<Text id=JamAmWr>
<Author>James, Henry</Author>
<Title>American Writers</Title>
<Edition>Literary Criticism. Library of America. New York: Literary Classics of the U.S., 1984</Edition>
<Date>1865-1912</Date>
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<p> <i>Louisa M. Alcott</i> (1)
<p><i>Moods.</i> By Louisa M. Alcott, author of "Hospital Sketches." Boston: Loring, 1865.
<p>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.
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr190</locdoc><milestone n=190> desperately
enamored of her before the week is out. These two gentlemen are Miss
Alcott's heroes. One of them, Mr. Geoffrey Moor, is unobjectionable
enough; we shall have something to say of him hereafter: but the other,
Mr. Adam Warwick, is one of our oldest and most inveterate foes. He is
the inevitable <i>cavaliere servente</i> of the precocious little girl; the
laconical, satirical, dogmatical lover, of about thirty-five, with the
"brown mane," the quiet smile, the "masterful soul," and the "commanding
eye." Do not all novel-readers remember a figure, a hundred figures,
analogous to this? Can they not, one of his properties being given, --
the "quiet smile" for instance, -- reconstruct the whole monstrous
shape? When the "quiet smile" is suggested, we know what is coming: we
foresee the cynical bachelor or widower, the amateur of human nature,
"Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard," who has travelled
all over the world, lives on a mysterious patrimony, and spends his time
in breaking the hearts and the wills of demure little school-girls, who
answer him with "Yes, sir," and "No, sir."
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr191</locdoc><milestone n=191> is quite dramatic. We are not certain
of the extent to which the author sympathizes with her hero; but we are
pretty sure that she has a secret "Bravo" in store for him upon his
exit. He talks to his mistress as no sane man ever talked to a woman.
It is not too much to say that he talks like a brute. Ottila's great
crime has been, that, after three months' wooing, he has not found her
so excellent a person as he at first supposed her to be. This is a
specimen of his language. "You allured my eye with loveliness, my ear
with music; piqued curiosity, pampered pride, and subdued will by
flatteries subtly administered. Beginning afar off, you let all
influences do their work, till the moment came for the effective stroke.
Then you made a crowning sacrifice of maiden modesty, and owned you
loved me." What return does she get for the sacrifice, if sacrifice it
was? To have her favors thrown back in her teeth on the day that her
lover determines to jilt her. To jilt a woman in an underhand fashion
is bad enough; but to break your word to her and at the same time load
her with outrage, to call her evil names because she is so provokingly
in the right, to add the foulest insult to the bitterest injury, --
these things may be worthy of a dissolute adventurer, but they are
certainly not worthy of a model hero. Warwick tells Ottila that he is
"a man untamed by any law but that of [his] own will." He is further
described as "violently virtuous, a masterful soul, bent on living out
his aspirations at any cost"; and as possessed of "great nobility of
character, great audacity of mind"; as being "too fierce an iconoclast
to suit the old party, too individual a reformer to join the new," and
"a grand man in the rough, an excellent tonic for those who have courage
to try him." Truly, for her courage in trying him, poor Ottila is
generously rewarded. His attitude towards her may be reduced to this: -
- Three months ago, I fell in love with your beauty, your grace, your
wit. I took them as a promise of a moral elevation which I now find you
do not possess. And yet, the deuse take it, I am engaged to you.
<i>Ergo</i>, you are false, immodest, and lacking in the "moral sentiment,"
and I will have nothing to do with you. I may be a sneak, a coward, a
brute; but at all events, I am untamed by any law, etc.
<p>Before the picnic above mentioned is over, Warwick and </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr192</locdoc><milestone n=192>
Moor have, unknown to each other, both lost their hearts to Sylvia.
Warwick may not declare himself, inasmuch as, to do him justice, he
considers himself bound by word to the unfortunate beauty of the Havana.
But Moor, who is free to do as he pleases, forthwith offers himself. He
is refused, the young girl having a preference for Warwick. But while
she is waiting for Warwick's declaration, his flirtation with Ottila
comes to her knowledge. She recalls Moor, marries him, and goes to
spend her honeymoon among the White Mountains. Here Warwick turns up.
He has been absent in Cuba, whether taking back his rude speeches to
Ottila, or following them up with more of the same sort, we are not
informed. He is accordingly ignorant of the change in his mistress's
circumstances. He finds her alone on the mountain-side, and straightway
unburdens his heart. Here ensues a very pretty scene, prettily told.
On learning the sad truth, Warwick takes himself off, over the crest of
the hill, looking very tall and grand against the sun, and leaving his
mistress alone in the shadow. In the shadow she passes the rest of her
brief existence. She might have lived along happily enough, we
conceive, masquerading with her gentle husband in the fashion of old
days, if Warwick had not come back, and proffered a visit, -- his one
natural and his one naughty act. Of course it is all up with Sylvia.
An honest man in Warwick's position would immediately have withdrawn, on
seeing that his presence only served seriously to alienate his mistress
from her husband. A dishonest man would have remained and made love to
his friend's wife.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr193</locdoc><milestone n=193> concern. Miss Alcott would tell us, we
presume, that it is not as a lover, but as a friend, that Warwick offers
the advice here put into his mouth. Family friends, when they know what
they are about, are only too glad to shirk the responsibility of an
opinion in matrimonial differences. When a man beats, starves, or
otherwise misuses his wife, any judicious acquaintance will take the
responsibility of advising the poor woman to seek legal redress; and he
need not, to use Miss Alcott's own preposition, have an affinity "for"
her, to do so. But it is inconceivable that a wise and virtuous
gentleman should deliberately persuade two dear friends -- dear equally
to himself and to each other -- to pick imperceptible flaws in a
relation whose inviolability is the great interest of their lives, and
which, from the picture presented to us, is certainly one of exceptional
comfort and harmony.
<p>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.
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<p>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.
<p>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.
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr195</locdoc><milestone n=195> which she has seen. When such a novel
comes, as we doubt not it eventually will, we shall be among the first
to welcome it. With the exception of two or three celebrated names, we
know not, indeed, to whom, in this country, unless to Miss Alcott, we
are to look for a novel above the average.
<p> <i>North American Review</i>, July 1865
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr195</locdoc><milestone n=195> <i>Eight Cousins: or, The Aunt-Hill.</i> By Louisa M. Alcott. Boston: Roberts Bros., 1875.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr196</locdoc><milestone n=196> their elders and betters and
the social mysteries that surround them. Miss Alcott seems to have a
private understanding with the youngsters she depicts, at the expense of
their pastors and masters; and her idea of friendliness to the infant
generation seems to be, at the same time, to initiate them into the
humorous view of them taken by their elders when the children are out of
the room. In this last point Miss Alcott does not perhaps go so far as
some of her fellow-chroniclers of the nursery (in whom the tendency may
be called nothing less than depraved), but she goes too far, in our
opinion, for childish simplicity or parental equanimity. All this is
both poor entertainment and poor instruction. What children want is the
objective, as the philosophers say; it is good for them to feel that the
people and things around them that appeal to their respect are beautiful
and powerful specimens of what they seem to be. Miss Alcott's heroine
is evidently a very subjective little girl, and certainly her history
will deepen the subjective tendency in the little girls who read it.
She "observes in a pensive tone" that her health is considered bad. She
charms her uncle by telling him, when he intimates that she may be vain,
that "she don't think she is repulsive." She is sure, when she has left
the room, that people are talking about her; when her birthday arrives
she "feels delicate about mentioning it." Her conversation is salted
with the feminine humor of the period. When she falls from her horse,
she announces that "her feelings are hurt, but her bones are all safe."
She certainly reads the magazines, and perhaps even writes for them.
Her uncle Alec, with his crusade against the conventionalities, is like
a young lady's hero of the "Rochester" school astray in the nursery.
When he comes to see his niece he descends from her room by the water-
spout; why not by a rope-ladder at once? When her aunts give her
medicine, he surreptitiously replaces the pills with pellets of brown-
bread, and Miss Alcott winks at the juvenile reader at the thought of
how the aunts are being humbugged. Very likely many children are
overdosed; but this is a poor matter to tell children stories about.
When the little girl makes a long, pert, snubbing speech to one of her
aunts, who has been enquiring into her studies, and this poor lady has
been driven from the room, he is so tickled by what would be vulgarly
called her </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr197</locdoc><milestone n=197> "cheek" that he dances a polka with her in
jubilation. This episode has quite spoiled, for our fancy, both the
uncle and the niece. What have become of the "Rollo" books of our
infancy and the delightful "Franconia" tales? If they are out of print,
we strongly urge that they be republished, as an antidote to this
unhappy amalgam of the novel and the story-book. These charming tales
had, relatively speaking, an almost Homeric simplicity and
"objectivity." The aunts in "Rollo" were all wise and comfortable, and
the nephews and nieces were never put under the necessity of teaching
them their place. The child-world was not a world of questions, but of
things, and though the things were common and accessible to all
children, they seemed to have the glow of fairy-land upon them. But in
`Eight Cousins' there is no glow and no fairies; it is all prose, and to
our sense rather vulgar prose.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, October 14, 1875
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<p> <i>William Rounseville Alger</i> (2)
<p><i>The Friendships of Women.</i> By William Rounseville Alger. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1868.
<p>Mr. Alger has already made himself favorably known as a
scholar, a writer, and a <i>connoisseur</i> in matters of sentiment. He
seems to have an especial fondness for certain <i>outlying</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr199</locdoc><milestone n=199> so in the
dusky, musty corners of character and of history, and discovers so
grievous blots upon the fair complexion of humanity, that a great deal
of ingenuity is required to persuade the reader that the flame of virtue
still smoulders in the dim recesses and that the ugly stains are not
indelible. Mr. Alger's ingenuity shrinks from the task. He thinks it
the wiser and better plan to direct one's vision along the level spaces
of history -- or rather, we should say, to let it follow a fancied line
in the upper atmosphere, which shall in reality embrace only the
scattered peaks of transcendent worth, but which we shall suppose by
courtesy to strike the average of healthy, human merit. The purely
sentimental way of dealing with personal history and character, which,
as we say, is simply the courteous way, and which transports into
literature that principle of compromise with the strict and embarrassing
truth of things which finds its only complete and beautiful application
in manners, is one for which we have individually very little sympathy.
We cannot help thinking that, invaluable as it is in literature as an
auxiliary sentiment, it is worthless as the prime and sole agent; and
that a book which recommends itself chiefly by its gentleness and
charitableness of tone will of necessity fall far short of perfection in
its kind. Fortunately, Mr. Alger's love of the <i>couleur de rose</i> is not
the only quality by which he addresses the sympathetic judgment. It is
impossible not to sympathize unconditionally with his manly and generous
interest in the idiosyncrasies and pursuits of women, as well as with
his unwearying intellectual curiosity -- although, as we say, he <i>will</i>
insist on dipping the edge of it in milk.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr200</locdoc><milestone n=200> this frivolous world
have obtained their full share of irony. But what strikes us is, that
Mr. Alger's style is not even potentially satirical. It seems to lack
that small but essential measure of irony which accompanies real
discrimination. Mr. Alger is emphatically <i>not</i> discriminating. The
reader is constantly struck with the oddity of a man's having at once so
great a love for collecting personal facts and so little of a turn for
analyzing them. Mr. Alger, in truth, with his large information, and
his profuseness and abundance in his own direction, might offer a very
fair field of exercise to a critic with less knowledge and less
tenderness, but more discernment and cleverness and a more lively sense
of the real. And such a critic would be especially struck with the fact
that the objects of Mr. Alger's special predilection -- certain ladies
of the earlier modern society of France (Mesdames de Sta l, Rcamier,
Swetchine, etc.) -- may be said to have been especially distinguished,
in spite of their uncontested moral elevation, by the liveliest sense of
this same element of reality in life and by the full complement of
malice which accompanies such appreciation. These ladies had not kept
salons for nothing; and Mr. Alger, who has evidently frequented their
drawing-rooms as assiduously as a man of this generation may do --
studied their records, that is, with generous devotion -- has assuredly
visited them the least bit in vain. As a general thing, Mr. Alger's
heroines are more knowing than he, and one is led to doubt whether they
would quite recognize themselves in the fresh white gowns in which he
dresses them. "A certain Madame Ancelot," says Mr. Alger scornfully,
speaking of a clever and distinguished woman who some years ago wrote a
rather darkly-shaded account of Mme. Rcamier's social sway. And yet we
ask ourselves whether, after all, this charming woman would so very much
prefer to Mme. Ancelot's picture the portrait executed by a certain Mr.
Alger.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr201</locdoc><milestone n=201> no man has succeeded in doing, with a delicacy, a
sympathy, and a fineness of insight which amount almost, in value and in
charm, to revealed knowledge. We have been forcibly struck with the
singular and highly representative difference in their treatment of a
certain common point. Mr. Alger in his list of friendships has, of
course, not neglected the famous one between Bettina von Arnim and
Goethe; and he has devoted to this episode several pages marked by the
almost na ve intensity and ingenuity of his rhetoric, as well as by the
tone of pure and elevated conviction which everywhere redeems his most
partial and superficial judgments from being anything less than
respectable. "The electric soil of her brain," says Mr. Alger, speaking
of the graceful Bettina, "teemed with a miraculous efflorescence on
which he was never tired of gazing." We do not stop to criticise the
language of this statement. We content ourselves with saying that it
strikes us as out of all taste, if not of all reason. It is enough that
it gives the key of the whole picture, and is a valid assurance that the
precious lesson of doubt, of interrogation, of irony, so invaluable in
dealing with these sentimental matters, is a hundred miles away. Now,
Sainte-Beuve has written two excellent articles upon the correspondence
on which Mr. Alger's statement is based, in which he does ample justice
to its many delightful qualities, to the beautiful sagacity of Goethe,
and to the innocent exultation of the young girl. But he concludes his
second article in these words: "But on the day after you have read this
book, to get back fully into the truth of human nature and passion, to
purge your brain of all chimerical fantasies and mists, I advise you
strongly to read the Dido in the `Aeneid,' a few scenes of `Romeo and
Juliet,' or yet the episode of Francesca da Rimini in Dante, or just
simply `Manon Lescaut.'" Such a bit of critical reason is worth twenty
pages of uncritical sentiment. A glimpse of "Manon Lescaut" would come
by no means amiss in Mr. Alger's pages. It would serve very well, for
instance, to balance this insufferable little sentence, <i> propos</i> of
the German Rahel Levin: "The king among her friends was her lover and
husband, Varnhagen von Ense." All that there is infelicitous in this
sentence must be felt; it can hardly be indicated. To connect a man
with a woman, no matter how charming, under so many supreme titles is,
it </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr202</locdoc><milestone n=202> seems to us, to make dignities rather too cheap. It is true
Mr. Alger gives us Dido; but how, think you? Dido in what guise? In
the category of "Friendships of Sisters," <i>vis--vis</i> to her sister
Anna. One fancies the great Virgilian funeral-pyre flaming up afresh in
one supreme, indignant flash.
<p>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.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, December 26, 1867
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=3>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr203</locdoc><milestone n=203>
<p> <i>H. Willis Baxley</i> (3)
<p> <i>Spain. Art Remains and Art Realities: Painters, Priests, and Princes, etc.</i> By H. Willis Baxley, M. D. New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1875.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr204</locdoc><milestone n=204> architecture and painting he is much more satisfactory,
and he offers us a good deal of interesting information as to churches
and museums. Architecture is his strong point; here he apparently knows
and discriminates. As regards painting, he has more zeal than
knowledge, but he pleads the cause of Murillo with almost fanatical
ardor, and treats us, catalogue in hand, to interminable descriptions of
his innumerable pictures. To Velasquez he is much less liberal, and a
critic who fails to recognize this great painter's magic can hardly be
considered trustworthy. He falls foul of Mr. Ruskin, whom one is sorry
to see attacked save by thoroughly competent persons. Dr. Baxley has
much to say about Spanish climates, and in this particular we imagine
his remarks are judicious and valuable. He seems to think that the
absence of indoor comfort quite defeats the advantages of a mild winter
temperature. But this is an old story. In spite of his diffuseness,
his dogmatism, his theology in season and out, his pretentious, tumid
style, Dr. Baxley wins our esteem by a certain manly frankness and by
having in all cases the courage of his opinions. His book contains a
good deal of information which many travellers would doubtless find
acceptable; but in its present form this is absolutely unavailable, and
no traveller would dream of carrying about such a ponderous mass of
grossly irrelevant matter for the sake of a moderate dose of fair
guidance. We are afraid that the author will have an opportunity to
meditate upon the fatal consequences of producing misshapen books; but
if through any rare chance he should some day put forth a second
edition, let him compress it into a single volume, strike out all the
theology, half the history, and a good third of what he calls the "art
realities." After this an occasional tourist with a large literary
appetite and a robust palate may find his work of some use. As it
stands, it seems to us of almost none.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, May 20, 1875
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=4>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr205</locdoc><milestone n=205>
<p> <i>John Burroughs</i> (4)
<p> <i>Winter Sunshine.</i> By John Burroughs, author of <i>Wake-Robin</i>. New York: Hurd & Houghton, 1876.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr206</locdoc><milestone n=206> slightness, really
deserves to become classical. We have read far solider treatises which
contained less of the essence of the matter; or at least, if it is not
upon the subject itself that Mr. Burroughs throws particularly powerful
light, it is the essence of the ideal traveller's spirit that he gives
us, the freshness and intensity of impression, the genial bewilderment,
the universal appreciativeness. All this is delightfully <i>naif</i>, frank,
and natural. "All this had been told, and it pleased me so in the
seeing that I must tell it again," the author says; and this is the
constant spirit of his talk. He appears to have been "pleased" as no
man was ever pleased before; so much so that his reflections upon his
own country sometimes become unduly invidious. But if to be
appreciative is the traveller's prime duty, Mr. Burroughs is a prince of
travellers. "Then to remember that it was a new sky and a new earth I
was beholding, that it was England, the old mother at last, no longer a
faith or a fable but an actual fact, there before my eyes and under my
feet -- why should I not exult? Go to! I will be indulged. These
trees, those fields, that bird darting along the hedgerows, those men
and boys picking blackberries in October, those English flowers by the
roadside (stop the carriage while I leap out and pluck them), the homely
domestic looks of things, those houses, those queer vehicles, those
thick-coated horses, those big-footed, coarsely-clad, clear-skinned men
and women; this massive, homely, compact architecture -- let me have a
good look, for this is my first hour in England, and I am drunk with the
joy of seeing! This house-fly, let me inspect it, and that swallow
skimming along so familiarly." One envies Mr. Burroughs his acute relish
of the foreign spectacle even more than one enjoys his expression of it.
He is not afraid to start and stare; his state of mind is exactly
opposed to the high dignity of the <i>nil admirari</i>. When he goes into
St. Paul's, "my companions rushed about," he says, "as if each one had a
search-warrant in his pocket; but I was content to uncover my head and
drop into a seat, and busy my mind with some simple object near at hand,
while the sublimity that soared about me stole into my soul." He meets a
little girl carrying a pail in a meadow near Stratford, stops her and
talks with her, and finds an ineffable delight in "the sweet and novel
twang of her words. Her family had emigrated to </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr207</locdoc><milestone n=207> America,
failed to prosper, and come back; but I hardly recognized even the name
of my own country in her innocent prattle; it seemed like a land of
fable -- all had a remote mythological air, and I pressed my enquiries
as if I was hearing of this strange land for the first time." Mr.
Burroughs is unfailingly complimentary; he sees sermons in stones and
good in everything; the somewhat dusky British world was never steeped
in so intense a glow of rose-color. Sometimes his optimism rather
interferes with his accuracy -- as when he detects "forests and lakes"
in Hyde Park, and affirms that the English rural landscape does not, in
comparison with the American, appear highly populated. This latter
statement is apparently made apropos of that long stretch of suburban
scenery, pure and simple, which extends from Liverpool to London. It
does not strike us as felicitous, either, to say that women are more
kindly treated in England than in the United States, and especially that
they are less "leered at." "Leering" at women is happily less common all
the world over than it is sometimes made to appear for picturesque
purposes in the magazines; but we should say that if there is a country
where the art has not reached a high stage of development, it is our
own. It must be added that although Mr. Burroughs is shrewd as well as
<i>naif</i>, the latter quality sometimes distances the former. He runs over
for a week to France. "At Dieppe I first saw the wooden shoe, and heard
its dry, senseless clatter upon the pavement. How suggestive of the
cramped and inflexible conditions with which human nature has borne so
long in these lands!" But in Paris also he is appreciative -- singularly
so for so complete an outsider as he confesses himself to be -- and
throughout he is very well worth reading. We heartily commend his
little volume for its honesty, its individuality, and, in places, its
really blooming freshness.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, January 27, 1876
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=5>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr208</locdoc><milestone n=208>
<p> <i>George H. Calvert</i> (5)
<p> George H. Calvert, <i>Essays -- Aesthetical.</i> Boston: Lee & Shepard, 1875.
<p>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 <i>addendum</i>, 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:
<p>"Cher Monsieur: -- Oh! cette fois je reois bien dcidment le
tr
s-aimable et tr
s-tudi portrait du <i>critique</i>. Comment exprimer
comme je le sens ma gratitude pour </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr209</locdoc><milestone n=209> tant de soin, d'attention
pntrante, de dsir d'tre agrable tout en restant juste? Il y avait
certes moyen d'insister bien plus sur les variations, les disparates et
les dfaillances momentanes de la pense et du jugement travers cette
suite de volumes. C'est toujours un sujet d'tonnement pour moi, et
cette fois autant que jamais, de voir comment un lecteur ami et un juge
de got parvient tirer une figure une et consistante de ce qui ne me
para t moi-mme dans mon souvenir que le cours d'un long fleuve qui va
s'pandant un peu au hasard des pentes et dsertant continuellement ses
rives. De tels portraits comme celui que vous voulez bien m'offrir me
rendent un point d'appui et me feraient vritablement croire moi-mme.
Et quand je songe l'immense quantit d'esprits auxquels vous me
prsentez sous un aspect si favorable et si magistral dans ce nouveau
monde si plein de jeunesse et d'avenir, je me prends d'une sorte de
fiert et de courageuse confiance, comme en prsence dj de la
postrit."
<p>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 <i>ventilate</i>,
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." </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr210</locdoc><milestone n=210> Here, surely, the author is quite wrong. A word is a
vulgarism only when it is used without logical aptness. "To a person"
we have never heard the word in question applied; but when applied to an
idea, it has just that felicity, that harmonious analogy, which
legitimates a figurative form of speech. In certain cases no other word
would do so well. "Ventilate," also, if we are not mistaken, has
respectable tradition in its favor, and can be found in sound English
writers of the last century.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, June 3, 1875
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=6>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr211</locdoc><milestone n=211>
<p> <i>William Ellery Channing</i> (6)
<p> <i>Correspondence of William Ellery Channing, D.D., and Lucy
Aikin, from 1826 to 1842.</i> Edited by Anna Letitia Le Breton. Boston:
Roberts Brothers, 1874.
<p>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 <i>galop</i> 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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr212</locdoc><milestone n=212> scratching of their pens.
Miss Aikin lived at quiet Hampstead, among suburban English lanes and
garden-walls, and Dr. Channing dwelt in tranquil Boston, before the
days of street-cars and semi-annual fires. It took their letters a
month to come and go, and these missives have an air of expecting to be
treated with respect and unfolded with a deliberate hand. They have
other merits beside this agreeable suggestiveness; but we are obliged to
ask ourselves what degree of merit it is that would make it right we
should read them at all. Dr. Channing expressed the wish that they
should be rescued from such a fate, and requested Miss Aikin either to
return or to burn them. "Miss Aikin," says Dr. Channing's descendant,
on whom the responsibility of publishing them rests, "did not herself
interpret the passage so strictly;" did not, in fact, interpret it at
all. She kept the letters intact, and publicity has now marked them for
its own. Miss Aikin was excusable; she was a clever, eager old woman,
who was not in the least likely to surrender what she had once secured,
and who was free to reflect that if the letters were ever published
(with her own as the needful context), she would by no means come off
second best. Those of Dr. Channing take nothing from his reputation,
but they add nothing to it, and under the circumstances they might very
well have been left in obscurity. We touch upon this point because the
case seems to us a rather striking concession to the pestilent modern
fashion of publicity. A man has certainly a right to determine, in so
far as he can, what the world shall know of him and what it shall not;
the world's natural curiosity to the contrary notwithstanding. A while
ago we should have been tolerably lenient to non-compliance on the
world's part; have been tempted to say that privacy was respectable, but
that the future was for knowledge, precious knowledge, at any cost. But
now that knowledge (of an unsavory kind, especially) is pouring in upon
us like a torrent, we maintain that, beyond question, the more precious
law is that there should be a certain sanctity in all appeals to the
generosity and forbearance of posterity, and that a man's table-drawers
and pockets should not be turned inside out. This would be our feeling
where even a truly important contribution to knowledge was at stake, and
there is nothing in Dr. Channing's letters to overbear the rule.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr213</locdoc><milestone n=213>
<p>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 <i>hater</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr214</locdoc><milestone n=214> affairs seem rather
ancient history now, and the future has given its answer to Miss Aikin's
doubts and conjectures. She troubled herself a good deal about shadows,
and she was serenely unconscious of certain predestined realities; but,
on the whole, she read the signs of the times shrewdly enough. A
striking case of this is her prophecy that the Italians would come up
before long and prove themselves a more modern and practical people than
the French. There was little distinct promise of this when she wrote.
She had no love for the French, and they were rather a bone of
contention between her and the doctor, who admired them in a fashion
that strikes one as rather anomalous. But his admiration was
intellectual; he was in sympathy with their democratic and <i>galitaire</i>
theories; whereas Miss Aikin's dislike was inherent in her stout British
temperament. By virtue of this quality she gives one a really more
masculine impression than her friend. She had a truly feminine
garrulity; pen in hand, she is an endless talker; but her style has
decidedly more color and force than Dr. Channing's, and whatever
animation and point the volume contains is to be found in her letters.
She was evidently a woman of temper, and her phrase often has a snap in
it; but the only approach to absolute gayety in the book, perhaps, is on
her side. "I have had a glimpse, however, of the English reprint of the
book; a glimpse only, for it was lent to Mr. Le Breton and to me, and in
our mingled politeness and impatience we have been sending it to each
other and then snatching it back, so that neither of us yet has had much
good of it." It is rather amusing, in the light of subsequent history,
to read in the same letter this allusion to Mr. Bryant: "I lament over
the unpoetical destiny of the poet Bryant: his admirers should have
endeavored to procure for him some humble independence; but it will be
long, I suspect, before you pension men of letters." Miss Aikin's early
letters have a tone of extreme deference and respect, but as the
correspondence lasts, her native positiveness and conservatism assert
themselves. Her letters indeed have throughout a <i>manner</i>, such as may
very well have belonged personally to a learned British gentlewoman; she
professes much, and she fulfills to the utmost all the duties of
urbanity. But she speaks frankly, when the spirit moves her, and her
frankness reaches a sort of </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr215</locdoc><milestone n=215> dramatic climax in the last letter
of the series, which Dr. Channing did not live to answer. She was
willing to think hospitably and graciously of American people and
things, but the note of condescension is always audible. She says of
Prescott's style that "it is pretty well for an American," but regrets
that, not having "mingled with the good society of London," he should be
guilty of the vulgarity of calling artisans "<i>operatives</i>, the slang
word of the Glasgow weavers." It illustrates her literary standard that
she could see nothing in Carlyle but pure barbarism.
<p>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 <i>data</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr216</locdoc><milestone n=216> to me! It is worth more than all
renown, considering renown as a personal good, and not a moral power
which may help to change the face of society. The delight which I find
in a beautiful country, breathing and feeling a balmy atmosphere and
walking under a magnificent sky, is so pure and deep that it seems to me
worthy of a future world. <i>Not that I am in danger of any excess in
this particular</i>, for I never forget how very, very inferior this
tranquil pleasure is to disinterested action; and I trust I should
joyfully forego these gratifications of an invalid, to toil and suffer
for my race." And yet he was not unable to understand the epicurean way
of taking life, and speaks of the pleasure he has had in hearing his
children read out Lever's Charles O'Malley. "I read such books with
much interest," he adds, "as they give me human experience in strong and
strange contrast with my own, and help my insight into that mysterious
thing, the human soul." We have said that the correspondence moves
toward a kind of dramatic climax. The late Miss Sedgwick had expressed
herself disparagingly on the subject of the beauty and grace of Miss
Aikin's countrywomen, and Dr. Channing, with a placid aggressiveness
which must certainly have been irritating to his correspondent, attempts
to lay down the law in defense of her dictum. "You know, I suppose,
that we have much more beauty in our country than there is in yours, and
this beauty differs much in character." He intimates even that "the
profiles of American gentlemen are of a higher order than yours," and
enumerates the various points in which English loveliness fails to rise
to our standard. He had flung down the glove and it was picked up with
a vengeance. Miss Aikin comes down upon him, in vulgar parlance, with a
cumulative solidity which he must have found rather startling. If he
wishes the truth he shall have it! She proceeds to refute his invidious
propositions with a logical and categorical exhaustiveness at which, in
the light of our present easy familiarity with the topic, we feel rather
tempted to smile. Miss Aikin is not complimentary either to American
beauty or to American manners, and the most she will admit is that so
long as Dr. Channing's countrywomen sit in a corner and hold their
tongues, they avoid giving positive offense; whereas she proves by
chapter and verse that English comeliness and English </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr217</locdoc><milestone n=217> grace
ought to be, must be, shall be, of the most superlative quality. The
English ladies "walk with the same quiet grace that pervades all their
deportment, and to which you have seen nothing similar or comparable!"
Dr. Channing died almost immediately after the receipt of her letter.
<p> <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, March
1875
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=7>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr218</locdoc><milestone n=218>
<p> <i>Rebecca Harding Davis</i> (7)
<p> <i>Waiting for the Verdict.</i> By Mrs. R. H. Davis. New York:
Sheldon & Co., 1868.
<p>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 <i>amateur</i> of the
fine arts, and a person of aristocratic sympathies. He is vastly
impressed </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr219</locdoc><milestone n=219> by her earnestness, her nobleness, and the various
wholesome qualities by which she is distinguished from her Southern
sisters under the old rgime. "This girl's education had been
different; wherever her home might be, the air in it, he felt, was
electric with energy; it was but a focus from which opened fields of
work -- fields where help was needed. There was no dormant, unused
power in her brain; her companions had been men and women who entered
the world as thorough-blooded competitors once sprang on the green,
springy turf in the grand old game, every natural strength severely
trained, every nerve pulsing with enjoyment, etc." He loves her, woos
her, and wins her, and is made a convert to democracy and energy and
practicality and all the Northern virtues.
<p>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
<i>penchant</i>, 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 <i>mauvais sujet</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr220</locdoc><milestone n=220> to tell. We may
let this description of his drawing-room at an evening party fill up the
blank: "There were no filagree prettinesses in Broderip's rooms, no
glittering surprises or fatiguing beauty; they were warmly colored with
clear tints, large and liberal; there was a bust here, a picture there;
their meaning was pure and quiet, but unassertant as the atmosphere
about a thorough-bred woman. You were not conscious of them while
present, but when you were gone you remembered them as the place of all
others where you could surest find a great rest or a great pleasure." In
these apartments Miss Conrad makes her appearance in "cream-colored,
lustreless drapery." Dr. Broderip falls madly in love with her, and she
is gradually brought to think of him. He pushes his suit, and she
accepts him. But like poor Ross Burley, the famous surgeon and fine
gentleman has also his dreadful secret, only that his is many times more
dreadful. There run in his veins a few drops of negro blood. It rests
with himself to make the avowal to his <i>fiance</i> and run the risk of her
contempt, or to keep his secret and turn his back upon his negro
brethren. He decides upon the former course -- very unnaturally, we
think -- and Miss Conrad casts him off. He joins a negro regiment, goes
to the war, and is killed.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr221</locdoc><milestone n=221> with it, "Waiting for the
Verdict" might have claimed, without reproach, that much-abused title,
"A story of American life." As it stands, it preserves a certain
American flavor. The author has evidently seen something corresponding
to a portion of what she describes, and she has disengaged herself to a
much greater degree than many of the female story-tellers of our native
country from heterogeneous reminiscences of English novels. She has
evidently read Dickens with great assiduity, to say nothing of "Jane
Eyre" and "Wuthering Heights." But these are great authorities, and on
this ground we suppress our complaints, the more readily as we find
ourselves in conscience unable to give the book in any degree our
positive commendation.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr222</locdoc><milestone n=222> life some logical
correlative to that luxurious need for tears and sighs and sad-colored
imagery of all kinds which dwells in the mind of all those persons,
whether men or women, who pursue literature under the sole guidance of
sentimentality, and consider it a sufficient outlet for the pursuit.
Nothing is more respectable on the part of a writer -- a novelist --
than the intelligent sadness which forces itself upon him on the
completion of a dramatic scheme which is in strict accordance with human
life and its manifold miseries. But nothing is more trivial than that
intellectual temper which, for ever dissolved in the melting mood, goes
dripping and trickling over the face of humanity, and washing its honest
lineaments out of all recognition. It is enough to make one forswear
for ever all decent reflection and honest compassion, and take refuge in
cynical jollity and elegant pococurantism. Spontaneous pity is an
excellent emotion, but there is nothing so hardening as to have your
pity for ever tickled and stimulated, and nothing so debasing as to
become an agent between the supply and demand of the commodity. This is
the function which the author of the present work seems to have taken
upon her, and we need no better proof of our assertion than the
pernicious effect it has wrought upon her style. We know of no style
among story-tellers more utterly difficult to read. In her desire to
impart such reality to her characters as shall make them appeal
successfully to our feelings, she emphasizes their movements and
gestures to that degree that all vocal sounds, all human accents, are
lost to the ear, and nothing is left but a crowd of ghastly, frowning,
grinning automatons. The reader, exhausted by the constant strain upon
his moral sensibilities, cries aloud for the good, graceful old
nullities of the "fashionable novel."
<p> <i>Nation</i>, November 21,
1867
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr222</locdoc><milestone n=222> <i>Dallas Galbraith</i>. By Mrs. R. Harding Davis. Philadelphia:
J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1868.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr223</locdoc><milestone n=223> are less prominent and various
than in "Waiting for the Verdict." The story, the fable, to begin with,
is very much more simple and interesting, and is, in fact, very well
conducted. A really simple and healthy writer the author of "Dallas
Galbraith" never will be; but on careful consideration we think it would
be unjust not to admit that in the present work she has turned herself
about a little more towards nature and truth, and that she sometimes
honors them with a side-glance. In the conception and arrangement of
her story, moreover, she displays no inconsiderable energy and skill.
She has evidently done her best to make it interesting, and to give her
reader, in vulgar parlance, his money's worth. She may probably be
congratulated on a success. For ourselves, we shall never consider this
lady's novels easy reading; but many persons will doubtless find
themselves carried through the book without any great effort of their
own. It is this very circumstance, we think -- the fact that when a
book is the fruit of decided ability it gets a fair hearing and pushes
its own fortune -- that makes it natural and proper to criticise it
freely and impartially. The day of dogmatic criticism is over, and with
it the ancient infallibility and tyranny of the critic. No critic lays
down the law, because no reader receives the law ready made. The critic
is simply a reader like all the others -- a reader who prints his
impressions. All he claims is, that they are honest; and when they are
unfavorable, he esteems it quite as simple a matter that he should
publish them as when they are the reverse. Public opinion and public
taste are silently distilled from a thousand private affirmations and
convictions. No writer pretends that he tells the whole truth; he knows
that the whole truth is a synthesis of the great body of small partial
truths. But if the whole truth is to be pure and incontrovertible, it
is needful that these various contributions to it be thoroughly firm and
uncompromising. The critic reminds himself, then, that he must be
before all things clear and emphatic. If he has properly mastered his
profession, he will care only in a minor degree whether his relation to
a particular work is one of praise or of censure. He will care chiefly
whether he has detached from such a work any ideas and principles
appreciable and available to the cultivated public judgment. By his
success in this effort he measures his </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr224</locdoc><milestone n=224> usefulness, and by his
usefulness he measures his self-respect.
<p>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 <i>dictum</i>, 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.
<p>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 <i>divaguer</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr225</locdoc><milestone n=225> from those of the simple novel of entertainment,
of character, and of incident. The writer takes life desperately hard
and looks upon the world with a sentimental -- we may even say, a
tearful -- eye. The other novel -- the objective novel, as we may call
it, for convenience -- appeals to the reader's sense of beauty, his idea
of form and proportion, his humanity, in the broadest sense. Mrs.
Davis's tales and those of her school appeal, we may say -- to the
conscience, to the sense of right and wrong, to the instincts of charity
and patronage. She aims at instructing us, purifying us, stirring up
our pity. Writers of the other school content themselves with exciting
our curiosity. A good distinction to make, we should say, is that with
the latter the emotion of sympathy is the chief agent, and with the
former the feeling of pity. We do not propose to enquire which is the
higher school of the two. It is certain that the novelist who pretends
to edify and instruct must be gifted with extraordinary powers, and that
to carry out his character successfully he must have a stronger head
than the world has yet seen exercised in this department of literature.
There have been no great didactic novelists. Richardson, whom the world
is now coming back to after a long desertion, is valued as the great
inventor and supreme master of "realism," but his moralism hangs about
him as a dead weight. The same may be said -- the same assuredly will
be said more and more every year -- of Thackeray's trivial and shallow
system of sermonizing. As a story-teller he is well-nigh everything --
as a preacher and teacher he is nothing. On the other hand, the great
"objective" novelists, from Scott to Trollope, are almost innumerable.
It is our impression that Mrs. Davis might, by taking herself in hand,
make a very much better figure in this company than she has heretofore
done in the other.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr226</locdoc><milestone n=226> himself as a country physician in a fishing village
on the New Jersey coast, with the boy as his assistant. Here finally
the two are discovered by the searching eye of the law. Laddoun,
however, has arranged matters in such a way as that Dallas shall incur
the whole of the guilt (whereas, in fact, he is completely innocent),
and, being on the eve of marriage with a young girl of whom Dallas
himself is very fond, he persuades him for her sake not to betray him
and blast his character. Dallas then, at the age of sixteen, consents
out of pure generosity to suffer for the crime of another. He is sent
for five years to the Albany Penitentiary, and we are meanwhile
introduced to his father's family. The Galbraiths are great people in
Western Ohio, and consist of Madam Galbraith, the head of the house (the
hero's grandmother), her husband and her niece, Honora Dundas, who, in
the absence of the rightful heir, is presumptive mistress of the
property. The young woman to whom Laddoun was engaged, suspecting his
guilt and cruelty, has dismissed him, and occupies a situation as
housekeeper in the Galbraith establishment. When the young man's term
is out, he reappears in the world and makes his way to his father's
home. Here, without naming himself, but as a plain working
mineralogist, he falls in love with Miss Dundas. Here, too, he meets
his mother, who, a second time a widow, has returned to live with her
mother-in-law. But in spite of these strong inducements he maintains
his incognito and accepts an appointment on a geological survey of New
Mexico. His motives for this line of action are his shame, his
ignorance, his coarseness, the great gulf that separates him from his
elegant and prosperous relatives. And yet they are not so elegant
either; for this same Madam Galbraith aforesaid is, without offence to
the author, simply a monster. Dallas remains a year in New Mexico and
comes home just in time to witness a prodigious reversal of fortune in
the family, caused by the combustion of a village built by Madam
Galbraith for the purpose of working certain oil-wells. He is of great
service in mitigating this catastrophe, and finally makes up his mind to
reveal himself. He marries Honora. But on his wedding-night his evil
destiny reappears in the person of Laddoun, who denounces him to the
assembled family as an </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr227</locdoc><milestone n=227> ex-convict. Laddoun dies of his bad
habits, and Dallas establishes his innocence.
<p>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. </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr228</locdoc><milestone n=228> Laddoun, however, is better than Madam
Galbraith. Where the author looked for the original of this sketch we
know not; she has only succeeded in producing a coarse caricature.
Madam Galbraith is a grand old grey-headed matron, who governs her acres
and her tenants in the manner of an ancient feudal countess. She is
compared at various times to a mastiff and a lioness; she sniffs and
snorts and clears her throat when she wishes to express her emotions;
she dresses in "clinging purple velvet," to show "the grand poise and
attitude of her limbs;" and, in fine, she "leads society." The author
has, of course, had in her mind an ideal model for this remarkable
figure; but she has executed her copy with a singular indelicacy of
taste and of touch. A self-willed, coarse-grained, rugged, and yet
generous old woman was what she wanted for her story, but her manner of
writing is so extravagant, so immoderate, so unappreciative of the sober
truth, that she succeeds only in producing a vulgar effigy. In Mrs.
Duffield, Galbraith's mother, she has adhered more closely to the truth.
Nature here is represented and not travestied. In spite of the faults
of conception and of style exhibited in these characters, we think that
Mrs. Harding Davis might yet, with proper reflection, write a much
better novel than the one before us. She has a natural perception,
evidently, of the dramatic and picturesque elements of human life, and,
in spite of all her weakness, there is no denying her strength. "Dallas
Galbraith," as we have intimated, is <i>almost</i> interesting. What does it
need to be truly so? The materials, the subject are there. It needs
that the author should abjure her ultra-sentimentalism, her moralism on
a narrow basis, her hankering after the discovery of a ghastly moral
contortion in every natural impulse. Quite as much as she, we believe
that life is a very serious business. But it is because it is
essentially and inalienably serious that we believe it can afford not to
be tricked out in the fantastic trappings of a spurious and repulsive
solemnity. Art, too, is a very serious business. We have in our mind a
word of counsel for the various clever writers of Mrs. Davis's school.
That they should assiduously study and observe the world is an
injunction which they will, of course, anticipate. But we can recommend
them no more salutary or truly instructive process of research than to
sit down to a thorough </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr229</locdoc><milestone n=229> perusal of the novels and romances of M.
Alexandre Dumas. In him they will find their antipodes -- and their
model. We say their model, because we believe they have enough
intellectual resistance to hold their own against him, when their own is
worth holding, and that when it is not, he, from the munificence of his
genius, will substitute for it an impression of the manner in which a
story may be told without being a discredit to what is agreeable in art,
and various and natural in life.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, October 22,
1868
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=8>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr230</locdoc><milestone n=230>
<p> <i>John W. De Forest</i> (8)
<p> <i>Honest John Vane. A Story.</i> By J. W. De Forest, author of
<i>Kate Beaumont</i>, <i>The Wetherel Affair</i>, etc. New Haven: Richmond &
Patten, 1875.
<p>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 <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, 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, <i>mutatis mutandis</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr231</locdoc><milestone n=231> manner,
that he "started up and paced the room briskly for some seconds,
meanwhile tightly grasping his dried-up blackened claws across his coat-
skirts, perhaps to keep his long tail from wagging too conspicuously
inside his trousers -- that is, supposing he possessed such an unearthly
embellishment." The author's touch, in this and similar cases, has more
energy than delicacy, and even the energy aims rather wildly. Did Mr.
De Forest refresh his memory of Swift before writing the adventures of
John Vane? He would have been reminded that though that great master of
political satire is often coarse and ferocious, he is still oftener
keenly ingenious.
<p>`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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr232</locdoc><milestone n=232> recital. The most artistic
stroke it contains is the history of his successful hocus-pocussing of
the committee of investigation, and his ignobly triumphant evasion of
disgrace. Mr. De Forest did well not to sacrifice to the vulgar need
for a dnouement, but to leave his hero's subsequent career to the
irritated conscience of the reader. He is a national legislator at this
hour, with his precious outfit and his still more precious experience,
and of this interesting circumstance the tale is a pertinent reminder.
Otherwise, there is little "story" in the book; the dramatic element
expires before it has really tried its paces, and the narrative becomes
chargeable with a certain flatness. Several characteristic political
types are sketched, coarsely from the artistic point of view, but
wholesomely, it may appear, from the moral. In Darius Dorman, the
"smutty" wire-puller, as Mr. De Forest is fond of calling him, the
author has tried his hand at the grotesque and fantastic; but if he
recalls Hawthorne, it is not altogether to his own advantage. We might
repeat, however, that, <i>par le temps qui court</i>, his flag should be
suffered to cover his cargo, if it were not for some such final
reflection as this. Whether accidentally or intentionally we hardly
know, `Honest John Vane' exhales a penetrating aroma of what in plain
English one must call vulgarity. Every note the author strikes
reverberates with a peculiarly vulgar tone; vulgarity pervades the
suggestions, the atmosphere of his volume. This result has doubtless
been in a great measure designed; he has wished to overwhelm the reader
with the evil odor of lobbyism. But the reader, duly overwhelmed, and
laying down the volume with a sense of having been in irredeemably low
company, may be excused for wondering whether, if this were a logical
symbol of American civilization, it would not be well to let that
phenomenon be submerged in the tide of corruption.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, December 31,
1874
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=9>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr233</locdoc><milestone n=233>
<p> <i>Ralph Waldo Emerson</i> (9)
<p> <i>The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
1834-1872.</i> 2 vols. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1883.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr234</locdoc><milestone n=234> has come and gone, and the abolition of
slavery, and the novelty of the Unitarian creed, and the revelation of
Goethe, and the doctrine of a vegetable diet, and a great many other
reforms then deemed urgent. Carlyle's extraordinary personality has,
moreover, thanks to recent publications, revealed itself with unlooked-
for vividness. Of few distinguished men has the public come into such
complete possession so soon after death has unlocked the cabinets. The
deeply interesting volumes given to the world so promptly by Mr. Froude,
have transmuted the great Scotch humorist from a remote and mysterious
personage -- however portentous, disclosing himself in dusky, smoky
ejaculations and rumblings -- into a definite and measurable, an almost
familiar figure, with every feature marked and every peculiarity
demonstrated. We know Carlyle, in short; we may look at him at our
ease, and the advantage, though we have enjoyed it but for a year or
two, has become part of our modern illumination. When we receive new
contributions accordingly, we know what to do with them, and where, as
the phrase is, to fit them in; they find us prepared. I should add that
if we know Carlyle, we know him in a great measure because he was so
rich, so original a letter-writer. The letters in Mr. Froude's volumes
constituted the highest value of those memorials and led us to look for
entertainment as great in the Correspondence which Mr. Charles Eliot
Norton had had for some time in his keeping, and which, though his name
does not appear on the title-page, he has now edited with all needful
judgment and care. Carlyle takes his place among the first of English,
among the very first of all letter-writers. All his great merits come
out in this form of expression; and his defects are not felt as defects,
but only as striking characteristics and as tones in the picture.
Originality, nature, humor, imagination, freedom, the disposition to
talk, the play of mood, the touch of confidence -- these qualities, of
which the letters are full, will, with the aid of an inimitable use of
language -- a style which glances at nothing that it does not render
grotesque, -- preserve their life for readers even further removed from
the occasion than ourselves, and for whom possibly the vogue of
Carlyle's published writings in his day will be to a certain degree a
subject of wonder. The light thrown upon his character by the mass
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr235</locdoc><milestone n=235> of evidence edited by Mr. Froude had not embellished the image
nor made the reader's sympathy advance at the same pace as his
curiosity. But the volumes that lie before us seemed to promise a more
genial sort of testimony, and the promise has been partly kept. Carlyle
is here in intercourse with a friend for whom, almost alone among the
persons with whom he had dealings, he appears to have entertained a
sentiment of respect -- a constancy of affection untinged by that
humorous contempt in which (in most cases) he indulges when he wishes to
be kind, and which was the best refuge open to him from his other
alternative of absolutely savage mockery. Of the character, the
sincerity, the genius, the many good offices of his American
correspondent, he appears to have had an appreciation which, even in his
most invidious hours, never belied itself. It is singular, indeed, that
throughout his intercourse with Emerson he never appears to have known
the satiric fury which he directed at so many other objects -- accepting
his friend <i>en bloc</i>, once for all, with reservations and protests so
light that, as addressed to Emerson's own character, they are only a
finer form of consideration. Emerson, on the other hand, who was so
much more kindly a judge, so much more luminous a nature, holds off, as
the phrase is, comparatively, and expresses, at times, at least, the
disapprobation of silence. Carlyle was the more constant writer of the
two, especially toward the end of their correspondence; he constantly
expresses the desire to hear from Emerson oftener. The latter had not
an abundant epistolary impulse; the form and style of his letters,
charming as they are, is in itself a proof of that. But there were
evidently certain directions in which he could not go with his friend,
who has likewise sundry tricks of style which act at times even upon the
placid nerves of the inventor of Transcendentalism. He thinks, for
instance, that Carlyle's satire of the "gigmania" has been overdone; and
this, although Emerson himself was as little as possible of a gigmaniac.
I must add that it would be wrong to suppose that the element of
reserve, or of calculated silence, plays in the least a striking part in
the letters of either. There is nothing more striking, and nothing
finer, than their confident frankness. Altogether the charm of the book
is that as one reads it one is in excellent company. Two men of rare
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr236</locdoc><milestone n=236> and beautiful genius converse with each other, and the
conversation is a kind of exhibition.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr237</locdoc><milestone n=237> from his theories as to expect
happiness." Carlyle's fortunate temper and steadfast simplicity sound
to-day like bold touches of satire. It is true that his idiosyncrasies
were as yet more or less undeveloped. The Correspondence speedily
became brisk, the more so that, in the winter of 1834-5, Carlyle had
settled himself in London, that life and work had opened to him with a
somewhat better promise, and that the transmission to his American
disciple of his new compositions offered repeated occasion for letters.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr238</locdoc><milestone n=238> 1838, after Emerson had made arrangements for the
issue of the "French Revolution" in Boston, "it will be a very brave day
when cash actually reaches me, no matter what the <i>number</i> of the coins,
whether seven or seven hundred, out of Yankee-land; and strange enough,
what is not unlikely, if it be the <i>first</i> cash I realize for that piece
of work -- Angle-land continuing still <i>in</i>solvent to me." Six years
later, in 1844, he writes, on the occasion of a remittance from Emerson
of thirty-six pounds, "America, I think, is like an amiable family tea-
pot; you think it is all out long since, and lo, the valuable implement
yields you another cup, and another!" Encouragement had come to him from
America as well as money; and there is something touching in the care
with which Emerson assures him of the growth of his public on this side
of the ocean, and of there being many ingenuous young persons of both
sexes to whom his writings are as meat and drink. We had learned from
Mr. Froude's publications that his beginnings were difficult; but this
Correspondence throws a new light upon those grim years -- I mean in
exposing more definitely the fact that he was for some time on the point
of coming to seek his fortune in this country. Both his own and
Emerson's early letters are full of allusions to this possible voyage:
for Emerson, in particular, the idea appears to have a fascination; he
returns to it again and again, keeps it constantly before his
correspondent, never ceases to express his desire that Carlyle should
embark for Boston. There was a plan of his giving lectures in the
United States, and Emerson, at Carlyle's request, collects all possible
information as to the expenses and the rewards of such an attempt. It
would appear that the rewards of the lecturer's art, fifty years ago,
were extremely slender in comparison of what they have since become;
though it must be added that Emerson gives a truly touching description
of the cost of living. One might have entertainment at the best hotels
for the sum of eight dollars a week. It is true that he gives us no
reassurance as to what the best hotels in America, fifty years ago, may
have been. Emerson offers his friend the most generous hospitality; on
his return from Europe, he had married and settled himself at Concord.
To Concord he entreats Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle to take their way; their
room is ready and their fire is made. The </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr239</locdoc><milestone n=239> reader at this point
of the correspondence feels a certain suspense: he knows that Carlyle
never did come to America, but like a good novel the letters produce an
illusion. He holds his breath, for the terrible Scotchman may after all
have embarked, and there is something really almost heart-shaking in the
thought of his transporting that tremendous imagination and those
vessels of wrath and sarcasm to an innocent New England village. The
situation becomes dramatic, like the other incident I have mentioned, in
the presence of Emerson's serene good faith, his eagerness for the
arrival of such a cloud-compelling host. The catastrophe never came
off, however, and the air of Concord was disturbed by no fumes more
irritating than the tonic emanations of Emerson's own genius. It is
impossible to imagine what the historian of the French Revolution, of
the iron-fisted Cromwell, and the Voltairean Frederick, would have made
of that sensitive spot, or what Concord would have made of Carlyle.
<p>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.
<p>"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 <i>man's</i> voice, and I
<i>have</i> a kinsman and brother: God be thanked for it! I could have
<i>wept</i> to read that speech; the clear high melody of it went tingling
through my heart; I </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr240</locdoc><milestone n=240> said to my wife, `There, woman!' * * *
My brave Emerson! And all this has been lying silent, quite tranquil in
him, these seven years, and the `vociferous platitude' dinning his ears
on all sides, and he quietly answering no word; and a whole world of
thought has silently built itself in these calm depths, and, the day
having come, says quite softly, as if it were a common thing, `Yes, <i>I
am</i> here, too.' Miss Martineau tells me, `Some say it is inspired; some
say it is mad.' Exactly so; no <i>say</i> could be suitabler."
<p> 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 <i>man</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr241</locdoc><milestone n=241> of certain persons with whom, apparently, he
supposed his correspondent to be in some degree associated. "Another
Channing, whom I once saw here, sends me a `Progress-of-the-Species'
Periodical from New York. <i>Ach Gott!</i> These people and their affairs
seem all `melting' rapidly enough into thaw-slush, or one knows not
what. Considerable madness is visible in them * * * I am terribly
sick of all that; -- and wish it would stay at home at Fruitland, or
where there is good pasture for it, * * * [a] bottomless hubbub,
which is not all cheering." Several of the wanderers from "Fruitland"
knocked at his door, and he speaks of them to Emerson with a humorous
irreverence that contrasts characteristically with Emerson's own tone of
consideration (that beautiful courtesy which he never lost) for the same
persons. One of them, "all bent on saving the world by a return to
acorns and the golden age," he desires to be suffered to love him as he
can, "and live on vegetables in peace; as I, living <i>partly</i> on
vegetables, will continue to love him!" But he warns Emerson against the
"English Tail" of the same visitor, who, arrived in London, apparently
had given away his confidence on terms too easy. "Bottomless imbeciles
ought not to be seen in company with Ralph Waldo Emerson, who has
already <i>men</i> listening to him on this side of the water." Of Margaret
Fuller, however, -- one of those who had attempted "the flight of the
unwinged," as he calls it, -- Carlyle speaks in the most affectionate
though the most discriminating manner:
<p>"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 <i>eat</i> 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 <i>me</i>' indeed: -- but her courage too is high
and clear, her chivalrous nobleness indeed is great; her veracity, in
its deepest sense, <i> toute preuve</i>."
<p>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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr242</locdoc><milestone n=242> in the
reflection it offers of two contrasted characters of men of genius.
With several qualities in common, Carlyle and Emerson diverged, in their
total expression, with a completeness which is full of suggestion as to
their differences of circumstance, race, association, temper. Both were
men of the poetic quality, men of imagination; both were Puritans; both
of them looked, instinctively, at the world, at life, as a great total,
full of far-reaching relations; both of them set above everything else
the importance of conduct -- of what Carlyle called veracity and Emerson
called harmony with the universe. Both of them had the desire, the
passion, for something better, -- the reforming spirit, an interest in
the destiny of mankind. But their variations of feeling were of the
widest, and the temperament of the one was absolutely opposed to the
temperament of the other. Both were men of the greatest purity and, in
the usual sense, simplicity of life; each had a high ideal, each kept
himself unspotted from the world. Their Correspondence is to an
extraordinary degree the record, on either side, of a career with which
nothing base, nothing interested, no worldly avidity, no vulgar vanity
or personal error, was ever mingled -- a career of public distinction
and private honor. But with these things what disparities of tone, of
manner, of inspiration! "Yet I think I shall never be killed by my
ambition," Emerson writes in a letter of the date of 1841. "I behold my
failures and shortcomings there in writing, wherein it would give me
much joy to thrive, with an equanimity which my worst enemy might be
glad to see. * * * My whole philosophy -- which is very real --
teaches acquiescence and optimism. Only when I see how much work is to
be done, what room for a poet -- for any spiritualist -- in this great,
intelligent, sensual and avaricious America, I lament my fumbling
fingers and stammering tongue." Emerson speaks the word in that passage;
he was an optimist, and this in spite of the fact that he was the
inspiration of the considerable body of persons who at that time, in New
England, were seeking a better way. Carlyle, on the other hand, was a
pessimist -- a pessimist of pessimists -- and this great difference
between them includes many of the others. The American public has
little more to learn in regard to the extreme amenity of Emerson, his
eminently gentle spirit, his almost touching </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr243</locdoc><milestone n=243> tolerance, his
deference toward every sort of human manifestation; but many of his
letters remind us afresh of his singular modesty of attitude and of his
extreme consideration for that blundering human family whom he believed
to be in want of light. His optimism makes us wonder at times where he
discovered the errors that it would seem well to set right, and what
there was in his view of the world on which the spirit of criticism
could feed. He had a high and noble conception of good, without having,
as it would appear, a definite conception of evil. The few words I have
just quoted in regard to the America of 1841, "intelligent, sensual, and
avaricious," have as sharp an ironical ring in them as any that I
remember to have noticed in his part of the Correspondence. He has not
a grain of current contempt; one feels, at times, that he has not
enough. This salt is wanting in his taste of things. Carlyle, on the
other hand, who has fearfully little amenity (save in his direct
relation to Emerson, where he is admirable), has a vivid conception of
evil without a corresponding conception of good. Curiously narrow and
special, at least, were the forms in which he saw this latter spirit
embodied. "For my heart is sick and sore on behalf of my own poor
generation," he writes in 1842. "Nay, I feel withal as if the one hope
of help for it consisted in the possibility of new Cromwells and new
Puritans." Eleven years later, returning from a visit to Germany, he
writes that "truly and really the Prussian soldiers, with their
intelligent <i>silence</i>, with the touches of effective Spartanism I saw or
fancied in them, were the class of people that pleased me best." There
could be nothing more characteristic of Carlyle than this confession
that such an impression as that was the most agreeable that he had
brought back from a Continental tour. Emerson, by tradition and
temperament, was as deeply rooted a Puritan as Carlyle; but he was a
Puritan refined and sublimated, and a certain delicacy, a certain good
taste would have prevented him from desiring (for the amelioration of
mankind) so crude an occurrence as a return of the regiments of Oliver.
Full of a local quality, with a narrow social horizon, he yet never
would have ventured to plead so undisguisedly (in pretending to speak
for the world at large) the cause of his own parish. Of that "current
contempt" of which I just now spoke, Carlyle </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr244</locdoc><milestone n=244> had more than
enough. If it is humorous and half-compassionate in his moments of
comparative tolerance, it is savage in his melancholy ones; and, in
either case, it is full of the entertainment which comes from great
expression. "Man, all men, seem radically dumb, jabbering mere jargons
and noises from the teeth outward; the inner meaning of them -- of them
and of me, poor devils -- remaining shut, buried forever. * * *
Certainly could one generation of men be forced to live without
rhetoric, babblement, hearsay, in short with the tongue well cut out of
them altogether, their fortunate successors would find a most improved
world to start upon!" Carlyle's pessimism was not only deep, but loud;
not of the serene, but of the irritable sort. It is one of the
strangest of things to find such an appreciation of silence in a mind
that in itself was, before all things, expressive. Carlyle's expression
was never more rich than when he declared that things were immeasurable,
unutterable, not to be formulated. "The gospel of silence, in thirty
volumes," that was a happy epigram of one of his critics; but it does
not prevent us from believing that, after all, he really loved, as it
were, the inarticulate. And we believe it for this reason, that the
working of his own genius must have been accompanied with an
extraordinary internal uproar, sensible to himself, and from which, in a
kind of agony, he was forced to appeal. With the spectacle of human
things resounding and reverberating in his head, awaking extraordinary
echoes, it is no wonder that he had an ideal of the speechless. But his
irritation communed happily for fifty years with Emerson's serenity; and
the fact is very honorable to both.
<p>"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. </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr245</locdoc><milestone n=245> An almost touching
lightness, sparseness, transparency marked the social scenery in those
days; and this impression, in Emerson's pages, is the greater by
contrast with the echoes of the dense, warm life of London that are
transmitted by his correspondent. One is reminded, as we remember being
reminded in the perusal of Hawthorne's "American Notebooks," of the
importance of the individual in that simple social economy -- of almost
any individual who was not simply engaged in buying and selling. It
must be remembered, of course, that the importance of the individual was
Emerson's great doctrine; every one had a kingdom within himself -- was
potential sovereign, by divine right, over a multitude of inspirations
and virtues. No one maintained a more hospitable attitude than his
toward anything that any one might have to say. There was no
presumption against even the humblest, and the ear of the universe was
open to any articulate voice. In this respect the opposition to Carlyle
was complete. The great Scotchman thought <i>all</i> talk a jabbering of
apes; whereas Emerson, who was the perfection of a listener, stood
always in a posture of hopeful expectancy and regarded each delivery of
a personal view as a new fact, to be estimated on its merits. In a
genuine democracy all things are democratic; and this spirit of general
deference, on the part of a beautiful poet who might have availed
himself of the poetic license to be fastidious, was the natural product
of a society in which it was held that every one was equal to every one
else. It was as natural on the other side that Carlyle's philosophy
should have aristocratic premises, and that he should call aloud for
that imperial master, of the necessity for whom the New England mind was
so serenely unconscious. Nothing is more striking in Emerson's letters
than the way in which people are measured exclusively by their moral
standards, designated by moral terms, described according to their
morality. There was nothing else to describe them by. "A man named
Bronson Alcott is great, and one of the jewels we have to show you. *
* * A man named Bronson Alcott is a majestic soul, with whom
conversation is possible. He is capable of the truth, and gives one the
same glad astonishment that he should exist which the world does. * *
* The man Alcott bides his time. ---- ---- is a beautiful and noble
youth, of a most subtle </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr246</locdoc><milestone n=246> and magnetic nature. * * * I have a
young poet in the village named Thoreau, who writes the truest verses.
I pine to show you my treasures. * * * One reader and friend of
yours dwells now in my house, Henry Thoreau, a poet whom you may one day
be proud of, a noble, manly youth, full of melodies and inventions."
Carlyle, who held melodies and inventions so cheap, was probably not a
little irritated (though, faithful to his constant consideration for
Emerson, he shows it but mildly) by this enumeration of characters so
vaguely constituted. "In fact, I do again desiderate some <i>concretion</i>
of these beautiful <i>abstracta</i>." That remark which he makes in regard to
one of Emerson's discourses, might have been applied to certain of his
friends. "The <i>Dial</i>, too, it is all spirit-like, a riform, aurora-
borealis-like. Will no <i>Angel</i> body himself out of that; no stalwart
Yankee <i>man</i>, with color in the cheeks of him and a coat on his back?"
Emerson speaks of his friends too much as if they were disembodied
spirits. One doesn't see the color in the cheeks of them and the coats
on their back. The fine touch in his letters, as in his other writings,
is always the spiritual touch. For the rest, felicitous as they are,
for the most part they suffer a little by comparison with Carlyle's;
they are less natural, more composed, have too studied a quaintness. It
was his practice, apparently, to make two drafts of these
communications. The violent color, the large, avalanche-movement of
Carlyle's style -- as if a mass of earth and rock and vegetation had
detached itself and came bouncing and bumping forward -- make the
efforts of his correspondent appear a little pale and stiff. There is
always something high and pure in Emerson's speech, however, and it has
often a perfect propriety -- seeming, in answer to Carlyle's
extravagances, the note of reason and justice. "Faith and love are apt
to be spasmodic in the best minds. Men live on the brink of mysteries
and harmonies into which they never enter, and with their hand on the
door-latch they die outside."
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr247</locdoc><milestone n=247> Ripley is talking up a colony of agriculturists and
scholars, with whom he threatens to take the field and the book. One
man renounces the use of animal food; and another of coin; and another
of domestic hired service; and another of the State; and on the whole,
we have a commendable share of reason and hope." But Emerson's "madness"
was as mild as moonlight, compared with the strange commixture of the
nature of his friend. If the main interest of these letters is, as I
have said, their illustration of the character of the writers, the
effect of Carlyle's portion of them is to deepen our sense, already
sufficiently lively, of his enormous incongruities. Considerably sad,
as he would have said himself, is the picture they present of a man of
genius. One must allow, of course, for his extraordinary gift of
expression, which set a premium on every sort of exaggeration; but even
when one has done so, darkness and horror reside in every line of them.
He is like a man hovering on the edge of insanity -- hanging over a
black gulf and wearing the reflection of its bottomless deeps in his
face. His physical digestion was of the worst; but it was nothing
compared with his moral digestion. Truly, he was not genial, and he was
not gracious; as how should he have been in such conditions? He was
born out of humor with life; he came into the world with an
insurmountable prejudice; and to be genial and gracious naturally seemed
of small importance in the face of the eternal veracities -- veracities
of such a grim and implacable sort. The strangest thing, among so many
that were strange, was that his magnificent humor -- that saving grace
which has eased off the troubles of life for so many people who have
been blessed with it -- did so little to lighten his burden. Of this
humor these volumes contain some admirable specimens -- as in the
description of "the brave Gambardella," the Neapolitan artist who comes
to him with an introduction from Emerson; of the fish-eating Rio,
historian of Christian Art; of the "loquacious, scriblacious" Heraud; of
the "buckramed and mummy-swathed" Miss Martineau, and many more besides.
