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+Project Gutenberg's Relation of Literature to Life, by Charles Dudley Warner
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Relation of Literature to Life
+
+Author: Charles Dudley Warner
+
+Release Date: December 6, 2004 [EBook #3117]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Widger
+
+
+
+
+
+THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE
+
+By Charles Dudley Warner
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY.
+THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
+
+The county of Franklin in Northwestern Massachusetts, if not rivaling in
+certain ways the adjoining Berkshire, has still a romantic beauty of its
+own. In the former half of the nineteenth century its population was
+largely given up to the pursuit of agriculture, though not under
+altogether favorable conditions. Manufactures had not yet invaded the
+region either to add to its wealth or to defile its streams. The villages
+were small, the roads pretty generally wretched save in summer, and from
+many of the fields the most abundant crop that could be gathered was that
+of stones.
+
+The character of the people conformed in many ways to that of the soil.
+The houses which lined the opposite sides of the single street, of which
+the petty places largely consisted, as well as the dwellings which dotted
+the country, were the homes of men who possessed in fullness many of the
+features, good and bad, that characterized the Puritan stock to which
+they belonged. There was a good deal of religion in these rural
+communities and occasionally some culture. Still, as a rule, it must be
+confessed, there would be found in them much more of plain living than of
+high thinking. Broad thinking could hardly be said to exist at all. By
+the dwellers in that region Easter had scarcely even been heard of;
+Christmas was tolerated after a fashion, but was nevertheless looked upon
+with a good deal of suspicion as a Popish invention. In the beliefs of
+these men several sins not mentioned in the decalogue took really, if
+unconsciously, precedence of those which chanced to be found in that
+list. Dancing was distinctly immoral; card-playing led directly to
+gambling with all its attendant evils; theatre-going characterized the
+conduct of the more disreputable denizens of great cities. Fiction was
+not absolutely forbidden; but the most lenient regarded it as a great
+waste of time, and the boy who desired its solace on any large scale was
+under the frequent necessity of seeking the seclusion of the haymow.
+
+But however rigid and stern the beliefs of men might be, nature was there
+always charming, not only in her summer beauty, but even in her wildest
+winter moods. Narrow, too, as might be the views of the members of these
+communities about the conduct of life, there was ever before the minds of
+the best of them an ideal of devotion to duty, an earnest all-pervading
+moral purpose which implanted the feeling that neither personal success
+nor pleasure of any sort could ever afford even remotely compensation for
+the neglect of the least obligation which their situation imposed. It was
+no misfortune for any one, who was later to be transported to a broader
+horizon and more genial air, to have struck the roots of his being in a
+soil where men felt the full sense of moral responsibility for everything
+said or done, and where the conscience was almost as sensitive to the
+suggestion of sin as to its actual accomplishment.
+
+It was amidst such surroundings that Charles Dudley Warner was born on
+the 12th of September, 1829. His birthplace was the hill town of
+Plainfield, over two thousand feet above the level of the sea. His
+father, a farmer, was a man of cultivation, though not college-bred. He
+died when his eldest son had reached the age of five, leaving to his
+widow the care of two children. Three years longer the family continued
+to remain on the farm. But however delightful the scenery of the country
+might be, its aesthetic attractions did not sufficiently counterbalance
+its agricultural disadvantages. Furthermore, while the summers were
+beautiful on this high table land, the winters were long and dreary in
+the enforced solitude of a thinly settled region. In consequence, the
+farm was sold after the death of the grandfather, and the home broken up.
+The mother with her two children, went to the neighboring village of
+Charlemont on the banks of the Deerfield. There the elder son took up his
+residence with his guardian and relative, a man of position and influence
+in the community, who was the owner of a large farm. With him he stayed
+until he was twelve years old, enjoying all the pleasures and doing all
+the miscellaneous jobs of the kind which fall to the lot of a boy brought
+up in an agricultural community.
+
+The story of this particular period of his life was given by Warner in a
+work which was published about forty years later. It is the volume
+entitled "Being a Boy." Nowhere has there been drawn a truer or more
+vivid picture of rural New England. Nowhere else can there be found such
+a portrayal of the sights and sounds, the pains and pleasures of life on
+a farm as seen from the point of view of a boy. Here we have them all
+graphically represented: the daily "chores" that must be looked after;
+the driving of cows to and from the pasture; the clearing up of fields
+where vegetation struggled with difficulty against the prevailing stones;
+the climbing of lofty trees and the swaying back and forth in the wind on
+their topmost boughs; the hunting of woodchucks; the nutting excursions
+of November days, culminating in the glories of Thanksgiving; the romance
+of school life, over which vacations, far from being welcomed with
+delight, cast a gloom as involving extra work; the cold days of winter
+with its deep or drifting snows, the mercury of the thermometer clinging
+with fondness to zero, even when the sun was shining brilliantly; the
+long chilling nights in which the frost carved fantastic structures on
+the window-panes; the eager watching for the time when the sap would
+begin to run in the sugar-maples; the evenings given up to reading, with
+the inevitable inward discontent at being sent to bed too early; the
+longing for the mild days of spring to come, when the heavy cowhide boots
+could be discarded, and the boy could rejoice at last in the covering for
+his feet which the Lord had provided. These and scores of similar
+descriptions fill up the picture of the life furnished here. It was
+nature's own school wherein was to be gained the fullest intimacy with
+her spirit. While there was much which she could not teach, there was
+also much which she alone could teach. From his communion with her the
+boy learned lessons which the streets of crowded cities could never have
+imparted.
+
+At the age of twelve this portion of his education came to an end. The
+family then moved to Cazenovia in Madison county in Central New York,
+from which place Warner's mother had come, and where her immediate
+relatives then resided. Until he went to college this was his home. There
+he attended a preparatory school under the direction of the Methodist
+Episcopal Church, which was styled the Oneida Conference Seminary. It was
+at this institution that he fitted mainly for college; for to college it
+had been his father's dying wish that he should go, and the boy himself
+did not need the spur of this parting injunction. A college near his home
+was the excellent one of Hamilton in the not distant town of Clinton in
+the adjoining county of Oneida. Thither he repaired in 1848, and as he
+had made the best use of his advantages, he was enabled to enter the
+sophomore class. He was graduated in 1851.
+
+But while fond of study he had all these years been doing something
+besides studying. The means of the family were limited, and to secure the
+education he desired, not only was it necessary to husband the resources
+he possessed, but to increase them in every possible way. Warner had all
+the American boy's willingness to undertake any occupation not in itself
+discreditable. Hence to him fell a full share of those experiences which
+have diversified the early years of so many men who have achieved
+success. He set up type in a printing office; he acted as an assistant in
+a bookstore; he served as clerk in a post-office. He was thus early
+brought into direct contact with persons of all classes and conditions of
+life.
+
+The experience gave to his keenly observant mind an insight into the
+nature of men which was to be of special service to him in later years.
+Further, it imparted to him a familiarity with their opinions and hopes
+and aspirations which enabled him to understand and sympathize with
+feelings in which he did not always share.
+
+During the years which immediately followed his departure from college,
+Warner led the somewhat desultory and apparently aimless life of many
+American graduates whose future depends upon their own exertions and
+whose choice of a career is mainly determined by circumstances. From the
+very earliest period of his life he had been fond of reading. It was an
+inherited taste. The few books he found in his childhood's home would
+have been almost swept out of sight in the torrent, largely of trash,
+which pours now in a steady stream into the humblest household. But the
+books, though few, were of a high quality; and because they were few they
+were read much, and their contents became an integral part of his
+intellectual equipment. Furthermore, these works of the great masters,
+with which he became familiar, set for him a standard by which to test
+the value of whatever he read, and saved him even in his earliest years
+from having his taste impaired and his judgment misled by the vogue of
+meretricious productions which every now and then gain popularity for the
+time. They gave him also a distinct bent towards making literature his
+profession. But literature, however pleasant and occasionally profitable
+as an avocation, was not to be thought of as a vocation. Few there are at
+any period who have succeeded in finding it a substantial and permanent
+support; at that time and in this country such a prospect was practically
+hopeless for any one. It is no matter of surprise, therefore, that
+Warner, though often deviating from the direct path, steadily gravitated
+toward the profession of law.
+
+Still, even in those early days his natural inclination manifested
+itself. The Knickerbocker Magazine was then the chosen organ to which all
+young literary aspirants sent their productions. To it even in his
+college days Warner contributed to some extent, though it would doubtless
+be possible now to gather out of this collection but few pieces which,
+lacking his own identification, could be assigned to him positively. At a
+later period he contributed articles to Putnam's Magazine, which began
+its existence in 1853. Warner himself at one time, in that period of
+struggle and uncertainty, expected to become an editor of a monthly which
+was to be started in Detroit. But before the magazine was actually set on
+foot the inability of the person who projected it to supply the necessary
+means for carrying it on prevented the failure which would inevitably
+have befallen a venture of that sort, undertaken at that time and in that
+place. Yet he showed in a way the native bent of his mind by bringing out
+two years after his graduation from college a volume of selections from
+English and American authors entitled "The Book of Eloquence." This work
+a publisher many years afterward took advantage of his later reputation
+to reprint.
+
+This unsettled period of his life lasted for several years. He was
+resident for a while in various places. Part of the time he seems to have
+been in Cazenovia; part of the time in New York; part of the time in the
+West. One thing in particular there was which stood in the way of fixing
+definitely his choice of a profession. This was the precarious state of
+his health, far poorer then than it was in subsequent years. Warner,
+however, was never at any period of his life what is called robust. It
+was his exceeding temperance in all things which enabled him to venture
+upon the assumption and succeed in the accomplishment of tasks which men,
+physically far stronger than he, would have shrunk from under-taking,
+even had they been possessed of the same abilities. But his condition,
+part of that time, was such that it led him to take a course of treatment
+at the sanatorium in Clifton Springs. It became apparent, however, that
+life in the open air, for a while at least, was the one thing essential.
+Under the pressure of this necessity he secured a position as one of an
+engineering party engaged in the survey of a railway in Missouri. In that
+occupation he spent a large part of 1853 and 1854. He came back from this
+expedition restored to health. With that result accomplished, the duty of
+settling definitely upon what he was to do became more urgent. Among
+other things he did, while living for a while with his uncle in
+Binghamton, N. Y., he studied law in the office of Daniel S. Dickinson.
+
+In the Christmas season of 1854 he went with a friend on a visit to
+Philadelphia and stayed at the house of Philip M. Price, a prominent
+citizen of that place who was engaged, among other things, in the
+conveyancing of real estate. It will not be surprising to any one who
+knew the charm of his society in later life to be told that he became at
+once a favorite with the older man. The latter was advanced in years, he
+was anxious to retire from active business. Acting under his advice,
+Warner was induced to come to Philadelphia in 1855 and join him, and to
+form subsequently a partnership in legal conveyancing with another young
+man who had been employed in Mr. Price's office. Thus came into being the
+firm of Barton and Warner. Their headquarters were first in Spring Garden
+Street and later in Walnut Street. The future soon became sufficiently
+assured to justify Warner in marriage, and in October, 1856, he was
+wedded to Susan Lee, daughter of William Elliott Lee of New York City.
+
+But though in a business allied to the law, Warner was not yet a lawyer.
+His occupation indeed was only in his eyes a temporary makeshift while he
+was preparing himself for what was to be his real work in life.
+Therefore, while supporting himself by carrying on the business of
+conveyancing, he attended the courses of study at the law department of
+the University of Pennsylvania, during the academic years of 1856-57 and
+1857-58. From that institution he received the degree of bachelor of law
+in 1858--often misstated 1856--and was ready to begin the practice of
+his, profession.
+
+In those days every young man of ability and ambition was counseled to go
+West and grow up with the country, and was not unfrequently disposed to
+take that course of his own accord. Warner felt the general impulse. He
+had contemplated entering, in fact had pretty definitely made up his mind
+to enter, into a law partnership with a friend in one of the smaller
+places in that region. But on a tour, somewhat of exploration, he stopped
+at Chicago. There he met another friend, and after talking over the
+situation with him he decided to take up his residence in that city. So
+in 1858 the law-firm of Davenport and Warner came into being. It lasted
+until 1860. It was not exactly a favorable time for young men to enter
+upon the practice of this profession. The country was just beginning to
+recover from the depression which had followed the disastrous panic of
+1857; but confidence was as yet far from being restored. The new firm did
+a fairly good business; but while there was sufficient work to do, there
+was but little money to pay for it. Still Warner would doubtless have
+continued in the profession had he not received an offer, the acceptance
+of which determined his future and changed entirely his career.
+
+Hawley, now United States Senator from Connecticut, was Warner's senior
+by a few years. He had preceded him as a student at the Oneida Conference
+Seminary and at Hamilton College. Practicing law in Hartford, he had
+started in 1857, in conjunction with other leading citizens, a paper
+called the Evening Press. It was devoted to the advocacy of the
+principles of the Republican party, which was at that time still in what
+may be called the formative state of its existence. This was a period in
+which for some years the dissolution had been going on of the two old
+parties which had divided the country. Men were changing sides and were
+aligning themselves anew according to their views on questions which were
+every day assuming greater prominence in the minds of all. There was
+really but one great subject talked about or thought about. It split into
+opposing sections the whole land over which was lowering the grim, though
+as yet unrecognizable, shadow of civil war. The Republican party had been
+in existence but a very few years, but in that short time it had
+attracted to its ranks the young and enthusiastic spirits of the North,
+just as to the other side were impelled the members of the same class in
+the South. The intellectual contest which preceded the physical was
+stirring the hearts of all men. Hawley, who was well aware of Warner's
+peculiar ability, was anxious to secure his co-operation and assistance.
+He urged him to come East and join him in the conduct of the new
+enterprise he had undertaken.
+
+Warner always considered that he derived great benefit from his
+comparatively limited study and practice of law; and that the little time
+he had given up to it had been far from being misspent. But the opening
+which now presented itself introduced him to a field of activity much
+more suited to his talents and his tastes. He liked the study of law
+better than its practice; for his early training had not been of a kind
+to reconcile him to standing up strongly for clients and causes that he
+honestly believed to be in the wrong. Furthermore, his heart, as has been
+said, had always been in literature; and though journalism could hardly
+be called much more than a half-sister, the one could provide the support
+which the other could never promise with certainty. So in 1860 Warner
+removed to Hartford and joined his friend as associate editor of the
+newspaper he had founded. The next year the war broke out. Hawley at once
+entered the army and took part in the four years' struggle. His departure
+left Warner in editorial charge of the paper, into the conduct of which
+he threw himself with all the earnestness and energy of his nature, and
+the ability, both political and literary, displayed in its columns gave
+it at once a high position which it never lost.
+
+At this point it may be well to give briefly the few further salient
+facts of Warner's connection with journalism proper. In 1867 the owners
+of the Press purchased the Courant, the well-known morning paper which
+had been founded more than a century before, and consolidated the Press
+with it. Of this journal, Hawley and Warner, now in part proprietors,
+were the editorial writers. The former, who had been mustered out of the
+army with the rank of brevet Major-General, was soon diverted from
+journalism by other employments. He was elected Governor, he became a
+member of Congress, serving successively in both branches. The main
+editorial responsibility for the conduct of the paper devolved in
+consequence upon Warner, and to it he gave up for years nearly all his
+thought and attention. Once only during that early period was his labor
+interrupted for any considerable length of time. In May, 1868, he set out
+on the first of his five trips across the Atlantic. He was absent nearly
+a year. Yet even then he cannot be said to have neglected his special
+work. Articles were sent weekly from the other side, describing what he
+saw and experienced abroad. His active connection with the paper he never
+gave up absolutely, nor did his interest in it ever cease. But after he
+became connected with the editorial staff of Harpers Magazine the
+contributions he made to his journal were only occasional and what may be
+called accidental.
