the 18th of May, 1864,
He was a beautiful, natural, original genius, and his life had been singularly exempt from worldly preoccupations and vulgar efforts. It had been as pure, as simple, as unsophisticated, as his work. He had lived primarily in his domestic affections, which were of the tenderest kind; and then -- without eagerness, without pretension, but with a great deal of quiet devotion -- in his charming art. His work will remain; it is too original and exquisite to pass away; among the men of imagination he will always have his niche. No one has had just that vision of life, and no one has had a literary form that more successfully expressed his vision. He was not a moralist, and he was not simply a poet. The moralists are weightier, denser, richer, in a sense; the poets are more purely inconclusive and irresponsible. He combined in a singular degree the spontaneity of the imagination with a haunting care for moral problems. Man's conscience was his theme, but he saw it in the light of a creative fancy which added, out of its own substance, an interest, and, I may almost say, an importance.
London: Macmillan,
1879
Nathaniel Hawthorne (25)
Nathaniel Hawthorne; (1804 - 1864). Written for the Library of the World's Best Literature Ancient and Modern, Vol. XII.
It is perhaps an advantage in writing of Nathaniel Hawthorne's work, that his life offers little opportunity to the biographer. The record of it makes so few exactions that in a critical account of him -- even as brief as this -- the work may easily take most of the place. He was one of those happy men of letters in whose course the great milestones are simply those of his ideas that found successful form. Born at Salem, Massachusetts, on July 4th, 1804, of established local Puritan -- and in a conspicuous degree, sturdy seafaring -- stock, he was educated at his birthplace and at Bowdoin College, Maine, where H. W. Longfellow was one of his fellow-students. Another was Franklin Pierce, who was to be elected President of the United States in 1852, and with whom Hawthorne formed relations that became an influence in his life. On leaving college in 1825 he returned to Salem to live, and in 1828 published in Boston a short romance called `Fanshawe,' of which the scene, in spite of its being a "love story," is laid, but for a change of name, at Bowdoin, with professors and undergraduates for its male characters. The experiment was inevitably faint, but the author's beautiful touch had begun to feel its way. In 1837, after a dozen years spent in special solitude, as he later testified, at Salem, he collected as the first series of `Twice-Told Tales' various more or less unremunerated contributions to the magazines and annuals of the day. In 1845 appeared the second series, and in 1851 the two volumes were, with a preface peculiarly graceful and touching, reissued together; he is in general never more graceful than when prefatory. In 1851 and 1854 respectively came to light `The Snow Image' and `Mosses from an Old Manse,' which form, with the previous double sheaf, his three main gatherings-in of the shorter fiction. I neglect, for brevity and as addressed to children, `Grandfather's Chair' and `The Wonder Book' (1851), as well as `Tanglewood Tales' (1852). Of the other groups, some preceded, some followed, the appearance in 1850 of his second novel, `The Scarlet Letter.'
These things -- the experiments in the shorter fiction -- had sounded, with their rare felicity, from the very first the note that was to be Hawthorne's distinguished mark, -- that feeling for the latent romance of New England, which in summary form is the most final name to be given, I think, to his inspiration. This element, which is what at its best his genius most expresses, was far from obvious, -- it had to be looked for; and Hawthorne found it, as he wandered and mused, in the secret play of the Puritan faith: the secret, I say particularly, because the direct and ostensible, face to face with common tasks and small conditions (as I may call them without prejudice to their general grimness), arrived at forms of which the tender imagination could make little. It could make a great deal, on the other hand, of the spiritual contortions, the darkened outlook, of the ingrained sense of sin, of evil, and of responsibility. There had been other complications in the history of the community surrounding him, -- savages from behind, soldiers from before, a cruel climate from every quarter and a pecuniary remittance from none. But the great complication was the pressing moral anxiety, the restless individual conscience. These things were developed at the cost of so many others, that there were almost no others left to help them to make a picture for the artist. The artist's imagination had to deck out the subject, to work it up, as we nowadays say; and Hawthorne's was, -- on intensely chastened lines, indeed, -- equal to the task. In that manner it came into exercise from the first, through the necessity of taking for granted, on the part of the society about him, a life of the spirit more complex than anything that met the mere eye of sense. It was a question of looking behind and beneath for the suggestive idea, the artistic motive; the effect of all of which was an invaluable training for the faculty that evokes and enhances. This ingenuity grew alert and irrepressible as it man;oeuvred for the back view and turned up the under side of common aspects, -- the laws secretly broken, the impulses secretly felt, the hidden passions, the double lives, the dark corners, the closed rooms, the skeletons in the cupboard and at the feast. It made, in short, and cherished, for fancy's sake, a mystery and a glamour where there were otherwise none very ready to its hand; so that it ended by living in a world of things
The specimens he collected, as we may call them, are divisible into groups, but with the mark in common that they are all early products of the dry New England air. Some are myths and mysteries of old Massachusetts, -- charming ghostly passages of colonial history. Such are `The Grey Champion,' `The Maypole of Merry Mount,' the four beautiful `Legends of the Province House.' Others, like `Roger Malvin's Burial,' `Rappaccini's Daughter,' `Young Goodman Brown,' are "moralities" without the moral, as it were; small cold apologues, frosty and exquisite, occasionally gathered from beyond the sea. Then there are the chapters of the fanciful all for fancy's sake, of the pure whimsical, and of observation merely amused and beguiled; pages, many of them, of friendly humorous reflections on what, in Salem or in Boston, a dreamer might meet in his walks. What Hawthorne encountered he instinctively embroidered, working it over with a fine, slow needle, and with flowers pale, rosy, or dusky, as the case might suggest. We have a handful of these in `The Great Carbuncle' and `The Great Stone Face,' `The Seven Vagabonds,' `The Threefold Destiny,' `The Village Uncle,' `The Toll Gatherer's Day,' `A Rill from the Town Pump,' and `Chippings with a Chisel.' The inequalities in his work are not, to my sense, great; and in specifying, we take and leave with hesitation.
`The Scarlet Letter,' in 1850, brought him immediate distinction, and has probably kept its place not only as the most original of his novels, but as the most distinguished piece of prose fiction that was to spring from American soil. He had received in 1839 an appointment to a small place in the Boston custom-house, where his labors were sordid and sterile, and he had given it up in permissible weariness. He had spent in 1841 near Roxbury, Massachusetts, a few months in the
It is the story as old as the custom of marriage, -- the story of the husband, the wife, and the lover; but bathed in a misty, moonshiny light, and completely neglecting the usual sources of emotion. The wife, with the charming child of her guilt, has stood under the stern inquisitorial law in the public pillory of the adulteress; while the lover, a saintly young minister, undetected and unbetrayed, has in an anguish of pusillanimity suffered her to pay the whole fine. The husband, an ancient scholar, a man of abstruse and profane learning, finds his revenge years after the wrong, in making himself insidiously the intimate of the young minister, and feeding secretly on the remorse, the inward torments, which he does everything to quicken but pretends to have no ground for suspecting. The march of the drama lies almost wholly in the malignant pressure exercised in this manner by Chillingworth upon Dimmesdale; an influence that at last reaches its climax in the extraordinary penance of the subject, who in the darkness, in the sleeping town, mounts, himself, upon the scaffold on which, years before, the partner of his guilt has undergone
`The House of the Seven Gables,' written during a residence of two years at Lenox, Massachusetts, was published in 1851. If there are probably no four books of any author among which, for a favorite, readers hesitate longer than between Hawthorne's four longest stories, there are at any rate many for whom this remains distinctly his largest and fullest production. Suffused as it is with a pleasant autumnal haze, it yet brushes more closely than its companions the surface of American life, comes a trifle nearer to being a novel of manners. The manners it shows us indeed are all interfused with the author's special tone, seen in a slanting afternoon light; but detail and illustration are sufficiently copious; and I am tempted for my own part to pronounce the book, taking subject and treatment together, and in spite of the position as a more concentrated classic enjoyed by `The Scarlet Letter,' the closest approach we are likely to have to the great work of fiction, so often called for, that is to do us nationally most honor and most good. The subject reduced to its essence, indeed, accounts not quite altogether for all that there is in the picture. What there is besides is an extraordinary charm of expression, of sensibility, of humor, of touch. The question is that of the mortal shrinkage of a family once uplifted, the last
Weary of Lenox, Hawthorne spent several months of 1852 at West Newton near Boston, where `The Blithedale Romance' was brought forth. He made the most, for the food of fancy, of what came under his hand, -- happy in an appetite that could often find a feast in meagre materials. The third of his novels is an echo, delightfully poetized, of his residence at Brook Farm. "Transcendentalism" was in those days in New England much in the air; and the most comprehensive account
We feel, however, that he lets them off easily, when we think of some of the queer figures and queer nostrums then abroad in the land, and which his mild satire -- incurring none the less some mild reproach -- fails to grind in its mill. The idea that he most tangibly presents is that of the unconscious way in which the search for the common good may cover a hundred interested impulses and personal motives; the suggestion that such a company could only be bound together more by its delusions, its mutual suspicions and frictions, than by any successful surrender of self. The book contains two images of large and admirable intention: that of Hollingsworth the heavy-handed radical, selfish and sincere, with no sense for jokes, for forms, or for shades; and that of Zenobia the woman of "sympathies," the passionate patroness of "causes," who plays as it were with revolution, and only encounters embarrassment. Zenobia is the most graceful of all portraits of the strong-minded of her sex; borrowing something of her grace, moreover, from the fate that was not to allow her to grow old and shrill, and not least touching from the air we attribute to her of looking, with her fine imagination, for adventures that were hardly, under the circumstances, to be met. We fill out the figure, perhaps, and even lend to the vision something more than Hawthorne intended.
In 1853 Franklin Pierce, then President, appointed him consul at Liverpool, which was the beginning of a residence of some seven years in England and in Italy, the period to which we owe `The Marble Faun' and `Our Old Home.' The material for the latter of these was the first to be gathered; but the appearance of `The Marble Faun,' begun in Rome in 1858 and finished during a second stay in England, preceded that of its companion. This is his only long drama on a foreign stage. Drawn from his own air, however, are much of its inspiration and its character. Hawthorne took with him to Italy, as he had done to England, more of the old Puritan consciousness than he left behind. The book has been consecrated as a kind of manual of Roman sights and impressions, brought together indeed in the light of a sympathy always detached and often withheld; and its value is not diminished by its constant reference to an order of things of which, at present, the yearning pilgrim -- before a board for the most part swept bare -- can only pick up the crumbs. The mystical, the mythical, are in `The Marble Faun' more than ever at hide-and-seek with the real. The author's fancy for freakish correspondences has its way, with Donatello's points of resemblance to the delightful statue in the Capitol. What he offers us is the history of a character blissfully immature, awakening to manhood through the accidental, the almost unconscious, commission of a crime. For the happy youth before his act -- the first complete act of his life -- there have been no unanswered questions; but after it he finds himself confronted with all the weary questions of the world. This act consists of his ridding of an obscure tormentor -- the obscurity is rather a mistake -- a woman whom he loves, and who is older, cleverer, and
The drama in `The Marble Faun' none the less, I think, is of an effect less complete than that of the almost larger element that I can only call the landscape and the spirit. Nothing is more striking than the awkward grace with which the author utters, without consenting to it, -- for he is full of half-amiable, half-angry protest and prejudice, -- the message, the mystery of the medium in which his actors move. Miriam and her muffled bandit have faded away, and we have our doubts and even our fears about Kenyon and his American statuary; but the breath of old Rome, the sense of old Italy, still meet us as we turn the page, and the book will long, on the great sentimental journey, continue to peep out of most pockets.
He returned to America in 1860, settled once more at Concord, and died at Plymouth, New Hampshire, in the arms of Franklin Pierce, in 1864. At home, with the aid of many memories and of the copious diaries ultimately published by his wife and children, he brought forth, one by one, the chapters eventually collected under the title of `Our Old Home.' The
The important item in this remainder is the close, ripe cluster, the series presented by himself, of his impressions of England. These admirable papers, with much of the same fascination, have something of the same uncomforted note with which he had surrendered himself to the charm of Italy: the mixture of sensibility and reluctance, of response and dissent, the strife between his sense of beauty and his sense of banishment. He came to the Old World late in life -- though after dabbling for years, indeed, in the fancied phenomena of time, and with inevitable reserves, mistrusts, and antagonisms. The striking thing to my sense, however, is not what he missed but what he so ingeniously and vividly made out. If he had been, imaginatively, rather old in his youth, he was youthful in his age; and when all is said, we owe him, as a contribution to the immemorial process of lively repartee between the mother land and the daughter, the only pages of the business that can be said to belong to pure literature. He was capable of writing `The Marble Faun,' and yet of declaring, in a letter from Rome, that he bitterly detested the place and should rejoice to bid it farewell for ever. Just so he was capable of drawing from English aspects a delight that they had yielded not even to Washington Irving, and yet of insisting, with a perversity that both smiled and frowned, that they rubbed him mainly all the wrong way. At home he had fingered the musty, but abroad he seemed to pine for freshness. In truth, for many persons his great, his most touching sign will have been his aloofness wherever he is. He is outside of everything, and an alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window. It was a faculty that gave him much more a terrible sense of human abysses than a desire rashly to sound them and rise to the
New York: R. S. Peale and J. A. Hill, 1896
RYE, SUSSEX, ENGLAND.
June 10, 1904.
DEAR SIR:
I much regret my being able to participate only in that spirit of sympathy that makes light of distance -- that defies difference of latitude and hemisphere -- in the honours you are paying, at his birthplace, to the beautiful genius to whom Salem owes the most precious gift perhaps that an honest city may receive from one of her sons -- the gift of a literary association high enough in character to emerge thus brilliantly from the test of Time. How happily it has lasted for you, and why it has lasted -- this flower of romantic art, never to become a mere desiccated specimen, that Hawthorne interwove with your sturdy annals, -- I shall attempt, by your leave, briefly to say; but your civic pride is at any rate fortunate in being able to found your claim to have contributed to the things of the mind on a case and a career so eminent and so interesting. The spirit of such occasions is always, on the spot, communicative and irresistible; full of the amenity of each man's -- and I suppose still more of each woman's -- scarce
I at all events almost venture to say that, save for the pleasure of your company, save for that community of demonstration which is certainly a joy in itself, I could not wish to be better placed than at this distance for a vision of the lonely young man that Hawthorne then was, and that he was in fact pretty well always to remain, dreaming his dreams, nursing his imagination, feeling his way, leading his life, intellectual, personal, economic, in the place that Salem then was, and becoming, unwittingly and unsuspectedly, with an absence of calculation fairly precious for the final effect, the pretext for the kind of recognition you greet him with to-day. It is the
All of which leads me back to what I said, to begin with, about our romancer's having borne the test of Time. I mentioned that there is a reason, in particular, why he has borne it so well, and I think you will recognize with me, in the light of what I have tried to say, that he has done so by very simply, quietly, slowly and steadily, becoming for us a Classic. If we look at the real meaning of our celebration to- day, ask ourselves what is at the back of our heads or in the bottom of our hearts about it, we become conscious of that interesting process and eloquent plea of the years on Hawthorne's behalf -- of that great benefit, that effect of benevolence, for him, from so many of the things the years have brought. We are in the presence thus of one of the happiest opportunities to see how a Classic comes into being, how three such things as the Scarlet Letter, the Gables and Blithedale -- to choose only a few names where I might choose many -- acquire their final value. They acquire it, in a large measure, by the manner in which later developments have worked in respect to them -- and, it is scarce too much to say, acquire it in spite of themselves and by the action of better machinery than their authors could have set in motion, stronger (as well as longer!) wires than their authors could have pulled. Later developments, I think, have worked in respect to them by contrast -- that is the point -- so much more either than by a generous emulation or by a still more generous originality. They have operated to make the beauty -- the other beauty -- delicate
The Proceedings in Commemoration of the One Hundredth
Anniversary of the Birth of Nathaniel Hawthorne.
Salem, Mass.: Essex Institute,
1905
William Dean Howells (26)
Italian Journeys. By W. D. Howells, Author of Venetian Life. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1867.
Under favor of his work on "Venetian Life," Mr. Howells took his place as one of the most charming of American writers and most satisfactory of American travellers. He is assuredly not one of those who journey from Dan to Beersheba only to cry out that all is barren. Thanks to the keenness of his observation and the vivacity of his sympathies, he treads afresh the most frequently trodden routes, without on the one hand growing cynical over his little or his great disappointments, or taking refuge on the other in the well-known alternative of the Baron Munchausen. Mr. Howells has an eye for the small things of nature, of art, and of human life, which enables him to extract sweetness and profit from adventures the most prosaic, and which prove him a very worthy successor of the author of the "Sentimental Journey."
Mr. Howells is in fact a sentimental traveller. He takes things as he finds them and as history has made them; he presses them into the service of no theory, nor scourges them into the following of his prejudices; he takes them as a man of the world, who is not a little a moralist, -- a gentle moralist, a good deal a humorist, and most of all a poet; and he leaves them, -- he leaves them as the man of real literary power and the delicate artist alone know how to leave them, with new memories mingling, for our common delight, with the old memories that are the accumulation of ages, and with a fresh touch of color modestly gleaming amid the masses of local and historical coloring. It is for this solid literary merit that Mr. Howells's writing is valuable, -- and the more valuable that it is so rarely found in books of travel in our own tongue. Nothing is more slipshod and slovenly than the style in which publications of this kind are habitually composed. Letters and diaries are simply strung into succession and transferred to print. If the writer is a clever person, an observer, an explorer, an intelligent devotee of the picturesque, his work will doubtless furnish a considerable amount of entertaining reading; but there will yet be something essentially
These "Italian Journeys" are a record of some dozen excursions made to various parts of the peninsula during a long residence in Venice. They take the reader over roads much travelled, and conduct him to shrines worn by the feet -- to say nothing of the knees -- of thousands of pilgrims, no small number of whom, in these latter days, have imparted their impressions to the world. But it is plain that the world is no more weary of reading about Italy than it is of visiting it; and that so long as that deeply interesting country continues to stand in its actual relation, aesthetically and intellectually, to the rest of civilization, the topic will not grow threadbare. There befell a happy moment in history when Italy got the start of the rest of Christendom; and the ground gained, during that splendid advance, the other nations have never been able to recover. We go to Italy to gaze upon certain of the highest achievements of human power, -- achievements, moreover, which, from their visible and tangible nature, are particularly well adapted to represent to the imagination the
In the simplest manner possible, and without declamation or rhetoric or affectation of any kind, but with an exquisite alternation of natural pathos and humor, Mr. Howells reflects this constant mute eloquence of Italian life. As to what estimate he finally formed of the Italian character he has left us uncertain; but one feels that he deals gently and tenderly with the foibles and vices of the land, for the sake of its rich and inexhaustible beauty, and of the pleasure which he absorbs with every breath. It is doubtless unfortunate for the Italians, and unfavorable to an exact appreciation of their intrinsic merits, that you cannot think of them or write of them in the same judicial manner as you do of other people, -- as from equal to equal, -- but that the imagination insists upon having a voice in the matter, and making you generous rather than just. Mr. Howells has perhaps not wholly resisted this temptation; and his tendency, like that of most sensitive spirits brought to know Italy, is to feel -- even when he does not express it -- that much is to be forgiven the people, because they are so picturesque. Mr. Howells is by no means indifferent, however, to the human element in all that he sees. Many of the best passages in his book, and the most delicate touches, bear upon the common roadside figures which he met, and upon the manners and morals of the populace. He observes on their behalf a vast
Mr. Howells is, in short, a descriptive writer in a sense and with a perfection that, in our view, can be claimed for no American writer except Hawthorne. Hawthorne, indeed, was perfection, but he was only half descriptive. He kept an eye on an unseen world, and his points of contact with this actual sphere were few and slight. One feels through all his descriptions, -- we speak especially of his book on England, -- that he was not a man of the world, -- of this world which we after all love so much better than any other. But Hawthorne cannot be disposed of in a paragraph, and we confine ourselves to our own author. Mr. Howells is the master of certain refinements of style, of certain exquisite intentions (intentions in which humor generally plays a large part), such as are but little practised in these days of crude and precipitate writing. At the close of a very forcible and living description of certain insufferable French commis-voyageurs on the steamer from Genoa to Naples, "They wore their hats at dinner," writes Mr. Howells; "but always went away, after soup, deadly pale." It would be difficult to give in three lines a better picture of unconscious vulgarity than is furnished by this conjunction of abject frailties with impertinent assumptions.
And so at Capri, "after we had inspected the ruins of the emperor's villa, a clownish imbecile of a woman, professing to
North American Review, January 1868
The many readers who find in Mr. Howells's charming prose one of the most refined literary pleasures of the day will open his volume of Poems with a good deal of curiosity as well as a good deal of confidence. The author's habit of finished workmanship is in itself an assurance of delicate entertainment; but those who have relished as we have the lurking poetical intuitions of "Italian Journeys" and "Suburban Sketches" will ask themselves what a fancy which finds so happy an utterance in natural, flexible prose has left itself to say in verse. As it turns out, Mr. Howells's verse is as natural and unforced as his prose; and we are left wondering what law it is that governs his occasional preference of one vehicle of expression to the other, until at last we forget our wonderment in envy of this double skill. Double it is, this delicate skill, and yet characteristically single, too; for, whatever he writes, style somehow comes uppermost under Mr. Howells's hand, and what is poetry when it charms us most but style? We have taken much of our pleasure over these light lyrics and grave hexameters in recognizing and greeting again the
But this light irresponsibility of sadness is, we confess, the great charm of his verse. Poetry was made to talk about vague troubles and idle hopes, to express the thinnest caprices of thought, and when sensitive people meddle with it it is certain to be charged with the more or less morbid overflow of sadness. There is almost nothing of this sort that the poetic form, in its happiest moods, may not justify and make sweet. We must hasten to add, however, that Mr. Howells has laid no such very heavy burden upon it. His melancholy is the melancholy of reflection, not of passion; and his bitterness has an indefinable air, which becomes it vastly, of being turned to mild good humor by the glimpses it enjoys of its graceful poetized image. One always feels free to doubt of the absolute despondency of a genuine artist. Before his sorrow is nine days old he is half in love with its picturesqueness; everything in his experience, dark or bright, is a passable "subject." The artistic element in Mr. Howells's talent is inveterate; with him, as with many of our modern singers, it is often a question for the reader whether the pain of feeling is not out
We infer that, as a deposit, as it were, from this and other impressions, he has retained a zealous affection for light literature, and has come to believe no time wasted which is spent in exploring the secrets of literary form. To conclude our running analysis, we fancy him writing fewer verses than formerly, but turning over his old ones with a good deal of tender sympathy, feeling how many impressions once vivid and convictions once intense, how many felicities of phrase, how many notes happily struck, how much true poetic inspiration is stored away in them; and saying to himself that sifted, revised, retouched, they may be read with something of the pleasure with which they were written.
He has certainly been right -- right to collect his verses and right to have sifted them; for, thanks to the latter circumstance, the volume gives us a peculiarly agreeable sense of
"That time of year, you know, when the summer, beginning
to sadden,
Full-mooned and silver-hearted, glides from the heart of
September,
Mourned by disconsolate crickets and iterant grasshoppers,
crying
All the still nights long from the ripened abundance of
gardens;
Then ere the boughs of maple are mantled with earliest
autumn,
But the wind of autumn breathes from the orchards at
nightfall,
Full of winy perfume and mystical yearning and languor;
And in the noonday woods you hear the foraging squirrels,
And the long, crashing fall of the half-eaten nut from the
tree-top;
When the robins are mute and the yellow-birds, haunting
the thistles,
Cheep and twitter and flit through the dusty lanes and the loppings,
When the pheasant hums from your stealthy foot in the
cornfield;
And the wild pigeons feed, few and shy, in the scokeberry
bushes;
When the weary land lies hushed, like a seer in a vision,
And your life seems but the dream of a dream that you
cannot remember --
Broken, bewildering, vague, an echo that answers to
nothing!
That time of year, you know."
These few lines from "Clement" are an excellent specimen both of the author's graceful management of a meter which easily becomes awkward and of that touching suggestiveness of image and epithet which we find especially characteristic of him. The diction here seems to us really exquisite. If the essence of poetry is to make our muse a trifle downhearted, our quotation is richly charged with it. "Clement" is the most finished of the longer pieces and the fullest of this charm of minute detail. "The Faithful of the Gonzaga" is a very pretty version in ballad measure of a picturesque Mantuan legend; and "Bo-Peep; A Pastoral" is a pastiche, a trifle too elaborate perhaps for the theme, of the fairy tale or Spenserian style of poem. It is the only piece in the volume that is not serious; but in its jocose picturesqueness it is full of lovely, half-serious lines. The author has been vigorously in earnest, on the other hand, in the painful tale of "Avery," one of the dismal legends of Niagara. This is an excellent piece of rapidly moving poetic narrative. It might aptly replace certain threadbare favorites in the repertory of public "readers." The things, however, which have given us most pleasure are the shorter and slighter poems -- poems about nothing, as we may almost call some of them; slender effusions of verse, on themes to which you can hardly give names, and which you would scarcely think phraseable in song unless the singer prunes it. The smallest pretexts have sufficed for these things, and half their substance is in the way they are said. Some vague regret, felt or fancied; some idle, youthful hope or longing; a hint, a conjecture, a reminiscence, a nameless pulsation of youth; the bitter-sweet sense of a past and a future -- these are the author's poetic promptings -- half emotion, half imagination, and, in their own peculiarly delicate way, all style. They are the expression of a sensitive mind; but of a mind happy beyond the fortune of many of the numerous spirits who take things hard in having this exquisite esthetic compensation.
"One after one they left us;
The sweet birds out of our breasts
Went flying away in the morning:
Will they come again to their nests?
"Will they come again at nightfall,
With God's breath in their song?
Noon is fierce with heats of summer
And summer days are long!
"O my life, with thy upward liftings,
Thy downward-striking roots,
Ripening out of thy tender blossoms
But hard and bitter fruits!
"In thy boughs there is no shelter
For the birds to seek again.
The desolate nest is broken
And torn with wind and rain!"