His humor was in truth not of comic but of tragic intention, and not so
much a flame as an all-enveloping smoke. His treatment of all things is
the humorous -- unfortunately in too many cases the ill-humorous. He
even hated his work -- hated his subjects. These volumes </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr248</locdoc><milestone n=248> are a
sort of record of the long weariness and anguish (as one may indeed call
it) with which he struggled through his "Cromwell," his "French
Revolution," and the history of Frederick. He thought, after all, very
little of Frederick, and he detested the age in which he lived, the
"putrid eighteenth century -- an ocean of sordid nothingness, shams, and
scandalous hypocrisies." He achieved a noble quantity of work, but all
the while he found no inspiration in it. "The reason that I tell you
nothing about Cromwell is, alas, that there is nothing to be told. I
am, day and night, these long months and years, very miserable about it
-- nigh broken-hearted often. * * * No history of it <i>can</i> be
written to this wretched, fleering, sneering, canting, twaddling, God-
forgetting generation. How can I explain men to Apes by the Dead Sea?"
Other persons have enjoyed life as little as Carlyle; other men have
been pessimists and cynics; but few men have rioted so in their
disenchantments, or thumped so perpetually upon the hollowness of things
with the view of making it resound. Pessimism, cynicism, usually imply
a certain amount of indifference and resignation; but in Carlyle these
forces were nothing if not querulous and vocal. It must be remembered
that he had an imagination which made acquiescence difficult -- an
imagination haunted with theological and apocalyptic visions. We have
no occasion here to attempt to estimate his position in literature, but
we may be permitted to say that it is mainly to this splendid
imagination that he owes it. Both the moral and the physical world were
full of pictures for him, and it would seem to be by his great pictorial
energy that he will live. To get an idea of the solidity and sincerity
of this gift one must read his notes on a tour in Ireland in 1849 (note-
ch9-1, see page 271); it is a revelation of his attention to external
things and his perception of the internal states that they express. His
doctrine, reduced to the fewest words, is that life is very serious and
that every one should do his work honestly. This is the gist of the
matter; all the rest is magnificent vocalization. We call it
magnificent, in spite of the fact that many people find him unreadable
on account of his unprecedented form. His extemporized, empirical
style, however, seems to us the very substance </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr249</locdoc><milestone n=249> of his thought.
If the merit of a style lies in complete correspondence with the feeling
of the writer, Carlyle's is one of the best. It is not defensible, but
it is victorious; and if it is neither homogeneous, nor, at times,
coherent, it bristles with all manner of felicities. It is true,
nevertheless, that he had invented a manner, and that his manner had
swallowed him up. To look at realities and not at imitations is what he
constantly and sternly enjoins; but all the while he gives us the sense
that it is not at things themselves, but straight into this abysmal
manner of his own that he is looking.
<p>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 <i>through</i> 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.
<p> <i>Century Magazine</i>, June
1883
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr250</locdoc><milestone n=250> <i>A Memoir of Ralph Waldo Emerson</i>; by James Elliot Cabot. 2
vols. London, 1887.
<p>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 <i>Discourses in
America</i>, 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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr251</locdoc><milestone n=251> not that of another): fifty
years of residence in the home of one's forefathers, pervaded by
reading, by walking in the woods and the daily addition of sentence to
sentence.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr252</locdoc><milestone n=252> which nothing was reflected with
violence. It is a pleasure of the critical sense to find, with Mr.
Cabot's extremely intelligent help, a notation for such delicacies.
<p>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 <i>all</i> 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.
<p>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 <i>pour prendre cong</i>.
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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr253</locdoc><milestone n=253>
his secession from the mild Unitarian pulpit: we wonder at a condition
of opinion in which any utterance of his should appear to be wanting in
superior piety -- in the essence of good instruction. All that is
changed: the great difference has become the infinitely small, and we
admire a state of society in which scandal and schism took on no darker
hue; but there is even yet a sort of drollery in the spectacle of a body
of people among whom the author of <i>The American Scholar</i> and of the
Address of 1838 at the Harvard Divinity College passed for profane, and
who failed to see that he only gave his plea for the spiritual life the
advantage of a brilliant expression. They were so provincial as to
think that brilliancy came ill-recommended, and they were shocked at his
ceasing to care for the prayer and the sermon. They might have
perceived that he <i>was</i> the prayer and the sermon: not in the least a
seculariser, but in his own subtle insinuating way a sanctifier.
<p>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 <i>word</i>), 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr254</locdoc><milestone n=254> surrounded him
was not fertile in variations: it had great intelligence and energy, but
it moved altogether in the straightforward direction. On three
occasions later -- three journeys to Europe -- he was introduced to a
more complicated world; but his spirit, his moral taste, as it were,
abode always within the undecorated walls of his youth. There he could
dwell with that ripe unconsciousness of evil which is one of the most
beautiful signs by which we know him. His early writings are full of
quaint animadversion upon the vices of the place and time, but there is
something charmingly vague, light and general in the arraignment.
Almost the worst he can say is that these vices are negative and that
his fellow-townsmen are not heroic. We feel that his first impressions
were gathered in a community from which misery and extravagance, and
either extreme, of any sort, were equally absent. What the life of New
England fifty years ago offered to the observer was the common lot, in a
kind of achromatic picture, without particular intensifications. It was
from this table of the usual, the merely typical joys and sorrows that
he proceeded to generalise -- a fact that accounts in some degree for a
certain inadequacy and thinness in his enumerations. But it helps to
account also for his direct, intimate vision of the soul itself -- not
in its emotions, its contortions and perversions, but in its passive,
exposed, yet healthy form. He knows the nature of man and the long
tradition of its dangers; but we feel that whereas he can put his finger
on the remedies, lying for the most part, as they do, in the deep
recesses of virtue, of the spirit, he has only a kind of hearsay,
uninformed acquaintance with the disorders. It would require some
ingenuity, the reader may say too much, to trace closely this
correspondence betweenhis genius and the frugal, dutiful, happy but
decidedly lean Boston of the past, where there was a great deal of will
but very little fulcrum -- like a ministry without an opposition.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr255</locdoc><milestone n=255> we require and what we are capable of
in the way of aspiration and independence. With Emerson it is ever the
special capacity for moral experience -- always that and only that. We
have the impression, somehow, that life had never bribed him to look at
anything but the soul; and indeed in the world in which he grew up and
lived the bribes and lures, the beguilements and prizes, were few. He
was in an admirable position for showing, what he constantly endeavoured
to show, that the prize was within. Any one who in New England at that
time could do that was sure of success, of listeners and sympathy: most
of all, of course, when it was a question of doing it with such a divine
persuasiveness. Moreover, the way in which Emerson did it added to the
charm -- by word of mouth, face to face, with a rare, irresistible voice
and a beautiful mild, modest authority. If Mr. Arnold is struck with
the limited degree in which he was a man of letters I suppose it is
because he is more struck with his having been, as it were, a man of
lectures. But the lecture surely was never more purged of its grossness
-- the quality in it that suggests a strong light and a big brush --
than as it issued from Emerson's lips; so far from being a
vulgarisation, it was simply the esoteric made audible, and instead of
treating the few as the many, after the usual fashion of gentlemen on
platforms, he treated the many as the few. There was probably no other
society at that time in which he would have got so many persons to
understand that; for we think the better of his audience as we read him,
and wonder where else people would have had so much moral attention to
give. It is to be remembered however that during the winter of 1847-8,
on the occasion of his second visit to England, he found many listeners
in London and in provincial cities. Mr. Cabot's volumes are full of
evidence of the satisfactions he offered, the delights and revelations
he may be said to have promised, to a race which had to seek its
entertainment, its rewards and consolations, almost exclusively in the
moral world. But his own writings are fuller still; we find an instance
almost wherever we open them.
<p>"All these great and transcendent properties are ours. . . .
Let us find room for this great guest in our small </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr256</locdoc><milestone n=256> houses. . .
. Where the heart is, there the muses, there the gods sojourn, and not
in any geography of fame. Massachusetts, Connecticut River, and Boston
Bay, you think paltry places, and the ear loves names of foreign and
classic topography. But here we are, and if we will tarry a little we
may come to learn that here is best. . . . The Jerseys were handsome
enough ground for Washington to tread, and London streets for the feet
of Milton. . . . That country is fairest which is inhabited by the
noblest minds."
<p> 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.
<p>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.
<p>"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."
<p> 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) </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr257</locdoc><milestone n=257> we feel that his spiritual tact needed to be
very just, but that if it was so it must have brought a blessing.
<p>"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." . . .
<p> And another extract: --
<p>"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."
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr258</locdoc><milestone n=258> as might
have been inferred from the fact that the air swarmed with reformers and
improvers. Of the patient, philosophic manner in which Emerson groped
and waited, through teaching the young and preaching to the adult, for
his particular vocation, Mr. Cabot's first volume gives a full and
orderly account. His passage from the Unitarian pulpit to the lecture-
desk was a step which at this distance of time can hardly help appearing
to us short, though he was long in making it, for even after ceasing to
have a parish of his own he freely confounded the two, or willingly, at
least, treated the pulpit as a platform. "The young people and the
mature hint at odium and the aversion of faces, to be presently
encountered in society," he writes in his journal in 1838; but in point
of fact the quiet drama of his abdication was not to include the note of
suffering. The Boston world might feel disapproval, but it was far too
kindly to make this sentiment felt as a weight: every element of
martyrdom was there but the important ones of the cause and the
persecutors. Mr. Cabot marks the lightness of the penalties of dissent;
if they were light in somewhat later years for the transcendentalists
and fruit-eaters they could press but little on a man of Emerson's
distinction, to whom, all his life, people went not to carry but to ask
the right word. There was no consideration to give up, he could not
have been one of the dingy if he had tried; but what he did renounce in
1838 was a material profession. He was "settled," and his indisposition
to administer the communion unsettled him. He calls the whole business,
in writing to Carlyle, "a tempest in our washbowl"; but it had the
effect of forcing him to seek a new source of income. His wants were
few and his view of life severe, and this came to him, little by little,
as he was able to extend the field in which he read his discourses. In
1835, upon his second marriage, he took up his habitation at Concord,
and his life fell into the shape it was, in a general way, to keep for
the next half-century. It is here that we cannot help regretting that
Mr. Cabot had not found it possible to treat his career a little more
pictorially. Those fifty years of Concord -- at least the earlier part
of them -- would have been a subject bringing into play many odd
figures, many human incongruities: they would have abounded in
illustrations of the primitive New England character, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr259</locdoc><milestone n=259>
especially during the time of its queer search for something to expend
itself upon. Objects and occupations have multiplied since then, and
now there is no lack; but fifty years ago the expanse was wide and free,
and we get the impression of a conscience gasping in the void, panting
for sensations, with something of the movement of the gills of a landed
fish. It would take a very fine point to sketch Emerson's benignant,
patient, inscrutable countenance during the various phases of this
democratic communion; but the picture, when complete, would be one of
the portraits, half a revelation and half an enigma, that suggest and
fascinate. Such a striking personage as old Miss Mary Emerson, our
author's aunt, whose high intelligence and temper were much of an
influence in his earlier years, has a kind of tormenting representative
value: we want to see her from head to foot, with her frame and her
background; having (for we happen to have it), an impression that she
was a very remarkable specimen of the transatlantic Puritan stock, a
spirit that would have dared the devil. We miss a more liberal
handling, are tempted to add touches of our own, and end by convincing
ourselves that Miss Mary Moody Emerson, grim intellectual virgin and
daughter of a hundred ministers, with her local traditions and her
combined love of empire and of speculation, would have been an
inspiration for a novelist. Hardly less so the charming Mrs. Ripley,
Emerson's life-long friend and neighbour, most delicate and accomplished
of women, devoted to Greek and to her house, studious, simple and dainty
-- an admirable example of the old-fashioned New England lady. It was a
freak of Miss Emerson's somewhat sardonic humour to give her once a
broom-stick to carry across Boston Common (under the pretext of a
"moving"), a task accepted with docility but making of the victim the
most benignant witch ever equipped with that utensil.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr260</locdoc><milestone n=260> part of them, in Mr. Frothingham's clever
<i>History of Transcendentalism in New England</i>. This must be admitted to
be true of even so lively a "factor," as we say nowadays, as the
imaginative, talkative, intelligent and finally Italianised and ship-
wrecked Margaret Fuller: she is now one of the dim, one of Carlyle's
"then-celebrated" at most. It seemed indeed as if Mr. Cabot rather
grudged her a due place in the record of the company that Emerson kept,
until we came across the delightful letter he quotes toward the end of
his first volume -- a letter interesting both as a specimen of
inimitable, imperceptible edging away, and as an illustration of the
curiously generalised way, as if with an implicit protest against
personalities, in which his intercourse, epistolary and other, with his
friends was conducted. There is an extract from a letter to his aunt on
the occasion of the death of a deeply-loved brother (his own) which
reads like a passage from some fine old chastened essay on the vanity of
earthly hopes: strangely unfamiliar, considering the circumstances.
Courteous and humane to the furthest possible point, to the point of an
almost profligate surrender of his attention, there was no familiarity
in him, no personal avidity. Even his letters to his wife are
courtesies, they are not familiarities. He had only one style, one
manner, and he had it for everything -- even for himself, in his notes,
in his journals. But he had it in perfection for Miss Fuller; he
retreats, smiling and flattering, on tiptoe, as if he were advancing.
"She ever seems to crave," he says in his journal, "something which I
have not, or have not for her." What he had was doubtless not what she
craved, but the letter in question should be read to see how the modicum
was administered. It is only between the lines of such a production
that we read that a part of her effect upon him was to bore him; for his
system was to practise a kind of universal passive hospitality -- he
aimed at nothing less. It was only because he was so deferential that
he could be so detached; he had polished his aloofness till it reflected
the image of his solicitor. And this was not because he was an
"uncommunicating egotist," though he amuses himself with saying so to
Miss Fuller: egotism is the strongest of passions, and he was altogether
passionless. It was because he had no personal, just as he had almost
no physical wants. "Yet I plead not guilty to </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr261</locdoc><milestone n=261> the malice
prepense. 'Tis imbecility, not contumacy, though perhaps somewhat more
odious. It seems very just, the irony with which you ask whether you
may not be trusted and promise such docility. Alas, we will all
promise, but the prophet loiters." He would not say even to himself that
she bored him; he had denied himself the luxury of such easy and obvious
short cuts. There is a passage in the lecture (1844) called "Man the
Reformer," in which he hovers round and round the idea that the practice
of trade, in certain conditions likely to beget an underhand
competition, does not draw forth the nobler parts of character, till the
reader is tempted to interrupt him with, "Say at once that it is
impossible for a gentleman!"
<p>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.
<p>"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?"
<p>His observation of Nature was exquisite -- always the direct,
irresistible impression.
<p>"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." . . . (<i>Literary
Ethics</i>.)
<p> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr262</locdoc><milestone n=262> wine -- he took them in sips. But he needed them
and liked them; he had volumes of notes from his reading, and he could
not have produced his lectures without them. He liked literature as a
thing to refer to, liked the very names of which it is full, and used
them, especially in his later writings, for purposes of ornament, to
dress the dish, sometimes with an unmeasured profusion. I open <i>The
Conduct of Life</i> and find a dozen on the page. He mentions more
authorities than is the fashion to-day. He can easily say, of course,
that he follows a better one -- that of his well-loved and irrepressibly
allusive Montaigne. In his own bookishness there is a certain
contradiction, just as there is a latent incompleteness in his whole
literary side. Independence, the return to nature, the finding out and
doing for one's self, was ever what he most highly recommended; and yet
he is constantly reminding his readers of the conventional signs and
consecrations -- of what other men have done. This was partly because
the independence that he had in his eye was an independence without ill-
nature, without rudeness (though he likes that word), and full of gentle
amiabilities, curiosities and tolerances; and partly it is a simple
matter of form, a literary expedient, confessing its character -- on the
part of one who had never really mastered the art of composition -- of
continuous expression. Charming to many a reader, charming yet ever
slightly droll, will remain Emerson's frequent invocation of the
"scholar": there is such a friendly vagueness and convenience in it. It
is of the scholar that he expects all the heroic and uncomfortable
things, the concentrations and relinquishments, that make up the noble
life. We fancy this personage looking up from his book and arm-chair a
little ruefully and saying, "Ah, but why <i>me</i> always and only? Why so
much of me, and is there no one else to share the responsibility?"
"Neither years nor books have yet availed to extirpate a prejudice then
rooted in me [when as a boy he first saw the graduates of his college
assembled at their anniversary], that a scholar is the favourite of
heaven and earth, the excellency of his country, the happiest of men."
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr263</locdoc><milestone n=263> of books. This is
characteristic of his humility -- that humility which was nine-tenths a
plain fact (for it is easy for persons who have at bottom a great fund
of indifference to be humble), and the remaining tenth a literary habit.
Moreover an American reader may be excused for finding in it a pleasant
sign of that prestige, often so quaintly and indeed so extravagantly
acknowledged, which a connection with literature carries with it among
the people of the United States. There is no country in which it is
more freely admitted to be a distinction -- <i>the</i> distinction; or in
which so many persons have become eminent for showing it even in a
slight degree. Gentlemen and ladies are celebrated there on this ground
who would not on the same ground, though they might on another, be
celebrated anywhere else. Emerson's own tone is an echo of that, when
he speaks of the scholar -- not of the banker, the great merchant, the
legislator, the artist -- as the most distinguished figure in the
society about him. It is because he has most to give up that he is
appealed to for efforts and sacrifices. "Meantime I know that a very
different estimate of the scholar's profession prevails in this
country," he goes on to say in the address from which I last quoted (the
<i>Literary Ethics</i>), "and the importunity with which society presses its
claim upon young men tends to pervert the views of the youth in respect
to the culture of the intellect." The manner in which that is said
represents, surely, a serious mistake: with the estimate of the
scholar's profession which then prevailed in New England Emerson could
have had no quarrel; the ground of his lamentation was another side of
the matter. It was not a question of estimate, but of accidental
practice. In 1838 there were still so many things of prime material
necessity to be done that reading was driven to the wall; but the reader
was still thought the cleverest, for he found time as well as
intelligence. Emerson's own situation sufficiently indicates it. In
what other country, on sleety winter nights, would provincial and
bucolic populations have gone forth in hundreds for the cold comfort of
a literary discourse? The distillation anywhere else would certainly
have appeared too thin, the appeal too special. But for many years the
American people of the middle regions, outside of a few cities, had in
the most rigorous seasons no other recreation. A gentleman, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr264</locdoc><milestone n=264>
grave or gay, in a bare room, with a manuscript, before a desk, offered
the reward of toil, the refreshment of pleasure, to the young, the
middle-aged and the old of both sexes. The hour was brightest,
doubtless, when the gentleman was gay, like Doctor Oliver Wendell
Holmes. But Emerson's gravity never sapped his career, any more than it
chilled the regard in which he was held among those who were
particularly his own people. It was impossible to be more honoured and
cherished, far and near, than he was during his long residence in
Concord, or more looked upon as the principal gentleman in the place.
This was conspicuous to the writer of these remarks on the occasion of
the curious, sociable, cheerful public funeral made for him in 1883 by
all the countryside, arriving, as for the last honours to the first
citizen, in trains, in waggons, on foot, in multitudes. It was a
popular manifestation, the most striking I have ever seen provoked by
the death of a man of letters.
<p>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
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr265</locdoc><milestone n=265> many years, of having the question of application assumed for
him by Thoreau, who took upon himself to be, in the concrete, the sort
of person that Emerson's "scholar" was in the abstract, and who paid for
it by having a shorter life than that fine adumbration. The
application, with Thoreau, was violent and limited (it became a matter
of prosaic detail, the non-payment of taxes, the non-wearing of a
necktie, the preparation of one's food one's self, the practice of a
rude sincerity -- all things not of the essence), so that, though he
wrote some beautiful pages, which read like a translation of Emerson
into the sounds of the field and forest and which no one who has ever
loved nature in New England, or indeed anywhere, can fail to love, he
suffers something of the <i>amoindrissement</i> of eccentricity. His master
escapes that reduction altogether. I call it an advantage to have had
such a pupil as Thoreau; because for a mind so much made up of
reflection as Emerson's everything comes under that head which prolongs
and reanimates the process -- produces the return, again and yet again,
on one's impressions. Thoreau must have had this moderating and even
chastening effect. It did not rest, moreover, with him alone; the
advantage of which I speak was not confined to Thoreau's case. In 1837
Emerson (in his journal) pronounced Mr. Bronson Alcott the most
extraordinary man and the highest genius of his time: the sequence of
which was that for more than forty years after that he had the gentleman
living but half a mile away. The opportunity for the return, as I have
called it, was not wanting.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr266</locdoc><milestone n=266> element, like salt or meal. So that I
have to begin with endless disclaimers and explanations: `I am not the
man you take me for.'" He was never the man any one took him for, for
the simple reason that no one could possibly take him for the elusive,
irreducible, merely gustatory spirit for which he took himself.
<p>"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."
<p>That is his private expression about a large part of a ferment
in regard to which his public judgment was that
<p> "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."
<p>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. </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr267</locdoc><milestone n=267>
Nothing is more perceptible to-day than that their criticism produced no
fruit -- that it was little else than a very decent and innocent
recreation -- a kind of Puritan carnival. The New England world was for
much the most part very busy, but the Dial and Fruitlands and Brook Farm
were the amusement of the leisure-class. Extremes meet, and as in older
societies that class is known principally by its connection with castles
and carriages, so at Concord it came, with Thoreau and Mr. W. H.
Channing, out of the cabin and the wood-lot.
<p>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."
<p>"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."
<p> 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 --
<p> "Pay ransom to the owner
<p> And fill the bag to the brim.
<p> Who is the owner? The slave is owner,
<p> And ever was. Pay <i>him</i>!" </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr268</locdoc><milestone n=268>
<p> And Mr. Cabot chronicles the fact that the <i>gran' rifiuto</i> --
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.
<p>"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."
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr269</locdoc><milestone n=269> and from
Dante to Miss Austen and taking Don Quixote and Aristophanes on the way,
is a large allowance to have to make for a man of letters, and may
appear to confirm but slightly any claim of intellectual hospitality and
general curiosity put forth for him. The truth was that, sparely
constructed as he was and formed not wastefully, not with material left
over, as it were, for a special function, there were certain chords in
Emerson that did not vibrate at all. I well remember my impression of
this on walking with him in the autumn of 1872 through the galleries of
the Louvre and, later that winter, through those of the Vatican: his
perception of the objects contained in these collections was of the most
general order. I was struck with the anomaly of a man so refined and
intelligent being so little spoken to by works of art. It would be more
exact to say that certain chords were wholly absent; the tune was
played, the tune of life and literature, altogether on those that
remained. They had every wish to be equal to their office, but one
feels that the number was short -- that some notes could not be given.
Mr. Cabot makes use of a singular phrase when he says, in speaking of
Hawthorne, for several years our author's neighbour at Concord and a
little -- a very little we gather -- his companion, that Emerson was
unable to read his novels -- he thought them "not worthy of him." This
is a judgment odd almost to fascination -- we circle round it and turn
it over and over; it contains so elusive an ambiguity. How highly he
must have esteemed the man of whose genius <i>The House of the Seven
Gables</i> and <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> gave imperfectly the measure, and how
strange that he should not have been eager to read almost anything that
such a gifted being might have let fall! It was a rare accident that
made them live almost side by side so long in the same small New England
town, each a fruit of a long Puritan stem, yet with such a difference of
taste. Hawthorne's vision was all for the evil and sin of the world; a
side of life as to which Emerson's eyes were thickly bandaged. There
were points as to which the latter's conception of right could be
violated, but he had no great sense of wrong -- a strangely limited one,
indeed, for a moralist -- no sense of the dark, the foul, the base.
There were certain complications in life which he never suspected. One
asks one's self whether that is why he did not care for </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr270</locdoc><milestone n=270> Dante
and Shelley and Aristophanes and Dickens, their works containing a
considerable reflection of human perversity. But that still leaves the
indifference to Cervantes and Miss Austen unaccounted for.
<p>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.
<p>"O my friends, there are resources in us on which we have not
yet drawn. There are men who rise refreshed on </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr271</locdoc><milestone n=271> hearing a
threat; men to whom a crisis which intimidates and paralyses the
majority -- demanding not the faculties of prudence and thrift, but
comprehension, immovableness, the readiness of sacrifice, come graceful
and beloved as a bride. . . . But these are heights that we can scarce
look up to and remember without contrition and shame. Let us thank God
that such things exist."
<p>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.
<p> <i>Macmillan's Magazine</i>, December
1887
<p> Reprinted under the title
"Emerson"
<p> in <i>Partial Portraits</i>,
1888
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr271</locdoc><milestone n=271>-fn
<p>(note-ch9-1) See THE CENTURY for May, June, and July 1882.
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=10>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr272</locdoc><milestone n=272>
<p> <i>Henriette (Deluzy-Desportes) Field</i> (10)
<p> <i>Home Sketches in France, and Other Papers</i>. By the late Mrs.
Henry M. Field. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1875.
<p>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.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, June 10,
1875
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=11>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr273</locdoc><milestone n=273>
<p> <i>Julia Constance Fletcher</i> (11)
<p> <i>Kismet</i>. Boston: Roberts Bros., 1877.
<p>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 <i>rara avis</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr274</locdoc><milestone n=274> calling the
heroine "Bell" is perhaps rendered less remarkable by the fact that she
immediately begins to talk to him of her stepmother as "Flossy." The
small points, however, are the only ones in which the author misreports
the manners of American young persons. Bell's manners are very well,
but it strikes us that her morals are a trifle relaxed. She is
"engaged" to a young man of superior character who has remained in
Venice to study art while she travels in Egypt with her parents, and in
spite of this circumstance she attaches herself to Mr. Arthur
Livingston, whom she meets upon the Nile, with a violence which deprives
her of a portion of the reader's esteem. Livingston loves her in
return, though in a more frigid fashion. The affair is momentarily
interrupted by his learning that she has already accepted the young man
in Venice; but then the latter is dismissed, the lovers embrace again,
and, with an intimation that it was their "destiny" to do so, the book
closes. The story is too slight -- the knot is never tied tight enough
to make the reader care how it is loosened. The natural interest of the
matter would be the struggle in the heroine's mind between her two
sentiments; but this interest fails through the reader's not realizing
the first one. The young man in Venice remains absent, represented only
by his letters to the young girl, which seem to bore her extremely.
Between a young man who bores her and a young man who extremely
interests her she cannot properly hesitate, and there is therefore no
struggle and no drama. If the author, on the other hand, has meant that
Ferris does not bore her, and that she more or less loves him, she falls
quite too easily into the arms of Mr. Livingston. It is probable that
the latter case has been the author's meaning; but if it has, she has
let her faithless maiden off too easily. The reader could forgive Miss
Hamlyn under stress, but his imagination would demand that she should
pass through a little more tribulation. As it is, however, we see only
one horn of her dilemma, a result produced by the disjointed,
unbusiness-like way in which the story is told. There seems no reason,
however, why the author should not do very much better. There is a good
deal of excellent intention in the figures of the heroine and the
"fastidious American" who wins her, and if the other people (the
travelling companions of this pair) are very shadowy, their </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr275</locdoc><milestone n=275>
talk contains a number of good things. The trouble is that there is too
much of it, and that half of it is referred to no one in particular. We
had marked several clever passages for quotation, but our space fails.
The book has not a little charm, but it would have more if, the
descriptive portion remaining untouched, the story were more solid and
the personal portraiture, often graceful, had been put more into form.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, June 7,
1877
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr275</locdoc><milestone n=275> <i>Mirage</i>. By George Fleming, author of <i>Kismet</i>. Boston:
Roberts Bros., 1877.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr276</locdoc><milestone n=276> impression of the
country. Some of the pictures in these pages are very charming indeed,
and we should like to have space to quote them.
<p>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 <i>donne</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr277</locdoc><milestone n=277> come to an understanding with his mistress has a
rather shadowy and insalubrious air. Very noteworthy is the partiality
of American story-tellers for aesthetic heroes. The usual English
novelist, desiring to provide a heroine with an interesting and
inspiring suitor, picks out a brilliant young man of affairs -- a rising
young statesman or a prospective commander-in-chief, a man of action, in
short, of some kind. The American narrator, on the other hand, is
prone, less gloriously, to select an artist, with a "sensitive mouth."
The secondary figures in `Mirage' strike us as the more successful, and
they abound, indeed, in clever touches. In especial, the author says
very good things about them. The sketch of the young Oxford neo-pagan,
Davenant, is really brilliant; and very good is the English family, the
Vaughan-Smythes, encountered by the Sea of Galilee, who are so eager to
partake of the fish of its waters, and among whom the mater-familias
remarks that in travelling in the Holy Land she makes it a point of
conscience to have a <i>Christian</i> dragoman! With so much that is
agreeable and clever, `Mirage' strikes us as the work of a person who
might write a better novel yet, and we should be curious to see the
result of her attempting to tell a story pure and simple -- a story
which should not be at the same time a record of reminiscences of
travel. She has a delicacy of observation and a certain liberty of mind
which might go far; the present book is infinitely fresher and wittier
than ninety-nine-hundredths of the novels periodically emitted by the
regular group of English fiction-mongers. But, even if the author
attempts nothing else or nothing different, `Mirage' will remain an
eminently readable story.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, March 7,
1878
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=12>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr278</locdoc><milestone n=278>
<p> <i>William C. Gannett</i> (12)
<p> <i>Ezra Stiles Gannett, Unitarian Minister in Boston, 1824-1871.</i>
Memoir, by his son, William C. Gannett. Boston: Roberts Bros., 1875.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr279</locdoc><milestone n=279> in the novels of Miss Stuart Phelps and
Mrs. Harding Davis. Dr. Gannett's career was essentially limited and
local; he evidently was a man of incorruptible modesty, and his own
self-estimate did not err by over-liberality. Local, indeed, is Mr.
William Gannett's memoir; it is conceived not only in the temper, but
written in the vocabulary, of an especial phase of Boston civilization.
But it operates as such a flinging wide of doors, such a tossing up of
windows, such a lavish admission of searching, staring daylight, that,
where much is intended to be pathetic, the image that most solicits
sympathy is perhaps that of the venerable subject in his extreme
bereavement of privacy. If we should say that the manner of all this is
unwholesome, we should doubtless seem to be making an unkind charge, but
we hardly know how else to qualify this latest development of literary
portraiture. It is the trivial playing at the serious; it is not the
masculine way of looking at things.
<p>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. </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr280</locdoc><milestone n=280> His piety was of a most strenuous and consistent type;
what is called the "world" said little or nothing to him; in his tastes,
in his habits, in his temperament, he was a pure ascetic; his life was
altogether the life of the conscience. Religion for him, in fact, meant
simply intense conscientiousness -- an attitude of perpetual vigilance
against wrong-doing. His conscientiousness, as his son intimates, was
morbid and overdone. We read with a sort of alarm that the young lady
he was about to marry had "a conscientiousness as certain as his own."
Dr. Gannett's religious feeling was so intense and, if there had been a
little more of what we may call "temperament" in it, one would say so
ardent, that one almost wonders that he found himself able, in Unitarian
soil, to sink his shaft deep enough. It would seem that he ought to
have belonged to a Church of the rigid, old-fashioned sort. But he
found his opportunity by making his Unitarianism as conservative as
possible; he kept his faith, and that of his congregation, in so far as
he could, where he found it, and conspicuously failed to avail himself
of any later-born latitude of thought. Mr. Emerson diverged into
magnificent vagueness, but we doubt whether Dr. Gannett went a step with
him even in imagination. He opposed Theodore Parker, he had nothing in
common with the Anti-Slavery group. Both at first and afterwards, he
saw nothing in the Civil War but matter for regret. His biographer has
printed in an appendix a number of his sermons, few of which were
published during his life. He declined, sagaciously, shortly before his
death, to make a volume of them, for he felt that, though they had
played a useful part when addressed to a congregation with whom he was
in intimate personal relations, they would not fall very forcibly on the
ear of the world at large. They have a great deal of precision and
earnestness of statement, but they strike us as almost painfully dry.
They are meagre and colorless, and we think they lack the highest sort
of elevation. They have neither spiritual passion on one side, nor
marked intellectual acuteness on the other. Dr. Gannett's character, in
short, viewed on the scale on which his son has unfolded it, is
chargeable on the whole with an extreme dryness; it is not the sort of
character which a race is the stronger for producing in more than
limited quantity. It seems, somehow, too </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr281</locdoc><milestone n=281> economically
compounded; it has, as we said just now, a fatal lack of temperament.
It has certainly done good service in the history of New England, and it
has carried the mechanical development of conscience, as it may be
called, to an extreme refinement. But we doubt whether, experimentally,
measured by sufficient periods, the type to which it belongs would prove
to be the soil from which first-rate men spring -- men either of large
purpose or of large culture.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, April 1,
1875
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=13>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr282</locdoc><milestone n=282>
<p> <i>Henry Harland</i> (13)
<p> The Story-Teller at Large: Mr. Henry Harland. <i>Comedies and
Errors</i>. London and New York: J. Lane, 1898.
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr283</locdoc><milestone n=283> Fenimore
Cooper, was fearfully -- or perhaps only fortunately -- far from
Chicago, and Paris stood to London in a relation almost equally awkward
for an Easter run, though singularly favourable, on either side, for
concentration. The forces that are changing all this need scarce be
mentioned at a moment when each day's breakfast-table -- if the morning
paper be part of its furniture -- fairly bristles with revelations of
them. The globe is fast shrinking, for the imagination, to the size of
an orange that can be played with; the hurry to and fro over its surface
is that of ants when you turn up a stone, and there are times when we
feel as if, as regards his habitat -- and especially as regards <i>hers</i>,
for women wander as they have never wandered -- almost everyone must
have changed place, and changed language, with everyone else. The
ancient local concentration that was so involuntary in Dickens and
Balzac is less and less a matter of course; and the period is calculably
near when successfully to emulate it will figure to the critical eye as
a rare and possibly beautiful <i>tour de force</i>.
<p>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 <i>Comedies and
Errors</i>; 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr284</locdoc><milestone n=284> or the
branch on the tree -- the fact of being confined, attached, continuous.
Mr. Harland is at the worst in a cage of wires remarkably interspaced,
and not on the tree save so far as we may suppose it to put forth
branches of fantastic length. He is the branch broken off and converted
to other useful and agreeable purposes -- even in portions to that of
giving out, in a state of combustion, charming red and blue flame.
<p>To put it less indirectly, I have found half the interest of
<i>Comedies and Errors</i> 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.
<i>Then</i> we may, with all due exhilaration, set down all his shipwrecks to
his unanchored state.
<p>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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr285</locdoc><milestone n=285>
the kind of virtue that shunned the high light of the public square.
The public square is now the whole city, and, taking us all in, has
acoustic properties so remarkable that thoughts barely whispered in a
corner are heard all over the place. Therefore each of us already knows
what every other of us thinks of the short story, though he knows
perhaps at the same time that not every other can write it. Anything we
may say about it is at best but a compendium of the current wisdom. It
is a form delightful and difficult, and with one of these qualities --
as, for that matter, one of them almost everywhere is -- the direct
reason of the other. It is an easy thing, no doubt, to do a little
with, but the interest quickens at a high rate on an approximation to
that liberal <i>more</i> of which we speedily learn it to be capable. The
charm I find in Mr. Harland's tales is that he is always trying for the
more, for the extension of the picture, the full and vivid summary, and
trying with an art of ingenuity, an art of a reflective order, all alive
with felicities and delicacies.
<p>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. <i>The Friend of
Man</i>, 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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr286</locdoc><milestone n=286> comic, pathetic,
tragic -- disengaged from old remembrances, encounters, accidents,
exhibitions and exposures, and resolving these glimpses and patches into
the unity of air and feeling that makes up a character. It is all a
matter of odds and ends recovered and interpreted. The "story" is
nothing, the subject everything, and the manner in which the whole thing
becomes expressive strikes me as an excellent specimen of what can be
done on the minor scale when art comes in. There are, of course,
particular effects that insist on space, and the thing, above all, that
the short story has to renounce is the actual <i>pursuit</i> of a character.
Temperaments and mixtures, the development of a nature, are shown us
perforce in a tale, as they are shown us in life, only by illustration
more or less copious and frequent; and the drawback is that when the
tale is short the figure, before we have had time to catch up with it,
gets beyond and away, dips below the horizon made by the little square
of space that we have accepted.
<p>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. <i>Petit-Bleu</i>, in this
volume, <i>Cousin Rosalys</i>, <i>Tirala-Tirala</i>, <i>Rooms</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr287</locdoc><milestone n=287> and
refinements, the feeling of the American for his famous Europe.
<p>It is a very wonderful thing, this Europe of the American in
general and of the author of <i>Comedies and Errors</i> 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 <i>Invisible Prince</i>, from <i>The
Queen's Pleasure</i>, from <i>Flower o' the Clove</i>, from each indeed, I have
noted as I read, of these compositions.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr288</locdoc><milestone n=288> youth as the whole thing seems, it is the play of a memory
that has had half-a-dozen lives. Nothing is more charming in it than
the reverberation of the old delicate, sociable France that the author
loves most of all to conjure up and that fills the exquisite little
picture of <i>Rooms</i> with an odour of faint lavender in wonderful bowls
and a rustle of ancient silk on polished floors. But these, I dare say,
are mere exuberances of curiosity and levities of independence. He has,
as I have sufficiently hinted, the sense of subject and the sense of
shape, and it is when, under the coercion of these things, he really
stops and begins to dig that the critic will more attentively look out
for him. Then we shall come back to the question of soil -- the
question with which I started -- and of the possible ups and downs, as
an artist, of the citizen of the world.
<p> <i>Fortnightly Review</i>, April
1898
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=14>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr289</locdoc><milestone n=289>
<p> <i>James Albert Harrison</i> (14)
<p> <i>A Group of Poets and their Haunts</i>. By James Albert Harrison.
New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1875.
<p>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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr290</locdoc><milestone n=290> the Swedish poet, Branger, Chnier,
Alfred de Musset -- these are all remunerative themes, if one has the
art to make them so. But it is hard to imagine a man taking more
trouble to make less of them than Mr. Harrison has done. He is bitten
with the mania of being picturesque at any cost, in season and out, and
on this errand he indulges in the most fantastic escapades. His
writing, half the time, reads like a repulsive rehash of the sort of
literature to which Mr. G. A. Sala and Mr. Hepworth Dixon have
accustomed us, and of which the London <i>Telegraph</i> is the classic
exponent. We have but to open him at random for an illustration.
"Venetian women are not pretty if one sees them squinting, arms a-kimbo,
behind their booth-counters, inhaling the slops and slums of forty
doges. They look like brunettes of Eblis. Their gibble-gabble is
incessant. A little of the silent vaccine of Turkey might be introduced
to advantage into the national carcass." What does Mr. Harrison mean,
elsewhere, by "the rugged facts, the red-hot soberness, the telescopic
vividness to which Hawthorne clings, as to the Pillars of Hercules"?
What does he mean by calling Paul Veronese "that Taine of Italians"?
What profit does he find in winding up an incoherent rhapsody about
Hawthorne's Miriam, "whose character has the purple opaqueness of
clouded amethyst," with the statement that in the contours of the Faun
of Praxiteles "there is focalized the whole of an extinct civilization,
there is unsphered from the mere pictorial symbol the glorious
fearlessness and freedom and energy that triremed the whole
Mediterranean and hamstrung the monarchy of Xerxes"? What is he
thinking of when he calls Lord Byron "the stereopticon of British
poets"? What does he mean, above all, by producing such an unsavory
passage as that on page 38, relative to what he calls the "flowery
vices" of Lady Byron? The taste of such stuff as this strikes us as
simply depraved; neither reason nor imagination has anything to do with
it.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr291</locdoc><milestone n=291> faculty for turning his topics upside
down and grasping them by the wrong handle. The reader fairly rubs his
eyes when he stumbles upon such lines as these, touching Alfred de
Musset: "His romance, `Confessions of a Child of the Time,' is written
with great and uncommon excellence. . . . The cheerful realism of the
man has made him almost as great a favorite as Reuter with his
countrymen beyond the Rhine. More than any French writer, he recalls
Goethe, strangely enough; then a gleam of Rabelaisian fun reveals his
intimacy with the French humorists of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries." De Musset's "cheerful realism" and his analogy with Reuter,
Goethe, and Rabelais are points which we hardly expected to live to see
expatiated upon. Mr. Harrison's fault is not simply that he is too
fervid and florid and fanciful; but he is astride of the wrong horse
altogether, his foundations are quite unsound. He gives us a long
rhapsody on the Swedish poet Bellmann, whom we do not know, but whom he
declares a most delightful genius. This is excellent; but it will
hardly be believed that in support of his eulogy he does not offer a
single specimen of his author, a scrap, a line of quotation. He talks
to equally vain purpose of the Provenal poet Jasmin. A few grains of
example substituted for his great redundancy of precept would in each
case have been welcome. Mr. Harrison is too fond of his own rhetorical
flourishes to sacrifice one of them to his subject, and his subjects
therefore, <i>qu</i> subjects, fare very badly. If we seem to be taking his
indiscretions unduly hard, it is that he seems to us really to have a
literary gift which ought to be turned to better account.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, June 10,
1875
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=15>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr292</locdoc><milestone n=292>
<p> <i>Gilbert Haven</i> (15)
<p> <i>Our Next-Door Neighbor: A Winter in Mexico</i>. By Gilbert
Haven. New York: Harper & Bros., 1875.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr293</locdoc><milestone n=293> we add that Mr. Haven's tone is
inordinately ignorant, bigoted, flippant, conceited, and ill-conditioned
generally, we perhaps complete the sketch of the most offensive literary
personality it has lately been our fortune to encounter.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr294</locdoc><milestone n=294> fanatical and wise as Wendell
Phillips, the wisest man as well as the most eloquent of his generation,
could they but look on these Mexican pictures." "Take heed in time," the
author eloquently adds, "and let Christianity have its perfect work, or
anti-Christianity will have its."
<p>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.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, July 8,
1875
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=16>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr295</locdoc><milestone n=295>
<p> <i>Julian Hawthorne</i> (16)
<p> Julian Hawthorne, <i>Idolatry: A Romance</i>. Boston: J. R. Osgood
& Co., 1874.
<p>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 <i>ex officio</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr296</locdoc><milestone n=296> robust faculty of expression,
and, in especial, an idea. The idea -- an attempted apprehension,
namely, of the conflict between the love in which the spirit, and the
love in which sense is uppermost -- was an interesting one, and gave the
tale, with all its crudities, a rather striking appearance of gravity.
Its gravity was not agreeable, however, and the general impression of
the book, apart from its faults of taste and execution, was decidedly
sinister. Judged simply as an attempt, nevertheless, it did no dishonor
to hereditary tradition; it was a glance toward those dusky
psychological realms from which the author of The Scarlet Letter evoked
his fantastic shadows.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr297</locdoc><milestone n=297> grotesques of
thought, as we may call them, with which the fancy that produced the
Twice-Told Tales loved so well to play. Further in the story the author
shows us his hero walking forth from the passionate commission of a
great crime (he has just thrown a man overboard from the Boston and New
York steamer), and beginning to tingle with the consciousness of guilt.
He is addressed caressingly by a young girl who is leaning into the
street from a window, and it immediately occurs to him that (never
having had the same fortune before) her invitation has some mysterious
relation to his own lapse from virtue. This is, generically, just such
an incident as plays up into every page of the late Mr. Hawthorne's
romances, although it must be added that in the case of particular
identity the touch of the author of The House of the Seven Gables would
have had a fineness which is wanting here. We have no desire to push
the analogy too far, and many readers will perhaps feel that to allude
to it at all is to give Mr. Julian Hawthorne the benefit of one's good-
will on too easy terms. He resembles his father in having a great deal
of imagination and in exerting it in ingenious and capricious forms:
but, in fact, the mold, as might have been feared, is so loose and rough
that it often seems to offer us but a broad burlesque of Mr. Hawthorne's
exquisite fantasies. To relate in a few words the substance of Idolatry
would require a good deal of ingenuity; it would require a good deal on
our own part, in especial, to glaze over our imperfect comprehension of
the mysteries of the plot. It is a purely fantastic tale, and deals
with a hero, Balder Helwyse by name, whose walking costume, in the
streets of Boston, consists of a black velveteen jacket and tights, high
boots, a telescope, and a satchel; and of a heroine, by name Gnulemah,
the fashion of whose garments is yet more singular, and who has spent
her twenty years in the precincts of an Egyptian temple on the Hudson
River. This is a singular couple, but there are stranger things still
in the volume, and we mean no irony whatsoever when we say they must be
read at first-hand to be appreciated. Mr. Hawthorne has proposed to
himself to write a prodigiously strange story, and he has thoroughly
succeeded. He is probably perfectly aware that it is a very easy story
to give a comical account of, and serenely prepared to be assured on all
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr298</locdoc><milestone n=298> sides that such people, such places, and such doings are
preposterously impossible. This, in fact, is no criticism of his book,
which, save at a certain number of points, where he deals rather too
profusely in local color, pursues its mysterious aim on a line quite
distinct from reality. It is indiscreet, artistically, in a work in
which enchanted rings and Egyptian temples and avenging thunderbolts
play so prominent a part, to bring us face to face with the Tremont
House, the Beacon Hill Bank in School Street, the Empire State
steamboat, and the "sumptuous residence in Brooklyn" -- fatal
combination! -- of Mrs. Glyphic's second husband. We do not in the
least object, for amusement's sake, to Dr. Glyphic's miniature Egypt on
the North River; but we should prefer to approach it through the air, as
it were, and not by a conveyance which literally figures in a time-
table. Mr. Hawthorne's story is purely imaginative, and this fact,
which by some readers may be made its reproach, is, to our sense, its
chief recommendation. An author, if he feels it in him, has a perfect
right to write a fairy-tale. Of course he is bound to make it
entertaining, and if he can also make it mean something more than it
seems to mean on the surface, he doubly justifies himself. It must be
confessed that when one is confronted with a fairy-tale as bulky as the
volume before us, one puts forward in self-defense a few vague
reflections. Such a production may seem on occasion a sort of <i>reductio
ad absurdum</i> of the exaggerated modern fashion of romancing. One
wonders whether pure fiction is not running away with the human mind,
and operating as a kind of leakage in the evolution of thought. If one
decides, as we, for our part, have decided, that though there is
certainly a terrible number too many novels written, yet the novel
itself is an excellent thing, and a possible vehicle of an infinite
amount of wisdom, one will find no fault with a romance for being
frankly romantic, and only demand of it, as one does of any other book,
that it be good of its kind. In fact, as matters stand just now, the
presumption seems to us to be rather in favor of something finely
audacious in the line of fiction. Let a novelist of the proper
temperament shoot high by all means, we should say, and see what he
brings down. Mr. Hawthorne shoots very high indeed, and bags some
strangely feathered game; but, to be perfectly frank, we </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr299</locdoc><milestone n=299> have
been more impressed with his length of range than with his good luck.
Idolatry, we take it, is an allegory, and the fantastic fable but the
gayly figured vestment of a poised and rounded moral. We are haunted as
we read by an uncomfortable sense of allegorical intention; episodes and
details are so many exact correspondences to the complexities of a moral
theme, and the author, as he goes, is constantly drawing an incidental
lesson in a light, fantastic way, and tracing capricious symbolisms and
analogies. If the value of these, it must be said, is a measure of the
value of the central idea, those who, like ourselves, have failed to
read between the lines have not suffered an irreparable loss. We have
not, really, the smallest idea of what Idolatry is about. Who is the
idol and who is the idolizer? What is the enchanted ring and what the
fiddle of Manetho? What is the latent propriety of Mr. MacGentle's
singular attributes, and what is shadowed forth in the blindness of
Gnulemah? What does Salome stand for, and what does the hoopoe
symbolize? We give it up, after due reflection; but we give it up with
a certain kindness for the author, disappointing as he is. He is
disappointing because his second novel is on the whole more juvenile
than his first, and he makes us wonder whether he has condemned himself
to perpetual immaturity. But he has a talent which it would be a great
pity to see come to nothing. On the side of the imagination he is
distinctly the son of his illustrious father. He has a vast amount of
fancy; though we must add that it is more considerable in quantity than
in quality, and finer, as we may say, than any use he makes of it. He
has a commendable tendency to large imaginative conceptions, of which
there are several noticeable specimens in the present volume. The whole
figure of Balder Helwyse, in spite of its crudities of execution, is a
handsome piece of fantasy, and there is something finely audacious in
his interview with Manetho in the perfect darkness, in its catastrophe,
and in the general circumstances of his meeting with Gnulemah.
Gnulemah's antecedents and mental attitude are a matter which it
required much ingenuity to conceive and much courage to attempt to
render. Mr. Hawthorne writes, moreover, with a conscience of his own,
and his tale has evidently been, from his own point of view, elaborately
and carefully worked out. Above all, he </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr300</locdoc><milestone n=300> writes, even when he
writes ill, with remarkable vigor and energy; he has what is vulgarly
called "go," and his book is pervaded by a grateful suggestion of high
animal spirits. He is that excellent thing, a story-teller with a
temperament. A temperament, however, if it is a good basis, is not much
more, and Mr. Hawthorne has a hundred faults of taste to unlearn. Our
advice to him would be not to mistrust his active imagination, but
religiously to respect it, and, using the term properly, to cultivate
it. He has vigor and resolution; let him now supply himself with
culture -- a great deal of it.
<p> <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, December
1874
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr300</locdoc><milestone n=300> <i>Saxon Studies.</i> By Julian Hawthorne. Boston: J. R. Osgood &
Co., 1876.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr301</locdoc><milestone n=301> itself. It must
have a graceful, agreeable, and pliable spirit to reward us for the
extra steps we take. But Mr. Hawthorne has quite violated this canon
and has been fanciful only to be acrimonious, and reflective only to be
-- it is not too strong a word -- unwholesome. He has written a
<i>brooding</i> book, with all the defects and none of the charms of the
type. His reveries are ill-natured, and his ingenuity is all
vituperative.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr302</locdoc><milestone n=302> charge, and the reader would have been glad to
have the author go a little into the psychology of the matter, or at
least into the history of his opinion -- offer a few anecdotes, a few
examples of Saxon selfishness, help us to know more exactly what he
means. But Mr. Hawthorne is always sweeping and always vague. We can
recall but two definite statements in his volume -- that bearing upon
the fact that the Germans, indoors, are pitifully ignorant of the charms
of pure air, and the other upon the even more regrettable circumstance
that they condemn their women to an infinite amount of hard labor. Here
is an example of some of the reflections provoked in Mr. Hawthorne by
the first-mentioned of these facts: "As might be imagined, such lung-
food as this gets the native complexion into no enviable state; in fact,
until I had examined for myself the mixture of paste and blotches which
here passes for faces, I had not conceived what were the capacities for
evil of the human skin. I have heard it said -- inconsiderately -- that
the best side of the Saxon was his outside; that the more deeply one
penetrated into him, the more offensive he became. But I think the
worst damnation that the owner of one of these complexions could be
afflicted with would be the correspondence of his interior with his
exterior man."
<p>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. </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr303</locdoc><milestone n=303> Upon those other
valuable sources of one's knowledge of a foreign country -- the
theatre, literature, the press, the arts -- Mr. Hawthorne is entirely
dumb. The only literary allusion that his volume contains is the
observation that the relation of Schiller and Goethe to the Germans of
the present day may be described as sublimity reflected in mud-puddles.
The absence of those influences to which we have alluded makes `Saxon
Studies' seem unduly trivial and even rather puerile. It gives us the
feeling that the author has nursed his dislikes and irritations in a
dark closet, that he has never put them forth into the open air, never
discussed and compared and intelligently verified them. This -- and not
at all the fact that they <i>are</i> dislikes -- is the weak point of Mr.
Hawthorne's volume. He had a perfect right to detest the Saxons, and
our strictures are made not in the least in defence of this eminent
people, but simply in that of good literature. We are extremely sorry,
indeed, that so lively an aversion should not have been better served in
expression. Even if Mr. Hawthorne had made the Saxon vices much more
vivid, and his irritation much more intelligible, we should still find
fault with his spirit. It is the spirit which sees the very small
things and ignores the large ones -- which gives more to fancy than to
observation, and more to resentment than to reflection.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, March 30,
1876
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr303</locdoc><milestone n=303> <i>Garth</i>. By Julian Hawthorne. New York: D. Appleton & Co.,
1877.
<p>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' </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr304</locdoc><milestone n=304> there is something strangely
sophomorical. What we spoke of just now as puzzling is the fact that,
in spite of this unripe tone, Mr. Hawthorne continues to remind us of a
genius as finished and mellow as his illustrious father's. His
imagination belongs to the same family as that which produced the `House
of the Seven Gables'; and the resemblance is singular, considering the
marked tendency of talent in the second generation to "react" rather
than to move on in the same line. Mr. Julian Hawthorne, who is
doubtless weary of being contrasted with his father, has not the
latter's profundity or delicacy; but he looks at things in the same way
-- from the imagination, and not from observation -- and he is equally
fond of symbolisms and fanciful analogies. He has a merit, indeed,
which his father lacked; though it must be added that the presence of
the quality is not always a virtue or its absence always a defect.
There is a kind of positive masculinity in `Garth,' a frank indication
of pleasure in the exercise of the senses, which makes the book contrast
agreeably with that type of fiction, much of it pervaded, as it were, by
the rustle of petticoats, in which the imagination is as dry as a
squeezed sponge. `Garth' is a very long story, and we have not the
space to recite its various entanglements. Like many of Nathaniel
Hawthorne's tales, it is the history of a house -- an old human dwelling
which serves as the central figure of the story. A house, in being
founded and erected, has involved bloodshed and wrong, and its future
inhabitants have had to expiate these things in perplexity and
suffering. Such, briefly expressed, is the idea of Mr. Julian
Hawthorne's novel. It is a very pretty, picturesque idea, but it is not
what we should call a "strong" subject and strikes us as not necessarily
involving any very direct portraiture of reality. Such portraiture the
author has not given us; what he has given us is a bit of picturesque
romance, lodged in a New England village, which remains gracefully vague
and unobtrusive. He deserves credit for what he has attempted in the
figure of his hero; for it is kinder to speak of Garth Urmson as an
attempt than as a success. The attempt, however, was difficult,
inasmuch as the author's design was to represent a hero with a strongly
brutal side which should be, potentially, as disagreeable as his moral
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr305</locdoc><milestone n=305> side was noble and beautiful. Mr. Julian Hawthorne's taste is
constantly at fault, and he has thrown too much misdirected gusto into
the portrayal of young Urmson's scowlings and snortings, his ferocity,
his taciturnity, and his bad manners. It was an odd idea, too, to have
made him an artist; we confess to having here quite lost the thread of
Mr. Hawthorne's intention. Garth begins by thinking that art is
"irreverent" and that he must therefore leave it alone; but he gets over
this and takes up the brushes, which he handles with great success in
the attic of the village house above mentioned. The author has
evidently meant him for a pugilistic young Puritan who mistrusts
aesthetics; but he has indicated the contradiction too much and
described the struggle too little. We remain under the impression that
Garth harnessed the family horse better than he painted pictures. He is
surrounded by a great many figures which will not strike the usual
reader as "natural," but which are all ingenious and touched by a
certain imaginative coloring. Mr. Hawthorne cares for types, evidently,
and he has suggested various types with a good deal of fanciful truth.
His greatest success, perhaps, is with Golightly Urmson, the wicked
uncle of the hero, who represents plausible rascality as against
innocent and unvarnished virility. Mr. Hawthorne, as we said just now,
has something indefinably immature and provincial in his tone; but he
has two or three merits which make us believe that with the lapse of
time he will do things much better than `Garth.' He has an imagination -
- a rare gift. With Mr. Hawthorne it is unmistakable; he sees
everything in the imaginative light, and his fancy sports and
experiments with a warranted confidence in its strength. He has also a
literary ideal, and this long and complicated story of `Garth' has
evidently been composed with a great deal of care, reflection, and
artistic intention. The author's great fault, we should say, is a want
of observation. The absence of observation in these pages amounts,
indeed, to a positive quality. Why should Mr. Sam Kineo, the
fashionable young sharper who is represented as having passed muster in
the most "fashionable circles" of Europe, always express himself in the
English of a newsboy or a bootblack? But the manners and customs of Mr.
Julian Hawthorne's <i>dramatis personae</i> are </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr306</locdoc><milestone n=306> throughout very
surprising. The graceful heroine, for instance, while on a visit to the
house of the interesting hero, is invited to clean out the cellar!
<p> <i>Nation</i>, June 21,
1877
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=17>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr307</locdoc><milestone n=307>
<p> <i>Nathaniel Hawthorne</i> (17)
<p> <i>Passages from the French and Italian Note-Books of Nathaniel
Hawthorne</i>. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1872.
<p>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.
<p>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 <i>per se</i>. 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; </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr308</locdoc><milestone n=308> but from beginning to
end they cast no faintest shadow upon the purity of his peculiar gift.
Our own sole complaint has been not that they should have been
published, but that there are not a dozen volumes more. The truth is
that Mr. Hawthorne belonged to the race of magicians, and that his
genius took its nutriment as insensibly -- to our vision -- as the
flowers take the dew. He was the last man to have attempted to explain
himself, and these pages offer no adequate explanation of him. They
show us one of the gentlest, lightest, and most leisurely of observers,
strolling at his ease among foreign sights in blessed intellectual
irresponsibility, and weaving his chance impressions into a tissue as
smooth as fireside gossip. Mr. Hawthorne had what belongs to genius --
a style individual and delightful; he seems to have written as well for
himself as he did for others -- to have written from the impulse to keep
up a sort of literary tradition in a career singularly devoid of the air
of professional authorship; but, as regards substance, his narrative
flows along in a current as fitfully diffuse and shallow as a regular
correspondence with a distant friend -- a friend familiar but not
intimate -- sensitive but not exacting. With all allowance for
suppressions, his entries are never confidential; the author seems to
have been reserved even with himself. They are a record of things
slight and usual. Some of the facts noted are incredibly minute; they
imply a peculiar <i>leisure</i> of attention. How little his journal was the
receptacle of Mr. Hawthorne's deeper feelings is indicated by the fact
that during a long and dangerous illness of his daughter in Rome, which
he speaks of later as "a trouble that pierced into his very vitals," he
never touched his pen.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr309</locdoc><milestone n=309> and
nobly cheerful, so verdant, so sweetly shadowed, and so presided over by
the stately minster and surrounded by the ancient and comely habitations
of Christian men.'' The book is full, nevertheless, of the same spirit
of serene, detached contemplation; equally full of refined and gently
suggestive description. Excessively detached Mr. Hawthorne remains,
from the first, from Continental life, touching it throughout
mistrustfully, shrinkingly, and at the rare points at which he had, for
the time, unlearnt his nationality. The few pages describing his
arrival in France betray the irreconcilable foreignness of his instincts
with a frank simplicity which provokes a smile. "Nothing really thrives
here," he says of Paris; "man and vegetables have but an artificial
life, like flowers stuck in a little mould, but never taking root." The
great city had said but little to him; he was deaf to the Parisian
harmonies. Just so it is under protest, as it were, that he looks at
things in Italy. The strangeness, the remoteness, the Italianism of
manners and objects, seem to oppress and confound him. He walks about
bending a puzzled, ineffective gaze at things, full of a mild, genial
desire to apprehend and penetrate, but with the light wings of his fancy
just touching the surface of the massive consistency of fact about him,
and with an air of good-humored confession that he is too simply an idle
Yankee <i>flneur</i> to conclude on such matters. The main impression
produced by his observations is that of his simplicity. They spring not
only from an unsophisticated, but from an excessively natural mind.
Never, surely, was a man of literary genius less a man of letters. He
looks at things as little as possible in that composite historic light
which forms the atmosphere of many imaginations. There is something
extremely pleasing in this simplicity, within which the character of the
man rounds itself so completely and so firmly. His judgments abound in
common sense; touched as they often are by fancy, they are never
distorted by it. His errors and illusions never impugn his fundamental
wisdom; even when (as is almost the case in his appreciation of works of
art) they provoke a respectful smile, they contain some saving particle
of sagacity. Fantastic romancer as he was, he here refutes conclusively
the common charge that he was either a melancholy or a morbid genius.
He had a native relish for the picturesque </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr310</locdoc><milestone n=310> greys and browns of
life; but these pages betray a childlike evenness and clearness of
intellectual temper. Melancholy lies deeper than the line on which his
fancy moved. Toward the end of his life, we believe, his cheerfulness
gave way; but was not this in some degree owing to a final sense of the
inability of his fancy to grope with fact? -- fact having then grown
rather portentous and overshadowing.
<p>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 <i>eagerness</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr311</locdoc><milestone n=311> and statues of Italy were
a heavy burden upon his conscience; though indeed, in a manner, his
conscience bore them lightly -- it being only at the end of three months
of his Roman residence that he paid his respects to the
"Transfiguration," and a month later that he repaired to the Sistine
Chapel. He was not, we take it, without taste; but his taste was not
robust. He is "willing to accept Raphael's violin-player as a good
picture"; but he prefers "Mr. Brown," the American landscapist, to
Claude. He comes to the singular conclusion that "the most delicate, if
not the highest, charm of a picture is evanescent, and that we continue
to admire pictures prescriptively and by tradition, after the qualities
that first won them their fame have vanished." The "most delicate charm"
to Mr. Hawthorne was apparently simply the primal freshness and
brightness of paint and varnish, and -- not to put too fine a point upon
it -- the new gilding of the frame. "Mr. Thompson," too, shares his
admiration with Mr. Brown: "I do not think there is a better painter . .
. living -- among Americans at least; not one so earnest, faithful, and
religious in his worship of art. I had rather look at his pictures than
at any, except the very old masters; and taking into consideration only
the comparative pleasure to be derived, I would not except more than one
or two of those." From the statues, as a general thing, he derives
little profit. Every now and then he utters a word which seems to
explain his indifference by the Cis-Atlantic remoteness of his point of
view. He remains unreconciled to the nudity of the marbles. "I do not
altogether see the necessity of our sculpturing another nakedness. Man
is no longer a naked animal; his clothes are as natural to him as his
skin, and we have no more right to undress him than to flay him." This
is the sentiment of a man to whom sculpture was a sealed book; though,
indeed, in a momentary "burst of confidence," as Mr. Dickens says, he
pronounces the Pompey of the Spada Palace "worth the whole sculpture
gallery of the Vatican"; and when he gets to Florence, gallantly loses
his heart to the Venus de' Medici and pays generous tribute to Michael
Angelo's Medicean sepulchres. He has indeed, throughout, that mark of
the man of genius that he may at any moment surprise you by some
extremely happy "hit," as when he detects at a glance, apparently,
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr312</locdoc><milestone n=312> the want of force in Andrea del Sarto, or declares in the
Florentine cathedral that "any little Norman church in England would
impress me as much and more. There is something, I do not know what,
but it is in the region of the heart, rather than in the intellect, that
Italian architecture, of whatever age or style, never seems to reach."
It is in his occasional sketches of the persons -- often notabilities --
whom he meets that his perception seems finest and firmest. We lack
space to quote, in especial, a notice of Miss Bremer and of a little
tea-party of her giving, in a modest Roman chamber overhanging the
Tarpeian Rock, in which in a few kindly touches the Swedish romancer is
herself suffused with the atmosphere of romance, and relegated to quaint
and shadowy sisterhood with the inmates of the "House of the Seven
Gables."
<p>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 <i>vettura</i>, 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:
<p>"This evening I have been on the tower-top star-gazing and
looking at the comet which waves along the sky like an </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr313</locdoc><milestone n=313> immense
feather of flame. Over Florence there was an illuminated atmosphere,
caused by the lights of the city gleaming upward into the mists which
sleep and dream above that portion of the valley as well of the rest of
it. I saw dimly, or fancied I saw, the Hill of Fiesole, on the other
side of Florence, and remembered how ghostly lights were seen passing
thence to the Duomo on the night when Lorenzo the Magnificent died.
From time to time the sweet bells of Florence rang out, and I was loath
to come down into the lower world, knowing that I shall never again look
heavenward from an old tower-top, in such a soft calm evening as this."
<p>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. </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr314</locdoc><milestone n=314> This image deepens that tender
personal regard which it is the constant effect of these volumes to
produce.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, March 14,
1872
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=18>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr315</locdoc><milestone n=315>
<p> <i>HAWTHORNE</i>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr319</locdoc><milestone n=319>
<p> <i>Early Years</i> (18)
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr320</locdoc><milestone n=320> general flatness of the literary field that surrounds him,
there is also, to a spectator, something almost touching in his
situation. He was so modest and delicate a genius that we may fancy him
appealing from the lonely honour of a representative attitude --
perceiving a painful incongruity between his imponderable literary
baggage and the large conditions of American life. Hawthorne on the one
side is so subtle and slender and unpretending, and the American world
on the other is so vast and various and substantial, that it might seem
to the author of <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> and the <i>Mosses from an Old
Manse</i>, that we render him a poor service in contrasting his proportions
with those of a great civilization. But our author must accept the
awkward as well as the graceful side of his fame; for he has the
advantage of pointing a valuable moral. This moral is that the flower
of art blooms only where the soil is deep, that it takes a great deal of
history to produce a little literature, that it needs a complex social
machinery to set a writer in motion. American civilization has hitherto
had other things to do than to produce flowers, and before giving birth
to writers it has wisely occupied itself with providing something for
them to write about. Three or four beautiful talents of trans-Atlantic
growth are the sum of what the world usually recognises, and in this
modest nosegay the genius of Hawthorne is admitted to have the rarest
and sweetest fragrance.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr321</locdoc><milestone n=321>
air of New England seems to blow through his pages, and these, in the
opinion of many people, are the medium in which it is most agreeable to
make the acquaintance of that tonic atmosphere. As to whether it is
worth while to seek to know something of New England in order to extract
a more intimate quality from <i>The House of Seven Gables</i> and <i>The
Blithedale Romance</i>, I need not pronounce; but it is certain that a
considerable observation of the society to which these productions were
more directly addressed is a capital preparation for enjoying them. I
have alluded to the absence in Hawthorne of that quality of realism
which is now so much in fashion, an absence in regard to which there
will of course be more to say; and yet I think I am not fanciful in
saying that he testifies to the sentiments of the society in which he
flourished almost as pertinently (proportions observed) as Balzac and
some of his descendants -- MM. Flaubert and Zola -- testify to the
manners and morals of the French people. He was not a man with a
literary theory; he was guiltless of a system, and I am not sure that he
had ever heard of Realism, this remarkable compound having (although it
was invented some time earlier) come into general use only since his
death. He had certainly not proposed to himself to give an account of
the social idiosyncrasies of his fellow-citizens, for his touch on such
points is always light and vague, he has none of the apparatus of an
historian, and his shadowy style of portraiture never suggests a rigid
standard of accuracy. Nevertheless he virtually offers the most vivid
reflection of New England life that has found its way into literature.