+
+When 1870 came, forty years of Warner's life had gone by, and nearly
+twenty years since he had left college. During the latter ten years of
+this period he had been a most effective and forcible leader-writer on
+political and social questions, never more so than during the storm and
+stress of the Civil War. Outside of these topics he had devoted a great
+deal of attention to matters connected with literature and art. His
+varied abilities were fully recognized by the readers of the journal he
+edited.
+
+But as yet there was little or no recognition outside. It is no easy
+matter to tell what are the influences, what the circumstances, which
+determine the success of a particular writer or of a particular work.
+Hitherto Warner's repute was mainly confined to the inhabitants of a
+provincial capital and its outlying and dependent towns. However
+cultivated the class to which his writings appealed--and as a class it
+was distinctly cultivated--their number was necessarily not great. To the
+country at large what he did or what he was capable of doing was not
+known at all. Some slight efforts he had occasionally put forth to secure
+the publication of matter he had prepared. He experienced the usual fate
+of authors who seek to introduce into the market literary wares of a new
+and better sort. His productions did not follow conventional lines.
+Publishers were ready to examine what he offered, and were just as ready
+to declare that these new wares were of a nature in which they were not
+inclined to deal.
+
+But during 1870 a series of humorous articles appeared in the Hartford
+Courant, detailing his experiences in the cultivation of a garden. Warner
+had become the owner of a small place then almost on the outskirts of the
+city. With the dwelling-house went the possession of three acres of land.
+The opportunity thus presented itself of turning into a blessing the
+primeval curse of tilling the soil, in this instance not with a hoe, but
+with a pen. These articles detailing his experiences excited so much
+amusement and so much admiration that a general desire was manifested
+that they should receive a more permanent life than that accorded to
+articles appearing in the columns of newspapers, and should reach a
+circle larger than that to be found in the society of the Connecticut
+capital. Warner's previous experience had not disposed him to try his
+fortunes with the members of the publishing fraternity. In fact he did
+not lay so much stress upon the articles as did his readers and friends.
+He always insisted that he had previously written other articles which in
+his eyes certainly were just as good as they, if not better.
+
+It so chanced that about this time Henry Ward Beecher came to Hartford to
+visit his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe. Warner was invited to meet him.
+In the course of the conversation the articles just mentioned were
+referred to by some one of those present. Beecher's curiosity was aroused
+and he expressed a desire to see them. To him they were accordingly sent
+for perusal. No sooner had he run through them than he recognized in them
+the presence of a rare and delicate humor which struck a distinctly new
+note in American literature. It was something he felt which should not be
+confined to the knowledge of any limited circle. He wrote at once to the
+publisher James T. Fields, urging the production of these articles in
+book form. Beecher's recommendation in those days was sufficient to
+insure the acceptance of any book by any publisher. Mr. Fields agreed to
+bring out the work, provided the great preacher would prefix an
+introduction. This he promised to do and did; though in place of the
+somewhat more formal piece he was asked to write, he sent what he called
+an introductory letter.
+
+The series of papers published under the title of "My Summer in a Garden"
+came out at the very end of 1870, with the date of 1871 on the
+title-page. The volume met with instantaneous success. It was the subject
+of comment and conversation everywhere and passed rapidly through several
+editions. There was a general feeling that a new writer had suddenly
+appeared, with a wit and wisdom peculiarly his own, precisely like which
+nothing had previously existed in our literature. To the later editions
+of the work was added an account of a cat which had been presented to the
+author by the Stowes. For that reason it was given from the Christian
+name of the husband of the novelist the title of Calvin. To this John was
+sometimes prefixed, as betokening from the purely animal point of view a
+certain resemblance to the imputed grimness and earnestness of the great
+reformer. There was nothing in the least exaggerated in the account which
+Warner gave of the character and conduct of this really remarkable member
+of the feline race. No biography was ever truer; no appreciation was ever
+more sympathetic; and in the long line of cats none was ever more worthy
+to have his story truly and sympathetically told. All who had the fortune
+to see Calvin in the flesh will recognize the accuracy with which his
+portrait was drawn. All who read the account of him, though not having
+seen him, will find it one of the most charming of descriptions. It has
+the fullest right to be termed a cat classic.
+
+With the publication of "My Summer in a Garden" Warner was launched upon
+a career of authorship which lasted without cessation during the thirty
+years that remained of his life. It covered a wide field. His interests
+were varied and his activity was unremitting. Literature, art, and that
+vast diversity of topics which are loosely embraced under the general
+name of social science--upon all these he had something fresh to say, and
+he said it invariably with attractiveness and effect. It mattered little
+what he set out to talk about, the talk was sure to be full both of
+instruction and entertainment. No sooner had the unequivocal success of
+his first published work brought his name before the public than he was
+besieged for contributions by conductors of periodicals of all sorts; and
+as he had ideas of his own upon all sorts of subjects, he was constantly
+furnishing matter of the most diverse kind for the most diverse
+audiences.
+
+As a result, the volumes here gathered together represent but a limited
+portion of the work he accomplished. All his life, indeed, Warner was not
+only an omnivorous consumer of the writings of others, but a constant
+producer. The manifestation of it took place in ways frequently known to
+but few. It was not merely the fact that as an editor of a daily paper he
+wrote regularly articles on topics of current interest to which he never
+expected to pay any further attention; but after his name became widely
+known and his services were in request everywhere, he produced scores of
+articles, some long, some short, some signed, some unsigned, of which he
+made no account whatever. One looking through the pages of contemporary
+periodical literature is apt at any moment to light upon pieces, and
+sometimes upon series of them, which the author never took the trouble to
+collect. Many of those to which his name was not attached can no longer
+be identified with any approach to certainty. About the preservation of
+much that he did--and some of it belonged distinctly to his best and most
+characteristic work--he was singularly careless, or it may be better to
+say, singularly indifferent.
+
+If I may be permitted to indulge in the recital of a personal experience,
+there is one incident I recall which will bring out this trait in a
+marked manner. Once on a visit to him I accompanied him to the office of
+his paper. While waiting for him to discharge certain duties there, and
+employing myself in looking over the exchanges, I chanced to light upon a
+leading article on the editorial page of one of the most prominent of the
+New York dailies. It was devoted to the consideration of some recent
+utterances of a noted orator who, after the actual mission of his life
+had been accomplished, was employing the decline of it in the
+exploitation of every political and economic vagary which it had entered
+into the addled brains of men to evolve. The article struck me as one of
+the most brilliant and entertaining of its kind I had ever read; it was
+not long indeed before it appeared that the same view of it was taken by
+many others throughout the country. The peculiar wit of the comment, the
+keenness of the satire made so much of an impression upon me that I
+called Warner away from his work to look at it. At my request he hastily
+glanced over it, but somewhat to my chagrin failed to evince any
+enthusiasm about it. On our way home I again spoke of it and was a good
+deal nettled at the indifference towards it which he manifested. It
+seemed to imply that my critical judgment was of little value; and
+however true might be his conclusion on that point, one does not enjoy
+having the fact thrust too forcibly upon the attention in the familiarity
+of conversation. Resenting therefore the tone he had assumed, I took
+occasion not only to reiterate my previously expressed opinion somewhat
+more aggressively, but also went on to insinuate that he was himself
+distinctly lacking in any real appreciation of what was excellent. He
+bore with me patiently for a while. "Well, sonny," he said at last,
+"since you seem to take the matter so much to heart, I will tell you in
+confidence that I wrote the piece myself." I found that this was not only
+true in the case just specified, but that while engaged in preparing
+articles for his own paper he occasionally prepared them for other
+journals. No one besides himself and those immediately concerned, ever
+knew anything about the matter. He never asserted any right to these
+pieces, he never sought to collect them, though some of them exhibited
+his happiest vein of humor. Unclaimed, unidentified, they are swept into
+that wallet of oblivion in which time stows the best as well as the worst
+of newspaper production.
+
+The next volume of Warner's writings that made its appearance was
+entitled "Saunterings." It was the first and, though good of its kind,
+was by no means the best of a class of productions in which he was to
+exhibit signal excellence. It will be observed that of the various works
+comprised in this collective edition, no small number consist of what by
+a wide extension of the phrase may be termed books of travel. There are
+two or three which fall strictly under that designation. Most of them,
+however, can be more properly called records of personal experience and
+adventure in different places and regions, with the comments on life and
+character to which they gave rise.
+
+Books of travel, if they are expected to live, are peculiarly hard to
+write. If they come out at a period when curiosity about the region
+described is predominant, they are fairly certain, no matter how
+wretched, to achieve temporary success. But there is no kind of literary
+production to which, by the very law of its being, it is more difficult
+to impart vitality. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is perfectly true that
+the greatest hinderance to their permanent interest is the information
+they furnish. The more full, specific and even accurate that is, the more
+rapidly does the work containing it lose its value. The fresher knowledge
+conveyed by a new, and it may be much inferior book, crowds out of
+circulation those which have gone before. The changed or changing
+conditions in the region traversed renders the information previously
+furnished out of date and even misleading. Hence the older works come in
+time to have only an antiquarian interest. Their pages are consulted only
+by that very limited number of persons who are anxious to learn what has
+been and view with stolid indifference what actually is. Something of
+this transitory nature belongs to all sketches of travel. It is the one
+great reason why so very few of the countless number of such works,
+written, and sometimes written by men of highest ability, are hardly
+heard of a few years after publication. Travels form a species of
+literary production in which great classics are exceedingly rare.
+
+From this fatal characteristic, threatening the enduring life of such
+works, most of Warner's writings of this sort were saved by the method of
+procedure he followed. He made it his main object not to give facts but
+impressions. All details of exact information, everything calculated to
+gratify the statistical mind or to quench the thirst of the seeker for
+purely useful information, he was careful, whether consciously or
+unconsciously, to banish from those volumes of his in which he followed
+his own bent and felt himself under no obligation to say anything but
+what he chose. Hence these books are mainly a record of views of men and
+manners made by an acute observer on the spot, and put down at the moment
+when the impression created was most vivid, not deferred till familiarity
+had dulled the sense of it or custom had caused it to be disregarded.
+Take as an illustration the little book entitled "Baddeck," one of the
+slightest of his productions in this field. It purports to be and is
+nothing more than an account of a two weeks' tour made to a Cape Breton
+locality in company with the delightful companion to whom it was
+dedicated. You take it up with the notion that you are going to acquire
+information about the whole country journeyed over, you are beguiled at
+times with the fancy that you are getting it. In the best sense it may be
+said that you do get it; for it is the general impression of the various
+scenes through which the expedition leads the travelers that is left upon
+the mind, not those accurate details of a single one of them which the
+lapse of a year might render inaccurate. It is to the credit of the work
+therefore than one gains from it little specific knowledge. In its place
+are the reflections both wise and witty upon life, upon the characters of
+the men that are met, upon the nature of the sights that are seen.
+
+This is what constitutes the enduring charm of the best of these pictures
+of travel which Warner produced. It is perhaps misleading to assert that
+they do not furnish a good deal of information. Still it is not the sort
+of information which the ordinary tourist gives and which the cultivated
+reader resents and is careful not to remember. Their dominant note is
+rather the quiet humor of a delightful story-teller, who cannot fail to
+say something of interest because he has seen so much; and who out of his
+wide and varied observation selects for recital certain sights he has
+witnessed, certain experiences he has gone through, and so relates them
+that the way the thing is told is even more interesting than the thing
+told. The chief value of these works does not accordingly depend upon the
+accidental, which passes. Inns change and become better or worse.
+Facilities for transportation increase or decrease. Scenery itself alters
+to some extent under the operation of agencies brought to bear upon it
+for its own improvement or for the improvement of something else. But
+man's nature remains a constant quantity. Traits seen here and now are
+sure to be met with somewhere else, and even in ages to come. Hence works
+of this nature, embodying descriptions of men and manners, always retain
+something of the freshness which characterized them on the day of their
+appearance.
+
+Of these productions in which the personal element predominates, and
+where the necessity of intruding information is not felt as a burden,
+those of Warner's works which deal with the Orient take the first rank.
+The two--"My Winter on the Nile" and "In the Levant"--constitute the
+record of a visit to the East during the years 1875 and 1876.
+
+They would naturally have of themselves the most permanent value,
+inasmuch as the countries described have for most educated men an abiding
+interest. The lifelike representation and graphic characterization which
+Warner was apt to display in his traveling sketches were here seen at
+their best, because nowhere else did he find the task of description more
+congenial. Alike the gorgeousness and the squalor of the Orient appealed
+to his artistic sympathies. Egypt in particular had for him always a
+special fascination. Twice he visited it--at the time just mentioned and
+again in the winter of 1881-82. He rejoiced in every effort made to
+dispel the obscurity which hung over its early history. No one, outside
+of the men most immediately concerned, took a deeper interest than he in
+the work of the Egyptian Exploration Society, of which he was one of the
+American vice-presidents. To promoting its success he gave no small share
+of time and attention. Everything connected with either the past or the
+present of the country had for him an attraction. A civilization which
+had been flourishing for centuries, when the founder of Israel was a
+wandering sheik on the Syrian plains or in the hill-country of Canaan;
+the slow unraveling of records of dynasties of forgotten kings; the
+memorials of Egypt's vanished greatness and the vision of her future
+prosperity these and things similar to these made this country, so
+peculiarly the gift of the Nile, of fascinating interest to the modern
+traveler who saw the same sights which had met the eyes of Herodotus
+nearly twenty-five hundred years before.
+
+To the general public the volume which followed--"In the Levant"--was
+perhaps of even deeper interest. At all events it dealt with scenes and
+memories with which every reader, educated or uneducated, had
+associations. The region through which the founder of Christianity
+wandered, the places he visited, the words he said in them, the acts he
+did, have never lost their hold over the hearts of men, not even during
+the periods when the precepts of Christianity have had the least
+influence over the conduct of those who professed to it their allegiance.
+In the Levant, too, were seen the beginnings of commerce, of art, of
+letters, in the forms in which the modern world best knows them. These,
+therefore, have always made the lands about the eastern Mediterranean an
+attraction to cultivated men and the interest of the subject accordingly
+reinforced the skill of the writer.
+
+There are two or three of these works which can not be included in the
+class just described. They were written for the specific purpose of
+giving exact information at the time. Of these the most noticeable are
+the volumes entitled "South and West" and the account of Southern
+California which goes under the name of "Our Italy." They are the outcome
+of journeys made expressly with the intent of investigating and reporting
+upon the actual situation and apparent prospects of the places and
+regions described. As they were written to serve an immediate purpose,
+much of the information contained in them tends to grow more and more out
+of date as time goes on; and though of value to the student of history,
+these volumes must necessarily become of steadily diminishing interest to
+the ordinary reader. Yet it is to be said of them that while the pill of
+useful information is there, it has at least been sugar-coated. Nor can
+we afford to lose sight of the fact that the widely-circulated articles,
+collected under the title of "South and West," by the spirit pervading
+them as well as by the information they gave, had a marked effect in
+bringing the various sections of the country into a better understanding
+of one another, and in imparting to all a fuller sense of the community
+they possessed in profit and loss, in honor and dishonor.