This seems to us altogether a little masterpiece, and we can offer the reader no kindlier wish than for a frequent occurrence of those quiet moods -- not melancholy, but tolerant of melancholy, in which he may best enjoy it -- one of the moods, par excellence, in which Mr. Longfellow, in those charming verses which every one knows, expresses a preference for the small suggestive singers over the grandly oppressive ones. It has a dozen companions -- "The First Cricket," "Bubbles," "The Mulberries" -- in which a moral shadow resolves itself into a lovely poetic fantasy. We intend no illiberal praise when we say that the fifth stanza of the "Elegy" on the author's brother seems to us the very perfection of good taste. It reverberates with all possible tenderness in the reader's conscience, and yet in its happy modulation it troubles him with no uneasy effort to reach beyond itself. The reminiscences of Heine which we have alluded to the reader will
Independent, January 8, 1874
Those who, a couple of years ago, read "A Chance Acquaintance" will find much interest in learning how the author has justified the liberal fame awarded that performance. Having tried other literary forms with remarkable success, Mr. Howells finally proved himself an accomplished story-teller, and the critic lurking in even the kindliest reader will be glad to ascertain whether this consummation was due chiefly to chance or to skill. "A Chance Acquaintance" was indeed not only a very charming book, but a peculiarly happy hit; the fancy of people at large was vastly tickled by the situation it depicted; the hero and heroine were speedily promoted to the distinction of types, and you became likely to overhear discussions as to the probability of their main adventures wherever men and women were socially assembled. Kitty Ellison and her weak-kneed lover, we find, are still objects of current allusion, and it would be premature, even if it were possible, wholly to supersede them; but even if Mr. Howells was not again to hit just that nail, he was welcome to drive in another beside it and to supply the happy creations we have mentioned with successors who should divide our admiration. We had little doubt ourselves that he would on this occasion reach whatever mark he had aimed at; for, with all respect to the good fortune of his former novel, it seemed to us very maliciously contrived to play its part. It would have been a question in our minds, indeed, whether it was not
"A Venetian priest in love with an American girl, -- there's richness, as Mr. Squeers said!" -- such was the formula by which we were first gossipingly made acquainted with the subject of "A Foregone Conclusion." An amiable American widow, travelling in Italy with her daughter, lingers on in Venice into the deeper picturesqueness of the early summer. With that intellectual thriftiness that characterizes many of her class (though indeed in Mrs. Vervain it is perhaps only a graceful anomaly the more), she desires to provide the young girl with instruction in Italian, and requests the consul of her native land (characteristically again) to point her out a teacher. The consul finds himself interested in a young ecclesiastic, with an odd mechanical turn, who has come to bespeak the consular patronage for some fanciful device in gunnery, and whose only wealth is a little store of English, or rather Irish, phrases, imparted by a fellow-priest from Dublin. Having been obliged to give the poor fellow the cold shoulder as an inventor, he is prompt in offering him a friendly hand as an Italian master, and Don Ippolito is introduced to Miss Vervain. Miss Vervain is charming, and the young priest discovers it to his cost. He falls in love with her, offers himself, is greeted with the inevitable horror provoked by such a proposition from such a source, feels the deep displeasure he must have caused, but finds he is only the more in love, resists, protests, rebels, takes it all terribly hard, becomes intolerably miserable, and falls fatally ill, while the young girl and her mother hurry away from Venice. Such is a rapid outline of Mr. Howells's story, which, it will be seen, is simple in the extreme, -- is an air played on a single string, but an air exquisitely modulated. Though the author has not broken
The character of Florida Vervain contributes greatly to the dusky, angular relief of Don Ippolito. This young lady is a singularly original conception, and we remember no heroine in fiction in whom it is proposed to interest us on just such terms. "Her husband laughed," we are told at the close of the book, "to find her protecting and serving [her children] with the same tigerish tenderness, the same haughty humility, as that with which she used to care for poor Mrs. Vervain; and he perceived that this was merely the direction away from herself of that intense arrogance of nature which, but for her power and need of loving, would have made her intolerable. What she chiefly exacted from them, in return for her fierce devotedness, was the truth in everything; she was content they should be rather less fond of her than of their father, whom, indeed, they found much more amusing." A heroine who ripens into this sort of wife and mother is rather an exception
"The portal was a tall arch of Venetian Gothic, tipped with a carven flame; steps of white Istrian stone descended to the level of the lowest ebb, irregularly embossed with barnacles and dabbling long fringes of soft green sea-mosses in the rising and falling tide. Swarms of water-bugs and beetles played over the edges of the steps, and crabs scuttled sidewise into deeper water at the approach of a gondola. A length of stone-capped brick wall, to which patches of stucco still clung, stretched from the gate on either hand, under cover of an ivy that flung its mesh of shining green from within, where there lurked a lovely garden, stately, spacious for Venice, and full of a delicious half-sad surprise for whoso opened upon it. In the midst it had a broken fountain, with a marble naiad standing on a shell, and looking saucier than the sculptor meant, from having lost the point of her nose; nymphs and fauns and shepherds and shepherdesses, her kinsfolk, coquetted in and out among the greenery in flirtation not to be embarrassed by the fracture of an arm or the casting of a leg or so; one lady had no head, but she was the boldest of all. In this garden there were some mulberry and pomegranate trees, several of which hung about the fountain with seats in their shade, and, for the rest, there seemed to be mostly roses and oleanders, with other shrubs of the kind that made the greatest show of blossom and cost the least for ten-dance."
It was in this garden that Don Ippolito told his love. We are aware that to consider Providence and New York not worthy to be mentioned in the same breath with it is a strictly conservative view of the case, and the author of "Their Wedding Journey" and "A Chance Acquaintance" has already proved himself, where American local color is concerned, a thoroughgoing radical. We may ground our objection to the dubious element, in this instance, on saying that the story is Don Ippolito's, and that in virtue of that fact it should not
North American Review, January 1875
Acquaintance, etc. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1875.
MR. HOWELLS in his new novel returns to his first love, and treats once more of Venice and Venetian figures. His constancy has not betrayed him, for `A Foregone Conclusion' is already rapidly making its way. A novelist is always safer for laying his scene in his own country, and the best that can be said of his errors of tone and proportion, when he deals with foreign manners, is that the home reader is rarely wise enough to measure them. But in Venice Mr. Howells is almost at home, and if his book contains any false touches, we, for our part, have not had the skill to discover them. His Venetian hero is not only a very vivid human being, but a distinct Italian, with his subtle race-qualities artfully interwoven with his personal ones. We confess, however, that in spite of this evidence of the author's ability to depict a consistent
This story is admirably told, and leads one to expect very considerable things from Mr. Howells as a novelist. He has given himself a narrow stage, or rather a scanty dramatis personae
A matter which it is doubtless very possible to discuss, but in which we ourselves should be on the protesting side, is the felicity of the episodes related in the last twenty pages of the tale. After the hero's death the action is transplanted to America, and the conclusion takes place in the shadow of the Fifth Avenue Hotel. We have found these pages out of tune with their predecessors, and we suspect that this will be the verdict of readers with the finer ear. The philosophy of such matters is very ethereal, and one can hardly do more than take one's stand on the "I do not like you, Doctor Fell" principle. One labors under the disadvantage, too, that the author's defence will be much more categorical than the reader's complaint, and that the complaint itself lays one open to the charge of siding against one's own flesh and blood. We should risk it, then, and almost be willing, for the sake of keeping a singularly perfect composition intact, to pass for a disloyal citizen. And then the author can point triumphantly to `A Chance Acquaintance' as proof that a very American tale may be also a very charming one. Of this there is no doubt; but everything is relative, and the great point is, as the French say, not to mler les genres. We renounce the argument, but in reading over `A Foregone Conclusion' we shall close the work when the hero dies -- when old Veneranda comes to the door and shakes her hands in Ferris's face and smites him, as it were, with the announcement. The author, however, is thoroughly consistent, for in stamping his tale at the last with the American local seal he is simply expressing his own literary temperament. We have always thought Mr. Howells's, in spite of his Italian affiliations, a most characteristically American talent; or rather not in spite of them, but in a manner on account of them, for he takes Italy as no Italian surely ever took it -- as your enterprising Yankee alone is at pains to take it. American literature is immature, but it has, in prose and verse alike, a savor of its own, and we have often thought that this might be a theme for various interesting reflections. If we undertook
Nation, January 7, 1875
As the existence of a man of letters (so far as the public is concerned with it) may be said to begin with his first appearance in literature, that of Mr. HOWELLS, who was born
The mingled freshness and irony of these things gave them an originality which has not been superseded, to my knowledge, by any impressions of European life from an American stand-point. At Venice Mr. Howells married a lady of artistic accomplishment and association, passed through the sharp alternations of anxiety and hope to which those who spent the long years of the civil war in foreign lands were inevitably condemned, and of which the effect was not rendered less wearing by the perusal of the London Times and the conversation of the British tourist. The irritation, so far as it proceeded
On his return from Venice he settled in the vicinity of Boston, and began to edit the Atlantic Monthly, accommodating himself to this grave complication with infinite tact and industry. He conferred further distinction upon the magazine; he wrote the fine series of "Suburban Sketches," one of the least known of his productions, but one of the most perfect,
He was still under the shadow of his editorship when, in the intervals of his letter-writing and reviewing, he made his first cautious attempts in the walk of fiction. I say cautious, for in looking back nothing is more clear than that he had determined to advance only step by step. In his first story, Their Wedding Journey, there are only two persons, and in his next, A Chance Acquaintance, which contains one of his very happiest studies of a girl's character, the number is not lavishly increased.
In A Foregone Conclusion, where the girl again is admirable, as well as the young Italian priest, also a kind of maidenly figure, the actors are but four. To-day MR. HOWELLS doesn't
MR. HOWELLS has gone from one success to another, has taken possession of the field, and has become copious without detriment to his freshness. I need not enumerate his works in their order, for, both in America and in England (where it is a marked feature of the growing curiosity felt about American life that they are constantly referred to for information and verification), they have long been in everybody's hands. Quietly and steadily they have become better and better; one may like some of them more than others, but it is noticeable that from effort to effort the author has constantly enlarged his scope. His work is of a kind of which it is good that there should be much to-day -- work of observation, of patient and definite notation. Neither in theory nor in practice is MR. HOWELLS a romancer; but the romancers can spare him; there will always be plenty of people to do their work. He has definite and downright convictions on the subject of the work that calls out to be done in opposition to theirs, and this fact is a source of much of the interest that he excites.
It is a singular circumstance that to know what one wishes to do should be, in the field of art, a rare distinction; but it is incontestable that, as one looks about in our English and American fiction, one does not perceive any very striking examples of a vivifying faith. There is no discussion of the great question of how best to write, no exchange of ideas, no vivacity nor variety of experiment. A vivifying faith MR. HOWELLS may distinctly be said to possess, and he conceals it so little as to afford every facility to those people who are anxious to prove that it is the wrong one. He is animated by a love of the common, the immediate, the familiar and vulgar elements of life, and holds that in proportion as we move into the rare and strange we become vague and arbitrary; that truth of representation, in a word, can be achieved only so long as it is in our power to test and measure it. He thinks scarcely anything too paltry to be interesting, that the small and the vulgar have been terribly neglected, and would rather see an exact account of a sentiment or a character he stumbles against every day than a brilliant evocation of a passion or a type he has never seen and does not even particularly believe in. He adores the real, the natural, the colloquial, the moderate,
The picture of American life on MR. HOWELLS'S canvas is not of a dazzling brightness, and many readers have probably wondered why it is that (among a sensitive people) he has so successfully escaped the imputation of a want of patriotism. The manners he describes -- the desolation of the whole social prospect in A Modern Instance is perhaps the strongest expression of those influences -- are eminently of a nature to discourage the intending visitor, and yet the westward pilgrim continues to arrive, in spite of the Bartley Hubbards and the Laphams, and the terrible practices at the country hotel in Doctor Breen, and at the Boston boarding-house in A Woman's Reason. This tolerance of depressing revelations is explained partly, no doubt, by the fact that MR. HOWELLS'S truthfulness imposes itself -- the representation is so vivid that the reader accepts it as he accepts, in his own affairs, the mystery of fate -- and partly by a very different consideration,
This production had struck me as the author's high-water mark, until I opened the monthly sheets of Lemuel Barker, in which the art of imparting a palpitating interest to common things and unheroic lives is pursued (or is destined, apparently, to be pursued) to an even higher point. The four (or is it eight?) repeated "good-mornings" between the liberated Lemuel and the shop-girl who has crudely been the cause of his being locked up by the police all night are a poem, an idyl, a trait of genius, and a compendium of American good-nature. The whole episode is inimitable, and I know fellow-novelists of MR. HOWELLS'S who would have given their eyes
It would be absurd to speak of MR. HOWELLS to-day in the encouraging tone that one would apply to a young writer who had given fine pledges, and one feels half guilty of that mistake if one makes a cheerful remark about his future. And yet we cannot pretend not to take a still more lively interest in his future than we have done in his past. It is hard to see how it can help being more and more fruitful, for his face is turned in the right direction, and his work is fed from sources which play us no tricks.
Harper's Weekly, June 19, 1886
IT IS MADE KNOWN to me that they are soon to feast in New York the newest and freshest of the splendid birthdays to which you keep treating us, and that your many friends will meet round you to rejoice in it and reaffirm their allegiance. I shall not be there, to my sorrow; and, though this is inevitable, I yet want to be missed, peculiarly and monstrously missed, so that these words shall be a public apology for my absence: read by you, if you like and can stand it, but, better still, read to you and, in fact, straight at you by whoever will be so kind and so loud and so distinct. For I doubt, you see, whether any of your toasters and acclaimers have anything like my ground and title for being with you at such an hour. There can scarce be one, I think, to-day who has known you from so far back, who has kept so close to you for so long, and who has such fine old reasons -- so old, yet so well preserved -- to feel your virtue and sound your praise. My debt to you began well-nigh half a century ago in the most personal way possible, and then kept growing and growing with your own admirable growth -- but always rooted in the early intimate benefit. This benefit was that you held out your open
That, then, was what I had with time to settle down to -- the common attitude of seeing you do it again and again; keep on doing it, with your heroic consistency and your noble, genial abundance, during all the years that have seen so many apparitions come and go, so many vain flourishes attempted and achieved, so many little fortunes made and unmade, so many weaker inspirations betrayed and spent. Having myself to practise meaner economies, I have admired from period to period your so ample and liberal flow; wondered at your secret for doing positively a little -- what do I say, a little? I mean a magnificent deal! -- of Everything. I seem to myself to have faltered and languished, to have missed more occasions than I have grasped, while you have piled up your monument just by remaining at your post. For you have had the advantage, after all, of breathing an air that has suited and nourished you; of sitting up to your neck, as I may say -- or at least up to your waist -- amid the sources of your inspiration. There and so you were at your post; there and so the spell could ever work for you, there and so your relation to all your material grow closer and stronger, your perception penetrate, your authority accumulate. They make a great array, a literature in themselves, your studies of American life so acute, so direct, so disinterested, so preoccupied but with the fine truth of the case; and the more attaching to me always for their referring themselves to a time and an order when we knew together what American life was -- or thought we did, deluded though we may have been! I don't pretend to measure the effect or to sound the depths, if they be not the shallows, of the huge wholesale importations and so- called assimilations of this later time; I only feel and speak for those conditions in which, as "quiet observers," as careful
North American Review, April
1912
Helen Hunt Jackson and Rhoda Broughton (27)
Mercy Philbrick's Choice. No Name Series. Boston: Robert Brothers, 1876. Joan. By Rhoda Broughton. London: Bentley; New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1876.
The keynote of `Mercy Philbrick's Choice' is given in the opening lines of the story, in the sentence in which we are told that there is "something pathetic" in the attempt to put fences round small gardens. The authoress takes the pathetic view not only of fences, but of things in general. We wish, by the way, that the adjective in question could be excluded for ten good years from the literature of New England, in which of late it has played a very active part. Mercy Philbrick is a young widow from Cape Cod, who comes, with her invalid mother, to occupy, in a small inland town, the wing of a house of which a certain Stephen White is the lessee. The young lady is a poetess of remarkable talent, whose verses exert much influence upon her contemporaries. These verses are, in too liberal a measure, reproduced in the pages of the tale. Stephen White is a young man of an "artistic temperament," burdened also with the care of an invalid mother, who, however, unlike the aged parent of Mercy Philbrick, is an intolerable scold. In spite of his artistic temperament, he bears his cross with the meekness of a Catholic saint of legend, and his "sweet reasonableness," as Matthew Arnold has it, wins for him the affection of the frigid Sappho of the wing -- or, as the author terms it, the jag. Nothing particular happens between them until towards the end of the book, when Stephen White finds behind the chimney-piece a bag of gold, concealed there by the owner of the house, which he exultantly appropriates, with the view of procuring for his mother some of those comforts which their poverty has hitherto kept out of her reach. Against this conduct Mrs. Philbrick violently protests, representing to him that the money properly belongs to a certain Mrs. Jacobs, a destitute old woman, some time owner of the house, and from whom he has been holding a mortgage on the same. This mortgage he has just foreclosed. Stephen White declines to surrender the bag, and the strenuous Mercy, who has lately lost her mother, threatens, in case he keeps it, to "inform the authorities."
This little story is more noticeable for something typical and characteristic in its tone than for any especial force or brilliancy. It reads like a Sunday tract, enlarged and improved; and yet we must add that in the author's part of the work, as it may be called, there is nothing disagreeable. She has done her work -- the work is plainly a woman's -- with evident zeal and care, and bestowed much serious sentiment and thought upon it. But the subject is rather too thankless; the three or four people she has put forward are hopelessly disagreeable. New England life is not the most picturesque in the world, but there is something regrettable in this pale, unlighted representation of a dry and bloodless population, and a style of manners farther removed from the spectacular than a cranberry-bog from a vineyard. The typical part of it is that in certain circles there is an extreme relish for histories of sternly moralistic young women, whose social horizon is bounded on one side by the vines trained round their picture-frames, on another by a system of feeble casuistry, and on another by poetical contributions to the magazines. Mercy Philbrick is haunted by the fear "of appearing to like her friend more than she really did" -- the fear of telling wicked lies for the sake of good manners. We must declare that, in spite of her "great gift" of creating a "vitalized individuality" in rooms (the author admits that this accomplishment is hard to define), she was decidedly too angular and pedantic a young woman. And what put it into the author's head to make her a poetess and endow her with the "poetic temperament"? These things do not at all hang together. Poets are not a literal but an imaginative folk, devoted to seeing the charm, the joke, of things -- to finding it where it may be, and slipping it in where it is not. It is an equal oddity to talk about Stephen White's "artistic temperament." He is very vague -- we don't particularly see him; but we are told that when Mercy offers to embrace him, he "puts her away with
We must mention Parson Dorrance, the town minister and college professor, who has also had a cross to bear -- a cross almost exactly similar to those of Mercy and Stephen. His wife has been an invalid for twenty-five years, and his career has been fatally obstructed by his having to sit with her for days, holding her hand. He has performed this task with heroic devotion, and on the death of his wife he proposes to Mercy to marry him. She answers characteristically that "it would not be right." Whereupon Parson Dorrance, convicted, apparently, with singular promptitude of an impropriety, asks her if she "will let him be just as he was before." She says she will try, and he kisses her hair and departs. He is a venerable gentleman, with a daughter of Mercy's age; and in her sketch of him the author has not avoided the suggestion of disagreeable models. She shows a curious monotony of fancy in giving exactly the same background to the lives of each of her figures. An elderly female invalid of an exacting temper is in each case the governing influence. Does the author mean to suggest that this is the universal background of New England lives? What a dreary generalization! Indeed, the extreme dreariness of this little tale -- the mingled blackness and tameness
It has, however, a crystalline purity as compared with the latest production of the remarkable author of `Cometh up as a Flower.' If there is something typical in the tone of `Mercy Philbrick's Choice,' there is in `Joan' an even more forcible suggestion of the social milieu from which it has sprung. The contrast is curious, and is altogether to the advantage of the American tale. If the latter is written for the edification of circles in which young ladies commune with their consciences over the question whether they have not seemed to like their friends more than they really do, this is a nobler range of speculation than any that we find alluded to in `Joan.' `Joan' and its sister-productions are, we believe, devoured by the young ladies of England, among whom the appearance of a new work by Miss Broughton is a literary event of high importance. To form an idea of what the English manufacture of fasionable fiction has come to when such productions as these are possible, the present tale must be attentively perused. The reflections it suggests will be found worth the trouble. `Mercy Philbrick's Choice' is a very rare and perfect work of art in comparison -- so much so that it is really almost an offence to couple it, however discriminatingly, with such a farrago of puerility and nastiness, inanity and vulgarity. But both books have been successful, and it is interesting to see what it is that "takes" in different communities. In one, to make a hit, there must be a balancing of moral questions, and a nice adjustment of righteousness in the walk and conversation of heroes and heroines; society must be represented as much preoccupied with ethical hair-splitting, and as addicted to no grosser form of sensuality than the decoration of rooms with green twigs and vines, and the enjoyment of the "vitalized individuality" so produced. In the other, there must be strapping young Guardsmen, with "race-horse nostrils," who frequent country-houses, and profit by the occasion of presenting bedroom-candles to young ladies to keep hold of
Nation, December 21, 1876
James Russell Lowell (28)
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
After a man's long work is over and the sound of his voice is still, those in whose regard he has held a high place find his image strangely simplified and summarized. The hand of death, in passing over it, has smoothed the folds, made it more typical and general. The figure retained by the memory is compressed and intensified; accidents have dropped away from it and shades have ceased to count; it stands, sharply, for a few estimated and cherished things, rather than, nebulously, for a swarm of possibilities. We cut the silhouette, in a word, out of the confusion of life, we save and fix the outline, and it is with his eye on this profiled distinction that the critic speaks. It is his function to speak with assurance when once his impression has become final; and it is in noting this circumstance that I perceive how slenderly prompted I am to deliver myself on such an occasion as a critic. It is not that due conviction is absent; it is only that the function is a cold one. It is not that the final impression is dim; it is only that it is made on a softer side of the spirit than the critical sense. The process is more mystical, the deposited image is insistently personal, the generalizing principle is that of loyalty. I can therefore not pretend to write of James Russell Lowell in the tone of detachment and classification; I can only offer a few anticipatory touches for a portrait that asks for a steadier hand.
It may be professional prejudice, but as the whole color of his life was literary, so it seems to me that we may see in his high and happy fortune the most substantial honor gathered by the practice of letters from a world preoccupied with other things. It was in looking at him as a man of letters that one drew closest to him, and some of his more fanatical friends are not to be deterred from regarding his career as in the last analysis a tribute to the dominion of style. This is the idea that to my sense his name most promptly evokes; and though it was not by any means the only idea he cherished, the unity of his career is surely to be found in it. He carried style -- the
The association could only grow, but the essence of it was all there on the eve of his going as minister to Spain. It was late in the summer of 1877; he spent a few days in London on his way to Madrid, in the hushed gray August, and I remember dining with him at a dim little hotel in Park Street, which I had never entered before and have never entered since, but which, whenever I pass it, seems to look at me with the melancholy of those inanimate things that have participated. That particular evening remained, in my fancy, a kind of bridge between his old bookish and his new worldly life; which, however, had much more in common than they had in distinction. He turned the pages of the later experience with very much the same contemplative reader's sense with which in this library he had for years smoked the student's pipe over a thousand volumes: the only difference was that a good many of the leaves were still to cut. At any rate, he was enviably gay and amused, and this preliminary hour struck me literally as the reward of consistency. It was tinted with the promise of a singularly interesting future, but the saturated American time was all behind it, and what was to come seemed an ideal opportunity for the nourished mind. That the American years had been diluted with several visits to Europe was not a flaw in the harmony, for to recollect certain other foreign occasions -- pleasant Parisian and delightful Italian strolls -- was to remember that, if these had been months of absence for him, they were for me, on the wings of his talk, hours of repatriation. This talk was humorously and racily fond, charged with a perfect drollery of reference to the other country (there were always two -- the one we were in and the one we weren't), the details of my too sketchy conception of which, admitted for argument, he showed endless good-nature in filling in. It
His America was a country worth hearing about, a magnificent conception, an admirably consistent and lovable object of allegiance. If the sign that in Europe one knew him best by was his intense national consciousness, one felt that this consciousness could not sit lightly on a man in whom it was the strongest form of piety. Fortunately for him and for his friends he was one of the most whimsical, one of the wittiest of human beings, so that he could play with his patriotism and make it various. All the same, one felt in it, in talk, the depth of passion that hums through much of his finest verse -- almost the only passion that, to my sense, his poetry contains -- the accent of chivalry, of the lover, the knight ready to do battle for his mistress. Above all, it was a particular allegiance to New England -- a quarter of the earth in respect to which the hand of long habit, of that affection which is usually half convenience, never let go the prime idea, the standard. New England was heroic to him, for he felt in his pulses the whole history of her origines; it was impossible to know him without a sense that he had a rare divination of the hard realities of her past. "The Biglow Papers" show to what a tune he could play with his patriotism -- all literature contains, I think, no finer sport; but he is serious enough when he speaks of the
. . . "strange New World, that yit wast never young,
Whose youth, from thee, by gripin' need was wrung;
Brown foundlin' of the woods whose baby-bed
Was prowled round by the Injun's cracklin' tread,
And who grew'st strong thro' shifts and wants and pains,
Nussed by stern men with empires in their brains."
He was never at trouble to conceal his respect for such an origin as that, and when he came to Europe in 1877 this sentiment was, in his luggage, one of the articles on which he could most easily put his hand.
One of the others was the extraordinary youthfulness which
I waited some years really to know him, but it was to find at once that he was delightful to walk with. He spent the winter of 1872 - - 73 in Paris, and if I had not already been fond of the streets of that city his example and companionship would have made me so. We both had the habit of long walks, and he knew his Paris as he knew all his subjects. The history of a thing was always what he first saw in it -- he recognized the object as a link in an interminable chain. He led at this season the most home-keeping, book-buying life, and Old French texts made his evenings dear to him. He had dropped (and where he dropped he usually stayed) into an intensely local and extremely savory little hotel in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, unknown to tourists, but patronized by deputies, where the table d'hte, at which the host sat down with the guests and contradiction flourished, was a page of Balzac, full of illustration for the humorist. I used sometimes of a Sunday evening to dine there, and to this day, on rainy winter nights, I never cross the Seine amid the wet flare of the myriad lamps, never note the varnished rush of the river or the way the Louvre grows superb in the darkness, without a recurrent consciousness of the old sociable errand, the sense of dipping into a still denser Paris, with the Temps and M. Sarcey in my pocket.