His value in this respect is not diminished by the fact that he has not
attempted to portray the usual Yankee of comedy, and that he has been
almost culpably indifferent to his opportunities for commemorating the
variations of colloquial English that may be observed in the New World.
His characters do not express themselves in the dialect of the <i>Biglow
Papers</i> -- their language indeed is apt to be too elegant, too delicate.
They are not portraits of actual types, and in their phraseology there
is nothing imitative. But none the less, Hawthorne's work savours
thoroughly of the local soil -- it is redolent of the social system in
which he had his being.
<p>This could hardly fail to be the case, when the man himself
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr322</locdoc><milestone n=322> was so deeply rooted in the soil. Hawthorne sprang from the
primitive New England stock; he had a very definite and conspicuous
pedigree. He was born at Salem, Massachusetts, on the 4th of July,
1804, and his birthday was the great American festival, the anniversary
of the Declaration of national Independence. (note-ch18-1, see page 337)
Hawthorne was in his disposition an unqualified and unflinching
American; he found occasion to give us the measure of the fact during
the seven years that he spent in Europe toward the close of his life;
and this was no more than proper on the part of a man who had enjoyed
the honour of coming into the world on the day on which of all the days
in the year the great Republic enjoys her acutest fit of self-
consciousness. Moreover, a person who has been ushered into life by the
ringing of bells and the booming of cannon (unless indeed he be
frightened straight out of it again by the uproar of his awakening)
receives by this very fact an injunction to do something great,
something that will justify such striking natal accompaniments.
Hawthorne was by race of the clearest Puritan strain. His earliest
American ancestor (who wrote the name "Hathorne" -- the shape in which
it was transmitted to Nathaniel, who inserted the <i>w</i>,) was the younger
son of a Wiltshire family, whose residence, according to a note of our
author's in 1837, was "Wigcastle, Wigton." Hawthorne, in the note in
question, mentions the gentleman who was at that time the head of the
family; but it does not appear that he at any period renewed
acquaintance with his English kinsfolk. Major William Hathorne came out
to Massachusetts in the early years of the Puritan settlement; in 1635
or 1636, according to the note to which I have just alluded; in 1630
according to information presumably more accurate. He was one of the
band of companions of the virtuous and exemplary </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr323</locdoc><milestone n=323> John Winthrop,
the almost lifelong royal Governor of the young colony, and the
brightest and most amiable figure in the early Puritan annals. How
amiable William Hathorne may have been I know not, but he was evidently
of the stuff of which the citizens of the Commonwealth were best advised
to be made. He was a sturdy fighting man, doing solid execution upon
both the inward and outward enemies of the State. The latter were the
savages, the former the Quakers; the energy expended by the early
Puritans in resistance to the tomahawk not weakening their disposition
to deal with spiritual dangers. They employed the same -- or almost the
same -- weapons in both directions; the flintlock and the halberd
against the Indians, and the cat-o'-nine-tails against the heretics.
One of the longest, though by no means one of the most successful, of
Hawthorne's shorter tales (<i>The Gentle Boy</i>) deals with this pitiful
persecution of the least aggressive of all schismatic bodies. William
Hathorne, who had been made a magistrate of the town of Salem, where a
grant of land had been offered him as an inducement to residence,
figures in New England history as having given orders that "Anne Coleman
and four of her friends" should be whipped through Salem, Boston, and
Dedham. This Anne Coleman, I suppose, is the woman alluded to in that
fine passage in the Introduction to <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, in which
Hawthorne pays a qualified tribute to the founder of the American branch
of his race: --
<p>"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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr324</locdoc><milestone n=324> in
the church; he had all the Puritanic traits, both good and evil. He was
likewise a bitter persecutor, as witness the Quakers, who have
remembered him in their histories, and relate an incident of his hard
severity towards a woman of their sect which will last longer, it is to
be feared, than any of his better deeds, though these were many."
<p>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 <i>The Salem Farms</i> in Longfellow's <i>New England
Tragedies</i>. 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 <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr325</locdoc><milestone n=325> race for some time back would
argue to exist -- may be now and henceforth removed." The two first
American Hathornes had been people of importance and responsibility; but
with the third generation the family lapsed into an obscurity from which
it emerged in the very person of the writer who begs so gracefully for a
turn in its affairs. It is very true, Hawthorne proceeds, in the
Introduction to <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, that from the original point of
view such lustre as he might have contrived to confer upon the name
would have appeared more than questionable.
<p>"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."
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr326</locdoc><milestone n=326> old Salem
worthies. To him as to them, the consciousness of <i>sin</i> was the most
importunate fact of life, and if they had undertaken to write little
tales, this baleful substantive, with its attendant adjective, could
hardly have been more frequent in their pages than in those of their
fanciful descendant. Hawthorne had moreover in his composition,
contemplator and dreamer as he was, an element of simplicity and
rigidity, a something plain and masculine and sensible, which might have
kept his black-browed grandsires on better terms him than he admits to
be possible. However little they might have appreciated the artist,
they would have approved of the man. The play of Hawthorne's intellect
was light and capricious, but the man himself was firm and rational.
The imagination was profane, but the temper was not degenerate.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr327</locdoc><milestone n=327> during the war
of Independence. His father, from whom he was named, was also a
shipmaster, and he died in foreign lands, in the exercise of his
profession. He was carried off by a fever, at Surinam, in 1808. He
left three children, of whom Nathaniel was the only boy. The boy's
mother, who had been a Miss Manning, came of a New England stock almost
as long-established as that of her husband; she is described by our
author's biographer as a woman of remarkable beauty, and by an authority
whom he quotes, as being "a minute observer of religious festivals," of
"feasts, fasts, new-moons, and Sabbaths." Of feasts the poor lady in her
Puritanic home can have had but a very limited number to celebrate; but
of new-moons, she may be supposed to have enjoyed the usual, and of
Sabbaths even more than the usual, proportion.
<p>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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr328</locdoc><milestone n=328> to a Toledo
and a Verona, Salem has a physiognomy in which the past plays a more
important part than the present. It is of course a very recent past;
but one must remember that the dead of yesterday are not more alive than
those of a century ago. I know not of what picturesqueness Hawthorne
was conscious in his respectable birthplace; I suspect his perception of
it was less keen than his biographer assumes it to have been; but he
must have felt at least that of whatever complexity of earlier life
there had been in the country, the elm-shadowed streets of Salem were a
recognisable memento. He has made considerable mention of the place,
here and there, in his tales; but he has nowhere dilated upon it very
lovingly, and it is noteworthy that in <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i>,
the only one of his novels of which the scene is laid in it, he has by
no means availed himself of the opportunity to give a description of it.
He had of course a filial fondness for it -- a deep-seated sense of
connection with it; but he must have spent some very dreary years there,
and the two feelings, the mingled tenderness and rancour, are visible in
the Introduction to <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>.
<p>"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."
<p>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; </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr329</locdoc><milestone n=329> that he is weary
of the old wooden houses, the mud and the dust, the dead level of site
and sentiment, the chill east wind, and the chilliest of social
atmospheres; -- all these and whatever faults besides he may see or
imagine, are nothing to the purpose. The spell survives, and just as
powerfully as if the natal spot were an earthly paradise." There is a
very American quality in this perpetual consciousness of a spell on
Hawthorne's part; it is only in a country where newness and change and
brevity of tenure are the common substance of life, that the fact of
one's ancestors having lived for a hundred and seventy years in a single
spot would become an element of one's morality. It is only an
imaginative American that would feel urged to keep reverting to this
circumstance, to keep analysing and cunningly considering it.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr330</locdoc><milestone n=330> coast-towns, scattered along the
great sea-face of New England, and of which the list is completed by the
names of Portsmouth, Plymouth, New Bedford, Newburyport, Newport --
superannuated centres of the traffic with foreign lands, which have seen
their trade carried away from them by the greater cities. As Hawthorne
says, their ventures have gone "to swell, needlessly and imperceptibly,
the mighty flood of commerce at New York or Boston." Salem, at the
beginning of the present century, played a great part in the Eastern
trade; it was the residence of enterprising shipowners who despatched
their vessels to Indian and Chinese seas. It was a place of large
fortunes, many of which have remained, though the activity that produced
them has passed away. These successful traders constituted what
Hawthorne calls "the aristocratic class." He alludes in one of his
slighter sketches (<i>The Sister Years</i>) to the sway of this class and the
"moral influence of wealth" having been more marked in Salem than in any
other New England town. The sway, we may believe, was on the whole
gently exercised, and the moral influence of wealth was not exerted in
the cause of immorality. Hawthorne was probably but imperfectly
conscious of an advantage which familiarity had made stale -- the fact
that he lived in the most democratic and most virtuous of modern
communities. Of the virtue it is but civil to suppose that his own
family had a liberal share; but not much of the wealth, apparently, came
into their way. Hawthorne was not born to a patrimony, and his income,
later in life, never exceeded very modest proportions.
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr331</locdoc><milestone n=331> almost in duty bound to do, a very good
case in favour of Hawthorne's having been an interesting child. He was
not at any time what would be called a sociable man, and there is
therefore nothing unexpected in the fact that he was fond of long walks
in which he was not known to have had a companion. "Juvenile
literature" was but scantily known at that time, and the enormous and
extraordinary contribution made by the United States to this department
of human happiness was locked in the bosom of futurity. The young
Hawthorne, therefore, like many of his contemporaries, was constrained
to amuse himself, for want of anything better, with the <i>Pilgrim's
Progress</i> and the <i>Faery Queen</i>. A boy may have worse company than
Bunyan and Spenser, and it is very probable that in his childish rambles
our author may have had associates of whom there could be no record.
When he was nine years old he met with an accident at school which
threatened for a while to have serious results. He was struck on the
foot by a ball and so severely lamed that he was kept at home for a long
time, and had not completely recovered before his twelfth year. His
school, it is to be supposed, was the common day-school of New England -
- the primary factor in that extraordinarily pervasive system of
instruction in the plainer branches of learning, which forms one of the
principal ornaments of American life. In 1818, when he was fourteen
years old, he was taken by his mother to live in the house of an uncle,
her brother, who was established in the town of Raymond, near Lake
Sebago, in the State of Maine. The immense State of Maine, in the year
1818, must have had an even more magnificently natural character than it
possesses at the present day, and the uncle's dwelling, in consequence
of being in a little smarter style than the primitive structures that
surrounded it, was known by the villagers as Manning's Folly. Mr.
Lathrop pronounces this region to be of a "weird and woodsy" character;
and Hawthorne, later in life, spoke of it to a friend as the place where
"I first got my cursed habits of solitude." The outlook, indeed, for an
embryonic novelist, would not seem to have been cheerful; the social
dreariness of a small New England community lost amid the forests of
Maine, at the beginning of the present century, must have been
consummate. But for a boy with a relish for solitude </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr332</locdoc><milestone n=332> there
were many natural resources, and we can understand that Hawthorne should
in after years have spoken very tenderly of this episode. "I lived in
Maine like a bird of the air, so perfect was the freedom I enjoyed."
During the long summer days he roamed, gun in hand, through the great
woods, and during the moonlight nights of winter, says his biographer,
quoting another informant, "he would skate until midnight, all alone,
upon Sebago Lake, with the deep shadows of the icy hills on either
hand."
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr333</locdoc><milestone n=333>
has several distinguished names. Among Hawthorne's fellow-students was
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who divides with our author the honour of
being the most distinguished of American men of letters. I know not
whether Mr. Longfellow was especially intimate with Hawthorne at this
period (they were very good friends later in life), but with two of his
companions he formed a friendship which lasted always. One of these was
Franklin Pierce, who was destined to fill what Hawthorne calls "the most
august position in the world." Pierce was elected President of the
United States in 1852. The other was Horatio Bridge, who afterwards
served with distinction in the Navy, and to whom the charming prefatory
letter of the collection of tales published under the name of <i>The Snow
Image</i>, is addressed. "If anybody is responsible at this day for my
being an author it is yourself. I know not whence your faith came; but
while we were lads together at a country college -- gathering
blueberries in study-hours under those tall Academic pines; or watching
the great logs as they tumbled along the current of the Androscoggin; or
shooting pigeons and grey squirrels in the woods; or bat-fowling in the
summer twilight; or catching trout in that shadowy little stream which,
I suppose, is still wandering riverward through the forest -- though you
and I will never cast a line in it again -- two idle lads, in short (as
we need not fear to acknowledge now), doing a hundred things the Faculty
never heard of, or else it had been worse for us -- still it was your
prognostic of your friend's destiny that he was to be a writer of
fiction." That is a very pretty picture, but it is a picture of happy
urchins at school, rather than of undergraduates "panting," as Macaulay
says, "for one and twenty." Poor Hawthorne was indeed thousands of miles
away from Oxford and Cambridge; that touch about the blueberries and the
logs on the Androscoggin tells the whole story, and strikes the note, as
it were, of his circumstances. But if the pleasures at Bowdoin were not
expensive, so neither were the penalties. The amount of Hawthorne's
collegiate bill for one term was less than 4<i>l</i>., and of this sum more
than 9<i>s</i>. was made up of fines. The fines, however, were not heavy.
Mr. Lathrop prints a letter addressed by the President to "Mrs.
Elizabeth C. Hathorne," requesting her co-operation with the officers of
this </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr334</locdoc><milestone n=334> college, "in the attempt to induce your son faithfully to
observe the laws of this institution." He has just been fined fifty
cents for playing cards for money during the preceding term. "Perhaps
he might not have gamed," the Professor adds, "were it not for the
influence of a student whom we have dismissed from college." The
biographer quotes a letter from Hawthorne to one of his sisters, in
which the writer says, in allusion to this remark, that it is a great
mistake to think that he has been led away by the wicked ones. "I was
fully as willing to play as the person he suspects of having enticed me,
and would have been influenced by no one. I have a great mind to
commence playing again, merely to show him that I scorn to be seduced by
another into anything wrong." There is something in these few words that
accords with the impression that the observant reader of Hawthorne
gathers of the personal character that underlay his duskily-sportive
imagination -- an impression of simple manliness and transparent
honesty.
<p>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.
<p> "The ocean hath its silent caves,
<p> Deep, quiet and alone.
<p> Though there be fury on the waves,
<p> Beneath them there is none."
<p> 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 <i>Fanshawe</i>, 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
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr335</locdoc><milestone n=335> boyish period. It was issued anonymously, but he so repented
of his venture that he annihilated the edition, of which, according to
Mr. Lathrop, "not half a dozen copies are now known to be extant." I
have seen none of these rare volumes, and I know nothing of <i>Fanshawe</i>
but what the writer just quoted relates. It is the story of a young
lady who goes in rather an odd fashion to reside at "Harley College"
(equivalent of Bowdoin), under the care and guardianship of Dr. Melmoth,
the President of the institution, a venerable, amiable, unworldly, and
henpecked, scholar. Here she becomes very naturally an object of
interest to two of the students; in regard to whom I cannot do better
than quote Mr. Lathrop. One of these young men "is Edward Wolcott, a
wealthy, handsome, generous, healthy young fellow from one of the
seaport towns; and the other Fanshawe, the hero, who is a poor but
ambitious recluse, already passing into a decline through overmuch
devotion to books and meditation. Fanshawe, though the deeper nature of
the two, and intensely moved by his new passion, perceiving that a union
between himself and Ellen could not be a happy one, resigns the hope of
it from the beginning. But circumstances bring him into intimate
relation with her. The real action of the book, after the
preliminaries, takes up only some three days, and turns upon the attempt
of a man named Butler to entice Ellen away under his protection, then
marry her, and secure the fortune to which she is heiress. This scheme
is partly frustrated by circumstances, and Butler's purpose towards
Ellen thus becomes a much more sinister one. From this she is rescued
by Fanshawe, and knowing that he loves her, but is concealing his
passion, she gives him the opportunity and the right to claim her hand.
For a moment the rush of desire and hope is so great that he hesitates;
then he refuses to take advantage of her generosity, and parts with her
for a last time. Ellen becomes engaged to Wolcott, who had won her
heart from the first; and Fanshawe, sinking into rapid consumption, dies
before his class graduates." The story must have had a good deal of
innocent lightness; and it is a proof of how little the world of
observation lay open to Hawthorne, at this time, that he should have had
no other choice than to make his little drama go forward between the
rather naked walls of </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr336</locdoc><milestone n=336> Bowdoin, where presence of his heroine
was an essential incongruity. He was twenty-four years old, but the
"world," in its social sense, had not disclosed itself to him. He had,
however, already, at moments, a very pretty writer's touch, as witness
this passage, quoted by Mr. Lathrop, and which is worth transcribing.
The heroine has gone off with the nefarious Butler, and the good Dr.
Melmoth starts in pursuit of her, attended by young Wolcott.
<p>"`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.'
<p>"`I took some thought for that matter, reverend knight,'
replied Edward, whose imagination was highly tickled by Dr. Melmoth's
chivalrous comparison.
<p>"`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.'
<p>"`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.'
<p>"`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?'
<p>"`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.'
<p>"`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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr337</locdoc><milestone n=337> for whose sake I must take
heed to my safety. But, lo! who rides yonder?'"
<p>On leaving college Hawthorne had gone back to live at Salem.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr337</locdoc><milestone n=337>-fn
<p>(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 <i>A Study of Hawthorne</i>, 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.
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=19>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr338</locdoc><milestone n=338>
<p>
<p> <i>Early Manhood</i> (19)
<p>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: --
<p>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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr339</locdoc><milestone n=339> when I may call myself famous and
prosperous! -- when I am happy too."
<p>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 <i>Revue des Deux Mondes</i>,
in the year 1860, invents for our author the appellation of "Un
Romancier Pessimiste." Superficially speaking, perhaps, the title
is a </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr340</locdoc><milestone n=340> happy one; but only superficially. Pessimism
consists in having morbid and bitter views and theories about
human nature; not in indulging in shadowy fancies and conceits.
There is nothing whatever to show that Hawthorne had any such
doctrines or convictions; certainly, the note of depression, of
despair, of the disposition to undervalue the human race, is
never sounded in his Diaries. These volumes contain the record
of very few convictions or theories of any kind; they move with
curious evenness, with a charming, graceful flow, on a level
which lies above that of a man's philosophy. They adhere with
such persistence to this upper level that they prompt the reader
to believe that Hawthorne had no appreciable philosophy at all --
no general views that were in the least uncomfortable. They are
the exhibition of an unperplexed intellect. I said just now that
the development of Hawthorne's mind was not towards sadness; and
I should be inclined to go still further, and say that his mind
proper -- his mind in so far as it was a repository of opinions
and articles of faith -- had no development that it is of
especial importance to look into. What had a development was his
imagination -- that delicate and penetrating imagination which
was always at play, always entertaining itself, always engaged in
a game of hide and seek in the region in which it seemed to him
that the game could best be played -- among the shadows and
substructions, the dark-based pillars and supports, of our moral
nature. Beneath this movement and ripple of his imagination --
as free and spontaneous as that of the sea surface -- lay
directly his personal affections. These were solid and strong,
but, according to my impression, they had the place very much to
themselves.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr341</locdoc><milestone n=341> fifty years ago;
and when we think of a young man of beautiful genius, with a love
of literature and romance, of the picturesque, of style and form
and colour, trying to make a career for himself in the midst of
them, compassion for the young man becomes our dominant
sentiment, and we see the large dry village picture in perhaps
almost too hard a light. It seems to me then that it was
possibly a blessing for Hawthorne that he was not expansive and
inquisitive, that he lived much to himself and asked but little
of his <i>milieu</i>. If he had been exacting and ambitious, if his
appetite had been large and his knowledge various, he would
probably have found the bounds of Salem intolerably narrow. But
his culture had been of a simple sort -- there was little of any
other sort to be obtained in America in those days, and though he
was doubtless haunted by visions of more suggestive
opportunities, we may safely assume that he was not to his own
perception the object of compassion that he appears to a critic
who judges him after half a century's civilization has filtered
into the twilight of that earlier time. If New England was
socially a very small place in those days, Salem was a still
smaller one; and if the American tone at large was intensely
provincial, that of New England was not greatly helped by having
the best of it. The state of things was extremely natural, and
there could be now no greater mistake than to speak of it with a
redundancy of irony. American life had begun to constitute
itself from the foundations; it had begun to <i>be</i>, simply; it was
at an immeasurable distance from having begun to enjoy. I
imagine there was no appreciable group of people in New England
at that time proposing to itself to enjoy life; this was not an
undertaking for which any provision had been made, or to which
any encouragement was offered. Hawthorne must have vaguely
entertained some such design upon destiny; but he must have felt
that his success would have to depend wholly upon his own
ingenuity. I say he must have proposed to himself to enjoy,
simply because he proposed to be an artist, and because this
enters inevitably into the artist's scheme. There are a thousand
ways of enjoying life, and that of the artist is one of the most
innocent. But for all that, it connects itself with the idea of
pleasure. He proposes to give pleasure, and to give it he must
first get it. Where he gets it will depend </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr342</locdoc><milestone n=342> upon
circumstances, and circumstances were not encouraging to
Hawthorne.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr343</locdoc><milestone n=343> empirical enough; he was one
of, at most, some dozen Americans who had taken up literature as
a profession. The profession in the United States is still very
young, and of diminutive stature; but in the year 1830 its head
could hardly have been seen above ground. It strikes the
observer of to-day that Hawthorne showed great courage in
entering a field in which the honours and emoluments were so
scanty as the profits of authorship must have been at that time.
I have said that in the United States at present authorship is a
pedestal, and literature is the fashion; but Hawthorne's history
is a proof that it was possible, fifty years ago, to write a
great many little masterpieces without becoming known. He begins
the preface to the <i>Twice-Told Tales</i> by remarking that he was
"for many years the obscurest man of letters in America." When
once this work obtained recognition, the recognition left little
to be desired. Hawthorne never, I believe, made large sums of
money by his writings, and the early profits of these charming
sketches could not have been considerable; for many of them,
indeed, as they appeared in journals and magazines, he had never
been paid at all; but the honour, when once it dawned -- and it
dawned tolerably early in the author's career -- was never
thereafter wanting. Hawthorne's countrymen are solidly proud of
him, and the tone of Mr. Lathrop's <i>Study</i> is in itself
sufficient evidence of the manner in which an American
story-teller may in some cases look to have his eulogy
pronounced.
<p>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 <i>Fanshawe</i> he
produced a group of short stories entitled <i>Seven Tales of my
Native Land</i>, 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
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr344</locdoc><milestone n=344> published were unsuccessful, and at last, in a fit of
irritation and despair, the young author burned the manuscript.
<p>2 There is probably something autobiographic in the striking
little tale of <i>The Devil in Manuscript</i>. "They have been
offered to seventeen publishers," says the hero of that sketch in
regard to a pile of his own lucubrations.
<p>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."
<p>4 But though the <i>Seven Tales</i> were not printed, Hawthorne
proceeded to write others that were; the two collections of the
<i>Twice-Told Tales</i>, and the <i>Snow Image</i>, 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 <i>Souvenirs</i>." 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr345</locdoc><milestone n=345> pleasure itself of
composition, an enjoyment not at all amiss in its way, and
perhaps essential to the merit of the work in hand, but which in
the long run will hardly keep the chill out of a writer's heart,
or the numbness out of his fingers." These words occur in the
preface attached in 1851 to the second edition of the <i>Twice-Told
Tales</i>; <i> propos</i> of which I may say that there is always a
charm in Hawthorne's prefaces which makes one grateful for a
pretext to quote from them. At this time <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>
had just made his fame, and the short tales were certain of a
large welcome; but the account he gives of the failure of the
earlier edition to produce a sensation (it had been published in
two volumes, at four years apart), may appear to contradict my
assertion that, though he was not recognised immediately, he was
recognised betimes. In 1850, when <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> appeared,
Hawthorne was forty-six years old, and this may certainly seem a
long-delayed popularity. On the other hand, it must be
remembered that he had not appealed to the world with any great
energy. The <i>Twice-Told Tales</i>, charming as they are, do not
constitute a very massive literary pedestal. As soon as the author,
resorting to severer measures, put forth <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>, the
public ear was touched and charmed, and after that it was held to the
end. "Well it might have been!" the reader will exclaim. "But what a
grievous pity that the dulness of this same organ should have operated
so long as a deterrent, and by making Hawthorne wait till he was nearly
fifty to publish his first novel, have abbreviated by so much his
productive career!" The truth is, he cannot have been in any very high
degree ambitious; he was not an abundant producer, and there was
manifestly a strain of generous indolence in his composition. There was
a loveable want of eagerness about him. Let the encouragement offered
have been what it might, he had waited till he was lapsing from middle-
life to strike his first noticeable blow; and during the last ten years
of his career he put forth but two complete works, and the fragment of a
third.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr346</locdoc><milestone n=346> title of <i>The Boston Token and
Atlantic Souvenir</i>. The editor of this graceful repository was S. G.
Goodrich, a gentleman who, I suppose, may be called one of the pioneers
of American periodical literature. He is better known to the world as
Mr. Peter Parley, a name under which he produced a multitude of popular
school-books, story-books, and other attempts to vulgarize human
knowledge and adapt it to the infant mind. This enterprising purveyor
of literary wares appears, incongruously enough, to have been
Hawthorne's earliest protector, if protection is the proper word for the
treatment that the young author received from him. Mr. Goodrich induced
him in 1836 to go to Boston to edit a periodical in which he was
interested, <i>The American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining
Knowledge</i>. I have never seen the work in question, but Hawthorne's
biographer gives a sorry account of it. It was managed by the so-called
Bewick Company, which "took its name from Thomas Bewick, the English
restorer of the art of wood-engraving, and the magazine was to do his
memory honour by his admirable illustrations. But in fact it never did
any one honour, nor brought any one profit. It was a penny popular
affair, containing condensed information about innumerable subjects, no
fiction, and little poetry. The woodcuts were of the crudest and most
frightful sort. It passed through the hands of several editors and
several publishers. Hawthorne was engaged at a salary of five hundred
dollars a year; but it appears that he got next to nothing, and did not
stay in the position long." Hawthorne wrote from Boston in the winter of
1836: "I came here trusting to Goodrich's positive promise to pay me
forty-five dollars as soon as I arrived; and he has kept promising from
one day to another, till I do not see that he means to pay at all. I
have now broke off all intercourse with him, and never think of going
near him. . . . . I don't feel at all obliged to him about the
editorship, for he is a stockholder and director in the Bewick Company .
. . . and I defy them to get another to do for a thousand dollars, what
I do for five hundred." -- "I make nothing," he says in another letter,
"of writing a history or biography before dinner." Goodrich proposed to
him to write a <i>Universal History</i> for the use of schools, offering him
a hundred dollars for his share in the work. Hawthorne </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr347</locdoc><milestone n=347>
accepted the offer and took a hand -- I know not how large a one -- in
the job. His biographer has been able to identify a single phrase as
our author's. He is speaking of George IV: "Even when he was quite a
young man this King cared as much about dress as any young coxcomb. He
had a great deal of taste in such matters, and it is a pity that he was
a King, for he might otherwise have made an excellent tailor." The
<i>Universal History</i> had a great vogue and passed through hundreds of
editions; but it does not appear that Hawthorne ever received more than
his hundred dollars. The writer of these pages vividly remembers making
its acquaintance at an early stage of his education -- a very fat,
stumpy-looking book, bound in boards covered with green paper, and
having in the text very small woodcuts, of the most primitive sort. He
associates it to this day with the names of Sesostris and Semiramis
whenever he encounters them, there having been, he supposes, some
account of the conquests of these potentates that would impress itself
upon the imagination of a child. At the end of four months, Hawthorne
had received but twenty dollars -- four pounds -- for his editorship of
the <i>American Magazine</i>.
<p>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 <i>Twice-Told Tales</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr348</locdoc><milestone n=348> has of necessity a relish
for detail; his business is to multiply points of characterisation. Mr.
Lathrop tells us that our author "had little communication with even the
members of his family. Frequently his meals were brought and left at
his locked door, and it was not often that the four inmates of the old
Herbert Street mansion met in family circle. He never read his stories
aloud to his mother and sisters. . . . It was the custom in this
household for the several members to remain very much by themselves; the
three ladies were perhaps nearly as rigorous recluses as himself, and,
speaking of the isolation which reigned among them, Hawthorne once said,
`We do not even <i>live</i> at our house!'" It is added that he was not in
the habit of going to church. This is not a lively picture, nor is that
other sketch of his daily habits much more exhilarating, in which Mr.
Lathrop affirms that though the statement that for several years "he
never saw the sun" is entirely an error, yet it is true that he stirred
little abroad all day and "seldom chose to walk in the town except at
night." In the dusky hours he took walks of many miles along the coast,
or else wandered about the sleeping streets of Salem. These were his
pastimes, and these were apparently his most intimate occasions of
contact with life. Life, on such occasions, was not very exuberant, as
any one will reflect who has been acquainted with the physiognomy of a
small New England town after nine o'clock in the evening. Hawthorne,
however, was an inveterate observer of small things, and he found a
field for fancy among the most trivial accidents. There could be no
better example of this happy faculty than the little paper entitled
"Night Sketches," included among the <i>Twice-Told Tales</i>. This small
dissertation is about nothing at all, and to call attention to it is
almost to overrate its importance. This fact is equally true, indeed,
of a great many of its companions, which give even the most appreciative
critic a singular feeling of his own indiscretion -- almost of his own
cruelty. They are so light, so slight, so tenderly trivial, that simply
to mention them is to put them in a false position. The author's claim
for them is barely audible, even to the most acute listener. They are
things to take or to leave -- to enjoy, but not to talk about. Not to
read them would be to do them an injustice (to read them is essentially
to relish them), but to bring the </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr349</locdoc><milestone n=349> machinery of criticism to
bear upon them would be to do them a still greater wrong. I must
remember, however, that to carry this principle too far would be to
endanger the general validity of the present little work -- a
consummation which it can only be my desire to avert. Therefore it is
that I think it permissible to remark that in Hawthorne, the whole class
of little descriptive effusions directed upon common things, to which
these just-mentioned Night Sketches belong, have a greater charm than
there is any warrant for in their substance. The charm is made up of
the spontaneity, the personal quality, of the fancy that plays through
them, its mingled simplicity and subtlety, its purity and its
<i>bonhomie</i>. The Night Sketches are simply the light, familiar record of
a walk under an umbrella, at the end of a long, dull, rainy day, through
the sloppy, ill-paved streets of a country town, where the rare gas-
lamps twinkle in the large puddles, and the blue jars in the druggist's
window shine through the vulgar drizzle. One would say that the
inspiration of such a theme could have had no great force, and such
doubtless was the case; but out of the Salem puddles, nevertheless,
springs, flower-like, a charming and natural piece of prose.
<p>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 <i>memoranda</i>.
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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr350</locdoc><milestone n=350> minute and often trivial chronicle. For a person desiring
information about him at any cost, it is valuable; it sheds a vivid
light upon his character, his habits, the nature of his mind. But we
find ourselves wondering what was its value to Hawthorne himself. It is
in a very partial degree a register of impressions, and in a still
smaller sense a record of emotions. Outward objects play much the
larger part in it; opinions, convictions, ideas pure and simple, are
almost absent. He rarely takes his Note-Book into his confidence or
commits to its pages any reflections that might be adapted for
publicity; the simplest way to describe the tone of these extremely
objective journals is to say that they read like a series of very
pleasant, though rather dullish and decidedly formal, letters, addressed
to himself by a man who, having suspicions that they might be opened in
the post, should have determined to insert nothing compromising. They
contain much that is too futile for things intended for publicity;
whereas, on the other hand, as a receptacle of private impressions and
opinions, they are curiously cold and empty. They widen, as I have
said, our glimpse of Hawthorne's mind (I do not say that they elevate
our estimate of it), but they do so by what they fail to contain, as
much as by what we find in them. Our business for the moment, however,
is not with the light that they throw upon his intellect, but with the
information they offer about his habits and his social circumstances.
<p>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 <i>Transformation</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr351</locdoc><milestone n=351> American reads
between the lines -- he completes the suggestions -- he constructs a
picture. I think I am not guilty of any gross injustice in saying that
the picture he constructs from Hawthorne's American diaries, though by
no means without charms of its own, is not, on the whole, an interesting
one. It is characterised by an extraordinary blankness -- a curious
paleness of colour and paucity of detail. Hawthorne, as I have said,
has a large and healthy appetite for detail, and one is therefore the
more struck with the lightness of the diet to which his observation was
condemned. For myself, as I turn the pages of his journals, I seem to
see the image of the crude and simple society in which he lived. I use
these epithets, of course, not invidiously, but descriptively; if one
desire to enter as closely as possible into Hawthorne's situation, one
must endeavour to reproduce his circumstances. We are struck with the
large number of elements that were absent from them, and the coldness,
the thinness, the blankness, to repeat my epithet, present themselves so
vividly that our foremost feeling is that of compassion for a romancer
looking for subjects in such a field. It takes so many things, as
Hawthorne must have felt later in life, when he made the acquaintance of
the denser, richer, warmer European spectacle -- it takes such an
accumulation of history and custom, such a complexity of manners and
types, to form a fund of suggestion for a novelist. If Hawthorne had
been a young Englishman, or a young Frenchman of the same degree of
genius, the same cast of mind, the same habits, his consciousness of the
world around him would have been a very different affair; however
obscure, however reserved, his own personal life, his sense of the life
of his fellow-mortals would have been almost infinitely more various.
The negative side of the spectacle on which Hawthorne looked out, in his
contemplative saunterings and reveries, might, indeed, with a little
ingenuity, be made almost ludicrous; one might enumerate the items of
high civilization, as it exists in other countries, which are absent
from the texture of American life, until it should become a wonder to
know what was left. No State, in the European sense of the word, and
indeed barely a specific national name. No sovereign, no court, no
personal loyalty, no aristocracy, no church, no clergy, no army, no
diplomatic service, no country gentlemen, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr352</locdoc><milestone n=352> no palaces, no
castles, nor manors, nor old country-houses, nor parsonages, nor
thatched cottages nor ivied ruins; no cathedrals, nor abbeys, nor little
Norman churches; no great Universities nor public schools -- no Oxford,
nor Eton, nor Harrow; no literature, no novels, no museums, no pictures,
no political society, no sporting class -- no Epsom nor Ascot! Some
such list as that might be drawn up of the absent things in American
life -- especially in the American life of forty years ago, the effect
of which, upon an English or a French imagination, would probably as a
general thing be appalling. The natural remark, in the almost lurid
light of such an indictment, would be that if these things are left out,
everything is left out. The American knows that a good deal remains;
what it is that remains -- that is his secret, his joke, as one may say.
It would be cruel, in this terrible denudation, to deny him the
consolation of his national gift, that "American humour" of which of
late years we have heard so much.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr353</locdoc><milestone n=353> tail;
in still another he remarks, in a paragraph by itself -- "The aromatic
odor of peat-smoke, in the sunny autumnal air is very pleasant." The
reader says to himself that when a man turned thirty gives a place in
his mind -- and his inkstand -- to such trifles as these, it is because
nothing else of superior importance demands admission. Everything in
the Notes indicates a simple, democratic, thinly-composed society; there
is no evidence of the writer finding himself in any variety or intimacy
of relations with any one or with anything. We find a good deal of
warrant for believing that if we add that statement of Mr. Lathrop's
about his meals being left at the door of his room, to rural rambles of
which an impression of the temporary phases of the local apple-crop were
the usual, and an encounter with an organ-grinder, or an eccentric dog,
the rarer, outcome, we construct a rough image of our author's daily
life during the several years that preceded his marriage. He appears to
have read a good deal, and that he must have been familiar with the
sources of good English we see from his charming, expressive, slightly
self-conscious, cultivated, but not too cultivated, style. Yet neither
in these early volumes of his Note-Books, nor in the later, is there any
mention of his reading. There are no literary judgments or impressions
-- there is almost no allusion to works or to authors. The allusions to
individuals of any kind are indeed much less numerous than one might
have expected; there is little psychology, little description of
manners. We are told by Mr. Lathrop that there existed at Salem during
the early part of Hawthorne's life "a strong circle of wealthy
families," which "maintained rigorously the distinctions of class," and
whose "entertainments were splendid, their manners magnificent." This is
a rather pictorial way of saying that there were a number of people in
the place -- the commercial and professional aristocracy, as it were --
who lived in high comfort and respectability, and who, in their small
provincial way, doubtless had pretensions to be exclusive. Into this
delectable company Mr. Lathrop intimates that his hero was free to
penetrate. It is easy to believe it, and it would be difficult to
perceive why the privilege should have been denied to a young man of
genius and culture, who was very good-looking (Hawthorne must have been
in these days, judging by his appearance later </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr354</locdoc><milestone n=354> in life, a
strikingly handsome fellow), and whose American pedigree was virtually
as long as the longest they could show. But in fact Hawthorne appears
to have ignored the good society of his native place almost completely;
no echo of its conversation is to be found in his tales or his journals.
Such an echo would possibly not have been especially melodious, and if
we regret the shyness and stiffness, the reserve, the timidity, the
suspicion, or whatever it was, that kept him from knowing what there was
to be known, it is not because we have any very definite assurance that
his gains would have been great. Still, since a beautiful writer was
growing up in Salem, it is a pity that he should not have given himself
a chance to commemorate some of the types that flourished in the richest
soil of the place. Like almost all people who possess in a strong
degree the story-telling faculty, Hawthorne had a democratic strain in
his composition and a relish for the commoner stuff of human nature.
Thoroughly American in all ways, he was in none more so than in the
vagueness of his sense of social distinctions and his readiness to
forget them if a moral or intellectual sensation were to be gained by
it. He liked to fraternise with plain people, to take them on their own
terms, and put himself if possible into their shoes. His Note-Books,
and even his tales, are full of evidence of this easy and natural
feeling about all his unconventional fellow-mortals -- this imaginative
interest and contemplative curiosity -- and it sometimes takes the most
charming and graceful forms. Commingled as it is with his own subtlety
and delicacy, his complete exemption from vulgarity, it is one of the
points in his character which his reader comes most to appreciate --
that reader I mean for whom he is not as for some few, a dusky and
malarious genius.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr355</locdoc><milestone n=355> Hawthorne's general fastidiousness would not express it
quite so artlessly. "A shrewd gentlewoman, who kept a tavern in the
town," he says, in <i>Chippings with a Chisel</i>, "was anxious to obtain two
or three gravestones for the deceased members of her family, and to pay
for these solemn commodities by taking the sculptor to board." This
image of a gentlewoman keeping a tavern and looking out for boarders,
seems, from the point of view to which I allude, not at all incongruous.
It will be observed that the lady in question was shrewd; it was
probable that she was substantially educated, and of reputable life, and
it is certain that she was energetic. These qualities would make it
natural to Hawthorne to speak of her as a gentlewoman; the natural
tendency in societies where the sense of equality prevails, being to
take for granted the high level rather than the low. Perhaps the most
striking example of the democratic sentiment in all our author's tales,
however, is the figure of Uncle Venner, in <i>The House of the Seven
Gables</i>. Uncle Venner is a poor old man in a brimless hat and patched
trousers, who picks up a precarious subsistence by rendering, for a
compensation, in the houses and gardens of the good people of Salem,
those services that are known in New England as "chores." He carries
parcels, splits fire-wood, digs potatoes, collects refuse for the
maintenance of his pigs, and looks forward with philosophic equanimity
to the time when he shall end his days in the almshouse. But in spite
of the very modest place that he occupies in the social scale, he is
received on a footing of familiarity in the household of the far-
descended Miss Pyncheon; and when this ancient lady and her companions
take the air in the garden of a summer evening, he steps into the
estimable circle and mingles the smoke of his pipe with their refined
conversation. This obviously is rather imaginative -- Uncle Venner is a
creation with a purpose. He is an original, a natural moralist, a
philosopher; and Hawthorne, who knew perfectly what he was about in
introducing him -- Hawthorne always knew perfectly what he was about --
wished to give in his person an example of humorous resignation and of a
life reduced to the simplest and homeliest elements, as opposed to the
fantastic pretensions of the antiquated heroine of the story. He wished
to strike a certain exclusively human and personal note. He knew that
for this </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr356</locdoc><milestone n=356> purpose he was taking a licence; but the point is that
he felt he was not indulging in any extravagant violation of reality.
Giving in a letter, about 1830, an account of a little journey he was
making in Connecticut, he says, of the end of a seventeen miles' stage,
that "in the evening, however, I went to a Bible-class with a very
polite and agreeable gentleman, whom I afterwards discovered to be a
strolling tailor of very questionable habits."
<p>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
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr357</locdoc><milestone n=357> variety of social types and of settled heads under which he
may be easily and conveniently pigeon-holed, he is to a certain extent a
wonder and a mystery. An Englishman, a Frenchman -- a Frenchman above
all -- judges quickly, easily, from his own social standpoint, and makes
an end of it. He has not that rather chilly and isolated sense of moral
responsibility which is apt to visit a New Englander in such processes;
and he has the advantage that his standards are fixed by the general
consent of the society in which he lives. A Frenchman, in this respect,
is particularly happy and comfortable, happy and comfortable to a degree
which I think is hardly to be over-estimated; his standards being the
most definite in the world, the most easily and promptly appealed to,
and the most identical with what happens to be the practice of the
French genius itself. The Englishman is not quite so well off, but he
is better off than his poor interrogative and tentative cousin beyond
the seas. He is blessed with a healthy mistrust of analysis, and hair-
splitting is the occupation he most despises. There is always a little
of the Dr. Johnson in him, and Dr. Johnson would have had wofully little
patience with that tendency to weigh moonbeams which in Hawthorne was
almost as much a quality of race as of genius; albeit that Hawthorne has
paid to Boswell's hero (in the chapter on "Lichfield and Uttoxeter," in
his volume on England), a tribute of the finest appreciation. American
intellectual standards are vague, and Hawthorne's countrymen are apt to
hold the scales with a rather uncertain hand and a somewhat agitated
conscience.
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=20>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr358</locdoc><milestone n=358>
<p>
<p> <i>Early Writings</i> (20)
<p>The second volume of the <i>Twice-Told Tales</i> was published in
1845, in Boston; and at this time a good many of the stories which were
afterwards collected into the <i>Mosses from an Old Manse</i> had already
appeared, chiefly in <i>The Democratic Review</i>, 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
<i>Twice-Told Tales</i> at once. During the same year Hawthorne edited an
interesting volume, the <i>Journals of an African Cruiser</i>, 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: --
<p>"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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr359</locdoc><milestone n=359> wondering why it did not know
me sooner, or whether it would ever know me at all -- at least till I
were in my grave. And sometimes it seems to me as if I were already in
the grave, with only life enough to be chilled and benumbed. But
oftener I was happy -- at least as happy as I then knew how to be, or
was aware of the possibility of being. By and by the world found me out
in my lonely chamber and called me forth -- not indeed with a loud roar
of acclamation, but rather with a still small voice -- and forth I went,
but found nothing in the world I thought preferable to my solitude till
now. . . . . And now I begin to understand why I was imprisoned so many
years in this lonely chamber, and why I could never break through the
viewless bolts and bars; for if I had sooner made my escape into the
world, I should have grown hard and rough, and been covered with earthly
dust, and my heart might have become callous by rude encounters with the
multitude. . . . . But living in solitude till the fulness of time was
come, I still kept the dew of my youth and the freshness of my heart. .
. . . I used to think that I could imagine all passions, all feelings,
and states of the heart and mind; but how little did I know! . . . .
Indeed, we are but shadows; we are not endowed with real life, and all
that seems most real about us is but the thinnest substance of a dream -
- till the heart be touched. That touch creates us -- then we begin to
be -- thereby we are beings of reality and inheritors of eternity."
<p>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 <i>Twice-Told</i> series to his old college friend, Longfellow, who
had already laid, solidly, the foundation of his great poetic </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr360</locdoc><milestone n=360>
reputation, and at the time of his sending it had written him a letter
from which it will be to our purpose to quote a few lines: --
<p>"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."
<p>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 <i>Twice-Told Tales</i>,
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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr361</locdoc><milestone n=361> his attempts, and very
imperfectly successful ones, to open an intercourse with the world." We
are speaking here of small things, it must be remembered -- of little
attempts, little sketches, a little world. But everything is relative,
and this smallness of scale must not render less apparent the
interesting character of Hawthorne's efforts. As for the <i>Twice-Told
Tales</i> themselves, they are an old story now; every one knows them a
little, and those who admire them particularly have read them a great
many times. The writer of this sketch belongs to the latter class, and
he has been trying to forget his familiarity with them, and ask himself
what impression they would have made upon him at the time they appeared,
in the first bloom of their freshness, and before the particular
Hawthorne-quality, as it may be called, had become an established, a
recognised and valued, fact. Certainly, I am inclined to think, if one
had encountered these delicate, dusky flowers in the blossomless garden
of American journalism, one would have plucked them with a very tender
hand; one would have felt that here was something essentially fresh and
new; here, in no extraordinary force or abundance, but in a degree
distinctly appreciable, was an original element in literature. When I
think of it, I almost envy Hawthorne's earliest readers; the sensation
of opening upon <i>The Great Carbuncle</i>, <i>The Seven Vagabonds</i>, or <i>The
Threefold Destiny</i> in an American annual of forty years ago, must have
been highly agreeable.
<p>Among these shorter things (it is better to speak of the whole
collection, including the <i>Snow Image</i>, and the <i>Mosses from an Old
Manse</i> 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 <i>Malvin's Burial</i>,
<i>Rappaccini's Daughter</i>, and <i>Young Goodman Brown</i> 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 <i>The Grey
Champion</i>, <i>The Maypole of Merry Mount</i>, and the four beautiful <i>Legends
of the Province House</i>, as they are called, are the most successful
specimens. Lastly come the </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr362</locdoc><milestone n=362> slender sketches of actual scenes
and of the objects and manners about him, by means of which, more
particularly, he endeavoured "to open an intercourse with the world,"
and which, in spite of their slenderness, have an infinite grace and
charm. Among these things <i>A Rill from the Town Pump</i>, <i>The Village
Uncle</i>, <i>The Toll-Gatherer's Day</i>, the <i>Chippings with a Chisel</i>, may
most naturally be mentioned. As we turn over these volumes we feel that
the pieces that spring most directly from his fancy, constitute, as I
have said (putting his four novels aside), his most substantial claim to
our attention. It would be a mistake to insist too much upon them;
Hawthorne was himself the first to recognise that. "These fitful
sketches," he says in the preface to the <i>Mosses from an Old Manse</i>,
"with so little of external life about them, yet claiming no profundity
of purpose -- so reserved even while they sometimes seem so frank --
often but half in earnest, and never, even when most so, expressing
satisfactorily the thoughts which they profess to image -- such trifles,
I truly feel, afford no solid basis for a literary reputation." This is
very becomingly uttered; but it may be said, partly in answer to it, and
partly in confirmation, that the valuable element in these things was
not what Hawthorne put into them consciously, but what passed into them
without his being able to measure it -- the element of simple genius,
the quality of imagination. This is the real charm of Hawthorne's
writing -- this purity and spontaneity and naturalness of fancy. For
the rest, it is interesting to see how it borrowed a particular colour
from the other faculties that lay near it -- how the imagination, in
this capital son of the old Puritans, reflected the hue of the more
purely moral part, of the dusky, overshadowed conscience. The
conscience, by no fault of its own, in every genuine offshoot of that
sombre lineage, lay under the shadow of the sense of <i>sin</i>. This
darkening cloud was no essential part of the nature of the individual;
it stood fixed in the general moral heaven under which he grew up and
looked at life. It projected from above, from outside, a black patch
over his spirit, and it was for him to do what he could with the black
patch. There were all sorts of possible ways of dealing with it; they
depended upon the personal temperament. Some natures would let it lie
as it fell, and contrive to be tolerably </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr363</locdoc><milestone n=363> comfortable beneath
it. Others would groan and sweat and suffer; but the dusky blight would
remain, and their lives would be lives of misery. Here and there an
individual, irritated beyond endurance, would throw it off in anger,
plunging probably into what would be deemed deeper abysses of depravity.
Hawthorne's way was the best, for he contrived, by an exquisite process,
best known to himself, to transmute this heavy moral burden into the
very substance of the imagination, to make it evaporate in the light and
charming fumes of artistic production. But Hawthorne, of course, was
exceptionally fortunate; he had his genius to help him. Nothing is more
curious and interesting than this almost exclusively <i>imported</i>
character of the sense of sin in Hawthorne's mind; it seems to exist
there merely for an artistic or literary purpose. He had ample
cognizance of the Puritan conscience; it was his natural heritage; it
was reproduced in him; looking into his soul, he found it there. But
his relation to it was only, as one may say, intellectual; it was not
moral and theological. He played with it and used it as a pigment; he
treated it, as the metaphysicians say, objectively. He was not
discomposed, disturbed, haunted by it, in the manner of its usual and
regular victims, who had not the little postern door of fancy to slip
through, to the other side of the wall. It was, indeed, to his
imaginative vision, the great fact of man's nature; the light element
that had been mingled with his own composition always clung to this
rugged prominence of moral responsibility, like the mist that hovers
about the mountain. It was a necessary condition for a man of
Hawthorne's stock that if his imagination should take licence to amuse
itself, it should at least select this grim precinct of the Puritan
morality for its play-ground. He speaks of the dark disapproval with
which his old ancestors, in the case of their coming to life, would see
him trifling himself away as a story-teller. But how far more darkly
would they have frowned could they have understood that he had converted
the very principle of their own being into one of his toys!
<p>It will be seen that I am far from being struck with the
justice of that view of the author of the <i>Twice-Told Tales</i>, which is
so happily expressed by the French critic to whom I alluded at an
earlier stage of this essay. To speak of Hawthorne, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr364</locdoc><milestone n=364> as M.
Emile Montgut does, as a <i>romancier pessimiste</i>, seems to me very much
beside the mark. He is no more a pessimist than an optimist, though he
is certainly not much of either. He does not pretend to conclude, or to
have a philosophy of human nature; indeed, I should even say that at
bottom he does not take human nature as hard as he may seem to do. "His
bitterness," says M. Montgut, "is without abatement, and his bad
opinion of man is without compensation. . . . . His little tales have
the air of confessions which the soul makes to itself; they are so many
little slaps which the author applies to our face." This, it seems to
me, is to exaggerate almost immeasurably the reach of Hawthorne's relish
of gloomy subjects. What pleased him in such subjects was their
picturesqueness, their rich duskiness of colour, their chiaroscuro; but
they were not the expression of a hopeless, or even of a predominantly
melancholy, feeling about the human soul. Such at least is my own
impression. He is to a considerable degree ironical -- this is part of
his charm -- part even, one may say, of his brightness; but he is
neither bitter nor cynical -- he is rarely even what I should call
tragical. There have certainly been story-tellers of a gayer and
lighter spirit; there have been observers more humorous, more hilarious
-- though on the whole Hawthorne's observation has a smile in it oftener
than may at first appear; but there has rarely been an observer more
serene, less agitated by what he sees and less disposed to call things
deeply into question. As I have already intimated, his Note-Books are
full of this simple and almost childlike serenity. That dusky pre-
occupation with the misery of human life and the wickedness of the human
heart which such a critic as M. Emile Montgut talks about, is totally
absent from them; and if we may suppose a person to have read these
Diaries before looking into the tales, we may be sure that such a reader
would be greatly surprised to hear the author described as a
disappointed, disdainful genius. "This marked love of cases of
conscience," says M. Montgut, "this taciturn, scornful cast of mind,
this habit of seeing sin everywhere and hell always gaping open, this
dusky gaze bent always upon a damned world and a nature draped in
mourning, these lonely conversations of the imagination with the
conscience, this pitiless analysis resulting </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr365</locdoc><milestone n=365> from a perpetual
examination of one's self, and from the tortures of a heart closed
before men and open to God -- all these elements of the Puritan
character have passed into Mr. Hawthorne, or to speak more justly, have
<i>filtered</i> into him, through a long succession of generations." This is
a very pretty and very vivid account of Hawthorne, superficially
considered; and it is just such a view of the case as would commend
itself most easily and most naturally to a hasty critic. It is all true
indeed, with a difference; Hawthorne was all that M. Montgut says,
<i>minus</i> the conviction. The old Puritan moral sense, the consciousness
of sin and hell, of the fearful nature of our responsibilities and the
savage character of our Taskmaster -- these things had been lodged in
the mind of a man of Fancy, whose fancy had straightway begun to take
liberties and play tricks with them -- to judge them (Heaven forgive
him!) from the poetic and aesthetic point of view, the point of view of
entertainment and irony. This absence of conviction makes the
difference; but the difference is great.
<p>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 <i>The House of the Seven
Gables</i> 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.
<p>"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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr366</locdoc><milestone n=366> spoke from the pulpit, with power
and fervid eloquence, and with his hand on the open Bible of the sacred
truth of our religion, and of saint-like lives and triumphant deaths,
and of future bliss or misery unutterable, then did Goodman Brown grow
pale, dreading lest the roof should thunder down upon the gray
blasphemer and his hearers. Often, awaking suddenly at midnight, he
shrank from the bosom of Faith; and at morning or eventide, when the
family knelt down at prayer, he scowled and muttered to himself, and
gazed sternly at his wife, and turned away. And when he had lived long,
and was borne to his grave a hoary corpse, followed by Faith, an aged
woman, and children, and grandchildren, a goodly procession, besides
neighbours not a few, they carved no hopeful verse upon his tombstone,
for his dying hour was gloom."
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr367</locdoc><milestone n=367> visible, and the end to which it
operates becomes a matter of indifference. There was but little
literary criticism in the United States at the time Hawthorne's earlier
works were published; but among the reviewers Edgar Poe perhaps held the
scales the highest. He at any rate rattled them loudest, and pretended,
more than any one else, to conduct the weighing-process on scientific
principles. Very remarkable was this process of Edgar Poe's, and very
extraordinary were his principles; but he had the advantage of being a
man of genius, and his intelligence was frequently great. His
collection of critical sketches of the American writers flourishing in
what M. Taine would call his <i>milieu</i> and <i>moment</i>, is very curious and
interesting reading, and it has one quality which ought to keep it from
ever being completely forgotten. It is probably the most complete and
exquisite specimen of <i>provincialism</i> ever prepared for the edification
of men. Poe's judgments are pretentious, spiteful, vulgar; but they
contain a great deal of sense and discrimination as well, and here and
there, sometimes at frequent intervals, we find a phrase of happy
insight imbedded in a patch of the most fatuous pedantry. He wrote a
chapter upon Hawthorne, and spoke of him on the whole very kindly; and
his estimate is of sufficient value to make it noticeable that he should
express lively disapproval of the large part allotted to allegory in his
tales -- in defence of which, he says, "however, or for whatever object
employed, there is scarcely one respectable word to be said. . . . .
The deepest emotion," he goes on, "aroused within us by the happiest
allegory <i>as</i> allegory, is a very, <i>very</i> imperfectly satisfied sense of
the writer's ingenuity in overcoming a difficulty we should have
preferred his not having attempted to overcome. . . . . One thing is
clear, that if allegory ever establishes a fact, it is by dint of
overturning a fiction;" and Poe has furthermore the courage to remark
that the <i>Pilgrim's Progress</i> is a "ludicrously overrated book."
Certainly, as a general thing, we are struck with the ingenuity and
felicity of Hawthorne's analogies and correspondences; the idea appears
to have made itself at home in them easily. Nothing could be better in
this respect than <i>The Snow-Image</i> (a little masterpiece), or <i>The Great
Carbuncle</i>, or <i>Doctor Heidegger's Experiment</i>, or <i>Rappaccini's
Daughter</i>. But in such things as <i>The</i> </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr368</locdoc><milestone n=368> <i>Birth-Mark</i> and <i>The
Bosom-Serpent</i>, we are struck with something stiff and mechanical,
slightly incongruous, as if the kernel had not assimilated its envelope.
But these are matters of light impression, and there would be a want of
tact in pretending to discriminate too closely among things which all,
in one way or another, have a charm. The charm -- the great charm -- is
that they are glimpses of a great field, of the whole deep mystery of
man's soul and conscience. They are moral, and their interest is moral;
they deal with something more than the mere accidents and
conventionalities, the surface occurrences of life. The fine thing in
Hawthorne is that he cared for the deeper psychology, and that, in his
way, he tried to become familiar with it. This natural, yet fanciful
familiarity with it, this air, on the author's part, of being a
confirmed <i>habitu</i> of a region of mysteries and subtleties, constitutes
the originality of his tales. And then they have the further merit of
seeming, for what they are, to spring up so freely and lightly. The
author has all the ease, indeed, of a regular dweller in the moral,
psychological realm; he goes to and fro in it, as a man who knows his
way. His tread is a light and modest one, but he keeps the key in his
pocket.
<p>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 <i>appear</i> picturesque. His
fancy, which was always alive, played a little </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr369</locdoc><milestone n=369> with the
somewhat meagre and angular facts of the colonial period and forthwith
converted a great many of them into impressive legends and pictures.
There is a little infusion of colour, a little vagueness about certain
details, but it is very gracefully and discreetly done, and realities
are kept in view sufficiently to make us feel that if we are reading
romance, it is romance that rather supplements than contradicts history.
The early annals of New England were not fertile in legend, but
Hawthorne laid his hands upon everything that would serve his purpose,
and in two or three cases his version of the story has a great deal of
beauty. <i>The Grey Champion</i> is a sketch of less than eight pages, but
the little figures stand up in the tale as stoutly, at the least, as if
they were propped up on half-a-dozen chapters by a dryer annalist, and
the whole thing has the merit of those cabinet pictures in which the
artist has been able to make his persons look the size of life.
Hawthorne, to say it again, was not in the least a realist -- he was not
to my mind enough of one; but there is no genuine lover of the good city
of Boston but will feel grateful to him for his courage in attempting to
recount the "traditions" of Washington Street, the main thoroughfare of
the Puritan capital. The four <i>Legends of the Province House</i> are
certain shadowy stories which he professes to have gathered in an
ancient tavern lurking behind the modern shop-fronts of this part of the
city. The Province House disappeared some years ago, but while it stood
it was pointed to as the residence of the Royal Governors of
Massachusetts before the Revolution. I have no recollection of it, but
it cannot have been, even from Hawthorne's account of it, which is as
pictorial as he ventures to make it, a very imposing piece of antiquity.
The writer's charming touch, however, throws a rich brown tone over its
rather shallow venerableness; and we are beguiled into believing, for
instance, at the close of <i>Howe's Masquerade</i> (a story of a strange
occurrence at an entertainment given by Sir William Howe, the last of
the Royal Governors, during the siege of Boston by Washington), that
"superstition, among other legends of this mansion, repeats the wondrous
tale that on the anniversary night of Britain's discomfiture the ghosts
of the ancient governors of Massachusetts still glide through the
Province House. And last of all comes a figure shrouded in a </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr370</locdoc><milestone n=370>
military cloak, tossing his clenched hands into the air and stamping
his iron-shod boots upon the freestone steps, with a semblance of
feverish despair, but without the sound of a foot-tramp." Hawthorne had,
as regards the two earlier centuries of New England life, that faculty
which is called now-a-days the historic consciousness. He never sought
to exhibit it on a large scale; he exhibited it indeed on a scale so
minute that we must not linger too much upon it. His vision of the past
was filled with definite images -- images none the less definite that
they were concerned with events as shadowy as this dramatic passing away
of the last of King George's representatives in his long loyal but
finally alienated colony.
<p>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 <i>Twice-Told
Tales</i> (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
<i>conversazione</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr371</locdoc><milestone n=371> paleness . . . . his agitation
was very great; he stood by a table and, taking up some small object
that lay upon it, he found his hand trembling so that he was obliged to
lay it down." It was desirable, certainly, that something should occur
to break the spell of a diffidence that might justly be called morbid.
There is another little sentence dropped by Mr. Lathrop in relation to
this period of Hawthorne's life, which appears to me worth quoting,
though I am by no means sure that it will seem so to the reader. It has
a very simple and innocent air, but to a person not without an
impression of the early days of "culture" in New England, it will be
pregnant with historic meaning. The elder Miss Peabody, who afterwards
was Hawthorne's sister-in-law and who acquired later in life a very
honourable American fame as a woman of benevolence, of learning, and of
literary accomplishment, had invited the Miss Hathornes to come to her
house for the evening, and to bring with them their brother, whom she
wished to thank for his beautiful tales. "Entirely to her surprise,"
says Mr. Lathrop, completing thereby his picture of the attitude of this
remarkable family toward society -- "entirely to her surprise they came.
She herself opened the door, and there, before her, between his sisters,
stood a splendidly handsome youth, tall and strong, with no appearance
whatever of timidity, but instead, an almost fierce determination making
his face stern. This was his resource for carrying off the extreme
inward tremor which he really felt. His hostess brought out Flaxman's
designs for Dante, just received from Professor Felton, of Harvard, and
the party made an evening's entertainment out of them." This last
sentence is the one I allude to; and were it not for fear of appearing
too fanciful I should say that these few words were, to the initiated
mind, an unconscious expression of the lonely frigidity which
characterised most attempts at social recreation in the New England
world some forty years ago. There was at that time a great desire for
culture, a great interest in knowledge, in art, in aesthetics, together
with a very scanty supply of the materials for such pursuits. Small
things were made to do large service; and there is something even
touching in the solemnity of consideration that was bestowed by the
emancipated New England conscience upon little wandering books and
prints, little </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr372</locdoc><milestone n=372> echoes and rumours of observation and
experience. There flourished at that time in Boston a very remarkable
and interesting woman, of whom we shall have more to say, Miss Margaret
Fuller by name. This lady was the apostle of culture, of intellectual
curiosity, and in the peculiarly interesting account of her life,
published in 1852 by Emerson and two other of her friends, there are
pages of her letters and diaries which narrate her visits to the Boston
Athenaeum and the emotions aroused in her mind by turning over
portfolios of engravings. These emotions were ardent and passionate --
could hardly have been more so had she been prostrate with contemplation
in the Sistine Chapel or in one of the chambers of the Pitti Palace.
The only analogy I can recall to this earnestness of interest in great
works of art at a distance from them, is furnished by the great Goethe's
elaborate study of plaster-casts and pencil-drawings at Weimar. I
mention Margaret Fuller here because a glimpse of her state of mind --
her vivacity of desire and poverty of knowledge -- helps to define the
situation. The situation lives for a moment in those few words of Mr.
Lathrop's. The initiated mind, as I have ventured to call it, has a
vision of a little unadorned parlour, with the snow-drifts of a
Massachusetts winter piled up about its windows, and a group of
sensitive and serious people, modest votaries of opportunity, fixing
their eyes upon a bookful of Flaxman's attenuated outlines.
<p>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,
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr373</locdoc><milestone n=373> he appears to have become conscious of a good deal of latent
radicalism in his disposition; he was oppressed with the burden of
antiquity in Europe, and he found himself sighing for lightness and
freshness and facility of change. But these things are relative to the
point of view, and in his own country Hawthorne cast his lot with the
party of conservatism, the party opposed to change and freshness. The
people who found something musty and mouldy in his literary productions
would have regarded this quite as a matter of course; but we are not
obliged to use invidious epithets in describing his political
preferences. The sentiment that attached him to the Democracy was a
subtle and honourable one, and the author of an attempt to sketch a
portrait of him, should be the last to complain of this adjustment of
his sympathies. It falls much more smoothly into his reader's
conception of him than any other would do; and if he had had the
perversity to be a Republican, I am afraid our ingenuity would have been
considerably taxed in devising a proper explanation of the circumstance.
At any rate, the Democrats gave him a small post in the Boston Custom-
house, to which an annual salary of $1,200 was attached, and Hawthorne
appears at first to have joyously welcomed the gift. The duties of the
office were not very congruous to the genius of a man of fancy; but it
had the advantage that it broke the spell of his cursed solitude, as he
called it, drew him away from Salem, and threw him, comparatively
speaking, into the world. The first volume of the American Note-Books
contains some extracts from letters written during his tenure of this
modest office, which indicate sufficiently that his occupations cannot
have been intrinsically gratifying.
<p>"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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr374</locdoc><milestone n=374> with ice, which the
rising and falling of successive tides had left upon them, so that they
looked like immense icicles. Across the water, however, not more than
half a mile off, appeared the Bunker's Hill Monument, and what
interested me considerably more, a church-steeple, with the dial of a
clock upon it, whereby I was enabled to measure the march of the weary
hours. Sometimes I descended into the dirty little cabin of the
schooner, and warmed myself by a red-hot stove, among biscuit-barrels,
pots and kettles, sea-chests, and innumerable lumber of all sorts -- my
olfactories meanwhile being greatly refreshed with the odour of a pipe,
which the captain, or some one of his crew, was smoking. But at last
came the sunset, with delicate clouds, and a purple light upon the
islands; and I blessed it, because it was the signal of my release."