+
+It is a somewhat singular fact that these sketches of travel led Warner
+incidentally to enter into an entirely new field of literary exertion.
+This was novel-writing. Something of this nature he had attempted in
+conjunction with Mark Twain in the composition of "The Gilded Age," which
+appeared in 1873. The result, however, was unsatisfactory to both the
+collaborators. Each had humor, but the humor of each was fundamentally
+different. But the magazine with which Warner had become connected was
+desirous that he should prepare for it an account of some of the
+principal watering-places and summer resorts of the country. Each was to
+be visited in turn and its salient features were to be described. It was
+finally suggested that this could be done most effectively by weaving
+into a love story occurrences that might happen at a number of these
+places which were made the subjects of description. The principal
+characters were to take their tours under the personal conduct of the
+novelist. They were to go to the particular spots selected North and
+South, according to the varying seasons of the year. It was a somewhat
+novel way of, visiting resorts of this nature; there are those to whom it
+will seem altogether more agreeable than would be the visiting of them in
+person. Hence appeared in 1886 the articles which were collected later in
+the volume entitled "Their Pilgrimage."
+
+Warner executed the task which had been assigned him with his wonted
+skill. The completed work met with success--with so much success indeed
+that he was led later to try his fortune further in the same field and
+bring out the trilogy of novels which go under the names respectively of
+"A Little Journey in the World," "The Golden House," and "That Fortune."
+Each of these is complete in itself, each can be read by itself; but the
+effect of each and of the whole series can be best secured by reading
+them in succession. In the first it is the story of how a great fortune
+was made in the stock market; in the second, how it was fraudulently
+diverted from the object for which it was intended; and in the third, how
+it was most beneficially and satisfactorily lost. The scene of the last
+novel was laid in part in Warner's early home in Charlemont. These works
+were produced with considerable intervals of time between their
+respective appearances, the first coming out in 1889 and the third ten
+years later. This detracted to some extent from the popularity which they
+would have attained had the different members followed one another
+rapidly. Still, they met with distinct success, though it has always been
+a question whether this success was due so much to the story as to the
+shrewd observation and caustic wit which were brought to bear upon what
+was essentially a serious study of one side of American social life.
+
+The work with which Warner himself was least satisfied was his life of
+Captain John Smith, which came out in 18881. It was originally intended
+to be one of a series of biographies of noted men, which were to give the
+facts accurately but to treat them humorously. History and comedy,
+however, have never been blended successfully, though desperate attempts
+have occasionally been made to achieve that result. Warner had not long
+been engaged in the task before he recognized its hopelessness. For its
+preparation it required a special study of the man and the period, and
+the more time he spent upon the preliminary work, the more the humorous
+element tended to recede. Thus acted on by two impulses, one of a light
+and one of a grave nature, he moved for a while in a sort of diagonal
+between the two to nowhere in particular; but finally ended in treating
+the subject seriously.
+
+In giving himself up to a biography in which he had no special interest,
+Warner felt conscious that he could not interest others. His forebodings
+were realized. The work, though made from a careful study of original
+sources, did not please him, nor did it attract the public. The attempt
+was all the more unfortunate because the time and toil he spent upon it
+diverted him from carrying out a scheme which had then taken full
+possession of his thoughts. This was the production of a series of essays
+to be entitled "Conversations on Horseback." Had it been worked up as he
+sketched it in his mind, it would have been the outdoor counterpart of
+his "Backlog Studies." Though in a measure based upon a horseback ride
+which he took in Pennsylvania in 1880, the incidents of travel as he
+outlined its intended treatment would have barely furnished the slightest
+of backgrounds. Captain John Smith, however, interfered with a project
+specially suited to his abilities and congenial to his tastes. That he
+did so possibly led the author of his life to exhibit a somewhat hostile
+attitude towards his hero. When the biography was finished, other
+engagements were pressing upon his attention. The opportunity of taking
+up and completing the projected series of essays never presented itself,
+though the subject lay in his mind for a long time and he himself
+believed that it would have turned out one of the best pieces of work he
+ever did.
+
+It was unfortunate. For to me--and very likely to many others if not to
+most--Warner's strength lay above all in essay-writing. What he
+accomplished in this line was almost invariably pervaded by that genial
+grace which makes work of the kind attractive, and he exhibited
+everywhere in it the delicate but sure touch which preserves the just
+mean between saying too much and too little. The essay was in his nature,
+and his occupation as a journalist had developed the tendency towards
+this form of literary activity, as well as skill in its manipulation.
+Whether he wrote sketches of travel, or whether he wrote fiction, the
+scene depicted was from the point of view of the essayist rather than
+from that of the tourist or of the novelist. It is this characteristic
+which gives to his work in the former field its enduring interest. Again
+in his novels, it was not so much the story that was in his thoughts as
+the opportunity the varying scenes afforded for amusing observations upon
+manners, for comments upon life, sometimes good-natured, sometimes
+severe, but always entertaining, and above all, for serious study of the
+social problems which present themselves on every side for examination.
+This is distinctly the province of the essayist, and in it Warner always
+displayed his fullest strength.
+
+We have seen that his first purely humorous publication of this nature
+was the one which made him known to the general public. It was speedily
+followed, however, by one of a somewhat graver character, which became at
+the time and has since remained a special favorite of cultivated readers.
+This is the volume entitled "Backlog Studies." The attractiveness of this
+work is as much due to the suggestive social and literary discussions
+with which it abounds as to the delicate and refined humor with which the
+ideas are expressed. Something of the same characteristics was displayed
+in the two little volumes of short pieces dealing with social topics,
+which came out later under the respective titles of "As We Were Saying,"
+and "As We Go." But there was a deeper and more serious side of his
+nature which found utterance in several of his essays, particularly in
+some which were given in the form of addresses delivered at various
+institutions of learning. They exhibit the charm which belongs to all his
+writings; but his feelings were too profoundly interested in the subjects
+considered to allow him to give more than occasional play to his humor.
+Essays contained in such a volume, for instance, as "The Relation of
+Literature to Life" will not appeal to him whose main object in reading
+is amusement. Into them Warner put his deepest and most earnest
+convictions. The subject from which the book just mentioned derived its
+title lay near to his heart. No one felt more strongly than he the
+importance of art of all kinds, but especially of literary art, for the
+uplifting of a nation. No one saw more distinctly the absolute necessity
+of its fullest recognition in a moneymaking age and in a money-making
+land, if the spread of the dry rot of moral deterioration were to be
+prevented. The ampler horizon it presented, the loftier ideals it set up,
+the counteracting agency it supplied to the sordidness of motive and act
+which, left unchecked, was certain to overwhelm the national spirit--all
+these were enforced by him again and again with clearness and
+effectiveness. His essays of this kind will never be popular in the sense
+in which are his other writings. But no thoughtful man will rise up from
+reading them without having gained a vivid conception of the part which
+literature plays in the life of even the humblest, and without a deeper
+conviction of its necessity to any healthy development of the character
+of a people.
+
+During the early part of his purely literary career a large proportion of
+Warner's collected writings, which then appeared, were first published in
+the Atlantic Monthly. But about fourteen years before his death he became
+closely connected with Harper's Magazine. From May, 1886, to March, 1892,
+he conducted the Editor's Drawer of that periodical. The month following
+this last date he succeeded William Dean Howells as the contributor of
+the Editor's Study. This position he held until July, 1898. The scope of
+this department was largely expanded after the death of George William
+Curtis in the summer of 1892, and the consequent discontinuance of the
+Editor's Easy Chair. Comments upon other topics than those to which his
+department was originally devoted, especially upon social questions, were
+made a distinct feature. His editorial connection with the magazine
+naturally led to his contributing to it numerous articles besides those
+which were demanded by the requirements of the position he held. Nearly
+all these, as well as those which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, are
+indicated in the bibliographical notes prefixed to the separate works.
+
+There were, however, other literary enterprises in which he was
+concerned; for the calls upon him were numerous, his own appetite for
+work was insatiable, and his activity was indefatigable. In 1881 he
+assumed the editorship of the American Men of Letters series. This he
+opened with his own biography of Washington Irving, the resemblance
+between whom and himself has been made the subject of frequent remark.
+Later he became the editor-in-chief of the thirty odd volumes which make
+up the collection entitled "The World's Best Literature." To this he
+contributed several articles of his own and carefully allotted and
+supervised the preparation of a large number of others. The labor he put
+upon the editing of this collection occupied him a great deal of the time
+from 1895 to 1898.
+
+But literature, though in it lay his chief interest, was but one of the
+subjects which employed his many-sided activity. He was constantly called
+upon for the discharge of civic duties. The confidence felt by his
+fellow-citizens in his judgment and taste was almost equal to the
+absolute trust reposed in his integrity. The man who establishes a
+reputation for the possession of these qualities can never escape from
+bearing the burdens which a good character always imposes. If any work of
+art was ordered by the state, Warner was fairly certain to be chosen a
+member of the commission selected to decide upon the person who was to do
+it and upon the way it was to be done. By his fellow-townsmen he was made
+a member of the Park Commission. Such were some of the duties imposed;
+there were others voluntarily undertaken. During the latter years of his
+life he became increasingly interested in social questions, some of which
+partook of a semi-political character. One of the subjects which engaged
+his attention was the best method to be adopted for elevating the
+character and conduct of the negro population of the country. He
+recognized the gravity of the problem with which the nation had to deal
+and the difficulties attending its solution. One essay on the subject was
+prepared for the meeting held at Washington in May, 1900, of the American
+Social Science Association, of which he was president. He was not able to
+be there in person. The disease which was ultimately to strike him down
+had already made its preliminary attack. His address was accordingly read
+for him. It was a subject of special regret that he could not be present
+to set forth more fully his views; for the debate, which followed the
+presentation of his paper, was by no means confined to the meeting, but
+extended to the press of the whole country. Whether the conclusions he
+reached were right or wrong, they were in no case adopted hastily nor
+indeed without the fullest consideration.
+
+But a more special interest of his lay in prison reform. The subject had
+engaged his attention long before he published anything in connection
+with it. Later one of the earliest articles he wrote for Harper's
+Magazine was devoted to it. It was in his thoughts just before his death.
+He was a member of the Connecticut commission on prisons, of the National
+Prison Association, and a vice-president of the New York Association for
+Prison Reform. A strong advocate of the doctrine of the indeterminate
+sentence, he had little patience with many of the judicial outgivings on
+that subject. To him they seemed opinions inherited, not formed, and in
+most cases were nothing more than the result of prejudice working upon
+ignorance. This particular question was one which he purposed to make the
+subject of his address as president of the Social Science Association, at
+its annual meeting in 1901. He never lived to complete what he had in
+mind.
+
+During his later years the rigor of the Northern winter had been too
+severe for Warner's health. He had accordingly found it advisable to
+spend as much of this season as he could in warmer regions. He visited at
+various times parts of the South, Mexico, and California. He passed the
+winter of 1892-93 at Florence; but he found the air of the valley of the
+Arno no perceptible improvement upon that of the valley of the
+Connecticut. In truth, neither disease nor death entertains a prejudice
+against any particular locality. This fact he was to learn by personal
+experience. In the spring of 1899, while at New Orleans, he was stricken
+by pneumonia which nearly brought him to the grave. He recovered, but it
+is probable that the strength of his system was permanently impaired, and
+with it his power of resisting disease. Still his condition was not such
+as to prevent him from going on with various projects he had been
+contemplating or from forming new ones. The first distinct warning of the
+approaching end was the facial paralysis which suddenly attacked him in
+April, 1900, while on a visit to Norfolk, Va. Yet even from that he
+seemed to be apparently on the full road to recovery during the following
+summer.
+
+It was in the second week of October, 1900, that Warner paid me a visit
+of two or three days. He was purposing to spend the winter in Southern
+California, coming back to the East in ample time to attend the annual
+meeting of the Social Science Association. His thoughts were even then
+busy with the subject of the address which, as president, he was to
+deliver on that occasion. It seemed to me that I had never seen him when
+his mind was more active or more vigorous. I was not only struck by the
+clearness of his views--some of which were distinctly novel, at least to
+me--but by the felicity and effectiveness with which they were put.
+
+Never, too, had I been more impressed with the suavity, the
+agreeableness, the general charm of his manner. He had determined during
+the coming winter to learn to ride the wheel, and we then and there
+planned to take a bicycle trip during the following summer, as we had
+previously made excursions together on horseback. When we parted, it was
+with the agreement that we should meet the next spring in Washington and
+fix definitely upon the time and region of our intended ride. It was on a
+Saturday morning that I bade him good-by, apparently in the best of
+health and spirits. It was on the evening of the following Saturday
+--October 20th--that the condensed, passionless, relentless message which
+the telegraph transmits, informed me that he had died that afternoon.
+
+That very day he had lunched at a friend's, where were gathered several
+of his special associates who had chanced to come together at the same
+house, and then had gone to the office of the Hartford Courant. There was
+not the slightest indication apparent of the end that was so near. After
+the company broke up, he started out to pay a visit to one of the city
+parks, of which he was a commissioner. On his way thither, feeling a
+certain faintness, he turned aside into a small house whose occupants he
+knew, and asked to sit down for a brief rest, and then, as the faintness
+increased, to lie undisturbed on the lounge for a few minutes. The few
+minutes passed, and with them his life. In the strictest sense of the
+words, he had fallen asleep. From one point of view it was an ideal way
+to die. To the individual, death coming so gently, so suddenly, is shorn
+of all its terrors. It is only those who live to remember and to lament
+that the suffering comes which has been spared the victim. Even to them,
+however, is the consolation that though they may have been fully prepared
+for the coming of the inevitable event, it would have been none the less
+painful when it actually came.
+
+Warner as a writer we all know. The various and varying opinions
+entertained about the quality and value of his work do not require notice
+here. Future times will assign him his exact position in the roll of
+American authors, and we need not trouble ourselves to anticipate, as we
+shall certainly not be able to influence, its verdict. But to only a
+comparatively few of those who knew him as a writer was it given to know
+him as a man; to still fewer to know him in that familiarity of intimacy
+which reveals all that is fine or ignoble in a man's personality. Scanty
+is the number of those who will come out of that severest of ordeals so
+successfully as he. The same conclusion would be reached, whether we were
+to consider him in his private relations or in his career as a man of
+letters. Among the irritable race of authors no one was freer from petty
+envy or jealousy. During many years of close intercourse, in which he
+constantly gave utterance to his views both of men and things with
+absolute unreserve, I recall no disparaging opinion ever expressed of any
+writer with whom he had been compared either for praise or blame. He had
+unquestionably definite and decided opinions. He would point out that
+such or such a work was above or below its author's ordinary level; but
+there was never any ill-nature in his comment, no depreciation for
+depreciation's sake. Never in truth was any one more loyal to his
+friends. If his literary conscience would not permit him to say anything
+in favor of something which they had done, he usually contented himself
+with saying nothing. Whatever failing there was on his critical side was
+due to this somewhat uncritical attitude; for it is from his particular
+friends that the writer is apt to get the most dispassionate
+consideration and sometimes the coldest commendation. It was a part of
+Warner's generous recognition of others that he was in all sincerity
+disposed to attribute to those he admired and to whom he was attached an
+ability of which some of them at least were much inclined to doubt their
+own possession.