We both spent the following winter -- he at least the larger part of it -- in Florence, out of manifold memories of which certain hours in his company, certain charmed Italian afternoons in Boboli gardens, on San Miniato terraces, come back to me with a glow of their own. He had indeed memories of earlier Italian times, some of which he has admirably recorded -- anecdotes, tormenting to a late-comer, of the superseded, the missed. He himself, in his perpetual freshness, seemed to come so late that it was always a surprise to me that he had started so early. Almost any Italy, however, was good enough for him, and he kept criticism for great occasions, for the wise relapse, the study- chair, and the vanquished hesitation (not timid, but overbrimming, like a vessel dangerous to move) of that large prose pen which was so firm when once set in motion. He liked the Italian people -- he liked the people everywhere, and the warm street life and the exquisite idiom; the Tuscan tongue, indeed, so early ripe and
"I cannot think he wished so soon to die
With all his senses full of eager heat,
And rosy years that stood expectant by
To buckle the winged sandals on their feet,
He that was friends with Earth, and all her sweet
Took with both hands unsparingly."
Of Mr. Lowell's residence in Spain I know nothing but what I gathered from his talk after he took possession, late in the spring of 1879, of the post in London rendered vacant by the retirement of Mr. John Welsh; much of it inevitably referring to the domestic sorrow -- the prolonged illness of his admirable wife -- which cast over these years a cloud that darkened further during the early part of his English period. I remember getting from him a sense that a diplomatic situation at Madrid was not quite so refreshing a thing as might have been expected, and that for the American representative at least there was not enough business to give a savor to duty. This particular representative's solution of every personal problem, however, was a page of philology in a cloud of tobacco, and as he had seen the picture before through his studies, so now he doubtless saw his studies through the picture. The palace was a part of it, where the ghost of Charles V. still walked and the princesses were what is called in princesses
I may appear to speak too much of this phase of his life as the most memorable part of it -- especially considering how short a time it occupied in regard to the whole; but in addition to its being the only long phase of which I can speak at all closely from personal observation, it is just to remember that these were the years in which all the other years were made most evident. "We knew him and valued him ages before, and never stinted our appreciation, never waited to care for him till he had become the fashion," his American readers and listeners, his pupils and colleagues, might say; to which the answer is that those who admired him most were just those who might naturally rejoice in the multiplication of his opportunities. He came to London with only a vague notion, evidently, of what these opportunities were to be, and in fact there was no defining them in advance: what they proved to be, on the spot, was anything and everything that he might make them. I remember hearing him say a day or two after his arrival, "Oh, I've lost all my wit -- you mustn't look to me
From the friendly and intimate point of view it was presumable from the first that there would be a kind of drama, a spectacle; and if one had already lived a few years in London one could have an interesting prevision of some of its features. London is a great personage, and with those with whom she establishes a relation she always plays, as it were, her game. This game, throughout Mr. Lowell's residence, but especially during the early part, was exciting; so much so that I remember being positively sorry, as if I were leaving the theatre before the fall of the curtain, when, at that time, more than once I found myself, by visits to the Continent, obliged to turn my back upon it. The sight of his variety was a help to know London better; and it was a question whether he could ever know her so well as those who could freely consider the pair together. He offered her from the first a nut to
Mr. Lowell immediately found himself in England, whether to his surprise or no I am unable to say, the first of after-dinner speakers. It was perhaps somewhat to the surprise of his public there, for it was not to have been calculated in advance that he would have become so expert in his own country -- a country sparing of feast-days and ceremonies. His practice had been great before he came to London, but his performance there would have been a strain upon any practice. It was a point of honor with him never to refuse a challenge, and this attitude, under the circumstances, was heroic, for he became a convenience that really tended to multiply occasions. It was exactly his high competence in these directions that constituted the practical good effect of his mission, the particular manner in which it made for civilization. It was the revanche of letters; that throughout was the particular
He had studied English history for forty years in the texts, and at last he could study it in the pieces themselves, could handle and verify the relics. For the man who in such a position recognizes his advantages England makes herself a museum of illustration. She is at home in the comfortable dust of her ages, where there is no need of excavation, as she has never been buried, and the explorer finds the ways as open to him as the corridors of an exhibition. It was an exhibition of which Mr. Lowell never grew tired, for it was infinitely various and living; it brought him back repeatedly after his public mission had expired, and it was perpetually suggestive to him while that mission lasted. If he played his part so well here -- I allude now more particularly to the social and expressive side of it -- it was because he was so open to suggestion. Old England spoke to him so much as a man of letters that it was inevitable he should answer her back. On the firmness and tact with which he acquitted himself of his strictly diplomatic work I shall not presume to touch; his success was
I may seem to exaggerate in Mr. Lowell's history the importance of the last dozen years of his life -- especially if the reckoning be made of the amount of characteristic production that preceded them. He was the same admirable writer that he appears to-day before he touched diplomacy -- he had already given to the world the volumes on which his reputation rests. I cannot attempt in this place and at this hour a critical estimate of his writings; the perspective is too short and our acquaintance too recent. Yet I have been reading him over in fragments, not to judge, but to recall him, and it is as impossible to speak of him without the sense of his high place as it would be with the pretension to be final about it. He looms, in such a renewed impression, very large and ripe and sane, and if he was an admirable man of letters there should be no want of emphasis on the first term of the title. He was indeed in literature a man essentially masculine, upright, downright. Presenting to us survivors that simplified face that I have spoken of, he almost already looks at us as the last accomplished representative of the joy of life. His robust and humorous optimism rounds itself more and more; he has even now something of the air of a classic, and if he really becomes one it will be in virtue of his having placed as fine an irony at the service of hope as certain masters of the other strain have placed at that of despair. Sturdy liberal as he was and contemptuous of all timidities of advance and reservations of
Few things were really so droll as he could make them, and not a great many perhaps are so absolute. The solution of the problem of life lay for him in action, in conduct, in decency; his imagination lighted up to him but scantily the region of analysis and apology. Like all interesting literary figures he is full of tacit as well as of uttered reference to the conditions that engendered him; he really testifies as much as Hawthorne to the New England spirit, though in a totally different tone. The two writers, as witnesses, weigh against each other, and the picture would be imperfect if both had not had a hand in it. If Hawthorne expressed the mysticism and the gloom of the transplanted Puritan, his passive and haunted side, Lowell saw him in the familiar daylight of practice and prosperity and good health. The author of "The Biglow Papers" was surely the healthiest of highly cultivated geniuses, just as he was the least flippant of jesters and the least hysterical of poets. If Hawthorne fairly cherished the idea of evil in man, Lowell's vision of "sin" was operative mainly for a single purpose -- that of putting in motion the civic lash. "The Biglow Papers" are mainly an exposure of national injustice and political dishonesty; his satiric ardor was simply the other side of the medal of his patriotism. His poetry is not all satirical, but the highest and most sustained flights of it are patriotic, and in reading it over I am struck with the vivid virtue of this part of it -- something strenuous and antique, the watchful citizen smiting the solemn lyre.
The look at life that it embodies is never merely curious, never irresponsible; it is only the author's humor that is whimsical, never his emotion nor his passion. His poetical performance might sometimes, no doubt, be more intensely lyrical, but it is hard to see how it could be more intensely moral -- I mean, of course, in the widest sense of the term. His play is as good as a game in the open air; but when he is serious he is as serious as Wordsworth, and much more compact. He is the poet of pluck and purpose and action, of the gayety and liberty of virtue. He commemorates all manly
This temper drove the principle of subtlety in his intelligence, which is a need for the last refinement, to take refuge in one particular, and I must add very spacious, corner, where indeed it was capable of the widest expansion. The thing he loved most in the world after his country was the English tongue, of which he was an infallible master, and his devotion to which was, in fact, a sort of agent in his patriotism. The two passions, at any rate, were closely connected, and I will not pretend to have determined whether the Western republic was dear to him because he held that it was a magnificent field for the language, or whether the language was dear to him because it had felt the impact of Massachusetts. He himself was not unhappily responsible for a large part of the latter occurrence. His linguistic sense is perhaps the thing his reputation may best be trusted to rest upon -- I mean, of course, in its large outcome of style. There is a high strain of originality in it, for it is difficult to recall a writer of our day in
His work represents this reconciled opposition, referable as it is half to the critic and half to the poet. If either half suffers just a little it is perhaps in places his poetry, a part of which is I scarcely know what to say but too literary, more the result of an interest in the general form than of the stirred emotion. One feels at moments that he speaks in verse mainly because he is penetrated with what verse has achieved. But these moments are occasional, and when the stirred emotion does give a hand to the interest in the general form the product is always of the highest order. His poems written during the war all glow with a splendid fusion -- one can think of nothing at once more personal and, in the highest sense of the word, more professional. To me, at any rate, there is something fascinating in the way in which, in the Harvard "Commemoration Ode," for instance, the air of the study mingles with the hot breath of passion. The reader who is eternally bribed by form may ask himself whether Mr. Lowell's prose or his poetry has the better chance of a long life -- the hesitation being justified by the rare degree in which the prose has the great qualities of style; but in the presence of some of the splendid stanzas inspired by the wartime (and among them I include, of course, the second series of "The Biglow Papers") one feels that, whatever shall become of the essays, the transmission from generation to generation of such things as these may safely be left to the national conscience. They translate with equal exaltation and veracity the highest national mood, and it is in them that all younger Americans, those now and lately
"Dear land whom triflers now make bold to scorn
(Thee from whose forehead Earth awaits her morn).
"Oh Beautiful! my Country! ours once more!
Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair
O'er such sweet brows as never other wore,
And letting thy set lips,
Freed from wrath's pale eclipse,
The rosy edges of their smile lay bare!"
Great poetry is made only by a great meaning, and the national bias, I know, never made anything better that was not good in itself; but each time I read over the Harvard "Commemoration Ode" the more full and strong, the more august and pathetic, does it appear. This is only a proof that if the national sentiment preserves it the national sentiment will show excellent taste -- which she has been known in some cases not to do.
If I were not afraid of falling into the tone of literary criticism I should speak of several of the impressions -- that is, of the charmed absorption -- accompanying an attentive reperusal of the four or five volumes of Mr. Lowell's poetry. The word I have already used comes back to me: it is all so masculine, so fine without being thin, so steadied by the temperament of the author. It is intensely literary and yet intensely warm, warm with the contact of friendly and domestic things, loved local sights and sounds, the color and odor of New England, and (here particularly warm without fever) with the sanest, lucidest intellectual life. There is something of seasonable nature in every verse -- the freshness of the spirit sociable with earth and sky and stream. In the best things there is the incalculable magic note -- all the more effective from the general ground-tone of reason. What could be more strangely
I may not go into detail, or I should speak of twenty other things, especially of the mellow, witty wisdom of "The Cathedral" and of the infinite, intricate delicacy of "Endymion" -- more tremulous, more penetrating than any other of the author's poetic productions, I think, and exceptionally fine in surface. As for "The Biglow Papers," they seem to me, in regard to their author, not so much produced as productive -- productive of a clear, delightful image of the temper and nature of the man. One says of them not that they are by him, but that they are his very self, so full of his opinions and perceptions, his humor and his wit, his character, his experience, his talk, and his intense consciousness of race. They testify to many things, but most of all to the thing I have last named; and it may seem to those whose observation of the author was most complete during the concluding years of his life that they could testify to nothing more characteristic. If he was inveterately, in England and on the Continent, the American abroad (though jealous, indeed, of the liberty to be at home even there), so the lucubrations of Parson Wilbur and his contributors are an unsurpassably deliberate exhibition of the primitive home-quality. I may seem to be going far when I say that they constitute to my sense the author's most literary production; they exemplify, at any rate, his inexhaustible interest in the question of style and his extraordinary acuteness in dealing with it. They are a wonderful study of style -- by which I mean of organized expression -- and nothing could be more significant than the fact that he should have put his finest faculty for linguistics at the service of the Yankee character.
He knew more, I think, about the rustic American speech than all others together who have known anything of it, so much more closely, justly, and sympathetically had he noted it. He honored it with the strongest scientific interest, and indeed he may well have been on terms of reciprocity with a dialect that had enabled him to produce a masterpiece. The only drawback I can imagine to a just complacency in this transaction would have been the sense that the people are few, after all, who can measure the minute perfection of the success -- a success not only of swift insight, but of patient observation. Mr. Lowell was as capable of patience in illustrating New England idiosyncrasies as he was capable of impatience. He never forgot, at any rate, that he stood there for all such things -- stood for them particularly during the years he spent in England; and his attitude was made up of many curious and complicated and admirable elements. He was so proud -- not for himself, but for his country -- that he felt the need of a kind of official version of everything at home that in other quarters might be judged anomalous. Theoretically he cared little for the judgment of other quarters, and he was always amused -- the good- natured British lion in person could not have been more so -- at "well- meaning" compliment or commendation; it required, it must be admitted, more tact than is usually current to incur the visitation of neither the sharper nor the sunnier form of his irony. But, in fact, the national consciousness was too acute in him for slumber at his post, and he paid in a certain restlessness the penalty of his imagination, of the fatal sense of perspective and the terrible faculty of comparison. It would have been intolerable to him, moreover, to be an empirical American, and he had organized his loyalty with a thoroughness of which his admirable wit was an efficient messenger. He never anticipated attack, though it would be a meagre account of his attitude to say it was defensive; but he took appreciation for granted, and eased the way for it with reasons that were cleverer in nothing than in appearing casual. These reasons were innumerable, but they were all the reasons of a lover. It was not simply that he loved his country -- he was literally in love with it.
If there be two kinds of patriotism, the latent and the
None the less it was impossible to be witness of his general action during his residence in England without feeling that, not only by the particular things he did, but by the general thing he was, he contributed to a large ideal of peace. We certainly owe to him (and by "we" I mean both countries -- he made that plural elastic) a mitigation of danger. There is always danger between country and country, and danger in small and shameful forms as well as big and inspiring ones; but the danger is less and the dream of peace more rosy when they have been beguiled into a common admiration. A common aversion even will do -- the essential thing is the disposition to share. The poet, the writer, the speaker ministers to this community; he is Orpheus with his lute -- the lute that pacifies the great, stupid beasts of international prejudice; so that if a quarrel takes place over the piping form of the loved of Apollo it is as if he were rent again by the Maenads. It was a charm to the observant mind to see how Mr. Lowell kept the Maenads in their place -- a work admirably continued by his successor in office, who had, indeed, under his roof an inestimable assistant in the process. Mr. Phelps was not, as I may say, single-handed; which was his predecessor's case even for some time prior to an irreparable bereavement. The prying Furies -- at any rate, during these years -- were effectually snubbed, and will, it is to be hoped, never again hold their snaky heads very high. The spell that worked upon them was simply the voice of civilization, and Mr. Lowell's advantage was that he happened to find himself in a supremely good place for producing it. He produced it both consciously and unconsciously, both officially and privately, from principle
The combination made a quality which pervaded his whole intellectual character; for the quality of his diplomatic action, of his public speeches, of his talk, of his influence, was simply the genius that we had always appreciated in his critical writings. The hours and places with which he had to deal were not equally inspiring; there was inevitably colorless company, there were dull dinners, influences prosaic and functions mechanical; but he was substantially always the messenger of the Muses and of that particular combination of them which had permitted him to include a tenth in their number -- the infallible sister to whom humor is dear. I mean that the man and the author, in him, were singularly convertible; it was what made the author so vivid. It was also what made that voice of civilization to whose harmony I have alluded practically the same thing as the voice of literature. Mr. Lowell's style was an indefeasible part of him, as his correspondence, if it be ever published, will copiously show; it was in all relations his natural channel of communication. This is why, at the opening of this paper, I ventured to speak of his happy exercise of a great opportunity as at bottom the revenge of letters. This, at any rate, the literary observer was free to see in it; such an observer made a cross against the day, as an anniversary for form, and an anniversary the more memorable that form, when put to tests that might have been called severe, was so far from being found wanting in substance; met the occasion, in fact, so completely. I do not pretend that, during Mr. Lowell's residence in England, the public which he found constituted there spent most of its time in reading his essays; I only mean that the faculty it relished in him most was the faculty most preserved for us in his volumes of criticism.
It is not an accident that I do not linger over the contents
It was when his lifetime was longest that the fruit of culture was finest in him and that his wit was most profuse. In the
It was an extreme satisfaction to the very many persons in England who valued Mr. Lowell's society that the termination of his official mission there proved not the termination of the episode. He came back for his friends -- he would have done anything for his friends. He also, I surmise, came back somewhat for himself, inasmuch as he entertained an affection for London which he had no reason for concealing. For several successive years he reappeared there with the brightening months, and I am not sure that this irresponsible and less rigorously sociable period did not give him his justest impressions. It surrendered him, at any rate, more completely to his friends and to several close and particularly valued ties. He
It is very possible not to feel the charm of London at all; the foreigner who feels it must be tolerably sophisticated. It marks the comparative community of the two big branches of the English race that of all aliens, under this heavy pressure, Americans are the most submissive. They are capable of loving the capital of their race almost with passion, which for the most part is the way it is loved when it is not hated. The sentiment was strong in Mr. Lowell; one of the branches of his tree of knowledge had planted itself and taken root here, and at the end he came back every year to sit in the shade of it. He gave himself English summers, and if some people should say that the gift was scarcely liberal, others who met him on this ground will reply that such seasons drew from him in the circle of friendship a radiance not inherent in their complexion. This association became a feature of the London May and June -- it held its own even in the rank confusion of July. It pervaded the quarter he repeatedly inhabited, where a commonplace little house, in the neighborhood of the Paddington station, will long wear in its narrow front, to the inner sense of many passers, a mystical gold-lettered tablet. Here he came and went, during several months, for such and such a succession of years; here one could find him at home in the late afternoon, in his lengthened chair, with his cherished pipe and his table piled high with books. Here he practised little jesting hospitalities, for he was irrepressibly and amusingly hospitable. Whatever he was in his latest time, it was, even in muffled miseries of gout, with a mastery of laughter and forgetfulness. Nothing amused him more than for people to dine with him, and few things certainly amused them as much. His youth came back to him not once for all, but twenty times for every occasion. He was certainly the most boyish of learned doctors.
This was always particularly striking during the several
I note these particulars, as may easily be imagined, wholly for their reference to himself -- for the emphasized occasion they give to remembrance and regret. Yet even remembrance and regret, in such a case, have a certain free relief, for our final thought of James Russell Lowell is that what he consistently lived for remains of him. There is nothing ineffectual in his name and fame -- they stand for large and delightful things. He is one of the happy figures of literature. He had his trammels and his sorrows, but he drank deep of the tonic draught, and he will long count as an erect fighting figure on the side of optimism and beauty. He was strong without narrowness, he was wise without bitterness and glad without fatuity. That appears for the most part the temper of those who speak from the quiet English heart, the steady pulses of which were the sufficient rhythm of his eloquence. This source of influence will surely not forfeit its long credit in the world so long as we continue occasionally to know it by what is so rich in performance and so stainless in character.
Atlantic Monthly, January 1892
Reprinted in Essays in London and Elsewhere, 1893
THE FORMULA WOULD NOT be hard to find which would best, at the outset, introduce to readers the author of the following extracts and specimens. With a certain close propriety that seems to give him, among Americans of his time, the supreme right, James Russell Lowell wears the title of a man of letters. He was a master of verse and a political disputant; he was to some extent a journalist, and in a high degree an orator; he administered learning in a great university; he was concerned, in his later years, with public affairs, and represented in two foreign countries the interests of the United States. Yet there is only one term to which, in an appreciation,
He was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, on February 22d, 1819, and died in the same house on August 12th, 1891. His inheritance of every kind contributed to the easy play of his gifts and the rich uniformity of his life. He was of the best and oldest New England -- of partly clerical -- stock; a stock robust and supple, and which has given to its name many a fruit-bearing branch. We read him but dimly in not reading into him, as it were, everything that was present, around him, in race and place; and perhaps also in not seeing him in relation to some of the things that were absent. He is one more instance of the way in which the poet's message is almost always, as to what it contains or omits, a testimony to personal circumstance, a communication of the savor of the mother soil. He figures to us thus -- more handsomely than any competitor -- as New England conscious of its powers and its standards, New England accomplished and articulate. He grew up in clerical and collegiate air, at half an hour's walk from the cluster of homely halls that are lost to-day in the architectural parade of the modernized Harvard. He spent fifty years of his life in the shade, or the sunshine, of Alma Mater; a connection which was to give his spirit just enough of the unrest of responsibility, and his style just too much perhaps of the authority of the pedagogue. His early years unfolded with a security and a simplicity that the middle ones enriched without disturbing; and the long presence of which, with its implications of leisure, of quietude, of reflection and concentration, supplies in all his work an element of agreeable relish not lessened by the suggestion of a certain meagreness
His history from this time, at least for many years, would be difficult to write save as a record of stages, phases, dates too particular for a summary. The general complexion of the period is best presented in the simple statement that he was able to surrender on the spot to his talent and his taste. There is something that fairly charms, as we look at his life, in the almost complete elimination of interference or deviation: it makes a picture exempt from all shadow of the usual image of genius hindered or inclination blighted. Drama and disaster could spring as little from within as from without; and no one in the country probably led a life -- certainly for so long a time -- of intellectual amenity so great in proportion to its intensity. There was more intensity perhaps for such a spirit as Emerson's: but there was, if only by that fact, more of moral ravage and upheaval; there was less of applied knowledge and successful form, less of the peace of art. Emerson's utterance, his opinions, seem to-day to give us a series, equally full of beauty and void of order, of noble experiments and fragments. Washington Irving and Longfellow, on the other hand, if they show us the amenity, show us also, in their greater abundance and diffusion, a looseness, an exposure; they sit as it were with open doors, more or less in the social draught. Hawthorne had further to wander and longer to wait; and if he too, in the workshop of art, kept tapping
But such drama as could not mainly, after all, be played out within the walls of his library, came to him, on the whole, during half a century, only in two or three other forms. I mention first the subordinate, -- which were all, as well, in the day's work: the long grind of teaching the promiscuous and preoccupied young, and those initiations of periodical editorship which, either as worries or as triumphs, may never perhaps be said to strike very deep. In 1855 he entered, at Harvard College, upon the chair just quitted by Longfellow: a comprehensive professorship in literature, that of France and that of Spain in particular. He conducted on its foundation, for
This note, the first of the `Biglow Papers,' was sounded in the summer of 1846, the moment of the outbreak of the Mexican War. It presented not quite as yet so much an "American humorist" the more, as the very possibility or fact of the largest expressiveness in American humor. If he was the first of the dialectic and colloquial group in the order of time, so he was to remain, on this ground, the master and the real authority. The `Biglow Papers' were an accident, begun without plan or forecast: but by the accident the author was, in a sense, determined and prompted; he himself caught from them and from their success a fuller idea of the "Yankee" character, lighted up by every advantage that wit and erudition could lend it. Lowell found himself, on the spot, committed to giving it such aid to literary existence as it could never have had without him. His conception of all the fine things of the mind -- of intelligence, honesty, judgment, knowledge -- was placed straight at the service of the kind of American spirit that he was conscious of in himself, and that he sought in his three or four typical figures to make ironic and racy.
The `Biglow Papers' are in this relation an extraordinary performance and a rare work of art: in what case, on the part of an artist, has the national consciousness, passionately acute, arrived at a form more independent, more objective? If they were a disclosure of this particular artist's humor, and of the kind of passion that could most possess him, they represent as well the element that for years gave his life its main enlargement, and as may be said its main agitation, -- the element that preserved him from dryness, from the danger of
The secret of the situation was that he could only, could actively, "cultivate" as a retort to cultivation. There were American phenomena that, as he gathered about the world, cultivation in general deemed vulgar; and on this all his
I may refer, however, as little to the detail of his verse as to that of the robust body of his prose. The latter consists of richly accomplished literary criticism, and of a small group of public addresses; and would obviously be much more abundant were we in possession of all the wrought material of Harvard lectures and professorial talks. If we are not, it is because Lowell recognized no material as wrought till it had passed often through the mill. He embarked on no magnum opus, historical, biographical, critical; he contented himself with uttering thought that had great works in its blood. It was for the great works and the great figures he cared; he was a critic of a pattern mainly among ourselves superseded -- superseded so completely that he seems already to have receded into time, and to belong to an age of vulgarity less blatant. If he was in educated appreciation the most distinct voice that the United States had produced, this is partly, no doubt, because the chatter of the day and the triumph of the trivial could even then still permit him to be audible, permit him to show his office as supported on knowledge and on a view of the subject. He represented so well the use of a view of the subject that he may be said to have represented best what at present strikes us as most urgent; the circumstance, namely, that so far from being a chamber surrendering itself from the threshold to the ignorant young of either sex, criticism is positively and miraculously not the simplest and most immediate, but the most postponed and complicated of the arts, the last qualified for and arrived at, the one requiring behind it most maturity, most power to understand and compare.
One is disposed to say of him, in spite of his limited pro
New York: R. S. Peale and J. A. Hill,
1896
Philip Van Ness Myers (29)
Remains of Lost Empires: Sketches of the Ruins of Palmyra, Nineveh, Babylon, and Persepolis, etc. By P. V. N. Myers, A.M. New York: Harper & Bros., 1875.
This stout and handsome volume (it is beautifully printed) is a decidedly disappointing record of an extremely interesting journey. Mr. Myers's opportunities were excellent, and his scientific equipment, especially in the matter of geology, seems to have been very sufficient; but he possesses the art neither of minute observation nor of graphic description, and he has the misfortune to write a style recalling in equal measure that of the newspaper reporter and the pietistic "tract." There is something really irritating in seeing a traveller with Mr. Myers's apparent energy in locomotion wear such very dim spectacles as those he generally brings to bear on people and manners. "A few hours from Birijic we met a party of four or five horsemen breaking along the rocks at a reckless speed. They proved to be the post with the Aleppo mail. This was the first thing like a hurry we had seen in Syria. It was really refreshing to see something moving lively in such a stupidly slow country." The writer of these lines seems to us here, besides giving the key to his style, to betray that he is not a sympathetic observer. He is himself in too great a hurry, and though he gives careful descriptions of the ruins and the topography of the several great extinct cities he visited, he has little sense of detail and but a rough way of relating things. That portion of his journey which he here narrates was begun at Damascus, from which city (with his brother, who was his companion throughout, and whose early death he commemorates in his preface) he proceeded on a five days' excursion across the desert to Palmyra. He reproduces, in a degree, the impressiveness of those mighty colonnades, gazing in silence at their sandy horizon, and makes us feel that, if they point to a nearer and less mysterious past than Nineveh and Babylon, their immense desolation is perhaps only more tragical. Palmyra rose and fell under the Roman Caesars, and both her rise, while she was tributary, and her fall, when she rebelled, give us the measure of a power in which we are still interested, as the great initiator of our modern
Mr. Myers hired a raft at Mosul and floated down the Tigris to Bagdad, "the only living city of any note in a region filled with the entombed cities of dead monarchies." His account of navigation on the great Assyrian stream is entertaining -- especially the story of a prolonged hurricane, during which the raft took, as it were, the bit between her teeth and rushed along for a night at her own discretion. In the chapter on Bagdad the reader finds himself regretting the author's dry, common manner, and wishing that his touch were more pictorial. His fortune widens as he goes. He gives a copious account of the ruins of Babylon, from which it appears that he accepts the Tower of Babel as an historical fact, and is inclined to believe in its identity with the great mound, now invisible, known as Birs Nimrod. But he draws the line of acceptance at the confusion of tongues, and quotes from a "fugitive article" by the "Rev. E. P. Powell" in support of this attitude. After this Mr. Myers's journey became magnificent. Down the Tigris again, into the Persian Gulf, and across the Gulf in time to catch, at Bushire, a caravan which led him across Persia -- past more ruined cities and through picturesque mountain passes, among traces, still vivid, of the late horrible famine, to Shiraz and Persepolis. The very names here seem full of the stuff that delightful books of travel are made of; but Mr. Myers continues rather tame, and has little else for the poor Persian civilization but cursory contempt, which, though doubtless in a sense rational enough, is not what the reader bargains for in the way of entertainment. But
The work is readable, thanks to the subject; but we think that we do not misrepresent it in saying that it makes the more enquiring reader wish very frequently that he might have had half the author's chance. The illustrations are poor, and in place of them we should have preferred a map with the indication of Mr. Myers's course.