<p>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: --
<p>"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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr375</locdoc><milestone n=375>
Paradise into that dismal region. A salt or even a coal-ship is ten
million times preferable; for there the sky is above me, and the fresh
breeze around me, and my thoughts having hardly anything to do with my
occupation, are as free as air. Nevertheless . . . . it is only once in
a while that the image and desire of a better and happier life makes me
feel the iron of my chain; for after all a human spirit may find no
insufficiency of food for it, even in the Custom-house. And with such
materials as these I do think and feel and learn things that are worth
knowing, and which I should not know unless I had learned them there; so
that the present position of my life shall not be quite left out of the
sum of my real existence. . . . . It is good for me, on many accounts,
that my life has had this passage in it. I know much more than I did a
year ago. I have a stronger sense of power to act as a man among men.
I have gained worldly wisdom, and wisdom also that is not altogether of
this world. And when I quit this earthy career where I am now buried,
nothing will cling to me that ought to be left behind. Men will not
perceive, I trust, by my look or the tenor of my thoughts and feelings,
that I have been a Custom-house officer."
<p>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."
<p>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.
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=21>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr376</locdoc><milestone n=376>
<p> IV
<p> <i>Brook Farm and Concord</i> (21)
<p>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. <i>The Blithedale
Romance</i> is the main result of Brook Farm; but <i>The Blithedale Romance</i>
was very properly never recognised by the Brook Farmers as an accurate
portrait of their little colony.
<p>Nevertheless, in a society as to which the more frequent
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr377</locdoc><milestone n=377> complaint is that it is monotonous, that it lacks variety of
incident and of type, the episode, our own business with which is
simply that it was the cause of Hawthorne's writing an admirable tale,
might be welcomed as a picturesque variation. At the same time, if we
do not exaggerate its proportions, it may seem to contain a fund of
illustration as to that phase of human life with which our author's own
history mingled itself. The most graceful account of the origin of
Brook Farm is probably to be found in these words of one of the
biographers of Margaret Fuller: "In Boston and its vicinity, several
friends, for whose character Margaret felt the highest honour, were
earnestly considering the possibility of making such industrial, social,
and educational arrangements as would simplify economies, combine
leisure for study with healthful and honest toil, avert unjust
collisions of caste, equalise refinements, awaken generous affections,
diffuse courtesy, and sweeten and sanctify life as a whole." The reader
will perceive that this was a liberal scheme, and that if the experiment
failed, the greater was the pity. The writer goes on to say that a
gentleman, who afterwards distinguished himself in literature (he had
begun by being a clergyman), "convinced by his experience in a faithful
ministry that the need was urgent for a thorough application of the
professed principles of Fraternity to actual relations, was about
staking his all of fortune, reputation, and influence, in an attempt to
organize a joint-stock company at Brook Farm." As Margaret Fuller passes
for having suggested to Hawthorne the figure of Zenobia in <i>The
Blithedale Romance</i>, and as she is probably, with one exception, the
person connected with the affair who, after Hawthorne, offered most of
what is called a personality to the world, I may venture to quote a few
more passages from her Memoirs -- a curious, in some points of view
almost a grotesque, and yet, on the whole, as I have said, an extremely
interesting book. It was a strange history and a strange destiny, that
of this brilliant, restless, and unhappy woman -- this ardent New
Englander, this impassioned Yankee, who occupied so large a place in the
thoughts, the lives, the affections, of an intelligent and appreciative
society, and yet left behind her nothing but the memory of a memory.
Her function, her reputation, were singular, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr378</locdoc><milestone n=378> and not altogether
reassuring: she was a talker, she was <i>the</i> talker, she was the genius
of talk. She had a magnificent, though by no means an unmitigated,
egotism; and in some of her utterances it is difficult to say whether
pride or humility prevails -- as for instance when she writes that she
feels "that there is plenty of room in the Universe for my faults, and
as if I could not spend time in thinking of them when so many things
interest me more." She has left the same sort of reputation as a great
actress. Some of her writing has extreme beauty, almost all of it has a
real interest, but her value, her activity, her sway (I am not sure that
one can say her charm), were personal and practical. She went to
Europe, expanded to new desires and interests, and, very poor herself,
married an impoverished Italian nobleman. Then, with her husband and
child, she embarked to return to her own country, and was lost at sea in
a terrible storm, within sight of its coasts. Her tragical death
combined with many of the elements of her life to convert her memory
into a sort of legend, so that the people who had known her well, grew
at last to be envied by later comers. Hawthorne does not appear to have
been intimate with her; on the contrary, I find such an entry as this in
the American Note-Books in 1841: "I was invited to dine at Mr.
Bancroft's yesterday, with Miss Margaret Fuller; but Providence had
given me some business to do; for which I was very thankful!" It is true
that, later, the lady is the subject of one or two allusions of a
gentler cast. One of them indeed is so pretty as to be worth quoting: -
-
<p>"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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr379</locdoc><milestone n=379> reclining on the ground and me standing by her side.
He made some remark upon the beauty of the afternoon, and withdrew
himself into the shadow of the wood. Then we talked about autumn, and
about the pleasures of being lost in the woods, and about the crows,
whose voices Margaret had heard; and about the experiences of early
childhood, whose influence remains upon the character after the
recollection of them has passed away; and about the sight of mountains
from a distance, and the view from their summits; and about other
matters of high and low philosophy."
<p>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. <i>The Blithedale
Romance</i> 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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr380</locdoc><milestone n=380> Brook Farm
without any great Transcendental fervour, yet he had various good
reasons for casting his lot in this would-be happy family. He was as
yet unable to marry, but he naturally wished to do so as speedily as
possible, and there was a prospect that Brook Farm would prove an
economical residence. And then it is only fair to believe that
Hawthorne was interested in the experiment, and that though he was not a
Transcendentalist, an Abolitionist, or a Fourierite, as his companions
were in some degree or other likely to be, he was willing, as a generous
and unoccupied young man, to lend a hand in any reasonable scheme for
helping people to live together on better terms than the common. The
Brook Farm scheme was, as such things go, a reasonable one; it was
devised and carried out by shrewd and sober-minded New Englanders, who
were careful to place economy first and idealism afterwards, and who
were not afflicted with a Gallic passion for completeness of theory.
There were no formulas, doctrines, dogmas; there was no interference
whatever with private life or individual habits, and not the faintest
adumbration of a rearrangement of that difficult business known as the
relations of the sexes. The relations of the sexes were neither more
nor less than what they usually are in American life, excellent; and in
such particulars the scheme was thoroughly conservative and
irreproachable. Its main characteristic was that each individual
concerned in it should do a part of the work necessary for keeping the
whole machine going. He could choose his work and he could live as he
liked; it was hoped, but it was by no means demanded, that he would make
himself agreeable, like a gentleman invited to a dinner-party.
Allowing, however, for everything that was a concession to worldly
traditions and to the laxity of man's nature, there must have been in
the enterprise a good deal of a certain freshness and purity of spirit,
of a certain noble credulity and faith in the perfectibility of man,
which it would have been easier to find in Boston in the year 1840, than
in London five-and-thirty years later. If that was the era of
Transcendentalism, Transcendentalism could only have sprouted in the
soil peculiar to the general locality of which I speak -- the soil of
the old New England morality, gently raked and refreshed by an imported
culture. The Transcendentalists read a great deal </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr381</locdoc><milestone n=381> of French
and German, made themselves intimate with George Sand and Goethe, and
many other writers; but the strong and deep New England conscience
accompanied them on all their intellectual excursions, and there never
was a so-called "movement" that embodied itself, on the whole, in fewer
eccentricities of conduct, or that borrowed a smaller licence in private
deportment. Henry Thoreau, a delightful writer, went to live in the
woods; but Henry Thoreau was essentially a sylvan personage and would
not have been, however the fashion of his time might have turned, a man
about town. The brothers and sisters at Brook Farm ploughed the fields
and milked the cows; but I think that an observer from another clime and
society would have been much more struck with their spirit of conformity
than with their <i>drglements</i>. Their ardour was a moral ardour, and
the lightest breath of scandal never rested upon them, or upon any phase
of Transcendentalism.
<p>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 <i>Blithedale</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr382</locdoc><milestone n=382> they were young and
enthusiastic, they had been initiated into moral mysteries, they had
played at a wonderful game. Their usual mark (it is true I can think of
exceptions) was that they seemed excellently good. They appeared
unstained by the world, unfamiliar with worldly desires and standards,
and with those various forms of human depravity which flourish in some
high phases of civilisation; inclined to simple and democratic ways,
destitute of pretensions and affectations, of jealousies, of cynicism,
of snobbishness. This little epoch of fermentation has three or four
drawbacks for the critic -- drawbacks, however, that may be overlooked
by a person for whom it has an interest of association. It bore,
intellectually, the stamp of provincialism; it was a beginning without a
fruition, a dawn without a noon; and it produced, with a single
exception, no great talents. It produced a great deal of writing, but
(always putting Hawthorne aside, as a contemporary but not a sharer)
only one writer in whom the world at large has interested itself. The
situation was summed up and transfigured in the admirable and exquisite
Emerson. He expressed all that it contained, and a good deal more,
doubtless, besides; he was the man of genius of the moment; he was the
Transcendentalist <i>par excellence</i>. Emerson expressed, before all
things, as was extremely natural at the hour and in the place, the value
and importance of the individual, the duty of making the most of one's
self, of living by one's own personal light and carrying out one's own
disposition. He reflected with beautiful irony upon the exquisite
impudence of those institutions which claim to have appropriated the
truth and to dole it out, in proportionate morsels, in exchange for a
subscription. He talked about the beauty and dignity of life, and about
every one who is born into the world being born to the whole, having an
interest and a stake in the whole. He said "all that is clearly due to-
day is not to lie," and a great many other things which it would be
still easier to present in a ridiculous light. He insisted upon
sincerity and independence and spontaneity, upon acting in harmony with
one's nature, and not conforming and compromising for the sake of being
more comfortable. He urged that a man should await his call, his
finding the thing to do which he should really believe in doing, and not
be urged by the world's opinion </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr383</locdoc><milestone n=383> to do simply the world's work.
"If no call should come for years, for centuries, then I know that the
want of the Universe is the attestation of faith by my abstinence. . . .
If I cannot work, at least I need not lie." The doctrine of the
supremacy of the individual to himself, of his originality and, as
regards his own character, <i>unique</i> quality, must have had a great charm
for people living in a society in which introspection, thanks to the
want of other entertainment, played almost the part of a social
resource.
<p>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 <i>bourgeois</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr384</locdoc><milestone n=384> especial that one might not have been
present on a certain occasion which made a sensation, an era -- the
delivery of an address to the Divinity School of Harvard University, on
a summer evening in 1838. In the light, fresh American air, unthickened
and undarkened by customs and institutions established, these things, as
the phrase is, told.
<p>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 <i>The Blithedale
Romance</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr385</locdoc><milestone n=385> would not have done so if the author of
<i>Blithedale</i> had been more of a satirist. Certainly, if Hawthorne was
an observer, he was a very harmless one; and when one thinks of the
queer specimens of the reforming genus with which he must have been
surrounded, one almost wishes that, for our entertainment, he had given
his old companions something to complain of in earnest. There is no
satire whatever in the <i>Romance</i>; the quality is almost conspicuous by
its absence. Of portraits there are only two; there is no sketching of
odd figures -- no reproduction of strange types of radicalism; the human
background is left vague. Hawthorne was not a satirist, and if at Brook
Farm he was, according to his habit, a good deal of a mild sceptic, his
scepticism was exercised much more in the interest of fancy than in that
of reality.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr386</locdoc><milestone n=386> stainless
companionship of young men and maidens, in the mixture of manual labour
and intellectual flights -- dish-washing and aesthetics, wood-chopping
and philosophy. Wordsworth's "plain living and high thinking" were made
actual. Some passages in Margaret Fuller's journals throw plenty of
light on this. (It must be premised that she was at Brook Farm as an
occasional visitor; not as a labourer in the Hive.)
<p>"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 <i>sans-culotte</i> 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
<i>experiment</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr387</locdoc><milestone n=387> observation of
me will see that she ought not to have done it. In the evening a
husking in the barn . . . . a most picturesque scene . . . . . I stayed
and helped about half an hour, and then took a long walk beneath the
stars. Wednesday . . . . In the evening a conversation on Impulse . .
. . I defended nature, as I always do; -- the spirit ascending through,
not superseding, nature. But in the scale of Sense, Intellect, Spirit,
I advocated the claims of Intellect, because those present were rather
disposed to postpone them. On the nature of Beauty we had good talk.
------ seemed in a much more reverent humour than the other night, and
enjoyed the large plans of the universe which were unrolled . . . .
Saturday. -- Well, good-bye, Brook Farm. I know more about this place
than I did when I came; but the only way to be qualified for a judge of
such an experiment would be to become an active, though unimpassioned,
associate in trying it. . . . . The girl who was so rude to me stood
waiting, with a timid air, to bid me good-bye."
<p>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."
<p>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 <i>The Blithedale
Romance</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr388</locdoc><milestone n=388> from the greedy,
struggling, self-seeking world, should relate to the possibility of
getting the advantage over the outside barbarians in their own field of
labour. But to tell the truth, I very soon became sensible that, as
regarded society at large, we stood in a position of new hostility
rather than new brotherhood." He was doubtless oppressed by the "sultry
heat of society," as he calls it in one of the jottings in the Note-
Books. "What would a man do if he were compelled to live always in the
sultry heat of society, and could never bathe himself in cool solitude?"
His biographer relates that one of the other Brook Farmers, wandering
afield one summer's day, discovered Hawthorne stretched at his length
upon a grassy hill-side, with his hat pulled over his face, and every
appearance, in his attitude, of the desire to escape detection. On his
asking him whether he had any particular reason for this shyness of
posture -- "Too much of a party up there!" Hawthorne contented himself
with replying, with a nod in the direction of the Hive. He had
nevertheless for a time looked forward to remaining indefinitely in the
community; he meant to marry as soon as possible and bring his wife
there to live. Some sixty pages of the second volume of the American
Note-Books are occupied with extracts from his letters to his future
wife and from his journal (which appears however at this time to have
been only intermittent), consisting almost exclusively of descriptions
of the simple scenery of the neighbourhood, and of the state of the
woods and fields and weather. Hawthorne's fondness for all the common
things of nature was deep and constant, and there is always something
charming in his verbal touch, as we may call it, when he talks to
himself about them. "Oh," he breaks out, of an October afternoon, "the
beauty of grassy slopes, and the hollow ways of paths winding between
hills, and the intervals between the road and wood-lots, where Summer
lingers and sits down, strewing dandelions of gold and blue asters as
her parting gifts and memorials!" He was but a single summer at Brook
Farm; the rest of his residence had the winter-quality.
<p>But if he returned to solitude, it was henceforth to be as the
French say, a <i>solitude deux</i>. 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr389</locdoc><milestone n=389> which has given
the title to one of his collections of tales, and upon which this work,
in turn, has conferred a permanent distinction. I use the epithets
"ancient" and "near" in the foregoing sentence, according to the
American measurement of time and distance. Concord is some twenty miles
from Boston, and even to-day, upwards of forty years after the date of
Hawthorne's removal thither, it is a very fresh and well-preserved
looking town. It had already a local history when, a hundred years ago,
the larger current of human affairs flowed for a moment around it.
Concord has the honour of being the first spot in which blood was shed
in the war of the Revolution; here occurred the first exchange of
musket-shots between the King's troops and the American insurgents.
Here, as Emerson says in the little hymn which he contributed in 1836 to
the dedication of a small monument commemorating this circumstance --
<p> "Here once the embattled farmers stood,
<p> And fired the shot heard round the world."
<p> 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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr390</locdoc><milestone n=390> its immediate background of
promiscuous field and forest, would have been part of the composition.
For the rest, there were the selectmen and the town-meetings, the town-
schools and the self-governing spirit, the rigid morality, the friendly
and familiar manners, the perfect competence of the little society to
manage its affairs itself. In the delightful introduction to the
<i>Mosses</i>, Hawthorne has given an account of his dwelling, of his simple
occupations and recreations, and of some of the characteristics of the
place. The Manse is a large, square wooden house, to the surface of
which -- even in the dry New England air, so unfriendly to mosses and
lichens and weather-stains, and the other elements of a picturesque
complexion -- a hundred and fifty years of exposure have imparted a kind
of tone, standing just above the slow-flowing Concord river, and
approached by a short avenue of over-arching trees. It had been the
dwelling-place of generations of Presbyterian ministers, ancestors of
the celebrated Emerson, who had himself spent his early manhood and
written some of his most beautiful essays there. "He used," as
Hawthorne says, "to watch the Assyrian dawn, and Paphian sunset and
moonrise, from the summit of our eastern hill." From its clerical
occupants the place had inherited a mild mustiness of theological
association -- a vague reverberation of old Calvinistic sermons, which
served to deepen its extra-mundane and somnolent quality. The three
years that Hawthorne passed here were, I should suppose, among the
happiest of his life. The future was indeed not in any special manner
assured; but the present was sufficiently genial. In the American Note-
Books there is a charming passage (too long to quote) descriptive of the
entertainment the new couple found in renovating and re-furnishing the
old parsonage, which, at the time of their going into it, was given up
to ghosts and cobwebs. Of the little drawing-room, which had been most
completely reclaimed, he writes that "the shade of our departed host
will never haunt it; for its aspect has been as completely changed as
the scenery of a theatre. Probably the ghost gave one peep into it,
uttered a groan, and vanished for ever." This departed host was a
certain Doctor Ripley, a venerable scholar, who left behind him a
reputation of learning and sanctity which was reproduced in one of the
ladies of his family, long the most </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr391</locdoc><milestone n=391> distinguished woman in the
little Concord circle. Doctor Ripley's predecessor had been, I believe,
the last of the line of the Emerson ministers -- an old gentleman who,
in the earlier years of his pastorate, stood at the window of his study
(the same in which Hawthorne handled a more irresponsible quill)
watching, with his hands under his long coat-tails, the progress of
Concord fight. It is not by any means related, however, I should add,
that he waited for the conclusion to make up his mind which was the
righteous cause.
<p>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
<i>Mosses</i>, 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 <i>Walden</i>. 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.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr392</locdoc><milestone n=392> But at his best he has an extreme natural charm, and he must
always be mentioned after those Americans -- Emerson, Hawthorne,
Longfellow, Lowell, Motley -- who have written originally. He was
Emerson's independent moral man made flesh -- living for the ages, and
not for Saturday and Sunday; for the Universe, and not for Concord. In
fact, however, Thoreau lived for Concord very effectually, and by his
remarkable genius for the observation of the phenomena of woods and
streams, of plants and trees, and beasts and fishes, and for flinging a
kind of spiritual interest over these things, he did more than he
perhaps intended toward consolidating the fame of his accidental human
sojourn. He was as shy and ungregarious as Hawthorne; but he and the
latter appear to have been sociably disposed towards each other, and
there are some charming touches in the preface to the <i>Mosses</i> in regard
to the hours they spent in boating together on the large, quiet Concord
river. Thoreau was a great voyager, in a canoe which he had constructed
himself, and which he eventually made over to Hawthorne, and as expert
in the use of the paddle as the Red men who had once haunted the same
silent stream. The most frequent of Hawthorne's companions on these
excursions appears, however, to have been a local celebrity -- as well
as Thoreau a high Transcendentalist -- Mr. Ellery Channing, whom I may
mention, since he is mentioned very explicitly in the preface to the
<i>Mosses</i>, and also because no account of the little Concord world would
be complete which should omit him. He was the son of the distinguished
Unitarian moralist, and, I believe, the intimate friend of Thoreau, whom
he resembled in having produced literary compositions more esteemed by
the few than by the many. He and Hawthorne were both fishermen, and the
two used to set themselves afloat in the summer afternoons. "Strange
and happy times were those," exclaims the more distinguished of the two
writers, "when we cast aside all irksome forms and strait-laced
habitudes, and delivered ourselves up to the free air, to live like the
Indians or any less conventional race, during one bright semi-circle of
the sun. Rowing our boat against the current, between wide meadows, we
turned aside into the Assabeth. A more lovely stream than this, for a
mile above its junction with the Concord, has never flowed on earth --
nowhere </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr393</locdoc><milestone n=393> indeed except to lave the interior regions of a poet's
imagination. . . . . It comes flowing softly through the midmost
privacy and deepest heart of a wood which whispers it to be quiet; while
the stream whispers back again from its sedgy borders, as if river and
wood were hushing one another to sleep. Yes; the river sleeps along its
course and dreams of the sky and the clustering foliage. . . . ." While
Hawthorne was looking at these beautiful things, or, for that matter,
was writing them, he was well out of the way of a certain class of
visitants whom he alludes to in one of the closing passages of this long
Introduction. "Never was a poor little country village infested with
such a variety of queer, strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mortals, most
of whom took upon themselves to be important agents of the world's
destiny, yet were simply bores of a very intense character." "These
hobgoblins of flesh and blood," he says in a preceding paragraph, "were
attracted thither by the wide-spreading influence of a great original
thinker who had his earthly abode at the opposite extremity of our
village. . . . . People that had lighted on a new thought or a thought
they fancied new, came to Emerson, as the finder of a glittering gem
hastens to a lapidary, to ascertain its quality and value." And
Hawthorne enumerates some of the categories of pilgrims to the shrine of
the mystic counsellor, who as a general thing was probably far from
abounding in their own sense (when this sense was perverted), but gave
them a due measure of plain practical advice. The whole passage is
interesting, and it suggests that little Concord had not been ill-
treated by the fates -- with "a great original thinker" at one end of
the village, an exquisite teller of tales at the other, and the rows of
New England elms between. It contains moreover an admirable sentence
about Hawthorne's pilgrim-haunted neighbour, with whom, "being happy,"
as he says, and feeling therefore "as if there were no question to be
put," he was not in metaphysical communion. "It was good nevertheless
to meet him in the wood-paths, or sometimes in our avenue, with that
pure intellectual gleam diffused about his presence, like the garment of
a shining one; and he so quiet, so simple, so without pretension,
encountering each man alive as if expecting to receive more than he
could impart!" One may without indiscretion risk the surmise that
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr394</locdoc><milestone n=394> Hawthorne's perception of the "shining" element in his
distinguished friend was more intense than his friend's appreciation of
whatever luminous property might reside within the somewhat dusky
envelope of our hero's identity as a collector of "mosses." Emerson, as
a sort of spiritual sun-worshipper, could have attached but a moderate
value to Hawthorne's cat-like faculty of seeing in the dark.
<p>"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."
<p>These compositions, which were so unpunctually paid for,
appeared in the <i>Democratic Review</i>, a periodical published at </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr395</locdoc><milestone n=395>
Washington, and having, as our author's biographer says, "considerable
pretensions to a national character." It is to be regretted that the
practice of keeping its creditors waiting should, on the part of the
magazine in question, have been thought compatible with these
pretensions. The foregoing lines are a description of a very monotonous
but a very contented life, and Mr. Lathrop justly remarks upon the
dissonance of tone of the tales Hawthorne produced under these happy
circumstances. It is indeed not a little of an anomaly. The episode of
the Manse was one of the most agreeable he had known, and yet the best
of the <i>Mosses</i> (though not the greater number of them) are singularly
dismal compositions. They are redolent of M. Montgut's pessimism.
"The reality of sin, the pervasiveness of evil," says Mr. Lathrop, "had
been but slightly insisted upon in the earlier tales: in this series the
idea bursts up like a long-buried fire, with earth-shaking strength, and
the pits of hell seem yawning beneath us." This is very true (allowing
for Mr. Lathrop's rather too emphatic way of putting it); but the
anomaly is, I think, on the whole, only superficial. Our writer's
imagination, as has been abundantly conceded, was a gloomy one; the old
Puritan sense of sin, of penalties to be paid, of the darkness and
wickedness of life, had, as I have already suggested, passed into it.
It had not passed into the parts of Hawthorne's nature corresponding to
those occupied by the same horrible vision of things in his ancestors;
but it had still been determined to claim this later comer as its own,
and since his heart and his happiness were to escape, it insisted on
setting its mark upon his genius -- upon his most beautiful organ, his
admirable fancy. It may be said that when his fancy was strongest and
keenest, when it was most itself, then the dark Puritan tinge showed in
it most richly; and there cannot be a better proof that he was not the
man of a sombre <i>parti-pris</i> whom M. Montgut describes, than the fact
that these duskiest flowers of his invention sprang straight from the
soil of his happiest days. This surely indicates that there was but
little direct connection between the products of his fancy and the state
of his affections. When he was lightest at heart, he was most creative,
and when he was most creative, the moral picturesqueness of the old
secret of mankind in general and of the Puritans in </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr396</locdoc><milestone n=396> particular,
most appealed to him -- the secret that we are really not by any means
so good as a well-regulated society requires us to appear. It is not
too much to say, even, that the very condition of production of some of
these unamiable tales would be that they should be superficial, and, as
it were, insincere. The magnificent little romance of <i>Young Goodman
Brown</i>, for instance, evidently means nothing as regards Hawthorne's own
state of mind, his conviction of human depravity and his consequent
melancholy; for the simple reason that if it meant anything, it would
mean too much. Mr. Lathrop speaks of it as a "terrible and lurid
parable;" but this, it seems to me, is just what it is not. It is not a
parable, but a picture, which is a very different thing. What does M.
Montgut make, one would ask, from the point of view of Hawthorne's
pessimism, of the singularly objective and unpreoccupied tone of the
Introduction to the <i>Old Manse</i>, in which the author speaks from
himself, and in which the cry of metaphysical despair is not even
faintly sounded?
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr397</locdoc><milestone n=397> of Rabelais), behold, the
head of a little bird, who seemed to demand admittance." It was a quiet
life, of course, in which these diminutive incidents seemed noteworthy;
and what is noteworthy here to the observer of Hawthorne's contemplative
simplicity, is the fact that though he finds a good deal to say about
the little bird (he devotes several lines more to it) he makes no remark
upon Rabelais. He had other visitors than little birds, however, and
their demands were also not Rabelaisian. Thoreau comes to see him, and
they talk "upon the spiritual advantages of change of place, and upon
the <i>Dial</i>, and upon Mr. Alcott, and other kindred or concatenated
subjects." Mr. Alcott was an arch-transcendentalist, living in Concord,
and the <i>Dial</i> was a periodical to which the illuminated spirits of
Boston and its neighbourhood used to contribute. Another visitor comes
and talks "of Margaret Fuller, who, he says, has risen perceptibly into
a higher state since their last meeting." There is probably a great deal
of Concord five-and-thirty years ago in that little sentence!
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=22>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr398</locdoc><milestone n=398>
<p>
<p> <i>The Three American Novels</i> (22)
<p>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 <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>. 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 <i>Democratic Review</i>. 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.
<i>The Scarlet Letter</i> was not written till 1849. In the
delightful prologue to that work, entitled <i>The Custom-house</i>, 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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr399</locdoc><milestone n=399> say directly
afterwards what I have to say about the two companions of <i>The
Scarlet Letter</i> -- <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i> and <i>The
Blithedale Romance</i>. I quoted some passages from the prologue to
the first of these novels in the early pages of this essay.
There is another passage, however, which bears particularly upon
this phase of Hawthorne's career, and which is so happily
expressed as to make it a pleasure to transcribe it -- the
passage in which he says that "for myself, during the whole of my
Custom-house experience, moonlight and sunshine, and the glow of
the fire-light, were just alike in my regard, and neither of them
was of one whit more avail than the twinkle of a tallow candle.
An entire class of susceptibilities, and a gift connected with
them -- of no great richness or value, but the best I had -- was
gone from me." He goes on to say that he believes that he might
have done something if he could have made up his mind to convert
the very substance of the commonplace that surrounded him into
matter of literature.
<p>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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr400</locdoc><milestone n=400> nevertheless, it is anything but
agreeable to be haunted by a suspicion that one's intellect is
dwindling away, or exhaling, without your consciousness, like
ether out of phial; so that at every glance you find a smaller
and less volatile residuum."
As, however, it was with what was left of his intellect
after three years' evaporation, that Hawthorne wrote <i>The Scarlet
Letter</i>, there is little reason to complain of the injury he
suffered in his Surveyorship.
<p>2 His publisher, Mr. Fields, in a volume entitled <i>Yesterdays
with Authors</i>, 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 <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>; 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr401</locdoc><milestone n=401> I was
beside myself, and laughed sadly at my enthusiasm." Hawthorne,
however, went on with the book and finished it, but it appeared
only a year later. His biographer quotes a passage from a letter
which he wrote in February, 1850, to his friend Horatio Bridge.
"I finished my book only yesterday; one end being in the press at
Boston, while the other was in my head here at Salem, so that, as
you see, my story is at least fourteen miles long. . . My book,
the publisher tells me, will not be out before April. He speaks
of it in tremendous terms of approbation, so does Mrs. Hawthorne,
to whom I read the conclusion last night. It broke her heart,
and sent her to bed with a grievous headache -- which I look upon
as a triumphant success. Judging from the effect upon her and
the publisher, I may calculate on what bowlers call a ten-strike.
But I don't make any such calculation." And Mr. Lathrop calls
attention, in regard to this passage, to an allusion in the
English Note-Books (September 14, 1855). "Speaking of Thackeray,
I cannot but wonder at his coolness in respect to his own pathos,
and compare it to my emotions when I read the last scene of <i>The
Scarlet Letter</i> to my wife, just after writing it -- tried to
read it rather, for my voice swelled and heaved as if I were
tossed up and down on an ocean as it subsides after a storm. But
I was in a very nervous state then, having gone through a great
diversity of emotion while writing it, for many months."
<p>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, <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr402</locdoc><milestone n=402> artist's work the
first time he has touched his highest mark -- a sort of
straightness and naturalness of execution, an unconsciousness of
his public, and freshness of interest in his theme. It was a
great success, and he immediately found himself famous. The
writer of these lines, who was a child at the time, remembers
dimly the sensation the book produced, and the little shudder
with which people alluded to it, as if a peculiar horror were
mixed with its attractions. He was too young to read it himself,
but its title, upon which he fixed his eyes as the book lay upon
the table, had a mysterious charm. He had a vague belief indeed
that the "letter" in question was one of the documents that come
by the post, and it was a source of perpetual wonderment to him
that it should be of such an unaccustomed hue. Of course it was
difficult to explain to a child the significance of poor Hester
Prynne's blood-coloured <i>A</i>. But the mystery was at last partly
dispelled by his being taken to see a collection of pictures (the
annual exhibition of the National Academy), where he encountered
a representation of a pale, handsome woman, in a quaint black
dress and a white coif, holding between her knees an
elfish-looking little girl, fantastically dressed and crowned
with flowers. Embroidered on the woman's breast was a great
crimson <i>A</i>, over which the child's fingers, as she glanced
strangely out of the picture, were maliciously playing. I was
told that this was Hester Prynne and little Pearl, and that when
I grew older I might read their interesting history. But the
picture remained vividly imprinted on my mind; I had been vaguely
frightened and made uneasy by it; and when, years afterwards, I
first read the novel, I seemed to myself to have read it before,
and to be familiar with its two strange heroines. I mention this
incident simply as an indication of the degree to which the
success of <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> had made the book what is called
an actuality. Hawthorne himself was very modest about it; he
wrote to his publisher, when there was a question of his
undertaking another novel, that what had given the history of
Hester Prynne its "vogue" was simply the introductory chapter.
In fact, the publication of <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> was in the
United States a literary event of the first importance. The book
was the finest piece of imaginative writing yet put forth in the
country. There was a consciousness of this in the welcome </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr403</locdoc><milestone n=403>
that was given it -- a satisfaction in the idea of
America having produced a novel that belonged to literature, and
to the forefront of it. Something might at last be sent to
Europe as exquisite in quality as anything that had been
received, and the best of it was that the thing was absolutely
American; it belonged to the soil, to the air; it came out of the
very heart of New England.
<p>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 <i>dnoment</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr404</locdoc><milestone n=404> his guilt
standing in the full glare of exposure and humbling herself to
the misery of atonement -- between this more wretched and
pitiable culprit, to whom dishonour would come as a comfort and
the pillory as a relief, and the older, keener, wiser man, who,
to obtain satisfaction for the wrong he has suffered, devises the
infernally ingenious plan of conjoining himself with his wronger,
living with him, living upon him, and while he pretends to
minister to his hidden ailment and to sympathise with his pain,
revels in his unsuspected knowledge of these things and
stimulates them by malignant arts. The attitude of Roger
Chillingworth, and the means he takes to compensate himself --
these are the highly original elements in the situation that
Hawthorne so ingeniously treats. None of his works are so
impregnated with that after-sense of the old Puritan
consciousness of life to which allusion has so often been made.
If, as M. Montgut says, the qualities of his ancestors
<i>filtered</i> down through generations into his composition, <i>The
Scarlet Letter</i> was, as it were, the vessel that gathered up the
last of the precious drops. And I say this not because the story
happens to be of so-called historical cast, to be told of the
early days of Massachusetts and of people in steeple-crowned hats
and sad coloured garments. The historical colouring is rather
weak than otherwise; there is little elaboration of detail, of
the modern realism of research; and the author has made no great
point of causing his figures to speak the English of their
period. Nevertheless, the book is full of the moral presence of
the race that invented Hester's penance -- diluted and
complicated with other things, but still perfectly recognisable.
Puritanism, in a word, is there, not only objectively, as
Hawthorne tried to place it there, but subjectively as well.
Not, I mean, in his judgment of his characters, in any harshness
of prejudice, or in the obtrusion of a moral lesson; but in the
very quality of his own vision, in the tone of the picture, in a
certain coldness and exclusiveness of treatment.
<p>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
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr405</locdoc><milestone n=405> the situation, which is insistently kept before us, with
little progression, though with a great deal, as I have said, of
a certain stable variation; and to which they, out of their
reality, contribute little that helps it to live and move. I was
made to feel this want of reality, this over-ingenuity, of <i>The
Scarlet Letter</i>, by chancing not long since upon a novel which
was read fifty years ago much more than to-day, but which is
still worth reading -- the story of <i>Adam Blair</i>, by John Gibson
Lockhart. This interesting and powerful little tale has a great
deal of analogy with Hawthorne's novel -- quite enough, at least,
to suggest a comparison between them; and the comparison is a
very interesting one to make, for it speedily leads us to larger
considerations than simple resemblances and divergences of plot.
<p>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
<i>Life of Scott</i>) 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 <i>The
Scarlet Letter</i>. 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.
<i>Adam Blair</i> is the history of the passion, and <i>The Scarlet
Letter</i> 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 <i>Adam Blair</i>, to my mind, when once I had perceived that it
would repeat in a great measure the situation of <i>The Scarlet
Letter</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr406</locdoc><milestone n=406> elaborate imaginative
delicacy. These things do not precisely constitute a weakness in
<i>The Scarlet Letter</i>; indeed, in a certain way they constitute a
great strength; but the absence of a certain something warm and
straightforward, a trifle more grossly human and vulgarly
natural, which one finds in <i>Adam Blair</i>, will always make
Hawthorne's tale less touching to a large number of even very
intelligent readers, than a love-story told with the robust,
synthetic pathos which served Lockhart so well. His novel is not
of the first rank (I should call it an excellent second-rate
one), but it borrows a charm from the fact that his vigorous, but
not strongly imaginative, mind was impregnated with the reality
of his subject. He did not always succeed in rendering this
reality; the expression is sometimes awkward and poor. But the
reader feels that his vision was clear, and his feeling about the
matter very strong and rich. Hawthorne's imagination, on the
other hand, plays with his theme so incessantly, leads it such a
dance through the moonlighted air of his intellect, that the
thing cools off, as it were, hardens and stiffens, and, producing
effects much more exquisite, leaves the reader with a sense of
having handled a splendid piece of silversmith's work. Lockhart,
by means much more vulgar, produces at moments a greater
illusion, and satisfies our inevitable desire for something, in
the people in whom it is sought to interest us, that shall be of
the same pitch and the same continuity with ourselves. Above
all, it is interesting to see how the same subject appears to two
men of a thoroughly different cast of mind and of a different
race. Lockhart was struck with the warmth of the subject that
offered itself to him, and Hawthorne with its coldness; the one
with its glow, its sentimental interest -- the other with its
shadow, its moral interest. Lockhart's story is as decent, as
severely draped, as <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>; but the author has a
more vivid sense than appears to have imposed itself upon
Hawthorne, of some of the incidents of the situation he
describes; his tempted man and tempting woman are more actual and
personal; his heroine in especial, though not in the least a
delicate or a subtle conception, has a sort of credible, visible,
palpable property, a vulgar roundness and relief, which are
lacking to the dim and chastened image of Hester Prynne. But I
am going too far; I am comparing simplicity </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr407</locdoc><milestone n=407> with
subtlety, the usual with the refined. Each man wrote as his turn
of mind impelled him, but each expressed something more than
himself. Lockhart was a dense, substantial Briton, with a taste
for the concrete, and Hawthorne was a thin New Englander, with a
miasmatic conscience.
<p>2 In <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> 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 <i>A</i> 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.
<p>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
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr408</locdoc><milestone n=408> familiar objects by an unaccustomed light. The wooden
houses, with their jutting stories and quaint gable-peaks; the
doorsteps and thresholds, with the early grass springing up about
them; the garden-plots, black with freshly-turned earth; the
wheel-track, little worn, and, even in the market-place, margined
with green on either side; -- all were visible, but with a
singularity of aspect that seemed to give another moral
interpretation to the things of this world than they had ever
borne before. And there stood the minister, with his hand over
his heart; and Hester Prynne, with the embroidered letter
glimmering on her bosom; and little Pearl, herself a symbol, and
the connecting-link between these two. They stood in the noon of
that strange and solemn splendour, as if it were the light that
is to reveal all secrets, and the daybreak that shall unite all
that belong to one another."
<p>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 <i>A</i> -- 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,
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr409</locdoc><milestone n=409> estranged from Pearl; as if the child, in her lonely
ramble through the forest, had strayed out of the sphere in which
she and her mother dwelt together, and was now vainly seeking to
return to it." And Hawthorne devotes a chapter to this idea of
the child's having, by putting the brook between Hester and
herself, established a kind of spiritual gulf, on the verge of
which her little fantastic person innocently mocks at her
mother's sense of bereavement. This conception belongs, one
would say, quite to the lighter order of a story-teller's
devices, and the reader hardly goes with Hawthorne in the large
development he gives to it. He hardly goes with him either, I
think, in his extreme predilection for a small number of vague
ideas which are represented by such terms as "sphere" and
"sympathies." Hawthorne makes too liberal a use of these two
substantives; it is the solitary defect of his style; and it
counts as a defect partly because the words in question are a
sort of specialty with certain writers immeasurably inferior to
himself.
<p>2 I had not meant, however, to expatiate upon his defects,
which are of the slenderest and most venial kind. <i>The Scarlet
Letter</i> 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 <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> 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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr410</locdoc><milestone n=410> picturesquely yet simply,
and for infusing a gently colloquial tone into matter of the most
unfamiliar import, he had evidently cultivated with great
assiduity. I have spoken of the anomalous character of his
Note-Books -- of his going to such pains often to make a record
of incidents which either were not worth remembering or could be
easily remembered without its aid. But it helps us to understand
the Note-Books if we regard them as a literary exercise. They
were compositions, as school boys say, in which the subject was
only the pretext, and the main point was to write a certain
amount of excellent English. Hawthorne must at least have
written a great many of these things for practice, and he must
often have said to himself that it was better practice to write
about trifles, because it was a greater tax upon one's skill to
make them interesting. And his theory was just, for he has
almost always made his trifles interesting. In his novels his
art of saying things well is very positively tested, for here he
treats of those matters among which it is very easy for a
blundering writer to go wrong -- the subtleties and mysteries of
life, the moral and spiritual maze. In such a passage as one I
have marked for quotation from <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> there is the
stamp of the genius of style.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr411</locdoc><milestone n=411> dreamed it, there could be no
real bond betwixt the clergyman and herself. And thus much of
woman there was in Hester, that she could scarcely forgive him --
least of all now, when the heavy footstep of their approaching
fate might be heard, nearer, nearer, nearer! -- for being able to
withdraw himself so completely from their mutual world, while she
groped darkly, and stretched forth her cold hands, and found him
not!"
<p>2 <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i> 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 <i>The Scarlet
Letter</i> 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 <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i>, 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 <i>The Scarlet Letter</i>; 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
<i>donne</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr412</locdoc><milestone n=412> <i>The
House of the Seven Gables</i> is admirable. But the story has a
sort of expansive quality which never wholly fructifies, and as I
lately laid it down, after reading it for the third time, I had a
sense of having interested myself in a magnificent fragment. Yet
the book has a great fascination, and of all of those of its
author's productions which I have read over while writing this
sketch, it is perhaps the one that has gained most by re-perusal.
If it be true of the others that the pure, natural quality of the
imaginative strain is their great merit, this is at least as true
of <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i>, the charm of which is in a
peculiar degree of the kind that we fail to reduce to its grounds
-- like that of the sweetness of a piece of music, or the
softness of fine September weather. It is vague, indefinable,
ineffable; but it is the sort of thing we must always point to in
justification of the high claim that we make for Hawthorne. In
this case of course its vagueness is a drawback, for it is
difficult to point to ethereal beauties; and if the reader whom
we have wished to inoculate with our admiration inform us after
looking a while that he perceives nothing in particular, we can
only reply that, in effect, the object is a delicate one.
<p>2 <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i> 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 <i>indirect</i> testimony of his tone, his
accent, his temper, of his very omissions and suppressions. <i>The
House of the Seven Gables</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr413</locdoc><milestone n=413> to
some such reminiscence, and in stirring up the association it
renders it delightful. The comparison is to the honour of the
New England town, which gains in it more than it bestows. The
shadows of the elms, in <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i>, are
exceptionally dense and cool; the summer afternoon is peculiarly
still and beautiful; the atmosphere has a delicious warmth, and
the long daylight seems to pause and rest. But the mild
provincial quality is there, the mixture of shabbiness and
freshness, the paucity of ingredients. The end of an old race --
this is the situation that Hawthorne has depicted, and he has
been admirably inspired in the choice of the figures in whom he
seeks to interest us. They are all figures rather than
characters -- they are all pictures rather than persons. But if
their reality is light and vague, it is sufficient, and it is in
harmony with the low relief and dimness of outline of the objects
that surround them. They are all types, to the author's mind, of
something general, of something that is bound up with the
history, at large, of families and individuals, and each of them
is the centre of a cluster of those ingenious and meditative
musings, rather melancholy, as a general thing, than joyous,
which melt into the current and texture of the story and give it
a kind of moral richness. A grotesque old spinster, simple,
childish, penniless, very humble at heart, but rigidly conscious
of her pedigree; an amiable bachelor, of an epicurean temperament
and an enfeebled intellect, who has passed twenty years of his
life in penal confinement for a crime of which he was unjustly
pronounced guilty; a sweet-natured and bright-faced young girl
from the country, a poor relation of these two ancient
decrepitudes, with whose moral mustiness her modern freshness and
soundness are contrasted; a young man still more modern, holding
the latest opinions, who has sought his fortune up and down the
world, and, though he has not found it, takes a genial and
enthusiastic view of the future: these, with two or three
remarkable accessory figures, are the persons concerned in the
little drama. The drama is a small one, but as Hawthorne does
not put it before us for its own superficial sake, for the dry
facts of the case, but for something in it which he holds to be
symbolic and of large application, something that points a moral
and that it behoves us to remember, the scenes in the </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr414</locdoc><milestone n=414>
rusty wooden house whose gables give its name to the story, have
something of the dignity both of history and of tragedy. Miss
Hephzibah Pyncheon, dragging out a disappointed life in her
paternal dwelling, finds herself obliged in her old age to open a
little shop for the sale of penny toys and gingerbread. This is
the central incident of the tale, and, as Hawthorne relates it,
it is an incident of the most impressive magnitude and most
touching interest. Her dishonoured and vague-minded brother is
released from prison at the same moment, and returns to the
ancestral roof to deepen her perplexities. But, on the other
hand, to alleviate them, and to introduce a breath of the air of
the outer world into this long unventilated interior, the little
country cousin also arrives, and proves the good angel of the
feebly distracted household. All this episode is exquisite --
admirably conceived, and executed with a kind of humorous
tenderness, an equal sense of everything in it that is
picturesque, touching, ridiculous, worthy of the highest praise.
Hephzibah Pyncheon, with her near-sighted scowl, her rusty
joints, her antique turban, her map of a great territory to the
eastward which ought to have belonged to her family, her vain
terrors and scruples and resentments, the inaptitude and
repugnance of an ancient gentlewoman to the vulgar little
commerce which a cruel fate has compelled her to engage in --
Hephzibah Pyncheon is a masterly picture. I repeat that she is a
picture, as her companions are pictures; she is a charming piece
of descriptive writing, rather than a dramatic exhibition. But
she is described, like her companions too, so subtly and lovingly
that we enter into her virginal old heart and stand with her
behind her abominable little counter. Clifford Pyncheon is a
still more remarkable conception, though he is perhaps not so
vividly depicted. It was a figure needing a much more subtle
touch, however, and it was of the essence of his character to be
vague and unemphasised. Nothing can be more charming than the
manner in which the soft, bright, active presence of Ph;oebe
Pyncheon is indicated, or than the account of her relations with
the poor dimly sentient kinsman for whom her light-handed
sisterly offices, in the evening of a melancholy life, are a
revelation of lost possibilities of happiness. "In her aspect,"
Hawthorne says of the young girl, "there was a familiar gladness,
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr415</locdoc><milestone n=415> and a holiness that you could play with, and yet
reverence it as much as ever. She was like a prayer offered up
in the homeliest beauty of one's mother-tongue. Fresh was
Ph;oebe, moreover, and airy, and sweet in her apparel; as if
nothing that she wore -- neither her gown, nor her small straw
bonnet, nor her little kerchief, any more than her snowy
stockings -- had ever been put on before; or if worn, were all
the fresher for it, and with a fragrance as if they had lain
among the rose-buds." Of the influence of her maidenly salubrity
upon poor Clifford, Hawthorne gives the prettiest description,
and then, breaking off suddenly, renounces the attempt in
language which, while pleading its inadequacy, conveys an
exquisite satisfaction to the reader. I quote the passage for
the sake of its extreme felicity, and of the charming image with
which it concludes.
<p>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!"
<p>3 I have not mentioned the personage in <i>The House of the
Seven Gables</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr416</locdoc><milestone n=416> broadly
executed, very sagaciously composed and rendered -- the portrait
of a superb, full-blown hypocrite, a large-based, full-nurtured
Pharisee, bland, urbane, impressive, diffusing about him a
"sultry" warmth of benevolence, as the author calls it again and
again, and basking in the noontide of prosperity and the
consideration of society; but in reality hard, gross, and
ignoble. Judge Pyncheon is an elaborate piece of description,
made up of a hundred admirable touches, in which satire is always
winged with fancy, and fancy is linked with a deep sense of
reality. It is difficult to say whether Hawthorne followed a
model in describing Judge Pyncheon; but it is tolerably obvious
that the picture is an impression -- a copious impression -- of
an individual. It has evidently a definite starting-point in
fact, and the author is able to draw, freely and confidently,
after the image established in his mind. Holgrave, the modern
young man, who has been a Jack-of-all-trades and is at the period
of the story a daguerreotypist, is an attempt to render a kind of
national type -- that of the young citizen of the United States
whose fortune is simply in his lively intelligence, and who
stands naked, as it were, unbiased and unencumbered alike, in the
centre of the far-stretching level of American life. Holgrave is
intended as a contrast; his lack of traditions, his democratic
stamp, his condensed experience, are opposed to the desiccated
prejudices and exhausted vitality of the race of which poor
feebly-scowling, rusty-jointed Hephzibah is the most heroic
representative. It is perhaps a pity that Hawthorne should not
have proposed to himself to give the old Pyncheon-qualities some
embodiment which would help them to balance more fairly with the
elastic properties of the young daguerreotypist -- should not
have painted a lusty conservative to match his strenuous radical.
As it is, the mustiness and mouldiness of the tenants of the
House of the Seven Gables crumble away rather too easily.
Evidently, however, what Hawthorne designed to represent was not
the struggle between an old society and a new, for in this case
he would have given the old one a better chance; but simply, as I
have said, the shrinkage and extinction of a family. This
appealed to his imagination; and the idea of long perpetuation
and survival always appears to have filled him with a kind of
horror and disapproval. Conservative, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr417</locdoc><milestone n=417> in a certain
degree, as he was himself, and fond of retrospect and quietude
and the mellowing influences of time, it is singular how often
one encounters in his writings some expression of mistrust of old
houses, old institutions, long lines of descent. He was disposed
apparently to allow a very moderate measure in these respects,
and he condemns the dwelling of the Pyncheons to disappear from
the face of the earth because it has been standing a couple of
hundred years. In this he was an American of Americans; or
rather he was more American than many of his countrymen, who,
though they are accustomed to work for the short run rather than
the long, have often a lurking esteem for things that show the
marks of having lasted. I will add that Holgrave is one of the
few figures, among those which Hawthorne created, with regard to
which the absence of the realistic mode of treatment is felt as a
loss. Holgrave is not sharply enough characterised; he lacks
features; he is not an individual, but a type. But my last word
about this admirable novel must not be a restrictive one. It is
a large and generous production, pervaded with that vague hum,
that indefinable echo, of the whole multitudinous life of man,
which is the real sign of a great work of fiction.
<p>2 After the publication of <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i>,
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 -- <i>The Wonder-Book</i>, and a small collection
of stories entitled <i>Tanglewood Tales</i>. 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 <i>The</i> </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr418</locdoc><milestone n=418> <i>Wonder-Book</i>. It is in its pages
that they first make the acquaintance of the heroes and heroines
of the antique mythology, and something of the nursery fairy-tale
quality of interest which Hawthorne imparts to them always
remains.
<p>2 I have said that Lenox was a very pretty place, and that he
was able to work there Hawthorne proved by composing <i>The House
of the Seven Gables</i> 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 <i>The Blithedale Romance</i>.
<p>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 <i>The Blithedale Romance</i> is the lightest, the brightest, the
liveliest, of this company of unhumorous fictions.
<p>4 The story is told from a more joyous point of view -- from
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr419</locdoc><milestone n=419> a point of view comparatively humorous -- and a number
of objects and incidents touched with the light of the profane
world -- the vulgar, many-coloured world of actuality, as
distinguished from the crepuscular realm of the writer's own
reveries -- are mingled with its course. The book indeed is a
mixture of elements, and it leaves in the memory an impression
analogous to that of an April day -- an alternation of brightness
and shadow, of broken sun-patches and sprinkling clouds. Its
dnoment is tragical -- there is indeed nothing so tragical in
all Hawthorne, unless it be the murder of Miriam's persecutor by
Donatello, in <i>Transformation</i>, as the suicide of Zenobia; and
yet on the whole the effect of the novel is to make one think
more agreeably of life. The standpoint of the narrator has the
advantage of being a concrete one; he is no longer, as in the
preceding tales, a disembodied spirit, imprisoned in the haunted
chamber of his own contemplations, but a particular man, with a
certain human grossness.
<p>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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr420</locdoc><milestone n=420> I lack a purpose," he
writes, at the close of his story. "How strange! He was ruined,
morally, by an overplus of the same ingredient the want of which,
I occasionally suspect, has rendered my own life all an
emptiness. I by no means wish to die. Yet were there any cause
in this whole chaos of human struggle, worth a sane man's dying
for, and which my death would benefit, then -- provided, however,
the effort did not involve an unreasonable amount of trouble --
methinks I might be bold to offer up my life. If Kossuth, for
example, would pitch the battle-field of Hungarian rights within
an easy ride of my abode, and choose a mild sunny morning, after
breakfast, for the conflict, Miles Coverdale would gladly be his
man, for one brave rush upon the levelled bayonets. Further than
that I should be loth to pledge myself."
<p>2 The finest thing in <i>The Blithedale Romance</i> 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 <i>person</i>. 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr421</locdoc><milestone n=421> be noted on one side, I say; on the
other, the beautiful and sumptuous Zenobia, with her rich and
picturesque temperament and physical aspects, offers many points
of divergence from the plain and strenuous invalid who
represented feminine culture in the suburbs of the New England
metropolis. This picturesqueness of Zenobia is very happily
indicated and maintained; she is a woman, in all the force of the
term, and there is something very vivid and powerful in her large
expression of womanly gifts and weaknesses. Hollingsworth is, I
think, less successful, though there is much reality in the
conception of the type to which he belongs -- the strong-willed,
narrow-hearted apostle of a special form of redemption for
society. There is nothing better in all Hawthorne than the scene
between him and Coverdale, when the two men are at work together
in the field (piling stones on a dyke), and he gives it to his
companion to choose whether he will be with him or against him.
It is a pity, perhaps, to have represented him as having begun
life as a blacksmith, for one grudges him the advantage of so
logical a reason for his roughness and hardness.
<p>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."
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr422</locdoc><milestone n=422> strikes me as
least felicitous is that which deals with Priscilla and with her
mysterious relation to Zenobia -- with her mesmeric gifts, her
clairvoyance, her identity with the Veiled Lady, her divided
subjection to Hollingsworth and Westervelt, and her numerous
other graceful but fantastic properties -- her Sibylline
attributes, as the author calls them. Hawthorne is rather too
fond of Sibylline attributes -- a taste of the same order as his
disposition, to which I have already alluded, to talk about
spheres and sympathies. As the action advances, in <i>The
Blithedale Romance</i>, we get too much out of reality, and cease to
feel beneath our feet the firm ground of an appeal to our own
vision of the world, our observation. I should have liked to see
the story concern itself more with the little community in which
its earlier scenes are laid, and avail itself of so excellent an
opportunity for describing unhackneyed specimens of human nature.
I have already spoken of the absence of satire in the novel, of
its not aiming in the least at satire, and of its offering no
grounds for complaint as an invidious picture. Indeed the
brethren of Brook Farm should have held themselves slighted
rather than misrepresented, and have regretted that the admirable
genius who for a while was numbered among them should have
treated their institution mainly as a perch for starting upon an
imaginative flight. But when all is said about a certain want of
substance and cohesion in the latter portions of <i>The Blithedale
Romance</i>, the book is still a delightful and beautiful one.
Zenobia and Hollingsworth live in the memory, and even Priscilla
and Coverdale, who linger there less importunately, have a great
deal that touches us and that we believe in. I said just now
that Priscilla was infelicitous; but immediately afterwards I
open the volume at a page in which the author describes some of
the out-of-door amusements at Blithedale, and speaks of a
foot-race across the grass, in which some of the slim young girls
of the society joined. "Priscilla's peculiar charm in a
foot-race was the weakness and irregularity with which she ran.
Growing up without exercise, except to her poor little fingers,
she had never yet acquired the perfect use of her legs. Setting
buoyantly forth therefore, as if no rival less swift than
Atalanta could compete with her, she ran falteringly, and often
tumbled on the grass. Such an incident -- though it seems
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr423</locdoc><milestone n=423> too slight to think of -- was a thing to laugh at, but
which brought the water into one's eyes, and lingered in the
memory after far greater joys and sorrows were wept out of it, as
antiquated trash. Priscilla's life, as I beheld it, was full of
trifles that affected me in just this way." That seems to me
exquisite, and the book is full of touches as deep and delicate.
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr424</locdoc><milestone n=424> sweetly, intermixed with a
few young elms, and white pines and infant oaks -- the whole
forming rather a thicket than a wood. Nevertheless, there is
some very good shade to be found there. I spend delectable hours
there in the hottest part of the day, stretched out at my lazy
length, with a book in my hand, or some unwritten book in my
thoughts. There is almost always a breeze stirring along the
sides or brow of the hill. From the hill-top there is a good
view along the extensive level surfaces and gentle hilly
outlines, covered with wood, that characterise the scenery of
Concord. . . . . I know nothing of the history of the house
except Thoreau's telling me that it was inhabited, a generation
or two ago, by a man who believed he should never die. I
believe, however, he is dead; at least, I hope so; else he may
probably reappear and dispute my title to his residence."
<p>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 <i>Septimius Felton</i>." The scenery of that romance, he
adds, "was evidently taken from the Wayside and its hill."
<i>Septimius Felton</i> 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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr425</locdoc><milestone n=425>
Pierce, was installed as President of the United States. He had
been the candidate of the Democratic party, and all good
Democrats, accordingly, in conformity to the beautiful and
rational system under which the affairs of the great Republic
were carried on, began to open their windows to the golden
sunshine of Presidential patronage. When General Pierce was put
forward by the Democrats, Hawthorne felt a perfectly loyal and
natural desire that his good friend should be exalted to so
brilliant a position, and he did what was in him to further the
good cause, by writing a little book about its hero. His <i>Life
of Franklin Pierce</i> belongs to that class of literature which is
known as the "campaign biography," and which consists of an
attempt, more or less successful, to persuade the many-headed
monster of universal suffrage that the gentleman on whose behalf
it is addressed is a paragon of wisdom and virtue. Of
Hawthorne's little book there is nothing particular to say, save
that it is in very good taste, that he is a very fairly ingenious
advocate, and that if he claimed for the future President
qualities which rather faded in the bright light of a high
office, this defect of proportion was essential to his
undertaking. He dwelt chiefly upon General Pierce's exploits in
the war with Mexico (before that, his record, as they say in
America, had been mainly that of a successful country lawyer),
and exercised his descriptive powers so far as was possible in
describing the advance of the United States troops from Vera Cruz
to the city of the Montezumas. The mouth-pieces of the Whig
party spared him, I believe, no reprobation for "prostituting"
his exquisite genius; but I fail to see anything reprehensible in
Hawthorne's lending his old friend the assistance of his graceful
quill. He wished him to be President -- he held afterwards that
he filled the office with admirable dignity and wisdom -- and as
the only thing he could do was to write, he fell to work and
wrote for him. Hawthorne was a good lover and a very sufficient
partisan, and I suspect that if Franklin Pierce had been made
even less of the stuff of a statesman, he would still have found
in the force of old associations an injunction to hail him as a
ruler. Our hero was an American of the earlier and simpler type
-- the type of which it is doubtless premature to say that it has
wholly passed away, but of which it may at least be said that
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr426</locdoc><milestone n=426> the circumstances that produced it have been greatly
modified. The generation to which he belonged, that generation
which grew up with the century, witnessed during a period of
fifty years the immense, uninterrupted material development of
the young Republic; and when one thinks of the scale on which it
took place, of the prosperity that walked in its train and waited
on its course, of the hopes it fostered and the blessings it
conferred, of the broad morning sunshine, in a word, in which it
all went forward, there seems to be little room for surprise that
it should have implanted a kind of superstitious faith in the
grandeur of the country, its duration, its immunity from the
usual troubles of earthly empires. This faith was a simple and
uncritical one, enlivened with an element of genial optimism, in
the light of which it appeared that the great American state was
not as other human institutions are, that a special Providence
watched over it, that it would go on joyously for ever, and that
a country whose vast and blooming bosom offered a refuge to the
strugglers and seekers of all the rest of the world, must come
off easily, in the battle of the ages. From this conception of
the American future the sense of its having problems to solve was
blissfully absent; there were no difficulties in the programme,
no looming complications, no rocks ahead. The indefinite
multiplication of the population, and its enjoyment of the
benefits of a common-school education and of unusual facilities
for making an income -- this was the form in which, on the whole,
the future most vividly presented itself, and in which the
greatness of the country was to be recognised of men. There was
indeed a faint shadow in the picture -- the shadow projected by
the "peculiar institution" of the Southern States; but it was far
from sufficient to darken the rosy vision of most good Americans,
and above all, of most good Democrats. Hawthorne alludes to it
in a passage of his life of Pierce, which I will quote not only
as a hint of the trouble that was in store for a cheerful race of
men, but as an example of his own easy-going political attitude.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr427</locdoc><milestone n=427> fully
recognised by his votes and his voice, the rights pledged to the
South by the Constitution. This, at the period when he declared
himself, was an easy thing to do. But when it became more
difficult, when the first imperceptible murmur of agitation had
grown almost to a convulsion, his course was still the same. Nor
did he ever shun the obloquy that sometimes threatened to pursue
the Northern man who dared to love that great and sacred reality
-- his whole united country -- better than the mistiness of a
philanthropic theory."
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr428</locdoc><milestone n=428> relation, of the world being a more
complicated place than it had hitherto seemed, the future more
treacherous, success more difficult. At the rate at which things
are going, it is obvious that good Americans will be more
numerous than ever; but the good American, in days to come, will
be a more critical person than his complacent and confident
grandfather. He has eaten of the tree of knowledge. He will
not, I think, be a sceptic, and still less, of course, a cynic;
but he will be, without discredit to his well-known capacity for
action, an observer. He will remember that the ways of the Lord
are inscrutable, and that this is a world in which everything
happens; and eventualities, as the late Emperor of the French
used to say, will not find him intellectually unprepared. The
good American of which Hawthorne was so admirable a specimen was
not critical, and it was perhaps for this reason that Franklin
Pierce seemed to him a very proper President.
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr429</locdoc><milestone n=429> countrymen.
Also, any other information about foreign countries would be
acceptable to an inquiring mind."
<p>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.
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=23>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr430</locdoc><milestone n=430>
<p> VI
<p> <i>England and Italy</i> (23)
<p>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 <i>Our Old
Home</i>; 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr431</locdoc><milestone n=431> themselves, and
finally give the whole thing the appearance of a triumph, not of
initiation, but of the provincial point of view itself.
<p>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 <i>Our Old
Home</i>, 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 <i>Our Old Home</i> (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 <i>rsum</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr432</locdoc><milestone n=432>
extremely just; he had a sense of the relations of things, which some of
his admirers have not thought it well to cultivate; and he never
exaggerated his own importance as a writer. <i>Our Old Home</i> is not a
weighty book; it is decidedly a light one. But when he says it is not a
good one, I hardly know what he means, and his modesty at this point is
in excess of his discretion. Whether good or not, <i>Our Old Home</i> is
charming -- it is most delectable reading. The execution is singularly
perfect and ripe; of all his productions it seems to be the best
written. The touch, as musicians say, is admirable; the lightness, the
fineness, the felicity of characterisation and description, belong to a
man who has the advantage of feeling delicately. His judgment is by no
means always sound; it often rests on too narrow an observation. But
his perception is of the keenest, and though it is frequently partial,
incomplete, it is excellent as far as it goes. The book gave but
limited satisfaction, I believe, in England, and I am not sure that the
failure to enjoy certain manifestations of its sportive irony, has not
chilled the appreciation of its singular grace. That English readers,
on the whole, should have felt that Hawthorne did the national mind and
manners but partial justice, is, I think, conceivable; at the same time
that it seems to me remarkable that the tender side of the book, as I
may call it, should not have carried it off better. It abounds in
passages more delicately appreciative than can easily be found
elsewhere, and it contains more charming and affectionate things than, I
should suppose, had ever before been written about a country not the
writer's own. To say that it is an immeasurably more exquisite and
sympathetic work than any of the numerous persons who have related their
misadventures in the United States have seen fit to devote to that
country, is to say but little, and I imagine that Hawthorne had in mind
the array of English voyagers -- Mrs. Trollope, Dickens, Marryat, Basil
Hall, Miss Martineau, Mr. Grattan -- when he reflected that everything
is relative and that, as such books go, his own little volume observed
the amenities of criticism. He certainly had it in mind when he wrote
the phrase in his preface relating to the impression the book might make
in England. "Not an Englishman of them all ever spared America for
courtesy's sake or kindness; nor, in my opinion, would it contribute in
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr433</locdoc><milestone n=433> the least to any mutual advantage and comfort if we were to
besmear each other all over with butter and honey." I am far from
intending to intimate that the vulgar instinct of recrimination had
anything to do with the restrictive passages of <i>Our Old Home</i>; I mean
simply that the author had a prevision that his collection of sketches
would in some particulars fail to please his English friends. He
professed, after the event, to have discovered that the English are
sensitive, and as they say of the Americans, for whose advantage I
believe the term was invented, thin-skinned. "The English critics," he
wrote to his publisher, "seem to think me very bitter against their
countrymen, and it is perhaps natural that they should, because their
self-conceit can accept nothing short of indiscriminate adulation; but I
really think that Americans have much more cause than they to complain
of me. Looking over the volume I am rather surprised to find that
whenever I draw a comparison between the two people, I almost invariably
cast the balance against ourselves." And he writes at another time: --
"I received several private letters and printed notices of <i>Our Old
Home</i> from England. It is laughable to see the innocent wonder with
which they regard my criticisms, accounting for them by jaundice,
insanity, jealousy, hatred, on my part, and never admitting the least
suspicion that there may be a particle of truth in them. The
monstrosity of their self-conceit is such that anything short of
unlimited admiration impresses them as malicious caricature. But they
do me great injustice in supposing that I hate them. I would as soon
hate my own people." The idea of his hating the English was of course
too puerile for discussion; and the book, as I have said, is full of a
rich appreciation of the finest characteristics of the country. But it
has a serious defect -- a defect which impairs its value, though it
helps to give consistency to such an image of Hawthorne's personal
nature as we may by this time have been able to form. It is the work of
an outsider, of a stranger, of a man who remains to the end a mere
spectator (something less even than an observer), and always lacks the
final initiation into the manners and nature of a people of whom it may
most be said, among all the people of the earth, that to know them is to
make discoveries. Hawthorne freely confesses to this constant
exteriority, and appears to have been perfectly conscious </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr434</locdoc><milestone n=434> of
it. "I remember," he writes in the sketch of "A London Suburb," in <i>Our
Old Home</i>, "I remember to this day the dreary feeling with which I sat
by our first English fireside and watched the chill and rainy twilight
of an autumn day darkening down upon the garden, while the preceding
occupant of the house (evidently a most unamiable personage in his
lifetime), scowled inhospitably from above the mantel-piece, as if
indignant that an American should try to make himself at home there.