+
+Were I indeed compelled to select any one word which would best give the
+impression, both social and literary, of Warner's personality, I should
+be disposed to designate it as urbanity. That seems to indicate best the
+one trait which most distinguished him either in conversation or writing.
+Whatever it was, it was innate, not assumed. It was the genuine outcome
+of the kindliness and broad-mindedness of his nature and led him to
+sympathize with men of all positions in life and of all kinds of ability.
+It manifested itself in his attitude towards every one with whom he came
+in contact. It led him to treat with fullest consideration all who were
+in the least degree under his direction, and converted in consequence the
+toil of subordinates into a pleasure. It impelled him to do unsought
+everything which lay in his power for the success of those in whom he
+felt interest. Many a young writer will recall his words of encouragement
+at some period in his own career when the quiet appreciation of one meant
+more to him than did later the loud applause of many. As it was in
+public, so it was in private life. The generosity of his spirit, the
+geniality and high-bred courtesy of his manner, rendered a visit to his
+home as much a social delight as his wide knowledge of literature and his
+appreciation of what was best in it made it an intellectual
+entertainment.
+
+
+THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE
+PRELIMINARY
+
+This paper was prepared and delivered at several of our universities as
+introductory to a course of five lectures which insisted on the value of
+literature in common life--some hearers thought with an exaggerated
+emphasis--and attempted to maintain the thesis that all genuine, enduring
+literature is the outcome of the time that produces it, is responsive to
+the general sentiment of its time; that this close relation to human life
+insures its welcome ever after as a true representation of human nature;
+and that consequently the most remunerative method of studying a
+literature is to study the people for whom it was produced. Illustrations
+of this were drawn from the Greek, the French, and the English
+literatures. This study always throws a flood of light upon the meaning
+of the text of an old author, the same light that the reader
+unconsciously has upon contemporary pages dealing with the life with
+which he is familiar. The reader can test this by taking up his
+Shakespeare after a thorough investigation of the customs, manners, and
+popular life of the Elizabethan period. Of course the converse is true
+that good literature is an open door into the life and mode of thought of
+the time and place where it originated.
+
+
+
+
+THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE
+
+I hade a vision once--you may all have had a like one--of the stream of
+time flowing through a limitless land. Along its banks sprang up in
+succession the generations of man. They did not move with the stream-they
+lived their lives and sank away; and always below them new generations
+appeared, to play their brief parts in what is called history--the
+sequence of human actions. The stream flowed on, opening for itself
+forever a way through the land. I saw that these successive dwellers on
+the stream were busy in constructing and setting afloat vessels of
+various size and form and rig--arks, galleys, galleons, sloops, brigs,
+boats propelled by oars, by sails, by steam. I saw the anxiety with which
+each builder launched his venture, and watched its performance and
+progress. The anxiety was to invent and launch something that should
+float on to the generations to come, and carry the name of the builder
+and the fame of his generation. It was almost pathetic, these puny
+efforts, because faith always sprang afresh in the success of each new
+venture. Many of the vessels could scarcely be said to be launched at
+all; they sank like lead, close to the shore. Others floated out for a
+time, and then, struck by a flaw in the wind, heeled over and
+disappeared. Some, not well put together, broke into fragments in the
+bufleting of the waves. Others danced on the flood, taking the sun on
+their sails, and went away with good promise of a long voyage. But only a
+few floated for any length of time, and still fewer were ever seen by the
+generation succeeding that which launched them. The shores of the stream
+were strewn with wrecks; there lay bleaching in the sand the ribs of many
+a once gallant craft.
+
+Innumerable were the devices of the builders to keep their inventions
+afloat. Some paid great attention to the form of the hull, others to the
+kind of cargo and the loading of it, while others--and these seemed the
+majority--trusted more to some new sort of sail, or new fashion of
+rudder, or new application of propelling power. And it was wonderful to
+see what these new ingenuities did for a time, and how each generation
+was deceived into the belief that its products would sail on forever. But
+one fate practically came to the most of them. They were too heavy, they
+were too light, they were built of old material, and they went to the
+bottom, they went ashore, they broke up and floated in fragments. And
+especially did the crafts built in imitation of something that had
+floated down from a previous generation come to quick disaster. I saw
+only here and there a vessel, beaten by weather and blackened by time
+--so old, perhaps, that the name of the maker was no longer legible; or
+some fragments of antique wood that had evidently come from far up the
+stream. When such a vessel appeared there was sure to arise great dispute
+about it, and from time to time expeditions were organized to ascend the
+river and discover the place and circumstances of its origin. Along the
+banks, at intervals, whole fleets of boats and fragments had gone ashore,
+and were piled up in bays, like the driftwood of a subsided freshet.
+Efforts were made to dislodge these from time to time and set them afloat
+again, newly christened, with fresh paint and sails, as if they stood a
+better chance of the voyage than any new ones. Indeed, I saw that a large
+part of the commerce of this river was, in fact, the old hulks and
+stranded wrecks that each generation had set afloat again. As I saw it in
+this foolish vision, how pathetic this labor was from generation to
+generation; so many vessels launched; so few making a voyage even for a
+lifetime; so many builders confident of immortality; so many lives
+outlasting this coveted reputation! And still the generations, each with
+touching hopefulness, busied themselves with this child's play on the
+banks of the stream; and still the river flowed on, whelming and wrecking
+the most of that so confidently committed to it, and bearing only here
+and there, on its swift, wide tide, a ship, a boat, a shingle.
+
+These hosts of men whom I saw thus occupied since history began were
+authors; these vessels were books; these heaps of refuse in the bays were
+great libraries. The allegory admits of any amount of ingenious
+parallelism. It is nevertheless misleading; it is the illusion of an idle
+fancy. I have introduced it because it expresses, with some whimsical
+exaggeration--not much more than that of "The Vision of Mirza"--the
+popular notion about literature and its relation to human life. In the
+popular conception, literature is as much a thing apart from life as
+these boats on the stream of time were from the existence, the struggle,
+the decay of the generations along the shore. I say in the popular
+conception, for literature is wholly different from this, not only in its
+effect upon individual lives, but upon the procession of lives upon this
+earth; it is not only an integral part of all of them, but, with its
+sister arts, it is the one unceasing continuity in history. Literature
+and art are not only the records and monuments made by the successive
+races of men, not only the local expressions of thought and emotion, but
+they are, to change the figure, the streams that flow on, enduring, amid
+the passing show of men, reviving, transforming, ennobling the fleeting
+generations. Without this continuity of thought and emotion, history
+would present us only a succession of meaningless experiments. The
+experiments fail, the experiments succeed--at any rate, they end--and
+what remains for transmission, for the sustenance of succeeding peoples?
+Nothing but the thought and emotion evolved and expressed. It is true
+that every era, each generation, seems to have its peculiar work to do;
+it is to subdue the intractable earth, to repel or to civilize the
+barbarians, to settle society in order, to build cities, to amass wealth
+in centres, to make deserts bloom, to construct edifices such as were
+never made before, to bring all men within speaking distance of each
+other--lucky if they have anything to say when that is accomplished--to
+extend the information of the few among the many, or to multiply the
+means of easy and luxurious living. Age after age the world labors for
+these things with the busy absorption of a colony of ants in its castle
+of sand. And we must confess that the process, such, for instance, as
+that now going on here--this onset of many peoples, which is transforming
+the continent of America--is a spectacle to excite the imagination in the
+highest degree. If there were any poet capable of putting into an epic
+the spirit of this achievement, what an epic would be his! Can it be that
+there is anything of more consequence in life than the great business in
+hand, which absorbs the vitality and genius of this age? Surely, we say,
+it is better to go by steam than to go afoot, because we reach our
+destination sooner--getting there quickly being a supreme object. It is
+well to force the soil to yield a hundred-fold, to congregate men in
+masses so that all their energies shall be taxed to bring food to
+themselves, to stimulate industries, drag coal and metal from the bowels
+of the earth, cover its surface with rails for swift-running carriages,
+to build ever larger palaces, warehouses, ships. This gigantic
+achievement strikes the imagination.
+
+If the world in which you live happens to be the world of books, if your
+pursuit is to know what has been done and said in the world, to the end
+that your own conception of the value of life may be enlarged, and that
+better things may be done and said hereafter, this world and this pursuit
+assume supreme importance in your mind. But you can in a moment place
+yourself in relations--you have not to go far, perhaps only to speak to
+your next neighbor--where the very existence of your world is scarcely
+recognized. All that has seemed to you of supreme importance is ignored.
+You have entered a world that is called practical, where the things that
+we have been speaking of are done; you have interest in it and sympathy
+with it, because your scheme of life embraces the development of ideas
+into actions; but these men of realities have only the smallest
+conception of the world that seems to you of the highest importance; and,
+further, they have no idea that they owe anything to it, that it has ever
+influenced their lives or can add anything to them. And it may chance
+that you have, for the moment, a sense of insignificance in the small
+part you are playing in the drama going forward. Go out of your library,
+out of the small circle of people who talk of books, who are engaged in
+research, whose liveliest interest is in the progress of ideas, in the
+expression of thought and emotion that is in literature; go out of this
+atmosphere into a region where it does not exist, it may be into a place
+given up to commerce and exchange, or to manufacturing, or to the
+development of certain other industries, such as mining, or the pursuit
+of office--which is sometimes called politics. You will speedily be aware
+how completely apart from human life literature is held to be, how few
+people regard it seriously as a necessary element in life, as anything
+more than an amusement or a vexation. I have in mind a mountain district,
+stripped, scarred, and blackened by the ruthless lumbermen, ravished of
+its forest wealth; divested of its beauty, which has recently become the
+field of vast coal-mining operations. Remote from communication, it was
+yesterday an exhausted, wounded, deserted country. Today audacious
+railways are entering it, crawling up its mountain slopes, rounding its
+dizzy precipices, spanning its valleys on iron cobwebs, piercing its
+hills with tunnels. Drifts are opened in its coal seams, to which iron
+tracks shoot away from the main line; in the woods is seen the gleam of
+the engineer's level, is heard the rattle of heavily-laden wagons on the
+newly-made roads; tents are pitched, uncouth shanties have sprung up,
+great stables, boarding-houses, stores, workshops; the miner, the
+blacksmith, the mason, the carpenter have arrived; households have been
+set up in temporary barracks, children are already there who need a
+school, women who must have a church and society; the stagnation has
+given place to excitement, money has flowed in, and everywhere are the
+hum of industry and the swish of the goad of American life. On this
+hillside, which in June was covered with oaks, is already in October a
+town; the stately trees have been felled; streets are laid out and graded
+and named; there are a hundred dwellings, there are a store, a
+post-office, an inn; the telegraph has reached it, and the telephone and
+the electric light; in a few weeks more it will be in size a city, with
+thousands of people--a town made out of hand by drawing men and women
+from other towns, civilized men and women, who have voluntarily put
+themselves in a position where they must be civilized over again.
+
+This is a marvelous exhibition of what energy and capital can do. You
+acknowledge as much to the creators of it. You remember that not far back
+in history such a transformation as this could not have been wrought in a
+hundred years. This is really life, this is doing something in the world,
+and in the presence of it you can see why the creators of it regard your
+world, which seemed to you so important, the world whose business is the
+evolution and expression of thought and emotion, as insignificant. Here
+is a material addition to the business and wealth of the race, here
+employment for men who need it, here is industry replacing stagnation,
+here is the pleasure of overcoming difficulties and conquering obstacles.
+Why encounter these difficulties? In order that more coal may be procured
+to operate more railway trains at higher speed, to supply more factories,
+to add to the industrial stir of modern life. The men who projected and
+are pushing on this enterprise, with an executive ability that would
+maintain and manoeuvre an army in a campaign, are not, however,
+consciously philanthropists, moved by the charitable purpose of giving
+employment to men, or finding satisfaction in making two blades of grass
+grow where one grew before. They enjoy no doubt the sense of power in
+bringing things to pass, the feeling of leadership and the consequence
+derived from its recognition; but they embark in this enterprise in order
+that they may have the position and the luxury that increased wealth will
+bring, the object being, in most cases, simply material
+advantages--sumptuous houses, furnished with all the luxuries which are
+the signs of wealth, including, of course, libraries and pictures and
+statuary and curiosities, the most showy equipages and troops of
+servants; the object being that their wives shall dress magnificently,
+glitter in diamonds and velvets, and never need to put their feet to the
+ground; that they may command the best stalls in the church, the best
+pews in the theatre, the choicest rooms in the inn, and--a consideration
+that Plato does not mention, because his world was not our world--that
+they may impress and reduce to obsequious deference the hotel clerk.
+
+This life--for this enterprise and its objects are types of a
+considerable portion of life--is not without its ideal, its hero, its
+highest expression, its consummate flower. It is expressed in a word
+which I use without any sense of its personality, as the French use the
+word Barnum--for our crude young nation has the distinction of adding a
+verb to the French language, the verb to barnum--it is expressed in the
+well-known name Croesus. This is a standard--impossible to be reached
+perhaps, but a standard. If one may say so, the country is sown with
+seeds of Croesus, and the crop is forward and promising. The interest to
+us now in the observation of this phase of modern life is not in the
+least for purposes of satire or of reform. We are inquiring how wholly
+this conception of life is divorced from the desire to learn what has
+been done and said to the end that better things may be done and said
+hereafter, in order that we may understand the popular conception of the
+insignificant value of literature in human affairs. But it is not aside
+from our subject, rather right in its path, to take heed of what the
+philosophers say of the effect in other respects of the pursuit of
+wealth.
+
+One cause of the decay of the power of defense in a state, says the
+Athenian Stranger in Plato's Laws--one cause is the love of wealth, which
+wholly absorbs men and never for a moment allows them to think of
+anything but their private possessions; on this the soul of every citizen
+hangs suspended, and can attend to nothing but his daily gain; mankind
+are ready to learn any branch of knowledge and to follow any pursuit
+which tends to this end, and they laugh at any other; that is the reason
+why a city will not be in earnest about war or any other good and
+honorable pursuit.
+
+The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals, says
+Socrates, in the Republic, is the ruin of democracy. They invent illegal
+modes of expenditure; and what do they or their wives care about the law?
+
+"And then one, seeing another's display, proposes to rival him, and thus
+the whole body of citizens acquires a similar character.
+
+"After that they get on in a trade, and the more they think of making a
+fortune, the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are
+placed together in the balance, the one always rises as the other falls.
+
+"And in proportion as riches and rich men are honored in the state,
+virtue and the virtuous are dishonored.
+
+"And what is honored is cultivated, and that which has no honor is
+neglected.
+
+"And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become
+lovers of trade and money, and they honor and reverence the rich man and
+make a ruler of him, and dishonor the poor man.
+
+"They do so."
+
+The object of a reasonable statesman (it is Plato who is really speaking
+in the Laws) is not that the state should be as great and rich as
+possible, should possess gold and silver, and have the greatest empire by
+sea and land.