Nation, January 28, 1875
Ehrman Syme Nadal (30)
Impressions of London Social Life. With other Papers suggested by an English Residence. By E. S. Nadal. New York: Scribner, Armstrong & Co., 1875.
Mr. Nadal's subject is interesting and suggestive, and might be made an occasion for discussing a great many things. His opportunity, too, for making himself acquainted with it appears to have been enviable -- he was, we believe, attached to the American Legation in London. London society is a very vast and complex affair, and an observant American, steeped in it for a couple of years, can hardly fail to gather a number of impressions which are worth being formulated. There has lately been a good deal of ratiocination upon "society" in America -- a discussion which has not advanced so far that it may not be illuminated in some degree by the testimony of other climes. It has not yet even been settled whether we possess the thing so called; opinions vary, but the negative view seems to be found most convenient. It is, however, rather dolefully held by most of its advocates, who think that the melancholy void in question should be filled up with all possible speed. All definite information, then, as to the characteristics of a society which is acknowledged to be a very ripe and substantial specimen of its genus should be welcomed and pondered, so that we may be either consoled or enlightened; instructed as to what to aim at and as to what to avoid. "One felt," says Mr. Nadal, "that here was company which, however it might be in Saturn or Jupiter, no set of tellurians at least could affect to despise. You enjoyed this sensation. All round this wide planet, through the continents and the islands of the sea, among the Franks and the Arabs, the Scandinavians, the Patagonians, and the Polynesians, there were none who could give themselves airs over this. The descendants of Adam, the world over, could show nothing better." This expresses a feeling that the stranger in England feels it no disgrace to confess to, and it makes the reflections of the returning sojourner almost to a certainty worth listening to. Mr. Nadal's volume is entertaining rather on this general ground than in virtue of any remarkable acuteness of its own. It is graceful and agreeable --
It must not be inferred from the words just quoted that Mr. Nadal's criticism is generally of a hostile kind. It is, on the contrary, very friendly and sympathetic, and the author has the faculty of frank, yet not intemperate, admiration. For the women and young girls he has nothing but good words. "That `young English girl' who is the theme of the novelists and magazine bards and artists, easily merits all the admiration she receives. Does not all the world know, is it not an impertinence to say, that for dignity, modesty, propriety, sense, and a certain soft self-possession, she has hardly her equal anywhere?" Mr. Nadal's appreciative spirit does justice even to the preoccupied dowagers at the parties. "Some large and listless mother whose eyes are following her charges over the field, and who has asked you for the fourth time the question you have already answered for the third -- to go on discoursing
About the innumerable picturesque aspects of England Mr. Nadal says some very charming things, and in this matter he seems to us at his best. He says, indeed, that, "if the man of society be unselfish, and be careful to retain his sanity, its chief good [that of London society] is in what it offers him to look at -- the carriages flashing back and forth at the dinner-hour, looking like caskets or Christmas-boxes, with the most wonderful lining and furniture (the drapery and lace almost floating out of the windows), the balls and parties, the acres of fair- armed British maidens through which he may wander as in a wilderness, the odors of the midnight gardens, the breath of the dawn, and the first flush of sunrise over
"I sat alone upon a broken, dirty, iron bench -- (I beg the T - --- 's pardon for calling their bench dirty) -- and under an old pear- tree. It was a long narrow patch of sod and flowers. The brick walls were rent and decayed, and, except where the peach and vine covered them, were green with moss and black with age. The neighboring gardens I only knew by the tops of the pear and May-trees. No sound came from them save the rustle of their greenery, which now and then disturbed the heart of the quiet hour. Of the children who played in them, of the maidens who knelt among their flowers, I knew nothing. The same sunshine and yellow haze filled them all, the same Sabbath silence. From out their narrow plots all looked upward to the same
That last is quite exquisite, and exactly hits the fancy that the charmed American is apt to have in England concerning almost any green place in which he may find himself.
Nation, October 7,
1875
Charles Nordhoff (31)
The Communistic Societies of the United States, from Personal Visit and Observation, etc. By Charles Nordhoff. With Illustrations. New York: Harper & Bros., 1875.
Mr. Nordhoff offers us here a copious volume on a subject deserving of liberal treatment. His researches have been minute and exhaustive, and he makes a very lucid and often an entertaining exposition of their results. He writes in a friendly spirit and tends rather, on the whole, to dip his pen into rose-color; but he professes to take the rigidly economical and not the sentimental view; and certainly the Rappists and the Shakers, the Perfectionists and the Bethel people, make their accounts balance with an exactness very delightful to a practical mind. It would have been possible, we think, for an acute moralist to travel over the same ground as Mr. Nordhoff and to present in consequence a rather duskier picture of human life at Amana, Mount Lebanon, and Oneida; but his work for our actual needs would doubtless have been less useful. Mr. Nordhoff, too, has not neglected the moral side of his topic, and much of the information he gives us has an extreme psychological interest. His purpose, however, was to investigate communistic life from the point of view of an adversary to trades-unions, and to see whether in the United States, with their vast area for free experiments in this line, it might not offer a better promise to workingmen than mere coalitions to increase wages and shorten the hours of labor. Such experiments would be worth examining if they did nothing more for the workingman than change the prospect ahead of him into something better than a simple perpetuity of hire -- a prospect at the best depressing and irritating. "Hitherto," says Mr. Nordhoff, "very little, indeed almost nothing definite and precise, has been made known concerning these societies; and Communism remains loudly but very vaguely spoken of, by friends as well as enemies, and is commonly either a word of terror or contempt in the public prints. . . . I desired to discover how the successful Communists had met and overcome the difficulties of idleness, selfishness, and unthrift in individuals, which are commonly believed to make Communism impossible. . . . I
Mr. Nordhoff's field was extensive, stretching as it does from Maine to Oregon, and southward down to Kentucky. It contains some eight distinct communistic societies, but these are composed of a large number of subdivisions; the Shakers alone having no less than fifty-eight settlements. Mr. Nordhoff begins with the Amana Society, whose present abode, or
One is struck, throughout Mr. Nordhoff's book, with the existence in human nature of lurking and unsuspected strata, as it were, of asceticism, of the capacity for taking a grim satisfaction in dreariness. One would have been curious to have a little personal observation of these "younger members" who were so in love with the idea of single blessedness. "The joys of the celibate life," says one of the author's Shaker informants, "are far greater than I can make you know. They are indescribable." The Shakers, on this point, go further than the Catholic monks and nuns, who profess merely to find celibacy holy, and salutary to the spirit -- not positively agreeable in itself. Mr. Nordhoff found in a Shaker Community near Rochester several French Canadians of the Catholic faith, and in another in Ohio several more Catholics, one of whom was a Spaniard and an ex-priest. A French Canadian Shaker strikes one as the most amusing imbroglio of qualities conceivable until one encounters the Spanish priest. One wonders how ineffable they deemed the joys of celibacy. At the village of Zoar, in Ohio, the author found a community of three hundred persons, of German origin, calling themselves "Separatists," owning "over seven thousand acres of very fertile land," together with other property, representing more than a million of dollars. "The Zoar Communists belong to the peasant class of Southern Germany. They are, therefore, unintellectual, and they have not risen in culture beyond their original condition. . . . The Zoarites have achieved comfort -- according to the German peasant's notion -- and wealth. They are relieved from severe toil, and have driven the wolf permanently from their doors. More they might have accomplished; but they have not been taught the need of more. They are sober, quiet, and orderly, very industrious, economical, and the amount of ingenuity and
The volume is largely occupied with a very complete and exhaustive report on the various Shaker settlements. Everything is told here about Shakerism that one could possibly
The most interesting, or at least the most curious, section of Mr. Nordhoff's book is his report on the Oneida Perfectionists: "
"We have built us a dome
On our beautiful plantation,
And we have all one home,
And one family relation."
If the lines we quoted just now gave the key-note of culture among the Shakers, this charming stanza gives the key-note of culture among the ladies and gentlemen at Oneida. The
Nation, January 14,
1875
Francis Parkman (32)
The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century. By Francis Parkman. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1867.
Mr. Parkman gives in the present volume the second part of his history of the short-lived French dominion in North America. His first volume described the abortive attempt of the Huguenots to establish themselves in Florida, the cruel destruction of their colony by the Spaniards, and the vengeance wrought upon them in turn by the Frenchman de Gourgues, together with a narrative of the gallant and useful career of Samuel de Champlain, the founder of Quebec. His third volume is to be devoted to that French exploration of the Valley of the Mississippi of which the memory still subsists in so many mispronounced names, from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Superior. But whatever may be the interest of these narratives, and the importance of the facts on which they rest, it is certain that this touching story of the Jesuit missions in Canada is no less dramatic and instructive. It has peculiar and picturesque interest from the fact that the enterprise was, in a great measure, a delusion and a failure -- a delusion consecrated by the most earnest conviction and the most heroic effort, a failure redeemed by the endurance of incalculable suffering. The Jesuit undertaking as it stands described in Mr. Parkman's pages has an indefinably factitious look -- an expression intensely subjective, as we call it nowadays. Its final results were null, and its success at no time such as to gratify the reason of the missionaries. Nevertheless they persisted through unprecedented hardship and danger, baptizing, preaching, rebuking, exploring, and hoping. Their faith, patience, and courage form a very interesting chapter in the history of the human mind, and it is to our perception more as contributions to that history than as a stage of the process of our American civilization that their labors are valuable. It is very true that these labors were not without a certain permanent and wholesome effect. The missionaries aimed at the sky, and their missiles reached the tree-tops. Their example and exhortations, if they failed to elevate the Indians to the practice of even the simpler virtues, or to make
Mr. Parkman's narrative is founded chiefly on the reports regularly transmitted to France by the active members of the order, and from which, frequent as are his citations, we cannot help wishing that he had given more copious extracts. These reports were minute, frequent, and rigorously truthful -- that is, if the writers told of miracles and portents they told of none but such as they themselves believed. The relations are marked apparently by great simplicity of tone, great credulity, and very great discrimination with regard to the Indian character. The missionaries were keen observers of the manners and impulses of the savages, as, indeed, it was of vital importance to their own personal safety that they should be. The Indians were the most unpromising material for conversion. Generally they were obstinate, intractable, and utterly averse to the reception of light; occasionally, however, they would consent to become Christians; but on such a basis! Their piety was more discouraging than their obduracy. Mr. Parkman gives a very vivid picture of the state of the savage populations at the time of the early settlements -- a picture beside which the old-fashioned portrait of the magnanimous and rhetorical red man is a piece of very false coloring. Mr. Parkman knows his subject, and he mentions no single trait of intelligence, of fancy, or of character by which the Indian should have a hold on our respect or his fate a claim to our regret. The cruelty of the Canadian tribes is beyond description. They had no imagination in their religion; they confined what little they possessed to the science of torture. A prominent feature of this science was their voracious cannibalism,
We have no space to trace in detail the various incidents and vicissitudes of the Jesuit mission. It lasted for forty years; and during this period was made illustrious by every form of heroism and martyrdom. Its failure was the result of several causes -- of the purely religious character of the French establishments, of the superficial and mechanical nature of the conversions, and of the ceaseless internecine warfare of the different tribes, terminating in the supremacy of the Iroquois, the most cruel and intractable of all, and the extirpation of the Hurons, among whom the Jesuits had found their best proselytes. Quebec and Montreal were wholly priest-governed -- the latter, indeed, priest-settled. The emigrations from France were under ecclesiastical auspices, and entirely wanting in any desire to turn the material resources of the country to account. On the contrary, all excessive prosperity, all superfluous comfort, were discouraged and prohibited. The motive of emigration was a strictly sentimental one, and the enterprise undertaken only for the greater glory of God. The interests of this life were consulted at most only in so far
"He says," writes Mr. Parkman, "that Boston (meaning Massachusetts) could alone furnish four thousand fighting men, and that the four united colonies could furnish forty thousand souls. His numbers may be challenged; but, at all events, the contrast was striking with the attenuated and suffering bands of priests, nuns, and fur- traders on the St. Lawrence. About forty thousand persons had come from Old to New England with the resolve of making it their home; and, though this immigration had virtually ceased, the natural increase had been great. The necessity, or the strong desire, of escaping from persecution had given the impulse to Puritan colonization; while, on the other hand, none but good Catholics, the favored class of France, were tolerated in Canada. These had no motive for exchanging the comforts of home and the smiles of fortune for a starving wilderness and the scalping-knives of the Iroquois. The Huguenots would have emigrated in swarms, but they were rigidly forbidden. The zeal of propagandism and the fur trade were, as we have seen, the vital forces of New France. Of her feeble population, the best part was bound to perpetual chastity, while the fur-traders rarely brought their wives to the wilderness. . . . . To the mind of the
In heaven alone, then, they found their reward. Their story is far more romantic and touching than that of their Protestant neighbors; it is written in those rich and mellow colors in which the Catholic Church inscribes her records; but it leaves the mind profoundly unsatisfied. Like all sad stories, it carries a moral. What is this moral? However well disinterestedness and self-immolation may work for individuals, they work but ill for communities, however small. The Puritans were frank self-seekers. They withdrew from persecution at home and they practised it here. They have left, accordingly, a vast, indelible trace of their passage through history. The Jesuits worked on a prepared field, in an artificial atmosphere, and it was, therefore, easy for them to be sublime. However they, as a group -- a very small group -- might embrace suffering and martyrdom, the paternal Church courted only prosperity and dominion. The Church was well aware of the truth at which we just hinted -- that collective bodies find but small account in self-sacrifice; and it carefully superintended and directed the fervent passion of the Jesuits. The record of these latter in Canada is unstained by persecution, for the simple reason that French Protestants were not allowed to enter their circle. In this circle they freely burned themselves out. The Church could afford it on the part of the Catholic world at large, and as for individuals each had but his own case to manage. Of how well each performed his task, Mr. Parkman's pages are an excellent record. They furnish us, too, with a second inference, more gratifying to human vanity than the other, and that is, that religion, in spite of the commonplace, intellectual form which it has recently grown to assume in many quarters, is essentially bound up with miracles. Only the miracles are a tribute of man to God, and not of God to
Canada, though it is a large corner of the world, is a small corner of history; but such as it is, Mr. Parkman has made it his own province. He has just added another volume to the series of deeply- interesting chronicles in which he has been tracing, for the last ten years, the more distinctively heroic element in American history. Looking at the matter superficially, we need to make a certain effort to interest ourselves in the Canadian past. It is hard not to imagine its records to be as bleak and arid and provincial as the aspects of nature and of society in this frigid colony, and we instinctively transpose the climate into a moral key, and think of human emotion there as having been always rather numb and unproductive. Canadian history is, moreover, meagre in quantity; it deals with small enterprises, small numbers, small names, names at least which have not become household words nearly as often as they deserved to do. And then it swarms with savages, and the Iroquois and the Mohawk are essentially monotonous and unhistorical. But to Mr. Parkman belongs the credit of having perceived the capacities of all this unpromising material, and felt that if his work must be a slender chronicle of events separated from the main current of modern civilization, in the quality of its interest, at least, it would be second to none. It is the history of an heroic undertaking, and the heroism pervades the most obscure details. The men and women by whose help the settlement of Canada was effected offer an exhibition of conduct which needed
"MY MOST DEAR AND HONORED MOTHER: I know very well that my capture must have distressed you very much. I ask you to forgive my disobedience. It is my sins that have placed me where I am. I owe my life to your prayers and those of M. de Saint-Quentin and of my sisters. I hope to see you again before winter. I pray you to tell the good brethren of Notre Dame to pray to God and the Holy Virgin for me, my dear mother, and for you and all my sisters.
-- Your poor FANCHON."
With this had been sent another letter to a friend, to whom he confides that his right hand has been burned, and the thumb of the other one chopped off by the Mohawks. He begs, however, his mother may not hear of it. Poor Fanchon's sad little note seems therefore an epitome of the early Canadian character at its best. Stout endurance and orthodox Catholicism form the simple sum of it, and the note of devout manliness, as this young adventurer strikes it, is heard as distinctly through two centuries as if it had been sounded but
With his present volume Mr. Parkman has brought his narrative well on towards its climax, and in no portion of it has the need to read the political lesson been more urgent. We have here related the fortunes of the infant colony from the time Louis XIV. took it paternally by the hand until his decline and death left it again to do battle unaided with its native wilderness. They form a very curious and, in some aspects, an almost comical history. It would be difficult to find a more pregnant and convenient example of the vicious side of the great French virtue -- the passion for administration. The example is the more striking, as Mr. Parkman forcibly points out, that we see it contrasted with an equally eminent embodiment of the great English virtue -- the faculty of shifting for one's self. How extremely artificial a creation was French Canada, how it was nursed and coddled and bribed and caressed; by what innumerable devices it was enticed and encouraged into a certain prosperity, and propped and legislated into a certain stability; how everything came to it from without, and as time went on, and security was established, and the need for the more acutely heroic virtues declined, nothing from within; how it was a fancy of Colbert's and a hobby of the king's, and how it languished when they passed away -- all this is unfolded by Mr. Parkman with superabundance of illustration. It was a sort of luxury of the king's conscience, and one of the trappings of his grandeur, and it offers the oddest combination of the Versailles view of things and the hard reality of things themselves. It has become the fashion to smile a good deal at the so-called greatness of Louis XIV., and there is no doubt that, when tapped by the impudent knuckle of modern criticism, much of it rings very hollow. French Canada was hollow enough, and yet it bears in a manner the stamp of a brilliant period. There was greatness in the idea of establishing a purely religious colony for the glory of God and the most Christian king -- a disinterested focus of conversion for hordes of thankless savages. The way chosen was sadly erratic, but the error was of a splendid kind. The king's generosity was boundless, and
Nation, October 15,
1874
Albert Rhodes (33)
The French at Home. By Albert Rhodes. New York: Dodd & Mead, 1875.
Mr. Rhodes knows his subject evidently to such depth as he pretends to fathom it, and he has written an amusing, though an extremely light, little volume. The American demand for information about Parisian manners and customs seems to amount to what is commercially called a "steady run," and it might be less intelligently supplied than in these pages. The author's observations of external characteristics is very lively and persistent, and if he is not very strong as a reasoner, he is an excellent taker of notes. He does not pretend to moralize, but simply to report definite facts, and the merit of his book is in containing a great many of these, of a minute kind. His picture is a friendly one, and we have no disposition to quarrel with it. Moreover, his attitude is the right one, in that he accompanies his generalizations, such as they are, with a number of examples and anecdotes. In some points, however, Mr. Rhodes is open to criticism. That he is writing to explain and elucidate French matters to an ignorant public (as the rudimentary character of much of his information implies) is a reason against and not in favor of his incorporating uninterpreted French phrases into his style. In this way he constantly puts the cart before the horse. "The country of the Tender" is impossible English, besides being an inexact translation. The French phrase is the "pays de Tendre" -- not "du Tendre." The "garments that are left out of the hands of the aunt" is an awkward form for a first allusion to the pawnbroker; the "addition" for the "bill" is a needless Gallicism; and to speak of "walls of that bluish-gray affectioned by painters" is very bad indeed. Is not Mr. Rhodes also rather lax sometimes in his economic statements? -- as when he says that "twenty-five thousand [francs a year] for a bachelor" will yield "an apartment in the Boulevard Malesherbes, au second, with a cook and a man-servant, a horse and coup, a box at the French Opera, breakfasts at home, and dinners at the Imperial or Jockey Club; the dwelling consisting of five rooms, with objects of art, one or two of some value." We rather think that the bachelor in question would
Nation, August 5,
1875
Addison Peale Russell (34)
Library Notes. By A. P. Russell. New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1875.
It is usually thought invidious to call a man a bookworm, and there is a common impression that great scholars are not always great thinkers. The compiler of this agreeable volume may, however, in no unflattering sense be spoken of as a voracious reader. There are readers and readers -- the readers who sift and weigh, and the readers for whom any printed matter has a more or less sacred character. Mr. Russell belongs rather to the latter class; he is not a critic, but a collector. He collects extracts as some other people collect almanacs and medals, and his hospitality is altogether impartial. It ranges from Thomas Kempis to the author of `Six Months at the White House,' and from Marcus Aurelius to Se$or Castelar. His extracts are classed under heads, in the Emersonian taste -- "Insufficiency," "Types," "Mutations," "Standards"; but the connection between the example and the category is not always very manifest. It is difficult to see, for instance, in what way it illustrates the subject of "Rewards" to quote from Crabbe Robinson that dogs sometimes kill themselves by barking at their own echo. This, however, is but a small drawback, as the book is of course meant to be very irregularly handled. Mr. Russell has been a multifarious reader, and if his taste is not always infallible -- he has a limited sense of differences of value, and quotes dull passages with the same relish as fine ones -- his book is the fruit of a real passion for literature, and is full of curious reflections and out-of-the-way facts. It justifies its title, and the reader, in turning its leaves, seems to inhale the pleasant, half-musty atmosphere of a well- conditioned but well-used old library.
Nation, January 6,
1876
Henry D. Sedley (35)
Marian Rooke; or, the Quest for Fortune. A Tale of the Younger World. By Henry D. Sedley. New York: Sheldon & Co., 1865.
This is an average novel and a very bad book -- a distinction, as it seems to us, easy to understand. There have been many novels, contemptible or ridiculous in point of dramatic interest, which have obtained a respectful attention through the wisdom of their tone or the elevation of their style. There have been others, skilful and absorbing in the matter of plot, which the reader has nevertheless flung aside half-read, as intolerably foolish, or intolerably vicious in spirit. The plot of "Marian Rooke," although it can hardly be called very skilful on the writer's part or very absorbing on the reader's, is yet decently interesting, as plots go, and may readily suffice to the entertainment of those jolly barbarians of taste who read novels only for what they call the "story." "Marian Rooke" has an abundance -- a superabundance -- of story, a vast deal of incident, of variety, of sentiment, of passion, of description, of conversation, and of that facetious element which no gentleman's novel should be without. These merits, however, are not by themselves of so high an order as to justify us to our conscience in an attempt to impose them upon the public recognition; we should have been content to leave their destinies to fortune. The part of duty in the matter, since duty there is, is to point out the defects of the work.
"Marian Rooke," then, is a tale of the "younger world," or, in other words, of life in the United States. If we are not mistaken, it was published in England either just before, or simultaneously with, its appearance in New York; and if on this point, too, we are not wrong in our facts, it met with a warmer welcome on the other side of the water than it has encountered on this, as, indeed, it had every reason to do, inasmuch as we may convey a certain idea of its spirit in saying that, whereas it was written for English circulating libraries, it was written only, if we may so express it, at American ones. This air of divided nationality which attended its production is an index of a similar feature in the conception of the book. The reader vacillates between setting the author
The hero of the tale is the son of a dissolute English gentleman -- time-honored and familiar combination! -- who, having immigrated to this country, married an American wife. In this manner originated the fatal "kink" in the young man's nature -- the conflict between his literal allegiance to the land of his birth and his spiritual affinity with the proud home of his ancestors. Marian Rooke, a burning Creole beauty, the daughter of a rich Louisiana planter, is similarly at odds with fortune, it having been discovered on her father's death that she is the child of a slave. Hence a beautiful bond of sympathy between the two. We do not propose to relate their adventures. It is enough to say that these are cast successively in California, in Europe, in Boston, in Berkshire County, Massachusetts (where the local color becomes quite appalling), and in the city of New York. The hero and heroine
Nation, February 22,
1866
Anne Moncure (Crane) Seemller (36)
Emily Chester. A Novel. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864.
This book is so well-meaning, that we are deterred by a feeling of real consideration for its author from buying back, in the free expression of our regret at misused time, the several tedious hours we have spent over its pages. It is emphatically a dull work; and yet it is a work in which many persons might discern that arch-opponent of dulness, -- questionable moral tendency. It is almost, we think, a worthless book; and yet it is decidedly a serious one. Its composition has evidently been a great matter for the author.
This latter fact commands our sympathy and tempers our severity; and yet at the same time it arouses a strong feeling of melancholy. This is the age of conscientious poor books, as well as of unscrupulous clever ones; and we are often appalled at the quantity of ponderous literary matter which is kept afloat in the market by the simple fact that those who have set it afloat are persons of a well- meaning sort. When a book is both bad and clever, the critic who pulls it to pieces feels that the author has some consolation in the sweetness of his own wit for the acerbity of that of others. But when a book is destitute of even the excellence of a pleasant style, it is surrounded with an atmosphere of innocence and innocuousness which inspires the justly indignant reviewer with compassion for the hapless adventurer who has nothing to fall back upon.