Possibly it may appease his sulky shade to know that I quitted his abode
as much a stranger as I entered it." The same note is struck in an entry
in his journal, of the date of October 6th, 1854.
<p>"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 <i>Times</i> 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.'"
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr435</locdoc><milestone n=435> people in the world, and
the most addicted to the belief that the other nations of the earth are
in a conspiracy to undervalue them. They are conscious of being the
youngest of the great nations, of not being of the European family, of
being placed on the circumference of the circle of civilisation rather
than at the centre, of the experimental element not having as yet
entirely dropped out of their great political undertaking. The sense of
this relativity, in a word, replaces that quiet and comfortable sense of
the absolute, as regards its own position in the world, which reigns
supreme in the British and in the Gallic genius. Few persons, I think,
can have mingled much with Americans in Europe without having made this
reflection, and it is in England that their habit of looking askance at
foreign institutions -- of keeping one eye, as it were, on the American
personality, while with the other they contemplate these objects -- is
most to be observed. Add to this that Hawthorne came to England late in
life, when his habits, his tastes, his opinions, were already formed,
that he was inclined to look at things in silence and brood over them
gently, rather than talk about them, discuss them, grow acquainted with
them by action; and it will be possible to form an idea of our writer's
detached and critical attitude in the country in which it is easiest,
thanks to its aristocratic constitution, to the absence of any
considerable public fund of entertainment and diversion, to the degree
in which the inexhaustible beauty and interest of the place are private
property, demanding constantly a special introduction -- in the country
in which, I say, it is easiest for a stranger to remain a stranger. For
a stranger to cease to be a stranger he must stand ready, as the French
say, to pay with his person; and this was an obligation that Hawthorne
was indisposed to incur. Our sense, as we read, that his reflections
are those of a shy and susceptible man, with nothing at stake, mentally,
in his appreciation of the country, is therefore a drawback to our
confidence; but it is not a drawback sufficient to make it of no
importance that he is at the same time singularly intelligent and
discriminating, with a faculty of feeling delicately and justly, which
constitutes in itself an illumination. There is a passage in the sketch
entitled <i>About Warwick</i> which is a very good instance of what </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr436</locdoc><milestone n=436>
was probably his usual state of mind. He is speaking of the aspect of
the High Street of the town.
<p>"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."
<p>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 <i>Our Old Home</i> 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.
<p>"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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr437</locdoc><milestone n=437> the waiter, who, like
most of his class in England, had evidently left his conversational
abilities uncultivated. No former practice of solitary living, nor
habits of reticence, nor well-tested self-dependence for occupation of
mind and amusement, can quite avail, as I now proved, to dissipate the
ponderous gloom of an English coffee-room under such circumstances as
these, with no book at hand save the county directory, nor any newspaper
but a torn local journal of five days ago. So I buried myself, betimes,
in a huge heap of ancient feathers (there is no other kind of bed in
these old inns), let my head sink into an unsubstantial pillow, and
slept a stifled sleep, compounded of the night-troubles of all my
predecessors in that same unrestful couch. And when I awoke, the odour
of a bygone century was in my nostrils -- a faint, elusive smell, of
which I never had any conception before crossing the Atlantic."
<p>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.
<p>"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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr438</locdoc><milestone n=438> English moralist. Never
was a descriptive epithet more nicely appropriate than that! Doctor
Johnson's morality was as English an article as a beef-steak."
<p>And for mere beauty of expression I cannot forbear quoting this
passage about the days in a fine English summer: --
<p>"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."
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr439</locdoc><milestone n=439> charm; and such a reader will
accordingly take an even greater satisfaction in the Diaries kept during
the two years Hawthorne spent in Italy; for in these volumes the element
I speak of is especially striking. He resigned his consulate at
Liverpool towards the close of 1857 -- whether because he was weary of
his manner of life there and of the place itself, as may well have been,
or because he wished to anticipate supersession by the new government
(Mr. Buchanan's) which was just establishing itself at Washington, is
not apparent from the slender sources of information from which these
pages have been compiled. In the month of January of the following year
he betook himself with his family to the Continent, and, as promptly as
possible, made the best of his way to Rome. He spent the remainder of
the winter and the spring there, and then went to Florence for the
summer and autumn; after which he returned to Rome and passed a second
season. His Italian Note-Books are very pleasant reading, but they are
of less interest than the others, for his contact with the life of the
country, its people and its manners, was simply that of the ordinary
tourist -- which amounts to saying that it was extremely superficial.
He appears to have suffered a great deal of discomfort and depression in
Rome, and not to have been on the whole in the best mood for enjoying
the place and its resources. That he did, at one time and another,
enjoy these things keenly is proved by his beautiful romance,
<i>Transformation</i>, which could never have been written by a man who had
not had many hours of exquisite appreciation of the lovely land of
Italy. But he took it hard, as it were, and suffered himself to be
painfully discomposed by the usual accidents of Italian life, as
foreigners learn to know it. His future was again uncertain, and during
his second winter in Rome he was in danger of losing his elder daughter
by a malady which he speaks of as a trouble "that pierced to my very
vitals." I may mention, with regard to this painful episode, that
Franklin Pierce, whose presidential days were over, and who, like other
ex-presidents, was travelling in Europe, came to Rome at the time, and
that the Note-Books contain some singularly beautiful and touching
allusions to his old friend's gratitude for his sympathy, and enjoyment
of his society. The sentiment of friendship has on the whole been
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr440</locdoc><milestone n=440> so much less commemorated in literature than might have been
expected from the place it is supposed to hold in life, that there is
always something striking in any frank and ardent expression of it. It
occupied, in so far as Pierce was the object of it, a large place in
Hawthorne's mind, and it is impossible not to feel the manly tenderness
of such lines as these: --
<p>"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."
<p>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
<i>Transformation</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr441</locdoc><milestone n=441>
lime, and that the granite Egyptian statues were hewn and squared into
building stones."
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr442</locdoc><milestone n=442> present
inevitably accommodate himself more easily to the idiosyncrasies of
foreign lands. An American as cultivated as Hawthorne, is now almost
inevitably more cultivated, and, as a matter of course, more
Europeanised in advance, more cosmopolitan. It is very possible that in
becoming so, he has lost something of his occidental savour, the quality
which excites the good-will of the American reader of our author's
Journals for the dislocated, depressed, even slightly bewildered
diarist. Absolutely the last of the earlier race of Americans Hawthorne
was, fortunately, probably far from being. But I think of him as the
last specimen of the more primitive type of men of letters; and when it
comes to measuring what he succeeded in being, in his unadulterated
form, against what he failed of being, the positive side of the image
quite extinguishes the negative. I must be on my guard, however,
against incurring the charge of cherishing a national consciousness as
acute as I have ventured to pronounce his own.
<p>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: --
<p>"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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr443</locdoc><milestone n=443> gradually filtered and
sublimated through my consulate, on the way outward and homeward. I
first got acquainted with my own countrymen there. At Rome too it was
not much better. But here in Florence, and in the summer-time, and in
this secluded villa, I have escaped out of all my old tracks, and am
really remote. I like my present residence immensely. The house stands
on a hill, overlooking Florence, and is big enough to quarter a
regiment, insomuch that each member of the family, including servants,
has a separate suite of apartments, and there are vast wildernesses of
upper rooms into which we have never yet sent exploring expeditions. At
one end of the house there is a moss-grown tower, haunted by owls and by
the ghost of a monk who was confined there in the thirteenth century,
previous to being burnt at the stake in the principal square of
Florence. I hire this villa, tower and all, at twenty-eight dollars a
month; but I mean to take it away bodily and clap it into a romance,
which I have in my head, ready to be written out."
<p>This romance was <i>Transformation</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr444</locdoc><milestone n=444> of Redcar, on the Yorkshire
coast, in February of the following year. It was issued primarily in
England; the American edition immediately followed. It is an odd fact
that in the two countries the book came out under different titles. The
title that the author had bestowed upon it did not satisfy the English
publishers, who requested him to provide it with another; so that it is
only in America that the work bears the name of <i>The Marble Faun</i>.
Hawthorne's choice of this appellation is, by the way, rather singular,
for it completely fails to characterise the story, the subject of which
is the living faun, the faun of flesh and blood, the unfortunate
Donatello. His marble counterpart is mentioned only in the opening
chapter. On the other hand Hawthorne complained that <i>Transformation</i>
"gives one the idea of Harlequin in a pantomime." Under either name,
however, the book was a great success, and it has probably become the
most popular of Hawthorne's four novels. It is part of the intellectual
equipment of the Anglo-Saxon visitor to Rome, and is read by every
English-speaking traveller who arrives there, who has been there, or who
expects to go.
<p>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 <i>The Scarlet Letter</i> and <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i> 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 <i>Transformation</i> he has attempted to deal with actualities
more than he did in either of his earlier </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr445</locdoc><milestone n=445> novels. He has
described the streets and monuments of Rome with a closeness which forms
no part of his reference to those of Boston and Salem. But for all this
he incurs that penalty of seeming factitious and unauthoritative, which
is always the result of an artist's attempt to project himself into an
atmosphere in which he has not a transmitted and inherited property. An
English or a German writer (I put poets aside) may love Italy well
enough, and know her well enough, to write delightful fictions about
her; the thing has often been done. But the productions in question
will, as novels, always have about them something second-rate and
imperfect. There is in <i>Transformation</i> enough beautiful perception of
the interesting character of Rome, enough rich and eloquent expression
of it, to save the book, if the book could be saved; but the style, what
the French call the <i>genre</i>, is an inferior one, and the thing remains a
charming romance with intrinsic weaknesses.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr446</locdoc><milestone n=446> ingenious and exquisite touches. Of course, to make
the interest complete, there is a woman in the affair, and Hawthorne has
done few things more beautiful than the picture of the unequal
complicity of guilt between his immature and dimly-puzzled hero, with
his clinging, unquestioning, unexacting devotion, and the dark,
powerful, more widely-seeing feminine nature of Miriam. Deeply touching
is the representation of the manner in which these two essentially
different persons -- the woman intelligent, passionate, acquainted with
life, and with a tragic element in her own career; the youth ignorant,
gentle, unworldly, brightly and harmlessly natural -- are equalised and
bound together by their common secret, which insulates them, morally,
from the rest of mankind. The character of Hilda has always struck me
as an admirable invention -- one of those things that mark the man of
genius. It needed a man of genius and of Hawthorne's imaginative
delicacy, to feel the propriety of such a figure as Hilda's and to
perceive the relief it would both give and borrow. This pure and
somewhat rigid New England girl, following the vocation of a copyist of
pictures in Rome, unacquainted with evil and untouched by impurity, has
been accidentally the witness, unknown and unsuspected, of the dark deed
by which her friends, Miriam and Donatello, are knit together. This is
<i>her</i> revelation of evil, her loss of perfect innocence. She has done
no wrong, and yet wrong-doing has become a part of her experience, and
she carries the weight of her detested knowledge upon her heart. She
carries it a long time, saddened and oppressed by it, till at last she
can bear it no longer. If I have called the whole idea of the presence
and effect of Hilda in the story a trait of genius, the purest touch of
inspiration is the episode in which the poor girl deposits her burden.
She has passed the whole lonely summer in Rome, and one day, at the end
of it, finding herself in St. Peter's, she enters a confessional,
strenuous daughter of the Puritans as she is, and pours out her dark
knowledge into the bosom of the Church -- then comes away with her
conscience lightened, not a whit the less a Puritan than before. If the
book contained nothing else noteworthy but this admirable scene, and the
pages describing the murder committed by Donatello under Miriam's eyes,
and the ecstatic wandering, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr447</locdoc><milestone n=447> afterwards, of the guilty couple,
through the "blood-stained streets of Rome," it would still deserve to
rank high among the imaginative productions of our day.
<p>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
<i>Transformation</i> 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 <i>Transformation</i>, 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.
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=24>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr448</locdoc><milestone n=448>
<p> VII
<p> <i>Last Years</i> (24)
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr449</locdoc><milestone n=449> it was not intended for such grossness, and that in a
world ideally constituted he would have enjoyed a liberal pension, an
assured subsistence, and have been able to produce his charming prose
only when the fancy took him.
<p>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
<i>Our Old Home</i> 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. <i>Our Old Home</i>
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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr450</locdoc><milestone n=450> his book. His answer (to his publisher), was much
to the point.
<p>"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."
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr451</locdoc><milestone n=451> among
my certainties that no man's loyalty is more steadfast,no man's hopes or
apprehensions on behalf of our national existence more deeply heartfelt,
or more closely intertwined with his possibilities of personal
happiness, than those of Franklin Pierce." I know not how well the ex-
President liked these lines, but the public thought them admirable, for
they served as a kind of formal profession of faith, on the question of
the hour, by a loved and honoured writer. That some of his friends
thought such a profession needed is apparent from the numerous editorial
ejaculations and protests appended to an article describing a visit he
had just paid to Washington, which Hawthorne contributed to the
<i>Atlantic Monthly</i> for July, 1862, and which, singularly enough, has not
been reprinted. The article has all the usual merit of such sketches on
Hawthorne's part -- the merit of delicate, sportive feeling, expressed
with consummate grace -- but the editor of the periodical appears to
have thought that he must give the antidote with the poison, and the
paper is accompanied with several little notes disclaiming all sympathy
with the writer's political heresies. The heresies strike the reader of
to-day as extremely mild, and what excites his emotion, rather, is the
questionable taste of the editorial commentary, with which it is strange
that Hawthorne should have allowed his article to be encumbered. He had
not been an Abolitionist before the War, and that he should not pretend
to be one at the eleventh hour, was, for instance, surely a piece of
consistency that might have been allowed to pass. "I shall not pretend
to be an admirer of old John Brown," he says, in a page worth quoting,
"any further than sympathy with Whittier's excellent ballad about him
may go; nor did I expect ever to shrink so unutterably from any
apophthegm of a sage whose happy lips have uttered a hundred golden
sentences" -- the allusion here, I suppose, is to Mr. Emerson -- "as
from that saying (perhaps falsely attributed to so honoured a name),
that the death of this blood-stained fanatic has `made the Gallows as
venerable as the Cross!' Nobody was ever more justly hanged. He won his
martyrdom fairly, and took it fairly. He himself, I am persuaded (such
was his natural integrity), would have acknowledged that Virginia had a
right to take the life which he had staked and lost; although it would
have been better for her, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr452</locdoc><milestone n=452> in the hour that is fast coming, if
she could generously have forgotten the criminality of his attempt in
its enormous folly. On the other hand, any common-sensible man, looking
at the matter unsentimentally, must have felt a certain intellectual
satisfaction in seeing him hanged, if it were only in requital of his
preposterous miscalculation of possibilities." Now that the heat of that
great conflict has passed away, this is a capital expression of the
saner estimate, in the United States, of the dauntless and deluded old
man who proposed to solve a complex political problem by stirring up a
servile insurrection. There is much of the same sound sense, interfused
with light, just appreciable irony, in such a passage as the following:
--
<p>"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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr453</locdoc><milestone n=453> that sentiment of physical love for the
soil which renders an Englishman, for example, so intensely sensitive to
the dignity and well-being of his little island, that one hostile foot,
treading anywhere upon it, would make a bruise on each individual
breast. If a man loves his own State, therefore, and is content to be
ruined with her, let us shoot him, if we can, but allow him an
honourable burial in the soil he fights for."
<p>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.
<p>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 <i>The Dolliver Romance</i>, 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.
<p>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
<i>Septimius Felton, or the Elixir of Life</i>; 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 <i>Faust</i>; and still
more widely from a critic whom Mr. Lathrop quotes, who regards a certain
portion of it as "one </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr454</locdoc><milestone n=454> of the very greatest triumphs in all
literature." It seems to me almost cruel to pitch in this exalted key
one's estimate of the rough first draught of a tale in regard to which
the author's premature death operates, virtually, as a complete
renunciation of pretensions. It is plain to any reader that <i>Septimius
Felton</i>, as it stands, with its roughness, its gaps, its mere
allusiveness and slightness of treatment, gives us but a very partial
measure of Hawthorne's full intention; and it is equally easy to believe
that this intention was much finer than anything we find in the book.
Even if we possessed the novel in its complete form, however, I incline
to think that we should regard it as very much the weakest of
Hawthorne's productions. The idea itself seems a failure, and the best
that might have come of it would have been very much below <i>The Scarlet
Letter</i> or <i>The House of the Seven Gables</i>. The appeal to our interest
is not felicitously made, and the fancy of a potion, to assure eternity
of existence, being made from the flowers which spring from the grave of
a man whom the distiller of the potion has deprived of life, though it
might figure with advantage in a short story of the pattern of the
<i>Twice-Told Tales</i>, appears too slender to carry the weight of a novel.
Indeed, this whole matter of elixirs and potions belongs to the fairy-
tale period of taste, and the idea of a young man enabling himself to
live forever by concocting and imbibing a magic draught, has the
misfortune of not appealing to our sense of reality or even to our
sympathy. The weakness of <i>Septimius Felton</i> is that the reader cannot
take the hero seriously -- a fact of which there can be no better proof
than the element of the ridiculous which inevitably mingles itself in
the scene in which he entertains his lady-love with a prophetic sketch
of his occupations during the successive centuries of his earthly
immortality. I suppose the answer to my criticism is that this is
allegorical, symbolic, ideal; but we feel that it symbolises nothing
substantial, and that the truth -- whatever it may be -- that it
illustrates, is as moonshiny, to use Hawthorne's own expression, as the
allegory itself. Another fault of the story is that a great historical
event -- the war of the Revolution -- is introduced in the first few
pages, in order to supply the hero with a pretext for killing the young
man from whose grave the flower of immortality is to sprout, and then
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr455</locdoc><milestone n=455> drops out of the narrative altogether, not even forming a
background to the sequel. It seems to me that Hawthorne should either
have invented some other occasion for the death of his young officer, or
else, having struck the note of the great public agitation which
overhung his little group of characters, have been careful to sound it
through the rest of his tale. I do wrong, however, to insist upon these
things, for I fall thereby into the error of treating the work as if it
had been cast into its ultimate form and acknowledged by the author. To
avoid this error I shall make no other criticism of details, but content
myself with saying that the idea and intention of the book appear,
relatively speaking, feeble, and that even had it been finished it would
have occupied a very different place in the public esteem from the
writer's masterpieces.
<p>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
<i>The Dolliver Romance</i>, which had been promised to the subscribers of
the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> (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. </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr456</locdoc><milestone n=456> That
trouble perhaps still awaits you, after I shall have reached a further
stage of decay. Seriously, my mind has, for the time, lost its temper
and its fine edge, and I have an instinct that I had better keep quiet.
Perhaps I shall have a new spirit of vigour if I wait quietly for it;
perhaps not." The winter passed away, but the "new spirit of vigour"
remained absent, and at the end of February he wrote to Mr. Fields that
his novel had simply broken down, and that he should never finish it.
"I hardly know what to say to the public about this abortive romance,
though I know pretty well what the case will be. I shall never finish
it. Yet it is not quite pleasant for an author to announce himself, or
to be announced, as finally broken down as to his literary faculty. . .
. . I cannot finish it unless a great change comes over me; and if I
make too great an effort to do so, it will be my death; not that I
should care much for that, if I could fight the battle through and win
it, thus ending a life of much smoulder and a scanty fire, in a blaze of
glory. But I should smother myself in mud of my own making. . . . . I
am not low-spirited, nor fanciful, nor freakish, but look what seem to
me realities in the face, and am ready to take whatever may come. If I
could but go to England now, I think that the sea-voyage and the `old
Home' might set me all right."
<p>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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr457</locdoc><milestone n=457> death overtook him.
His companion, General Pierce, going into his room in the early morning,
found that he had breathed his last during the night -- had passed away,
tranquilly, comfortably, without a sign or a sound, in his sleep. This
happened at the hotel of the place -- a vast white edifice, adjacent to
the railway station, and entitled the Pemigiwasset House. He was buried
at Concord, and many of the most distinguished men in the country stood
by his grave.
<p>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.
<p> London: Macmillan,
1879
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=25>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr458</locdoc><milestone n=458>
<p> <i>Nathaniel Hawthorne</i> (25)
<p> Nathaniel Hawthorne; (1804 - 1864). Written for the <i>Library
of the World's Best Literature Ancient and Modern</i>, Vol. XII.
<p>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.'
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr459</locdoc><milestone n=459>
<p>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
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr460</locdoc><milestone n=460> symbolic and allegoric, a presentation of objects casting, in
every case, far behind them a shadow more curious and more amusing than
the apparent figure. Any figure therefore easily became with him an
emblem, any story a parable, any appearance a cover: things with which
his concern is -- gently, indulgently, skillfully, with the lightest
hand in the world -- to pivot them round and show the odd little stamp
or sign that gives them their value for the collector.
<p>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.
<p>`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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr461</locdoc><milestone n=461> co-operative community of Brook Farm, a short-
lived socialistic experiment. He had married in the following year and
gone to live at the old Manse at Concord, where he remained till 1846,
when, with a fresh fiscal engagement, he returned to his native town.
It was in the intervals of his occupation at the Salem custom-house that
`The Scarlet Letter' was written. The book has achieved the fortune of
the small supreme group of novels: it has hung an ineffaceable image in
the portrait gallery, the reserved inner cabinet, of literature. Hester
Prynne is not one of those characters of fiction whom we use as a term
of comparison for a character of fact: she is almost more than that, --
she decorates the museum in a way that seems to forbid us such a
freedom. Hawthorne availed himself, for her history, of the most
striking anecdote the early Puritan chronicle could give him, -- give
him in the manner set forth by the long, lazy Prologue or Introduction,
an exquisite commemoration of the happy dullness of his term of service
at the custom-house, where it is his fancy to pretend to have discovered
in a box of old papers the faded relic and the musty documents which
suggested to him his title and his theme.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr462</locdoc><milestone n=462> irrevocable
anguish. In this situation he calls to him Hester Prynne and her child,
who, belated in the course of the merciful ministrations to which Hester
has now given herself up, pass, among the shadows, within sight of him;
and they in response to his appeal ascend for a second time to the place
of atonement, and stand there with him under cover of night. The scene
is not complete, of course, till Chillingworth arrives to enjoy the
spectacle and his triumph. It has inevitably gained great praise, and
no page of Hawthorne's shows more intensity of imagination; yet the main
achievement of the book is not what is principally its subject, -- the
picture of the relation of the two men. They are too faintly -- the
husband in particular -- though so fancifully figured. `The Scarlet
Letter' lives, in spite of too many cold <i>concetti</i>, -- Hawthorne's
general danger, -- by something noble and truthful in the image of the
branded mother and the beautiful child. Strangely enough, this pair are
almost wholly outside the action; yet they preserve and vivify the work.
<p>`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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr463</locdoc><milestone n=463> spasm of their starved gentility and flicker
of their slow extinction. In the haunted world of Hawthorne's
imagination the old Pyncheon house, under its elm in the Salem by-
street, is the place where the ghosts are most at home. Ghostly even
are its actual tenants, the ancient virgin Hepzibah, with her turban,
her scowl, her creaking joints, and her map of the great territory to
the eastward belonging to her family, -- reduced, in these dignities, to
selling profitless pennyworths over a counter; and the bewildered
bachelor Clifford, released, like some blinking and noble <i>dterr</i> of
the old Bastile, from twenty years of wrongful imprisonment. We meet at
every turn, with Hawthorne, his favorite fancy of communicated sorrows
and inevitable atonements. Life is an experience in which we expiate
the sins of others in the intervals of expiating our own. The heaviest
visitation of the blighted Pyncheons is the responsibility they have
incurred through the misdeeds of a hard-hearted witch-burning ancestor.
This ancestor has an effective return to life in the person of the one
actually robust and successful representative of the race, -- a bland,
hard, showy, shallow "ornament of the bench," a massive hypocrite and
sensualist, who at last, though indeed too late, pays the penalty and
removes the curse. The idea of the story is at once perhaps a trifle
thin and a trifle obvious, -- the idea that races and individuals may
die of mere dignity and heredity, and that they need for refreshment and
cleansing to be, from without, breathed upon like dull mirrors. But the
art of the thing is exquisite, its charm irresistible, its distinction
complete. `The House of the Seven Gables,' I may add, contains in the
rich portrait of Judge Pyncheon a character more solidly suggested than
-- with the possible exception of the Zenobia of `The Blithedale
Romance' -- any other figure in the author's list.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr464</locdoc><milestone n=464> of
the partakers of this quaint experiment appears to have been held to be
that they were Transcendentalists. More simply stated, they were young,
candid radicals, reformers, philanthropists. The fact that it sprang --
all irresponsibly indeed -- from the observation of a known episode,
gives `The Blithedale Romance' also a certain value as a picture of
manners; the place portrayed, however, opens quickly enough into the
pleasantest and idlest dream-world. Hawthorne, we gather, dreamed there
more than he worked; he has traced his attitude delightfully in that of
the fitful and ironical Coverdale, as to whom we wonder why he chose to
rub shoulders quite so much. We think of him as drowsing on a hillside
with his hat pulled over his eyes, and the neighboring hum of reform
turning in his ears, to a refrain as vague as an old song. One thing is
certain: that if he failed his companions as a laborer in the field, it
was only that he might associate them with another sort of success.
<p>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. </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr465</locdoc><milestone n=465> Zenobia was, like Coverdale himself,
a subject of dreams that were not to find form at Roxbury; but Coverdale
had other resources, while she had none but her final failure.
Hawthorne indicates no more interesting aspect of the matter than her
baffled effort to make a hero of Hollingsworth, who proves, to her
misfortune, so much too inelastic for the part. All this, as we read it
to-day, has a soft, shy glamour, a touch of the poetry of far-off
things. Nothing of the author's is a happier expression of what I have
called his sense of the romance of New England.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr466</locdoc><milestone n=466> more acquainted with life than himself. The humanizing,
the moralizing of the faun is again an ingenious conceit; but it has had
for result to have made the subject of the process -- and the case is
unique in Hawthorne's work -- one of those creations of the story-teller
who give us a name for a type. There is a kind of young man whom we
have now only to call a Donatello, to feel that we sufficiently classify
him. It is a part of the scheme of the story to extend to still another
nature than his the same sad initiation. A young woman from across the
Atlantic, a gentle copyist in Roman galleries of still gentler Guidos
and Guercinos, happens to have caught a glimpse, at the critical moment,
of the dismal secret that unites Donatello and Miriam. This, for her,
is the tree of bitter knowledge, the taste of which sickens and saddens
her. The burden is more than she can bear, and one of the most charming
passages in the book describes how at last, at a summer's end, in sultry
solitude, she stops at St. Peter's before a confessional, and Protestant
and Puritan as she is, yields to the necessity of kneeling there and
ridding herself of her obsession. Hawthorne's young women are
exquisite; Hilda is a happy sister to the Ph;oebe of `The House of the
Seven Gables' and the Priscilla of `The Blithedale Romance.'
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr467</locdoc><milestone n=467> American `Note Books,' the English, and the French
and Italian, were given to the world after his death, -- in 1868, 1870,
and 1871 respectively; and if I add to these the small "campaign" `Life
of Franklin Pierce' (1852), two posthumous fragments, `Septimius Felton'
and `The Dolliver Romance,' and those scraps and shreds of which his
table drawers were still more exhaustively emptied, his literary
catalogue -- none of the longest -- becomes complete.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr468</locdoc><milestone n=468> surface with his report. On the surface -- the
surface of the soul and the edge of the tragedy -- he preferred to
remain. He lingered, to weave his web, in the thin exterior air. This
is a partial expression of his characteristic habit of dipping, of
diving just for sport, into the moral world without being in the least a
moralist. He had none of the heat nor of the dogmatism of that
character; none of the impertinence, as we feel he would almost have
held it, of any intermeddling. He never intermeddled; he was divertedly
and discreetly contemplative, pausing oftenest wherever, amid prosaic
aspects, there seemed most of an appeal to a sense for subtleties. But
of all cynics he was the brightest and kindest, and the subtleties he
spun are mere silken threads for stringing polished beads. His
collection of moral mysteries is the cabinet of a dilettante.
<p> New York: R. S. Peale and J. A. Hill, 1896
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr468</locdoc><milestone n=468> LETTER TO THE HON. ROBERT S. RANTOUL
<p> RYE, SUSSEX, ENGLAND.
<p> June 10, 1904.
<p>DEAR SIR:
<p> 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 <i>why</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr469</locdoc><milestone n=469>
distinguishing, in the general friendliness, between the <i>loan</i> of
enthusiasm and the gift, between the sound that starts the echo and the
echo that comes back from the sound. But being present by projection of
the mind, present afar off and under another sky, <i>that</i> has its
advantages too -- for other distinctions, for lucidity of vision and a
sense of the reasons of things. The career commemorated may perhaps so
be looked at, over a firm rest, as through the telescope that fixes it,
even to intensity, and helps it to become, as we say, objective -- and
objective not strictly to cold criticism, but to admiration and wonder
themselves, and even, in a degree, to a certain tenderness of envy. The
earlier scene, now smothered in flowers and eloquence and music,
possibly hangs before one rather more, under this perspective, in <i>all</i>
its parts -- with its relation, unconscious at the time, to the rare
mind that had been planted in it as in a parent soil, and with the
relation of that mind to its own preoccupied state, to the scene itself
as enveloping and suggesting medium: a relation, this latter, to come to
consciousness always so much sooner, so much more nervously, so much
more expressively, than the other! By which I mean that there is,
unfortunately for the prospective celebrity, no short cut possible, on
the part of his fellow-townsmen, to the expensive holiday they are
keeping in reserve for his name. It is there, all the while --
somewhere in the air at least, even while he lives; but they cannot get
<i>at</i> it till the Fates have forced, one by one, all the locks of all the
doors and crooked passages that shut it off; and the celebrity meantime,
by good luck, can have little idea what is missing.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr470</locdoc><milestone n=470> addition of
all the limitations and depressions and difficulties of genius that
makes always -- with the factor of Time thrown in -- the sum total of
posthumous glory. We see, at the end of the backward vista, the
restless unclassified artist pursue the <i>immediate</i>, the pressing need
of the hour, the question he is not to come home to his possibly
uninspiring hearth-stone without having met -- we see him chase it, none
too confidently, through quite familiar, <i>too</i> familiar streets, round
well-worn corners that don't trip it up for him, or into dull doorways
that fail to catch and hold it; and then we see, at the other end of the
century, these same streets and corners and doorways, these quiet
familiarities, the stones he trod, the objects he touched, the air he
breathed, positively and all impatiently <i>waiting</i> to bestow their
reward, to measure him out success, in the great, in the almost
superfluous, abundance of the eventual! This general quest that
Hawthorne comes back to us out of the old sunny and shady Salem, the
blissfully homogeneous community of the forties and fifties, as urged to
by his particular, and very individual, sense of life, is that of man's
relation to his environment seen on the side that we call, for our best
convenience, the romantic side: a term that we half the time, nowadays,
comfortably escape the challenge to define precisely because "The
Scarlet Letter" and "The House of the Seven Gables" have made that
possible to us under cover of mere triumphant reference to them. That
is why, to my sense, our author's Salem years and Salem impressions are
so interesting a part of his development. It was while they lasted, it
was to all appearance under their suggestion, that the romantic spirit
in him learned to expand with that right and beautiful felicity that was
to make him one of its rarest representatives. Salem had the good-
fortune to assist him, betimes, to this charming discrimination -- that
of looking for romance near at hand, and where it grows thick and true,
rather than on the other side of the globe and in the Dictionary of
Dates. We see it, nowadays, more and more, inquired and bargained for
in places and times that are strange and indigestible to us; and for the
most part, I think, we see those who deal in it on these terms come back
from their harvest with their hands smelling, under their brave leather
gauntlets, or royal rings, or whatever, of the plain </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr471</locdoc><milestone n=471> domestic
blackberry, the homeliest growth of our actual dusty waysides. These
adventurers bring home, in general, simply what they have taken with
them, the mechanical, at best the pedantic, view of the list of romantic
properties. The country of romance has been for them but a particular
spot on the map, coloured blue or red or yellow -- they have to <i>take</i>
it from the map; or has been this, that or the other particular set of
complications, machinations, coincidences or escapes, this, that or the
other fashion of fire-arm or cutlass, cock of hat, frizzle of wig,
violence of scuffle or sound of expletive: mere accidents and outward
patches, all, of the engaging mystery -- no more of its essence than the
brass band at a restaurant is of the essence of the dinner. What was
admirable and instinctive in Hawthorne was that he saw the quaintness or
the weirdness, the interest <i>behind</i> the interest, of things, as
continuous with the very life we are leading, or that we were leading --
you, at Salem, certainly were leading -- round about him and under his
eyes; saw it as something deeply within us, not as something infinitely
disconnected from us; saw it in short in the very application of the
spectator's, the poet's mood, in the kind of reflection the things we
know best and see oftenest may make in our minds. So it is that such
things as "The Seven Gables," "The Blithedale Romance," "The Marble
Faun," are singularly fruitful examples of the real as distinguished
from the artificial romantic note. Here "the light that never was on
land or sea" keeps all the intimacy and yet adds all the wonder. In the
first two of the books I have named, especially, the author has read the
romantic effect into the most usual and contemporary things -- arriving
by it at a success that, in the Seven Gables perhaps supremely, is a
marvel of the free-playing, yet ever unerring, never falsifying
instinct. We have an ancient gentlewoman reduced to keep a shop; a
young photographer modestly invoking fortune; a full-fed, wine-flushed
"prominent citizen" asleep in his chair; a weak-minded bachelor spending
his life under the shadow of an early fault that has not been in the
least heroic; a fresh New England girl of the happy complexion of
thousands of others -- we have, thrown together, but these gently-
persuasive challenges to mystification, yet with the result that they
transport us to a world in which, as in that of Tennyson's </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr472</locdoc><milestone n=472>
Lotus-Eaters, it seems always afternoon. And somehow this very freedom
of the spell remains all the while truth to the objects observed --
truth to the very Salem in which the vision was born. Blithedale is
scarcely less fine a case of distinction conferred, the curiosity and
anxiety dear to the reader purchased, not by a shower of counterfeit
notes, simulating munificence, but by that artistic economy which
understands <i>values</i> and uses them. The book takes up the parti-
coloured, angular, audible, traceable Real, the New England earnest,
aspiring, reforming Real, scattered in a few frame-houses over a few
stony fields, and so invests and colours it, makes it rich and strange -
- and simply by finding a felicitous <i>tone</i> for it -- that its
characters and images remain for us curious winged creatures preserved
in the purest amber of the imagination.
<p>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 <i>contrast</i> --
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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr473</locdoc><milestone n=473> and noble, to throw the
distinction into relief. The scene has changed and everything with it -
- the pitch, and the tone, and the quantity, and the quality, above all;
reverberations are gained, but proportions are lost; the distracted Muse
herself stops her ears and shuts her eyes: the brazen trumpet has so
done its best to deafen us to the fiddle-string. But to the fiddle-
string we nevertheless return; it sounds, for our sense, with the
slightest lull of the general noise -- such a lull as, for reflection,
for taste, a little even for criticism, and much, certainly, for a
legitimate complacency, our present occasion beneficently makes. Then
it is that such a mystery as that of the genius we commemorate may
appear a perfect example of the truth that the state of being a classic
is a <i>comparative</i> state -- considerably, generously, even when blindly,
brought about, for the author on whom the crown alights, by the
generations, the multitudes worshipping other gods, that have followed
him. He must obviously have been in himself exquisite and right, but it
is not to that only, to being in himself exquisite and right, that any
man ever was so fortunate as to owe the supreme distinction. He owes it
more or less, at the best, to the <i>relief</i> in which some happy, some
charming combination of accidents has placed his intrinsic value. This
combination, in our own time, has been the contagion of the form that we
may, for convenience, and perhaps, as regards much of it, even for
compliment, call the journalistic -- so pervasive, so ubiquitous, so
unprecedentedly prosperous, so wonderful for outward agility, but so
unfavourable, even so fatal, to development from within. Hawthorne saw
it -- and it saw him -- but in its infancy, before these days of huge
and easy and immediate success, before the universal, the overwhelming
triumph of the monster. He <i>had</i> developed from within -- as to
feeling, as to form, as to sincerity and character. So it is, as I say,
that he enjoys his relief, and that we are thrown back, by the sense of
difference, on his free possession of himself. He lent himself, of
course, to his dignity -- by the way the serious, in him, flowered into
the grace of art; but our need of him, almost quite alone as he stands,
in one tray of the scales of Justice, would add, if this were necessary,
to the earnestness of our wish to see that he be undisturbed there.
Vigilance, in the matter, however, assuredly, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr474</locdoc><milestone n=474> is happily not
necessary! The grand sign of being a classic is that when you have
"passed," as they say at examinations, you have passed; you have become
one once for all; you have taken your degree and may be left to the
light and the ages.
<p> <i>The Proceedings in Commemoration of the One Hundredth
<p> Anniversary of the Birth of Nathaniel
Hawthorne.</i>
<p> Salem, Mass.: Essex Institute,
1905
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=26>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr475</locdoc><milestone n=475>
<p> <i>William Dean Howells</i> (26)
<p> <i>Italian Journeys</i>. By W. D. Howells, Author of <i>Venetian
Life</i>. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1867.
<p>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."
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr476</locdoc><milestone n=476> common in
its character. The book will be diffuse, overgrown, shapeless; it will
not belong to literature. This charm of style Mr. Howells's two books
on Italy possess in perfection; they belong to literature and to the
centre and core of it, -- the region where men think and feel, and one
may almost say breathe, in good prose, and where the classics stand on
guard. Mr. Howells is not an economist, a statistician, an historian,
or a propagandist in any interest; he is simply an observer, responsible
only to a kindly heart, a lively fancy, and a healthy conscience. It
may therefore indeed be admitted that there was a smaller chance than in
the opposite case of his book being ill written. He might notice what
he pleased and mention what he pleased, and do it in just the manner
that pleased him. He was under no necessity of sacrificing his style to
facts; he might under strong provocation -- provocation of which the
sympathetic reader will feel the force -- sacrifice facts to his style.
But this privilege, of course, enforces a corresponding obligation, such
as a man of so acute literary conscience as our author would be the
first to admit and to discharge. He must have felt the importance of
making his book, by so much as it was not to be a work of strict
information, a work of generous and unalloyed entertainment.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr477</locdoc><milestone n=477> <i>maximum</i> of man's
creative force. So wide is the interval between the great Italian
monuments of art and the works the colder genius of the neighboring
nations, that we find ourselves willing to look upon the former as the
ideal and the perfection of human effort, and to invest the country of
their birth with a sort of half-sacred character. This is, indeed, but
half the story. Through the more recent past of Italy there gleams the
stupendous image of a remoter past; behind the splendid efflorescence of
the Renaissance we detect the fulness of a prime which, for human effort
and human will, is to the great aesthetic explosion of the sixteenth
century very much what the latter is to the present time. And then,
beside the glories of Italy, we think of her sufferings; and, beside the
master-works of art, we think of the favors of Nature; and, along with
these profane matters, we think of the Church, -- until, betwixt
admiration and longing and pity and reverence, it is little wonder that
we are charmed and touched beyond healing.
<p>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 <i>so</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr478</locdoc><milestone n=478> number of small things; and
he ignores, for their sake, a large number of great ones. He is not
fond of generalizing, nor of offering views and opinions. A certain
poetical inconclusiveness pervades his book. He relates what he saw
with his own eyes, and what he thereupon felt and fancied; and his work
has thus a thoroughly personal flavor. It is, in fact, a series of
small personal adventures, -- adventures so slight and rapid that
nothing comes of them but the impression of the moment, and, as a final
result, the pleasant chapter which records them. These chapters, of
course, differ in interest and merit, according to their subject, but
the charm of manner is never absent; and it is strongest when the author
surrenders himself most completely to his faculty for composition, and
works his matter over into the perfection of form, as in the episode
entitled "Forza Maggiore," a real masterpiece of light writing. Things
slight and simple and impermanent all put on a hasty comeliness at the
approach of his pen.
<p>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 <i>commis-voyageurs</i> 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.
<p>And so at Capri, "after we had inspected the ruins of the
emperor's villa, a clownish imbecile of a woman, <i>professing to </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr479</locdoc><milestone n=479>
be the wife of the peasant who had made the excavations</i>, came forth out
of a cleft in the rock and received tribute of us; why, I do not know."
The sketch is as complete as it is rapid, and a hoary world of extortion
and of stupefied sufferance is unveiled with a single gesture. In all
things Mr. Howells's touch is light, but none the less sure for its
lightness. It is the touch of a writer who is a master in his own line,
and we have not so many writers and masters that we can afford not to
recognize real excellence. It is our own loss when we look vacantly at
those things which make life pleasant. Mr. hwells has the qualities
which make literature a delightful element in life, -- taste and culture
and imagination, and the incapacity to be common. We cannot but feel
that one for whom literature has done so much is destined to repay his
benefactor with interest.
<p> <i>North American Review</i>, January 1868
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr479</locdoc><milestone n=479> <i>Poems</i>. By William D. Howells. Boston: James R. Osgood & Co.,
1873.
<p>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 <i>Poems</i> 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, <i>style</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr480</locdoc><milestone n=480> manner and the sentiment
which our author's sketches and tales have made familiar to us. His
inspiration throughout seems very much akin to itself; the only visible
rule we detect in the matter being that, when a prompting of his fancy
is just a trifle too idle, too insubstantial, too unapologetically
picturesque, as it were, for even the minute ingenuities of his own
prose manner, the trick of the versifier steps in and lends the charming
folly its saving music. In prose, indeed, the reader knows the author
of "A Chance Acquaintance" to be much of a humorist -- there are few
writers now in whose pages there is more of a certain sort of critical,
appreciative exhilaration; and to his humor he has given, happily, we
think, little play in his verse. Versified jokes, except in rare cases,
spoil, to our taste, good things. But for the rest, prose and poetry
with Mr. Howells strike very much the same chords and utter the same
feelings. These feelings in the volume before us are chiefly of a
melancholy strain; pathetic pieces we should call most of the poems. It
is for the most part a very fine-drawn melancholy. We should, perhaps,
find it hard to determine, at times, the whence, the whither, the
wherefore of the author's melodious sighs.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr481</locdoc><milestone n=481>
balanced by the relish of exquisite form. They have not been simple
people as a general thing, the best of our recent poets; and this is one
of their many complexities. They are the product of many influences; of
their own restless fancy and sensitive tempers, to begin with; of the
changing experience of life; of the culture that is in the air, of the
other poets whom they love and emulate; of their New World consciousness
(when they are Americans) and their Old World sympathies; of their
literary associations, as well as their moral disposition. Half our
pleasure, for instance, in Mr. Longfellow's poetry is in its <i>barkish</i>
flavor, its vague literary echoes. So in its own measure Mr. Howells's
verse is a tissue of light reflections from an experience closely
interfused with native impulse. Discriminating readers, we think, will
enjoy tracing out these reflections and lingering over them. They speak
of the author's early youth having been passed in undisturbed intimacy
with a peculiarly characteristic phase of American scenery; and then of
this youthful quietude having expanded into the experience, full of
mingled relief and regret, of an intensely European way of life. Ohio
and Italy commingle their suggestions in Mr. Howells's pages in a
harmony altogether original. We imagine, further, that the author has
read a great many German lyrics, and has during a season cherished the
belief that Heine's "Lieder" were the most delightful things in the
world.
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr482</locdoc><milestone n=482> evenness of
merit. There are no half successes to remind us harshly of the
inevitable element of effort contained in all charming skill. Three of
the poems are narratives in hexameter -- a measure for which Mr. Howells
has an evident relish. Half our pleasure in English hexameter has
always seemed to us to be the pleasure of seeing them done with proper
smoothness at all; and this pleasure is naturally greater with the poet
than with his readers. But there have been too many fine English
hexameters written to have solid ground for skepticism, and Mr.
Howells's may rank with the best. None have been more truly picturesque
or found a poet apter for their needful ingenuities. Both in poetry and
prose the chance to be verbally ingenious has a marked attraction for
our author, and we may safely say that the occasion never outwits him.
<p>"That time of year, you know, when the summer, beginning
<p> to sadden,
<p> Full-mooned and silver-hearted, glides from the heart of
<p> September,
<p> Mourned by disconsolate crickets and iterant grasshoppers,
<p> crying
<p> All the still nights long from the ripened abundance of
<p> gardens;
<p> Then ere the boughs of maple are mantled with earliest
<p> autumn,
<p> But the wind of autumn breathes from the orchards at
<p> nightfall,
<p> Full of winy perfume and mystical yearning and languor;
<p> And in the noonday woods you hear the foraging squirrels,
<p> And the long, crashing fall of the half-eaten nut from the
<p> tree-top;
<p> When the robins are mute and the yellow-birds, haunting
<p> the thistles,
<p> Cheep and twitter and flit through the dusty lanes and the
loppings,
<p> When the pheasant hums from your stealthy foot in the
<p> cornfield;
<p> And the wild pigeons feed, few and shy, in the scokeberry
<p> bushes;
<p> When the weary land lies hushed, like a seer in a vision,
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr483</locdoc><milestone n=483>
<p> And your life seems but the dream of a dream that you
<p> cannot remember --
<p> Broken, bewildering, vague, an echo that answers to
<p> nothing!
<p> That time of year, you know."
<p>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 <i>pastiche</i>, 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. </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr484</locdoc><milestone n=484> The moral
melancholy at the source of the little poem of "Lost Beliefs" is
transitory, but the charm of the poem is permanent. We leave the reader
to judge:
<p> "One after one they left us;
<p> The sweet birds out of our breasts
<p> Went flying away in the morning:
<p> Will they come again to their nests?
<p> "Will they come again at nightfall,
<p> With God's breath in their song?
<p> Noon is fierce with heats of summer
<p> And summer days are long!
<p> "O my life, with thy upward liftings,
<p> Thy downward-striking roots,
<p> Ripening out of thy tender blossoms
<p> But hard and bitter fruits!
<p> "In thy boughs there is no shelter
<p> For the birds to seek again.
<p> The desolate nest is broken
<p> And torn with wind and rain!"
<p>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, <i>par excellence</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr485</locdoc><milestone n=485>
recognize for himself; they are charming turns of verse and very venial
cynicism. We have no space for further specifications; we can only
recommend our author's volume to all lovers of delicate literary
pleasures. To literature, with its modest pretensions, it emphatically
belongs. It has no weak places. It is all really classic work. The
reader, as he goes, will count over its fine intuitions and agree with
us that Mr. Howells is a master of the waning art of saying delicate
things in a way that does them justice.
<p> <i>Independent</i>, January 8, 1874
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr485</locdoc><milestone n=485> <i>A Foregone Conclusion</i>. By W. D. Howells. Boston: J. R.
Osgood & Co., 1875.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr486</locdoc><milestone n=486> even too delicate a piece of work
for general circulation, -- whether it had not too literary a quality to
please that great majority of people who prefer to swallow their
literature without tasting. But the best things in this line hit the
happy medium, and it seems to have turned out, experimentally, that Mr.
Howells managed at once to give his book a loose enough texture to let
the more simply-judging kind fancy they were looking at a vivid fragment
of social history itself, and yet to infuse it with a lurking artfulness
which should endear it to the initiated. It rarely happens that what is
called a popular success is achieved by such delicate means; with so
little forcing of the tone or mounting of the high horse. People at
large do not flock every day to look at a sober cabinet-picture. Mr.
Howells continues to practise the cabinet-picture manner, though in his
present work he has introduced certain broader touches. He has returned
to the ground of his first literary achievements, and introduced us
again to that charming half-merry, half-melancholy Venice which most
Americans know better through his pages than through any others. He did
this, in a measure, we think, at his risk; partly because there was a
chance of disturbing an impression which, in so far as he was the author
of it, had had time to grow very tranquil and mellow; and partly because
there has come to be a not unfounded mistrust of the Italian element in
light literature. Italy has been made to supply so much of the easy
picturesqueness, the crude local color of poetry and the drama, that a
use of this expedient is vaguely regarded as a sort of unlawful short-
cut to success, -- one of those coarsely mechanical moves at chess
which, if you will, are strictly within the rules of the game, but which
offer an antagonist strong provocation to fold up the board. Italians
have been, from Mrs. Radcliffe down, among the stock-properties of
romance; their associations are melodramatic, their very names are
supposed to go a great way toward getting you into a credulous humor,
and they are treated, as we may say, as bits of coloring-matter, which
if placed in solution in the clear water of uninspired prose are
warranted to suffuse it instantaneously with the most delectable hues.
The growing refinement of the romancer's art has led this to be
considered a rather gross device, calculated only to delude the simplest
imaginations, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr487</locdoc><milestone n=487> and we may say that the presumption is now
directly against an Italian in a novel, until he has pulled off his
slouched hat and mantle and shown us features and limbs that an Anglo-
Saxon would acknowledge. Mr. Howells's temerity has gone so far as to
offer us a priest of the suspected race, -- a priest with a dead-pale
complexion, a blue chin, a dreamy eye, and a name in <i>elli</i>. The burden
of proof is upon him that we shall believe in him, but he casts it off
triumphantly at an early stage of the narrative, and we confess that our
faith in Don Ippolito becomes at last really poignant and importunate.
<p>"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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr488</locdoc><milestone n=488> ground widely, he has sunk his shaft deep. The
little drama goes on altogether between four persons, -- chiefly,
indeed, between two, -- but on its limited scale it is singularly
complete, and the interest gains sensibly from compression. Mr.
Howells's touch is almost that of a miniature-painter; every stroke in
"A Foregone Conclusion" plays its definite part, though sometimes the
eye needs to linger a moment to perceive it. It is not often that a
young lady in a novel is the resultant of so many fine intentions as the
figure of Florida Vervain. The interest of the matter depends greatly,
of course, on the quality of the two persons thus dramatically
confronted, and here the author has shown a deep imaginative force.
Florida Vervain and her lover form, as a couple, a more effective
combination even than Kitty Ellison and Mr. Arbuton; for Florida, in a
wholly different line, is as good -- or all but as good -- as the
sweetheart of that sadly incapable suitor; and Don Ippolito is not only
a finer fellow than the gentleman from Boston, but he is more acutely
felt, we think, and better understood on the author's part. Don
Ippolito is a real creation, -- a most vivid, complete, and appealing
one; of how many touches and retouches, how many caressing, enhancing
strokes he is made up, each reader must observe for himself. He is in
every situation a distinct personal image, and we never lose the sense
of the author's seeing him in his habit as he lived, -- "moving up and
down the room with his sliding step, like some tall, gaunt, unhappy
girl," -- and verging upon that quasi-hallucination with regard to him
which is the law of the really creative fancy. His childish mildness,
his courtesy, his innocence, which provokes a smile, but never a laugh,
his meagre experience, his general helplessness, are rendered with an
unerring hand: there is no crookedness in the drawing, from beginning to
end. We have wondered, for ourselves, whether we should not have been
content to fancy him a better Catholic and more intellectually at rest
in his priestly office, -- so that his passion for the strange and
lovely girl who is so suddenly thrust before him should, by itself, be
left to account for his terrible trouble; but it is evident, on the
other hand, that his confiding her his doubts and his inward rebellion
forms the common ground on which they come closely together, and the
picture of his state of mind has too </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr489</locdoc><milestone n=489> much truthful color not to
justify itself. He is a representation of extreme moral simplicity, and
his figure might have been simpler if he had been a consenting priest,
rather than a protesting one. But, though he might have been in a way
more picturesque, he would not have been more interesting; and the charm
of the portrait is in its suffering us to feel with him, and its
offering nothing that we find mentally disagreeable, -- as we should
have found the suggestion of prayers stupidly mumbled and of the <i>odeur
de sacristie</i>. The key to Don Ippolito's mental strainings and
yearnings is in his fancy for mechanics, which is a singularly happy
stroke in the picture. It indicates the intolerable <i>discomfort</i> of his
position, as distinguished from the deeper unrest of passionate
scepticism, and by giving a sort of homely practical basis to his
possible emancipation, makes him relapse into bondage only more
tragical. It is a hard case, and Mr. Howells has written nothing better
-- nothing which more distinctly marks his faculty as a story-teller --
than the pages in which he traces it to its climax. The poor caged
youth, straining to the end of his chain, pacing round his narrow
circle, gazing at the unattainable outer world, bruising himself in the
effort to reach it and falling back to hide himself and die unpitied, --
is a figure which haunts the imagination and claims a permanent place in
one's melancholy memories.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr490</locdoc><milestone n=490>
among the tender sisterhood. Mr. Howells has attempted to enlist our
imagination on behalf of a young girl who is positively unsympathetic,
and who has an appearance of chilling rigidity and even of almost
sinister reserve. He has brilliantly succeeded, and his heroine just
escapes being disagreeable, to be fascinating. She is a poet's
invention, and yet she is extremely real, -- as real, in her way, as
that Kitty Ellison whom she so little resembles. In these two figures
Mr. hwells has bravely notched the opposite ends of his measure, and
there is pleasure in reflecting on the succession of charming girls
arrayed, potentially, along the intermediate line. He has outlined his
field; we hope he will fill it up. His women are always most sensibly
women; their motions, their accents, their ideas, savor essentially of
the sex; he is one of the few writers who hold a key to feminine logic
and detect a method in feminine madness. It deepens, of course,
immeasurably, the tragedy of Don Ippolito's sentimental folly, that
Florida Vervain should be the high-and-mighty young lady she is, and
gives an additional edge to the peculiar cruelty of his situation, --
the fact that, being what he is, he is of necessity, as a lover,
repulsive. But Florida is a complex personage, and the tale depends in
a measure in her having been able to listen to him in a pitying,
maternal fashion, out of the abundance of her characteristic strength.
There is no doubt that, from the moment she learns he has dreamed she
might love him, he becomes hopelessly disagreeable to her; but the
author has ventured on delicate ground in attempting to measure the
degree in which passionate pity might qualify her repulsion. It is
ground which, to our sense, he treads very firmly; but the episode of
Miss Vervain's seizing the young priest's head and caressing it will
probably provoke as much discussion as to its verisimilitude as young
Arbuton's famous repudiation of the object of his refined affections.
For our part, we think Miss Vervain's embrace was more natural than
otherwise -- for Miss Vervain; and, natural or not, it is admirably
poetic. The poetry of the tale is limited to the priest and his pupil.
Mrs. Vervain is a humorous creation, and in intention a very happy one.
The kindly, garrulous, military widow, with her lively hospitality to
the things that don't happen, and her serene unconsciousness of the
things that do, is a sort </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr491</locdoc><milestone n=491> of image of the way human levity
hovers about the edge of all painful occurrences. Her scatter-brained
geniality deepens the picture of her daughter's brooding preoccupations,
and there is much sustained humor in making her know so much less of the
story in which she plays a part than we do. Her loquacity, however, at
times, strikes us as of a trifle too shrill a pitch, and her manner may
be charged with lacking the repose, if not of the Veres of Vere, at
least of the Veres of Providence. But there is a really ludicrous image
suggested by the juxtaposition of her near-sightedness and her cheerful
ignorance of Don Ippolito's situation, in which, at the same time, she
takes so friendly an interest. She <i>overlooks</i> the tragedy going on
under her nose, just as she overlooks the footstool on which she
stumbles when she comes into a room. This touch proves that with a
genuine artist, like Mr. Howells, there is an unfailing cohesion of all
ingredients. Ferris, the consul, whose ultimately successful passion
for Miss Vervain balances the sad heart-history of the priest, will
probably find -- has, we believe, already found -- less favor than his
companions, and will be reputed to have come too easily by his good
fortune. He is an attempt at a portrait of a rough, frank, and rather
sardonic humorist, touched with the <i>sans gne</i> of the artist and even
of the Bohemian. He is meant to be a good fellow in intention and a
likable one in person; but we think the author has rather over-
emphasized his irony and his acerbity. He holds his own firmly enough,
however, as a make-weight in the action, and it is not till Don Ippolito
passes out of the tale and the scale descends with a jerk into his
quarter that most readers -- feminine readers at least -- shake their
heads unmistakably. Mr. Howells's conclusion -- his last twenty pages -
- will, we imagine, make him a good many dissenters, -- among those, at
least, whose enjoyment has been an enjoyment of his art. The story
passes into another tone, and the new tone seems to <i>jurer</i>, as the
French say, with the old. It passes out of Venice and the exquisite
Venetian suggestiveness, over to Providence, to New York, to the Fifth
Avenue Hotel, and the Academy of Design. We ourselves regret the
transition, though the motive of our regrets is difficult to define. It
is a transition from the ideal to the real, to the vulgar, from soft to
hard, from charming color to some </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr492</locdoc><milestone n=492> thing which is not color.
Providence and the Fifth Avenue Hotel certainly have their rights; but
we doubt whether their rights, in an essentially romantic theme, reside
in a commixture with the suggestions offered us in such a picture as
this: --
<p> "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."
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr493</locdoc><milestone n=493> have
floated beyond the horizon of the lagoons. It is the poor priest's
property, as it were; we grudge even the reversion of it to Mr. Ferris.
We confess even to a regret at seeing it survive Don Ippolito at all,
and should have advocated a trustful surrender of Florida Vervain's
subsequent fortunes to the imagination of the reader. But we have no
desire to expatiate restrictively on a work in which, at the worst, the
imagination finds such abundant pasture. "A Foregone Conclusion" will
take its place as a singularly perfect production. That the author was
an artist his other books had proved, but his art ripens and sweetens in
the sun of success. His manner has now refined itself till it gives one
a sense of pure <i>quality</i> which it really taxes the ingenuity to
express. There is not a word in the present volume as to which he has
not known consummately well what he was about; there is an exquisite
intellectual comfort in feeling one's self in such hands. Mr. Howells
has ranked himself with the few writers on whom one counts with
luxurious certainty, and this little masterpiece confirms our security.
<p> <i>North American Review</i>, January 1875
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr493</locdoc><milestone n=493> <i>A Foregone Conclusion</i>. By W. D. Howells, author of <i>Their
Wedding A Chance
<p> Acquaintance</i>, etc. Boston: J. R. Osgood & Co., 1875.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr494</locdoc><milestone n=494> and natural member of the Latin family, we
should have grudged him a heroine of foreign blood. Not the least charm
of the charming heroines he has already offered us has been their
delicately native quality. They have been American women in the
scientific sense of the term, and the author, intensely American in the
character of his talent, is probably never so spontaneous, so much
himself, as when he represents the delicate, nervous, emancipated young
woman begotten of our institutions and our climate, and equipped with a
lovely face and an irritable moral consciousness. Mr. Howells's tales
have appeared in the pages of the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, and the young
ladies who figure in them are the actual young ladies who attentively
peruse that magazine. We are thankful accordingly, in `A Foregone
Conclusion,' for a heroine named after one of the States of the Union,
and characterized by what we may call a national aroma. The relation of
a heroine to a hero can only be, of course, to be adored by him; but the
specific interest of the circumstance in this case resides in the fact
that the hero is a priest, and that one has a natural curiosity to know
how an American girl of the typical free-stepping, clear-speaking cast
receives a declaration from a sallow Italian ecclesiastic. It is
characteristic of Mr. Howells's manner as a story-teller, of his
preference of fine shades to heavy masses, of his dislike to <i>les grands
moyens, that Florida Vervain's attitude is one of benignant, almost
caressing, pity. The author's choice here seems to us very happy; any
other tone on the young girl's part would have been relatively a trifle
vulgar. Absolute scorn would have made poor Don Ippolito's tragedy too
brutally tragical, and an answering passion, even with all imaginable
obstructions, would have had a quality less poignant than his sense that
in her very kindness the woman he loves is most inaccessible. Don
Ippolito dies of a broken heart, and Florida Vervain prospers extremely
-- even to the point of marrying, at Providence, R. I., an American
gentleman whom, in spite of his having in his favor that he does not
stand in a disagreeably false position, the reader is likely to care
less for than for the shabby Venetian ecclesiastic.
<p>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 <i>dramatis personae</i> </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr495</locdoc><milestone n=495>
(for he has all glowing Venice for a back scene), and he has attempted
to depict but a single situation. But between his four persons the
drama is complete and the interest acute. It is all a most remarkable
piece of elaboration. Mr. Howells had already shown that he lacked
nothing that art can give in the way of finish and ingenuity of manner;
but he has now proved that he can embrace a dramatic situation with the
true imaginative force -- give us not only its mechanical structure, but
its atmosphere, its meaning, its poetry. The climax of Don Ippolito's
history in the present volume is related with masterly force and warmth,
and the whole portrait betrays a singular genius for detail. It is made
up of a series of extremely minute points, which melt into each other
like scattered water-drops. Their unity is in their subdued poetic
suggestiveness, their being the work of a writer whose observation
always projects some vague tremulous shadow into the realm of fancy.
The image of Don Ippolito, if we are not mistaken, will stand in a niche
of its own in the gallery of portraits of humble souls. The best figure
the author had drawn hitherto was that charmingly positive young lady,
Miss Kitty Ellison, in `A Chance Acquaintance'; but he has given it a
very harmonious companion in the Florida Vervain of the present tale.
Miss Vervain is positive also, and in the manner of her positiveness she
is a singularly original invention. She is more fantastic than her
predecessor, but she is hardly less lifelike, and she is a remarkably
picturesque study of a complex nature. Her image is poetical, which is
a considerable compliment, as things are managed now in fiction (where
the only escape from bread-and-butter and commonplace is into golden
hair and promiscuous felony). In the finest scene in the book, when
Florida has learned to what extent Don Ippolito has staked his happiness
upon his impossible passion, she, in a truly superb movement of pity,
seizes his head in her hands and kisses it. Given the persons and the
circumstances, this seems to us an extremely fine imaginative stroke,
for it helps not only to complete one's idea of the young girl, but the
fact of the deed being possible and natural throws a vivid side-light on
the helpless, childish, touching personality of the priest. We believe,
however, that it has had the good fortune to create something like a
scandal. There are really some </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr496</locdoc><milestone n=496> readers who are in urgent need
of a tonic regimen! If Mr. hwells continues to strike notes of this
degree of resonance, he will presently find himself a very eminent
story-teller; and meanwhile he may find an agreeable stimulus in the
thought that he has provoked a discussion.
<p>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 <i>mler les
genres</i>. 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr497</locdoc><milestone n=497> to make a few, we should find Mr.
Howells a capital text. He reminds us how much our native-grown
imaginative effort is a matter of details, of fine shades, of pale
colors, a making of small things do great service. Civilization with us
is monotonous, and in the way of contrasts, of salient points, of
chiarchoscuro, we have to take what we can get. We have to look for
these things in fields where a less devoted glance would see little more
than an arid blank, and, at the last, we manage to find them. All this
refines and sharpens our perceptions, makes us in a literary way, on our
own scale, very delicate, and stimulates greatly our sense of proportion
and form. Mr. Lowell and Mr. Longfellow among the poets, and Mr.
Howells, Bret Harte, and Mr. Aldrich among the story-tellers ;opthe
latter writer, indeed, in verse as well as in prose), have all pre-
eminently the instinct of style and shape. It is true, in general, that
the conditions here indicated give American writing a limited authority,
but they often give it a great charm -- how great a charm, may be
measured in the volume before us. `A Foregone Conclusion' puts us for
the moment, at least, in good humor with the American manner. At a time
when the English novel has come in general to mean a ponderous,
shapeless, diffuse piece of machinery, "padded" to within an inch of its
life, without style, without taste, without a touch of the divine spark,
and effective, when it is effective, only by a sort of brutal dead-
weight, there may be pride as well as pleasure in reading this
admirably-balanced and polished composition, with its distinct literary
flavor, its grace and its humor, its delicate art and its perfume of
poetry, its extreme elaboration and yet its studied compactness. And if
Mr. Howells adheres in the future to his own standard, we shall have
pleasure as well as pride.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, January 7,
1875
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr497</locdoc><milestone n=497> WILLIAM DEAN HOWELLS
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr498</locdoc><milestone n=498> at Martinsville,
Ohio, in 1837, and spent his entire youth in his native State, dates
properly from the publication of his delightful volume on <i>Venetian
Life</i> -- than which he has produced nothing since of a literary quality
more pure -- which he put forth in 1865, after his return from the
consular post in the city of St. Mark which he had filled for four
years. He had, indeed, before going to live in Venice, and during the
autumn of 1860, published, in conjunction with his friend Mr. PIATT, a
so-called "campaign" biography of ABRAHAM LINCOLN; but as this
composition, which I have never seen, emanated probably more from a good
Republican than from a suitor of the Muse, I mention it simply for the
sake of exactitude, adding, however, that I have never heard of the Muse
having taken it ill. When a man is a born artist, everything that
happens to him confirms his perverse tendency; and it may be considered
that the happiest thing that could have been invented on MR. HOWELLS'S
behalf was his residence in Venice at the most sensitive and responsive
period of life; for Venice, bewritten and bepainted as she has ever
been, does nothing to you unless to persuade you that you also can
paint, that you also can write. Her only fault is that she sometimes
too flatteringly -- for she is shameless in the exercise of such arts --
addresses the remark to those who cannot. MR. HOWELLS could,
fortunately, for his writing was painting as well in those days. The
papers on Venice prove it, equally with the artistic whimsical chapters
of the <i>Italian Journeys</i>, made up in 1867 from his notes and memories
(the latter as tender as most glances shot eastward in working hours
across the Atlantic) of the holidays and excursions which carried him
occasionally away from his consulate.