+
+The citizen must, indeed, be happy and good, and the legislator will seek
+to make him so; but very rich and very good at the same time he cannot
+be; not at least in the sense in which many speak of riches. For they
+describe by the term "rich" the few who have the most valuable
+possessions, though the owner of them be a rogue. And if this is true, I
+can never assent to the doctrine that the rich man will be happy: he must
+be good as well as rich. And good in a high degree and rich in a high
+degree at the same time he cannot be. Some one will ask, Why not? And we
+shall answer, Because acquisitions which come from sources which are just
+and unjust indifferently are more than double those which come from just
+sources only; and the sums which are expended neither honorably nor
+disgracefully are only half as great as those which are expended
+honorably and on honorable purposes. Thus if one acquires double and
+spends half, the other, who is in the opposite case and is a good man,
+cannot possibly be wealthier than he. The first (I am speaking of the
+saver, and not of the spender) is not always bad; he may indeed in some
+cases be utterly bad, but as I was saying, a good man he never is. For he
+who receives money unjustly as well as justly, and spends neither justly
+nor unjustly, will be a rich man if he be also thrifty. On the other
+hand, the utterly bad man is generally profligate, and therefore poor;
+while he who spends on noble objects, and acquires wealth by just means
+only, can hardly be remarkable for riches any more than he can be very
+poor. The argument, then, is right in declaring that the very rich are
+not good, and if they are not good they are not happy.
+
+And the conclusion of Plato is that we ought not to pursue any occupation
+to the neglect of that for which riches exist--"I mean," he says, "soul
+and body, which without gymnastics and without education will never be
+worth anything; and therefore, as we have said not once but many times,
+the care of riches should have the last place in our thoughts."
+
+Men cannot be happy unless they are good, and they cannot be good unless
+the care of the soul occupies the first place in their thoughts. That is
+the first interest of man; the interest in the body is midway; and last
+of all, when rightly regarded, is the interest about money.
+
+The majority of mankind reverses this order of interests, and therefore
+it sets literature to one side as of no practical account in human life.
+More than this, it not only drops it out of mind, but it has no
+conception of its influence and power in the very affairs from which it
+seems to be excluded. It is my purpose to show not only the close
+relation of literature to ordinary life, but its eminent position in
+life, and its saving power in lives which do not suspect its influence or
+value. Just as it is virtue that saves the state, if it be saved,
+although the majority do not recognize it and attribute the salvation of
+the state to energy, and to obedience to the laws of political economy,
+and to discoveries in science, and to financial contrivances; so it is
+that in the life of generations of men, considered from an ethical and
+not from a religious point of view, the most potent and lasting influence
+for a civilization that is worth anything, a civilization that does not
+by its own nature work its decay, is that which I call literature. It is
+time to define what we mean by literature. We may arrive at the meaning
+by the definition of exclusion. We do not mean all books, but some books;
+not all that is written and published, but only a small part of it. We do
+not mean books of law, of theology, of politics, of science, of medicine,
+and not necessarily books of travel, or adventure, or biography, or
+fiction even. These may all be ephemeral in their nature. The term
+belles-lettres does not fully express it, for it is too narrow. In books
+of law, theology, politics, medicine, science, travel, adventure,
+biography, philosophy, and fiction there may be passages that possess, or
+the whole contents may possess, that quality which comes within our
+meaning of literature. It must have in it something of the enduring and
+the universal. When we use the term art, we do not mean the arts; we are
+indicating a quality that may be in any of the arts. In art and
+literature we require not only an expression of the facts in nature and
+in human life, but of feeling, thought, emotion. There must be an appeal
+to the universal in the race. It is, for example, impossible for a
+Christian today to understand what the religious system of the Egyptians
+of three thousand years ago was to the Egyptian mind, or to grasp the
+idea conveyed to a Chinaman's thought in the phrase, "the worship of the
+principle of heaven"; but the Christian of today comprehends perfectly
+the letters of an Egyptian scribe in the time of Thotmes III., who
+described the comical miseries of his campaign with as clear an appeal to
+universal human nature as Horace used in his 'Iter Brundusium;' and the
+maxims of Confucius are as comprehensible as the bitter-sweetness of
+Thomas a Kempis. De Quincey distinguishes between the literature of
+knowledge and the literature of power. The definition is not exact; but
+we may say that the one is a statement of what is known, the other is an
+emanation from the man himself; or that one may add to the sum of human
+knowledge, and the other addresses itself to a higher want in human
+nature than the want of knowledge. We select and set aside as literature
+that which is original, the product of what we call genius. As I have
+said, the subject of a production does not always determine the desired
+quality which makes it literature. A biography may contain all the facts
+in regard to a man and his character, arranged in an orderly and
+comprehensible manner, and yet not be literature; but it may be so
+written, like Plutarch's Lives or Defoe's account of Robinson Crusoe,
+that it is literature, and of imperishable value as a picture of human
+life, as a satisfaction to the want of the human mind which is higher
+than the want of knowledge. And this contribution, which I desire to be
+understood to mean when I speak of literature, is precisely the thing of
+most value in the lives of the majority of men, whether they are aware of
+it or not. It may be weighty and profound; it may be light, as light as
+the fall of a leaf or a bird's song on the shore; it may be the thought
+of Plato when he discourses of the character necessary in a perfect
+state, or of Socrates, who, out of the theorem of an absolute beauty,
+goodness, greatness, and the like, deduces the immortality of the soul;
+or it may be the lovesong of a Scotch plowman: but it has this one
+quality of answering to a need in human nature higher than a need for
+facts, for knowledge, for wealth.
+
+In noticing the remoteness in the popular conception of the relation of
+literature to life, we must not neglect to take into account what may be
+called the arrogance of culture, an arrogance that has been emphasized,
+in these days of reaction from the old attitude of literary
+obsequiousness, by harsh distinctions and hard words, which are paid back
+by equally emphasized contempt. The apostles of light regard the rest of
+mankind as barbarians and Philistines, and the world retorts that these
+self-constituted apostles are idle word-mongers, without any sympathy
+with humanity, critics and jeerers who do nothing to make the conditions
+of life easier. It is natural that every man should magnify the circle of
+the world in which he is active and imagine that all outside of it is
+comparatively unimportant. Everybody who is not a drone has his
+sufficient world. To the lawyer it is his cases and the body of law, it
+is the legal relation of men that is of supreme importance; to the
+merchant and manufacturer all the world consists in buying and selling,
+in the production and exchange of products; to the physician all the
+world is diseased and in need of remedies; to the clergyman speculation
+and the discussion of dogmas and historical theology assume immense
+importance; the politician has his world, the artist his also, and the
+man of books and letters a realm still apart from all others. And to each
+of these persons what is outside of his world seems of secondary
+importance; he is absorbed in his own, which seems to him all-embracing.
+To the lawyer everybody is or ought to be a litigant; to the grocer the
+world is that which eats, and pays--with more or less regularity; to the
+scholar the world is in books and ideas. One realizes how possessed he is
+with his own little world only when by chance he changes his profession
+or occupation and looks back upon the law, or politics, or journalism,
+and sees in its true proportion what it was that once absorbed him and
+seemed to him so large. When Socrates discusses with Gorgias the value of
+rhetoric, the use of which, the latter asserts, relates to the greatest
+and best of human things, Socrates says: I dare say you have heard men
+singing--at feasts the old drinking-song, in which the singers enumerate
+the goods of life-first, health; beauty next; thirdly, wealth honestly
+acquired. The producers of these things--the physician, the trainer, the
+money-maker--each in turn contends that his art produces the greatest
+good. Surely, says the physician, health is the greatest good; there is
+more good in my art, says the trainer, for my business is to make men
+beautiful and strong in body; and consider, says the money-maker, whether
+any one can produce a greater good than wealth. But, insists Gorgias, the
+greatest good of men, of which I am the creator, is that which gives men
+freedom in their persons, and the power of ruling over others in their
+several states--that is, the word which persuades the judge in the court,
+or the senators in the council, or the citizens in the assembly: if you
+have the power of uttering this word, you will have the physician your
+slave, and the trainer your slave, and the moneymaker of whom you talk
+will be found to gather treasures, not for himself, but for those who are
+able to speak and persuade the multitude.
+
+What we call life is divided into occupations and interest, and the
+horizons of mankind are bounded by them. It happens naturally enough,
+therefore, that there should be a want of sympathy in regard to these
+pursuits among men, the politician despising the scholar, and the scholar
+looking down upon the politician, and the man of affairs, the man of
+industries, not caring to conceal his contempt for both the others. And
+still more reasonable does the division appear between all the world
+which is devoted to material life, and the few who live in and for the
+expression of thought and emotion. It is a pity that this should be so,
+for it can be shown that life would not be worth living divorced from the
+gracious and ennobling influence of literature, and that literature
+suffers atrophy when it does not concern itself with the facts and
+feelings of men.
+
+If the poet lives in a world apart from the vulgar, the most lenient
+apprehension of him is that his is a sort of fool's paradise. One of the
+most curious features in the relation of literature to life is this, that
+while poetry, the production of the poet, is as necessary to universal
+man as the atmosphere, and as acceptable, the poet is regarded with that
+mingling of compassion and undervaluation, and perhaps awe, which once
+attached to the weak-minded and insane, and which is sometimes expressed
+by the term "inspired idiot." However the poet may have been petted and
+crowned, however his name may have been diffused among peoples, I doubt
+not that the popular estimate of him has always been substantially what
+it is today. And we all know that it is true, true in our individual
+consciousness, that if a man be known as a poet and nothing else, if his
+character is sustained by no other achievement than the production of
+poetry, he suffers in our opinion a loss of respect. And this is only
+recovered for him after he is dead, and his poetry is left alone to speak
+for his name. However fond my lord and lady were of the ballad, the place
+of the minstrel was at the lower end of the hall. If we are pushed to say
+why this is, why this happens to the poet and not to the producers of
+anything else that excites the admiration of mankind, we are forced to
+admit that there is something in the poet to sustain the popular judgment
+of his in utility. In all the occupations and professions of life there
+is a sign put up, invisible--but none the less real, and expressing an
+almost universal feeling--"No poet need apply." And this is not because
+there are so many poor poets; for there are poor lawyers, poor soldiers,
+poor statesmen, incompetent business men; but none of the personal
+disparagement attaches to them that is affixed to the poet. This popular
+estimate of the poet extends also, possibly in less degree, to all the
+producers of the literature that does not concern itself with knowledge.
+It is not our care to inquire further why this is so, but to repeat that
+it is strange that it should be so when poetry is, and has been at all
+times, the universal solace of all peoples who have emerged out of
+barbarism, the one thing not supernatural and yet akin to the
+supernatural, that makes the world, in its hard and sordid conditions,
+tolerable to the race. For poetry is not merely the comfort of the
+refined and the delight of the educated; it is the alleviator of poverty,
+the pleasure-ground of the ignorant, the bright spot in the most dreary
+pilgrimage. We cannot conceive the abject animal condition of our race
+were poetry abstracted; and we do not wonder that this should be so when
+we reflect that it supplies a want higher than the need for food, for
+raiment, or ease of living, and that the mind needs support as much as
+the body. The majority of mankind live largely in the imagination, the
+office or use of which is to lift them in spirit out of the bare physical
+conditions in which the majority exist. There are races, which we may
+call the poetical races, in which this is strikingly exemplified. It
+would be difficult to find poverty more complete, physical wants less
+gratified, the conditions of life more bare than among the Oriental
+peoples from the Nile to the Ganges and from the Indian Ocean to the
+steppes of Siberia. But there are perhaps none among the more favored
+races who live so much in the world of imagination fed by poetry and
+romance. Watch the throng seated about an Arab or Indian or Persian
+story-teller and poet, men and women with all the marks of want, hungry,
+almost naked, without any prospect in life of ever bettering their sordid
+condition; see their eyes kindle, their breathing suspended, their tense
+absorption; see their tears, hear their laughter, note their excitement
+as the magician unfolds to them a realm of the imagination in which they
+are free for the hour to wander, tasting a keen and deep enjoyment that
+all the wealth of Croesus cannot purchase for his disciples. Measure, if
+you can, what poetry is to them, what their lives would be without it. To
+the millions and millions of men who are in this condition, the bard, the
+story-teller, the creator of what we are considering as literature, comes
+with the one thing that can lift them out of poverty, suffering--all the
+woe of which nature is so heedless.
+
+It is not alone of the poetical nations of the East that this is true,
+nor is this desire for the higher enjoyment always wanting in the savage
+tribes of the West. When the Jesuit Fathers in 1768 landed upon the
+almost untouched and unexplored southern Pacific coast, they found in the
+San Gabriel Valley in Lower California that the Indians had games and
+feasts at which they decked themselves in flower garlands that reached to
+their feet, and that at these games there were song contests which
+sometimes lasted for three days. This contest of the poets was an old
+custom with them. And we remember how the ignorant Icelanders, who had
+never seen a written character, created the splendid Saga, and handed it
+down from father to son. We shall scarcely find in Europe a peasantry
+whose abject poverty is not in some measure alleviated by this power
+which literature gives them to live outside it. Through our sacred
+Scriptures, through the ancient storytellers, through the tradition which
+in literature made, as I said, the chief continuity in the stream of
+time, we all live a considerable, perhaps the better, portion of our
+lives in the Orient. But I am not sure that the Scotch peasant, the
+crofter in his Highland cabin, the operative in his squalid
+tenement-house, in the hopelessness of poverty, in the grime of a life
+made twice as hard as that of the Arab by an inimical climate, does not
+owe more to literature than the man of culture, whose material
+surroundings are heaven in the imagination of the poor. Think what his
+wretched life would be, in its naked deformity, without the popular
+ballads, without the romances of Scott, which have invested his land for
+him, as for us, with enduring charm; and especially without the songs of
+Burns, which keep alive in him the feeling that he is a man, which impart
+to his blunted sensibility the delicious throb of spring-songs that
+enable him to hear the birds, to see the bits of blue sky-songs that make
+him tender of the wee bit daisy at his feet--songs that hearten him when
+his heart is fit to break with misery. Perhaps the English peasant, the
+English operative, is less susceptible to such influences than the Scotch
+or the Irish; but over him, sordid as his conditions are, close kin as he
+is to the clod, the light of poetry is diffused; there filters into his
+life, also, something of that divine stream of which we have spoken, a
+dialect poem that touches him, the leaf of a psalm, some bit of
+imagination, some tale of pathos, set afloat by a poor writer so long ago
+that it has become the common stock of human tradition-maybe from
+Palestine, maybe from the Ganges, perhaps from Athens--some expression of
+real emotion, some creation, we say, that makes for him a world, vague
+and dimly apprehended, that is not at all the actual world in which he
+sins and suffers. The poor woman, in a hut with an earth floor, a reeking
+roof, a smoky chimney, barren of comfort, so indecent that a gentleman
+would not stable his horse in it, sits and sews upon a coarse garment,
+while she rocks the cradle of an infant about whom she cherishes no
+illusions that his lot will be other than that of his father before him.
+As she sits forlorn, it is not the wretched hovel that she sees, nor
+other hovels like it--rows of tenements of hopeless poverty, the
+ale-house, the gin-shop, the coal-pit, and the choking factory--but:
+
+       "Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood
+        Stand dressed in living green"
+
+for her, thanks to the poet. But, alas for the poet there is not a
+peasant nor a wretched operative of them all who will not shake his head
+and tap his forehead with his forefinger when the poor poet chap passes
+by. The peasant has the same opinion of him that the physician, the
+trainer, and the money-lender had of the rhetorician.