We have called "Emily Chester" a dull book, because the author has chosen a subject and a manner alike certain to make it dull in any but the most skilful hands. She has told a story of character in a would-be psychological mode; not of every-day character, such as is employed by Mr. Trollope and Miss Austen, but of character which she must allow us to term exceptional. She has brought together three persons; for although in the latter part of the book other names occur with some frequency, they remain nothing but names; and during three hundred and fifty close pages, we are invited to
She has linked her three persons together by a simple dramatic mechanism. They are a husband, a wife, and a lover. Emily Chester, the wife, is a beautiful and accomplished young woman. When we have said this, we have said as much about her as we venture positively to assert; for any further acquaintance with her is the result of mere guess-work. Her person is minutely described. At eighteen she has a magnificently developed figure. We are told that she has a deep sense of the beautiful; we gather generally that she is good yet proud, -- with a stern Romanesque pride, -- passionate yet cold, and although very calm and stately on all occasions, quite free from petty feminine affectations; that she is furthermore earnestly devoted to music, and addicted to quoting from the German. Is she clever? We know not. The author has evidently intended to make her very perfect, but she has only succeeded in making her very inane. She behaves on all occasions in a most irreproachable, inhuman manner; as if from the hour of her birth she had resolved to be a martyr, and was grimly determined not to be balked of her purpose. When anything particularly disagreeable happens, she becomes very pale and calm and statuesque. Although in the ordinary affairs of life she is sufficiently cheerful and voluble, whenever anything occurs a little out of the usual way she seems to remember the stake and the torture, and straightway becomes silent and cold and classical. She goes down into her grave after a life of acute misery without ever having "let on," as the phrase is, that there has been anything particular the matter with her. In view of these facts, we presume that the author has aimed at the creation of a perfect woman, -- a woman high-toned, high-spirited, high-souled, high-bred, high and mighty in all respects. Heaven preserve us from any more radical specimens of this perfection!
To wish to create such a specimen was a very laudable, but a very perilous ambition; to have created it, would have been an admirable achievement. But the task remains pretty much what it was. Emily Chester is not a character; she is a mere shadow; the mind's eye strives in vain to body her forth from
Max Crampton and Frederick Hastings, who are both very faulty persons, are equally incomplete and intangible. Max is an eccentric millionnaire, a mute adorer of Miss Chester; mute, that is, with regard to his passion, but a great talker and theorizer on things in general. We have a strong impression of having met him before. He is the repetition of a type that has of late years obtained great favor with lady novelists: the ugly, rich, middle-aged lover, with stern brows and white teeth; reticent and yet ardent; indolent and yet muscular, full of satire and common-sense. Max is partly a German, as such men often are, in novels. In spite of these striking characteristics, his fine, rich ugliness, his sardonic laugh, his enormous mental strength, the fulness of his devotion and of his magnanimity, he is anything but a living, moving person. He is essentially a woman's man; one of those impossible heroes, whom lady novelists concoct half out of their own erratic fancies and half out of those of other lady novelists. But if Max is a woman's man, what is Frederick Hastings? He is worse; he is almost a man's woman. He is nothing; he is more shadowy even than Emily. We are told that he had beauty and grace of person, delicacy, subtlety of mind, womanly quickness of perception. But, like his companions, he utterly fails to assert himself.
Such are the three mutually related individuals with whom we are brought into relation. We cannot but suppose that, as we have said, the author intended them for persons of exceptional endowments. Such beauty, such moral force and fervor, as are shadowed forth in Emily; so sublime and Gothic an ugliness, such intellectual depth, breadth, strength, so vast an intellectual and moral capacity generally, as we are taught to associate with Max: these traits are certainly not vouchsafed to the vulgar many. Nor is it given to one man out of five thousand, we apprehend, to be so consummate a charmer as Frederick Hastings.
But granting the existence of these almost unique persons, we recur to our statement that they are treated in a psychological fashion. We use this word, for want of a better one, in what we may call its technical sense. We apply it to the fact that the author makes the action of her story rest, not only exclusively, but what is more to the point, avowedly, upon the temperament, nature, constitution, instincts, of her characters; upon their physical rather than upon their moral sense. There is a novel at present languidly circulating in our literature -- "Charles Auchester" -- which is generally spoken of by its admirers as a "novel of temperament." "Emily Chester" is of the same sort; it is an attempt to exalt the physical sensibilities into the place of monitors and directors, or at any rate to endow them with supreme force and subtlety. Psychology, it may be said, is the observation of the moral and intellectual character. We repeat that we use the word in what we have called its technical sense, the scrutiny, in fiction, of motive generally. It is very common now-a-days for young novelists to build up figures minus the soul. There are two ways of so eliminating the spiritual principle. One is by effectually diluting it in the description of outward objects, as is the case with the picturesque school of writing; another is by diluting it in the description of internal subjects. This latter course has been pursued in the volume before us. In either case the temperament is the nearest approach we have to a soul. Emily becomes aware of Frederick Hastings's presence at Mrs. Dana's party by "a species of animal magnetism." Many writers would have said by the use of her eyes. During the period of her grief at her father's death, Max feels that he is "constitutionally powerless" to help her. So he does not even try. As she regains her health, after her marriage, "her morbid sensitiveness to outward influences" returns with renewed vigor. Her old constitutional repulsion towards (sic) her husband increases with fearful rapidity. She tries in vain to overcome it: "the battle with, and denial of, instinct resulted as such conflicts inevitably must." The mood in which she drives him from her, in what may not be inappropriately termed the "balcony scene" on the Lake of Como, arises from her having been "true to her constitutional sensitiveness." Max recognizes the old friendship between his wife and Hastings to
But it is needless to multiply examples. There is hardly a page in which the author does not insinuate her conviction that, in proportion as a person is finely organized, in so far is he apt to be the slave of his instincts, -- the subject of unaccountable attractions and repulsions, loathings and yearnings. We do not wish to use hard words; perhaps, indeed, the word which is in our mind, and which will be on the lips of many, is in these latter days no longer a hard word; but if "Emily Chester" is immoral, it is by the fact of the above false representation. It is not in making a woman prefer another man to her husband, nor even in making her detest a kind and virtuous husband. It is in showing her to be so disposed without an assignable reason; it is in making her irresponsible. But the absurdity of such a view of human nature nullifies its pernicious tendency. Beasts and idiots act from their instincts; educated men and women, even when they most violate principle, act from their reason, however perverted, and their affections, however misplaced.
We presume that our author wishes us to admire, or at least to compassionate, her heroine; but we must deny her the tribute of either sentiment. It may be claimed for her that she was ultimately victorious over her lawless impulses; but this claim we reject. Passion was indeed conquered by duty, but life was conquered by passion. The true victory of mind would have been, not perhaps in a happy, but at least in a peaceful life. Granting the possibility of Emily's having been beset by these vague and nameless conflicting forces, the one course open to her was to conquer a peace. Women who love less wisely than well engage our sympathy even while we deny them our approbation; but a woman who indulges in a foolish passion, without even the excuse of loving well, must be curtly and sternly dismissed. At no period of Emily's history could she have assigned a reason to herself (let alone her disability to make her position clear to her husband) for her intense
North American Review, January 1865
Miss Crane's first novel, "Emily Chester," went through several editions, if we are not mistaken, and found a great many readers, among whom were not a few admirers. We are at loss how to qualify her present work to the appreciation of these latter persons. If we say it is as good as "Emily Chester," they will be very much disappointed on coming to read it; and if we say it is as bad, they will, of course, be scandalized before reading a word of it. In truth, we remember thinking "Emily Chester" neither very good nor very bad, but simply mortally dull, and any temperate epithet which may be judicially affixed to the latter work we are ready to extend to the volume before us. It is of quite the same calibre as its predecessor. We are inclined even to place it a degree higher, for the excellent reason that it is not more than half as long. And yet, as we say, it is by no means certain that those persons who were strongly moved by "Emily Chester" will not be left unstirred by "Opportunity." It would hardly be logical to explain their probable insensibility by the circumstance just mentioned -- the greater brevity of the volume before us -- for even if it were prolonged ad infinitum in the same key, we should defy it to quicken even the most officious enthusiasm. The real explanation is that the book is feeble, the vital spark is absent, and that it was a great mistake to have got excited over "Emily Chester." There were several valid reasons why the odd impression should have obtained ground that "Emily Chester" was interesting. To begin with, there was an enticing look about the leading idea of the tale. It suggested something aside from the beaten track of Anglo-Saxon fiction, and promised to deal with really great passions. It brought up the famous "marriage question," and offered us a hero in love with another man's wife. That the situation was actually trimmed of its improprieties made very little difference
It is indeed by an author's second work that we can best measure his worth. It takes of course a clever book or a happy book to give him a right to address the public a second time; but it takes a really good book to prove that he had a right originally to address it, to make us believe that he had actually something to say and that his talent is a gift and not a loan. An author's first book -- or the first book, at least, by which he becomes famous, may easily owe its popularity to some accidental circumstance, extrinsic or intrinsic -- to a coincidence with the public humor or taste at the moment, or to a certain faux air of originality and novelty which takes people by surprise. But at the second attempt they are prepared, they are on their guard, they are critical, and the writer may be sure that this time his work must float or sink on its essential merits. This is the case with Miss Crane. The reader asks himself, with a due sense of the gravity of the question, whether or no "Opportunity" is a sound, strong, artistic piece of writing.
The plot of the story -- if plot there is -- may be rapidly sketched. We are introduced to a Maryland country home of twenty-five years ago, tenanted by a worthy elderly couple, with their two sons and their little orphan ward. The elderly couple are presented to us at such length and breadth, with so many little homely details, and with such an air of domestic comfort and stability, that we had begun to feel quite kindly towards them, and to assure ourselves that, whatever company we might fall into as we journeyed through the
This generous and penetrating young girl falls in with the irresistible Grahame Ferguson, and like the rest of her sex she succumbs. But she succumbs in her own fashion, with protests and pangs of conscience. She gives him a decidedly shrewish blowing-up, shows him that he is a good-for-nothing fellow, a trifler, a dangler, and that he ought to know better. This is not well managed. It is quite conceivable that a young woman like Harvey should react against her tender impressions, that she should be at once fascinated and annoyed by a charming man of the world, and that she should betray herself by passionate appeals to the better nature of the gentleman. But as the matter is here contrived, it has a puerile turn which interferes sadly with the reader's satisfaction. Harvey is too young to talk as she does, and Grahame too old to listen as he does. The young girl is simply pert and pedantic, and the young man is stupid and awkward. But the reader is struck with the general cast of their relations and feels it to be interesting; -- Harvey, at once charmed, thrilled, and disgusted, in love with all Grahame's delightful qualities, but not enough in love to forgive his foibles and to feel that to love him with passion is not to derogate from self-respect; and Grahame, held in bondage by the young girl's brightness and nobleness, and yet profoundly conscious that to love her is to turn his back upon a hundred pleasant places.
The great trouble with it all, moreover, is that nothing comes of it. The situation once indicated stands still in the tamest way conceivable, and moves neither to the right nor the left. A second young woman is introduced, who, of course, complicates matters, but without leading them to an ultimate clearing up. Douglas Ferguson, moreover, steps in and falls in love with Harvey. Harvey loves him in return, and we protest we don't see what obstacle there is to their union, for, beside his brother, we are assured that, to Harvey's perception, Grahame dwindles into abject nullity. Here, alas! is
The reader will see that this is the substance of a work not remarkable for strength. But perhaps, after all, he will find more in it than we have done. He will have looked then far less, and for less, than we can readily bring ourselves to look for in a novel which we pretend to read at all. We can't get along without a certain vigor, a certain fire, a certain heat and passion. We do not exact that it should be intense, but only that from centre to circumference it shall fill the book with an atmosphere, and not -- if the turn of our sentence is not too illogical -- with a vacuum. This is not too hard a word. Miss Crane's figures strike us as perfectly vague and thin, and we find that in order to give any account of her book at all we have been obliged to press our own little stock of imagination into the service and to force it to do extra work.
Nation, December 5,
1867
Alvan S. Southworth (37)
Four Thousand Miles of African Travel: A Personal Record of a Journey up the Nile, etc. By Alvan S. Southworth. New York: Baker, Pratt & Co., 1875.
One day, as the author of this volume was indulging in a reverie in the vestibule of the Grand Hotel in Paris, he was tapped on the shoulder by a friend and invited to stroll down the Boulevard. He assented, and the two gentlemen "met acquaintance after acquaintance, bowing and passing on." At last they were stopped by a "portly man" who had been in Egypt, and who talked about that country with such gusto that they all grew hungry. Hereupon they went to Bignon's to dine and drink Chambertin, and then Mr. Southworth, having made known to "Mr. Bennett" that he desired to see Egypt, he was "directed toward the East." At Cairo he found that "the Viceroy wished to Americanize his people." This circumstance is remarkable, inasmuch as, according to the author's ingenuous statement on the next page, the Americans "have preyed upon his fortunes, and have put upon him machines that are dead to action, guns that will not fire, and instruments which can be employed only to measure the highest altitude of swindling." Mr. Southworth has an immense admiration for the Viceroy, whose merits he sets forth in many glowing passages, and an exalted opinion of the future greatness of Egypt when the country shall have been thoroughly Americanized. He had an interview with the viceregal Minister for Foreign Affairs, of whom he gives the following description: "He was a man of about forty-two, an Armenian Christian, bold swarthy face, pleasant manners, and even handsome. He impressed me as a very competent minister, and one not apt to expand himself in a silly enterprise." Mr. Southworth's style is, it must be said, sometimes rather odd, as, to take another instance, when he speaks of Egypt as a "hermaphrodite land, half savage, half civilized." He also saw the Viceroy, the "Talleyrand of the East," whom he asked for a firman, and who, with admirable magnanimity, paid many compliments to the Americans. The author informed him that he wished to go up the Nile, "as a journalist, to ascertain Sir Samuel Baker's fate and to look at the country
Nation, December 2,
1875
Harriet Elizabeth (Prescott) Spofford (38)
Azarian: an Episode. By Harriet Elizabeth Prescott, Author of The Amber Gods, etc. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864.
The volume before us is characterized by that venturesome, unprincipled literary spirit, defiant alike of wisdom and taste, which has been traceable through Miss Prescott's productions, from "Sir Rohan's Ghost" downward. We looked upon this latter work, at the time of its publication, as the very apotheosis of the picturesque; but "Sir Rohan's Ghost," "The Amber Gods," and even "The Rim," compared with "Azarian," are admirably sober and coherent. Miss Prescott has steadily grown in audacity, and in that disagreeable audacity which seems to have been fostered rather by flattery than by remonstrance. Let her pray to be delivered from her friends.
What manner of writing is it which lends itself so frankly to aberrations of taste? It is that literary fashion which, to speak historically, was brought into our literature by Tennyson's poetry. The best name for it, as a literary style, is the ideal descriptive style. Like all founders of schools, Tennyson has been far exceeded by his disciples. The style in question reposes not so much upon the observation of the objects of external nature as the projection of one's fancy upon them. It may be seen exemplified in its youthful vigor in Tennyson's "Dream of Fair Women"; it is exemplified in its effete old age in Mr. Alexander Smith and Miss Prescott, passim.
The writer of a work of fiction has this advantage over his critic, that he can frequently substantiate his cause by an a posteriori scheme of treatment. For this reason, it is often difficult to fasten down a story-teller to his premises, and then to confront him with his aberrations. For each successive delinquency he has the ready excuse of an unimpeachable intention. Such or such a glaring blot is the very key-stone of his plan. When we tell Miss Prescott that some one of her tales is marvellously void of human nature and false to actual society, she may meet us with the reply that a correct portraiture of nature and society was not intended. She may claim the poet's license. And superficially she will have the best of it.
The subject of "Azarian" is sufficiently dramatic. A young orphan-girl -- a painter of flowers by profession -- allows herself to become engaged to a young Greek physician resident in Boston. Ruth is warm-hearted and patient; Azarian is cold-hearted, selfish, and an amateur of the fine arts, especially that of flirting. He wearies of Ruth before marriage, -- slights, neglects, and drives her to despair. She resolves on suicide; but when on the brink of destruction, she pauses and reconciles herself to life, and, the engagement with Azarian being broken off by tacit agreement, to happiness.
What is the central element of the above data? The element of feeling. What is the central element of the tale as it stands written? The element of words. The story contains, as it need contain, but few incidents. It is made of the stuff of a French tude. Its real interest lies in the history of two persons' moral intercourse. Instead of this, we are treated to an elaborate description of four persons' physical aspect and costume, and of certain aspects of inanimate nature. Of human nature there is not an unadulterated page in the book, -- not a chapter of history. From beginning to end it is a succession of forced assaults upon the impregnable stronghold of painting; a wearisome series of word-pictures, linked by a slight thread of narrative, strung together, to use one of Miss Prescott's own expressions, like "beads on a leash." If the dictionary were a palette of colors, and a goose-quill a brush, Miss Prescott would be a very clever painter. But as words possess a certain inherent dignity, value, and independence, language being rather the stamped and authorized coinage which expresses the value of thought than the brute metal out of which forms are moulded, her pictures are invariably incoherent and meaningless. What do we know of Ruth and Azarian, of Charmian and Madame Saratov? Next to nothing: the little that we know we learn in spite of Miss Prescott's fine writing. These persons are localized, christened (we admit in rather a pagan fashion), provided with matter-of-fact occupations. They are Bostonians of the nineteenth century. The little drama in
There is surely no principle of fictitious composition so true as this, -- that an author's paramount charge is the cure of souls, to the subjection, and if need be to the exclusion, of the picturesque. Let him look to his characters: his figures will take care of themselves. Let the author who has grasped the heart of his purpose trust to his reader's sympathy: from that vantage-ground he may infallibly command it. In what we may call subordinate points, that is, in Miss Prescott's prominent and obtrusive points, it is an immense succor. It supplements his intention. Given an animate being, you may readily clothe it in your mind's eye with a body, a local habitation, and a name. Given, we say, an animate being: that is the point. The reader who is set face to face with a gorgeous doll will assuredly fail to inspire it with sympathetic life. To do so, he must have become excited and interested. What is there in a doll to excite and interest?
In reading books of the Azarian school, -- for, alas! there is a school, -- we have often devoutly wished that some legal penalty were attached to the use of description. We have sighed for a novel with a dramatis personae of disembodied spirits. Azarian gives his name to two hundred and fifty pages; and at the end of those pages, the chief fact with which he is associated in our minds is that he wore his hair in "waves of flaccid gold." Of Madame Saratov we read that she was the widow of a Russian exile, domesticated in Boston for the purpose of giving lessons in French, music, and Russ, and of educating her boys. In spite of the narrowness of means attributable to a lady who follows the profession of teaching, she lives in a splendor not unworthy of the Muscovite Kremlin. She has a maid to haunt her steps; her chosen raiment is silks and velvets; she sleeps in counterpanes of satin; her thimble, when she sews, is incrusted at the base with pearls; she holds a salon, and treats her guests to draughts of "richly-rosy" cordial. One of her dresses is a gown of green Genoa
When a very little girl becomes the happy possessor of a wax- doll, she testifies her affection for it by a fond manipulation of its rosy visage. If the nose, for instance, is unusually shapely and pretty, the fact is made patent by a constant friction of the finger- tips; so that poor dolly is rapidly smutted out of recognition. In a certain sense we would compare Miss Prescott to such a little girl. She fingers her puppets to death. "Good heavens, Madam!" we are forever on the point of exclaiming, "let the poor things speak for themselves. What? are you afraid they can't stand alone?" Even the most clearly defined character would succumb beneath this repeated posing, attitudinizing, and changing of costume. Take any breathing person from the ranks of fiction, -- Hetty in "Adam Bede," or Becky Sharp the Great (we select women advisedly, for it is known that they can endure twenty times more than men in this respect), -- place her for a few pages in Miss Prescott's charge, and what will be the result? Adieu, dear familiar friend; you melt like wax in a candle. Imagine Thackeray forever pulling Rebecca's curls and settling the folds of her dress.
This bad habit of Miss Prescott's is more than an offence against art. Nature herself resents it. It is an injustice to men and women to assume that the fleshly element carries such weight. In the history of a loving and breaking heart, is that the only thing worth noticing? Are the external signs and accidents of passion the only points to be detailed? What we want is Passion's self, -- her language, her ringing voice, her gait, the presentment of her deeds. What do we care about the beauty of man or woman in comparison with their humanity? In a novel we crave the spectacle of that of which we may feel that we know it. The only lasting fictions are those
When once a work of fiction may be classed as a novel, its foremost claim to merit, and indeed the measure of its merit, is its truth, -- its truth to something, however questionable that thing may be in point of morals or of taste. "Azarian" is true to nothing. No one ever looked like Azarian, talked like him, nor, on the whole, acted like him; for although his specific deeds, as related in the volume before us, are few and far between, we find it difficult to believe that any one ever pursued a line of conduct so utterly meaningless as that which we are invited, or rather allowed, to attribute to him.
We have called Miss Prescott's manner the descriptive manner; but in so doing we took care to distinguish it from the famous realistic system which has asserted itself so largely in the fictitious writing of the last few years. It is not a counsel we would indiscriminately bestow, -- on the contrary, we would gladly see the vulgar realism which governs the average imagination leavened by a little old-fashioned idealism, -- but Miss Prescott, if she hopes to accomplish anything worth accomplishing, must renounce new-fashioned idealism for a while, and diligently study the canons of the so-called realist school. We gladly admit that she has the talent to profit by such a discipline. But to be real in writing is to describe; such is the popular notion. Were this notion correct, Miss Prescott would be a very good realist, -- none better. But for this fallacious axiom we propose to substitute another, which, if it does not embrace the whole truth, comes several degrees nearer to it: to be real in writing is to express; whether by description or otherwise is of secondary importance. The short tales of M. Prosper Mrime are eminently real; but he seldom or never describes: he conveys. It is not to be denied that the great names in the realist line are associated with a pronounced fondness for description. It is for this reason that we remind Miss Prescott of them. Let her take Balzac's "Eugnie Grandet," for instance. It will probably be affirmed that this story, the interest of which is to the full as human as that of her own, is equally elaborate in the painting of external
The reader feels that Miss Prescott describes not in accordance with any well-considered plan, but simply for the sake of describing, and of so gratifying her almost morbid love of the picturesque. There is a reason latent in every one of Balzac's tales why such things should appear thus, and such persons so, -- a clear, well-defined reason, easily discoverable by the observing and sympathetic eye. Each separate part is conducive to the general effect; and this general effect has been studied, pondered, analyzed: in the end it is produced. Balzac lays his stage, sets his scene, and introduces his puppets. He describes them once for all; this done, the story marches. He does not linger nervously about his figures, like a sculptor about his unfinished clay-model, administering a stroke here and affixing a lump there. He has done all this beforehand, in his thoughts; his figures are completed before the story begins.
Miss Prescott's style is evidently the point on which she bases her highest claims to distinction. She has been taught that, in possessing this style, she possesses a great and uncommon gift. Nothing is more false. The fine writing in which "Azarian" abounds is the cheapest writing of the day. Every magazine-story bears traces of it. It is so widely adopted, because to a person of clever fancy there is no kind of writing that is so easy, -- so easy, we mean, considering the effect produced. Of course it is much easier to write in a style which necessitates no looking out of words; but such a style makes comparatively little impression. The manner in question is easy, because the writer recognizes no standard of truth or accuracy by which his performances may be measured. He does not transcribe facts, -- facts must be counted, measured, weighed, which takes far too much trouble. He does not patiently study the nature and appearance of a thing until he has won from it the confession of that absolute appreciable quality, the correct statement of which is alone true description; he does not commit himself to statements, for these are dangerous things; he does not, in short, extract; he affixes. He does not consult the object to be described, so recognizing it as a fact; he consults his imagination, and so constitutes it a theme to be elaborated. In the picture which he proceeds to
All writing is narration; to describe is simply to narrate things in their order of place, instead of events in their order of time. If you consult this order, your description will stand; if you neglect it, you will have an imposing mass of words, but no recognizable thing. We do not mean to say that Miss Prescott has a wholly commonplace fancy. (We use the word commonplace advisedly, for there are no commonplaces so vulgar as those chromatic epigrams which mark the Tennysonian prose school.) On the contrary, she has a fancy which would serve very well to garnish a dish of solid fiction, but which furnishes poor material for the body of the dish. These clever conceits, this keen eye for the superficial picturesque, this inborn love of bric-- brac and sunsets, may be made very effectively to supplement a true dramatic exposition; but they are a wretched substitute for such. And even in bric--brac and sunsets Miss Prescott's execution is crude. In her very specialty, she is but an indifferent artist. Who is so clever in the bric--brac line as M. Thophile Gautier? He takes an occasional liberty with the French language; but, on the whole, he finds his best account in a policy of studious respect even for her most irritating forms of conservatism. The consequence is, that his efforts in this line are unapproachable, and, what is better, irreproachable. One of the greatest dangers to which those who pursue this line are liable is the danger that they may fall into the ridiculous. By a close adherence to that medium of expression which other forms of thought have made respectable, this danger is effectually set at naught. What is achieved by the paternally governed French tongue may surely be effected by that chartered libertine, our own. Miss Prescott uses far too many words, synonymous words and meaningless words. Like the majority of female writers, -- Mrs. Browning, George Sand, Gail Hamilton, Mrs. Stowe, -- she possesses in excess the fatal gift of fluency. Her paragraphs read as if in composition she completely ignored the expedient of erasure. What painter ever painted a picture without rubbing out and transposing, displacing, effacing, replacing? There is no essential difference of system between
If Miss Prescott would only take such good old English words as we possess, words instinct with the meaning of centuries, and, having fully resolved upon that which she wished to convey, cast her intention in those familiar terms which long use has invested with almost absolute force of expression, then she would describe things in a manner which could not fail to arouse the sympathy, the interest, the dormant memories of the reader. What is the possible bearing of such phrases as "vermeil ardency," or "a tang of color"? of such childish attempts at alliteration -- the most frequent bugbear of Miss Prescott's readers -- as "studded with starry sprinkle and spatter of splendor," and the following sentence, in which, speaking of the leaves of the blackberry- vine, she tells us that they are "damasked with deepening layer and spilth of color, brinded and barred and blotted beneath the dripping fingers of October, nipped by nest-lining bees," -- and, lastly, "suffused through all their veins with the shining soul of the mild and mellow season"?
This is nothing but "words, words, words, Horatio!" They express nothing; they only seem to express. The true test of the worth of a prose description -- to simplify matters we leave poetry quite out of the question -- is one's ability to resolve it back into its original elements. You construct your description from a chosen object; can you, conversely, from your description construct that object? We defy any one to represent the "fine scarlet of the blackberry vine," and "the gilded bronze of beeches," -- fair sentences by themselves, which express almost as much as we can reasonably hope to
Miss Prescott would rightfully resent our criticism if, after all, we had no counsel to offer. Of course our advice is to take or to leave, but it is due to ourselves to produce it.
We would earnestly exhort Miss Prescott to be real, to be true to something. In a notice of Mr. Charles Reade recently published in the Atlantic, our authoress indulged in a fling at Mr. Anthony Trollope for what she probably considers his grovelling fidelity to minute social truths. But we hold it far better to be real as Mr. Trollope is real, than to be ideal after the fashion of the authoress of "Azarian." As in the writing of fiction there is no grander instrument than a potent imagination, such as Mr. Hawthorne's, for instance, so there is no more pernicious dependence than an unbridled fancy. Mr.