<p>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 <i>Times</i> and the conversation of the
British tourist. The irritation, so far as it proceeded </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr499</locdoc><milestone n=499> from
the latter source, may even yet be perceived in Mr. Howells's pages. He
wrote poetry at Venice, as he had done of old in Ohio, and his poems
were subsequently collected into two thin volumes, the fruit, evidently,
of a rigorous selection. They have left more traces in the mind of many
persons who read and enjoyed them than they appear to have done in the
author's own. It is not nowadays as a cultivator of rhythmic periods
that MR. HOWELLS most willingly presents himself. Everything in the
evolution, as we must all learn to call it to-day, of a talent of this
order is interesting, but one of the things that are most so is the
separation that has taken place, in MR. HOWELLS'S case, between its
early and its later manner. There is nothing in <i>Silas Lapham</i>, or in
<i>Doctor Breen's Practice</i>, or in <i>A Modern Instance</i>, or in <i>The
Undiscovered Country</i>, to suggest that its author had at one time either
wooed the lyric Muse or surrendered himself to those Italian initiations
without which we of other countries remain always, after all, more or
less barbarians. It is often a good, as it is sometimes an evil, that
one cannot disestablish one's past, and MR. HOWELLS cannot help having
rhymed and romanced in deluded hours, nor would he, no doubt, if he
could. The repudiation of the weakness which leads to such aberrations
is more apparent than real, and the spirit which made him care a little
for the poor factitious Old World and the superstition of "form" is only
latent in pages which express a marked preference for the novelties of
civilization and a perceptible mistrust of the purist. I hasten to add
that MR. HOWELLS has had moments of reappreciation of Italy in later
years, and has even taken the trouble to write a book (the magnificent
volume on <i>Tuscan Cities</i>) to show it. Moreover, the exquisite tale <i>A
Foregone Conclusion</i>, and many touches in the recent novel of <i>Indian
Summer</i> (both this and the <i>Cities</i> the fruit of a second visit to
Italy), sound the note of a charming inconsistency.
<p>On his return from Venice he settled in the vicinity of Boston,
and began to edit the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, 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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr500</locdoc><milestone n=500> and on Sunday afternoons he took a
suburban walk -- perfect also, no doubt, in its way. I know not exactly
how long this phase of his career lasted, but I imagine that if he were
asked, he would reply, "Oh, a hundred years." He was meant for better
things than this -- things better, I mean, than superintending the
private life of even the most eminent periodical -- but I am not sure
that I would speak of this experience as a series of wasted years. They
were years rather of economized talent, of observation and accumulation.
They laid the foundation of what is most remarkable, or most, at least,
the peculiar sign, in his effort as a novelist -- his unerring sentiment
of the American character. MR. HOWELLS knows more about it than any
one, and it was during this period of what we may suppose to have been
rather perfunctory administration that he must have gathered many of his
impressions of it. An editor is in the nature of the case much exposed,
so exposed as not to be protected even by the seclusion (the security to
a superficial eye so complete) of a Boston suburb. His manner of
contact with the world is almost violent, and whatever bruises he may
confer, those he receives are the most telling, inasmuch as the former
are distributed among many, and the latter all to be endured by one.
MR. HOWELLS'S accessibilities and sufferings were destined to fructify.
Other persons have considered and discoursed upon American life, but no
one, surely, has <i>felt</i> it so completely as he. I will not say that MR.
HOWELLS feels it all equally, for are we not perpetually conscious how
vast and deep it is? -- but he is an authority upon many of those parts
of it which are most representative.
<p>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, <i>Their Wedding Journey</i>,
there are only two persons, and in his next, <i>A Chance Acquaintance</i>,
which contains one of his very happiest studies of a girl's character,
the number is not lavishly increased.
<p>In <i>A Foregone Conclusion</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr501</locdoc><milestone n=501> count, and
confers life with a generous and unerring hand. If the profusion of
forms in which it presents itself to him is remarkable, this is perhaps
partly because he had the good fortune of not approaching the novel
until he had lived considerably, until his inclination for it had
ripened. His attitude was as little as possible that of the gifted
young person who, at twenty, puts forth a work of imagination of which
the merit is mainly in its establishing the presumption that the next
one will be better. It is my impression that long after he was twenty
he still cultivated the belief that the faculty of the novelist was not
in him, and was even capable of producing certain unfinished chapters
(in the candor of his good faith he would sometimes communicate them to
a listener) in triumphant support of this contention. He believed, in
particular, that he could not make people talk, and such have been the
revenges of time that a cynical critic might almost say of him to-day
that he cannot make them keep silent. It was life itself that finally
dissipated his doubts, life that reasoned with him and persuaded him.
The feeling of life is strong in all his tales, and any one of them has
this rare (always rarer) and indispensable sign of a happy origin, that
it is an impression at first hand. MR. HOWELLS is literary, on certain
sides exquisitely so, though with a singular and not unamiable
perversity he sometimes endeavors not to be; but his vision of the human
scene is never a literary reminiscence, a reflection of books and
pictures, of tradition and fashion and hearsay. I know of no English
novelist of our hour whose work is so exclusively a matter of painting
what he sees, and who is so sure of what he sees. People are always
wanting a writer of MR. HOWELLS'S temperament to see certain things that
he doesn't (that he doesn't sometimes even want to), but I must content
myself with congratulating the author of <i>A Modern Instance</i> and <i>Silas
Lapham</i> on the admirable quality of his vision. The American life which
he for the most part depicts is certainly neither very rich nor very
fair, but it is tremendously positive, and as his manner of presenting
it is as little as possible conventional, the reader can have no doubt
about it. This is an immense luxury; the ingenuous character of the
witness (I can give it no higher praise) deepens the value of the
report.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr502</locdoc><milestone n=502>
<p>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.
<p>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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr503</locdoc><milestone n=503> the optimistic, the
domestic, and the democratic; looking askance at exceptions and
perversities and superiorities, at surprising and incongruous phenomena
in general. One must have seen a great deal before one concludes; the
world is very large, and life is a mixture of many things; she by no
means eschews the strange, and often risks combinations and effects that
make one rub one's eyes. Nevertheless, Mr. HOWELLS'S stand-point is an
excellent one for seeing a large part of the truth, and even if it were
less advantageous, there would be a great deal to admire in the firmness
with which he has planted himself. He hates a "story," and (this
private feat is not impossible) has probably made up his mind very
definitely as to what the pestilent thing consists of. In this respect
he is more logical than M. EMILE ZOLA, who partakes of the same
aversion, but has greater lapses as well as greater audacities. MR.
HOWELLS hates an artificial fable and a <i>dnouement</i> that is pressed
into the service; he likes things to occur as they occur in life, where
the manner of a great many of them is not to occur at all. He has
observed that heroic emotion and brilliant opportunity are not
particularly interwoven with our days, and indeed, in the way of
omission, he <i>has</i> often practised in his pages a very considerable
boldness. It has not, however, made what we find there any less
interesting and less human.
<p>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 <i>A Modern Instance</i> 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 <i>Doctor
Breen</i>, and at the Boston boarding-house in <i>A Woman's Reason</i>. 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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr504</locdoc><milestone n=504> which is simply that if many of his characters
are disagreeable, almost all of them are extraordinarily good, and with
a goodness which is a ground for national complacency. If American life
is on the whole, as I make no doubt whatever, more innocent than that of
any other country, nowhere is the fact more patent than in Mr. hWELLS'S
novels, which exhibit so constant a study of the actual and so small a
perception of evil. His women, in particular, are of the best -- except,
indeed, in the sense of being the best to live with. Purity of life,
fineness of conscience, benevolence of motive, decency of speech, good-
nature, kindness, charity, tolerance (though, indeed, there is little
but each other's manners for the people to tolerate), govern all the
scene; the only immoralities are aberrations of thought, like that of
Silas Lapham, or excesses of beer, like that of Bartley Hubbard. In the
gallery of MR. HOWELLS'S portraits there are none more living than the
admirable, humorous images of those two ineffectual sinners. Lapham, in
particular, is magnificent, understood down to the ground, inside and
out -- a creation which does MR. HOWELLS the highest honor. I do not
say that the figure of his wife is as good as his own, only because I
wish to say that it is as good as that of the minister's wife in the
history of <i>Lemuel Barker</i>, which is unfolding itself from month to
month at the moment I write. These two ladies are exhaustive renderings
of the type of virtue that worries. But everything in <i>Silas Lapham</i> is
superior -- nothing more so than the whole picture of casual female
youth and contemporaneous "engaging" one's self, in the daughters of the
proprietor of the mineral paint.
<p>This production had struck me as the author's high-water mark,
until I opened the monthly sheets of <i>Lemuel Barker</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr505</locdoc><milestone n=505> to produce that interchange of salutations,
which only an American reader, I think, can understand. Indeed, the
only limitation, in general, to his extreme truthfulness is, I will not
say his constant sense of the comedy of life, for that is irresistible,
but the verbal drollery of many of his people. It is extreme and
perpetual, but I fear the reader will find it a venial sin. Theodore
Colville, in <i>Indian Summer</i>, is so irrepressibly and happily facetious
as to make one wonder whether the author is not prompting him a little,
and whether he could be quite so amusing without help from outside.
This criticism, however, is the only one I find it urgent to make, and
Mr. HOWELLS doubtless will not suffer from my saying that, being a
humorist himself, he is strong in the representation of humorists.
There are other reflections that I might indulge in if I had more space.
I should like, for instance, to allude in passing, for purposes of
respectful remonstrance, to a phrase that he suffered the other day to
fall from his pen (in a periodical, but not in a novel), to the effect
that the style of a work of fiction is a thing that matters less and
less all the while. Why less and less? It seems to me as great a
mistake to say so as it would be to say that it matters more and more.
It is difficult to see how it can matter either less or more. The style
of a novel is a part of the execution of a work of art; the execution of
a work of art is a part of its very essence, and that, it seems to me,
must have mattered in all ages in exactly the same degree, and be
destined always to do so. I can conceive of no state of civilization in
which it shall not be deemed important, though of course there are
states in which executants are clumsy. I should also venture to express
a certain regret that MR. HOWELLS (whose style, in practice, after all,
as I have intimated, treats itself to felicities which his theory
perhaps would condemn) should appear increasingly to hold composition
too cheap -- by which I mean, should neglect the effect that comes from
alternation, distribution, relief. He has an increasing tendency to
tell his story altogether in conversations, so that a critical reader
sometimes wishes, not that the dialogue might be suppressed (it is too
good for that), but that it might be distributed, interspaced with
narrative and pictorial matter. The author forgets sometimes to paint,
to evoke the conditions and appearances, to build in </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr506</locdoc><milestone n=506> the
subject. He is doubtless afraid of doing these things in excess, having
seen in other hands what disastrous effects that error may have; but all
the same I cannot help thinking that the divinest thing in a valid novel
is the compendious, descriptive, pictorial touch, <i> la Daudet</i>
<p>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.
<p> <i>Harper's Weekly</i>, June 19,
1886
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr506</locdoc><milestone n=506> A LETTER TO MR. HOWELLS
<p>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 <i>to</i> you and, in fact, straight <i>at</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr507</locdoc><milestone n=507> editorial hand to me at the
time I began to write -- and I allude especially to the summer of 1866 -
- with a frankness and sweetness of hospitality that was really the
making of me, the making of the confidence that required help and
sympathy and that I should otherwise, I think, have strayed and stumbled
about a long time without acquiring. You showed me the way and opened
me the door; you wrote to me and confessed yourself struck with me -- I
have never forgotten the beautiful thrill of <i>that</i>. You published me
at once -- and paid me, above all, with a dazzling promptitude;
magnificently, I felt, and so that nothing since has ever quite come up
to it. More than this even, you cheered me on with a sympathy that was
in itself an inspiration. I mean that you talked to me and listened to
me -- ever so patiently and genially and suggestively conversed and
consorted with me. This won me to you irresistibly and made you the
most interesting person I knew -- lost as I was in the charming sense
that my best friend was an editor, and an almost insatiable editor, and
that such a delicious being as that was a kind of property of my own.
Yet how didn't that interest still quicken and spread when I became
aware that -- with such attention as you could spare from us, for I
recognized my fellow-beneficiaries -- you had started to cultivate
<i>your</i> great garden as well; the tract of virgin soil that, beginning as
a cluster of bright, fresh, sunny, and savory patches close about the
house, as it were, was to become that vast goodly pleasaunce of art and
observation, of appreciation and creation, in which you have labored,
without a break or a lapse, to this day, and in which you have grown so
grand a show of -- well, really of everything. Your liberal visits to
<i>my</i> plot and your free-handed purchases there were still greater events
when I began to see you handle yourself with such ease the key to our
rich and inexhaustible mystery. Then the question of what you would
make of your own powers began to be even more interesting than the
question of what you would make of mine -- all the more, I confess, as
you had ended by settling this one so happily. My confidence in myself,
which you had so helped me to, gave way to a fascinated impression of
your own spread and growth, for you broke out so insistently and
variously that it was a charm to watch and an excitement to follow you.
The only drawback </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr508</locdoc><milestone n=508> that I remember suffering from was that <i>I</i>,
your original debtor, couldn't print or publish or pay you -- which
would have been a sort of ideal of <i>re</i>payment and of enhanced credit;
you could take care of yourself so beautifully, and I could (unless by
some occasional happy chance or rare favor) scarce so much as glance at
your proofs or have a glimpse of your "endings." I could only read you,
full-blown and finished, always so beautifully finished -- and see, with
the rest of the world, how you were doing it again and again.
<p>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 <i>was</i> -- 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr509</locdoc><milestone n=509> painters,
as sincere artists, we could still in our native, our human and social
element, know more or less where we were and feel more or less what we
had hold of. You knew and felt these things better than I; you had
learned them earlier and more intimately, and it was impossible, I
think, to be in more instinctive and more informed possession of the
general truth of your subject than you happily found yourself. The
<i>real</i> affair of the American case and character, as it met your view
and brushed your sensibility, that was what inspired and attached you,
and, heedless of foolish flurries from other quarters, of all wild or
weak slashings of the air and wavings in the void, you gave yourself to
it with an incorruptible faith. You saw your field with a rare
lucidity: you saw all it had to give in the way of the romance of the
real and the interest and the thrill and the charm of the common, as one
may put it; the character and the comedy, the point, the pathos, the
tragedy, the particular home-grown humanity under your eyes and your
hand and with which the life all about you was closely interknitted.
Your hand reached out to these things with a fondness that was in itself
a literary gift and played with them as the artist only and always can
play: freely, quaintly, incalculably, with all the assurance of his
fancy and his irony, and yet with that fine taste for the truth and the
pity and the meaning of the matter which keeps the temper of observation
both sharp and sweet. To observe by such an instinct and by such
reflection is to find work to one's hands and a challenge in every bush;
and as the familiar American scene thus bristled about you, so year by
year your vision more and more justly responded and swarmed. You put
forth <i>A Modern Instance</i>, and <i>The Rise of Silas Lapham</i>, and <i>A Hazard
of New Fortunes</i>, and <i>The Landlord at Lion's Head</i>, and <i>The Kentons</i>
(that perfectly classic illustration of your spirit and your form) after
having put forth in perhaps lighter-fingered prelude <i>A Foregone
Conclusion</i>, and <i>The Undiscovered Country</i>, and <i>The Lady of the
Aroostook</i>, and <i>The Minister's Charge</i> -- to make of a long list too
short a one; with the effect again and again of a feeling for the human
relation, as the social climate of our country qualifies, intensifies,
generally conditions and colors it, which, married in perfect felicity
to the expression you found for its service, constituted the </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr510</locdoc><milestone n=510>
originality that we want to fasten upon you as with silver nails to-
night. Stroke by stroke and book by book your work was to become for
this exquisite notation of our whole democratic light and shade and give
and take in the highest degree <i>documentary</i>, so that none other,
through all your fine long season, could approach it in value and
amplitude. None, let me say, too, was to approach it in essential
distinction; for you had grown master, by insidious practices best known
to yourself, of a method so easy and so natural, so marked with the
personal element of your humor and the play, not less personal, of your
sympathy, that the critic kept coming on its secret connection with the
grace of letters much as Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking -- so knowing
to be able to do it! -- comes in the forest on the subtle tracks of
Indian braves. However, these things take us far, and what I wished
mainly to put on record is my sense of that unfailing, testifying truth
in you which will keep you from ever being neglected. The critical
intelligence -- if any such fitful and discredited light may still be
conceived as within our sphere -- has not at all begun to render you its
tribute. The more inquiringly and perceivingly it shall still be
projected upon the American life we used to know, the more it shall be
moved by the analytic and historic spirit, the more indispensable, the
more a vessel of light, will you be found. It's a great thing to have
used one's genius and done one's work with such quiet and robust
consistency that they fall by their own weight into that happy service.
You may remember perhaps, and I like to recall, how the great and
admirable Taine, in one of the fine excursions of his French curiosity,
greeted you as a precious painter and a sovereign witness. But his
appreciation, I want you to believe with me, will yet be carried much
further, and then -- though you may have argued yourself happy, in your
generous way and with your incurable optimism, even while noting
yourself not understood -- your really beautiful time will come.
Nothing so much as feeling that he may himself perhaps help a little to
bring it on can give pleasure to yours all faithfully,
<p> <i>North American Review</i>, April
1912
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=27>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr511</locdoc><milestone n=511>
<p> <i>Helen Hunt Jackson and Rhoda Broughton</i> (27)
<p> <i>Mercy Philbrick's Choice.</i> No Name Series. Boston: Robert
Brothers, 1876. <i>Joan</i>. By Rhoda Broughton. London: Bentley; New
York: D. Appleton & Co., 1876.
<p>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." </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr512</locdoc><milestone n=512> Stephen White, foregoing
his lifelong mildness, tells her she may do as she will; but she
contents herself with saying she will never look at him again, and
devotes the rest of her life to literary composition. The "choice"
mentioned in the title is between studious solitude and marriage with a
man of questionable honesty.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr513</locdoc><milestone n=513> almost a
reproof," and that, after spending a more lover-like evening with her
than this conduct would seem to make possible, he wastes no time on his
pillow in thinking it over, but goes stupidly to sleep. His conduct
about the bag of gold is certainly very shabby, and the reader, on being
made acquainted with it, feels injured at having been talked to during
two hundred and fifty pages about so ill-conditioned a young man. There
is something puerile in making him the pivot of the history of a lady
whose "influence as a writer was very great." He is of a very secretive
turn, and when he walks with Mercy he insists "upon going in by-ways and
lanes, lest some one should see them who might mention it to his
mother." Of Mercy we are told that "truth, truth, truth was still the
war cry of her soul"; so that she naturally objects to these underhand
proceedings. But it is a mistake to have made her fall in love at all
with a youth of such slender virility. The authoress was very welcome
to choose a hero who should be characterized by interesting weaknesses,
but in the choice of these weaknesses she has not been happily inspired.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr514</locdoc><milestone n=514> of its subject matter -- is
most surprising. Why should the mother of the ladylike Mercy be
represented as speaking a barbarous dialect of the "American humor"
family? Mercy dies at a hotel at a summer resort in the White
Mountains. If the book had less feebleness, we should say it exhibited
much purity of imagination.
<p>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
<i>milieu</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr515</locdoc><milestone n=515> their hands.
There must be a great deal of talk about legs and shoulders, horses and
dogs, and the "longevity" of first kisses. There must be about as
little delicacy as may be found in the higher walks of Hottentot
society, and an English style which reads like a backward school-girl's
burlesque of `Guy Livingstone.' On one side, in short, there must be
allusions to "high planes," and on the other to those phenomena of human
life which it is indecent to treat otherwise than by allusion. Both
stories, written by women, are addressed virtually to young girls; and
it is in view of this fact that `Joan' is especially remarkable. `Joan'
is the product of an age in which young girls must be supplied with a
strongly-seasoned literary article for their own especial consumption.
It must keep within the traditional limits of this species of
literature; it must deal with the beautiful young orphan who becomes a
governess, and captivates the tall young men who visit the family, etc.
But, as young girls have become "fast," as they say in England, the
novel must in tone keep up with them, and while it remains ostensibly
deadly stupid, must insidiously furnish them with the emotions in which
"fastness" delights. Miss Broughton's insidiousness is like the gambols
of an elephant; but it is curious to see how she fulfils the conditions
required of her -- by what immaturity and crudity of art, what
coarseness of sentiment and vacuity of thought.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, December 21, 1876
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=28>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr516</locdoc><milestone n=516>
<p> <i>James Russell Lowell</i> (28)
<p> JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr517</locdoc><milestone n=517> style of
literature -- into regions in which we rarely look for it: into
politics, of all places in the world, into diplomacy, into stammering
civic dinners and ponderous anniversaries, into letters and notes and
telegrams, into every turn of the hour -- absolutely into conversation,
where indeed it freely disguised itself as intensely colloquial wit.
Any friendly estimate of him is foredoomed to savor potently of
reminiscence, so that I may mention how vividly I recall the occasion on
which he first struck me as completely representative.
<p>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
<i>other</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr518</locdoc><milestone n=518>
was a joke, polished by much use, that I was dreadfully at sea about my
native land; and it would have been pleasant indeed to know even less
than I did, so that I might have learned the whole story from Mr.
Lowell's lips.
<p>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 <i>origines</i>; 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
<p>. . . "strange New World, that yit wast never young,
<p> Whose youth, from thee, by gripin' need was wrung;
<p> Brown foundlin' of the woods whose baby-bed
<p> Was prowled round by the Injun's cracklin' tread,
<p> And who grew'st strong thro' shifts and wants and pains,
<p> Nussed by stern men with empires in their brains."
<p>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.
<p>One of the others was the extraordinary youthfulness which
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr519</locdoc><milestone n=519> could make a man considerably younger than himself (so that it
was only with the lapse of years that the relation of age settled upon
the right note) constantly forget that he had copious antecedents. In
the times when the difference counted for more -- old Cambridge days
that seem far away now -- I doubtless thought him more professorial than
he felt, but I am sure that in the sequel I never thought him younger.
The boy in him was never more clamorous than during the last summer that
he spent in England, two years before his death. Since the recollection
comes of itself I may mention as my earliest impression of him the charm
that certain of his Harvard lectures -- on English literature, on Old
French -- had for a very immature person who was supposed to be
pursuing, in one of the schools, a very different branch of knowledge,
but who on dusky winter afternoons escaped with irresponsible zeal into
the glow of Mr. Lowell's learned lamplight, the particular incidence of
which, in the small, still lecture-room, and the illumination of his
head and hands, I recall with extreme vividness. He talked
communicatively of style, and where else in all the place was any such
talk to be heard? It made a romance of the hour -- it made even a
picture of the scene; it was an unforgetable initiation. If he was
American enough in Europe, in America he was abundantly European. He
was so steeped in history and literature that to some yearning young
persons he made the taste of knowledge almost sweeter than it was ever
to be again. He was redolent, intellectually speaking, of Italy and
Spain; he had lived in long intimacy with Dante and Cervantes and
Calderon; he embodied to envious aspirants the happy intellectual
fortune -- independent years in a full library, years of acquisition
without haste and without rest, a robust love of study which went
sociably arm in arm with a robust love of life. This love of life was
so strong in him that he could lose himself in little diversions as well
as in big books. He was fond of everything human and natural,
everything that had color and character, and no gayety, no sense of
comedy, was ever more easily kindled by contact. When he was not
surrounded by great pleasures he could find his account in small ones,
and no situation could be dull for a man in whom all reflection, all
reaction, was witty.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr520</locdoc><milestone n=520>
<p>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 <i>table d'hte</i>, 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 <i>Temps</i> and M.
Sarcey in my pocket.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr521</locdoc><milestone n=521> yet still so perfectly
alive, was one of the comforts of the world to him. He produced that
winter a poem so ample and noble that it was worthy to come into being
in classic air -- the magnificent elegy on the death of Agassiz, which
strikes me as a summary of all his vigors and felicities, his most
genial achievement, and (after the Harvard "Commemoration Ode") the
truest expression of his poetic nature. It is hard to lend to a great
old house, in Italy, even when it has become a modern inn, any
associations as romantic as those it already wears; but what the high-
windowed face of the Florentine Htel du Nord speaks to me of to-day,
over its chattering cab-stand and across the statued pillar of the
little square of the Holy Trinity, is neither its ancient honor nor its
actual fall, but the sound, one December evening, by the fire the poet
pronounces "starved," of
<p>"I cannot think he wished so soon to die
<p> With all his senses full of eager heat,
<p> And rosy years that stood expectant by
<p> To buckle the winged sandals on their feet,
<p> He that was friends with Earth, and all her sweet
<p> Took with both hands unsparingly."
<p>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
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr522</locdoc><milestone n=522> literary. The diplomatic circle was animated -- if that be the
word -- by whist; what his own share of the game was enlivened by may be
left to the imagination of those who remember the irrepressibility, on
his lips, of the comic idea. It might have been taken for granted that
he was well content to be transferred to England; but I have no definite
recollection of the degree of his satisfaction beforehand. I think he
was mainly conscious of the weight of the new responsibility, so that
the unalloyed pleasure was that of his friends and of the most
enlightened part of the public in the two countries, to which the
appointment appeared to have an unusual felicity. It was made, as it
were, for quality, and that continued to be the sign of the function so
long as Mr. Lowell exercised it. The difficulty -- if I may speak of
difficulty -- was that all judgment of it was necessarily <i>a priori</i>.
It was impossible for him to know what a success, in vulgar parlance, he
might make of a totally untried character, and, above all, to foresee
how this character would adapt itself to his own disposition. During
the years of his residence in London on an official footing it
constantly struck me that it was the office that inclined at every turn
to him, rather than he who inclined to the office.
<p>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. "<i>We</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr523</locdoc><milestone n=523> for good things
<i>now</i>." The words were uttered to a gentleman who had found one of his
"things" very good, and who, having a political speech to make in a day
or two, had thriftily asked his leave to bring it in. There could have
been no better example of the experimental nature of his acceptance of
the post; for the very foundation of the distinction that he gave it was
his great reserve of wit. He had no idea how much he had left till he
tried it, and he had never before had so much occasion to try it. This
uncertainty might pervade the minds even of such of his friends as had a
near view of his start; but those friends would have had singularly
little imagination if they had failed to be struck in a general way with
the highly civilized character of his mission. There are circumstances
in operation (too numerous to recite) which combine to undermine greatly
the comfort of the representative of the United States in a foreign
country; it is, to speak summarily, in many respects a singularly
embarrassing honor. I cannot express more strongly how happy Mr.
Lowell's opportunity seemed to be than by saying that he struck people
at the moment as enviable. It was an intensification of the impression
given by the glimpse of him on his way to Spain. The true reward of an
English style was to be sent to England, and if his career in that
country was throughout amusing, in the highest sense of the term, this
result was, for others at least, a part of their gratified suspense as
to the further possibilities of the style.
<p>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 <i>he</i> could ever know her so well as those who
could freely consider the pair together. He offered her from the first
a nut to </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr524</locdoc><milestone n=524> crack, a morsel to roll under her tongue. She is the
great consumer of spices and sweets; if I were not afraid of forcing the
image I should say that she is too unwieldy to feed herself, and
requires, in recurring seasons, as she sits prodigiously at her banquet,
to be approached with the consecrated ladle. She placed this implement
in Mr. Lowell's hands with a confidence so immediate as to be truly
touching -- a confidence that speaks for the eventual amalgamation of
the Anglo-Saxon race in a way that surely no casual friction can
obliterate. She can confer conspicuity, at least for the hour, so well
that she is constantly under the temptation to do so; she holds a court
for those who speak to her, and she is perpetually trying voices. She
recognized Mr. Lowell's from the first, and appointed him really her
speaker-in-chief. She has a peculiar need, which when you know her well
you understand, of being eased off with herself, and the American
minister speedily appeared just the man to ease her. He played into her
talk and her speeches, her commemorations and functions, her dinners and
discussions, her editorials and anecdotes. She has immense wheels which
are always going round, and the ponderous precision of which can be
observed only on the spot. They naturally demand something to grind,
and the machine holds out great iron hands and draws in reputations and
talents, or sometimes only names and phrases.
<p>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 <i>revanche</i> of letters; that throughout was the
particular </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr525</locdoc><milestone n=525> note of the part he played. There would have been
no <i>revanche</i> if he had played it inadequately; therefore it was a
pleasure to feel that he was accomplished up to the hilt. Those who
didn't like him pronounced him too accomplished, too omniscient; but,
save in a sense that I will specify, I never saw him commit himself
unadvisedly, and much is to be forgiven a love of precise knowledge
which keeps a man out of mistakes. He had a horror of them; no one was
ever more in love with the idea of being right and of keeping others
from being wrong. The famous Puritan conscience, which was a persistent
part of his heredity, operated in him perhaps most strongly on the
scholarly side. He enjoyed the detail of research and the discussion of
differences, and he had an instinct for rectification which was
unflinching. All this formed a part of the enviability I have noted --
the serenity of that larger reputation which came to him late in life,
which had been paid for in advance, and in regard to which his finished
discharge of his diplomatic duties acted, if not certainly as a cause,
at least as a stimulus. The reputation was not doubtless the happiest
thing; the happiest thing was the inward opportunity, the chance to
absorb into an intelligence extraordinarily prepared a peculiarly full
revelation.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr526</locdoc><milestone n=526>
promptly appreciated in quarters where the official record may be
found, as well as in others less discoverable to-day, columns congruous
with their vituperative "headings," where it must be looked for between
the lines. These latter responsibilities, begotten mainly of the great
Irish complication, were heavy ones, but they were presumably the
keenest interest of his term, and I include them essentially in the
picture afforded by that term of the supremely symmetrical literary life
-- the life in which the contrasts have been effectively timed; in which
the invading and acclaiming world has entered too late to interfere, to
distract, but still in time to fertilize; in which contacts have
multiplied and horizons widened gradually; in which, in short, the
dessert has come after the dinner, the answer after the question, and
the proof after the patience.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr527</locdoc><milestone n=527> faith, one thinks
of him to-day, at the point at which we leave him, as the last of the
literary conservatives. He took his stand on the ancient cheerful
wisdom, many of the ingenious modern emendations of which seemed to him
simply droll.
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr528</locdoc><milestone n=528> pieties and
affections, but rarely conceals his mistrust of overbrimming
sensibility. If the ancients and the Elizabethans, he somewhere says,
"had not discovered the picturesque, as we understand it, they found
surprisingly fine scenery in man and his destiny, and would have seen
something ludicrous, it may be suspected, in the spectacle of a grown
man running to hide his head in the apron of the Mighty Mother whenever
he had an ache in his finger or got a bruise in the tussle for
existence." It is visible that the poetic occasion that was most after
his own heart was the storm and stress of the Civil War. He vibrated in
this long tension more deeply than in any other experience. It was the
time that kindled his steadiest fire, prompted his noblest verse, and
gave him what he relished most, a ground for high assurance, a sense of
being sturdily in the right and having something to stand up for. He
never feared and never shirked the obligation to be positive. Firm and
liberal critic as he was, and with nothing of party spirit in his
utterance save in the sense that his sincerity was his party, his mind
had little affinity with superfine estimates and shades and tints of
opinion: when he felt at all he felt altogether -- was always on the
same side as his likings and loyalties. He had no experimental
sympathies, and no part of him was traitor to the rest.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr529</locdoc><milestone n=529> whom the handling of words has been at once such
an art and such a science. Mr. Lowell's generous temperament seems here
to triumph in one quarter, while his educated patience triumphs in the
other. When a man loves words singly he is apt not to care for them in
an order, just as a very great painter may be quite indifferent to the
chemical composition of his colors. But Mr. Lowell was both chemist and
artist; the only wonder was that with so many theories about language he
should have had so much lucidity left for practice. He used it both as
an antiquarian and as a lover of life, and was a capital instance of the
possible harmony between imagination and knowledge -- a living proof
that the letter does not necessarily kill.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr530</locdoc><milestone n=530> reaching
manhood, may best feel the great historic throb, the throb unknown to
plodding peace. No poet surely has ever placed the concrete idea of his
country in a more romantic light than Mr. Lowell; none certainly,
speaking as an American to Americans, has found on its behalf accents
more eloquently tender, more beguiling to the imagination."
<p> "Dear land whom triflers now make bold to scorn
<p> (Thee from whose forehead Earth awaits her morn).
<p> "Oh Beautiful! my Country! ours once more!
<p> Smoothing thy gold of war-dishevelled hair
<p> O'er such sweet brows as never other wore,
<p> And letting thy set lips,
<p> Freed from wrath's pale eclipse,
<p> The rosy edges of their smile lay bare!"
<p> 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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr531</locdoc><milestone n=531> sweet than the little poem of "Phoebe,"
in "Heartsease and Rue" -- a reminiscence of the saddest of small bird-
notes caught in the dimmest of wakeful dawns? What could be more
largely vivid, more in the grand style of friendship and portraiture,
than the masterly composition on the death of Agassiz, in which the very
tenderness of regret flushes faintly with humor, and ingenuity broadens
at every turn into eloquence? Such a poem as this -- immensely
fortunate in reflecting an extraordinary personality -- takes its place
with the few great elegies in our language, gives a hand to "Lycidas"
and to "Thyrsis."
<p>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 <i>by</i> 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.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr532</locdoc><milestone n=532>
<p>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.
<p>If there be two kinds of patriotism, the latent and the
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr533</locdoc><milestone n=533> patent, his kind was essentially the latter. Some people for
whom the world is various and universal, and who dread nothing so much
as seeing it minimized, regard this particular sentiment as a purely
practical one, a prescription of duty in a given case, like a knack with
the coiled hose when the house is on fire or the plunge of the swimmer
when a man is overboard. They grudge it a place in the foreground of
the spirit -- they consider that it shuts out the view. Others find it
constantly comfortable and perpetually fresh -- find, as it were, the
case always given; for them the immediate view <i>is</i> the view and the
very atmosphere of the mind, so that it is a question not only of
performance, but of contemplation as well. Mr. Lowell's horizon was too
wide to be curtained out, and his intellectual curiosity such as to have
effectually prevented his shutting himself up in his birth-chamber; but
if the local idea never kept his intelligence at home, he solved the
difficulty by at least never going forth without it. When he quitted
the hearth it was with the household god in his hand, and as he
delighted in Europe, it was to Europe that he took it. Never had a
household god such a magnificent outing, nor was made free of so many
strange rites and climes; never, in short, had any patriotism such a
liberal airing. If, however, Mr. Lowell was loath to admit that the
American order could have an infirmity, I think it was because it would
have cost him so much to acknowledge that it could have communicated one
to an object that he cherished as he cherished the English tongue.
<i>That</i> was the innermost atmosphere of his mind, and he never could have
afforded on this general question any policy but a policy of annexation.
He was capable of convictions in the light of which it was clear that
the language he wrote so admirably had encountered in the United States
not corruption, but conservation. Any conviction of his on this subject
was a contribution to science, and he was zealous to show that the
speech of New England was most largely that of an England older and more
vernacular than the England that to-day finds it queer. He was capable
of writing perfect American to bring out this archaic element. He kept
in general the two tongues apart, save in so far as his English style
betrayed a connection by a certain American tact in the art of leaving
out. He was perhaps sometimes slightly paradoxical </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr534</locdoc><milestone n=534> in the
contention that the language had incurred no peril in its Western
adventures; this is the sense in which I meant just now that he
occasionally crossed the line. The difficulty was not that his vision
of pure English could not fail in America sometimes to be clouded -- the
peril was for his vision of pure American. His standard was the
highest, and the wish was often no doubt father to the thought. "The
Biglow Papers" are delightful, but nothing could be less like "The
Biglow Papers" than the style of the American newspaper. He lent his
wit to his theories, but one or two of them lived on him like unthrifty
sons.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr535</locdoc><milestone n=535> and from instinct, in the hundred
spots, on the thousand occasions which it is one of the happiest
idiosyncrasies of English life to supply; and since I have spoken so
distinctly of his patriotism, I must add that, after all, he exercised
the virtue most in this particular way. His new friends liked him
because he was at once so fresh and so ripe, and this was predominantly
what he understood by being a good American. It was by being one in
this sense that he broke the heart of the Furies.
<p>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.
<p>It is not an accident that I do not linger over the contents
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr536</locdoc><milestone n=536> of these volumes -- this has not been a part of my undertaking.
They will not go out of fashion, they will keep their place and hold
their own; for they are full of broad-based judgment and of those
stamped sentences of which we are as naturally retentive as of gold and
silver coin. Reading them lately over in large portions, I was struck
not only with the particular "good things" that abound in them, but with
the soundness and fulness of their inspiration. It is intensely the air
of letters, but it is like that of some temperate and restorative clime.
I judge them, perhaps, with extravagant fondness, for I am attached to
the class to which they belong; I like such an atmosphere, I like the
aromatic odor of the book-room. In turning over Mr. Lowell's critical
pages I seem to hear the door close softly behind me and to find in the
shaded lamplight the conditions most in harmony with the sentient soul
of man. I see an apartment brown and book-lined, which is the place in
the world most convertible into other places. The turning of the
leaves, the crackling of the fire, are the only things that break its
stillness -- the stillness in which mild miracles are wrought. These
are the miracles of evocation, of resurrection, of transmission, of
insight, of history, of poetry. It may be a little room, but it is a
great space; it may be a deep solitude, but it is a mighty concert. In
this critical chamber of Mr. Lowell's there is a charm, to my sense, in
knowing what is outside of the closed door -- it intensifies both the
isolation and the experience. The big new Western order is outside, and
yet within all seems as immemorial as Persia. It is like a little
lighted cabin, full of the ingenuities of home, in the gray of a great
ocean. Such ingenuities of home are what represent in Mr. Lowell's case
the conservatism of the author. His home was the past that dipped below
the verge -- it was there that his taste was at ease. From what quarter
his disciples in the United States will draw their sustenance it is too
soon to say; the question will be better answered when we have the
disciples more clearly in our eye. We seem already, however, to
distinguish the quarter from which they will <i>not</i> draw it. Few of them
as yet appear to have in their hand, or rather in their head, any such
treasure of knowledge.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr537</locdoc><milestone n=537>
admirable address on Democracy that he pronounced at Birmingham in 1884,
in the beautiful speech on the Harvard anniversary of 1886, things are
so supremely well said that we feel ourselves reading some consecrated
masterpiece; they represent great literary art in its final phase of
great naturalness. There are places where he seems in mystical
communication with the richest sources of English prose. "But this
imputed and vicarious longevity, though it may be obscurely operative in
our lives and fortunes, is no valid offset for the shortness of our
days, nor widens by a hair's-breadth the horizon of our memories." He
sounds like a younger brother of Bacon and of Milton, either of whom,
for instance, could not have uttered a statelier word on the subject of
the relinquishment of the required study of Greek than that "Oblivion
looks in the face of the Grecian Muse only to forget her errand." On the
other hand, in the address delivered in 1884 before the English
Wordsworth Society, he sounds like no one but his inveterately
felicitous self. In certain cases Wordsworth, like Elias the prophet,
"`stands up as fire and his word burns like a lamp.' But too often, when
left to his own resources and to the conscientious performance of the
duty laid upon him to be a great poet <i>quand mme</i>, he seems diligently
intent on producing fire by the primitive method of rubbing the dry
sticks of his blank verse one against the other, while we stand in
shivering expectation of the flame that never comes." It would be
difficult to express better the curious evening chill of the author of
"The Excursion," which is so like the conscious mistake of camping out
in autumn.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr538</locdoc><milestone n=538> felt that he
had earned the right to a few frank predilections. English life is a
big pictured story-book, and he could dip into the volume where he
liked. It was altogether delightful to turn some of the pages with him,
and especially to pause -- for the marginal commentary in finer type,
some of it the model of the illuminating foot-note -- over the
interminable chapter of London.
<p>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 <i>them</i> 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.
<p>This was always particularly striking during the several
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr539</locdoc><milestone n=539> weeks of August and September that he had formed the habit of
spending at Whitby, on the Yorkshire coast. It was here, I think, that
he was most naturally at his ease, most humorously evaded the hard
bargain of time. The place is admirable -- an old, red-roofed fishing-
town in one of the indentations of a high, brave coast, with the ruins
of a great abbey just above it, an expanse of purple moor behind, and a
convenient extension in the way of an informal little modern watering-
place. The mingled breath of the sea and the heather makes a medium
that it is a joy to inhale, and all the land is picturesque and noble, a
happy hunting-ground for the good walker and the lover of grand lines
and fine detail. Mr. Lowell was wonderful in both these characters, and
it was in the active exercise of them that I saw him last. He was in
such conditions a delightful host and a prime initiator. Two of these
happy summer days on the occasion of his last visit to Whitby are marked
possessions of my memory; one of them a ramble on the warm, wide moors,
after a rough lunch at a little, stony upland inn, in company charming
and intimate, the thought of which to-day is a reference to a double
loss; the other an excursion, made partly by a longish piece of railway,
in his society alone, to Rievaulx Abbey, most fragmentary, but most
graceful, of ruins. The day at Rievaulx was as exquisite as I could
have wished it if I had known that it denoted a limit, and in the happy
absence of any such revelation altogether given up to adventure and
success. I remember the great curving green terrace in Lord Feversham's
park -- prodigious and surely unique; it hangs over the abbey like a
theatrical curtain -- and the temples of concord, or whatever they are,
at either end of it, and the lovable view, and the dear little dowdy
inn-parlor at Helmsley, where there is, moreover, a massive fragment of
profaner ruin, a bit of battered old castle, in the grassy <i>prau</i> of
which (it was a perfect English picture) a company of well-grown young
Yorkshire folk of both sexes were making lawn-tennis balls fly in and
out of the past. I recall with vividness the very waits and changes of
the return and our pleased acceptance of everything. We parted on the
morrow, but I met Mr. Lowell a little later in Devonshire -- O clustered
charms of Ottery! -- and spent three days in his company. I travelled
back to London </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr540</locdoc><milestone n=540> with him, and saw him for the last time at
Paddington. He was to sail immediately for America. I went to take
leave of him, but I missed him, and a day or two later he was gone.
<p>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.
<p> <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>, January 1892
<p> Reprinted in <i>Essays in London and Elsewhere</i>,
1893
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr540</locdoc><milestone n=540> James Russell Lowell (1819 -- 1891). Written for the <i>Library
of the World's Best Literature Ancient and Modern</i>, Vol. XVI.
<p>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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr541</locdoc><milestone n=541> we can without a
sense of injustice give precedence over the others. He was the American
of his time most saturated with literature and most directed to
criticism; the American also whose character and endowment were such as
to give this saturation and this direction -- this intellectual
experience, in short -- most value. He added to the love of learning
the love of expression; and his attachment to these things -- to poetry,
to history, to language, form, and style -- was such as to make him, the
greater part of his life, more than anything a man of study: but his
temperament was proof against the dryness of the air of knowledge, and
he remained to the end the least pale, the least passionless of
scholars.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr542</locdoc><milestone n=542> of personal experience. He took his
degree in 1838; he married young, in 1844, then again in 1857; he
inherited, on the death of his father in 1861, the commodious old house
of Elmwood (in those days more embowered and more remote), in which his
life was virtually to be spent. With a small family -- a single
daughter -- but also a small patrimony, and a deep indifference -- his
abiding characteristic -- to any question of profit or fortune, the
material condition he had from an early time to meet was the rather
blank face turned to the young American who in that age, and in the
consecrated phrase, embraced literature as a profession. The embrace,
on Lowell's part as on that of most such aspirants, was at first more
tender than coercive; and he was no exception to the immemorial rule of
propitiating the idol with verse. This verse took in 1841 the form of
his first book; a collection of poems elsewhere printed and unprinted,
but not afterwards republished.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr543</locdoc><milestone n=543> his silver hammer, it was never exactly the nail of
thought that he strove to hit on the head. What is true of Hawthorne is
truer still of Poe; who, if he had the peace of art, had little of any
other. Lowell's evolution was all in what I have called his saturation,
in the generous scale on which he was able to gather in and to store up
impressions. The three terms of his life for most of the middle time
were a quiet fireside, a quiet library, a singularly quiet community.
The personal stillness of the world in which for the most part he lived,
seems to abide in the delightful paper -- originally included in
`Fireside Travels' -- on `Cambridge Thirty Years Ago.' It gives the
impression of conditions in which literature might well become an
alternate world, and old books, old authors, old names, old stories,
constitute in daily commerce the better half of one's company.
Complications and distractions were not, even so far as they occurred,
appreciably his own portion; except indeed for their being -- some of
them, in their degree -- of the general essence of the life of letters.
If books have their destinies, they have also their antecedents; and in
the face of the difficulty of trying for perfection with a rough
instrument, it cannot of course be said that even concentration shuts
the door upon pain. If Lowell had all the joys of the scholar and the
poet, he was also, and in just that degree, not a stranger to the pangs
and the weariness that accompany the sense of exactitude, of proportion,
and of beauty; that feeling for intrinsic success, which in the long run
becomes a grievous burden for shoulders that have in the rash confidence
of youth accepted it, -- becomes indeed in the artist's breast the
incurable, intolerable ache.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr544</locdoc><milestone n=544> four
years, the Atlantic Monthly; and carried on from 1862, in conjunction
with Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, the North American Review, in which his
best critical essays appeared. There were published the admirable
article on Lessing, that on `Rousseau and the Sentimentalists,' that on
Carlyle's `Frederick the Great,' the rich, replete paper on
`Witchcraft,' the beautiful studies (1872 -- 1875) of Dante, Spenser,
and Wordsworth; and the brilliant <i>jeux d'esprit</i>, as their overflow of
critical wit warrants our calling them, on such subjects as (1866)
sundry infirmities of the poetical temper of Swinburne, or such
occasions as were offered (1865) by the collected writings of Thoreau,
or (1867) by the `Life and Letters' of James Gates Percival, --
occasions mainly to run to earth a certain shade of the provincial
spirit. Of his career from early manhood to the date of his going in
1877 as minister to Spain, the two volumes of his correspondence
published in 1893 by Mr. Norton give a picture reducible to a
presentment of study in happy conditions, and of opinions on "moral"
questions; an image subsequently thrown somewhat into the shade, but
still keeping distinctness and dignity for those who at the time had
something of a near view of it. Lowell's great good fortune was to
believe for so long that opinions and study sufficed him. There came in
time a day when he lent himself to more satisfactions than he literally
desired; but it is difficult to imagine a case in which the literary
life should have been a preparation for the life of the world. There
was so much in him of the man and the citizen, as well as of the poet
and the professor, that with the full reach of curiosities and
sympathies, his imagination found even in narrow walls, windows of long
range. It was during these years, at any rate, that his poetical and
critical spirit were formed; and I speak of him as our prime man of
letters precisely on account of the unhurried and unhindered process of
the formation. Literature was enough, without being too much, his
trade: it made of his life a reservoir never condemned, by too much
tapping, to show low water. We have had critics much more frequent, but
none more abundant; we have had poets more abundant, but none more
acquainted with poetry. This acquaintance with poetry bore fruits of a
quality to which I shall presently allude; his critical activity,
meantime, was the result of the </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr545</locdoc><milestone n=545> impulse given by the
responsibilities of instructorship to the innermost turn of his mind.
His studies could deepen and widen at their ease. The university air
soothed, but never smothered; Europe was near enough to touch, but not
tormentingly to overlap; the intimate friends were more excellent than
numerous, the college feasts just recurrent enough to keep wit in
exercise, and the country walks not so blank as to be unsweetened by a
close poetic notation of every aspect and secret of nature. He absorbed
and lectured and wrote, talked and edited and published; and had, the
while, struck early in the day the note from which, for a long time, his
main public identity was to spring.
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr546</locdoc><milestone n=546>
the dilettante. This safeguard was his care for public things and
national questions; those to which, even in his class-rooms and his
polishings of verse, all others were subordinate. He was politically an
ardent liberal, and had from the first engaged with all the force of his
imagination on the side that has figured at all historical moments as
the cause of reform. Reform, in his younger time, meant above all
resistance to the extension of slavery; then it came to mean -- and by
so doing, to give occasion during the Civil War to a fresh and still
finer `Biglow' series -- resistance to the pretension of the Southern
States to set up a rival republic. The two great impulses he received
from without were given him by the outbreak of the war, and -- after
these full years and wild waves had gradually ebbed -- by his being
appointed minister to Spain. The latter event began a wholly new
period, though serving as a channel for much, for even more perhaps, of
the old current; meanwhile, at all events, no account of his most
productive phases at least can afford not to touch on the large part,
the supreme part, played in his life by the intensity, and perhaps I may
go so far as to say the simplicity, of his patriotism. Patriotism had
been the keynote of an infinite quantity of more or less felicitous
behavior; but perhaps it had never been so much as in Lowell the keynote
of reflection and of the moral tone, of imagination and conversation.
Action, in this case, could mainly be but to <i>feel</i> as American as
possible, -- with an inevitable overflow of course into whatever was the
expression of the moment. It might often have seemed to those who often
-- or even to those who occasionally -- saw him, that his case was
almost unique, and that the national consciousness had never elsewhere
been so cultivated save under the stress of national frustration or
servitude. It was in fact, in a manner, as if he had been aware of
certain forces that made for oppression; of some league of the nations
and the arts, some consensus of tradition and patronage, to treat as
still in tutelage or on its trial the particular connection of which he
happened most to be proud.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr547</locdoc><milestone n=547> genius rose within him to
show what <i>his</i> cultivation could make of them. It enabled him to make
so much that all the positive passion in his work is for the direct
benefit of patriotism. That, beyond any other irritation of the lyric
temperament, is what makes him ardent. In nothing, moreover, is he more
interesting than in the very nature of his vision of this humorous
"Yankeeism" of type. He meant something it was at that time
comparatively easy, as well as perhaps a trifle more directly inspiring,
to mean; for his life opened out backward into Puritan solidities and
dignities. However this be, at any rate, his main care for the New
England -- or, as may almost be said, for the Cambridge --
consciousness, as he embodied it, was that it could be fed from as many
sources as any other in the world, and assimilate them with an ingenuity
all its own: literature, life, poetry, art, wit, all the growing
experience of human intercourse. His great honor is that in this
direction he led it to high success; and if the `Biglow Papers' express
supremely his range of imagination about it, they render the American
tone the service of placing it in the best literary company, -- that of
all his other affinities and echoes, his love of the older English and
the older French, of all classics and romantics and originals, of Dante
and Goethe, of Cervantes and the Elizabethans; his love, in particular,
of the history of language and of the complex questions of poetic form.
If they had no other distinction, they would have that of one of the
acutest of all studies in linguistics. They are more literary, in
short, than they at first appear; which is at once the strength and the
weakness of his poetry in general, literary indeed as most of it is at
sight. The chords of his lyre were of the precious metal, but not
perhaps always of the last lyric tenuity. He struck them with a hand
not idle enough for mere moods, and yet not impulsive enough for the
great reverberations. He was sometimes too ingenious, as well as too
reasonable and responsible; this leaves him, on occasion, too much in
the grasp of a certain morally conservative humor, -- a side on which he
touches the authors of "society" verse, -- or else mixes with his
emotion an intellectual substance, a something alien, that tends to
stiffen and retard it. Perhaps I only mean indeed that he had always
something to say, and his sturdiness as well as his "cleverness" about
the way it </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr548</locdoc><milestone n=548> should be said. It is congrous, no doubt, with his
poetic solidity that his highest point in verse is reached by his
`Harvard Commemoration Ode,' a poem for an occasion at once public and
intimate; a sustained lament for young lives, in the most vividly
sacrificed of which he could divide with the academic mother something
of the sentiment of proud ownership. It is unfair to speak of lines so
splendid as these as not warmed by the noble thought with which they are
charged; -- even if it be of the very nature of the English ode to show
us always, at its best, something of the chill of the poetic Exercise.
<p>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 <i>magnum opus</i>, 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 <i>not</i> 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.
<p>One is disposed to say of him, in spite of his limited pro
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr549</locdoc><milestone n=549> that he belonged to the massive race, and even has for the
present the air of one of the last of it. The two volumes of his
`Letters' help, in default of a biography, the rest of his work in
testifying to this; and would do so still more if the collection had
comprised more letters of the time of his last period in Europe. His
diplomatic years -- he was appointed in 1880 minister to England -- form
a chapter by themselves; they gave a new turn to his career, and made a
different thing of what was to remain of it. They checked, save here
and there for an irrepressible poem, his literary production; but they
opened a new field -- in the mother-land of "occasional" oratory -- for
his beautiful command of the spoken word. He spoke often from this
moment, and always with his admirable mixture of breadth and wit; with
so happy a surrender indeed to this gift that his two finest addresses,
that on `Democracy' (Birmingham, 1884) and that on the Harvard
Anniversary of 1886, connect themselves with the reconsecration, late in
life, of his eloquence. It was a singular fortune, and possible for an
American alone, that such a want of peculiarly professional, of
technical training, should have been consistent with a degree of success
that appeared to reduce training to unimportance. Nothing was more
striking, in fact, than that what Lowell had most in England to show was
simply all the air and all the effect of preparedness. If I have
alluded to the best name we can give him and the best niche we can make
for him, let this be partly because letters exactly met in him a more
distinguished recognition than usually falls to their lot. It was they
that had prepared him really; prepared him -- such is the subtlety of
their operation -- even for the things from which they are most
divorced. He reached thus the phase in which he took from them as much
as he had given; represented them in a new, insidious way. It was of
course in his various speeches that his preparedness came out most; most
enjoyed the superlative chance of becoming, by the very fact of its
exercise, one of the safeguards of an international relation that he
would have blushed not to have done his utmost to keep inviolable. He
had the immense advantage that the very voice in which he could speak --
so much at once that of his masculine, pugnacious intellect, and that of
the best side of the race -- was a plea for everything </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr550</locdoc><milestone n=550> the
millions of English stock have in common. This voice, as I may call it,
that sounds equally in every form of his utterance, was his great gift
to his time. In poetry, in satire, in prose, and on his lips, it was
from beginning to end the manliest, the most ringing, to be heard. He
was essentially a fighter; he could always begin the attack; could
always, in criticism as in talk, sound the charge and open the fire.
The old Puritan conscience was deep in him, with its strong and simple
vision, even in aesthetic things, of evil and of good, of wrong and of
right; and his magnificent wit was all at its special service. He armed
it, for vindication and persuasion, with all the amenities, the
"humanities" -- with weapons as sharp and bright as it has ever carried.
<p> New York: R. S. Peale and J. A. Hill,
1896
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=29>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr551</locdoc><milestone n=551>
<p> <i>Philip Van Ness Myers</i> (29)
<p> <i>Remains of Lost Empires: Sketches of the Ruins of Palmyra,
Nineveh, Babylon, and Persepolis, etc. </i>By P. V. N. Myers, A.M. New
York: Harper & Bros., 1875.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr552</locdoc><milestone n=552> world. Mr. Myers explored the ruined cities of
Northern Syria, which he found both numerous and interesting, and then
made his way across the plains of Mesopotamia to the Tigris, striking it
opposite to Nineveh. From Jerusalem to this point he had ridden a
thousand miles. As to Nineveh the author is voluminous, and devotes
some space to discussing, apropos of a Ninevite tablet inscribed with
the Chaldean record of the Deluge, the question of the literal veracity
of the Biblical recital of that event. He sides with the Bible, and,
being a geologist, is able to affirm that the Chaldean plains are
distinctly destitute of such evidence of submersion of the land as to
justify the theory that the tradition of the Flood was a myth resting on
a mere local inundation.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr553</locdoc><milestone n=553> archaeology enlivens our
author, and he gives an interesting report of the magnificent ruins of
Persepolis, where he found "Stanley, <i>New York Herald</i>, engraved between
the eyes of one of the colossal bulls, in letters as bold as the Ujiji
expedition." Remote posterity, Mr. Myers remarks, will have "a real
time" discussing, amid this conflict of evidence, just who it was that
set up these bulls. The last part of the volume is devoted to the
narration of a rapid run from Bombay up into the Himalayas and the Vale
of Cashmere, where it was the author's purpose to spend a portion of the
summer.
<p>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 <i>he</i> 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.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, January 28, 1875
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=30>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr554</locdoc><milestone n=554>
<p> <i>Ehrman Syme Nadal</i> (30)
<p> <i>Impressions of London Social Life. With other Papers
suggested by an English Residence.</i> By E. S. Nadal. New York: Scribner,
Armstrong & Co., 1875.
<p>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 --
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr555</locdoc><milestone n=555> it is what one would call a gentlemanly book; such a book as it
is becoming for a gentleman who has been attached to a legation to
write, if he is disposed to remain within the limits of decidedly light
literature. It is in excellent taste, and wholly free from indiscreet
allusions and betrayals. The author has had an eye to style, and,
indeed, like most of the young American writers of our day, he is rather
inclined to be finical -- to be too susceptible to the charm of words.
Mr. Nadal's observations, however, rather lack incisiveness, and strike
us occasionally as vague and ineffectual. They are too often not put
into a form to which the reader can say positively yes or no; he is left
wondering what the author would be at. We get an impression of an
unsuccessful attempt at subtlety -- as, for instance, when Mr. Nadal
speaks of the men at the clubs: "The few men who are literary and
intellectual make perhaps the weakest impression. The thin wash of
opinion which forms their conversation evaporates, and leaves a very
slight sediment. They have that contagious weariness I have noticed in
the agricultural population along the water-courses of Illinois and
Missouri." And he proceeds to develop the analogy between the clever
young Englishmen and these dismal products "of fever and ague and the
long eating of half-baked bread." The reader, however, has some trouble
in perceiving it, and suspects that Mr. Nadal sometimes pays himself, as
the French say, with mere conceits.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr556</locdoc><milestone n=556> to such a person as calmly and fluently as
Cato does to the universe, is a great and difficult thing. There is not
a pleasure in it, nor indeed a rapture, but there is real growth and
building-up in a certain amount of it." This is excellent, and Mr. Nadal
touches many other points no less happily, and, it may be added, in the
same inconsequent order in which one encounters them in English life.
One is struck, however, in reading his remarks with the essential
difficulty of making sound final generalizations upon foreign manners
and customs. There is never an example of a tendency which cannot be
matched with an example of a directly opposite one; and who shall say
which is the more characteristic? The gentleman who, on Mr. Nadal's
endeavoring to sound him as to the extent to which Englishmen were
bullied, in behavior, by public opinion, answered briefly, "Oh, I don't
know; we do about as we please" -- this typical Briton, whether or no he
affirmed a truth, at least administered a not unwholesome snub to the
analytic spirit. The English, we think, are especially impatient of
this kind of social and psychological analysis; they have little natural
genius for it; and the more delicate it pretends to be, the more they
feel the instinct to shake themselves free of it. We suspect that the
most valuable book that could be written upon "London social life" would
be a mere collection of anecdotes -- of facts from the writer's
observation -- arranged under heads, but not made to support
conclusions. Of things said to him, samples of conversation overheard,
incidents observed, and so on, a discriminating observer might present a
very curious array. Mr. Nadal errs in giving too few examples and too
many generalizations. He comments very justly upon the fixed limits in
which talk generally moves in England -- the way in which a certain
pitch is taken, so that it produces a discord to sound a note outside of
it. "Certain things are set apart as good for men to converse upon --
the races, horse-flesh, politics, anything, in short, provided it is not
discussed in a definite or original manner. No man should say anything
which might not be very well said by any one else." Every American who
has been in England knows the meaning of this, and yet he is puzzled to
reconcile it with the equally incontrovertible truth that in the London
world there is an unlimited amount of original </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr557</locdoc><milestone n=557> opinion
propounded, and that radicalism of thought may be observed at London
dinner-parties to be in a far more mature and highly organized condition
than is suggested by its usual presentation here. It is a seeming
inconsistency that Mr. Nadal should go on to say that "the freedom and
gaiety which are not uncommon in the parlors of Americans of the best
class will be hard to find in the drawing-rooms of English fashionables.
They <i>talk</i>, professedly." Does Mr. Nadal mean that the "fashionables"
<i>converse</i>, according to our American term? We rather imagined that we
possessed the monopoly of this accomplishment (though, indeed, it is
perhaps not most common in the somewhat mysterious class to which Mr.
Nadal alludes), and that from this particular reproach the English were
conspicuously free. Their small-talk is certainly more amorphous than
that of other nations, and we suspect that, by the same law,
conversation of the better sort is less declamatory. Here and there
(sometimes in very minor matters) Mr. Nadal is a trifle fallacious --
as, for example, when he says that "the genteel English think it common
and snobbish to dress much on Sunday." His adjective sets us rather
adrift; but if we are right in supposing that he uses the word "genteel"
without irony, we should say that on this momentous point his memory had
betrayed him. Certainly, the aspect of English society at eleven
o'clock on a Sunday morning is a lively testimony to the idea of wearing
one's "best." We appeal to the memory of any one who has assisted at an
English Sunday breakfast, and has seen the ladies gracing this meal in
the evening-dresses of the night before.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr558</locdoc><milestone n=558> Hyde Park as the drowsy cabman wheels him
home to bed." Mr. Nadal feels the English background sensitively, and is
able to say with evident sincerity that "the `decent church' (inimitable
adjective!), when, for the first time, on the road from Liverpool to
London, one sees it crowning a well-clipped, humid hill-top, softly
returns to the imagination as something known in infancy and forgotten."
In speaking of the general appeal which the Church of England makes to
the imagination, he says felicitously that "with us it is always the
particular church, say, at the corner of Moyamensing Avenue and
Eighteenth Street, which attracts or repels one. Is it a good place to
go to? Do we like the clergyman and do we like the people?" The author
makes a good point, in his admiration of English scenery, in lamenting
the absence of rail-fences -- on which to sit and enjoy the view. A
rail-fence, as we understand it here, is not a beautiful object -- and
for no small part of its prettiness the English landscape is indebted to
the absence of this feature -- and yet remains always, most distinctly,
a picture that one has to stand up to look at. When after a long and
lovely English walk, he has felt disposed to linger awhile longer in the
twilight, the American pilgrim has often found it an irritating
reflection that he cannot sit upon a hedge. To sit upon a fence for
aesthetic purposes is, we take it, not criminally vulgar. We may quote
in conclusion a very graceful allusion to a suburban garden which the
author used to frequent:
<p>"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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr559</locdoc><milestone n=559> blue
sky. I used to think that the gardens never ended, but lay side by side
the island through, and that the sea washed them round."
<p>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.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, October 7,
1875
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=31>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr560</locdoc><milestone n=560>
<p> <i>Charles Nordhoff</i> (31)
<p> <i>The Communistic Societies of the United States, from Personal
Visit and Observation, etc.</i> By Charles Nordhoff. With Illustrations.
New York: Harper & Bros., 1875.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr561</locdoc><milestone n=561> wished to see what they had made of their
lives; what was the effect of communal living upon the character of the
individual man and woman; whether the life had broadened or narrowed
them, and whether assured fortune and pecuniary independence had brought
to them a desire for beauty of surroundings and broader intelligence;
whether, in brief, the Communist had anywhere become more than a
comfortable and independent day-laborer, and aspired to something higher
than a mere bread-and-butter existence." As to some of these points, the
author must have been satisfied at an early stage of his researches:
beauty of surroundings and breadth of intelligence were nowhere striking
features of communistic life. This life was everywhere, save at a very
few points, nakedly practical; and at these exceptional points, as in
the case of the "spiritualism" of the Shakers, their celibacy, in a
measure, as well, and in that of the interchangeableness of husbands and
wives in the Oneida Community, the ideal element is singularly grotesque
and unlovely. The Shakers and the Perfectionists have certainly not
been broadened; whether they have been narrowed or not is a different
question. Mr. Nordhoff inclines to believe not, and he constantly
reminds us that, in judging the people he describes, we must be careful
that we do not compare them with a high ideal. They are for the most
part common, uneducated, unaspiring, and the question is whether they
are not, for the most part, more complete and independent than if they
had struggled along in individual obscurity and toil. They are
certainly more prosperous and more comfortable, and if their ignorance
has often hardened into queer, stiff, sterile dogmas, the sacrifice of
intelligence has not been considerable. Even the Shakers have, indeed,
a sort of angular poetry of their own, and the human creature for whom
it was a possibility to become a Shaker doubtless wears in that garb a
grace which would otherwise have been wanting.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr562</locdoc><milestone n=562> cluster of abodes, is in the State of Iowa. Like
most of its fellows, with the exception of the Perfectionists and
Shakers, this commune is of German origin. It established itself in
this country in 1842; it contains something less than fifteen hundred
members; it possesses twenty-five thousand acres of land; it has a
rigidly religious character; it allows marriage, but keeps the sexes as
much as possible apart, and thinks rather poorly of women. It supports
itself by farming and by the manufacture of woollen stuffs; "lives well
after the hearty German fashion, and bakes excellent bread"; has,
indeed, at some seasons of the year five meals a day; keeps its affairs
in very prosperous order, and finds an eager market for its produce of
all kinds. Religion here, as in most of the communities, is of a
strictly ascetic sort; they seem generally to find it needful to be
girded up by some tight doctrinal bond. "Inspiration" is the <i>cheval de
bataille</i> at Amana; the ministers, male and female, are called
"instruments"; "the hymns are printed as prose, only the verses being
separated." This congregation seems to have produced upon the author a
strong impression of easy thrift, of the "well-to-do." Even better in
this respect are the Rappists or Harmonists at Economy, near Pittsburgh.
"Passing Liverpool, you come to Freedom, Jethro (whose houses are both
lighted and heated with gas from a natural spring near by), Industry,
and Beaver." You must feel yourself to be on the native soil of social
experimentalism, and have a sort of sense of living in a scornfully
conservative parody or burlesque. The experiment of Father Rapp,
however, who came to America in 1803, and to this region in 1825, has
been a solid, palpable success. The Harmonists, who number one hundred
and ten persons, hold property to the amount of between two and three
million of dollars. Mr. Nordhoff makes a point of the importance, in
communistic ventures, of a strong-headed, strong-handed leader; and
this, indeed, with a very definite religious tendency, seems essential
to success. The Harmonists had both; and Father Rapp, the Moses who led
them out their house of bondage (the kingdom of Wrtemberg), seems to
have been a man of excellent sense and energy. He died in 1847, and,
though he has had successors, the society is resting on its gains,
making few recruits, and awaiting, in a sort of eventide tranquillity
and security, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr563</locdoc><milestone n=563> the second coming of Christ. The Rappists are
celibates; and that the institution has been successful with them may be
inferred from Mr. Nordhoff's remark that he has "been assured by older
members of the society, who have, as they say, often heard the period
described by those who were actors in it, that this determination to
refrain from marriage and from married life originated among the younger
members."