+
+The hard conditions of the lonely New England life, with its religious
+theories as sombre as its forests, its rigid notions of duty as difficult
+to make bloom into sweetness and beauty as the stony soil, would have
+been unendurable if they had not been touched with the ideal created by
+the poet. There was in creed and purpose the virility that creates a
+state, and, as Menander says, the country which is cultivated with
+difficulty produces brave men; but we leave out an important element in
+the lives of the Pilgrims if we overlook the means they had of living
+above their barren circumstances. I do not speak only of the culture
+which many of them brought from the universities, of the Greek and Roman
+classics, and what unworldly literature they could glean from the
+productive age of Elizabeth and James, but of another source, more
+universally resorted to, and more powerful in exciting imagination and
+emotion, and filling the want in human nature of which we have spoken.
+They had the Bible, and it was more to them, much more, than a book of
+religion, than a revelation of religious truth, a rule for the conduct of
+life, or a guide to heaven. It supplied the place to them of the
+Mahabharata to the Hindoo, of the story-teller to the Arab. It opened to
+them a boundless realm of poetry and imagination.
+
+What is the Bible? It might have sufficed, accepted as a book of
+revelation, for all the purposes of moral guidance, spiritual
+consolation, and systematized authority, if it had been a collection of
+precepts, a dry code of morals, an arsenal of judgments, and a treasury
+of promises. We are accustomed to think of the Pilgrims as training their
+intellectual faculties in the knottiest problems of human responsibility
+and destiny, toughening their mental fibre in wrestling with dogmas and
+the decrees of Providence, forgetting what else they drew out of the
+Bible: what else it was to them in a degree it has been to few peoples
+many age. For the Bible is the unequaled record of thought and emotion,
+the reservoir of poetry, traditions, stories, parables, exaltations,
+consolations, great imaginative adventure, for which the spirit of man is
+always longing. It might have been, in warning examples and commands,
+all-sufficient to enable men to make a decent pilgrimage on earth and
+reach a better country; but it would have been a very different book to
+mankind if it had been only a volume of statutes, and if it lacked its
+wonderful literary quality. It might have enabled men to reach a better
+country, but not, while on earth, to rise into and live in that better
+country, or to live in a region above the sordidness of actual life. For,
+apart from its religious intention and sacred character, the book is so
+written that it has supremely in its history, poetry, prophecies,
+promises, stories, that clear literary quality that supplies, as
+certainly no other single book does, the want in the human mind which is
+higher than the want of facts or knowledge.
+
+The Bible is the best illustration of the literature of power, for it
+always concerns itself with life, it touches it at all points. And this
+is the test of any piece of literature--its universal appeal to human
+nature. When I consider the narrow limitations of the Pilgrim households,
+the absence of luxury, the presence of danger and hardship, the harsh
+laws--only less severe than the contemporary laws of England and
+Virginia--the weary drudgery, the few pleasures, the curb upon the
+expression of emotion and of tenderness, the ascetic repression of
+worldly thought, the absence of poetry in the routine occupations and
+conditions, I can feel what the Bible must have been to them. It was an
+open door into a world where emotion is expressed, where imagination can
+range, where love and longing find a language, where imagery is given to
+every noble and suppressed passion of the soul, where every aspiration
+finds wings. It was history, or, as Thucydides said, philosophy teaching
+by example; it was the romance of real life; it was entertainment
+unfailing; the wonder-book of childhood, the volume of sweet sentiment to
+the shy maiden, the sword to the soldier, the inciter of the youth to
+heroic enduring of hardness, it was the refuge of the aged in failing
+activity. Perhaps we can nowhere find a better illustration of the true
+relation of literature to life than in this example.
+
+Let us consider the comparative value of literature to mankind. By
+comparative value I mean its worth to men in comparison with other things
+of acknowledged importance, such as the creation of industries, the
+government of States, the manipulation of the politics of an age, the
+achievements in war and discovery, and the lives of admirable men. It
+needs a certain perspective to judge of this aright, for the near and the
+immediate always assume importance. The work that an age has on hand,
+whether it be discovery, conquest, the wars that determine boundaries or
+are fought for policies, the industries that develop a country or affect
+the character of a people, the wielding of power, the accumulation of
+fortunes, the various activities of any given civilization or period,
+assume such enormous proportions to those engaged in them that such a
+modest thing as the literary product seems insignificant in comparison;
+and hence it is that the man of action always holds in slight esteem the
+man of thought, and especially the expresser of feeling and emotion, the
+poet and the humorist. It is only when we look back over the ages, when
+civilizations have passed or changed, over the rivalries of States, the
+ambitions and enmities of men, the shining deeds and the base deeds that
+make up history, that we are enabled to see what remains, what is
+permanent. Perhaps the chief result left to the world out of a period of
+heroic exertion, of passion and struggle and accumulation, is a sheaf of
+poems, or the record by a man of letters of some admirable character.
+Spain filled a large place in the world in the sixteenth century, and its
+influence upon history is by no means spent yet; but we have inherited
+out of that period nothing, I dare say, that is of more value than the
+romance of Don Quixote. It is true that the best heritage of generation
+from generation is the character of great men; but we always owe its
+transmission to the poet and the writer. Without Plato there would be no
+Socrates. There is no influence comparable in human life to the
+personality of a powerful man, so long as he is present to his
+generation, or lives in the memory of those who felt his influence. But
+after time has passed, will the world, will human life, that is
+essentially the same in all changing conditions, be more affected by what
+Bismarck did or by what Goethe said?
+
+We may without impropriety take for an illustration of the comparative
+value of literature to human needs the career of a man now living. In the
+opinion of many, Mr. Gladstone is the greatest Englishman of this age.
+What would be the position of the British empire, what would be the
+tendency of English politics and society without him, is a matter for
+speculation. He has not played such a role for England and its neighbors
+as Bismarck has played for Germany and the Continent, but he has been one
+of the most powerful influences in molding English action. He is the
+foremost teacher. Rarely in history has a nation depended more upon a
+single man, at times, than the English upon Gladstone, upon his will, his
+ability, and especially his character. In certain recent crises the
+thought of losing him produced something like a panic in the English
+mind, justifying in regard to him, the hyperbole of Choate upon the death
+of Webster, that the sailor on the distant sea would feel less safe--as
+if a protecting providence had been withdrawn from the world. His mastery
+of finance and of economic problems, his skill in debate, his marvelous
+achievements in oratory, have extorted the admiration of his enemies.
+There is scarcely a province in government, letters, art, or research in
+which the mind can win triumphs that he has not invaded and displayed his
+power in; scarcely a question in politics, reform, letters, religion,
+archaeology, sociology, which he has not discussed with ability. He is a
+scholar, critic, parliamentarian, orator, voluminous writer. He seems
+equally at home in every field of human activity--a man of prodigious
+capacity and enormous acquirements. He can take up, with a turn of the
+hand, and always with vigor, the cause of the Greeks, Papal power,
+education, theology, the influence of Egypt on Homer, the effect of
+English legislation on King O'Brien, contributing something noteworthy to
+all the discussions of the day. But I am not aware that he has ever
+produced a single page of literature. Whatever space he has filled in his
+own country, whatever and however enduring the impression he has made
+upon English life and society, does it seem likely that the sum total of
+his immense activity in so many fields, after the passage of so many
+years, will be worth to the world as much as the simple story of Rab and
+his Friends? Already in America I doubt if it is. The illustration might
+have more weight with some minds if I contrasted the work of this great
+man--as to its answering to a deep want in human nature--with a novel
+like 'Henry Esmond' or a poem like 'In Memoriam'; but I think it is
+sufficient to rest it upon so slight a performance as the sketch by Dr.
+John Brown, of Edinburgh. For the truth is that a little page of
+literature, nothing more than a sheet of paper with a poem written on it,
+may have that vitality, that enduring quality, that adaptation to life,
+that make it of more consequence to all who inherit it than every
+material achievement of the age that produced it. It was nothing but a
+sheet of paper with a poem on it, carried to the door of his London
+patron, for which the poet received a guinea, and perhaps a seat at the
+foot of my lord's table. What was that scrap compared to my lord's
+business, his great establishment, his equipages in the Park, his
+position in society, his weight in the House of Lords, his influence in
+Europe? And yet that scrap of paper has gone the world over; it has been
+sung in the camp, wept over in the lonely cottage; it has gone with the
+marching regiments, with the explorers--with mankind, in short, on its
+way down the ages, brightening, consoling, elevating life; and my lord,
+who regarded as scarcely above a menial the poet to whom he tossed the
+guinea--my lord, with all his pageantry and power, has utterly gone and
+left no witness.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Relation of Literature to Life
+by Charles Dudley Warner
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+Project Gutenberg's Relation of Literature to Life, by Warner
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+Title: Relation of Literature to Life
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+Relation of Literature To Life
+
+By Charles Dudley Warner
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY.
+THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE
+
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
+
+The county of Franklin in Northwestern Massachusetts, if not rivaling in
+certain ways the adjoining Berkshire, has still a romantic beauty of its
+own.  In the former half of the nineteenth century its population was
+largely given up to the pursuit of agriculture, though not under
+altogether favorable conditions.  Manufactures had not yet invaded the
+region either to add to its wealth or to defile its streams.  The
+villages were small, the roads pretty generally wretched save in summer,
+and from many of the fields the most abundant crop that could be gathered
+was that of stones.
+
+The character of the people conformed in many ways to that of the soil.
+The houses which lined the opposite sides of the single street, of which
+the petty places largely consisted, as well as the dwellings which dotted
+the country, were the homes of men who possessed in fullness many of the
+features, good and bad, that characterized the Puritan stock to which
+they belonged.  There was a good deal of religion in these rural
+communities and occasionally some culture.  Still, as a rule, it must be
+confessed, there would be found in them much more of plain living than of
+high thinking.  Broad thinking could hardly be said to exist at all.
+By the dwellers in that region Easter had scarcely even been heard of;
+Christmas was tolerated after a fashion, but was nevertheless looked upon
+with a good deal of suspicion as a Popish invention.  In the beliefs of
+these men several sins not mentioned in the decalogue took really, if
+unconsciously, precedence of those which chanced to be found in that
+list.  Dancing was distinctly immoral; card-playing led directly to
+gambling with all its attendant evils; theatre-going characterized the
+conduct of the more disreputable denizens of great cities.  Fiction was
+not absolutely forbidden; but the most lenient regarded it as a great
+waste of time, and the boy who desired its solace on any large scale was
+under the frequent necessity of seeking the seclusion of the haymow.
+
+But however rigid and stern the beliefs of men might be, nature was there
+always charming, not only in her summer beauty, but even in her wildest
+winter moods.  Narrow, too, as might be the views of the members of these
+communities about the conduct of life, there was ever before the minds of
+the best of them an ideal of devotion to duty, an earnest all-pervading
+moral purpose which implanted the feeling that neither personal success
+nor pleasure of any sort could ever afford even remotely compensation for
+the neglect of the least obligation which their situation imposed.
+It was no misfortune for any one, who was later to be transported to a
+broader horizon and more genial air, to have struck the roots of his
+being in a soil where men felt the full sense of moral responsibility for
+everything said or done, and where the conscience was almost as sensitive
+to the suggestion of sin as to its actual accomplishment.
+
+It was amidst such surroundings that Charles Dudley Warner was born on
+the 12th of September, 1829.  His birthplace was the hill town of
+Plainfield, over two thousand feet above the level of the sea.
+His father, a farmer, was a man of cultivation, though not college-bred.
+He died when his eldest son had reached the age of five, leaving to his
+widow the care of two children.  Three years longer the family continued
+to remain on the farm.  But however delightful the scenery of the country
+might be, its aesthetic attractions did not sufficiently counterbalance
+its agricultural disadvantages.  Furthermore, while the summers were
+beautiful on this high table land, the winters were long and dreary in
+the enforced solitude of a thinly settled region.  In consequence, the
+farm was sold after the death of the grandfather, and the home broken up.
+The mother with her two children, went to the neighboring village of
+Charlemont on the banks of the Deerfield.  There the elder son took up
+his residence with his guardian and relative, a man of position and
+influence in the community, who was the owner of a large farm.  With him
+he stayed until he was twelve years old, enjoying all the pleasures and
+doing all the miscellaneous jobs of the kind which fall to the lot of a
+boy brought up in an agricultural community.
+
+The story of this particular period of his life was given by Warner in a
+work which was published about forty years later.  It is the volume
+entitled "Being a Boy."  Nowhere has there been drawn a truer or more
+vivid picture of rural New England.  Nowhere else can there be found such
+a portrayal of the sights and sounds, the pains and pleasures of life on
+a farm as seen from the point of view of a boy.  Here we have them all
+graphically represented: the daily "chores" that must be looked after;
+the driving of cows to and from the pasture; the clearing up of fields
+where vegetation struggled with difficulty against the prevailing stones;
+the climbing of lofty trees and the swaying back and forth in the wind on
+their topmost boughs; the hunting of woodchucks; the nutting excursions
+of November days, culminating in the glories of Thanksgiving; the romance
+of school life, over which vacations, far from being welcomed with
+delight, cast a gloom as involving extra work; the cold days of winter
+with its deep or drifting snows, the mercury of the thermometer clinging
+with fondness to zero, even when the sun was shining brilliantly; the
+long chilling nights in which the frost carved fantastic structures on
+the window-panes; the eager watching for the time when the sap would
+begin to run in the sugar-maples; the evenings given up to reading, with
+the inevitable inward discontent at being sent to bed too early; the
+longing for the mild days of spring to come, when the heavy cowhide boots
+could be discarded, and the boy could rejoice at last in the covering for
+his feet which the Lord had provided.  These and scores of similar
+descriptions fill up the picture of the life furnished here.  It was
+nature's own school wherein was to be gained the fullest intimacy with
+her spirit.  While there was much which she could not teach, there was
+also much which she alone could teach.  From his communion with her the
+boy learned lessons which the streets of crowded cities could never have
+imparted.
+
+At the age of twelve this portion of his education came to an end.
+The family then moved to Cazenovia in Madison county in Central New York,
+from which place Warner's mother had come, and where her immediate
+relatives then resided.  Until he went to college this was his home.
+There he attended a preparatory school under the direction of the
+Methodist Episcopal Church, which was styled the Oneida Conference
+Seminary.  It was at this institution that he fitted mainly for college;
+for to college it had been his father's dying wish that he should go,
+and the boy himself did not need the spur of this parting injunction.
+A college near his home was the excellent one of Hamilton in the not
+distant town of Clinton in the adjoining county of Oneida.  Thither he
+repaired in 1848, and as he had made the best use of his advantages, he
+was enabled to enter the sophomore class.  He was graduated in 1851.
+
+But while fond of study he had all these years been doing something
+besides studying.  The means of the family were limited, and to secure
+the education he desired, not only was it necessary to husband the
+resources he possessed, but to increase them in every possible way.
+Warner had all the American boy's willingness to undertake any occupation
+not in itself discreditable.  Hence to him fell a full share of those
+experiences which have diversified the early years of so many men who
+have achieved success.  He set up type in a printing office; he acted as
+an assistant in a bookstore; he served as clerk in a post-office.  He was
+thus early brought into direct contact with persons of all classes and
+conditions of life.
+
+The experience gave to his keenly observant mind an insight into the
+nature of men which was to be of special service to him in later years.
+Further, it imparted to him a familiarity with their opinions and hopes
+and aspirations which enabled him to understand and sympathize with
+feelings in which he did not always share.