North American Review,
January 1865
Elizabeth Stoddard (39)
Two Men. A Novel. By Elizabeth Stoddard. New-York: Bunce and Huntington, 1865.
A few years ago Mrs. Stoddard published a work entitled The Morgesons, which although it failed to become widely known was generally spoken of as a remarkable book by those who had the good fortune to come across it. There is no doubt, however, that equally with this epithet it deserved the obscurity to which it was speedily consigned: for it was a thoroughly bad novel. It was nevertheless not to be confounded with the common throng of ignoble failures; inasmuch as no intelligent person could have read it without a lively irritation of the critical senses. To say that it was totally destitute of form is to speak from a standpoint absurdly alien to that of its author; but we may perhaps meet her on her own ground in saying that it possessed not even the slightest mechanical coherency. It was a long tedious record of incoherent dialogue between persons irresponsible in their sayings and doings even to the verge of insanity. Of narrative, of exposition, of statement, there was not a page in the book. Here and there a vivid sketch of seaside scenery bespoke a powerful fancy: but for the most part, the story was made up of disjointed, pointless repartee between individuals concerning whom the author had not vouchsafed us the smallest authentic information. She had perhaps wished us to study them exclusively in their utterances, as we study the characters of a play: but with what patience, it may be asked, does she suppose a play would be listened to, in which the action was at the mercy of such a method of development as she used in The Morgesons? With what success does she conceive that the bewildered auditor could construct the argument? In spite however of the essentially abortive character of her story, it contained several elements of power. If the reader threw down the book with the sensation of having been dreaming hard for an hour, he was yet also sensible of the extraordinary vividness of the different episodes of his dream. He arose with his head full of impressions as lively as they were disagreeable. He had seen humanity and society caricatured, coarsely misrepresented and misunderstood; but he had seen
The volume before us is practically but a repetition of its predecessor; from which it differs only in degree. It is a better novel, because it possesses a comparative unity of design. But like The Morgesons, it is almost brutally crude. Up to a certain point, to which the contagious ingenuity which fills the literary atmosphere of the day may easily carry a writer, the characters are sufficiently natural; but beyond this point, where a writer's only resource is his science, his honest competency to his task, they are violently unnatural. It is probable that Mrs. Stoddard's first novel, with all its disorderly energy, bespoke a certain amount of originality. By this term it is, at all events, that most people account for a flagrant absence of order in a work of art. Now Two Men reads very much as if its author, while determined to do the best she could and to profit by increased experience, was yet still more determined not to omit at any hazard this same precious fact of originality, but to give her work an unmistakable flavouring of it. The result is that her book betrays an almost mechanical infusion, in this interest, of a savage violence which she apparently believes to be a good imitation of the quiet seriousness of genius. Our expression is not too strong: the essential defects of Two Men are resumed in the fact that while it is feebly conceived, it is violently written. Violence is not strength: on the contrary it needs strength. In any but the strongest hands a violent style is fatal to truth. It is fatal to truth because of necessity it perverts everything it touches. Throughout the present volume, there is not a quiet page. What more forcible statement can we make of its inferiority? We use the word style here more especially to designate the author's manner of talking of human beings and of making them talk. In dealing with certain facts of nature she has frequently an admirable command of language. "That day a summer rain fell from morning till evening;
Studies in Bibliography, vol. 20,
1967
Harriet Beecher Stowe (40)
We and Our Neighbors: Records of an Unfashionable Street. By Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: J. B. Ford & Co., 1875.
It would be rather awkward to attempt to tell what Mrs. Stowe's novel is about. There is a young woman married to an editor of "three papers -- a monthly magazine for the grown folk, another for the children, and a weekly paper." This well-occupied personage, in a moment of easily conceivable bewilderment, invites an Englishman to dinner on washing-day, and this is how his wife, who is introduced to us as a model of the womanly graces, informs her cook of the circumstance (the lady, by the way, was one of the Van Arsdels, conspicuous among the first families of New York): "Mr. Henderson has invited an English gentleman to dinner, and a whole parcel of folks with him. . . . It's just sweet of you to take things so patiently, when I know you are feeling so bad, but the way it comes about is this." Mr. Henderson's dinner is one of the principal events of the book, and Mrs. Stowe's second manner, as we may call it, comes out strongly in the description of it. It proved a greater success than was to have been hoped -- thanks to the accommodating disposition of the British guest. "Mr. Selby proved one of that delightful class of English travellers who travel in America to see and enter into its peculiar and individual life, and not to show up its points of difference from old-world social standards. He seemed to take the sense of a little family dinner, got up on short notice, in which the stereotyped doctrine of courses was steadfastly ignored, where there was no soup or fish, and only a good substantial course of meat and vegetables, with a slight dessert of fruit and confectionery. . . . A real high-class English gentleman," under these circumstances, the author goes on to remark (not oppressed, that is, by a sense of repletion), ". . . makes himself frisky and gamesome to a degree that would astonish the solemn divinities of insular decorum." In this exhilaration "soon Eva and he were all over the house, while she eloquently explained to him the working of the furnace, the position of the water-pipes, and the various comforts and conveniences which they had introduced
There are a great many other people, of whose identity we have no very confident impression, inasmuch as they never do anything but talk -- and that chiefly about plumbing, carpet-laying, and other cognate topics. We cannot perhaps give chapter and verse for the discussion of these particular points, but the reader remains in an atmosphere of dense back-stairs detail which makes him feel as if he were reading an interminable file of tradesmen's bills. There is in particular a Mrs. Wouvermans, an aunt of the Eva just commemorated, who pervades the volume like a keeper of an intelligence office, or a female canvasser for sewing machines. This lady, we know, is intended to be very unpleasant, but would it not have been possible to vary a little, for the relief of the reader, the form of her importunity? She also belongs to one of the first families of New York, and this is a specimen of her conversational English. She is talking about the Ritualists and their processions: "I'd process 'em out in quick time. If I were he [the Bishop] I'd have all that sort of trumpery cleaned out at once." But none of Mrs. Stowe's ladies and gentlemen open their mouths without uttering some amazing vulgarism, and if we were to believe her report of the matter, the language used by good society in New York is a singular amalgam of the rural Yankee dialect (so happily reproduced by Mrs. Stowe in some of her tales), the jargon of the Southern negroes, and the style of the paragraphs in the Home Journal about such-and-such a lady's "German." "Never mind, I'll get track of them," says the exemplary Eva, alluding to the ghosts which her husband jestingly assures her she will find in the house of certain opposite neighbors; "and if there's a ghost's chamber I'll be into it!" Hereupon (she has never called at the house in question before) she throws over her head "a little
Nation, July 22, 1875
Bayard Taylor (41)
John Godfrey's Fortunes; Related by Himself; A Story of American Life. By Bayard Taylor. New York: G. P. Putnam; Hurd and Houghton, 1865.
John Godfrey, an ambitious and sensitive youth, comes up to New York from a small Pennsylvania village, to seek his fortune as a man of letters. After many disappointments and tribulations, he procures employment as a newspaper reporter. In the course of time he makes friends in literary and other circles. He falls into a semi-recognised literary society, the various members of which are described by Mr. Taylor with a humour which he probably intends to be satirical; but which has the disadvantage of evoking comparisons with both Dickens and Thackeray which the author is ill able to sustain. Besides his Bohemian friends Godfrey is introduced to a beautiful heiress, a young lady remarkable for having saved the life of an Irish waiter, who while bathing in Lake George, had ventured beyond his depth. To this young lady our hero secretly pledges his affections. His suit, however, does not prosper. It happens that while engaged in the dis-charge of his editorial duties, he has had occasion to be of use to an unfortunate young girl whom poverty and disgrace threaten to turn upon the Streets for a subsistence. As he stands, late at night under a street-lamp, giving ear to the outcast's tale, with his arm around her waist, "supporting her," his mistress, to whom he has not yet declared his passion and who regards him therefore but as a casual friend, passes by in a carriage and recognises him. The next morning she sends him a note informing him that their acquaintance is at an end! Considering Miss Haworth's Lake George Adventure, we think she should have been a little more charitable. The misconception is only temporary, but such as it is, it is sufficient to fill Godfrey with despair, to cause him to throw up his work and to drive him into dissipation. Here, as we have already seen it remarked, was the one dramatic point in Mr. Taylor's story. The author had it in his power to represent his hero, outraged as he was by social mistrust, as avenging himself on social conventions, and at least enjoying the bitter sweetness of evil repute. The
Such are John Godfrey's fortunes. We have many faults to find with Mr. Taylor's mode of relating them. We advert to the defects of the book the more frankly, because equally with its merits, they have obtained such general applause. Before reading the present work we were unacquainted with Mr. Taylor as a novelist. We therefore expected to find in these pages some justification of the praise which, both in England and America, has been awarded to his performances in this character. We confess we were considerably disappointed. We found but small measure of those qualities which we look for in a good novel: insight into character, beauty of style, humour, imagination. We found a ready, commonplace invention, and a competent knowledge of New-York life. We found, moreover, a general tone of vulgarity which made us regret that the author had seen fit, on his title page, to emphasise the American character of his work. We are so much misrepresented by foreigners in this respect that we are very sorry to have our case made worse by native writers. It is hard to point out the specific grounds of this imputation. They consist, broadly, in the fact that the reader feels himself to be in the society of men and women without tastes, manners or traditions. An impression the reverse of this is not perhaps, among well-bred Americans, so forcible as to be unpleasant, as it sometimes is among ill-bred Englishmen; but it is assuredly not conspicuous by its absence. Mr. Taylor's rustics, in the early part of the book, are vulgar without substantial humour and without reality. His "fashionables," as he calls them, are equally wanting in grace. The children of a wealthy Philadelphian suffer from the fact of their father having taken it into his head to marry his cook. Why are we treated to this incident? It was intended, we presume, as a partial key to Penrose's morbid
[at this point, four manuscript pages,
numbered 9 -- 12, are missing]
profit -- nor to the family circle before the children have gone to bed; but to mature men and women.
Mr. Taylor had of course a leading idea in writing "John Godfrey." We will gladly do him the justice to say that it defines itself with tolerable clearness. He proposed to represent, we conceive, the gradual process of undeception, of healthy sophistication, undergone in a great city by a friendless youth of delicate sensibilities and strong imagination. Godfrey's illusions begin to fall away before he comes up to town, and a few years of town life effectually dispel them. The idea is happier than Mr. Taylor's execution of it: it is suggested emphatically enough for us to be sure it is there, but it is not carried out. That is, we are but half admitted to the hero's confidence. In truth, the subject is too difficult for the author to handle consistently. We receive at the beginning a kind of tacit assurance that the hero will talk seriously, but as we go on, we find that he only intends to gossip -- fluently enough, good-naturedly enough, perhaps; but still this promise is broken and the book becomes, artistically, dishonest. The first few chapters, in which Godfrey treats of his childhood, are by far the happiest. Reminiscences of this period are always gossip at the best, and it is curious to see how commonly novelists, even poor novelists, excel in them. A writer who has brought his hero through his school-days very prettily and successfully, often fails of inspiration at the threshold of worldly life. This kind of retrospection makes poets and romancers of the dullest of us, and the professional writer gets the benefit of our common tendency. The autobiographical form of composition enables him to carry this tendency to its furthest limits. It is for this reason that it is so popular. It has indeed great advantages in the way of allowing a writer to run on, as we may call it; but it has the prime disadvantage of being the most dramatic form possible. The author not only puts off his own personality, but he assumes that of another, and in proportion as the imaginary hero is different from himself, his task becomes difficult. Hence the merit of most fictitious autobiographies is that they give you a tolerably
In writing these remarks we have felt frankly regarding Mr. Taylor's book, although we have not spoken so definitely nor so fully as we might have done. We have perhaps done both him and ourselves injustice by abstaining from the consideration of details. We shall reserve our examination of this kind for Mr. Taylor's next novel; for is it not probable that he will write another? He has our hearty wishes for success and our promise of hearty rejoicing in case of success. But we must say that success is contingent on principles of which in the volume before us he has signally failed to take counsel; principles which may be summed up in the following common-place: that to write a good novel is a work of long labour, of reflection, of devotion; and not in any degree an off-hand piece of business.
Harvard Library Bulletin, XI, Spring
1957
James Whistler (42)
MR. WHISTLER AND ART CRITICISM
A correspondent writes to us from London under date of Jan. 28:
"I may mention as a sequel to the brief account of the suit Whistler v. Ruskin, which I sent you a short time since, that the plaintiff has lately published a little pamphlet in which he delivers himself on the subject of art-criticism. This little pamphlet, issued by Chatto & Windus, is an affair of seventeen very prettily-printed small pages; it is now in its sixth edition, it sells for a shilling, and is to be seen in most of the shop-windows. It is very characteristic of the painter, and highly entertaining; but I am not sure that it will have rendered appreciable service to the cause which he has at heart. The cause that Mr. Whistler has at heart is the absolute suppression and extinction of the art-critic and his function. According to Mr. Whistler the art-critic is an impertinence, a nuisance, a monstrosity -- and usually, into the bargain, an arrant fool. Mr. Whistler writes in an off-hand, colloquial style, much besprinkled with French -- a style which might be called familiar if one often encountered anything like it. He writes by no means as well as he paints; but his little diatribe against the critics is suggestive, apart from the force of anything that he specifically urges. The painter's irritated feeling is interesting, for it suggests the state of mind of many of his brothers of the brush in the presence of the bungling and incompetent disquisitions of certain members of the fraternity who sit in judgment upon their works. `Let work be received in silence,' says Mr. Whistler, `as it was in the days to which the penman still points as an era when art was at its apogee.' He is very scornful of the `penman,' and it is on the general ground of his being a penman that he deprecates the existence of his late adversary, Mr. Ruskin. He does not attempt to make out a case in detail against the great commentator of pictures; it is enough for Mr. Whistler that he is a `littrateur,' and that a littrateur should concern himself with his own business. The author also falls foul of Mr. Tom Taylor, who does the reports of the exhibitions in the Times, and who had the misfortune,
Nation, February 13,
1879
Walt Whitman (43)
Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps. New York, 1865.
It has been a melancholy task to read this book; and it is a still more melancholy one to write about it. Perhaps since the day of Mr. Tupper's "Philosophy" there has been no more difficult reading of the poetic sort. It exhibits the effort of an essentially prosaic mind to lift itself, by a prolonged muscular strain, into poetry. Like hundreds of other good patriots, during the last four years, Mr. Walt Whitman has imagined that a certain amount of violent sympathy with the great deeds and sufferings of our soldiers, and of admiration for our national energy, together with a ready command of picturesque language, are sufficient inspiration for a poet. If this were the case, we had been a nation of poets. The constant developments of the war moved us continually to strong feeling and to strong expression of it. But in those cases in which these expressions were written out and printed with all due regard to prosody, they failed to make poetry, as any one may see by consulting now in cold blood the back volumes of the "Rebellion Record." Of course the city of Manhattan, as Mr. Whitman delights to call it, when regiments poured through it in the first months of the war, and its own sole god, to borrow the words of a real poet, ceased for a while to be the millionaire, was a noble spectacle, and a poetical statement to this effect is possible. Of course the tumult of a battle is grand, the results of a battle tragic, and the untimely deaths of young men a theme for elegies. But he is not a poet who merely reiterates these plain facts ore rotundo. He only sings them worthily who views them from a height. Every tragic event collects about it a number of persons who delight to dwell upon its superficial points -- of minds which are bullied by the accidents of the affair. The temper of such minds seems to us to be the reverse of the poetic temper; for the poet, although he incidentally masters, grasps, and uses the superficial traits of his theme, is really a poet only in so far as he extracts its latent meaning and holds it up to common eyes. And yet from such minds most of our war-verses have come, and Mr. Whitman's utterances, much as the assertion
"Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries,
For that which was lacking among you all, yet needed
most, I bring;
A book I have made for your dear sake, O soldiers,
And for you, O soul of man, and you, love of comrades;
The words of my book nothing, the life of it everything;
A book separate, not link'd with the rest, nor felt by the
intellect;
But you will feel every word, O Libertad! arm'd Libertad!
It shall pass by the intellect to swim the sea, the air,
With joy with you, O soul of man."
These are great pretensions, but it seems to us that the following are even greater:
"From Paumanok starting, I fly like a bird,
Around and around to soar, to sing the idea of all;
To the north betaking myself, to sing there arctic songs,
To Kanada, 'till I absorb Kanada in myself -- to Michigan
then,
To Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, to sing their songs (they
are inimitable);
Then to Ohio and Indiana, to sing theirs -- to Missouri and
Kansas and Arkansas to sing theirs,
To Tennessee and Kentucky -- to the Carolinas and Georgia,
to sing theirs,
To Texas, and so along up toward California, to roam
accepted everywhere;
To sing first (to the tap of the war-drum, if need be)
The idea of all -- of the western world, one and inseparable,
And then the song of each member of these States."
Mr. Whitman's primary purpose is to celebrate the greatness of our armies; his secondary purpose is to celebrate the greatness of the city of New York. He pursues these objects through a hundred pages of matter which remind us irresistibly of the story of the college professor who, on a venturesome youth's bringing him a theme done in blank verse, reminded him that it was not customary in writing prose to begin each line with a capital. The frequent capitals are the only marks of verse in Mr. Whitman's writing. There is, fortunately, but one attempt at rhyme. We say fortunately, for if the inequality of Mr. Whitman's lines were self-registering, as it would be in the case of an anticipated syllable at their close, the effect would be painful in the extreme. As the case stands, each line starts off by itself, in resolute independence of its companions, without a visible goal. But if Mr. Whitman does not write verse, he does not write ordinary prose. The reader has seen that liberty is "libertad." In like manner, comrade is "camerado;" Americans are "Americanos;" a pavement is a "trottoir," and Mr. Whitman himself is a "chansonnier." If there is one thing that Mr. Whitman is not, it is this, for Branger was a chansonnier. To appreciate the force of our conjunction, the reader should compare his military lyrics with Mr. Whitman's declamations. Our author's novelty, however, is not in his words, but in the form of his writing. As we have said, it begins for all the world like verse and turns out to be arrant prose. It is more like Mr. Tupper's proverbs than anything we have met. But what if, in form, it is prose? it may be asked. Very good poetry has come out of prose before this. To this we would reply that it must first have gone into it. Prose, in order to be good poetry, must first be good prose. As a general principle, we know of no circumstance more likely to impugn a writer's earnestness than the adoption of an anomalous style. He must have something very original to say if none of the old vehicles will carry his thoughts. Of course he may be surprisingly original. Still, presumption is against him. If on examination the matter of his discourse proves very valuable, it justifies, or at any rate excuses, his literary innovation.
But if, on the other hand, it is of a common quality, with nothing new about it but its manners, the public will judge
Nation, November 16,
1865
Adeline Dutton Whitney (44)
The Gayworthys: a Story of Threads and Thrums. By the Author of Faith Gartney's Girlhood. Boston: Loring, Publisher, 1865.
This book appears to have been suggested by a fanciful theory of life, which the author embodies in a somewhat over-figurative preface, and which recurs throughout the story at intervals, like a species of refrain. The theory in question amounts to neither more nor less than this: that life is largely made up of broken threads, of plans arrested in their development, of hopes untimely crushed. This idea is neither very new nor very profound; but the novel formula under which it is shadowed forth on the title-page will probably cause it to strike many well-disposed minds as for the first time. In a story written in the interest of a theory two excellent things are almost certain to be spoiled. It might seem, indeed, that it would be a very small figure of a story that could be injured by a theory like the present one; but when once an author has his dogma at heart, unless he is very much of an artist, it is sure to become obtrusive at the capital moment, and to remind the reader that he is, after all, learning a moral lesson. The slightly ingenious and very superficial figure in which the author embodies her philosophy recurs with a frequency which is truly impertinent.
Our story is organized upon three main threads, which, considering the apparent force of the author's conviction, are on the whole very tenderly handled; inasmuch as, although two of them are at moments drawn so tight that we are fully prepared for the final snap and the quiet triumph of the author's "I told you so," yet only one of them is really severed past all repair. This catastrophe symbolizes the fate of Miss Rebecca Gayworthy, who cherishes a secret flame for her pastor, the Rev. Jordan King. Mr. King, in turn, entertains a passion for another young lady, whom he marries, but who is not all for him that Miss Gayworthy would have been. The broken thread here is Miss Gayworthy's slighted regard for Mr. King.
There are two other pairs of lovers whose much shifting relations fill up the rest of the book. Miss Joanna Gayworthy
Of the parties yet mentioned, however, neither is to be taken for the hero and heroine proper; for in the presence of the inevitable, the orthodox little girl, -- this time, fortunately, matched not with a condescending man of the world, but with a lad of her own age, -- in the presence, we say, of these heroic figures, who shall dare to claim that distinction? Sarah Gair and Gershom Vorse are brought up together in the fields, like another Daphnis and Chloe. Gershom is sent to sea by the machinations of Sarah's mother, who has a quasi-prophetic insight into what may be. Sarah blossoms into young ladyhood, and Gershom obtains command of a vessel. In the course of time he comes home, but, we regret to say, with little of the breezy gallantry of his profession. For long years his old playmate has worn his image upon her heart of hearts. He utterly fails to take cognizance of her attachment, and in fact snubs her most unmercifully. Thrums again, as you see. It is perhaps hard to overstate the possibilities of man's insensibility as opposed to woman's cunning devotion. But the whole picture of Gershom Vorse strikes us as ill-conceived; and yet those who remember Tom Tulliver in "The Mill on the Floss" will acknowledge that much can be made in a dramatic way of the figure of the rational, practical, honest, prejudiced youth whose responsibilities begin early. It is perhaps natural that Gershom Vorse's contempt for the
It is hardly worth while, however, to criticise details in an episode which is so radically defective as this one. Its radical defect is the degradation of sentiment by making children responsible for it. This practice is becoming the bane of our novels. It signifies little where it began, or what authority it claims: it is, in our opinion, as fatal to the dignity of serious feeling and to the grandeur of strong passions as the most flagrant immoralities of French fiction. Heaven defend us from the puerile! If we desire to read about children, we shall not be at loss: the repertory of juvenile works is vast. But if we desire to learn the various circumstances under which love-making may be conducted, let us not repair to the nursery and the school-room. A man's childhood and his manhood can never, without a violation of truth, be made the same story; much less may the youth and maturity of a woman. In "The Gayworthys" the loves of the two young people are far too exclusively projected from their infancy. The age for Daphnis and Chloe has passed. Passion and sentiment must always be more or less intelligent not to shock the public taste. There are, of course, few things so charming as the innocence of childhood, just as there are few things so interesting as the experience of manhood. But they cannot in a love-story be successfully combined. Thackeray's great genius was insufficient to prevent the fruition of Henry Esmond's boyish devotion from seeming very disagreeable. Every reader feels that, if he had had the story to write, that should not have been its consummation. There is in the experience of every man and woman a certain proportion of sensations which are interesting only to themselves. To this class of feelings we would refer the childish reminiscences held in common by two persons who at the age of discretion
So much for the faults of "The Gayworthys." Let us now pay the tribute of an explicit recognition to its very great cleverness. Without this quality no novel in these days can hope to succeed. But "The Gayworthys" has even more of it than is needed for success. How many accomplishments the would-be successful novel demands! and how many are here displayed! When we count them over, indeed, we are half amazed at our temerity in offering these prosy strictures. The observation, the memory, the invention, the fancy, the humor, the love of human nature, lavished upon these four hundred pages are the results almost of an education. Let us, we repeat, make them a very low bow. They contain much that is admirable and much that is powerful. It is for this reason that, when we see them misused, as it seems to us, conjoined with what is vulgar and false, we make a respectful protest. We know not whether in this case their union makes a total which we may properly call genius; but it at all events makes a force sufficiently like genius not to be able with impunity to work in ignorance of principle. We do not claim to have laid down any principles. They are already laid down in a thousand consummate works of art. All we wish to do here -- all we have space to do -- is to remind the author of "The Gayworthys" that they exist.
North American Review,
October 1865
Constance Fenimore Woolson (45)
MISS WOOLSON
Flooded as we have been in these latter days with copious discussion as to the admission of women to various offices, colleges, functions, and privileges, singularly little attention has been paid, by themselves at least, to the fact that in one highly important department of human affairs their cause is already gained -- gained in such a way as to deprive them largely of their ground, formerly so substantial, for complaining of the intolerance of man. In America, in England, to-day, it is no longer a question of their admission into the world of literature: they are there in force; they have been admitted, with all the honours, on a perfectly equal footing. In America, at least, one feels tempted at moments to exclaim that they are in themselves the world of literature. In Germany and in France, in this line of production, their presence is less to be perceived. To speak only of the latter country, France has brought forth in the persons of Madame de Svign, Madame de Sta l, and Madame Sand, three female writers of the first rank, without counting a hundred ladies to whom we owe charming memoirs and volumes of reminiscence; but in the table of contents of the Revue des Deux Mondes, that epitome of the literary movement (as regards everything, at least, but the famous doctrine, in fiction, of "naturalism"), it is rare to encounter the name of a female contributor. The covers of American and English periodicals tell a different story; in these monthly joints of the ladder of fame the ladies stand as thick as on the staircase at a crowded evening party.