<p>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 <i>they</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr564</locdoc><milestone n=564> business skill they have developed
is quite remarkable. Comparing Zoar and Aurora with Economy, I saw the
extreme importance and value in such an experiment of leaders with ideas
at least a step higher than those of their people." The Zoarites
disapprove of marriage, but they permit it, which seems rather an
oddity. "Complete virginity," say their articles of faith, "is more
commendable than marriage." It is also, of course, more economical, and,
though the Communistic creeds generally do not say this, it is pretty
generally what they mean. At Bethel and Aurora, however, two German
Communes of four hundred members apiece, in Missouri and Oregon
respectively, Mr. Nordhoff found marriage not discountenanced, and
affairs in general fairly prosperous. Of Dr. Keil, a Prussian, the head
of the society at Aurora, Mr. Nordhoff gives an interesting account. He
had been a man-milliner in his own country, but his present character,
in spite of these rather frivolous antecedents, is a very vigorous and
sturdy one. Mr. Nordhoff stands with him beside the graves of his five
children -- all of whom he had lost between the ages of eighteen and
twenty-one. "After a minute's silence he turned upon me with sombre
eyes and said: `To bear all that comes upon us in silence, in quiet,
without noise, or outcry, or excitement, or useless repining -- that is
to be a man, and that we can only do with God's help.'" Mr. Nordhoff
gives further some account of several smaller and more struggling
Communes -- the Icarians, a French society in Iowa; a Swedish
settlement, at Bishop Hill, in Illinois; a cluster of seven hopeful
Russians (one of them a "hygienic doctor") at Cedar Vale, in Kansas;
and, lastly, of an experiment in Virginia, embodying as "full members"
two women, one man, and three boys. The three boys have a great
responsibility on their shoulders; we hope they are duly sensible of it.
There is also a sketch of some colonies -- notably that of Mr. E. V.
Boissi
re, of Bordeaux, in Kansas -- not strictly communistic. Mr.
Nordhoff thinks, with regard to this last settlement, that its members
sacrifice too many of the advantages of private life without securing in
a sufficient degree those of association.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr565</locdoc><milestone n=565> desire to know.
There are in the country eighteen societies, with something less than
twenty-five hundred members, and possessing some fifty thousand acres of
land. The Shakers seem to us by far the most perfect and consistent
communists, and Mr. Nordhoff's account of them is very interesting. He
explains everything indeed in the matter but one -- how twenty-five
hundred people, that is, can be found to embrace a life of such
organized and theorized aridity. But to comprehend this one must
reflect not only on what people take but on what they leave, and
remember that there are in America many domestic circles in which, as
compared with the dreariness of private life, the dreariness of
Shakerism seems like boisterous gaiety. "It was announced," Mr.
Nordhoff quotes from a Shaker record, "that the holy prophet Elisha was
deputized to visit the Zion of God on earth. The time at length
arrived. The people were grave, and concerned about their spiritual
standing. Two female instruments from Canterbury, N. H., were at length
ushered into the sanctuary. Their eyes were closed, and their faces
moved in semi-gyrations. . . . One or two instances occurred in which a
superhuman agency was indubitably obvious. One of the abnormal males
lay in a building at some distance from the infirmary where the female
instruments were confined." These few lines strike the note of Shaker
civilization; and it requires no great penetration to perceive that it
cannot be a very rich civilization. It proceeds, indeed, almost
entirely by negatives. "The beautiful, as you call it," said Elder
Frederick to Mr. Nordhoff, "is absurd and abnormal. It has no business
with us." And he proceeded to relate how he had once been in a rich
man's house in New York, where he had seen heavy picture-frames hung
against the walls as "receptacles of dust." The great source of
prosperity with the Shakers has evidently been their rigid, scientific
economy, carried into minute details, and never contravened by the
multiplication of children or non-producing members. Mr. Nordhoff says
that they do not toil severely (this is his testimony as to most of the
communes); but they work steadily, unremittingly, and, above all,
carefully, and they spend nothing on luxury or pleasure. The author
emphasizes strongly the excellent quality of their work and their
produce (this, too, is a general rule), and the high esteem in </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr566</locdoc><milestone n=566>
which they are held as neighbors and fellow-citizens. They "avoid all
speculative and hazardous enterprises. They are content with small
gains, and in an old-fashioned way study rather to moderate their
outlays than to increase their profits. . . . Their surplus capital they
invest in land, or in the best securities, such as United States bonds."
There is a kind of wholesome conservatism in the Shaker philosophy, as
Mr. Nordhoff depicts it, which we confess rather takes our fancy. It is
grotesque and perverted in many ways, but at its best points it is both
the source and the fruit of a considerable personal self-respect. Mr.
Nordhoff gives a number of long extracts from the publications of the
Shakers expository of their religious views, from which it appears that
they are "spiritualists" in the current sense of the term. But their
manifestations and miracles strike us as rather feeble and third-rate.
They ought to come up to town occasionally, and take a few lessons at
some of the more enterprising repositories of the faith. They have,
however, a sacrament of confession to their elders of evil thoughts and
deeds which seems to us respectable from their own point of view. It is
rigidly enforced, apparently, as far as is possible, and it is a
testimony to their sense of the value of discipline. The more
accomplished "spiritualists," we are afraid, don't confess. We think of
the Shakers as sitting in their more brilliant moods "with their faces
moving in semi-gyrations"; but we regret nevertheless to learn that
their number is decidedly not increasing. That they do not continue to
make recruits is perhaps a sign that family life among Americans at
large is becoming more entertaining.
<p>The most interesting, or at least the most curious, section of
Mr. Nordhoff's book is his report on the Oneida Perfectionists: "
<p> "We have built us a dome
<p> On our beautiful plantation,
<p> And we have all one home,
<p> <i>And one family relation</i>."
<p> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr567</locdoc><milestone n=567> line we have
italicized seems to us to have a delightful na vet, shadowing forth as
it does the fact that these ladies and gentlemen are all indifferently
and interchangeably each other's husbands and wives. But Mr. Nordhoff
chronicles many other facts beside this; as that the ladies wear short
hair, and jackets and trowsers; that the community numbers nearly three
hundred persons; that it is worth half a million of dollars; that it has
"faith-cures"; and that it assembles of an evening in the parlor and
devotes itself to "criticism" of a selected member. It is on a very
prosperous footing, and it has in Mr. J. H. Noyes a very skilful and (as
we suppose it would say) "magnetic" leader. Propagation is carefully
limited, and there are, as may be imagined, many applications for
admission. "If I should add," says Mr. Nordhoff, "that the predominant
impression made upon me was that it was a commonplace company, I might
give offence." Very likely; and the term is not the one we should
select. Such a phenomenon as the Oneida Community suggests many more
reflections than we have space for. Its industrial results are
doubtless excellent; but morally and socially it strikes us as simply
hideous. To appreciate our intention in so qualifying it the reader
should glance at the account given by Mr. Nordhoff of the "criticism" he
heard offered upon the young man Henry. In what was apparent here, and
still more in what was implied, there seem to us to be fathomless depths
of barbarism. The whole scene, and all that it rested on, is an attempt
to organize and glorify the detestable tendency toward the complete
effacement of privacy in life and thought everywhere so rampant with us
nowadays. For "perfectionists" this is sadly amiss. But it is the
worst fact chronicled in Mr. Nordhoff's volume, which, for the rest,
seems to establish fairly that, under certain conditions and with
strictly rational hopes, communism in America may be a paying
experiment.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, January 14,
1875
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=32>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr568</locdoc><milestone n=568>
<p> <i>Francis Parkman</i> (32)
<p> <i>The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century.</i> By
Francis Parkman. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1867.
<p>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 <i>subjective</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr569</locdoc><milestone n=569> them good Catholics, made them to a
certain extent bad heathens, and softened their most characteristic
usages. But, on the whole, we repeat it is when regarded as a portion
of the history of the Church and the ecclesiastical spirit that their
exploits are most interesting. It is our impression that they share
this character with most of the various Jesuit missions -- certainly
with those of the great Xavier. When the human mind wishes to
contemplate itself at its greatest tension -- its greatest desire for
action, for influence and dominion -- when it wishes to be reminded of
how much it is capable in the direction of conscious hope and naked
endurance, it cannot do better than read the story of the early Jesuit
adventurers.
<p>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 <i>relations</i> 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,
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr570</locdoc><milestone n=570> for in the enthusiasm of the practice they frequently neglected
to await the death of their victim. When perchance they did, they
danced about him as he stood in the stocks, shouting into his ears who
would eat this morsel and who the other. Add to this their incredible
squalor, their ignorance of any rule of decency, however elastic, the
utterly graceless and sterile character of their legends and traditions,
and finally the dismal severity of the climate in which they managed to
support existence -- their ceaseless struggle with winter, famine, and
pestilence -- and we have a conception as accurate as it is painful of
the life of our aboriginal predecessors, and of the civilization which
flourished on this continent during the long black ages in which Europe
lay basking in light -- such as it was. Let us not despair of our
literature. During the lifetime of those great writers and adventurers
about whom French and English critics write the brilliant articles which
occasionally minister to our discouragement, Hurons and Iroquois were
biting off each other's finger-ends on the shores of the St. Lawrence,
and Mohawks, in the beautiful valley which perpetuates their virtues,
were laying open the skulls of pious Frenchmen.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr571</locdoc><milestone n=571> as
to secure proper defence from attack. Agriculture was neglected, trade
restricted, and the neophytes were instructed only in the Catechism. An
Ursuline convent was founded at Quebec, and a number of enthusiastic
volunteers were recruited among the ladies of France. To the female
members of the mission Mr. Parkman has devoted a vividly-written
chapter. The reader will readily understand that among those grim
celibates in those snow-choked pine forests the interests of population
were left to take care of themselves; and he will transfer a glance of
approval down the map to the latitudes where prolific Dutch farmers and
Puritan divines were building up the State of New York and the
Commonwealth of Massachusetts. In 1650 Gabriel Druilletes, one of the
Jesuit brothers, made an expedition across the country from Quebec to
Boston, where he had occasion to be forcibly struck with the difference
in the character of the French and English settlements.
<p>"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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr572</locdoc><milestone n=572> Puritan heaven was God's throne; but no
less was the earth his footstool. . . . He held it a duty to labor and
to multiply, and, building quite as much on the Old Testament as on the
New, thought that a reward on earth as well as in heaven waited on those
who were faithful to the law. . . . On the other hand, those who shaped
the character and, in great measure, the destiny of New France, had
always on their lips the nothingness and the vanity of human life."
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr573</locdoc><milestone n=573> man. It may be fairly said of the Jesuit
missionaries that, in the firmness of their endurance of horrible
sufferings, they fairly broke the laws of nature. They broke at least
those of their own temperaments. The timid man hourly outfaced
impending torture, and the weak outlasted it. When one can boast of
such miracles as these, what is the use of insisting on diseases cured
by the touch of saintly bones, or of enthusiasts visibly transported in
the arms of angels?
<i>Nation</i>, June 6, 1867
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr573</locdoc><milestone n=573> <i>The Old Rgime in Canada</i>. By Francis Parkman. Boston:
Little, Brown & Co., 1874.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr574</locdoc><milestone n=574> nothing but a stage placed a
little more in the foreground of human affairs to have become a familiar
lesson in morals. It is hard to see in what element of grandeur such an
incident as the resistance of Adam Daulac, with his seventeen Frenchmen
and his forty Hurons, related by Mr. Parkman in his present volume, is
inferior to the struggle of Leonidas and his Greeks at Thermopylae. And
yet while all the world, for two thousand years, has heard of Leonidas,
who until now had heard of Adam Daulac? He made a stand for a week
against a thousand Iroquois whom he had gone forth with sublime temerity
to chastise, and died fighting hard and hacked to pieces, with history
to close about him as duskily as the Northern forests that witnessed his
struggle. Of course Greece depended on Leonidas, and only Quebec on
poor Daulac, but we cannot but feel nevertheless that fame in this world
is rather capriciously apportioned. In the same chapter which narrates
Daulac's crusade, Mr. Parkman prints a short letter of the time, which
seems to us worth quoting. It was written by a lad of eighteen,
Franois Hertel by name, who had been captured by the Mohawks:
<p>"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.
<p> -- Your poor
FANCHON."
<p> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr575</locdoc><milestone n=575> yesterday.
Whether Franois Hertel kept his devotion to the end we are unable to
say, but he never lost his pluck. Thirty years afterwards he led a raid
into New England, and indeed it is probable that the writer of the
foregoing lines hated the Massachusetts colonists no less heartily as
heretics than as rivals. Rugged courage, active and passive alike, is
the constant savor of Mr. Parkman's subject, and it has at last very
much the effect of giving his work the air (minus the dryness) of a
stoical treatise on morals. It is as wholesome as Epictetus, and, as a
proof of what may be achieved by the rigid human will, it is extremely
inspiring. Such works make one think better of mankind, and we can
imagine, in this age of cultivated sensibility, no better reading for
generous boys and girls. Mr. Parkman has been himself inspired by his
theme -- as during much of his labor, amid the interruptions of failing
eye-sight and ill-health, he has well needed to be. He treats his
subject as one who knows it in a personal as well as in a literary way,
and is evidently no less at home among the Northern woods and lakes than
among the archives of the French Marine. His descriptive touches are
never vague and rhetorical (except once, perhaps, where he speaks of the
"gorgeous euthanasia of the dying season"); they make definite,
characteristic pictures. His Jesuits and trappers are excellent, but
his Indians are even better, and he has plainly ventured to look at the
squalid savage <i>de pr
s</i> and for himself. His style is a capital
narrative style, and though abundantly vivid, resists the modern
temptation to be picturesque at any cost. Material for his task is
indeed apparently so plentiful that he is spared the necessity for that
familiarly conjectural discourse on the unknown and unknowable which
marks the latest school of historians. He is, moreover, a very
sufficient philosopher, and competent at all points to read the
political lesson of his story. We have been especially struck with his
fairness. He is an incorruptible Protestant, dealing with an intensely
Catholic theme, but he appears wholly free from any disposition to serve
his personages' narrow measure, or bear more heavily on their foibles
than his facts exactly warrant. He can hardly expect to have fully
pleased Catholic readers, but he must have displeased them singularly
little. Never, it must be </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr576</locdoc><milestone n=576> added, was there a case in which
Catholicism could so easily afford to be judged on its own strict merits
as in this early history of Canada.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr577</locdoc><milestone n=577>
Mr. Parkman says that no application for money was ever refused.
Applications were incessant; the colonists never dreamed of doing
anything without a premium from the home Government. Mr. Parkman gives
us a minute and entertaining picture of Canadian manners and morals
while the royal bounty was at its height. The most general impression
we derive from it is that human nature under the old rgime was made of
stouter stuff than now. French society, at Quebec and Montreal, adapted
itself to its new circumstances with a pliancy for which we should now
look in vain, and exhibited, for a time at least, a talent for
emigration which has quite passed out of its character. Life, for the
poorer sort, was hard enough at home, but they could make easier terms
with it than with the Canadian cold and the Indians. The poverty was
horrible, and even the colonial gentry, which became extremely numerous,
lived in almost abject destitution. Existence was a hand-to-hand fight
with the wilderness, with the climate, with the Iroquois, and with
native jealousies and treacheries. Ships arrived from France but once a
year, and were usually laden with disease. They brought the king's
instructions, and the primitive little machine was wound up again, and
set running for another twelvemonth. There was only one industry -- the
traffic in beaver skins -- and, as every one followed it, the market was
glutted, and the furriers, who were compelled by the Government to buy
the skins whether or no, became bankrupt. Over all this hovered the
rigid rule of the priests, enforcing, in intention, as grim a Puritanism
as that which prevailed in Massachusetts. The Jesuits were the guiding
spirits of early Canadian civilization, and they had no disposition to
be dislodged from the field. We noticed in these pages the really
thrilling volume in which a few years since Mr. Parkman commemorated
their early explorations and sufferings, and it must be confessed that
they had a certain right to an authority which they had purchased with
their heroism and their blood. But they governed as priests govern,
irritatingly and meddlingly, and, as if ice and Indians between them
might not have been trusted to impart a wholesome severity to life, they
urged war against such meagre forms of luxury as had straggled across
the sea, and prohibited all consolations but those of religion. The
natural result was that the </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr578</locdoc><milestone n=578> hardier spirits of the colony broke
loose from their rule, rambled away to the woods, and, finding tipsy
Indians more congenial company than super-sober Jesuits, founded the
picturesque tradition of the Canadian <i>coureur de bois</i>. One of the
priestly rulers of Quebec, the Vicar-General Laval, forms in Mr.
Parkman's pages an impressive and interesting figure. He was an ascetic
of the rigorous mediaeval pattern, but, with all his personal sanctity,
he relished vastly having his own way, and he held his power against all
intruders. The author gives a copious account of his squabbles with the
bishops (of Quebec) on one side, and the king's governors and intendants
on the other. It is a report, for all who are curious, of the current
politics of Quebec. Mr. Parkman justly remarks that it is singular that
none of the Canadian worthies, male or female, should have been deemed
worthy of canonization. There were plenty of thorough-going saints
among them, and the Sisters of Charity were not less devoted and
courageous than the Jesuit brothers. There was a certain Jeanne Le Ber,
in especial, who as a picturesque anchorite of questionable sanity
leaves nothing to be desired. She lived for twenty years in a narrow
cell behind the altar of a church at Quebec, in such an odor of sanctity
that, during a time of apprehension of an attack from the English, a
storm which overtook and destroyed their ships was attributed to the
virtue of her prayers. That such a name as this, and as many another
among the missionary brothers who braved the scalping-knife and the
death-torture, should be wanting on the Romish calendar of saints, is a
sort of crushing proof of the predestined provincialism of Canada -- of
its being out of the great world, out of the current. Nearer
headquarters, in bright, warm Italy, people were canonized on easier
terms. In this frigid atmosphere, however, where virtue was to miss
even that ultimate reward with the thought of which it consoles itself
for present hardship, men and women not only assembled in numbers, but
increased and multiplied and prospered and grew strong. It was a
capital illustration of the law of the survival of the fittest. The
weaklings perished, but the stronger grew magnificently tough. The
climate, strange to say, was especially friendly to women, and the
mothers of Canada had enormous families. The king set every imaginable
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr579</locdoc><milestone n=579> premium upon breeding, and the most curious pages in Mr.
Parkman's volume describe his ingenious attempts to stimulate it. Not
only were early marriages generously rewarded, but bachelors were made
thoroughly uncomfortable, and had finally either to marry in self-
defence or to buy themselves off from persecution. Marriageable young
women were shipped in even excessive numbers from France, and stepped
off the vessel into the arms of a husband. They appreciated their
market, and their alacrity had to be checked. "Not quite so many
demoiselles," the governor wrote to the emigration agent at home.
"Instead of the four I asked you for last year, you sent me fifteen."
This odd combination of celibate priests and nuns and excessively
prolific citizens gives us a rough measure of the something artificial
and anomalous in the history of New France. Mr. Parkman is to trace his
subject further, and although his concluding volume will lack the
interest peculiar to his `Jesuits' and to the early chapters of the
present one, it will deal, in the collapse of the French power, with an
abundantly dramatic episode, and, in Wolfe and Montcalm, with figures as
heroic as any he has sketched.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, October 15,
1874
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=33>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr580</locdoc><milestone n=580>
<p> <i>Albert Rhodes</i> (33)
<p> <i>The French at Home.</i> By Albert Rhodes. New York: Dodd & Mead,
1875.
<p>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 "<i>du</i> 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
<i>affectioned</i> 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, <i>au second</i>, 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr581</locdoc><milestone n=581>
have to be a thrifty fellow to extract these multifarious luxuries, in
the current year, from the income mentioned by Mr. Rhodes, ample though
it seems. His programme has an anachronistic sound; it reads like a
tender memory of the golden age of Louis Philippe. We must add that the
publishers of the present volume have disfigured it with "numerous
illustrations" which have been transferred without acknowledgment from
certain French publications of thirty years since, and have neither
merit nor suitableness. We have an impression, indeed, that some of
them (or some of the series to which several of the cuts belong) have
already figured as stolen goods in an American book published twenty
years ago and written by Mr. J. J. Jarves, entitled `Parisian Sights and
French Principles.' This little book, by the way, had in some degree
anticipated Mr. Rhodes -- how effectively, our memory does not serve us
sufficiently to say.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, August 5,
1875
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=34>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr582</locdoc><milestone n=582>
<p> <i>Addison Peale Russell</i> (34)
<p> <i>Library Notes</i>. By A. P. Russell. New York: Hurd & Houghton,
1875.
<p>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.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, January 6,
1876
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=35>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr583</locdoc><milestone n=583>
<p> <i>Henry D. Sedley</i> (35)
<p> <i>Marian Rooke; or, the Quest for Fortune. A Tale of the
Younger World</i>. By Henry D. Sedley. New York: Sheldon & Co., 1865.
<p>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.
<p>"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 <i>for</i> English circulating libraries, it was
written only, if we may so express it, <i>at</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr584</locdoc><milestone n=584> down as a consummate Yankee and
dubbing him as a consummate cockney. At one moment he asserts himself
an Englishman who has a perilously small amount of learning about the
United States, and at another he seems conclusively to prove himself one
of our dear fellow-countrymen, with his honest head slightly turned by a
glimpse of the carriage going to one of the Queen of England's drawing-
rooms. It remains a constant source of perplexity that he should be at
once so poor an American and so poor an Englishman. No Englishman ever
entertained for New England the magnificent loathing which burns in Mr.
Sedley's pages. What is New England to him or he to New England that he
should thus rack his ingenuity in her behalf? So divinely disinterested
an hostility was never inspired by a mere interest in abstract truth. A
tour in the United States in midwinter, with a fatal succession of bad
hotels, exorbitant hack-drivers, impertinent steam-boat clerks,
thankless female fellow-travellers, and terrific railway collisions,
might possibly create in a generous British bosom a certain lusty
personal antipathy to our unmannerly democracy; a vehement, honest
expression of which could not fail to make a chapter of picturesque and
profitable reading. But it takes an emancipated, a disfranchised, an
outlawed, or, if you please, a disappointed, American to wish us to
believe that he detests us simply on theory. This impression the author
of "Marian Rooke" would fain convey. Therefore we say we set him down
as one of ourselves. But he betrays, incidentally, as we have
intimated, so -- what shall we call it? -- so lively an ignorance of our
manners and customs, our method of action and of speech, that this
hypothesis also is not without a certain measure of disproof. He has
vouchsafed us no information on the contested point; and this it is that
prevents conjecture from being impertinent, for it is founded solely
upon the evidence of the story itself, which, as a book once fairly and
squarely published, is utterly given over to the public use, and to all
such probing, weighing, and analyzing as may help the public to
understand it. Further reflection, then, on the mooted point leads us
to the conclusion that in order to furnish Mr. Sedley with any local
habitation whatever we must consider one of the two conflicting elements
of his tale as a purely dramatic characteristic. As the </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr585</locdoc><milestone n=585>
conflict lies between his perfect familiarity with some points of
American life and his singular and arbitrary ignorance of others, we
must decide that either his knowledge or his ignorance is assumed. And
as his ignorance is generally not so much an absence of knowledge and of
statement as positive false knowledge and false statement, we embrace
the hypothesis that his scathing indifference to the facts of the case
is the result of a good deal of painful ingenuity. And this is what we
have in mind in calling his book at the outset a bad book. A book
which, from an avowedly critical stand-point -- even if it were a very
flimsy novel -- should roundly abuse and reprobate all things American,
would command our respect, if it did not command our agreement. But a
book projected (intellectually) from the midst of us, as the present one
betrays itself to have been, intended to strike us by a rebound from the
ignorant sympathy of foreign readers, displaying its knowledge of us by
the possession of a large number of facts and by the petty perversion of
every fact which it does possess, and leaving an issue for escape from
the charge of deliberate misrepresentation (so good a Yankee is the
author) by a species of implicit self-reference to a community where a
certain ignorance of our habits is no more than natural, -- a book in
which the author has put himself to so much trouble to do such an ugly
piece of work, commands neither our agreement nor our respect.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr586</locdoc><milestone n=586> are duly joined in matrimony at the
close, and subsequently, we are informed, the hero does "yeoman's
service" in the late war, on which side the author (still like a shrewd
Yankee) refuses to tell us, so leaving in considerable doubt (since so
essential a point is perforce slighted) whether he really fought on
either. He serves throughout the book as an instrument for eliciting in
their utmost intensity the vulgar manners and sordid morals of the
American people. He is, probably in view of this fact, the most deeply
pathetic character in the whole extent of fiction. We have no space
categorically to refute the ingenious accusations which Mr. Sedley has
levied upon our manners and our speech. We must content ourselves with
saying that as, if they were true, they would tell a sad tale of our
vulgarity, so, since they are false, they tell a sad tale of the
vulgarity of Mr. Sedley's imagination. What California was, socially,
fifteen years ago, we cannot say; but it was certainly not the
headquarters of politeness, and we accordingly leave it to Mr. Sedley's
tender mercies. But we are better qualified to judge of New York and
Boston. Here is a young lady of fashion, of the former city, welcoming
her mother's guests at a <i>conversazione</i>: "We are very gay to-night,
although promiscuous. Talk has been lively. There are a good many
ladies round. Pa and Professor Sukkar are conferring on immorality. Pa
is speaking now. Hush!" Here is another young lady, with the best blood
in the land in her veins, conferring with her mother as to the probable
character of the hero, who has just made his <i>entre</i> into New York
society: "Heavens, no! Clinton would have never given letters to a
politician; whatever his faults, my brother would never have introduced
a politician into the family of the Parapets!" "Unless sinning through
ignorance, perhaps," suggests the mother. "Ignorance! surely their
odious names are familiar enough. To be sure we do n't read the
detestable newspapers, their organs, but the men do; and I am confident
either papa or Clinton would know if Mr. Gifford had been compromised in
politics." Having represented every American in his pages, of no matter
what station in life, as using a form of the traditional Sam Slick
dialect, in which all the humorous quaintness is omitted and all the
extravagant coarseness is retained, the author makes generous amends at
last by the elegant </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr587</locdoc><milestone n=587> language which he puts into the mouths of
the Parapets, the family of the young lady just quoted; and by the still
more elegant distinction which he claims for them. Into various details
of their dreary snobbishness we will not plunge. They constitute, in
the author's sight, the one redeeming feature of our deplorable social
condition; and he assures us that, incredible as the fact may appear,
they yet do actually flourish in aristocratic idleness and seclusion in
the midst of our universal barbarism. This, surely, is the most
unkindest cut of all. It suggests, moreover, fearful reflections as to
what our fate would have been had Mr. Sedley been minded to be
complimentary.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, February 22,
1866
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=36>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr588</locdoc><milestone n=588>
<p> <i>Anne Moncure (Crane) Seemller</i> (36)
<p> <i>Emily Chester. A Novel</i>. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864.
<p>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.
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr589</locdoc><milestone n=589> watch the
moral operations of this romantic trio. What a chance for dulness is
here!
<p>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!
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr590</locdoc><milestone n=590> the fluent mass of talk in which
she is embodied. We do not wish to be understood as attributing this
fact of her indistinctness to the fact of her general excellence and
nobleness; good women, thank heaven, may be as vividly realized as bad
ones. We attribute it to the want of clearness in the author's
conception, to the want of science in her execution.
<p>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.
<p>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.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr591</locdoc><milestone n=591>
<p>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 <i>motive</i> generally. It is very common now-a-days for
young novelists to build up figures <i>minus</i> 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 (<i>sic</i>) 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr592</locdoc><milestone n=592> have been the "constitutional
harmony of two congenial natures." Emily's spirit, on page 245, is bound
by "human law with which its nature had no correspondence." We are told
on page 285, that Frederick Hastings held Emily fascinated by his
"motive power over the supersensuous portion of her being."
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr593</locdoc><milestone n=593>
loathing of Max Crampton! We do not say that she could not have
defended her position; she could not have even indicated it. Nor could
she have given a name to the state of her feelings with regard to
Hastings. She admits to herself that he does not engage her heart; he
dominates merely "the supersensuous portion of her being." We hope that
this glittering generality was not of Emily's own contrivance. Sore
distressed indeed must she have been, if she could not have made herself
out a better case than her biographer has made for her. If her
biographer had represented her as <i>loving</i> Frederick Hastings, as
struggling with her love, and finally reducing it from a disorderly to
an orderly passion, we should have pledged her our fullest sympathy and
interest. Having done so well, we might have regretted that she should
not have done better, and have continued to adorn that fashionable
society of which she was so brilliant a member. She was in truth
supremely handsome; she might have lived for her beauty's sake. But
others have done so much worse, that we should have been sorry to
complain. As the case stands, we complain bitterly, not so much of
Emily as of the author; for we are satisfied that an Emily is
impossible. Even from the author's point of view, however, her case is
an easy one. She had no hate to contend with, merely loathing; no love,
merely yearning; no feelings, as far as we can make out, merely
sensations. Except the loss of her property, we maintain that she has
no deep sorrow in life. She refuses Hastings in the season of her
trial. Good: she would not marry a man whom she did not love, merely
for a subsistence; so far she was an honest woman. But she refuses him
at the cost of a great agony. We do not understand her predicament. It
is our belief that there is no serious middle state between friendship
and love. If Emily did not love Hastings, why should she have suffered
so intensely in refusing him? Certainly not out of sympathy for him
disappointed. We may be told that she did not love him in a way to
marry him: she loved him, then, as a mother or a sister. The refusal of
his hand must have been, in such a case, an easy rather than a difficult
task. She accepts Max as irresponsibly as she refuses Frederick, --
because there is a look in his eyes of claiming her body and soul,
"through his divine right of the </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr594</locdoc><milestone n=594> stronger." Such a look must be
either very brutal or very tender. What we know of Max forbids us to
suppose that in his case it was tainted with the former element; it must
accordingly have expressed the ripened will to serve, cherish, and
protect. Why, then, should it in later years, as Emily looked back upon
it, have filled her with so grisly a horror? Such terrors are self-
made. A woman who despises her husband's person may perhaps, if she is
very weak and nervous, grow to invest it with numerous fantastic
analogies. If, on the contrary, she is as admirably self-poised as Mrs.
Crampton, she will endeavor, by the steady contemplation of his
magnificent intellect and his generous devotion, to discern the subtle
halo (always discernible to the eye of belief) which a noble soul sheds
through an ignoble body. Our author will perhaps resent our
insinuation that the unutterable loathing of Max's wife's for him was
anything so easily disposed of as a contempt for his person. Such a
feeling is a very lawful one; it may easily be an impediment to a wife's
happiness; but when it is balanced by so deep a conviction of her
partner's moral and intellectual integrity as Mrs. Crampton's own mental
acuteness furnished her, it is certainly not an insuperable bar to a
career of comfortable resignation. When it assumes the unnatural
proportions in which it is here exhibited, it conclusively proves that
its subject is a profoundly vicious person. Emily found just that in
Hastings which she missed in her husband. If the absence of this
quality in Max was sufficient to unfit him for her true love, why should
not its presence have been potent enough to insure her heart to
Frederick? We doubt very much whether she had a heart; we mistrust
those hearts which are known only by their ineffable emptiness and woe.
But taking her biographer's word for it that she had, the above little
piece of logic ought, we think, effectually to confound it. Heart-
histories, as they are called, have generally been considered a very
weary and unprofitable species of fiction; but we infinitely prefer the
old-fashioned love-stories, in which no love but heart-love was
recognized, to these modern teachings of a vagrant passion which has
neither a name nor a habitation. We are not particularly fond of any
kind of sentimentality; but Heaven defend us from the sentimentality
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr595</locdoc><milestone n=595> which soars above all our old superstitions, and allies itself
with anything so rational as a theory.
<p> <i>North American Review</i>,
January 1865
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr595</locdoc><milestone n=595> <i>Opportunity: A Novel</i>. By Anne Moncure Crane. Boston:
Ticknor & Fields, 1867.
<p>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
<i>ad infinitum</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr596</locdoc><milestone n=596> after
a reader had travelled through the book in search of these
improprieties, disillusioned only at the last page. Success was
achieved; the book had been read. And then, in the second place, there
was a general feeling that it was high time we should be having an
American novel which sensible people could read ten pages of and mention
without meeting a vacant stare for all response. Miss Crane's book
answered these high conditions, and found itself perforce a success. In
this way there was something decidedly factitious in the quality of the
reception it obtained. The author was, doubtless, much that was
estimable, but she was, above all things, fortunate, and it was,
therefore, a somewhat hazardous resolve to tempt fortune a second time.
<p>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 <i>faux air</i> 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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr597</locdoc><milestone n=597> book, we
should yet manage to hold our ground against them for the sake of these
good people. But, oddly enough, they are created only to be destroyed.
They are suppressed by the author's inscrutable <i>fiat</i>, and the tale
begins anew -- for we can hardly say it continues. Meanwhile the three
orphans have now grown to maturity. We say "meanwhile," referring the
adverb rather to a certain number of printed pages than to a succession
of events sufficiently definite to our perception for us to indicate
them more analytically. At all events, the two brothers reach manhood,
in striking contrast -- a contrast which makes the chief point in the
tale. Grahame Ferguson, the elder, is a capital specimen of what is
called, in the language of the day, a "swell" -- wonderfully, wofully
handsome, elegant, fastidious, languidly selfish, lazy, cynical, idle, a
charmer of women. His brother Douglas, on the contrary, is a good,
solid, serious, conscientious, high-toned, lusty, ugly fellow, who falls
resolutely to work while the other dangles about in ball-rooms. As for
the little ward, Rosy Carrel, she is discreetly sequestrated in a
boarding-school -- to our no small relief, we confess; for we had begun
to feel quite nervous about her relations with this honest Douglas. She
concedes the field to a person more competent to occupy it -- a certain
Harvey Berney. We hasten to add, lest the reader should accuse the
latter individual of an undue want of gallantry in thus putting a lady
to flight, that Harvey Berney is simply the heroine of the book. We
hardly know what to say of her -- there is, indeed, nothing to say but
that in drawing her lineaments the author's intentions were excellent,
but that some importunate prejudice, some fatal reminiscence, some
impertinent, irrational fantasy, has jostled her hand and destroyed the
grace of the figure. Harvey, after all, is better than half our modern
heroines, and we should feel much ashamed of ourselves if we attempted
to provoke a smile at her expense. But, as we say, she is good almost
solely in intention; the author is not artist enough to have realized
her vision and to have fixed it in firm, symmetrical lines. Yet even to
have fancied her is a step in the right direction -- the direction
furthest removed from that murky region where the poor bedraggled flirts
and fast women, or the insipid graduates of the school-room, to whose
society modern English novels confine </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr598</locdoc><milestone n=598> us, go through their
lifeless gambols. Harvey is meant to have a mind of her own, to be a
fit companion for a man of sense, to be a strong and free young girl.
She thinks and lives and acts, she has her face to the sun. Many thanks
to the author for what she would fain have done; she has at least
enlisted the imagination on the side of freedom and real grace.
<p>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.
<p>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
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr599</locdoc><milestone n=599> the objection to these high-toned, free-thinking heroines, in
whose favor, for Harvey's sake, we just now entered our voice. At the
crucial moment they are certain to do something utterly pedantic and
unnatural and insupportable. Rose Carrel is finally brought out from
her retreat, and Harvey detects in the expression of her face that she,
too, is smitten with Douglas. Whereupon she averts her own impassioned
gaze, although she knows very well that Douglas doesn't care two straws
for the young lady. So the poor young man is constrained to marry Rose,
and Harvey not to marry at all -- Grahame, meanwhile, having made a
great match. Here the book ends, or ought to end. But the author has
affixed a very trivial and silly conclusion, in which Harvey is
represented as enjoying the hospitality of Grahame and Douglas, with
their respective wives and families, and deriving great satisfaction
from the discovery that Mrs. Douglas has called her little girl after
herself (Harvey). This is, indeed, an anti-climax. What the deuce,
cries the reader, shall Harvey care for this lady's sentimental
vagaries? Her business was with Douglas, and she made very poor work of
it.
<p>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.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, December 5,
1867
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=37>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr600</locdoc><milestone n=600>
<p> <i>Alvan S. Southworth</i> (37)
<p> <i>Four Thousand Miles of African Travel: A Personal Record of a
Journey up the Nile, etc.</i> By Alvan S. Southworth. New York: Baker,
Pratt & Co., 1875.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr601</locdoc><milestone n=601> with liberal eyes." Mr. Southworth's admiration for
Sir Samuel Baker is extreme, and is apparently only equalled by that
which he feels for Lady Baker -- her "beautiful little white teeth" and
her "great Hungarian heart." He sailed up the Nile in a magnificent
dahabeah, and at the end of 800 miles disembarked and crossed the Nubian
Desert to Berber -- having "accomplished the trip from Cairo in the
shortest time ever made by white men." Mr. Southworth's description of
his days in the Desert -- days apparently of almost intolerable physical
discomfort -- contains the most graphic and successful pages in his
book. Under the influence of some extraordinary delusion, he and his
companions had determined to take no wine nor liquor with them on their
journey. Mr. Southworth must have longed for that Chambertin at
Bignon's. He resumed navigation, and continued on to Khartum, where he
spent the last of the winter and the spring. His residence in this
capacious city of 40,000 inhabitants appears to have formed the limit of
his researches into the fate of Sir Samuel Baker. He seems on this and
other occasions to have conceived large designs, which were defeated by
circumstances over which he had no control. While at Khartum, for
instance, he was firmly resolved to penetrate to the sanguinary kingdom
of Darfur -- "from whose bourne no traveller returns." But he thought
better of it. So also, later, on the Red Sea, he met a Turkish
nobleman, to whom he made a "serious proposition" that for the sum of
$500 he should conduct him to Mecca in disguise. But the "nobleman"
afterwards backed out, and Mr. Southworth had to content himself with
visiting the "tomb of Eve" at the convenient distance of two miles. He
observes after seeing this remarkable monument -- it is near Yeddah, and
two hundred feet long -- that "to keep a `tomb' is one of the most
flourishing occupations of the East." At Khartum, wishing to investigate
the mysteries of the slave-trade, he pretended to desire to purchase "a
small thirteen-year-old Abyssinian." "She was covered," he says, "with a
single loose garment. She was directed to denude herself of this; but I
instantly interposed, not wishing to allow even a traveller's curiosity
to insult the child's purity of person." He has much to say about the
slave-traffic and those explorers who "have sought to <i>deprecate</i> the
minds and per </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr602</locdoc><milestone n=602> sons of these helpless people in different parts
of the African continent, and have been ostentatious in proclaiming
their uselessness as human factors." At the end of his five months in
Khartum the author sailed down the Nile to Berber again, and crossed the
Desert to the Red Sea. In speaking of the number of wild beasts in
Central Africa, he says: "As the reader, however, can best judge by
figures, I will make some instead of taking them from the census-
takers." And he proceeds to "make" them, and to state that for every
human being of the population there are 100 monkeys, 50 lions, 50
antelopes, 1 elephant, etc. Mr. Southworth is, we regret to say,
Secretary of the American Geographical Society.
<p> <i>Nation</i>, December 2,
1875
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=38>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr603</locdoc><milestone n=603>
<p> <i>Harriet Elizabeth (Prescott) Spofford</i> (38)
<p> <i>Azarian: an Episode</i>. By Harriet Elizabeth Prescott, Author
of <i>The Amber Gods</i>, etc. Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1864.
<p>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.
<p>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, <i>passim</i>.
<p>The writer of a work of fiction has this advantage over his
critic, that he can frequently substantiate his cause by an <i>a
posteriori</i> 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.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr604</locdoc><milestone n=604> But woe to the writer who claims the poet's license, without
being able to answer the poet's obligations; to the writer of whatever
class who subsists upon the immunities, rather than the
responsibilities, of his task.
<p>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.
<p>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 <i>tude</i>. 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 <i>in spite</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr605</locdoc><milestone n=605>
which they have parts, or something very like it, is acted every day,
anywhere between the Common and the river. There is, accordingly, every
presumptive reason why we should feel conscious of a certain affinity
with them. But from any such sensation we are effectually debarred by
Miss Prescott's inordinate fondness for the picturesque.
<p>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 <i>figures</i> 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?
<p>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
<i>dramatis personae</i> 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 <i>salon</i>, and treats her guests to draughts of "richly-rosy" cordial.
One of her dresses is a gown of green Genoa </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr606</locdoc><milestone n=606> velvet, with
peacock's feathers of gorgeous green and gold. What do you think of
that for an exiled teacher of languages, boasting herself Russian?
Perhaps, after all, it is not so improbable. In the person of Madame
Saratov, Miss Prescott had doubtless the intention of a sufficiently
dramatic character, -- the European mistress of a <i>salon</i>. But her
primary intention completely disappears beneath this thick <i>impasto</i> of
words and images. Such is the fate of all her creations: either they
are still-born, or they survive but for a few pages; she smothers them
with caresses.
<p>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 <i>person</i>
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.
<p>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
<i>know</i> it. The only lasting fictions are those </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr607</locdoc><milestone n=607> which have
spoken to the reader's heart, and not to his eye; those which have
introduced him to an atmosphere in which it was credible that human
beings might exist, and to human beings with whom he might feel tempted
to claim kinship.
<p>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
<i>truth</i>, -- 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.
<p>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 <i>human</i> as that
of her own, is equally elaborate in the painting of external </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr608</locdoc><milestone n=608>
objects. But such an assertion will involve a mistake: Balzac does not
<i>paint</i>, does not copy, objects; his chosen instrument being a pen, he
is content to <i>write</i> them. He is literally real: he presents objects
as they are. The scene and persons of his drama are minutely described.
Grandet's house, his sitting-room, his habits, his appearance, his
dress, are all reproduced with the fidelity of a photograph. The same
with Madame Grandet and Eugnie. We are exactly informed as to the
young girl's stature, features, and dress. The same with Charles
Grandet, when he comes upon the scene. His coat, his trousers, his
watch-chain, his cravat, the curl of his hair, are all dwelt upon. We
almost see the musty little sitting-room in which so much of the action
goes forward. We are familiar with the gray <i>boiserie</i>, the faded
curtains, the rickety card-tables, the framed samplers on the walls,
Madame Grandet's foot-warmer, and the table set for the meagre dinner.
And yet our sense of the human interest of the story is never lost. Why
is this? It is because these things are all described <i>only in so far
as they bear upon the action</i>, and not in the least for themselves. If
you resolve to describe a thing, you cannot describe it too carefully.
But as the soul of a novel is its action, you should only describe those
things which are accessory to the action. It is in determining what
things <i>are</i> so accessory that real taste, science, and judgment are
shown.
<p>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 <i>why</i> 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. </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr609</locdoc><milestone n=609> This latter fact is perhaps one of
the most valuable in regard to Balzac. His story exists before it is
told; it stands complete before his mind's eye. It was a characteristic
of his mind, enriched as it was by sensual observation, to see his
figures clearly and fully as with the eye of sense. So seeing them, the
desire was irresistible to present them to the reader. How clearly he
saw them we may judge from the minuteness of his presentations. It was
clearly done because it was <i>scientifically</i> done. That word resumes
our lesson. He set down things in black and white, not, as Miss
Prescott seems vaguely to aim at doing, in red, blue, and green, -- in
prose, scientifically, as they stood. He aimed at local color; that is,
at giving the facts of things. To determine these facts required labor,
foresight, reflection; but Balzac shrank from no labor of eye or brain,
provided he could adequately cover the framework of his story.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr610</locdoc><milestone n=610> make, some of
the qualities of the object will certainly be found; but it matters
little whether they are the chief distinctive ones, -- any satisfy his
conscience.
<p>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
<i>thing</i>. 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 <i>bric--
brac</i> and sunsets, may be made very effectively to supplement a true
dramatic exposition; but they are a wretched substitute for such. And
even in <i>bric--brac</i> and sunsets Miss Prescott's execution is crude.
In her very specialty, she is but an indifferent artist. Who is so
clever in the <i>bric--brac</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr611</locdoc><milestone n=611> the painting of a
picture and the writing of a novel. Why should the novelist expect to
do what his fellow-worker never even hopes to acquire the faculty of
doing, -- execute his work at a stroke? It is plain that Miss Prescott
adds, tacks on, interpolates, piles up, if we may use the expression;
but it seems very doubtful if she often takes counsel of the old
Horatian precept, -- in plain English, to scratch out. A true artist
should be as sternly just as a Roman father. A moderate exercise of
this Roman justice would have reduced "Azarian" to half its actual
length. The various descriptive passages would have been wonderfully
simplified, and we might have possessed a few good pictures.
<p>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"?
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr612</locdoc><milestone n=612> express on
the subject, -- under the inspiration of the rhapsody above quoted, and
what follows it. Of course, where so much is attempted in the way of
expression, something is sometimes expressed. But with Miss Prescott
such an occasional success is apt to be what the French call a <i>succ
s
manqu</i>. This is the fault of what our authoress must allow us to call
her inveterate bad taste; for whenever she has said a good thing, she
invariably spoils it by trying to make it better: to let well enough
alone is indeed in all respects the great lesson which experience has in
store for her. It is sufficiently felicitous, for instance, as such
things go, to call the chandelier of a theatre "a basket of light."
There stands the simple successful image. But Miss Prescott immediately
tacks on the assertion that it "pours down on all its brimming burden of
lustre." It would be bad taste again, if it were not such bad
physiology, to speak of Azarian's flaccid hair being "drenched with some
penetrating perfume, an Oriental water that stung the brain to vigor."
The idea that a man's intellectual mood is at the mercy of his <i>pommade</i>
is one which we recommend to the serious consideration of barbers. The
reader will observe that Azarian's hair is <i>drenched</i>: an instance of
the habitual intensity of Miss Prescott's style. The word <i>intensity</i>
expresses better than any other its various shortcomings, or rather
excesses. The only intensity worth anything in writing is intensity of
thought. To endeavor to fortify flimsy conceptions by the constant use
of verbal superlatives is like painting the cheeks and pencilling the
eyebrows of a corpse.
<p>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.
<p>We would earnestly exhort Miss Prescott to be <i>real</i>, 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.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr613</locdoc><milestone n=613> Trollope has not the imagination of Mr. Reade, his strong grasp
of the possible; but he has a delicate perception of the actual which
makes every whit as firm ground to work upon. This delicate perception
of the actual Miss Prescott would do well to cultivate: if Mr. Trollope
is too distasteful to her, she may cultivate it in the attentive perusal
of Mr. Reade, in whom there are many Trollopes. Let her not fear to
grovel, but take note of what is, constitute herself an observer, and
review the immeasurable treasures she has slighted. If she will
conscientiously do this, she will need to invent neither new and
unprecedented phases of humanity nor equally unprecedented nouns and
adjectives. There are already more than enough for the novelist's
purpose. All we ask of him is to use the material ready to his hand.
When Miss Prescott reconciles herself to this lowly task, <i>then</i> and
then only will she find herself truly rich in resource.
<p> <i>North American Review</i>,
January 1865
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=39>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr614</locdoc><milestone n=614>
<p> <i>Elizabeth Stoddard</i> (39)
<p> <i>Two Men. A Novel.</i> By Elizabeth Stoddard. New-York: Bunce and
Huntington, 1865.
<p>A few years ago Mrs. Stoddard published a work entitled <i>The
Morgesons</i>, 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 <i>The Morgesons</i>? 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr615</locdoc><milestone n=615> all
this done with great energy, with an undoubted sincerity, although with
amazing ignorance; with shrewdness and with imagination. He felt that
he had read a book worthless as a performance -- or perhaps worse than
worthless; but valuable for what it contingently promised; a book which
its author had no excuse for repeating, inasmuch as it embraced the
widest limits in which a mind may void itself of its vicious and morbid
fancies, without causing suspicion of its vanity.
<p>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
<i>The Morgesons</i>, 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 <i>Two Men</i> 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
<i>Two Men</i> 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; </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr616</locdoc><milestone n=616> it sheeted the windows with mist, hummed against the
doors, and smote the roof with steady blows." There, in three lines, is
the in-door sensation of a rainy day, quietly given. But Mrs. Stoddard
is violent when she speaks, without explicit demonstration, of her
heroine's hungry soul. She is violent when she says that the same young
lady has speckled eyes and feathery hair. From these <i>data</i> and from
the condensed and mystic utterance which occasionally break the pregnant
silence which seems to be her <i>rle</i> in the story, as well as from the
circumstance that she is declared by one of her companions to be the
American Sphinx, and by another to embody the Genius of the Republic, we
are expected to deduce the heroine's character. Perhaps we are very
stupid, but we utterly fail to do so. For us, too, she remains the
American Sphinx. Nor have we much better luck with her companions. It
is Mrs. Stoddard's practice to shift all her responsibilities as story-
teller upon the reader's shoulders, and to give herself up at the
critical moment to the delight of manufacturing incoherent dialogue or
of uttering grim impertinences about her characters. This is doubtless
very good fun for Mrs. Stoddard; but it is poor fun for us. Take her
treatment of her hero. What useful or profitable fact has she told us
about him? We do not of course speak of facts which we may apply to our
moral edification; but of facts which may help us to read the story. Is
he a man? Is he a character, a mind, a heart, a soul? You wouldn't
suppose it from anything Mrs. Stoddard has said, or has made him say.
What is his formula? Is it that like Carlyle's Mirabeau he has
swallowed all formulas? A silence like the stage imitation of thunder
interrupted by remarks like the stage imitation of flashes of lightning;
such to our perceptions are the chief attributes of Jason Auster. And
yet he figures as a hero; he sustains a tragedy, he is the subject of a
passion. Like Mr. Gradgrind in Dickens's <i>Hard Times</i>, what the novel-
reader craves above all things is <i>facts</i>. No matter how fictitious
they may be, so long as they are facts. A hungry soul is no fact at
all, without a context, which Mrs. Stoddard has not given. Speckled
eyes and feathery hair are worthless facts. Death-beds, as a general
rule, are worthless facts, and there are no less than four of them in
Mrs. Stoddard's short story. Nothing is so common </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr617</locdoc><milestone n=617> as to see a
second-rate actor "die" with effect. The secret of the short breath,
the groans, the contortions is easily mastered. Just so, nothing leads
us more to suspect the strength of a novelist's talent than the
recurrence in his pages of these pathological phenomena. They are
essentially cheap tragedy. It is evidently Mrs. Stoddard's theory that
plenty of natural conversation makes a novel highly dramatic. Such also
is Mr. Trollope's theory. Now there is no doubt but what Mrs. Stoddard
has enough imagination to equip twenty Mr. Trollopes. But in the case
of both writers the practice of this theory makes the cheap dramatic.
Both writers make their characters talk about nothing; but those of Mrs.
Stoddard do it so much the more ingeniously and picturesquely, that it
seems at first as if they were really saying something. Yet this
intense and distorted common-place is worse than Mr. Trollope's flagrant
common-place. As we skim its shallow depths, one reflection perpetually
recurs. What a strain after nature, we exclaim at every turn, and yet
what poverty! That Mrs. Stoddard strains after nature shows that she
admires and loves it, and for this the critic commends her: but that she
utterly fails to grasp it shows that she has not seriously observed it;
and for this the critic censures her. We have spoken of her
imagination. She has exercised it with her back turned upon the truth.
Let her face the truth and she may let her imagination rest: as it is,
it only brings her into trouble. A middle-aged man who loves a young
girl for years in silence, knowing that she loves his own son: who
quietly and heroically awaits his wife's death, knowing that she hates
the young girl; and who at last when his wife is dead and his son has
gone forth from home, casts out his heart at the young girl's feet: all
this makes a story quite after the actual taste. But like all stories
that are worth the telling, it has this peculiarity, that it gives every
one concerned in it a great deal to do and especially the author. But
Mrs. Stoddard's notion is to get all the work done by the reader while
she amuses herself in talking what we feel bound to call nonsense.
<p> <i>Studies in Bibliography</i>, vol. 20,
1967
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=40>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr618</locdoc><milestone n=618>
<p> <i>Harriet Beecher Stowe</i> (40)
<p> <i>We and Our Neighbors: Records of an Unfashionable Street</i>. By
Harriet Beecher Stowe. New York: J. B. Ford & Co., 1875.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr619</locdoc><milestone n=619> into their little
territories." They -- who? The water-pipes? The phrase is ambiguous,
but it is to be supposed that this real high-class English gentleman
understood everything; for -- "`I've got a little box of my own out at
Kentish Town,' Mr. Selby said, in a return burst of confidence, `and I
shall tell my wife about some of your contrivances.'" It should be added
in fairness that the conversation was not all in this dangerously
familiar key, for we are presently informed that Eva "introduced the
humanitarian questions of the day."
<p>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 <i>Home Journal</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr620</locdoc><milestone n=620>
morsel of white fleecy worsted, darts across the street, and kisses her
hand to her husband on the door-step." What would those personages whom
she somewhere calls "the ambitious lady leaders of our time" say to
that?
<p> <i>Nation</i>, July 22, 1875
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=41>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr621</locdoc><milestone n=621>
<p> <i>Bayard Taylor</i> (41)
<p> <i>John Godfrey's Fortunes; Related by Himself; A Story of
American Life</i>. By Bayard Taylor. New York: G. P. Putnam; Hurd and
Houghton, 1865.
<p>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
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr622</locdoc><milestone n=622> situation is indeed faintly suggested; but the narrative skims
over it with a placid disregard of its best interests which the reader
whose sympathies the author has succeeded in enlisting, will find
somewhat irritating. At last the truth shines forth; Godfrey's
character is rehabilitated, the outcast is provided with kind friends,
and the hero and heroine settle down in matrimony in a snug little
cottage on Staten Island.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr623</locdoc><milestone n=623> cynicism. But why is Penrose introduced at
all? What part is he meant to play? We strongly suspect that when Mr.
Taylor created him in the early part of the book, it was with a very
vague idea of his ultimate destiny. He is conveniently disposed of by
being despatched to California. His slight collision with Godfrey
<i>propos</i> of Miss Haworth was probably devised as a late expedient to
justify his existence. The reader, however, who has been duly impressed
by his subtle charms, will regret as the book draws to a close, that so
brilliant a light should have been hidden under a bushel, and will
perhaps recur with a melancholy shake of the head, to Steerforth in
<i>David Copperfield</i>. But be that as it may, could not Mr. Taylor have
contrived a domestic tragedy less tainted with the elements of farce
than the elder Penrose's marriage? There is something very absurd and
very disagreeable in the constant allusions of a chivalrous and romantic
youth to the "Cook" as the source of his bitterest woes. This personage
serves very well, however, as a <i>pendant</i> to the Irish waiter. Mr.
Brandagee is another case in point. He is the "scion of a rich and
aristocratic family in New-Haven," who on the strength of an extended
European tour, entertains a dinner-party with anecdotes of his "old
friends" Silvio Pellico and Paul de Kock. The only condition of success
for a diner-out of the Brandagee stamp is good taste. Here, as in many
other cases, the reader readily credits the author with a praiseworthy
intention; but here, as in almost every case, he is forced to declare
that a good subject is spoiled by defective execution. How different a
figure would Mr. Brandagee have made in Thackeray's hands! Compare, in
fact, the whole description of John Godfrey's New York life, his
ambitions, vanities and temptations, with the corresponding portion of
<i>Pendennis</i>. Compare Mrs. Yorkton with Miss Bunion and Miss Levi, the
syren, with Blanche Amory. Mr. Taylor is of course not to be censured
for not being as clever as Thackeray; but that union of good sense and
good taste which forms the touchstone of the artist's conceptions should
be within the reach of every man who claims to be an artist. Mr. Taylor
is not, as a novelist, an artist: a peculiarity which he has the honour
of sharing with a large number of successful writers of fiction. As an
artist, it seems </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr624</locdoc><milestone n=624>
<p> [at this point, four manuscript pages,
<p> numbered 9 -- 12, are missing]
<p> profit -- nor to the family circle before the children have
gone to bed; but to mature men and women.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr625</locdoc><milestone n=625> fair reflection of the writer's character. To
project yourself into the consciousness of a person essentially your
opposite requires the audacity of great genius; and even men of genius
are cautious in approaching the problem. Mr. Browning the great master
of the art in these days never assumes the burden of its solution but
for a few pages at a time. Mr. Taylor, having endowed John Godfrey with
various nervous and magnetic sensibilities, and with a "sensuous love of
Beauty" as his strongest characteristic, must bear these things in mind
in every line that he writes. He has two stories to tell, one direct
and the other indirect: the first, that of Godfrey's character, is
contained in the way he makes Godfrey tell the second, that of his life.
Does Mr. Taylor succeed where other clever men have failed? Assuredly
not. We are struck throughout by the incongruity between the character
which Godfrey affirms of himself and that which he actually exhibits.
Not that he exhibits any very pronounced character. But he falls below
his presumptive Self. He impresses us as a thoughtful, gentle,
affectionate and charitable youth with a very matter-of-fact and prosaic
view of the world and a good newspaper style.
<p>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.
<p> <i>Harvard Library Bulletin</i>, XI, Spring
1957
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=42>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr626</locdoc><milestone n=626>
<p> <i>James Whistler</i> (42)
<p> MR. WHISTLER AND ART CRITICISM
<p>A correspondent writes to us from London under date of Jan. 28:
<p>"I may mention as a sequel to the brief account of the suit
Whistler <i>v.</i> 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 <i>Times</i>, and who had the misfortune, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr627</locdoc><milestone n=627> fifteen
years ago, to express himself rather unintelligently about Velasquez.
`The Observatory at Greenwich under the direction of an apothecary,'
says Mr. Whistler, `the College of Physicians with Tennyson as
president, and we know what madness is about! But a school of art with
an accomplished littrateur at its head disturbs no one, and is actually
what the world receives as rational, while Ruskin writes for pupils and
Colvin holds forth at Cambridge! Still, quite alone stands Ruskin,
whose writing is art and whose art is unworthy his writing. To him and
his example do we owe the outrage of proffered assistance from the
unscientific -- the meddling of the immodest -- the intrusion of the
garrulous. Art, that for ages has hewn its own history in marble and
written its own comments on canvas, shall it suddenly stand still and
stammer and wait for wisdom from the passer-by? -- for guidance from the
hand that holds neither brush nor chisel? Out upon the shallow conceit!
What greater sarcasm can Mr. Ruskin pass upon himself than that he
preaches to young men what he cannot perform? Why, unsatisfied with his
conscious power, should he choose to become the type of incompetence by
talking for forty years of what he has never done?' And Mr. Whistler
winds up by pronouncing Mr. Ruskin, of whose writings he has perused, I
suspect, an infinitesimally small number of pages, `the Peter Parley of
Painting.' This is very far, as I say, from exhausting the question; but
it is easy to understand the state of mind of a London artist (to go no
further) who skims through the critiques in the local journals. There
is no scurrility in saying that these are for the most part almost
incredibly weak and unskilled; to turn from one of them to a critical
feuilleton in one of the Parisian journals is like passing from a
primitive to a very high civilization. Even, however, if the reviews of
pictures were very much better, the protest of the producer as against
the critic would still have a considerable validity. Few people will
deny that the development of criticism in our day has become inordinate,
disproportionate, and that much of what is written under that exalted
name is very idle and superficial. Mr. Whistler's complaint belongs to
the general question, and I am afraid it will never obtain a serious
hearing, on special and exceptional grounds. The whole artistic
fraternity is in the same boat -- </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr628</locdoc><milestone n=628> the painters, the architects,
the poets, the novelists, the dramatists, the actors, the musicians, the
singers. They have a standing, and in many ways a very just, quarrel
with criticism; but perhaps many of them would admit that, on the whole,
so long as they appeal to a public laden with many cares and a great
variety of interests, it gratifies as much as it displeases them. Art
is one of the necessities of life; but even the critics themselves would
probably not assert that criticism is anything more than an agreeable
luxury -- something like printed talk. If it be said that they claim
too much in calling it `agreeable' to the criticised, it may be added on
their behalf that they probably mean agreeable in the long run."
<p> <i>Nation</i>, February 13,
1879
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=43>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr629</locdoc><milestone n=629>
<p> <i>Walt Whitman</i> (43)
<p> Walt Whitman's <i>Drum-Taps</i>. New York, 1865.
<p>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." <i>Of course</i> 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. <i>Of course</i> 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 <i>ore rotundo</i>. 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 <i>accidents</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr630</locdoc><milestone n=630> may surprise his friends, are in this respect no
exception to general fashion. They are an exception, however, in that
they openly pretend to be something better; and this it is that makes
them melancholy reading. Mr. Whitman is very fond of blowing his own
trumpet, and he has made very explicit claims for his book. "Shut not
your doors," he exclaims at the outset -- "
<p> "Shut not your doors to me, proud libraries,
<p> For that which was lacking among you all, yet needed
<p> most, I bring;
<p> A book I have made for your dear sake, O soldiers,
<p> And for you, O soul of man, and you, love of comrades;
<p> The words of my book nothing, the life of it everything;
<p> A book separate, not link'd with the rest, nor felt by the
<p> intellect;
<p> But you will feel every word, O Libertad! arm'd Libertad!
<p> It shall pass by the intellect to swim the sea, the air,
<p> With joy with you, O soul of man."
<p>These are great pretensions, but it seems to us that the
following are even greater:
<p> "From Paumanok starting, I fly like a bird,
<p> Around and around to soar, to sing the idea of all;
<p> To the north betaking myself, to sing there arctic songs,
<p> To Kanada, 'till I absorb Kanada in myself -- to Michigan
<p> then,
<p> To Wisconsin, Iowa, Minnesota, to sing their songs (they
<p> are inimitable);
<p> Then to Ohio and Indiana, to sing theirs -- to Missouri and
<p> Kansas and Arkansas to sing theirs,
<p> To Tennessee and Kentucky -- to the Carolinas and Georgia,
<p> to sing theirs,
<p> To Texas, and so along up toward California, to roam
<p> accepted everywhere;
<p> To sing first (to the tap of the war-drum, if need be)
<p> The idea of all -- of the western world, one and inseparable,
<p> And then the song of each member of these States."
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr631</locdoc><milestone n=631>
<p>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 <i>chansonnier</i>. 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 <i>is</i> 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
<i>may</i> 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.
<p>But if, on the other hand, it is of a common quality, with
nothing new about it but its manners, the public will judge </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr632</locdoc><milestone n=632> the
writer harshly. The most that can be said of Mr. Whitman's
vaticinations is, that, cast in a fluent and familiar manner, the
average substance of them might escape unchallenged. But we have seen
that Mr. Whitman prides himself especially on the substance -- the life
-- of his poetry. It may be rough, it may be grim, it may be clumsy --
such we take to be the author's argument -- but it is sincere, it is
sublime, it appeals to the soul of man, it is the voice of a people. He
tells us, in the lines quoted, that the words of his book are nothing.
To our perception they are everything, and very little at that. A great
deal of verse that is nothing but words has, during the war, been
sympathetically sighed over and cut out of newspaper corners, because it
has possessed a certain simple melody. But Mr. Whitman's verse, we are
confident, would have failed even of this triumph, for the simple reason
that no triumph, however small, is won but through the exercise of art,
and that this volume is an offense against art. It is not enough to be
grim and rough and careless; common sense is also necessary, for it is
by common sense that we are judged. There exists in even the commonest
minds, in literary matters, a certain precise instinct of conservatism,
which is very shrewd in detecting wanton eccentricities. To this
instinct Mr. Whitman's attitude seems monstrous. It is monstrous
because it pretends to persuade the soul while it slights the intellect;
because it pretends to gratify the feelings while it outrages the taste.
The point is that it does this <i>on theory</i>, wilfully, consciously,
arrogantly. It is the little nursery game of "open your mouth and shut
your eyes." Our hearts are often touched through a compromise with the
artistic sense, but never in direct violation of it. Mr. Whitman sits
down at the outset and counts out the intelligence. This were indeed a
wise precaution on his part if the intelligence were only submissive!
But when she is deliberately insulted, she takes her revenge by simply
standing erect and open-eyed. This is assuredly the best she can do.
And if she could find a voice she would probably address Mr. Whitman as
follows: "You came to woo my sister, the human soul. Instead of giving
me a kick as you approach, you should either greet me courteously, or,
at least, steal in unobserved. But now you have me on your hands. Your
chances are poor. What the human </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr633</locdoc><milestone n=633> heart desires above all is
sincerity, and you do not appear to me sincere. For a lover you talk
entirely too much about yourself. In one place you threaten to absorb
Kanada. In another you call upon the city of New York to incarnate you,
as you have incarnated it. In another you inform us that neither youth
pertains to you nor `delicatesse,' that you are awkward in the parlor,
that you do not dance, and that you have neither bearing, beauty,
knowledge, nor fortune. In another place, by an allusion to your
`little songs,' you seem to identify yourself with the third person of
the Trinity. For a poet who claims to sing `the idea of all,' this is
tolerably egotistical. We look in vain, however, through your book for
a single idea. We find nothing but flashy imitations of ideas. We find
a medley of extravagances and commonplaces. We find art, measure,
grace, sense sneered at on every page, and nothing positive given us in
their stead. To be positive one must have something to say; to be
positive requires reason, labor, and art; and art requires, above all
things, a suppression of one's self, a subordination of one's self to an
idea. This will never do for you, whose plan is to adapt the scheme of
the universe to your own limitations. You cannot entertain and exhibit
ideas; but, as we have seen, you are prepared to incarnate them. It is
for this reason, doubtless, that when once you have planted yourself
squarely before the public, and in view of the great service you have
done to the ideal, have become, as you say, `accepted everywhere,' you
can afford to deal exclusively in words. What would be bald nonsense
and dreary platitudes in any one else becomes sublimity in you. But all
this is a mistake. To become adopted as a national poet, it is not
enough to discard everything in particular and to accept everything in
general, to amass crudity upon crudity, to discharge the undigested
contents of your blotting-book into the lap of the public. You must
respect the public which you address; for it has taste, if you have not.