+
+During the years which immediately followed his departure from college,
+Warner led the somewhat desultory and apparently aimless life of many
+American graduates whose future depends upon their own exertions and
+whose choice of a career is mainly determined by circumstances.  From the
+very earliest period of his life he had been fond of reading.  It was an
+inherited taste.  The few books he found in his childhood's home would
+have been almost swept out of sight in the torrent, largely of trash,
+which pours now in a steady stream into the humblest household.  But the
+books, though few, were of a high quality; and because they were few they
+were read much, and their contents became an integral part of his
+intellectual equipment.  Furthermore, these works of the great masters,
+with which he became familiar, set for him a standard by which to test
+the value of whatever he read, and saved him even in his earliest years
+from having his taste impaired and his judgment misled by the vogue of
+meretricious productions which every now and then gain popularity for the
+time.  They gave him also a distinct bent towards making literature his
+profession.  But literature, however pleasant and occasionally profitable
+as an avocation, was not to be thought of as a vocation.  Few there are
+at any period who have succeeded in finding it a substantial and
+permanent support; at that time and in this country such a prospect was
+practically hopeless for any one.  It is no matter of surprise,
+therefore, that Warner, though often deviating from the direct path,
+steadily gravitated toward the profession of law.
+
+Still, even in those early days his natural inclination manifested
+itself.  The Knickerbocker Magazine was then the chosen organ to which
+all young literary aspirants sent their productions.  To it even in his
+college days Warner contributed to some extent, though it would doubtless
+be possible now to gather out of this collection but few pieces which,
+lacking his own identification, could be assigned to him positively.
+At a later period he contributed articles to Putnam's Magazine, which
+began its existence in 1853.  Warner himself at one time, in that period
+of struggle and uncertainty, expected to become an editor of a monthly
+which was to be started in Detroit.  But before the magazine was actually
+set on foot the inability of the person who projected it to supply the
+necessary means for carrying it on prevented the failure which would
+inevitably have befallen a venture of that sort, undertaken at that time
+and in that place.  Yet he showed in a way the native bent of his mind by
+bringing out two years after his graduation from college a volume of
+selections from English and American authors entitled "The Book of
+Eloquence."  This work a publisher many years afterward took advantage of
+his later reputation to reprint.
+
+This unsettled period of his life lasted for several years.  He was
+resident for a while in various places.  Part of the time he seems to
+have been in Cazenovia; part of the time in New York; part of the time in
+the West.  One thing in particular there was which stood in the way of
+fixing definitely his choice of a profession.  This was the precarious
+state of his health, far poorer then than it was in subsequent years.
+Warner, however, was never at any period of his life what is called
+robust.  It was his exceeding temperance in all things which enabled him
+to venture upon the assumption and succeed in the accomplishment of tasks
+which men, physically far stronger than he, would have shrunk from under-
+taking, even had they been possessed of the same abilities.  But his
+condition, part of that time, was such that it led him to take a course
+of treatment at the sanatorium in Clifton Springs.  It became apparent,
+however, that life in the open air, for a while at least, was the one
+thing essential.  Under the pressure of this necessity he secured a
+position as one of an engineering party engaged in the survey of a
+railway in Missouri.  In that occupation he spent a large part of 1853
+and 1854.  He came back from this expedition restored to health.  With
+that result accomplished, the duty of settling definitely upon what he
+was to do became more urgent.  Among other things he did, while living
+for a while with his uncle in Binghamton, N. Y., he studied law in the
+office of Daniel S. Dickinson.
+
+In the Christmas season of 1854 he went with a friend on a visit to
+Philadelphia and stayed at the house of Philip M. Price, a prominent
+citizen of that place who was engaged, among other things, in the
+conveyancing of real estate.  It will not be surprising to any one who
+knew the charm of his society in later life to be told that he became at
+once a favorite with the older man.  The latter was advanced in years,
+he was anxious to retire from active business.  Acting under his advice,
+Warner was induced to come to Philadelphia in 1855 and join him, and to
+form subsequently a partnership in legal conveyancing with another young
+man who had been employed in Mr. Price's office.  Thus came into being
+the firm of Barton and Warner.  Their headquarters were first in Spring
+Garden Street and later in Walnut Street.  The future soon became
+sufficiently assured to justify Warner in marriage, and in October, 1856,
+he was wedded to Susan Lee, daughter of William Elliott Lee of New York
+City.
+
+But though in a business allied to the law, Warner was not yet a lawyer.
+His occupation indeed was only in his eyes a temporary makeshift while he
+was preparing himself for what was to be his real work in life.
+Therefore, while supporting himself by carrying on the business of
+conveyancing, he attended the courses of study at the law department of
+the University of Pennsylvania, during the academic years of 1856-57 and
+1857-58.  From that institution he received the degree of bachelor of law
+in 1858--often misstated 1856--and was ready to begin the practice of
+his, profession.
+
+In those days every young man of ability and ambition was counseled to go
+West and grow up with the country, and was not unfrequently disposed to
+take that course of his own accord.  Warner felt the general impulse.
+He had contemplated entering, in fact had pretty definitely made up his
+mind to enter, into a law partnership with a friend in one of the smaller
+places in that region.  But on a tour, somewhat of exploration, he
+stopped at Chicago.  There he met another friend, and after talking over
+the situation with him he decided to take up his residence in that city.
+So in 1858 the law-firm of Davenport and Warner came into being.
+It lasted until 1860.  It was not exactly a favorable time for young men
+to enter upon the practice of this profession.  The country was just
+beginning to recover from the depression which had followed the
+disastrous panic of 1857; but confidence was as yet far from being
+restored.  The new firm did a fairly good business; but while there was
+sufficient work to do, there was but little money to pay for it.  Still
+Warner would doubtless have continued in the profession had he not
+received an offer, the acceptance of which determined his future and
+changed entirely his career.
+
+Hawley, now United States Senator from Connecticut, was Warner's senior
+by a few years.  He had preceded him as a student at the Oneida
+Conference Seminary and at Hamilton College.  Practicing law in Hartford,
+he had started in 1857, in conjunction with other leading citizens, a
+paper called the Evening Press.  It was devoted to the advocacy of the
+principles of the Republican party, which was at that time still in what
+may be called the formative state of its existence.  This was a period in
+which for some years the dissolution had been going on of the two old
+parties which had divided the country.  Men were changing sides and were
+aligning themselves anew according to their views on questions which were
+every day assuming greater prominence in the minds of all.  There was
+really but one great subject talked about or thought about.  It split
+into opposing sections the whole land over which was lowering the grim,
+though as yet unrecognizable, shadow of civil war.  The Republican party
+had been in existence but a very few years, but in that short time it had
+attracted to its ranks the young and enthusiastic spirits of the North,
+just as to the other side were impelled the members of the same class in
+the South.  The intellectual contest which preceded the physical was
+stirring the hearts of all men.  Hawley, who was well aware of Warner's
+peculiar ability, was anxious to secure his co-operation and assistance.
+He urged him to come East and join him in the conduct of the new
+enterprise he had undertaken.
+
+Warner always considered that he derived great benefit from his
+comparatively limited study and practice of law; and that the little time
+he had given up to it had been far from being misspent.  But the opening
+which now presented itself introduced him to a field of activity much
+more suited to his talents and his tastes.  He liked the study of law
+better than its practice; for his early training had not been of a kind
+to reconcile him to standing up strongly for clients and causes that he
+honestly believed to be in the wrong.  Furthermore, his heart, as has
+been said, had always been in literature; and though journalism could
+hardly be called much more than a half-sister, the one could provide the
+support which the other could never promise with certainty.  So in 1860
+Warner removed to Hartford and joined his friend as associate editor of
+the newspaper he had founded.  The next year the war broke out.  Hawley
+at once entered the army and took part in the four years' struggle.  His
+departure left Warner in editorial charge of the paper, into the conduct
+of which he threw himself with all the earnestness and energy of his
+nature, and the ability, both political and literary, displayed in its
+columns gave it at once a high position which it never lost.
+
+At this point it may be well to give briefly the few further salient
+facts of Warner's connection with journalism proper.  In 1867 the owners
+of the Press purchased the Courant, the well-known morning paper which
+had been founded more than a century before, and consolidated the Press
+with it.  Of this journal, Hawley and Warner, now in part proprietors,
+were the editorial writers.  The former, who had been mustered out of the
+army with the rank of brevet Major-General, was soon diverted from
+journalism by other employments.  He was elected Governor, he became a
+member of Congress, serving successively in both branches.  The main
+editorial responsibility for the conduct of the paper devolved in
+consequence upon Warner, and to it he gave up for years nearly all his
+thought and attention.  Once only during that early period was his labor
+interrupted for any considerable length of time.  In May, 1868, he set
+out on the first of his five trips across the Atlantic.  He was absent
+nearly a year.  Yet even then he cannot be said to have neglected his
+special work.  Articles were sent weekly from the other side, describing
+what he saw and experienced abroad.  His active connection with the paper
+he never gave up absolutely, nor did his interest in it ever cease.
+But after he became connected with the editorial staff of Harpers
+Magazine the contributions he made to his journal were only occasional
+and what may be called accidental.
+
+When 1870 came, forty years of Warner's life had gone by, and nearly
+twenty years since he had left college.  During the latter ten years of
+this period he had been a most effective and forcible leader-writer on
+political and social questions, never more so than during the storm and
+stress of the Civil War.  Outside of these topics he had devoted a great
+deal of attention to matters connected with literature and art.  His
+varied abilities were fully recognized by the readers of the journal he
+edited.
+
+But as yet there was little or no recognition outside.  It is no easy
+matter to tell what are the influences, what the circumstances, which
+determine the success of a particular writer or of a particular work.
+Hitherto Warner's repute was mainly confined to the inhabitants of a
+provincial capital and its outlying and dependent towns.  However
+cultivated the class to which his writings appealed--and as a class it
+was distinctly cultivated--their number was necessarily not great.  To
+the country at large what he did or what he was capable of doing was not
+known at all.  Some slight efforts he had occasionally put forth to
+secure the publication of matter he had prepared.  He experienced the
+usual fate of authors who seek to introduce into the market literary
+wares of a new and better sort.  His productions did not follow
+conventional lines.  Publishers were ready to examine what he offered,
+and were just as ready to declare that these new wares were of a nature
+in which they were not inclined to deal.
+
+But during 1870 a series of humorous articles appeared in the Hartford
+Courant, detailing his experiences in the cultivation of a garden.
+Warner had become the owner of a small place then almost on the outskirts
+of the city.  With the dwelling-house went the possession of three acres
+of land.  The opportunity thus presented itself of turning into a
+blessing the primeval curse of tilling the soil, in this instance not
+with a hoe, but with a pen.  These articles detailing his experiences
+excited so much amusement and so much admiration that a general desire
+was manifested that they should receive a more permanent life than that
+accorded to articles appearing in the columns of newspapers, and should
+reach a circle larger than that to be found in the society of the
+Connecticut capital.  Warner's previous experience had not disposed him
+to try his fortunes with the members of the publishing fraternity.
+In fact he did not lay so much stress upon the articles as did his
+readers and friends.  He always insisted that he had previously written
+other articles which in his eyes certainly were just as good as they, if
+not better.
+
+It so chanced that about this time Henry Ward Beecher came to Hartford to
+visit his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe.  Warner was invited to meet him.
+In the course of the conversation the articles just mentioned were
+referred to by some one of those present.  Beecher's curiosity was
+aroused and he expressed a desire to see them.  To him they were
+accordingly sent for perusal.  No sooner had he run through them than he
+recognized in them the presence of a rare and delicate humor which struck
+a distinctly new note in American literature.  It was something he felt
+which should not be confined to the knowledge of any limited circle.
+He wrote at once to the publisher James T. Fields, urging the production
+of these articles in book form.  Beecher's recommendation in those days
+was sufficient to insure the acceptance of any book by any publisher.
+Mr. Fields agreed to bring out the work, provided the great preacher
+would prefix an introduction.  This he promised to do and did; though in
+place of the somewhat more formal piece he was asked to write, he sent
+what he called an introductory letter.
+
+The series of papers published under the title of "My Summer in a Garden"
+came out at the very end of 1870, with the date of 1871 on the title-
+page.  The volume met with instantaneous success.  It was the subject of
+comment and conversation everywhere and passed rapidly through several
+editions.  There was a general feeling that a new writer had suddenly
+appeared, with a wit and wisdom peculiarly his own, precisely like which
+nothing had previously existed in our literature.  To the later editions
+of the work was added an account of a cat which had been presented to the
+author by the Stowes.  For that reason it was given from the Christian
+name of the husband of the novelist the title of Calvin.  To this John
+was sometimes prefixed, as betokening from the purely animal point of
+view a certain resemblance to the imputed grimness and earnestness of the
+great reformer.  There was nothing in the least exaggerated in the
+account which Warner gave of the character and conduct of this really
+remarkable member of the feline race.  No biography was ever truer; no
+appreciation was ever more sympathetic; and in the long line of cats none
+was ever more worthy to have his story truly and sympathetically told.
+All who had the fortune to see Calvin in the flesh will recognize the
+accuracy with which his portrait was drawn.  All who read the account of
+him, though not having seen him, will find it one of the most charming of
+descriptions.  It has the fullest right to be termed a cat classic.
+
+With the publication of "My Summer in a Garden" Warner was launched upon
+a career of authorship which lasted without cessation during the thirty
+years that remained of his life.  It covered a wide field.  His interests
+were varied and his activity was unremitting.  Literature, art, and that
+vast diversity of topics which are loosely embraced under the general
+name of social science--upon all these he had something fresh to say, and
+he said it invariably with attractiveness and effect.  It mattered little
+what he set out to talk about, the talk was sure to be full both of
+instruction and entertainment.  No sooner had the unequivocal success of
+his first published work brought his name before the public than he was
+besieged for contributions by conductors of periodicals of all sorts; and
+as he had ideas of his own upon all sorts of subjects, he was constantly
+furnishing matter of the most diverse kind for the most diverse
+audiences.
+
+As a result, the volumes here gathered together represent but a limited
+portion of the work he accomplished.  All his life, indeed, Warner was
+not only an omnivorous consumer of the writings of others, but a constant
+producer.  The manifestation of it took place in ways frequently known to
+but few.  It was not merely the fact that as an editor of a daily paper
+he wrote regularly articles on topics of current interest to which he
+never expected to pay any further attention; but after his name became
+widely known and his services were in request everywhere, he produced
+scores of articles, some long, some short, some signed, some unsigned,
+of which he made no account whatever.  One looking through the pages of
+contemporary periodical literature is apt at any moment to light upon
+pieces, and sometimes upon series of them, which the author never took
+the trouble to collect.  Many of those to which his name was not attached
+can no longer be identified with any approach to certainty.  About the
+preservation of much that he did--and some of it belonged distinctly to
+his best and most characteristic work--he was singularly careless, or it
+may be better to say, singularly indifferent.