There are, of course, two points of view from which this free possession of the public ear may be considered -- as regards its effect upon the life of women, and as regards its effect upon literature. I hasten to add that I do not propose to consider either, and I touch on the general fact simply because the writer whose name I have placed at the head of these remarks happens to be a striking illustration of it. The work of Miss Constance Fenimore Woolson is an excellent example of the way the door stands open between the personal
Miss Woolson's first productions were two collections of short tales, published in 1875 and 1880, and entitled respectively Castle Nowhere and Rodman the Keeper. I may not profess an acquaintance with the former of these volumes, but the latter is full of interesting artistic work. Miss Woolson has done nothing better than the best pages in this succession of careful, strenuous studies of certain aspects of life, after the war, in Florida, Georgia and the Carolinas. As the fruit of a remarkable minuteness of observation and tenderness of feeling on the part of one who evidently did not glance and pass, but lingered and analysed, they have a high value, especially when regarded in the light of the voicelessness of the conquered and reconstructed South. Miss Woolson strikes the reader as having a compassionate sense of this pathetic dumbness -- having perceived that no social revolution of equal magnitude had ever reflected itself so little in literature, remained so unrecorded,
No doubt that if in East Angels, as well as in the volume of tales, the sadness of Miss Woolson's South is more striking than its high spirits, this is owing somewhat to the author's taste in the way of subject and situation, and especially to her predilection for cases of heroic sacrifice -- sacrifice sometimes unsuspected and always unappreciated. She is fond of irretrievable personal failures, of people who have had to give up even the memory of happiness, who love and suffer in silence, and minister in secret to the happiness of those who look over their heads. She is interested in general in secret histories, in the "inner life" of the weak, the superfluous, the disappointed, the bereaved, the unmarried. She believes in personal renunciation, in its frequency as well as its beauty. It plays a prominent part in each of her novels, especially in the last two, and the interest of East Angels at least is largely owing to her success in having made an extreme case of the virtue in question credible to the reader. Is it because this element is
For the Major has an idea, a little fantastic perhaps, but eminently definite. This idea is the secret effort of an elderly woman to appear really as young to her husband as (owing to peculiar circumstances) he believed her to be when he married her. Nature helps her (she happens to preserve, late in life, the look of comparative youth), and art helps nature, and her husband's illusions, fostered by failing health and a weakened brain, help them both, so that she is able to keep on the mask till his death, when she pulls it off with a passionate cry of relief -- ventures at last, gives herself the luxury, to be old. The sacrifice in this case has been the sacrifice of the maternal instinct, she having had a son, now a man grown, by a former marriage, who reappears after unsuccessful wanderings in far lands, and whom she may not permit herself openly to recognise. The sacrificial attitude is indeed repeated on the part of her step-daughter, who, being at last taken into Madam Carroll's confidence, suffers the young man -- a shabby, compromising, inglorious acquaintance -- to pass for her lover, thereby discrediting herself almost fatally (till the situation is straightened out), with the Rev. Frederick Owen, who has
The author likes a glamour, and by minute touches and gentle, conciliatory arts, she usually succeeds in producing a valid one. If I had more space I should like to count over these cumulative strokes, in which a delicate manipulation of the real is mingled with an occasionally frank appeal to the romantic muse. But I can only mention two of the most obvious: one the frequency of her reference to the episcopal church as an institution giving a tone to American life (the sort of tone which it is usually assumed that we must seek in civilisations more permeated with ecclesiasticism); the other her fondness for family histories -- for the idea of perpetuation of race, especially in the backward direction. I hasten to add that there is nothing of the crudity of sectarianism in the former of these manifestations, or of the dreariness of the purely genealogical passion in the latter; but none the less is it clear that Miss Woolson likes little country churches that are dedicated to saints not vulgarised by too much notoriety, that are dressed with greenery (and would be with holly if there were any), at Christmas and Easter; that have "rectors," well connected, who are properly garmented, and organists, slightly deformed if possible, and addicted to playing Gregorian chants in the twilight, who are adequately artistic; likes also generations that have a pleasant consciousness of a few warm generations behind them, screening them in from too bleak a past, from vulgar draughts in the rear. I know not
It is, however, in East Angels that she has been most successful in this feat of evoking a local tone, and this is a part of the general superiority of that very interesting work, which to my mind represents a long stride of her talent, and has more than the value of all else she has done. In East Angels the attempt to create an atmosphere has had, to a considerable degree, the benefit of the actual quality of things in the warm, rank peninsula which she has studied so exhaustively and loves so well. Miss Woolson found a tone in the air of Florida, but it is not too much to say that she has left it still more agreeably rich -- converted it into a fine golden haze. Wonderful is the tact with which she has pressed it into the
The book has, to my sense, two defects, which I may as well mention at once -- two which are perhaps, however, but different faces of the same. One is that the group on which she has bent her lens strikes us as too detached, too isolated, too much on a desert island. Its different members go to and
In East Angels the sacrifice, as all Miss Woolson's readers know, is the great sacrifice of Margaret Harold, who immolates herself - - there is no other word -- deliberately, completely,
Garda Thorne is the next best thing in the book to Margaret,
Harper's Weekly, February 12, 1887
Reprinted in Partial Portraits, 1888
American Letters (46)
from Literature, March 26 -- July 9, 1898
THE QUESTION OF THE OPPORTUNITIES
March 26, 1898
Any fresh start of speech to-day on American literature seems to me so inevitably a more direct and even a slightly affrighted look at the mere numbers of the huge, homogeneous and fast-growing population from which the flood of books issues and to which it returns that this particular impression admonishes the observer to pause long enough on the threshold to be sure he takes it well in. Whatever the "literature" already is, whatever it may be destined yet to be, the public to which it addresses itself is of proportions that no other single public has approached, least of all those of the periods and societies to which we owe the comparatively small library of books that we rank as the most precious thing in our heritage. This question of numbers is brought home to us again and again with force by the amazing fortune apparently open now, any year, to the individual book -- usually the lucky novel -- that happens to please; by the extraordinary career, for instance, yesterday, of "Trilby," or, to-day (as I hear it reported) of an historical fiction translated from the Polish and entitled, "Quo Vadis?" It is clear enough that such a public must be, for the observer, an immense part of the whole question of the concatenation and quality of books, must present it in conditions hitherto almost unobserved and of a nature probably to give an interest of a kind so new as to suggest for the critic -- even the critic least sure of where the chase will bring him out -- a delicious rest from the oppressive priori. There can be no real sport for him -- if I may use the term that fits best the critical energy -- save in proportion as he gets rid of that; and he can hardly fail to get rid of it just in the degree in which the conditions are vivid to his mind. They are, of course, largely those of other publics as well, in an age in which, everywhere, more people than ever before buy and sell, and read and write, and run about; but their scale, in the great common-schooled and
Homogeneous I call the huge American public, with a due sense of the variety of races and idioms that are more and more under contribution to build it up, for it is precisely in the great mill of the language, our predominant and triumphant English, taking so much, suffering perhaps even so much, in the process, but giving so much more, on the whole, than it has to "put up" with, that the elements are ground into unity. Into its vast motherly lap the supreme speech manages somehow or other -- with a robust indifference to trifles and shades -- to see these elements poured; and just in this unique situation of the tongue itself we may surely find, if we attend, the interest of the drama and the excitement of the question. It is a situation that strikes me as presenting to the critic some of the strain and stress -- those of suspense, of life, movement, change, the multiplication of possibilities, surprises, disappointments (emotions, whatever they may be, of the truth-hunter) -- that the critic likes most to encounter. What may be, from point to point, noted as charming, or even as alarming, consequences? What forms, what colours, what sounds may the language take on or throw off in accommodating itself to such a growth of experience; what life may it -- and most of all may the literature that shall so copiously testify for it -- reflect and embody? The answer to these inquiries is simply the march of the critic's drama and the bliss, when not the misery, of that spectator; but while the endless play goes on the spectator may at least so far anticipate deferred conclusions as to find a savour in the very fact that it has been reserved not for French, not for German, not for Italian to meet fate on such a scale. That consciousness is an emotion in itself and, for large views, which are the only amusing ones, a great portent; so that we can surely say to ourselves that we shall not have been called upon to supply the biggest public for nothing.
To overflow with the same confidence to others is indeed perhaps to expose ourselves to hearing it declared improbable
The first chance that, in the longer run, expression avails herself of may, of course, very well be that of breaking up into pieces and showing thereby that -- as has been hitherto and in other parts of the world but imperfectly indicated -- the public we somewhat loosely talk of as for literature or for anything else is really as subdivided as a chess-board, with each little square confessing only to its own kind of accessibility. The comparison too much sharpens and equalizes; but there are certainly, as on a map of countries, divisions and boundaries; and if these varieties become, to assist individual genius or save individual life, accentuated in American letters,
The note of the difference -- at least of some of it -- is sharply enough struck in an equally recent volume from which I have gathered many suggestions and that exhibits a talent distinctly to come back to -- Mr. Owen Wister's "Lin McLean" (episodes in the career of a young "cattle-puncher"), in which the manners of the remoter West are worked into the general context, the American air at large, by a hand of a singularly trained and modern lightness. I but glance in passing, not to lose my thread, at these things; but Mr. Owen Wister's tales (an earlier strong cluster of which, "Red Men and White," I a year or two ago also much appreciated)
This relation, even taken alone, contains elements that strike me as only yearning for their interpreter -- elements, moreover, that would present the further merit of melting into the huge neighbouring province of the special situation of women in an order of things where to be a woman at all -- certainly to be a young one -- constitutes in itself a social position. The difficulty, doubtless, is that the world of affairs, as affairs are understood in the panting cities, though around us all the while, before us, behind us, beside us, and under our feet, is as special and occult a one to the outsider as the world, say, of Arctic exploration -- as impenetrable save as a result of special training. Those who know it are not the men to paint it; those who might attempt it are not the men who know it. The most energetic attempt at portrayal that we have anywhere
To glance at that is, at the point to which the English- speaking world has brought the matter, to remember by the same stroke that if there be no virtue in any forecast of the prospect of letters, any sounding of their deeps and shallows that fails to take account of the almost predominant hand now exercised about them by women, the precaution is doubly needful in respect to the American situation. Whether the extraordinary dimensions of the public be a promise or a threat, nothing is more unmistakable than the sex of some of the largest masses. The longest lines are feminine -- feminine, it may almost be said, the principal front. Both as readers and as writers on the other side of the Atlantic women have, in fine, "arrived" in numbers not equalled even in England, and they have succeeded in giving the pitch and marking the limits more completely than elsewhere. The public taste, as our fathers used to say, has become so largely their taste, their tone, their experiment, that nothing is at last more apparent than that the public cares little for anything that they cannot do. And what, after all, may the very finest opportunity of American literature be but just to show that they can do what the peoples will have ended by regarding as everything? The settlement of such a question, the ups and downs of such a
It was not unknown to the irresponsible critic -- by which I mean, not the critic who overflowed, but him who sought the refuge of the other extreme -- that in the United States, as in England, in France, in Germany, the flood of fiction is a rising tide; the truth was not to come fully home, however, till he perceived the effect of the exhibition of his notebook, the gleam of a single poor page of which reminded him, in the way of instant action on the ranks of romance, of the convergence of the ducks in a pond on the production of a biscuit. He can only therefore be quick to reflect on the early need of some principle of selection; though he may indeed, with scarce less promptitude, discover that no simplification in the matter is really easy. It is very well to say that the things of merit are the only ones that signify; that leaves on his hands the very question itself -- the mystery, the delicacy of merit. With the quality, in any very thrilling form, the air may not always strike him as intensely charged; it may, moreover, as he feels it, so often be absent from works that have formed the delight of thousands, that he is thrown back on his inner consciousness and on a queer secret code. He must at any rate arrive at some sort of working measure, have in his list signs enough to make, as it were, alternatives, so that if he do not recognize a book under one of them he shall under another.
I grasp, for instance, with Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, at the eminent fact that she is "international," finding this at least an interesting symptom and a mark, moreover, of something that we shall probably all, not long hence, be talking of as a "movement." As the novel in America multiplies, it will seek more room, I seem to foresee, by coming for inspiration to Europe; reversing in this manner, on another plane, oddly enough, a great historical fact. Just exactly for room these
Mrs. Atherton, however, has sailed, and we must make the best of it -- by which I mean give her the benefit of what she has come in search of. She strikes me at first, I confess -- in "American Wives and English Husbands" -- as looking for a situation rather than as finding one. I am not guilty, I think,
I have on my table three volumes of letters, and I lay the first hand on those of the greatest name. Here, in one of the extraordinarily pretty little books of which American taste and typography show themselves more and more capable, is a fragment, to be swallowed at a sitting, of the correspondence of General Grant; as to which I am not sure if it may bring home to us anything quite so much as the almost unfair advantage enjoyed in literature by the man who has played a great part out of it. If this part, to the reader's imagination, does not make the literary element, it may terribly often make something under the impression of which the want of that element enjoys a discouraging impunity. Such, at least, may easily be the despair of an observer accustomed to holding that there are no short cuts, yet reduced to recognizing here and there a presence that has certainly not got in by the regular way. General Grant is a case for us -- I mean, of course, if we be at all open to a hint -- of the absolute privilege of having got in by fame. It is easy, of course, to deny that he is "in," and assuredly no man ever pretended less to write. But somehow he expresses his own figure, and, for the rest, association helps.
It is doubtless association that makes his element -- the ground on which, on the printed page, we meet him; it simply crowds the other questions out. It is a matter about which I may very well be superstitious; but I should perhaps be
What sense shall I speak of as affected by the series of letters published, under the title of "Calamus," by Dr. R. M. Bucke, one of the literary executors of Walt Whitman? The democratic would be doubtless a prompt and simple answer, and as an illustration of democratic social conditions their interest is lively. The person to whom, from 1868 to 1880, they
There is not even by accident a line with a hint of style -- it is all flat, familiar, affectionate, illiterate colloquy. If the absolute natural be, when the writer is interesting, the supreme merit of letters, these, accordingly, should stand high on the list. (I am taking for granted, of course, the interest of Whitman.) The beauty of the natural is, here, the beauty of the particular nature, the man's own overflow in the deadly dry setting, the personal passion, the love of life plucked like a flower in a desert of innocent, unconscious ugliness. To call the whole thing vividly American is to challenge, doubtless, plenty of dissent -- on the ground, persumably, that the figure in evidence was no less queer a feature of Camden, New Jersey, than it would have been of South Kensington. That may perfectly be; but a thousand images of patient, homely, American life, else undistinguishable, are what its queerness -- however startling -- happened to express. In this little book is an audible New Jersey voice, charged thick with such impressions, and the reader will miss a chance who does not find in it many odd and pleasant human harmonies. Whitman wrote to his friend of what they both saw and touched, enormities of the common, sordid occupations, dreary amusements, undesirable food; and the record remains, by a mysterious marvel, a thing positively delightful. If we ever find out why, it must be another time. The riddle meanwhile is a neat one for the sphinx of democracy to offer.
Mr. Harding Davis' letters have neither the austerity of Grant's nor the intimacy of Whitman's, but I am not sure that I have not equally found in them their moral -- found it, where the moral of so many present signs and portents seems to lurk, in the quarter of the possibly fatal extravagance of our growing world-hunger. The author is one of the fresh, ubiquitous young spirits who make me sometimes fear we may eat up our orange too fast. "A Year from a Correspondent's Note- Book" owes, of course, nothing of its origin to the indulgence of the private ear; it is the last word of alert, familiar journalism, the world-hunger made easy, made, for the time, irresistible, placed in every one's reach. It gobbles up with the grace of a sword-swallower the showiest events of a remarkably showy year -- from the coronation of the Russian Emperor to the Jubilee of the British Queen, taking by the way the inauguration of a President, the Hungarian Banderium, the insurrection of the Cubans, and the defeat of the Greeks. It speaks of the initiation of the billion, and the span seems, for some reason, greatest when it starts from New York. Budapest "has the best club in the world, the Park Club" -- that has the air, on the surface, of a harmless phrase enough; but I seem to recognize in it a freedom of consumption that may soon throw one back on all one's instincts of thrift. I am more uneasy still over the young Hungarian gentlemen who were medieval at home, but who, "when I met some of them later in London," were in varnished boots and frock coats. There are depths, for the nervous mind, in the inevitability of Mr. Harding Davis' meetings. But he consumes with joy, with grace -- magnificently. The Victorian Jubilee can scarcely have been better than his account of it.
Mr. Theodore Roosevelt appears to propose -- in "American Ideals and Other Essays Social and Political" -- to tighten the screws of the national consciousness as they have never been tightened before. The national consciousness for Mr. Theodore Roosevelt is, moreover, at the
It is "purely as an American," he constantly reminds us, that each of us must live and breathe. Breathing, indeed, is a trifle; it is purely as Americans that we must think, and all that is wanting to the author's demonstration is that he shall give us a receipt for the process. He labours, however, on the whole question, under the drollest confusion of mind. To say that a man thinks as an American is to say that he expresses his thought, in whatever field, as one. That may be vividly -- it may be superbly -- to describe him after the fact; but to describe the way an American thought shall be expressed is surely a formidable feat, one that at any rate requires resources not brought by Mr. Roosevelt to the question. His American subject has only to happen to be encumbered with a mind to put him out altogether. Mr. Roosevelt, I surmise, deprecates the recognition of the encumbrance -- would at least have the danger kept well under. He seems, that is, but just barely to allow for it, as when, for instance, mentioning that he would not deny, in the public sphere, the utility of criticism. "The politician who cheats or swindles, or the
Mr. Roosevelt makes very free with the "American" name, but it is after all not a symbol revealed once for all in some book of Mormon dug up under a tree. Just as it is not criticism that makes critics, but critics who make criticism, so the national type is the result, not of what we take from it, but of what we give to it, not of our impoverishment, but of our enrichment of it. We are all making it, in truth, as hard as we can, and few of us will subscribe to any invitation to forgo the privilege -- in the exercise of which stupidity is really the great danger to avoid. The author has a happier touch when he ceases to deal with doctrine. Excellent are those chapters in his volume -- the papers on "machine" politics in New York, on the work of the Civil Service Reform Commission, on the reorganization of the New York police force -- that are in each case a record of experience and participation. These pages give an impression of high competence -- of Mr. Roosevelt's being a very useful force for example. But his value is impaired for intelligible precept by the puerility of his simplifications.
It scarcely takes that impression, however, to make me find a high lucidity in the admirable "Essays on the Civil War and Reconstruction" of Professor W. A. Dunning, of Columbia University -- a volume I commend, I hasten to add, with scant special competence and only in recognition of the roundabout and sentimental interest I have extracted from it. Professor Dunning's essays are not a picture -- they had no concern whatever to be and every concern not to; yet I have found it irresistible to read into them, page by page, some nearer vision of the immense social revolution of which they trace the complicated legal steps and which, of all dramas equally vast -- if many such indeed there have been -- remains, save in the legal record, the least commemorated, the most unsung. The Civil War had to adjust itself to a thousand hard
These adventures, as here unfolded, are so remarkable that I have found myself, even in Professor Dunning's mere dry light, sometimes holding my breath. As the great war recedes the whole drama more and more rounds and composes itself, with its huge complexities falling into place and perspective; but one element, more than ever, in the business -- and especially under the impression of such a volume as this -- occupies the foreground of the scene. I mean, of course, the full front-face of the question at issue -- the fond old figment of the Sovereign State. This romantic idea becomes for us a living, conscious figure, the protagonist of the epic. Their "rights" had been, in their time, from State to State, among the proud things of earth, but here we have chapter and verse for each stage of their abasement. These rights -- at least as to what they were most prized for -- utterly perished in the fray, not only trampled in the dust of battle, but stamped to death in angry senates; so that there can never be again, for the individual civic mind, the particular deluded glory of a Virginian or a Carolinian, or even of a son of Massachusetts or of Ohio. The sound doctrine, I suppose, is that we find consolation for that in the total gain of honour.
I have before me an assortment of the newest fiction, which I must mainly postpone, but as to which I meanwhile escape from a discrimination so marked as to be invidious by remembering in time that the most edifying volume of the group -- "The Workers" of Mr. Walter Wyckoff -- is as little as possible a novel. It is, however, a picture -- of a subject highly interesting -- and, as a picture, leaves an opening for the question of art. Let me say at once that the book has held me as under a spell, so as the sooner to meet and dispose of the difficulty, of the humiliation indeed, of my having succumbed to the minimum of magic. The maximum of magic is style, and of
The question of groups and directions in American fiction would take more observation than I have as yet been able to give it -- I mean with the closeness looked for in a regular record. Are there groups, directions, schools, as French criticism, for instance, deals with such matters? Are there influences -- definable, nameable -- either already established or in process of formation? That is precisely what it concerns us to ascertain, even though much obscurity should, at the outset, cluster about the inquiry and much ambiguity should, as is not impossible, finally, crown it. Nothing venture, nothing have: it will take some attentive experiment to assure us either of our poverty or of our wealth. It would certainly be difficult enough in England to-day -- so much should be remembered -- to put one's finger on the chefs d'cole. Is Miss Marie Corelli, is Mr. Hall Caine, is Miss Braddon to be so denominated? Is Mr. George Meredith, is Mr. Rudyard Kipling, is Mrs. Humphry Ward? The question would probably require a great clearing up, and might even end by suggesting to us the failure of application to our conditions of most terms of criticism borrowed from across the Channel.
The great difference -- to speak broadly -- between the French reading public and the English is that "literary success" is for the one the success of the author and for the other the success of the book. The book has often, for the English public, the air of a result of some impersonal, some mechanical process, in which, on the part of the producing mind, a particular quality or identity, a recognizable character and cast, are not involved. It is as if the production, like the babies whose
This may indeed, in some cases, prove difficult in any light. There are many eminent specimens of the satirical novel, and Mr. Winston Churchill is, in "The Celebrity," beyond all doubt satirical. The intention at least is there -- everything is there but the subject of satire. Mr. Churchill strikes the note of scathing irony on the first page of his book and keeps it up to the last; yet between the first and the last he never really puts us into possession of the object of his attentions. This object we gather to be an individual -- not a class; a ridiculous personal instance -- not, as in Thackeray, for example, and in minor masters, a social condition or a set of such. "The Celebrity" is a young man -- so much we piece together -- who has made a great reputation by writing fiction of a character that, in spite of several lively digs and thrusts, the author quite fails to enable the reader to grasp; and that practically remains to the end the total of our knowledge of him. The action moves in an air, mean-while, in which every one, and most of all Mr. Churchill, is so desperately sly, so bewilderingly crushing and so unfathomably clever at his expense, that we are reduced to saying we should doubtless enjoy the joke if we only knew what it is about.
The book strikes me as an extraordinarily unconscious and effective object-lesson. Satire, sarcasm, irony may be, as a hundred triumphs have taught us, vivid and comforting enough when two precautions have been taken; the first in regard to the reality, the second in regard to the folly, the criminality, or whatever it may be, of the thing satirized. Mr. Churchill, as I make out, has, with magnificent high spirits, neglected all precautions; his elaborate exposure of something
I grasp provisionally, perhaps, at some shadow of classification in saying that in "His Fortunate Grace" Mrs. Gertrude Atherton, of whose "American Wives and English Husbands" I lately spoke, is also, I surmise, sharply satiric. Her intention is apparently to give us a picture of the conditions making for success, on the part of "wealthy" New York ladies, in any conspiracy against the paterfamilias. These conditions Mrs. Atherton represents, I gather, as diffused and striking, resident in the general "upper hand" of the women; so much so that it would perhaps have been, artistically, in her interest not to complicate the particular case she offers by throwing in -- into the defeat of Mr. Forbes -- an agency not quite of the essence. The case is that of a managing mother who brings to pass, in the teeth of a protesting father, that her daughter shall marry an extremely dilapidated English duke. The situation is antique and the freshness to be looked for, doubtless, in the details and the local colour, the latter of which the author applies with a bold big brush. The difficulty is that we are too often at a loss with her, too uncertain as to the degree of intelligence and intention with which she presents these wonderful persons as so uncannily terrible.
Do I come late in the day to invoke from Mr. Bret Harte such aid as may be gathered -- in the field in which he has mainly worked -- toward the supposition of a "school?" Is not Mr. Bret Harte perhaps, after all, just one of the chiefs I am in search of? No one probably meets more the conditions. I seem, with a little ingenuity, to make out his pupils -- to trace, in his descendants, a lineage. If I take little time, however, to insist on this, it is because, in speaking of Mr. Bret Harte, a livelier speculation still arises and causes my thought
He has dealt in the wild West and in the wild West alone; but to say as much as this, I immediately feel, is to meet, in regard to the total feat, more questions than I shall find place or answer for. The essence of them is, after all -- in the presence of such a volume as "Tales of Trail and Town" -- the mere curiosity of the critic. It is, none the less, just the sense of such encounters that makes, I think, the critic. Is Mr. Bret Harte's supply of the demand -- in an alien air, I mean, and across the still wider gulf of time -- an extraordinary case of intellectual discipline, as it were, or only an extraordinary case of intellectual sympathy, sympathy keeping alive in spite of deterrent things? Has he continued to distil and dilute the wild West because the public would only take him as wild and Western, or has he achieved the feat, at whatever cost, out of the necessity of his conscience? But I go too far: the problem would have been a subject for Browning, who would, I imagine, have found in it a "psychological" monologue and all sorts of other interesting things.
The sudden state of war confounds larger calculations than those I am here concerned with; I need, therefore,
Walt Whitman, then occupying at Washington an obscure administrative post, became, under strong, simple pressure of personal charity, a constant, a permitted and encouraged familiar of the great hospitals rapidly instituted, profusely, and in some cases erratically, extemporized, as the whole scale of ministration widened, and the pages published by Dr. Bucke give out to such readers as can bear it the very breath of the terrible conditions. I know not what is most vivid, the dreadful back of the tapestry, the price paid on the spot, the immediate heritage of woe, or Whitman's own admirable, original gift of sympathy, his homely, racy, yet extraordinarily delicate personal devotion, exercised wholly at his own cost and risk. He affects us all the more that these pages, quite wofully, almost abjectly familiar and undressed, contain not a single bid for publicity. His correspondent, his obscure, laborious mother, was indeed, it is easy to see, a bountiful, worthy recipient, but the letters were meant for humble hands, hands quite unconscious of the light thus thrown, as it happened, on the interesting question of the heredity of strong originals. It had plainly taken a solid stock, a family circle, to produce Walt Whitman, and "The Wound Dresser," "documentary" in so many ways, is -- like "Calamus," of which I lately spoke -- particularly so on the general democratic
I find myself turning instinctively to what may smell of gunpowder, and, in the presence of that element, have done my best to read a certain intensity into the "Southern Soldier Stories" of Mr. George Cary Eggleston, who fought through the Civil War on the side of Secession, and who has here collected, in very brief form for each episode, some of his reminiscences and observations, keeping them wholly anecdotical, sticking altogether to the "story." This is a kind of volume, I feel, as to which a critic who is a man of peace finds himself hesitate and perhaps even slightly stammer -- aware as he is that he may appear, if at all restrictive, to cheapen a considerable quantity of heroic matter. The man of military memories can always retort that he would like to see him do half so well. But such a critic has, of course, only to do with Mr. Eggleston's book, which, indeed, causes him to groan exactly by reason of the high privilege of the writer's experience. It is just the writer's own inadequate sense of this privilege that strikes the serious reader. It passes the comprehension of an unfortunate shut out from such generous matters that Mr. Eggleston, rich in the possession of them, should have cared to do so little with them. He was more than welcome to his brevity; it was a question of eyes and senses. To what particular passive public of all the patient publics were these anecdotes supposedly addressed? Is it another case of the dreadful "boys' story"? -- the product of our time, in these walks, that has probably done most to minimize frankness of treatment. It seems the baleful gift of the "boys" to put, for compositions directly addressed to them, a high
But if I muse, much mystified, upon Mr. Eggleston's particular public, what shall I say of the special audience to which, as I learn from a note prefixed to "The Honourable Peter Stirling," Mr. Paul Leicester Ford so successfully appeals? It must also be a fraction of the mass, and yet the moment is here recorded at which it numbered readers represented by a circulation of thirty thousand copies. Something of the fascination of the abyss solicits the mind in fixing this fact. That the much-bought novel may, on a turning of the pages, cause the speculative faculty wildly to wander is probably, for many a reader, no new discovery -- nor even that there are two directions in which any reader may pensively lose himself.