It delights in the grand, the heroic, and the masculine; but it delights
to see these conceptions cast into worthy form. It is indifferent to
brute sublimity. It will never do for you to thrust your hands into
your pockets and cry out that, as the research of form is an intolerable
bore, the shortest and most economical way for the public to embrace its
idols -- for the nation to realize its </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr634</locdoc><milestone n=634> genius -- is in your own
person. This democratic, liberty-loving, American populace, this stern
and war-tried people, is a great civilizer. It is devoted to
refinement. If it has sustained a monstrous war, and practised human
nature's best in so many ways for the last five years, it is not to put
up with spurious poetry afterwards. To sing aright our battles and our
glories it is not enough to have served in a hospital (however
praiseworthy the task in itself), to be aggressively careless,
inelegant, and ignorant, and to be constantly preoccupied with yourself.
It is not enough to be rude, lugubrious, and grim. You must also be
serious. You must forget yourself in your ideas. Your personal
qualities -- the vigor of your temperament, the manly independence of
your nature, the tenderness of your heart -- these facts are
impertinent. You must be <i>possessed</i>, and you must strive to possess
your possession. If in your striving you break into divine eloquence,
then you are a poet. If the idea which possesses you is the idea of
your country's greatness, then you are a national poet; and not
otherwise."
<p> <i>Nation</i>, November 16,
1865
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=44>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr635</locdoc><milestone n=635>
<p> <i>Adeline Dutton Whitney</i> (44)
<p> <i>The Gayworthys: a Story of Threads and Thrums</i>. By the Author
of <i>Faith Gartney's Girlhood</i>. Boston: Loring, Publisher, 1865.
<p>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.
<p>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.
<p>There are two other pairs of lovers whose much shifting
relations fill up the rest of the book. Miss Joanna Gayworthy </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr636</locdoc><milestone n=636>
is gifted, for her misfortune, with a lively tongue and an impetuous
temper. She is kept for a number of years the subject of one of those
gratuitous misconceptions in which lady novelists delight. To our mind
there is quite as much of the comical as of the pathetic in her
misunderstanding with Gabriel Hartshorne. Both she and her lover seem
bent on fixing the <i>minimum</i> of words with which a courtship can be
conducted, and the utmost possible impertinence of those words. They
fall the natural victims to their own ingenuity. The fault, however, is
more with him than with her. If she was a little too much of a
coquette, he was far too little of an enthusiast. Women have a
prescriptive right to answer indirectly at serious moments; but men
labor under a prescriptive obligation at these moments to speak and act
to the point. We cannot but think that Gabriel obtained his mistress
quite as soon as he had won her.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr637</locdoc><milestone n=637> mother should
have predisposed him against the daughter; but why should he nurse so
unmannerly an intolerance of all her little woman's graces? If Sarah
was really a perfect young lady, she was too good for this grim and
precocious Puritan. He despises her because, being a young lady, she
looks and dresses like one, because she wears "puffed muslin and dainty
boots." Out upon him! What should he care about such things? That this
trait is not manly, we need not affirm; but it is the reverse of
masculine.
<p>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, <i>that</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr638</locdoc><milestone n=638> unite their destinies. A
man seldom falls in love with the young girl who has grown up at his
side; he either likes or dislikes her too much. But when he does, it is
from quite a new stand-point and with a new range of feelings. He does
not woo her in the name of their juvenile <i>escapades</i>. These are pretty
only in after years, when there is no other poetry to be had. And they
are, therefore, quite apart from the purposes of the serious novelist.
<p>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.
<p> <i>North American Review</i>,
October 1865
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=45>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr639</locdoc><milestone n=639>
<p> <i>Constance Fenimore Woolson</i> (45)
<p> MISS WOOLSON
<p>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
<i>Revue des Deux Mondes</i>, 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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr640</locdoc><milestone n=640> life of
American women and the immeasurable world of print, and what makes it so
is the particular quality that this work happens to possess. It
breathes a spirit singularly and essentially conservative -- the sort of
spirit which, but for a special indication pointing the other way, would
in advance seem most to oppose itself to the introduction into the
feminine lot of new and complicating elements. Miss Woolson evidently
thinks that lot sufficiently complicated, with the sensibilities which
even in primitive ages women were acknowledged to possess; fenced in by
the old disabilities and prejudices, they seem to her to have been by
their very nature only too much exposed, and it would never occur to her
to lend her voice to the plea for further exposure -- for a revolution
which should place her sex in the thick of the struggle for power. She
sees it in preference surrounded certainly by plenty of doors and
windows (she has not, I take it, a love of bolts and Oriental shutters),
but distinctly on the private side of that somewhat evasive and
exceedingly shifting line which divides human affairs into the profane
and the sacred. Such is the turn of mind of the author of <i>Rodman the
Keeper</i> and <i>East Angels</i>, and if it has not prevented her from writing
books, from competing for the literary laurel, this is a proof of the
strength of the current which to-day carries both sexes alike to that
mode of expression.
<p>Miss Woolson's first productions were two collections of short
tales, published in 1875 and 1880, and entitled respectively <i>Castle
Nowhere</i> and <i>Rodman the Keeper</i>. 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 <i>voicelessness</i> 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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr641</locdoc><milestone n=641> so unpainted and unsung. She has
attempted to give an impression of this circumstance, among others, and
a sympathy altogether feminine has guided her pen. She loves the whole
region, and no daughter of the land could have handled its peculiarities
more indulgently, or communicated to us more of the sense of close
observation and intimate knowledge. Nevertheless it must be confessed
that the picture, on the whole, is a picture of dreariness -- of
impressions that may have been gathered in the course of lonely
afternoon walks at the end of hot days, when the sunset was wan, on the
edge of rice-fields, dismal swamps, and other brackish inlets. The
author is to be congratulated in so far as such expeditions may have
been the source of her singularly exact familiarity with the "natural
objects" of the region, including the negro of reality. She knows every
plant and flower, every vague odour and sound, the song and flight of
every bird, every tint of the sky and murmur of the forest, and she has
noted scientifically the dialect of the freedmen. It is not too much to
say that the negroes in <i>Rodman the Keeper</i> and in <i>East Angels</i> are a
careful philological study, and that if Miss Woolson preceded Uncle
Remus by a considerable interval, she may have the credit of the
initiative -- of having been the first to take their words straight from
their lips.
<p>No doubt that if in <i>East Angels</i>, 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 <i>East Angels</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr642</locdoc><milestone n=642> weaker in <i>Anne</i>, which
was published in 1882, that <i>Anne</i> strikes me as the least happily
composed of the author's works? The early chapters are charming and
full of promise, but the story wanders away from them, and the pledge is
not taken up. The reader has built great hopes upon Tita, but Tita
vanishes into the vague, after putting him out of countenance by an
infant marriage -- an accident in regard to which, on the whole,
throughout her stories, Miss Woolson shows perhaps an excessive
indulgence. She likes the unmarried, as I have mentioned, but she likes
marriages even better, and also sometimes hurries them forward in
advance of the reader's exaction. The only complaint it would occur to
me to make of <i>East Angels</i> is that Garda Thorne, whom we cannot think
of as anything but a little girl, discounts the projects we have formed
for her by marrying twice; and somehow the case is not bettered by the
fact that nothing is more natural than that she should marry twice,
unless it be that she should marry three times. We have perceived her,
after all, from the first, to be peculiarly adapted to a succession of
pretty widowhoods.
<p><i>For the Major</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr643</locdoc><milestone n=643>
really been marked out by Providence for the character, and who cannot
explain on any comfortable hypothesis her relations with the mysterious
Bohemian. Miss Woolson's women in general are capable of these
refinements of devotion and exaltations of conscience, and she has a
singular talent for making our sympathies go with them. The conception
of Madam Carroll is highly ingenious and original, and the small
stippled portrait has a real fascination. It is the first time that a
woman has been represented as painting her face, dyeing her hair, and
"dressing young," out of tenderness for another: the effort usually has
its source in tenderness for herself. But Miss Woolson has done nothing
of a neater execution than this fanciful figure of the little ringleted,
white-frocked, falsely juvenile lady, who has the toilet-table of an
actress and the conscience of a Puritan.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr644</locdoc><milestone n=644> whether for the most part we are either so
Anglican or so long-descended as in Miss Woolson's pages we strike
ourselves as being, but it is certain that as we read we protest but
little against the soft impeachment. She represents us at least as we
should like to be, and she does so with such discretion and taste that
we have no fear of incurring ridicule by assent. She has a high sense
of the picturesque; she cannot get on without a social atmosphere.
Once, I think, she has looked for these things in the wrong place -- at
the country boarding-house denominated Caryl's, in <i>Anne</i>, where there
must have been flies and grease in the dining-room, and the ladies must
have been overdressed; but as a general thing her quest is remarkably
happy. She stays at home, and yet gives us a sense of being "abroad";
she has a remarkable faculty of making the new world seem ancient. She
succeeds in representing Far Edgerly, the mountain village in <i>For the
Major</i>, as bathed in the precious medium I speak of. Where is it meant
to be, and where was the place that gave her the pattern of it? We
gather vaguely, though there are no negroes, that it is in the south;
but this, after all, is a tolerably indefinite part of the United
States. It is somewhere in the midst of forests, and yet it has as many
idiosyncrasies as Mrs. Gaskell's <i>Cranford</i>, with added possibilities of
the pathetic and the tragic. What new town is so composite? What
composite town is so new? Miss Woolson anticipates these questions;
that is she prevents us from asking them: we swallow Far Edgerly whole,
or say at most, with a sigh, that if it couldn't have been like that it
certainly ought to have been.
<p>It is, however, in <i>East Angels</i> 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 <i>East Angels</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr645</locdoc><milestone n=645> service of her
story, draped the bare spots of the scene with it, and hung it there
half as a curtain and half as a background. <i>East Angels</i> is a
performance which does Miss Woolson the highest honour, and if her
talent is capable, in another novel, of making an advance equal to that
represented by this work in relation to its predecessors, she will have
made a substantial contribution to our new literature of fiction. Long,
comprehensive, copious, still more elaborate than her other
elaborations, <i>East Angels</i> presents the interest of a large and well-
founded scheme. The result is not flawless at every point, but the
undertaking is of a fine, high kind, and, for the most part, the effect
produced is thoroughly worthy of it. The author has, in other words,
proposed to give us the complete natural history, as it were, of a group
of persons collected, in a complicated relationship, in a little winter-
city on a southern shore, and she has expended on her subject stores of
just observation and an infinite deal of the true historical spirit.
How much of this spirit and of artistic feeling there is in the book,
only an attentive perusal will reveal. The central situation is a very
interesting one, and is triumphantly treated, but I confess that what is
most substantial to me in the book is the writer's general conception of
her task, her general attitude of watching life, waiting upon it and
trying to catch it in the fact. I know not what theories she may hold
in relation to all this business, to what camp or league she may belong;
my impression indeed would be that she is perfectly free -- that she
considers that though camps and leagues may be useful organisations for
looking for the truth, it is not in their own bosom that it is usually
to be found. However this may be, it is striking that, artistically,
she has had a fruitful instinct in seeing the novel as a picture of the
actual, of the characteristic -- a study of human types and passions, of
the evolution of personal relations. In <i>East Angels</i> she has gone much
farther in this direction than in either of her other novels.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr646</locdoc><milestone n=646> fro a good deal, to New York
and to Europe, but they have a certain shipwrecked air, as of extreme
dependence on each other, though surrounded with every convenience. The
other fault is that the famous "tender sentiment" usurps among them a
place even greater perhaps than that which it holds in life, great as
the latter very admittedly is. I spoke just now of their complicated
relationships, but the complications are almost exclusively the
complications of love. Our impression is of sky and sand -- the sky of
azure, the sand of silver -- and between them, conspicuous, immense,
against the low horizon, the question of engagement and marriage. I
must add that I do not mean to imply that this question is not, in the
very nature of things, at any time and in any place, immense, or that in
a novel it should be expected to lose its magnitude. I take it indeed
that on such a simple shore as Miss Woolson has described, love (with
the passions that flow from it), is almost inevitably the subject, and
that the perspective is not really false. It is not that the people are
represented as hanging together by that cord to an abnormal degree, but
that, there being few accessories and circumstances, there is no tangle
and overgrowth to disguise the effect. It is a question of effect, but
it is characteristic of the feminine, as distinguished from the
masculine hand, that in any portrait of a corner of human affairs the
particular effect produced in <i>East Angels</i>, that of what we used to
call the love-story, will be the dominant one. The love-story is a
composition in which the elements are distributed in a particular
proportion, and every tale which contains a great deal of love has not
necessarily a title to the name. That title depends not upon how much
love there may be, but upon how little of other things. In novels by
men other things are there to a greater or less degree, and I therefore
doubt whether a man may be said ever to have produced a work exactly
belonging to the class in question. In men's novels, even of the
simplest strain, there are still other references and other
explanations; in women's, when they are of the category to which I
allude, there are none but that one. And there is certainly much to be
said for it.
<p>In <i>East Angels</i> 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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr647</locdoc><milestone n=647> and
repeatedly, to a husband whose behaviour may as distinctly be held to
have absolved her. The problem was a very interesting one, and worthy
to challenge a superior talent -- that of making real and natural a
transcendent, exceptional act, representing a case in which the sense of
duty is raised to exaltation. What makes Margaret Harold's behaviour
exceptional and transcendent is that, in order to render the barrier
between herself and the man who loves her, and whom she loves,
absolutely insurmountable, she does her best to bring about his
marriage, endeavours to put another woman into the frame of mind to
respond to him in the event (possible, as she is a woman whom he has
once appeared to love) of his attempting to console himself for a bitter
failure. The care, the ingenuity, the precautions the author has
exhibited, to make us accept Mrs. Harold in her integrity, are
perceptible on every page, and they leave us finally no alternative but
to accept her; she remains exalted, but she remains at the same time
thoroughly sound. For it is not a simple question of cleverness of
detail, but a question of the larger sort of imagination, and Margaret
Harold would have halted considerably if her creator had not taken the
supreme precaution of all, and conceived her from the germ as capable of
a certain heroism -- of clinging at the cost of a grave personal loss to
an idea which she believes to be a high one, and taking such a fancy to
it that she endeavours to paint it, by a refinement of magnanimity, with
still richer hues. She is a picture, not of a woman indulging in a
great spasmodic flight or moral <i>tour de force</i>, but of a nature bent
upon looking at life from a high point of view, an attitude in which
there is nothing abnormal, and which the author illustrates, as it were,
by a test case. She has drawn Margaret with so close and firm and
living a line that she seems to put us in the quandary, if we repudiate
her, of denying that a woman <i>may</i> look at life from a high point of
view. She seems to say to us: "Are there distinguished natures, or are
there not? Very well, if there are, that's what they can do -- they can
try and provide for the happiness of others (when they adore them) even
to their own injury." And we feel that we wish to be the first to agree
that there <i>are</i> distinguished natures.
<p>Garda Thorne is the next best thing in the book to Margaret,
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr648</locdoc><milestone n=648> and she is indeed equally good in this, that she is conceived
with an equal clearness. But Margaret produces her impression upon us
by moving before us and doing certain things, whereas Garda is more
explained, or rather she explains herself more, tells us more about
herself. She says somewhere, or some one says of her, that she doesn't
narrate, but in fact she does narrate a good deal, for the purpose of
making the reader understand her. This the reader does, very
constantly, and Garda is a brilliant success. I must not, however,
touch upon the different parts of <i>East Angels</i>, because in a work of so
much patience and conscience a single example carries us too far. I
will only add that in three places in especial the author has been so
well inspired as to give a definite pledge of high accomplishment in the
future. One of these salient passages is the description of the closing
days of Mrs. Thorne, the little starved yet ardent daughter of the
Puritans, who has been condemned to spend her life in the land of the
relaxed, and who, before she dies, pours out her accumulations of
bitterness -- relieves herself in a passionate confession of everything
she has suffered and missed, of how she has hated the very skies and
fragrances of Florida, even when, as a consistent Christian, thankful
for every mercy, she has pretended most to appreciate them. Mrs. Thorne
is the pathetic, tragic form of the type of which Mrs. Stowe's Miss
Ophelia was the comic. In almost all of Miss Woolson's stories the New
England woman is represented as regretting the wholesome austerities of
the region of her birth. She reverts to them, in solemn hours, even
when, like Mrs. Thorne, she may appear for a time to have been converted
to mild winters. Remarkably fine is the account of the expedition
undertaken by Margaret Harold and Evert Winthrop to look for Lanse in
the forest, when they believe him, or his wife thinks there may be
reason to believe him, to have been lost and overtaken by a storm. The
picture of their paddling the boat by torchlight into the reaches of the
river, more or less smothered in the pestilent jungle, with the personal
drama, in the unnatural place, reaching an acute stage between them --
this whole episode is in a high degree vivid, strange, and powerful.
Lastly, Miss Woolson has risen altogether to the occasion in the scene
in which Margaret "has it out," as it were, with Evert </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr649</locdoc><milestone n=649>
Winthrop, parts from him and, leaving him baffled and unsurpassably
sore, gives him the measure of her determination to accept the necessity
of her fate. These three episodes are not alike, yet they have, in the
high finish of Miss Woolson's treatment of them, a family resemblance.
Moreover, they all have the stamp which I spoke of at first -- the stamp
of the author's conservative feeling, the implication that for her the
life of a woman is essentially an affair of private relations.
<p> <i>Harper's Weekly</i>, February 12, 1887
<p> Reprinted in <i>Partial Portraits</i>, 1888
</div0><div0 type=chapter n=46>
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr651</locdoc><milestone n=651>
<p> <i>American Letters</i> (46)
<p> from <i>Literature</i>, March 26 -- July 9, 1898
<p> THE QUESTION OF THE OPPORTUNITIES
<p> March 26, 1898
<p>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 <i> priori</i>. 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 <i>that</i>; 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr652</locdoc><milestone n=652> newspapered democracy,
is the largest and their pressure the greatest we see; their
characteristics are magnified and multiplied. From these
characteristics no intelligent forecast of the part played in the
community in question by the printed and circulated page will suffer its
attention too widely to wander.
<p>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.
<p>To overflow with the same confidence to others is indeed
perhaps to expose ourselves to hearing it declared improbable </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr653</locdoc><milestone n=653>
that we have been called upon to supply it, at any rate, for literature
-- the moral mainly latent in literature for the million, or rather for
the fast-arriving billion, finding here inevitably a tempting
application. But is not our instant rejoinder to that, as inevitably,
that such an application is precipitate and premature? Whether, in the
conditions we consider, the supply shall achieve sufficient vitality and
distinction really to be sure of itself as literature, and to
communicate the certitude, is the very thing we watch and wait to
discover. If the retort to that remark be in turn that all this depends
on what we may take it into our heads to <i>call</i> literature, we work
round to a ground of easy assent. It truly does much depend on that.
But that, in its order, depends on new light -- on the new light struck
out by the material itself, the distinguishable symptoms of which are
the justification for what I have called the critic's happy release from
the cramped posture of foregone conclusions and narrow rules. There
will be no real amusement if we are positively prepared to be stupid.
It is assuredly true that literature for the billion will not be
literature as we have hitherto known it at its best. But if the billion
give the pitch of production and circulation, they do something else
besides; they hang before us a wide picture of opportunities --
opportunities that would be opportunities still even if, reduced to the
<i>minimum</i>, they should be only those offered by the vastness of the
implied habitat and the complexity of the implied history. It is
impossible not to entertain with patience and curiosity the presumption
that life so colossal must break into expression at points of
proportionate frequency. These places, these moments will be the
chances.
<p>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
<i>kind</i> 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,
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr654</locdoc><milestone n=654> we shall immediately to that tune be rewarded for our faith.
It is, in other words, just from the very force of the conditions making
for reaction in spots and phases that the liveliest appeal of future
American production may spring -- reaction, I mean, against the
grossness of any view, any taste or tone, in danger of becoming so
extravagantly general as to efface the really interesting thing, the
traceability of the individual. Then, for all we know, we may get
individual publics positively more sifted and evolved than anywhere
else, shoals of fish rising to more delicate bait. That is a
possibility that makes meanwhile for good humour, though I must hasten
to add that it by no means exhausts the favourable list. We know what
the list actually shows or what, in the past, it has mainly shown -- New
England quite predominantly, almost exclusively, the literary voice and
dealing with little else than material supplied by herself. I have just
been reading two new books that mark strikingly how the Puritan culture
both used and exhausted its opportunity, how its place knows it no
longer with any approach to the same intensity. Mrs. Fields' "Life and
Letters of Harriet Beecher Stowe" and Mr. John Jay Chapman's acute and
admirable "Emerson and Other Essays" (the most penetrating study, as
regards his main subject, to my sense, of which that subject has been
made the occasion) appear to refer to a past already left long behind,
and are each, moreover, on this ground and on others, well worth
returning to. The American world of to-day is a world of combinations
and proportions different from those amid which Emerson and Mrs. Stowe
could reach right and left far enough to fill it.
<p>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) </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr655</locdoc><milestone n=655> give me a pretext for saying that,
not inexplicably perhaps, a novelist interested in the general outlook
of his trade may find the sharpest appeal of all in the idea of the
chances in reserve for the work of the imagination in particular -- the
vision of the distinguishable poetry of things, whether expressed in
such verse or (rarer phenomenon) in such prose as really does arrive at
expression. I cannot but think that the American novel has in a
special, far-reaching direction to sail much closer to the wind.
"Business" plays a part in the United States that other interests
dispute much less showily than they sometimes dispute it in the life of
European countries; in consequence of which the typical American figure
is above all that "business man" whom the novelist and the dramatist
have scarce yet seriously touched, whose song has still to be sung and
his picture still to be painted. He is often an obscure, but not less
often an epic, hero, seamed all over with the wounds of the market and
the dangers of the field, launched into action and passion by the
immensity and complexity of the general struggle, a boundless ferocity
of battle -- driven above all by the extraordinary, the unique relation
in which he for the most part stands to the life of his lawful, his
immitigable womankind, the wives and daughters who float, who splash on
the surface and ride the waves, his terrific link with civilization, his
social substitutes and representatives, while, like a diver for
shipwrecked treasure, he gasps in the depths and breathes through an
air-tube.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr656</locdoc><milestone n=656> had -- "L'Argent,"
of Emile Zola -- is precisely a warning of the difference between false
and true initiation. The subject there, though so richly imagined, is
all too mechanically, if prodigiously, "got up." Meanwhile, accordingly,
the American "business man" remains, thanks to the length and strength
of the wires that move him, <i>the</i> magnificent theme <i>en disponibilit</i>.
The romance of fact, indeed, has touched him in a way that quite puts to
shame the romance of fiction. It gives his measure for purposes of art
that it was he, essentially, who embarked in the great war of 1861 --
64, and who, carrying it on in the North to a triumphant conclusion,
went back, since business was his standpoint, to his very "own" with an
undimmed capacity to mind it. When, in imagination, you give the type,
as it exists to-day, the benefit of its great double lustre -- that of
these recorded antecedents and that of its preoccupied, systematic and
magnanimous abasement before the other sex -- you will easily feel your
sense of what may be done with its overflow.
<p>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 <i>their</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr657</locdoc><milestone n=657> process surely more than justify that sense of
sport, in this direction, that I have spoken of as the privilege of the
vigilant critic.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr657</locdoc><milestone n=657> April 9, 1898
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr658</locdoc><milestone n=658> three centuries Europe has been crossing the ocean
Westward. We may yet therefore find it sufficiently curious to see the
Western imagination, so planted, come back. This imagination will find
for a long time, to my sense -- it will find doubtless always -- its
most interesting business in staying where it has grown; but if there is
to be a great deal of it, it must obviously follow the fashion of other
matters, seek all adventures and take all chances. Fiction as yet in
the United States strikes me, none the less, as most curious when most
confined and most local; this is so much the case that when it is even
abjectly passive to surrounding conditions I find it capable of yielding
an interest that almost makes me dread undue enlargement. There are
moments when we are tempted to say that there is nothing like saturation
-- to pronounce it a safer thing than talent. I find myself rejoicing,
for example, in Mr. Hamlin Garland, a case of saturation so precious as
to have almost the value of genius. There are moods in which we seem to
see that the painter, of whatever sort, is most for us when he is most,
so to speak, the soaked sponge of his air and time; and of Mr. Hamlin
Garland -- as to whom I hasten to parenthesize that there are many other
things to remember, things for which I almost impatiently await the
first occasion -- I express his price, to my own taste, with all honour
if I call him the soaked sponge of Wisconsin. Saturation and talent
are, of course, compatible, talent being really but one's own sense and
use of one's saturation; but we must come round again to that. The
point I for the moment make is simply that in the American air I am
nervous, in general, lest talent should wish to "sail for Europe." Let
me now, indeed, recognize that it by no means inveterately does. Even
so great and active a faculty as that of the author of "The Rise of
Silas Lapham" has suffered him to remain, after all, very prosperously
at home. On the day Miss Mary Wilkins should "sail" I would positively
have detectives versed in the practice of extradition posted at
Liverpool.
<p>Mrs. Atherton, however, <i>has</i> 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, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr659</locdoc><milestone n=659> of that last ineptitude of the
helpless commentator -- a quarrel with the artist's subject, so always
<i>his</i> affair, and not, thank goodness, the critic's -- when I say that
she has passed beside her chance. A man of the trade may perhaps be
excused for the habit, in reading a novel, of thinking of what, in the
conditions, <i>he</i> would have done. I hold, indeed, that there is,
without some such attitude, no real acceptance on the critic's part of
the author's ground and standpoint. It is no such dishonour, after all,
for an artist's problem to be rehandled mentally by a brother. I
promised myself at the outset of Mrs. Atherton's volume the liveliest
moments, foresaw the drama of the confrontation, in all original good
faith, of incompatibles -- the habit on the part of the Californian girl
of the Californian view of the "relation of the sexes" and the habit on
the part of the young Englishman foredoomed to political life, a peerage
and a hundred other grand things, of a different attitude altogether.
The relation of the sexes is, to the Californian mind, especially when
tinged, as in the case of Mrs. Atherton's heroine, with a Southern
influence, that the husband -- for we are mainly reduced to husbands --
shall button his wife's boots and kiss her instep, these tributes being
in fact but the by-play of his general prostration. The early promise
in "American Wives and English Husbands" is the greater that the author
gives the gleam of something like detached spectatorship, of really
seeing the situation she appears to desire to evoke. But, in fact, as
it strikes me, she not only fails to see it, but leaves us wondering
what she has supposed herself to see instead. The conflict of
character, of tradition, in which the reader has expected the drama to
reside, is reduced to proportions so insignificant that we never catch
it in the act. It consists wholly in the momentary and quite
unpresented feeling, on the part of the American wife, domiciled, in
much splendour, in England, that she would like to see California again,
followed almost immediately by the conviction that after all she would
not. She has a young Californian kinsman who is fond of her and who,
coming to stay with her in her grandeur, wants her to go back with him;
but the intervention of this personage -- into which the reader
immediately begins to drop the psychological plummet -- promptly fails
of interest through want, as the playwrights </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr660</locdoc><milestone n=660> say, of
preparation. Nothing has been given us to see him work on, none of the
dramatic essence of the matter, the opposition, from husband to wife and
<i>vice versa</i>, of the famous relation. The relation, after all, seems,
in the case, simple -- as, I hasten to add, it may in general veritably
become, I think, to a degree eventually disconcerting perhaps to
international fiction. On that day the story-teller will frankly find
his liveliest effect in showing not how much, but how little, the
"American wife" has to get rid of for remote adjustments. There,
possibly, is the real psychological well.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr660</locdoc><milestone n=660> April 16, 1898
<p>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 <i>is</i> "in," and assuredly no man ever pretended less to write. But
somehow he expresses his own figure, and, for the rest, association
helps.
<p>It is doubtless association that <i>makes</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr661</locdoc><milestone n=661> ashamed if I were not,
and I admit that the sentiment that has enabled me to enjoy these scant
pages -- as hard and dry as sand-paper -- is one in support of which I
can scarcely give chapter and verse. Great is the name -- that is all
one can say -- when so great a bareness practically blooms. These few
bald little letters have a ray of the hard limpidity of the writer's
strong and simple Autobiography -- they have nothing more; yet for those
of a particular generation -- not the latest -- they can still
transport, even if merely by reminding us not so much of what is
required as of what is left out to make a man of action. As addressed
to one of his most intimate friends, Mr. E. B. Washburne, at one time
his Secretary of State, at another his Minister to France -- whose name,
oddly enough, Grant always curtailed of what he appeared to think the
nonsense of its final "e" -- they breathe an austerity in attachment
that helps, with various other singular signs, to make them seem
scarcely of our time. The old American note sounds in them, the sense
of the "hard" life and the plain speech. "Some men are only made by
their staff appointments, . . . while others give respectability to the
position." ". . . Friends must not think hard of me for holding on to
Galena as my home." He always held on, as to expression, to Galena.
There is scarcely a "shall" or a "should" in the whole little volume.
The later letters are written during his great tour of the nations after
he had ceased to be President. "The fact is, however, that I have seen
nothing to make me regret that I am an American." "As Mr. Young, who is
travelling with me, gives accurate and detailed accounts of every place
we visit . . . nothing of this sort is necessary from me." Nothing of
this sort could encumber, in any direction, his correspondence; but the
tone has something of the quality that, when we meet its equivalent in
an old, dry portrait or even an old angular piece of furniture, affects
the historic, not to say the aesthetic, sense.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr662</locdoc><milestone n=662> were addressed was a young
labouring man, employed in rough railway work, whom Whitman met by
accident -- the account of the meeting, in his correspondent's own
words, is the most charming passage in the volume -- and constituted for
the rest of life a subject of a friendship of the regular "eternal," the
legendary sort. The little book appeals, I daresay, mainly to the
Whitmanite already made, but I should be surprised if it has actually
failed of power to make a few more. I mean by the Whitmanite those for
whom the author of "Leaves of Grass" is, with all his rags and tatters,
an upright figure, a <i>successful</i> original. It has in a singular way
something of the same relation to poetry that may be made out in the
luckiest -- few, but fine -- of the writer's other pages; I call the way
singular because it squeezes through the narrowest, humblest gate of
prose.
<p>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.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr663</locdoc><milestone n=663>
<p>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.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr663</locdoc><milestone n=663> April 23, 1898
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr664</locdoc><milestone n=664> best a very fierce affair. He may be said neither to wear
it easily nor to enjoin any such wearing on any one else. Particularly
interesting is the spirit of his plea at a time when the infatuated
peoples in general, under the pressure of nearer and nearer
neighbourhood, show a tendency to relinquish the mere theory of
patriotism in favour of -- as on the whole more convenient -- the mere
practice. It is not the practice, but the theory that is violent, or
that, at any rate, may easily carry that air in an age when so much of
the ingenuity of the world goes to multiplying contact and
communication, to reducing separation and distance, to promoting, in
short, an inter-penetration that would have been the wonder of our
fathers, as the comparative inefficiency of our devices will probably be
the wonder of our sons. We may have been great fools to develop the
post office, to invent the newspaper and the railway; but the harm is
done -- it will be our children who will see it; we have created a
Frankenstein monster at whom our simplicity can only gape. Mr.
Roosevelt leaves us gaping -- deserts us as an adviser when we most need
him. The best he can do for us is to turn us out, for our course, with
a pair of smart, patent blinders.
<p>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 <i>shall</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr665</locdoc><milestone n=665> newspaper man who
lies in any form, should be made to feel that he is an object of scorn
for all honest men." That is luminous; but, none the less, "an educated
man must not go into politics as such; he must go in simply as an
American, . . . or he will be upset by some other American with no
education at all. . . ." A better way perhaps than to barbarize the
upset -- already, surely, sufficiently unfortunate -- would be to
civilize the upsetter.
<p>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.
<p>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
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr666</locdoc><milestone n=666> conditions, and that history has been voluminously told.
Professor Dunning's business is the history of some of the conditions -
- the constitutional, legal, doctrinal -- that had, with no less
asperity, to adjust themselves to the war. It was waged on a basis of
law, which, however, had to be supplied step by step as the whole great
field grew greater, and in which the various "bulwarks of our liberties"
went, as was inevitable, through extraordinary adventures.
<p>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.
<p>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
<i>minimum</i> of magic. The <i>maximum</i> of magic is style, and of </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr667</locdoc><milestone n=667>
style Mr. Wyckoff has not a solitary ray. He is only one of those happy
adventurers -- always to be so rebuked in advance and so rewarded
afterwards -- who have it in them to scramble through simply by hanging
on. Nine out of ten of them perish miserably by the way -- all the more
honour, therefore, to the tenth who arrives. What Mr. Wyckoff had to
hang on to was a capital chance.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr667</locdoc><milestone n=667> April 30, 1898
<p>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. <i>Are</i> 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 <i>chefs
d'cole</i>. 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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr668</locdoc><milestone n=668> advent is summarily explained to children, had
been found in the heart of a cabbage. This explains why one of a
writer's volumes may circulate largely and the next not at all. There
is no vision of a connexion. In France, on the contrary, the book has a
human parentage, and this humanity remains a conspicuous part of the
matter. Is the parentage, in the United States, taken in the same
degree into account, or does the cabbage-origin, as I may for
convenience call it, also there predominate? We must travel a few
stages more for evidence on this point, and in the meantime must stay
our curiosity with such aids as we happen to meet. Grouping them is,
yet awhile, not easy; grouping them, at least, in relation to each
other.
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr669</locdoc><milestone n=669> or of somebody strikes us, therefore, as
mere slashing at the wall. The movements are all in the air, and blood
is never drawn. There could be no better illustration than his first
short chapter of his reversal of the secure method. It is both allusive
and scathing, but so much more scathing than constructive that we feel
this not to be the way to build up the victim. The victim must be erect
and solid -- must be set upon his feet before he can be knocked down.
The Celebrity is down from the first -- we look straight over him. He
has been exposed too young and never recovers.
<p>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
<i>paterfamilias</i>. 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.
<p>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
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr670</locdoc><milestone n=670> to deflect. This is not the wonder of what others may have
learned from him, but the question of what he has learned from himself.
He has been his own school and his own pupil -- that, in short,
simplifies the question. Since his literary fortune, nearly thirty
years ago, with "The Luck of Roaring Camp," sprang into being full-armed
and full-blown, he has accepted it as that moment made it and bent his
back to it with a docility that is, to my sense, one of the most
touching things in all American literary annals. Removed, early in his
career, from all sound, all refreshing and fertilizing plash, of the
original fount of inspiration, he has, nevertheless, continued to draw
water there and to fill his pitcher to the brim. He has stretched a
long arm across seas and continents; there was never a more striking
image -- one could almost pencil it -- of the act of keeping "in touch."
<p>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.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr670</locdoc><milestone n=670> May 7, 1898
<p>The sudden state of war confounds larger calculations than
those I am here concerned with; I need, therefore, </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr671</locdoc><milestone n=671> I suppose,
not be ashamed to show my small scheme as instantly affected. Whether
or no there be a prospect of a commensurate outburst -- after time given
-- of war literature, it is interesting to recognize to-day on the
printed page the impulse felt during the long pressure of the early
sixties, especially in a case of which the echo reaches us for the first
time. I had been meaning to keep for some congruous association my
allusion to the small volume of letters addressed between the end of '62
and the summer of '64 by Walt Whitman to his mother, and lately
published by Dr. R. M. Bucke, to whom the writer's reputation has
already been happily indebted. But I yield on the spot to the occasion
-- this interesting and touching collection is so relevant to the sound
of cannon. It is at the same time -- thus resembling, or rather, for
the finer air of truth, exceeding, "La Dbcle" of Zola -- not such a
document as the recruiting-officer, at the beginning of a campaign,
would rejoice to see in many hands.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr672</locdoc><milestone n=672>
head. It holds up, for us, to-day, its jagged morsel of spotted
looking-glass to the innumerable nameless of the troublous years, the
poor and obscure, the suffering and sacrifice of the American people.
The good Walt, without unhappy verbiage or luckless barbarism here,
sounds a note of native feeling, pity and horror and helplessness, that
is like the wail of a mother for her mangled young; and in so far the
little volume may doubtless take its place on the much-mixed shelf of
the literature of patriotism. But let it, none the less, not be too
much presumed upon to fire the blood; it will live its life not
unworthily, too, in failing to assume that extreme responsibility.
<p>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 <i>him</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr673</locdoc><milestone n=673> premium upon
almost every unreality. Here is Mr. Eggleston, all grimed and scarred,
coated with blood and dust, and yet contenting himself with a series of
small <i>berquinades</i> that make the grimmest things rosy and vague -- make
them seem to reach us at third and fourth hand.
<p>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.
<p>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.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr674</locdoc><milestone n=674> May 21, 1898
<p>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.
<p>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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr675</locdoc><milestone n=675> numbers was on the scale of
a great pestilence; yet it had moved, from the first, under the
attraction of a local habitation and a name, and the mere speck in the
vastness -- still charming when seen -- which now bears that name has
probably no other association so interesting as that of having
contributed in this degree to something like a world-migration. For
though Schoharie proved a deep delusion, the floodgates had been opened,
and the incident was the beginning of a succession of waves through
which Pennsylvania -- New York, in the sequel, being rigidly boycotted -
- profited to the extent of barely escaping complete Germanization.
That particular circumstance suggests, I think, the main interest of the
"Story of the Palatines," which, otherwise, in spite of the charm of the
author's singularly unsophisticated manner, almost limits itself to the
usual woful reminder of all the dreary conditions, the obscure,
undiscriminated, multitudinous life and death it takes to make even the
smallest quantity of rather dull presentable history. So many miserable
Teutons, so many brave generations and so many ugly names -- very
interesting Mr. Cobb's few notes on the Americanization of certain of
these last -- only that the curious reader of the next century, with his
wanton daily need of "impressions," shall feel that he scarcely detaches
any; any, at least, save the great and general one, the fabulous
capacity for absorption and assimilation on the part of the primal
English stock. It is the same old story -- that we are a little prouder
of the stock in question, I think, on each fresh occasion of seeing, in
this way, that, taking so much -- and there was a fearful numerosity in
this contingent -- it could yet, wherever it took, give so much more.
It began to take the "Palatines" -- marvellous fact -- near 200 years
ago, and has been taking them regularly ever since, but only to grind
them and their type and their tongue, their Zollicoffers and Dochstaters
and Hartranfts, in its great inexorable mill.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr676</locdoc><milestone n=676> will be aided thereto -- I cannot express
otherwise my impression of Mr. Dole's outlook, and indeed his philosophy
-- by an absence, within them, of anything that shall prevent. There
will be no more badness in the world, assuredly, when every one is good,
and I gather from these pages that there are persons so happily
constituted as to be struck with the manner in which, practically, every
one is becoming so. The interest of ingenuous volumes proves not always
the exact interest they may have proposed to excite; and so it is that
the point I seem here chiefly to see established is that an extreme
earnestness is not necessarily the guarantee of a firm sense of the
real. Mr. Dole's earnestness, indeed, is compatible, like that of many
other sermonizers, with an undue love, both for retreat and for advance,
of the figure and the metaphor; but the displacement of a certain amount
of moral vulgarity is, no doubt, involved and, if we could measure such
things, effected by the very temper of his plea. Only, the temper seems
too much of the sort that is too frightened by the passions and
perversities of men really to look them in the face. There are one or
two of these that the author would seem even to have a scruple about
mentioning. Can there be any effectual disposing of them as Mr. Dole
sees them disposed of without our becoming a little clearer as to what
they are? Meanwhile, alas -- before the "coming people" have come -- we
make the most of the leisure left us to rejoice, with the aid of the
newspapers, at riddled and burning ships that go gloriously down "with
every soul on board." Mr. Dole's exhortations address themselves really
to those already so good that they scarce need to be better.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr677</locdoc><milestone n=677> almost any stir of the air. The
opportunity for a critic of authority in the field I speak of strikes me
as, at the present hour, on the whole, so much one of the most dazzling
in the world that there is no precaution in favour of his advent that it
is not positively criminal to neglect. The signs of his presence are as
yet so incommensurate with the need of him that the spectacle is, among
the peoples, almost a thing by itself. And let no one, looking at our
literature with an interrogative eye, say that his work is not cut out
for him: if it be a question of subject he has surely the largest he
need desire. Such a public is in itself a subject -- the greatest mass
of consumers, I conjecture, that, since the beginning of time, have been
left, in their consumption, so gregariously, as it were, alone. Mr.
Hapgood may have the stuff of a shepherd; his interests -- Lord
Rosebery, Mr. John Morley, Mr. Arthur Balfour, Stendhal, the American
art critics, the American cosmopolites -- are various and honourable; he
is serious, moreover -- too serious -- and informed and urbane; but he
strikes me, as yet, rather as feeling for his perceptions -- hunting for
his intelligence. But he is doubtless on the way to find these things,
and there are gleams in his predominant confusion which suggest that
they may prove excellent.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr677</locdoc><milestone n=677> May 28, 1898
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr678</locdoc><milestone n=678> and mysteries, for
instance, offered us in Mr. Robert W. Chambers' "Lorraine, a Romance," a
work as to which I must promptly make the grateful acknowledgment that
it has set me a-thinking. Yet I scarce know how to express my thoughts
without appearing to travel far from Mr. Chambers. By what odd
arrangement of the mind does it come to pass that a writer may have such
remarkable energy and yet so little artistic sincerity? -- that is the
desert of speculation into which the author of "Lorraine" drives me
forth to wander. How can he have cared enough for an epic theme -- or
call it even a mere brave, bustling business -- to plunge into it up to
his neck and with a grand air of gallantry and waving of banners, and
yet not have cared enough to see it in some other light than limelight,
stage-light and blue and red fire? He writes about the outbreak of the
Franco-Prussian war, the events culminating at Sedan, with the liveliest
rattling assurance, a mastery of military detail and a pleasant, showy,
general all-knowingness for which I have nothing but admiration. But
his puppets and his incidents, their movements and concussions, their
adventures, complications, emotions, solutions belong wholly to the
realm of elaborately "produced" operetta, the world of wonders in which
we are supposed to take it kindly that a war correspondent of a New York
newspaper, a brother-in-arms of the famous "Archibald Grahame" --
operating before our eyes, with all his signs and symptoms, in the
interest of another journal -- shall lead a fantastic war-dance round
the remarkable person of a daughter of Napoleon III. (himself amazingly
introduced to us), "Princess Imperial" by a first marriage, who becomes,
on the last page, his bonny bride, and sits beside him with "fathomless
blue eyes dreaming in the sunlight . . . of her Province of Lorraine, of
the Honour of France, of the Justice of God." It is one of Mr. Chambers'
happy touches that this young lady, costumed as for a music-hall and
appropriated and brought up in secret by an irreconcilable Legitimist
nobleman, has received, to make confusion worse confounded, the same
name as the land of tribulation in which he, for the most part, sets up
his footlights. All this is, doubtless, of an inexpensiveness past
praying for; and yet, in spite of it, there is a question that haunts
the critic's mind. Whence, in the depths of things, does it </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr679</locdoc><milestone n=679>
proceed that so much real initiation as, to a profane sense, the
writer's swinging pace and descriptive ease seem to imply, <i>can</i> have
failed to impose on him some happier pitch of truth, some neater piecing
together of parts? Why in the world operetta -- operetta, at best, with
guns? The mystery seems to point to dark and far-reaching things -- the
fatal observation of other impunities, the baleful effect of mistaken
examples.
<p>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 <i>pastiche</i> 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.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr680</locdoc><milestone n=680> him off his guard. If he be, as would seem possible, a
New Yorker of to-day still at the sensitive age, let him take to heart
that to get into the skin of a New Yorker, at any age, of the middle of
the last century, the primary need is to get out of his own. In his
own, alas! I fear Mr. Altsheler is destined, intellectually, to abide.
I ask myself, moreover, by what more general test, at all, the reader is
helped to find himself in effective relation with such attempts as "A
Soldier of Manhattan" and "Lorraine." Any attempt whatever, in such an
order, has for its primary intelligibility its treatment of a subject.
But what "subject," what discoverable obedience to any idea illustrated,
any determinant motive, may I even dimly suppose the productions before
me to profit by? One wants but little, in the way of an idea -- nor
does one always want that little "long"; but it must at least be
susceptible of identification. When it is not, the mere arbitrary seems
to reign; and the mere arbitrary, in a work of imagination, is apt to be
a very woful thing. An imagination of great power will sometimes carry
it off, but who are we that we should have a right to look every day for
a "Trois Mousquetaires" or a "St. Ives"?
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr681</locdoc><milestone n=681> of
which, before the general tide turned at Gettysburg, the country of the
Potomac and the Shenandoah was so constantly the scene -- but this,
even, only on condition of its having got itself embodied in some
personal, concrete case or group of cases. These cases, under the
author's hand, never really come to light -- they lose themselves in the
general hurly-burly, the clash of arms and the smoke of battle. He has
a romantic hero and a distracted heroine whom we never really get
intelligently near; the more so that he sadly compromises the former, to
our imagination, by speaking of him not only as "natty," but -- deeper
depth! -- as "brainy." These are dark spots, and yet the book is a brave
book, with maturity, manliness and vividness even in its want of art,
and with passages -- like the long story of Stuart's wonderful cavalry
raid into Pennsylvania in the summer of 1862, and the few pages given to
the battle of Gettysburg -- that readers who, in the American phrase, go
back will find full of the stirring and the touching.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr681</locdoc><milestone n=681> June 11, 1898
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr682</locdoc><milestone n=682> to the point where the idea
would almost certainly present itself -- thereby becoming less agreeable
to treat -- as that of the inferiority, not only marked, but
extravagant, of the newspapers to the magazines. With this latter
phenomenon I fortunately feel myself not concerned; save in so far as to
observe that if most Americans capable of the act of comparison would
rather suffer much extremity than admit that the manners of many of the
"great dailies" -- and even of the small -- offer a correspondence with
the private and personal manners of the nation, so, on the other hand,
few of them would probably not be glad to recognize that the tone of
life and the state of taste are largely and faithfully reflected in the
periodicals based upon selection.
<p>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 <i>Revue des Deux Mondes</i>.
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.
<p>These two things are intimately bound up and represent </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr683</locdoc><milestone n=683>
both the prize and the penalty. That the magazines are, above all,
copiously "illustrated," expresses portentously, for better or worse,
their character and situation; the fact, by itself, speaks volumes on
the whole subject -- their success, their limits, their standards, their
concessions, the temper of the public and the state of letters. The
history of illustration in the United States is moreover a very long
story and one as to which a mature observer might easily drop into an
excess of reminiscence. Such a critic goes back irrepressibly and
fondly to the charming time -- charming, I mean for infatuated authors -
- before the confirmed reign of the picture. This golden age of
familiar letters doubtless puts on, to his imagination, something of the
happy haze of fable. Yet, perhaps, had he time and space, he might be
ready with chapter and verse for anything he should attempt to say.
There was never, within my recollection, a time when the article was
not, now and then, to some extent, the pictures; but there was certainly
a time when it was, at the worst, very much less the pictures than to-
day. The pictures, in that mild age, besides being scant, were,
blissfully, too bad to do harm -- harm, I mean, of course, to the
general or particular air of literary authority, as in the case of the
great galleons now weighed down by them. I miss a few links perhaps if
I absolutely assume that the feebleness of the illustrations made the
strength of the text; but I make no mistake as to its having been, with
innocent intensity, essentially a question of the text. Did the
charming <i>Putnam</i> of far-away years -- the early fifties -- already
then, guilelessly, lay its slim white neck upon the wood-block? Nothing
would induce me really to inquire or to spoil a faint memory of very
young pleasure in prose that was not <i>all</i> prose only when it was all
poetry -- the prose, as mild and easy as an Indian summer in the woods,
of Herman Melville, of George William Curtis and "Ik Marvel."
<p>The magazines that have not succumbed to the wood-engraver --
notably the <i>North American Review</i> and the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> -- 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr684</locdoc><milestone n=684> every case the added absence of illustration that
makes the loss least sensible. The <i>North American Review</i>, as it has
been carried on for years past, deals almost wholly with subjects
political, commercial, economical, scientific, offering in this manner a
marked contrast to its earlier annals. The <i>Forum</i>, though of a similar
colour, occasionally publishes a critical study, but one of the striking
notes, in general, of the American, as of the English, contribution is
an extreme of brevity that excludes everything but the rapid business-
statement. This particular form of bribe to the public patience is
doubtless one of the ways in which the magazine without the attraction
of the picture attempts to cope with the magazine in which the
attraction of the picture has so immitigably led to the reduction of the
text. In the distribution of space it is the text that has come off
worst, and the sacrifice of mere prose, from being a relative charm, has
finally become an absolute one. It is still in the <i>Atlantic Monthly</i>
that the banner of that frail interest is most honourably borne. The
<i>Atlantic</i> remains, with a distinction of its own, practically the
single refuge of the essay and the literary portrait. The great
picture-books occasionally admit these things -- opening the door,
however, but, as children say, on a crack. In the <i>Atlantic</i> the book-
lover, the student, the painter standing on his own feet continue to
have room to turn round.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr685</locdoc><milestone n=685> far off. They mostly love dialect, but they
make for civilization. The extraordinary extension they have given to
the art of illustration is, of course, an absolute boon, and only a
fanatic, probably, here and there, holding that good prose is itself
full dress, will resent the amount of costume they tend to superimpose.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr686</locdoc><milestone n=686> of this happy issue from
it -- was, with its beautiful name and its so peculiar composition, as
uncanny, yet in as good taste, as some subtle invention of Edgar Poe.
The book contributes to the irresistible appeal resident, for the
American reader especially, in the very letters of the name of the
Floridian peninsula; bringing vividly home, at this time of day, the
rich anomaly, in a "health-resort" State, of a region as untrodden, if
not, in spite of its extent, as vast, as the heart of Africa. There is
something of the contemporary "boys' book" -- or say of the spirit of
Mr. Rider Haggard, who would find a title, "The Secret of the
Seminoles," ready to his hand -- in the great lonely, fresh-water
lagoons, the baffling channels, the maddening circuits, the supposed
Great Snakes, and the clothed and contracted Indians. Mr. Willoughby
fairly discovered the "secret" of these last -- for a revelation of
which, however, I must refer to his pages.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr687</locdoc><milestone n=687> small corner of the land had, in relation to the whole,
the consciousness of a great part to play -- a consciousness from which,
doubtless, much of the intensity has dropped. But the part was played,
none the less, with unshrinking consistency, and the story is full of
curious chapters. Colonel Higginson has the interesting quality of
having reflected almost everything that was in the New England air, of
vibrating with it all round. I can scarce perhaps express discreetly
how the pleasantest ring of Boston is in his tone -- of the Boston that
involved a Harvard not as the Harvard of to-day, involved the birth-time
of the "Atlantic," the storm and stress of the war, the agitations on
behalf of everything, almost, but especially of the negroes and the
ladies. Of a completely enlarged citizenship for women the author has
been an eminent advocate, as well, I gather, as one of the depositaries
of the belief in their full adaptation to public uses -- the
universality of their endowment. These, however, are details; the value
of the record lies, for readers old enough to be reminiscent of
connexions, in a general accent that is unmistakable. One would know it
anywhere.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr688</locdoc><milestone n=688> deal with Mr. Chapman's discriminations further than
to say that many of them strike me both as going straight and as going
deep. The New England spirit in prose and verse was, on a certain side,
wanting in life -- and this is one of the sides that Mr. Chapman has
happily expressed. His study, none the less, is the result of a really
critical process -- a literary portrait out of which the subject shines
with the rare beauty and originality that belong to it. Does Mr.
Chapman, on this showing, however contain the adumbration of the
literary critic for whom I a short time since spoke of the country as
yearning even to its core -- quite as with the apprehension that without
him it may literally totter to its fall? I should perhaps be rather
more prepared with an answer had I found the author, throughout the
remaining essays in his volume -- those on Walt Whitman, Browning, R. L.
Stevenson, Michael Angelo's sonnets -- equally firm on his feet. But he
is liable to extreme acuteness, is indeed highly refreshing in "A Study
of Romeo," and cannot, in general, be too pressingly urged to proceed.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr688</locdoc><milestone n=688> June 25, 1898
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr689</locdoc><milestone n=689>
can be done with them, to be made clear. Mr. Godkin makes them, these
anomalies, vividly, strikingly, in some cases almost luridly so; no such
distinct, detailed, yet patient and positively appreciative statement of
most of the American political facts that make for perplexity has, I
judge, anywhere been put forth. The author takes without blinking the
measure of all these things and threshes out with the steadiest hand, on
behalf of the whole case, that most interesting part of it -- as we are
apt almost always to find -- which embodies its weakness. Yet it is not
immediately, with him, a question either of weakness or of strength, so
little is his inquiry conducted on the assumption of any early arrival
at the last word.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr690</locdoc><milestone n=690> obliged to feel mistaken, on the whole, on the
general question of American life. One feels it to be a pity that, in
such a survey, the reference to the social conditions as well should not
somehow be interwoven: at so many points are they -- whether for
contradiction, confirmation, attenuation or aggravation -- but another
aspect of the political.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr691</locdoc><milestone n=691> examples bring out is, above all, that
circumstance -- the marked singularity of which an inexpert judge may
perhaps be excused for saying that he finds still more striking than
almost any of its special forms of objectionableness. This oddity would
doubtless be still more salient if the great alternative interest were,
for some reason, in our social scene, mysterious: then the wondering
observer might cudgel his brain and work on our suspense for the
particular pursuit actually felt by so vast a number of freemen
revelling in their freedom as more attaching. The particular pursuit,
as it happens, however, is not, in the most money-making country in the
world, far to seek; and it is what leaves the ground clear for a
presentation of the reverse of the tapestry.
<p>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 <i>rle</i>
-- 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.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr692</locdoc><milestone n=692>
<p>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 <i>be</i> 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.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr693</locdoc><milestone n=693>
<p>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.
<p>To read him under the influence of these things is to feel in
an extraordinary degree -- as may so often be felt in other </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr694</locdoc><milestone n=694>
American connexions -- that the question of education takes from some of
the primary circumstances of the nation that particular character of
vastness, of the great scale, that mainly constitutes the idea of the
splendid chance. Mr. Butler so beguiles and evokes -- and this by mere
force of logic -- that, not knowing what things in America may be
limited, I have, in turning his pages, surrendered myself almost
romantically to the impression that nothing of this especial sort at
least need ever be. Where will the great institutions of learning, the
great fountains of civilization, so evidently, at this rate, yet to grow
up there, find, in the path, any one or anything to say to them "Only so
far"? And I say nothing of the small institutions, though into these,
in a singularly interesting way, the author also abundantly enters. He
speaks in the name of a higher synthesis of cultivation altogether, and
when he asks if there be a "new education" leads us by all sorts of
admirable reasons to answer in the affirmative. He is most suggestive
on the subject of the secondary period, as to which he lights a lamp
that shows us in what darkness we have, in this country, for the most
part, walked; and he has, in respect of its connexion with what may
follow it, some lucid remarks that I am tempted to quote.
<p>"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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr695</locdoc><milestone n=695>
methods of the one ought to lead easily and gradually to those of the
other. That they do not do so in the educational systems of France and
Germany is one of the main defects of those systems. . . . Happily,
there are in the United States no artificial obstacles interposed
between the college and the university; we make it very easy to pass
from the one to the other; the custom is to accept any college degree
for just what it means. We make it equally easy to pass from one grade
or class to another and from elementary school to secondary school. . .
. The barrier between secondary school and college is the only one we
insist upon retaining. The intending collegian alone is required to run
the gauntlet of college professors and tutors, who, in utter ignorance
of his character, training, and acquirements, bruise him for hours with
such knotty questions as their fancy may suggest. In the interest of an
increased college attendance, not to mention that of a sounder
educational theory, this practice ought to be stopped and the formal
tests at entrance reduced to a minimum."
<p>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 <i>Atlantic Monthly</i> 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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr696</locdoc><milestone n=696> the part of the
writer to get into close quarters with his terminology. Let me add,
however, that the spirit of his plea -- a plea for "life" rather than
for learning -- has at least the interest of making the reader uneasy,
afresh, about one of the most frequent notes of the age, the singular
stupidity of countenance revealed in those photographic, those "process"
groups of congregations of athletes and game-players with which the
pictorial press and the shop windows of town and country more and more
abound. There would seem in general to be too great a disposition to
accept what such faces represent as a representation of "life." But
there is a vision of life of another sort in the two other excellent
<i>Atlantic</i> articles, that of Mr. Frederic Burk on Normal Schools --
which is not destitute of curious anecdote -- and that of Mr. D. S.
Sanford on "High School Extension." "Extension" is, in short, as we look
about, more and more the inspiring dream.
</loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr696</locdoc><milestone n=696> July 9, 1898
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr697</locdoc><milestone n=697> most deliberate. I have also just been
reading -- and with the liveliest interest -- a short and formless
fiction by Miss Sarah Barnwell Elliott, which reinforces many of the
impressions derived from "The Juggler"; but in "The Durket Sperret" --
the troubled tide of dialect here rising into the title itself -- an
artless spontaneity, an instinct, on the author's part, at times, I
hasten to add, remarkably happy, has the matter wholly in charge. Both
of these ladies have made a study of the life and speech of the
mountaineers of Tennessee, and what is most their own appears, on the
showing, to be their close notation of the language in particular. The
reproduction of the latter would seem, in each book, so far as the
inexpert may judge, extraordinarily close and vivid, but with the palm
for humour, for a certain audible ring of nature and of the homelier,
the homeliest truth, probably to be awarded to Miss Barnwell Elliott.
"The Durket Sperret" shows at some points so much sincerity of
observation that the critic would be reduced -- were he not, in the
literary work of women especially, familiar with the sad phenomenon --
wearily to wonder at the inconsequent drop, on other sides, of this and
of other merits. Half the critic's business is in learning to adjust
his expectations, and it would be a dreadful trade if there were not
sometimes some return for the lonely heroism of this effort. The return
is still a return perhaps even when he has, as I may say, to call for it
in person and carry it home.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr698</locdoc><milestone n=698> who, in that office, is so grievously
compromised by the attentions of an undergraduate that the Tennessee
hills and valleys fairly ring with the scandal. If there was anything
clearly enjoined by this <i>donne</i> it would surely be some presentation
of the relations between the parties; the effect serving only to
bewilder us so long as we vainly look for the cause. Was the cause, by
chance, one of those appearances of extreme intimacy which, even when
only appearances, a large body of the American public would seem to deny
to those aspiring to represent its manners the privilege of so much as
intelligibly alluding to? We grope in darkness -- that airless gloom of
false delicacy in which the light of life quite goes out. But that is
an old inconvenience and, at any rate, a different matter from my
concern at this moment. My point is the question of what may be implied
as a training for the painter of manners even by such a question of
dialectical treasure as may yield a hatful of queer pieces. Miss
Elliott gives us in the hideous figure of her old passionate, pipe-
smoking crone -- "Mrs. John Warren," a domestic despot instinct with
pride of race -- an admirable success, but she gives us nothing else.
There is no picture, no evocation of anything for any sense but the
lacerated ear, no expression of space or time or aspect or motion.
Fainter than faint are the "University" shadows and curiously suggestive
of how little the cultivation of the truth of vulgar linguistics is a
guarantee of the cultivation of any other truth.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr699</locdoc><milestone n=699> question of the possible bearing, on
the art of the representation of manners, of the predominance more and
more enjoyed by the representation of those particular manners with
which dialect is intimately allied. It is not a question, doubtless, on
which we are pressed to conclude, and that indeed is not the least of
its attractions. We can conclude only in the light of a good deal of
evidence, and the evidence, at present rates, promises to be still more
abundant and various. A part of the value of the two writers I have
just glanced at is that they literally contribute to it. More and more,
as we go through it, taking it as occasion serves, certain lessons will
scarcely fail to disengage themselves, and there will, at the worst,
have been a great deal of entertainment by the way. Nothing is more
striking, in fact, than the invasive part played by the element of
dialect in the subject-matter of the American fiction of the day.
Nothing like it, probably -- nothing like any such predominance --
exists in English, in French, in German work of the same order; the
difference, therefore, clearly has its reasons and suggests its
reflections. I am struck, right and left, with the fact that most of
the "cleverness" goes to the study of the conditions -- conditions
primitive often to the limit of extreme barbarism -- in which colloquial
speech arrives at complete debasement; if present signs are made good it
would seem destined, in the United States, to be, for a period, more
active and fruitful than any corresponding appreciation of the phenomena
of the civilized soul. It is a part, in its way, to all appearance, of
the great general wave of curiosity on the subject of the soul
aboundingly <i>not</i> civilized that has lately begun to roll over the
Anglo-Saxon globe and that has borne Mr. Rudyard Kipling, say, so
supremely high on its crest.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr700</locdoc><milestone n=700> Mrs. Humphry Ward. France has a
handful of close observers of special rustic manners, but has also M.
Paul Bourget. France, indeed, has even yet a good deal of everything.
We possess in America Mr. Howells; but Mr. Howells' imagination, though
remarkably comprehensive, does itself most justice, I think, in those
relations in which it can commune most persuasively with the democratic
passion that is really the prompter's voice -- the voice that may at
moments almost reach an ear or two even above the bustle of the play --
of his whole performance as a novelist. Leaving out Hawthorne and
beginning after him, I can think of no such neat hands as the hands
dealing with the orders that in other countries are spoken of as the
"lower." The American novel that has made most noise in the world --
Mrs. Beecher Stowe's famous tale -- is a picture of the life of negro
slaves. I have before me a considerable group of "stories," long and
short, in which rigorously hard conditions and a fashion of English --
or call it of American -- more or less abnormal are a general sign of
the types represented. In "Chimmie Fadden," by Mr. Edward Townsend, the
very riot of the abnormal -- the dialect of the New York newsboy and
bootblack -- is itself the text of the volume of two hundred pages. And
these are the great successes; the great successes are not the studies
of the human plant under cultivation. The answer to the Why? of it all
would probably take us far, land us even perhaps in the lap of an
inquiry as to what cultivation the human plant, in the country at large,
<i>is</i> under.
<p>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 </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr701</locdoc><milestone n=701> man -- and perhaps even more of
the contemporary woman -- of letters, the necessity of passing a longer
or a shorter time in the valley of the shadow of the theatre. The
recital of this spasmodic connexion on the part of almost any one who
has known it and is capable of treating it can never fail to be rich
alike in movement and in lessons, and the only restriction Mr. Howells'
volume has suggested to me is that he has not cut into the subject quite
so deep as the intensity of the experience -- for I assume his
experience -- might have made possible. It is a chapter of
bewilderments, but they are for the most part cleared up, and the
writer's fundamental optimism appears to have, on the whole matter, the
last word. There can surely be no stronger proof of it. He has perhaps
indeed even purposely approached his subject at an angle that compelled
him to graze rather than to penetrate -- I mean in opening the door only
upon such a part of the traffic as might come within the ken of the lady
who here figures as the partner of the hero's discipline. The latter's
experiment is hardly more than a glimpse of the business so long as it
includes, as it were, the collaboration of this lady; his initiation is
imperfect so long as hers gives the pace at which it proceeds. In short
I think the general opportunity a great one, and am brought back, by the
limits of the particular impression Mr. Howells has been content to give
of it, to that final sense of the predestined beauty of behaviour on the
part of every one concerned -- kindness, patience, submission to boredom
and general innocent humanity -- which is what most remains with me from
almost any picture he produces. It is sure to be, at the worst, a world
all lubricated with good nature and the tone of pleasantry. Life, in
his pages, is never too hard, too ugly, passions and perversities never
too sharp, not to allow, on the part of his people, of such an exercise
of friendly wit about each other as may well, when one considers it,
minimize shocks and strains. So it muffles and softens, all round, the
edges of "The Story of a Play." The mutual indulgences of the whole
thing fairly bathe the prospect in something like a suffusion of that
"romantic" to which the author's theory of the novel offers so little
hospitality. And that, for the moment, is an odd consummation.
<p>Miss Wilkins, in "Silence" -- a collection of six short tales -- </loc><loc><locdoc>JamAmWr702</locdoc><milestone n=702> has "gone in" for the romantic with visible relish; the
remark here is at least true of half her volume. The critic's promptest
attitude toward it -- that is if the critic happen to have cherished for
her earlier productions the enthusiastic admiration to which I am glad
to commit myself -- can only be an uplifting of the heart at the sight
of her return, safe and sound again, from the dangerous desert of the
"long" story. It is in pieces on the minor scale that her instinct of
presentation most happily serves her, and that instinct, in the things
before me, suffers only a partial eclipse. If I say this instead of
saying that it suffers none at all, that is simply because of my
recognizing the opportunity to make a point that would be spoiled by my
not insisting on my reserve. The actual, the immediate, the whole sound
and sense of the dry realities of rustic New England are what, for
comedy and elegy, she has touched with the firmest hand. In her new
book, however, she invokes in a manner the muse of history, summons to
her aid with much earnestness the predominant picturesqueness -- as we
are all so oddly committed to consider it -- of the past. I cannot help
thinking that, in spite of her good will, the past withholds from her
that natural note which she extracts so happily from the present. The
natural note is the touching, the stirring one; and thus it befalls that
she really plays the trick, the trick the romancer tries for, much more
effectually with the common objects about her than with the objects
preserved, and sufficiently faded and dusty, in the cracked glass case
of the rococo.
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