There are great and ever-remembered days when we find the public so touched and penetrated by some writer dear to our heart that we give ourselves up to the fancy of the charming persons who must compose it. But most often, I fear, the rush, the reverberation, is, in the given case, out of all proportion to our individual measure of the magic; and then this incongruity itself, to the exclusion of all power really to speak of the book, ends by placing us under a spell. When fully conscious of the spell, indeed, we positively surrender to it as to a refuge from a painful duty. We try not to be invidious -- try to make the public and not the book responsible. It is like turning one's back to an object and fixing the reflection in the mirror. I am afraid that, for to-day, I must take that method with Mr. Leicester Ford's long novel -- a work so disconnected, to my view, from almost any consideration with which an artistic product is at any point concerned, any effect of presentation, any prescription of form, composition, proportion, taste, art, that I am reduced merely to noting, for curiosity, the circumstance that it so remarkably triumphs. Then comes in the riddle, the critic's inevitable desire to touch bottom somewhere -- to sound the gulf. But I must try this some other time.
The record, for the moment, is almost negative, and I might devote some enumeration to the absence, in each quarter successively, of events interesting to the curious critic. "American literature" has, for the most part, taken refuge in the newspapers -- to find itself improved by the sojourn to a degree that there may be some future occasion to measure. There is one department, however, the local history -- local in the sense of being of the county, town, and village -- that involves ventures, we recognise, less likely than others to be disappointed at not doing, on any particular occasion, any better than usual. It is the type, here, at best, that flourishes, rather than the individual.
The special product, let me hasten to add, in the case of Mr. Sanford H. Cobb's "Story of the Palatines: An Episode in Colonial History," profits by a happy sacrifice of rigour in relation to the district commemorated. This district, the valley of Schoharie, in the State of New York, between Albany and Cooperstown, is the central image in Mr. Cobb's interesting recital, precisely, indeed, because his story is that of a pursuit eluded, a development nipped in the bud. His book deals with the immensely-numerous German immigration to New York and Pennsylvania in the early years of the last century -- the avalanche, as it afterwards proved, first loosened by Louis XIV. from the Palatinate of the Rhine. The first company of unfortunates driven westward from that desolation made, on their way, a remarkable halt in England, on the occasion of which, and as a means of speeding them further, they received from the English government certain vague and magnificent assurances in respect to the land of possible plenty, the special blessed spot, that awaited them. Mr. Cobb, who holds that the subjects of his melancholy epic have received scant justice from history, has to narrate, in such detail as is now accessible, the dismal frustration of these hopes, and to present with lucidity the substantial, squalid facts, into which I have no space to follow him.
This German invasion of 1710 was an invasion of the extremest misery, to which the misery that beset it all round added such abundance of rigour that the melting down of
This is more or less, I surmise, the sort of fact that prompts Mr. Charles F. Dole to the touching refinement of optimism exhibited in the little volume of exhortation and prophecy to which he gives the name of "The Coming People." The coming people, for Mr. Dole, as I make out, are people who will, in every circumstance, behave with the highest propriety, and
I can speak but for myself, but nothing, in the United States, appeals so to the attention at any moment as the symptom, in any quarter of the world of letters, of the possible growth of a real influence in criticism. That alertness causes me to lay a prompt hand upon the "Literary Statesmen and Others" of Mr. Norman Hapgood, and to feel, toward him, as toward one not unconscious of opportunity, a considerable warming of the heart. This is not, indeed, so much because I seem to see his own hand often upon the right place as because, in a state of things in which we are reduced to prayerful hope and desire, we try to extract promise from
Such fiction as I am, for the hour, most definitely aware of has, at any rate, the merit of pertinence -- it appeals to me, to begin with, in the shape of three military novels. These are delicate matters, I again remind myself, for, whatever else such books may be, they may be very good soldiering. The critic falls back, at the same time, perforce, on one or two principles early grasped and cherished, as to which he seems fondly to remember that they have seen him safely through still deeper waters. The "military" work of art, of any sort, is in no degree a critical term, and we never really get near a book save on the question of its being good or bad, of its really treating, that is, or not treating, its subject. That is a classification that covers everything -- covers even the marvels
I am afraid we are again brought round to these things by "A Soldier of Manhattan"; we are, at all events, at the outset, moved to muse afresh upon the deep difficulty, often so misrepresented, of casting a fictitious recital into the tone of another age. This difficulty, so particular, so extreme, has been braved, unblinkingly, by Mr. J. A. Altsheler, and without, so far as I can see, a single precaution against the dangers with which it bristles. They have proved, I think, much too many for him; I cannot pretend to see him emerge with any remnant of life from the superincumbent mass. Such a volume as Mr. Altsheler's gives us the measure of all that the "historical" novel, with which we are drenched in these days, has to answer for -- in a direction, especially, which leads straight to the silliest falsity from the moment it does not lead more or less directly to tolerable truth. Ministering, as a fashion, to the pleasant delusion that the old-time speech and the old-time view are easy things to catch and still easier ones to keep, it conducts its unhappy victims into drear desolation. The knowledge and the imagination, the saturation, perception, vigilance, taste, tact, required to achieve even a passable historic pastiche are surely a small enough order when we consider the feat involved -- the feat of completely putting off one consciousness before beginning to take on another.
Success depends, above all, on the "modernity" we get rid of, and the amount of this in solution in the air under the reign of the newspaper is inevitably huge. A single false note is a sufficient betrayal -- by which I do not mean to imply, on the other hand, that the avoidance of many is at all possible. Mr. Altsheler, frankly, strikes me as all false notes; we strain our ear, through his volume, for the ring of a true one. So I can only gather from it that, like Mr. Chambers, he is a young man of honourable ambition misled by false lights. The grievous wrong they have done him has been simply in putting
Captain Charles King is much more sustaining, and yet it would be a mistake to say that, as a picture of manners or of passions, his novel of "The General's Double" is particularly nutritive. He writes, as it strikes me, from positive excess of knowledge -- knowledge of the bewildering record of the army of the Potomac during the earlier passages of the Civil War; which knowledge, moreover, if it proceed from old experience is remarkable for freshness, and if it be founded on research is remarkable for the air of truth. I am at a loss, none the less, completely to account for the lively sympathy with which many parts of "The General's Double" have inspired me, and that mystification, after all, is not, as from reader to book, a bad relation to have accepted. Captain King has almost let his specific, dramatic subject go altogether; we see it smothered in his sense, and his overflowing expression, of the general military medley of the time, so that his presentation of it remains decidedly confused and confusing. He has even, it would appear, never quite made up his mind as to what his specific, dramatic subject exactly is. It might have been, we seem to see, the concatenation of discomfitures for the North
THERE IS NO MONTH in the year, I suppose, in which, in any view of actual aspects, the magazines, in the United States, may not with a certain assurance be called upon to speak for literature -- that is, for literature as it is, for the most part, at present understood in countries of English speech. They may be taken at any moment and not be found wanting to their pledge; they are committed to an immense energy, and move at an altitude at which things are not "kept back" for any trifle of war or other agitation -- for any supposed state, in short, of the public mind. They are themselves, doubtless, to their own view -- as they may very well also be to ours -- the public mind; and in a sense other, and certainly higher, than the newspapers; which is exactly what makes them particularly interesting. There would be much to be said, I seem to discern, on the marked superiority, in America, of the magazines to the newspapers; but this is a scent the critic might be drawn on to follow too far, to follow even
The intelligence and liberality with which a great number of these are conducted, and the remarkable extent of their diffusion, make them so representative of the conditions in which they circulate that they strike me as speaking for their native public -- comparing other publics and other circulations -- with a responsibility quite their own. There are more monthly and quarterly periodicals in England -- I forbear to go into the numerical relation, but they are certainly read by fewer persons and take fewer pains to be read at all; and there is in France a fortnightly publication -- venerable, magnificent, comprehensive -- the mere view of the rich resources and honourable life of which endears it, throughout the world, to the mind of the man of letters. But there is distinctly something more usual and mutual in the established American patronage of "Harper," "Scribner," the "Century," the "Cosmopolitan," than in any English patronage of anything of the monthly order or even than in any patronage anywhere of the august Revue des Deux Mondes. Therefore, on any occasion -- whether books abound or, more beneficently, hang back -- the magazines testify, punctually, for ideas and interests. The books moreover, at best or worst, never swamp them; they have the art of remaining thoroughly in view. But the most suggestive consideration of them, I hasten to add, strikes me not as a matter of reporting upon their contents at a given moment; it involves rather a glance at their general attempt and their general deviation.
These two things are intimately bound up and represent
The magazines that have not succumbed to the wood-engraver -- notably the North American Review and the Atlantic Monthly -- have retained by that fact a distinction that many an American reader is beguiled by mere contrast almost into feeling to be positive. The truth is, however, that if literary studies, literary curiosity and the play of criticism, are the element most absent from the American magazines, it is not in
But there are a hundred notes in all this matter, and I can pretend to strike but few of them; the most interesting, moreover, are those to be made on the character of the public at which the great galleons, as I have called them, are directed. Vast indeed is the variety of interest and curiosity to which they minister, and nothing more curious than the arranged and adjusted nature of the ground on which the demand and the supply thus meet. The whole spectacle becomes, for observation on this scale, admirable. The magazines are -- taking the huge nation as a whole -- richly educative, and if the huge nation as a whole is considerably restrictive, that only makes a process of ingenuity, of step by step advance and retreat, in which one's sympathies must be with the side destined in the long run to be the most insidious. If the periodicals are not overwhelmingly literary, they are at any rate just enough for easy working more literary than the people, and the end is yet
The charming volume in which Mr. Hugh L. Willoughby commemorates his ingenious trip "Across the Everglades" falls into its somewhat overshadowed place among the influences that draw the much- mixed attention of the hour to Florida. Before Mr. Willoughby's fortunate adventure no white explorer had made his way through the mysterious watery wilderness of the southernmost part of the peninsula - - a supposedly pathless, dismal swamp -- and 1892 saw the discomfiture of an elaborate expedition. I have no space to enumerate the various qualifications that, as a man of science and of patience, an inquirer and a sportsman, the author appears to have brought to his task; the suggestion of them forms, assuredly, a part of the attaching quality of the book, which carries the imagination into a region of strange animated solitude and monotonous, yet, as Mr. Willoughby's sobriety of touch seems still to enable us to gather, delicate and melancholy beauty. I fear that, as a reader of this kind of record, I have a habit that qualifies me but scantly for reporting lucidly upon definite results -- a habit under the influence of which nothing in books of travel is so interesting as the amount of "psychology" they may suffer to be read into them -- to say nothing of the amount of personal impression and visible picture. There is, to my sense, a fascination in almost any veracious notes of exploration that affords a clutch to this especial fond dependence. The game played with nature alone -- above all when played with pluck and modesty and gaiety as well as with all sorts of dedicated tools -- may become a drama as intense as any other; and the consecration of romance will, to the end of time, or, at the least, to the end of the complete suburbanization of the globe, rest on any pair of adventurers, master and man if need be, who go forth in loyal comradeship, with no matter how much apparatus from the Strand or Broadway, for even a week in the positive unknown. Mr. Willoughby's unknown, moreover -- on the evidence
Colonel T. W. Higginson has published, under the name of "Cheerful Yesterdays," an interesting volume in which the virtue expressed by the title covers a great deal of ground: from that of the impressions of childhood in the Cambridge (Massachusetts), of old time to the Abolitionist "rescues" in Northern cities under the now so incredible Fugitive Slave Law; from the organization and conduct of negro troops in the turmoil of the early sixties to the feast-days of literary Boston and the crown of labour, at the end of years, among the hospitalities of London and Paris. The volume is the abbreviated record of a very full life, in which action and art have been unusually mingled, with the final result of much serenity and charity, various good stories and the purest possible echo of a Boston of a past fashion. A conspicuous figure in almost all the many New England reforms and radicalisms, Colonel Higginson has lived long enough to see not a few "movements," temporary exaltations and intensities, foreshortened and relaxed, and, looking about him on changed conditions, is able to marshal his ghosts with a friendliness, a familiarity, that are documentary for the historian or the critic. "Cheerful Yesterdays" is indeed, in spite of its cheer, a book of ghosts, a roll of names, some still vivid, but many faded, redolent of a New England in general and a Boston in particular that will always be interesting to the moralist. This
I had occasion to allude some weeks ago to the "Emerson and Other Essays" of Mr. John Jay Chapman -- a volume in which what was most distinguished in the near New England past reverberates in a manner so different as to give it a relation of contrast to such a retrospect as Colonel Higginson's. Very much the most striking thing in Mr. Chapman's book is his long study of Emerson, and particularly striking in this study is the detachment of the younger critic, the product of another air and a new generation. Mr. Chapman's is a voice of young New York, and his subject one with which young New York clearly feels that it may take its intellectual ease. The detachment, for that matter, was presumably wanted, and the subject, I hasten to add, by no means, on the whole, a loser by it. This essay is the most effective critical attempt made in the United States, or I should suppose anywhere, really to get near the philosopher of Concord. The earnestness of the new generation can permit itself no such freedom in respect to the earnestness of the old without, in its day, being accused of "patronage." That is a trifle -- we are all patronized in our turn when we are not simply neglected. I cannot
No more interesting volume has lately been published than Mr. E. L. Godkin's "Unforeseen Tendencies of Democracy," which is interesting not only by reason of the general situation or predicament in which we are all more or less conscious of being steeped, but also as a result of the author's singular mastery of his subject, the impression he is able to give us, on that score, of extreme, of intense saturation. Conducting, these thirty-five years, the journal which, in all the American Press, may certainly be said to have been -- and independently of its other attributes -- the most systematically and acutely observant, he treats to-day, with an accumulation of authority, of the more general public conditions in which this long activity has been carried on. The present series of papers is the sequel to a volume -- on the same democratic mystery -- put forth a year ago, a sequel devoted mainly to anomalous aspects which have, before anything else
I cannot pretend, on a question of this order, to speak save as one of the most casual of observers, and much of the suggestiveness I have found in Mr. Godkin's book, and in the spectacle it reflects, springs exactly from the immense and inspiring extension given to the problem by his fundamental reservation of judgment. The time required for development and correction, for further exposure of dangers and further betrayal of signs, is the very moral of his pages. He would give, I take it, a general application to what he says of the vices of the actual nominating system. "Is the situation then hopeless? Are we tied up inexorably simply to a choice of evils? I think not. It seems to me that the nomination of candidates is another of the problems of democracy which are never seriously attacked without prolonged perception and discussion of their importance. One of these was the formation of the federal government; another was the abolition of slavery; another was the reform of the civil service. Every one of them looked hopeless in the beginning; but the solution came, in each case, through the popular determination to find some better way." What indeed may well give the book a positive fascination for almost any American who feels how much he owes it to his country that he is what he may happen to be is the way in which the enumeration of strange accidents -- and some of the accidents described by Mr. Godkin are of the strangest - - modifies in no degree a final acceptance of the huge democratic fact. That provides, for such a reader, an element of air and space that amounts almost to a sense of aesthetic conditions, gives him firm ground for not being
Such interweavings would result, however, in the voluminous, and the writer has had to eschew them; yet his picture, none the less, becomes suggestive in proportion as we read into it some adequate vision of the manners, compensatory or not, with which the different political phenomena he lays bare -- the vicious Nominating System, the Decline of Legislatures, the irregularities in Municipal Government, the incalculabilities of Public Opinion -- are intermixed. For the reader to be able at all reflectively to do this is to do justice to the point of view which both takes the democratic era unreservedly for granted and yet declines to take for granted that it has shown the whole, or anything like the whole, of its hand. Its inexorability and its great scale are thus converted into a more exciting element to reckon with -- for the student of manners at least -- than anything actually less absolute that might be put in its place. If, in other words, we are imprisoned in it, the prison is probably so vast that we need not even meditate plans of escape; it will be enough to relieve ourselves with dreams of such wider circulation as the premises themselves may afford. If it were not for these dreams there might be a grim despair in Mr. Godkin's quite mercilessly lucid and quite imperturbably good-humoured register of present bewilderments. I am unable to dip into such a multitude of showings, but what most comes to the surface is surely the comparative personal indifference with which, in the United States, questions of the mere public order are visited. The public order is at once so vast and so light that the private beguiles, absorbs, exhausts. The author gives a hundred illustrations of this, tracing it into many singular extremes which take, mostly, their rank among the "unforeseen." It was unforeseen, to begin with -- and this is the standing surprise -- that so unqualified a democracy should prove, in proportion to its size, the society in the world least disposed to "meddle" in politics. The thing that Mr. Godkin's
That side of the matter has been simply the evolution of the "boss," and the figure of the boss -- I had almost said his portrait -- is the most striking thing in Mr. Godkin's pages. If he is not absolutely portrayed, this is partly the effect of their non-social side and partly the result of the fact that, as the author well points out, he is, after all, singularly obscure and featureless. He is known almost wholly by negatives. He is silent, and he prescribes silence; he is too much in earnest even for speech. His arduous political career is unattended with discoverable views, opinions, judgments, with any sort of public physiognomy or attitude; it resides entirely -- dumbly and darkly -- in his work, and his work abides only in his nominations of candidates and appointments to offices. He is probably the most important person in the world of whom it may be said that he is simply what he is, and nothing else. A boss is a boss, and so his fellow- citizens leave him, getting on in the most marvellous way, as it were, both without him and with him. He has indeed, as helping all this, an odd, indefinable shade of modesty. "He hardly ever," our author says, "pleads merits of his own." I might gather from Mr. Godkin's pages innumerable lights on his so effaced, but so universal political rle -- such, for example, as the glimpse of the personal control of the situation given him by the fact of the insignificance of most of the State capitals, in which he may, remote from a developed civilization, be alone, as it were, with his nominees and the more undisturbedly put them through their paces.
But I must not attempt to take up the writer at particular points -- they follow each other too closely and are all too significant. His most interesting chapter is perhaps that of "The Decline of Legislatures," which he regards as scarcely less marked in other countries and as largely, in the United States at least, the result of something that may most simply be put as the failure of attraction in them for the candidate. In the immense activity of American life the ambitious young man finds, without supreme difficulty, positions that repay ambition better than the obscurity and monotony even of Congressional work, composed mainly of secret service on committees and deprived of opportunities for speech and for distinction. The "good time" that, of old, could be had in parliaments in such plenitude and that was for so long had in such perfection in the English, appears to be passing away everywhere, and has certainly passed away in America. The delegation to the boss, accordingly, of the care of recruiting these in some degree discredited assemblies is probably, even in America, not a finality; it is seemingly a step in the complex process of discovery that the solution may lie in the direction rather of a smaller than of a greater quantity of government. This solution was never supposed to be the one that the democracy was, as it would perhaps itself say, "after"; but the signs and symptoms are, in the United States, considerable. We were counted upon rather to overdo public affairs, and it turns out that, on the whole, we do not even like them. Dimly, as yet, but discernibly, it begins to appear to us that they may perhaps easily be overdone. Mr. Godkin notes by no means wholly as a morbid sign the very limited eagerness felt among us at almost any time for the convocation of almost any legislature. A thousand doubts and ambiguities, a thousand speculations and reserves are permitted the American who, in his own country, has seen how much energy in some directions is compatible with how much abdication in others. This, possibly -- or certainly, rather, when premature -- is a vicious state of mind to cultivate; and it is at all events unmistakable that Mr. Godkin has, on behalf of some of the conditions that produce it, stated the case with a maturity of knowledge and a simplicity of effect that make his four principal chapters a work of art.
It is a direct effect of any meditation provoked by such a book as Mr. Godkin's that we promptly, perhaps too promptly, revert to certain reminders, among our multitudinous aspects, that nothing here is grimly ultimate or, yet awhile -- as may, even at the risk of the air of flippancy, be said for convenience -- fatal; become aware that the correctives to doubt, the omens and promises of health and happiness, are on the scale of all the rest and at least as frequent as the tokens before which the face of the bold observer has its hours of elongation. If there were nothing else to hold on to -- which I hasten to add I am far from implying -- it may well come home to the reader of so admirable, so deeply interesting a volume as "The Meaning of Education," by Mr. Nicholas Murray Butler, Professor of Philosophy and Education in Columbia University, that the vast array of "the colleges" in the United States is, with every qualification to the prospect that a near view may suggest, nothing else, so far as it goes, than the pledge of a possibly magnificent national life. The value of Mr. Butler's testimony to such a possibility resides precisely in its being the result of a near view and of the most acute and enlightened criticism. The seven papers of which his book is composed are critical in the distinguished sense of being in a high degree constructive, as reflecting not only a knowledge of his subject, but a view of the particular complex relations in which the subject presents itself. They begin with an inquiry into "The Meaning of Education," put the questions of "What Knowledge is of Most Worth?" and "Is There a New Education?" proceed then to a study on "Democracy and Education," and wind up with examinations of "The American College and the American University" and of "The Function of the Secondary School." These addresses and articles handle in detail a hundred considerations that are matter for the specialist and as to which I am not in a position to weigh the author's authority: I can only admire the great elevation of his conception of such machinery for the pursuit of knowledge as is involved in any real attainment by a numerous people of a high future, and the general clearness and beauty that he gives to statement and argument.
To read him under the influence of these things is to feel in an extraordinary degree -- as may so often be felt in other
"Instead of forcing the course of study to suit the necessities of some preconceived system of educational organization, it should determine and control that organization absolutely. Were this done, the troubles of the secondary school, the Cinderella of our educational system, would disappear. Just at present it is jammed into the space left between the elementary school and the college, without any rational and ordered relation to either. The ever-present problem of college entrance is purely artificial, and has no business to exist at all. We have ingeniously created it, and are much less ingeniously trying to solve it. . . . The idea that there is a great gulf fixed between the sixteenth and seventeenth years, or between the seventeenth and eighteenth, that nothing but a college entrance examination can bridge, is a mere superstition that not even age can make respectable. It ought to be as easy and natural for the student to pass from the secondary school to the college as it is for him to pass from one class to another in the school or in the college. In like fashion the work and
I may not pretend, however, to follow him far, but content myself with speaking of his book as a singularly luminous plea for the great social unity, as it may be called, of education and life. "The difficulties of democracy," he excellently says, "are the opportunities of education;" and if we are to solidify at present rates, what almost seems clearest is that our collective response to these opportunities cannot, on the whole and at last, be unworthy. In the light of what "culture" is getting to mean, this response will, at the worst, be multiform; and I confess that such a reflection contributes, to my ear, in the whole concert, the deepest of all the voices that bid the observer wait. There will be much to wait for. The prospect, for a man of letters, certainly for a man of imagination, can scarce fail to come back to the most constant of his secret passions, the idea of the great things that, from quarters so interspaced, may more and more find themselves gathered together under the wide wings of the language. This fond fancy may borrow further force from three interesting articles on education in the Atlantic Monthly for June. Though the first of these, Mr. C. Hanford Henderson's "New Programme," is the most general, the least technical, I cannot pronounce it, oddly enough, the one I best understand -- partly perhaps from a failure on
Whatever books may be, at the present hour, "kept back," the flood of fiction shows -- so far as volume is concerned -- few signs, as yet, of running thin. It is doubtless capable, at the same time, of flowing a little clearer, and would do so but for the temporary check of some of its tributary streams. Meanwhile there would be many things to say about "The Juggler," the latest production of the lady writing under the name of Charles Egbert Craddock -- so many that I feel perhaps a little guilty of evading a duty in finding myself, since the question is one of selection, disposed not to say those things that spring most directly from a perusal of the work. This is because of the superior interest -- so I frankly confess the matter strikes me -- of some of its more circuitous suggestions. The author deals unstintingly with dialect and has so dealt from the first, and thereby, more forcibly perhaps than other workers of the same wondrous vein, confronts us with some of the particular consequences, artistically speaking, of the worship of that divinity. "Mr. Craddock" is the most serious case, as being, I judge, the most reflective and
There are pages of Miss Barnwell Elliott's novel in which, through the ignoble jargon of the population she depicts, the vibration of life -- the life, such as it is, this population appears to lead -- comes to us as straight as if talent had set it moving, pages, in short, for which I should be sorry not to express my admiration. Talent, accordingly, seems for the moment concerned; but suddenly there are lapses and surrenders before which we rub our eyes and wonder if we have only dreamt. The author's subject, so far as the candid reader would see his way to state it, is the predicament of a young woman of "mountain" origin, and thereby a child of nature, independent and unafraid, besides being by race, on her mother's side, still more upliftedly a Durket, who is reduced by domestic stress to taking a situation as "waitress" in the family of a professor at a neighbouring "University," and
That, I am afraid, is the moral, not less, of the impressions suggested by "Mr. Craddock," whose work presents to my puzzled sense the oddest association of incongruous things. The "Covites," the uncouth valley-people of the middle South-West, are again -- and as in the case of Miss Elliott -- her theme, but the general air of the picture loses itself in the strange overgrowth of expression into which the writer appears to feel the need of extravagantly rebounding from the simplicities about which I cannot but think it rather a perversion of her conscience to be insistently literal. The author sits down by herself, as it were, whenever she can, to a perfect treat of "modernity," of contemporary newspaperese. The flower of an English often stranger still than the mountain variety blooms bright in this soil, and that brings me precisely to what is really interesting in the general exhibition -- the
Critically, then, the needful thing is first to make sure of it, observe and follow it; it may still have unsuspected pearls -- for it occasionally deals in these trophies to cast at our feet. What, above all, makes the distinction in the literatures I have just mentioned is that, whether or no the portrayal of the simpler folk flourishes or fails, there always goes on beside it a tradition of portrayal (assuming this to be in cases effective) of those who are the product of circumstances more complex. England just now shows us Mr. Kipling, but shows us also
But I must not, after all, take up the inquiry just now. Mr. W. D. Howells' "Story of a Play" and the "Silence" of the admirable Miss Mary Wilkins suddenly rise before me with an air of dissuasion. Mr. Howells' short and charming novel, which perhaps might more fitly have been named "The Story of a Wife," moves in a medium at which we are at the opposite end of the scale from the illustrations prompting the foregoing remarks -- in a world of wit, perception, intellectual curiosity which have at their service an expression highly developed. The book -- admirably light, and dealing, for the most part, only with the comedy of the particular relation depicted -- is an interesting contribution to the history of one of the liveliest and most diffused necessities of the contemporary
Miss Wilkins, in "Silence" -- a collection of six short tales --