+
+If I may be permitted to indulge in the recital of a personal experience,
+there is one incident I recall which will bring out this trait in a
+marked manner.  Once on a visit to him I accompanied him to the office of
+his paper.  While waiting for him to discharge certain duties there, and
+employing myself in looking over the exchanges, I chanced to light upon a
+leading article on the editorial page of one of the most prominent of the
+New York dailies.  It was devoted to the consideration of some recent
+utterances of a noted orator who, after the actual mission of his life
+had been accomplished, was employing the decline of it in the
+exploitation of every political and economic vagary which it had entered
+into the addled brains of men to evolve.  The article struck me as one of
+the most brilliant and entertaining of its kind I had ever read; it was
+not long indeed before it appeared that the same view of it was taken by
+many others throughout the country.  The peculiar wit of the comment, the
+keenness of the satire made so much of an impression upon me that I
+called Warner away from his work to look at it.  At my request he hastily
+glanced over it, but somewhat to my chagrin failed to evince any
+enthusiasm about it.  On our way home I again spoke of it and was a good
+deal nettled at the indifference towards it which he manifested.
+It seemed to imply that my critical judgment was of little value; and
+however true might be his conclusion on that point, one does not enjoy
+having the fact thrust too forcibly upon the attention in the familiarity
+of conversation.  Resenting therefore the tone he had assumed, I took
+occasion not only to reiterate my previously expressed opinion somewhat
+more aggressively, but also went on to insinuate that he was himself
+distinctly lacking in any real appreciation of what was excellent.  He
+bore with me patiently for a while.  "Well, sonny," he said at last,
+"since you seem to take the matter so much to heart, I will tell you in
+confidence that I wrote the piece myself."  I found that this was not
+only true in the case just specified, but that while engaged in preparing
+articles for his own paper he occasionally prepared them for other
+journals.  No one besides himself and those immediately concerned, ever
+knew anything about the matter.  He never asserted any right to these
+pieces, he never sought to collect them, though some of them exhibited
+his happiest vein of humor.  Unclaimed, unidentified, they are swept into
+that wallet of oblivion in which time stows the best as well as the worst
+of newspaper production.
+
+The next volume of Warner's writings that made its appearance was
+entitled "Saunterings." It was the first and, though good of its kind,
+was by no means the best of a class of productions in which he was to
+exhibit signal excellence.  It will be observed that of the various works
+comprised in this collective edition, no small number consist of what by
+a wide extension of the phrase may be termed books of travel.  There are
+two or three which fall strictly under that designation.  Most of them,
+however, can be more properly called records of personal experience and
+adventure in different places and regions, with the comments on life and
+character to which they gave rise.
+
+Books of travel, if they are expected to live, are peculiarly hard to
+write.  If they come out at a period when curiosity about the region
+described is predominant, they are fairly certain, no matter how
+wretched, to achieve temporary success.  But there is no kind of literary
+production to which, by the very law of its being, it is more difficult
+to impart vitality.  Paradoxical as it may seem, it is perfectly true
+that the greatest hinderance to their permanent interest is the
+information they furnish.  The more full, specific and even accurate that
+is, the more rapidly does the work containing it lose its value.  The
+fresher knowledge conveyed by a new, and it may be much inferior book,
+crowds out of circulation those which have gone before.  The changed or
+changing conditions in the region traversed renders the information
+previously furnished out of date and even misleading.  Hence the older
+works come in time to have only an antiquarian interest.  Their pages are
+consulted only by that very limited number of persons who are anxious to
+learn what has been and view with stolid indifference what actually is.
+Something of this transitory nature belongs to all sketches of travel.
+It is the one great reason why so very few of the countless number of
+such works, written, and sometimes written by men of highest ability, are
+hardly heard of a few years after publication.  Travels form a species of
+literary production in which great classics are exceedingly rare.
+
+From this fatal characteristic, threatening the enduring life of such
+works, most of Warner's writings of this sort were saved by the method of
+procedure he followed.  He made it his main object not to give facts but
+impressions.  All details of exact information, everything calculated to
+gratify the statistical mind or to quench the thirst of the seeker for
+purely useful information, he was careful, whether consciously or
+unconsciously, to banish from those volumes of his in which he followed
+his own bent and felt himself under no obligation to say anything but
+what he chose.  Hence these books are mainly a record of views of men and
+manners made by an acute observer on the spot, and put down at the moment
+when the impression created was most vivid, not deferred till familiarity
+had dulled the sense of it or custom had caused it to be disregarded.
+Take as an illustration the little book entitled "Baddeck," one of the
+slightest of his productions in this field.  It purports to be and is
+nothing more than an account of a two weeks' tour made to a Cape Breton
+locality in company with the delightful companion to whom it was
+dedicated.  You take it up with the notion that you are going to acquire
+information about the whole country journeyed over, you are beguiled at
+times with the fancy that you are getting it.  In the best sense it may
+be said that you do get it; for it is the general impression of the
+various scenes through which the expedition leads the travelers that is
+left upon the mind, not those accurate details of a single one of them
+which the lapse of a year might render inaccurate.  It is to the credit
+of the work therefore than one gains from it little specific knowledge.
+In its place are the reflections both wise and witty upon life, upon the
+characters of the men that are met, upon the nature of the sights that
+are seen.
+
+This is what constitutes the enduring charm of the best of these pictures
+of travel which Warner produced.  It is perhaps misleading to assert that
+they do not furnish a good deal of information.  Still it is not the sort
+of information which the ordinary tourist gives and which the cultivated
+reader resents and is careful not to remember.  Their dominant note is
+rather the quiet humor of a delightful story-teller, who cannot fail to
+say something of interest because he has seen so much; and who out of his
+wide and varied observation selects for recital certain sights he has
+witnessed, certain experiences he has gone through, and so relates them
+that the way the thing is told is even more interesting than the thing
+told.  The chief value of these works does not accordingly depend upon
+the accidental, which passes.  Inns change and become better or worse.
+Facilities for transportation increase or decrease.  Scenery itself
+alters to some extent under the operation of agencies brought to bear
+upon it for its own improvement or for the improvement of something else.
+But man's nature remains a constant quantity.  Traits seen here and now
+are sure to be met with somewhere else, and even in ages to come.  Hence
+works of this nature, embodying descriptions of men and manners, always
+retain something of the freshness which characterized them on the day of
+their appearance.
+
+Of these productions in which the personal element predominates, and
+where the necessity of intruding information is not felt as a burden,
+those of Warner's works which deal with the Orient take the first rank.
+The two--"My Winter on the Nile" and "In the Levant"--constitute the
+record of a visit to the East during the years 1875 and 1876.
+
+They would naturally have of themselves the most permanent value,
+inasmuch as the countries described have for most educated men an abiding
+interest.  The lifelike representation and graphic characterization which
+Warner was apt to display in his traveling sketches were here seen at
+their best, because nowhere else did he find the task of description more
+congenial.  Alike the gorgeousness and the squalor of the Orient appealed
+to his artistic sympathies.  Egypt in particular had for him always a
+special fascination.  Twice he visited it--at the time just mentioned and
+again in the winter of 1881-82.  He rejoiced in every effort made to
+dispel the obscurity which hung over its early history.  No one, outside
+of the men most immediately concerned, took a deeper interest than he in
+the work of the Egyptian Exploration Society, of which he was one of the
+American vice-presidents.  To promoting its success he gave no small
+share of time and attention.  Everything connected with either the past
+or the present of the country had for him an attraction.  A civilization
+which had been flourishing for centuries, when the founder of Israel was
+a wandering sheik on the Syrian plains or in the hill-country of Canaan;
+the slow unraveling of records of dynasties of forgotten kings; the
+memorials of Egypt's vanished greatness and the vision of her future
+prosperity these and things similar to these made this country, so
+peculiarly the gift of the Nile, of fascinating interest to the modern
+traveler who saw the same sights which had met the eyes of Herodotus
+nearly twenty-five hundred years before.
+
+To the general public the volume which followed--"In the Levant"--was
+perhaps of even deeper interest.  At all events it dealt with scenes and
+memories with which every reader, educated or uneducated, had
+associations.  The region through which the founder of Christianity
+wandered, the places he visited, the words he said in them, the acts he
+did, have never lost their hold over the hearts of men, not even during
+the periods when the precepts of Christianity have had the least
+influence over the conduct of those who professed to it their allegiance.
+In the Levant, too, were seen the beginnings of commerce, of art, of
+letters, in the forms in which the modern world best knows them.  These,
+therefore, have always made the lands about the eastern Mediterranean an
+attraction to cultivated men and the interest of the subject accordingly
+reinforced the skill of the writer.
+
+There are two or three of these works which can not be included in the
+class just described.  They were written for the specific purpose of
+giving exact information at the time.  Of these the most noticeable are
+the volumes entitled "South and West" and the account of Southern
+California which goes under the name of "Our Italy."  They are the
+outcome of journeys made expressly with the intent of investigating and
+reporting upon the actual situation and apparent prospects of the places
+and regions described.  As they were written to serve an immediate
+purpose, much of the information contained in them tends to grow more and
+more out of date as time goes on; and though of value to the student
+of history, these volumes must necessarily become of steadily diminishing
+interest to the ordinary reader.  Yet it is to be said of them that while
+the pill of useful information is there, it has at least been sugar-
+coated.  Nor can we afford to lose sight of the fact that the widely-
+circulated articles, collected under the title of "South and West," by
+the spirit pervading them as well as by the information they gave, had a
+marked effect in bringing the various sections of the country into a
+better understanding of one another, and in imparting to all a fuller
+sense of the community they possessed in profit and loss, in honor and
+dishonor.
+
+It is a somewhat singular fact that these sketches of travel led Warner
+incidentally to enter into an entirely new field of literary exertion.
+This was novel-writing.  Something of this nature he had attempted in
+conjunction with Mark Twain in the composition of "The Gilded Age," which
+appeared in 1873.  The result, however, was unsatisfactory to both the
+collaborators.  Each had humor, but the humor of each was fundamentally
+different.  But the magazine with which Warner had become connected was
+desirous that he should prepare for it an account of some of the
+principal watering-places and summer resorts of the country.  Each was to
+be visited in turn and its salient features were to be described.  It was
+finally suggested that this could be done most effectively by weaving
+into a love story occurrences that might happen at a number of these
+places which were made the subjects of description.  The principal
+characters were to take their tours under the personal conduct of the
+novelist.  They were to go to the particular spots selected North and
+South, according to the varying seasons of the year.  It was a somewhat
+novel way of, visiting resorts of this nature; there are those to whom it
+will seem altogether more agreeable than would be the visiting of them in
+person.  Hence appeared in 1886 the articles which were collected later
+in the volume entitled "Their Pilgrimage."
+
+Warner executed the task which had been assigned him with his wonted
+skill.  The completed work met with success--with so much success indeed
+that he was led later to try his fortune further in the same field and
+bring out the trilogy of novels which go under the names respectively of
+"A Little Journey in the World," "The Golden House," and "That Fortune."
+Each of these is complete in itself, each can be read by itself; but the
+effect of each and of the whole series can be best secured by reading
+them in succession.  In the first it is the story of how a great fortune
+was made in the stock market; in the second, how it was fraudulently
+diverted from the object for which it was intended; and in the third, how
+it was most beneficially and satisfactorily lost.  The scene of the last
+novel was laid in part in Warner's early home in Charlemont.  These works
+were produced with considerable intervals of time between their
+respective appearances, the first coming out in 1889 and the third ten
+years later.  This detracted to some extent from the popularity which
+they would have attained had the different members followed one another
+rapidly.  Still, they met with distinct success, though it has always
+been a question whether this success was due so much to the story as to
+the shrewd observation and caustic wit which were brought to bear upon
+what was essentially a serious study of one side of American social life.
+
+The work with which Warner himself was least satisfied was his life of
+Captain John Smith, which came out in 18881.  It was originally intended
+to be one of a series of biographies of noted men, which were to give the
+facts accurately but to treat them humorously.  History and comedy,
+however, have never been blended successfully, though desperate attempts
+have occasionally been made to achieve that result.  Warner had not long
+been engaged in the task before he recognized its hopelessness.  For its
+preparation it required a special study of the man and the period, and
+the more time he spent upon the preliminary work, the more the humorous
+element tended to recede.  Thus acted on by two impulses, one of a light
+and one of a grave nature, he moved for a while in a sort of diagonal
+between the two to nowhere in particular; but finally ended in treating
+the subject seriously.
+
+In giving himself up to a biography in which he had no special interest,
+Warner felt conscious that he could not interest others.  His forebodings
+were realized.  The work, though made from a careful study of original
+sources, did not please him, nor did it attract the public.  The attempt
+was all the more unfortunate because the time and toil he spent upon it
+diverted him from carrying out a scheme which had then taken full
+possession of his thoughts.  This was the production of a series of
+essays to be entitled "Conversations on Horseback."  Had it been worked
+up as he sketched it in his mind, it would have been the outdoor
+counterpart of his "Backlog Studies."  Though in a measure based upon a
+horseback ride which he took in Pennsylvania in 1880, the incidents of
+travel as he outlined its intended treatment would have barely furnished
+the slightest of backgrounds.  Captain John Smith, however, interfered
+with a project specially suited to his abilities and congenial to his
+tastes.  That he did so possibly led the author of his life to exhibit a
+somewhat hostile attitude towards his hero.  When the biography was
+finished, other engagements were pressing upon his attention.  The
+opportunity of taking up and completing the projected series of essays
+never presented itself, though the subject lay in his mind for a long
+time and he himself believed that it would have turned out one of the
+best pieces of work he ever did.
+
+It was unfortunate.  For to me--and very likely to many others if not to
+most--Warner's strength lay above all in essay-writing.  What he
+accomplished in this line was almost invariably pervaded by that genial
+grace which makes work of the kind attractive, and he exhibited
+everywhere in it the delicate but sure touch which preserves the just
+mean between saying too much and too little.  The essay was in his
+nature, and his occupation as a journalist had developed the tendency
+towards this form of literary activity, as well as skill in its
+manipulation.  Whether he wrote sketches of travel, or whether he wrote
+fiction, the scene depicted was from the point of view of the essayist
+rather than from that of the tourist or of the novelist.  It is this
+characteristic which gives to his work in the former field its enduring
+interest.  Again in his novels, it was not so much the story that was in
+his thoughts as the opportunity the varying scenes afforded for amusing
+observations upon manners, for comments upon life, sometimes good-
+natured, sometimes severe, but always entertaining, and above all, for
+serious study of the social problems which present themselves on every
+side for examination.  This is distinctly the province of the essayist,
+and in it Warner always displayed his fullest strength.
+
+We have seen that his first purely humorous publication of this nature
+was the one which made him known to the general public.  It was speedily
+followed, however, by one of a somewhat graver character, which became at
+the time and has since remained a special favorite of cultivated readers.
+This is the volume entitled "Backlog Studies."  The attractiveness of
+this work is as much due to the suggestive social and literary
+discussions with which it abounds as to the delicate and refined humor
+with which the ideas are expressed.  Something of the same
+characteristics was displayed in the two little volumes of short pieces
+dealing with social topics, which came out later under the respective
+titles of "As We Were Saying," and "As We Go."  But there was a deeper
+and more serious side of his nature which found utterance in several of
+his essays, particularly in some which were given in the form of
+addresses delivered at various institutions of learning.  They exhibit
+the charm which belongs to all his writings; but his feelings were too
+profoundly interested in the subjects considered to allow him to give
+more than occasional play to his humor.  Essays contained in such a
+volume, for instance, as "The Relation of Literature to Life" will not
+appeal to him whose main object in reading is amusement.  Into them
+Warner put his deepest and most earnest convictions.  The subject from
+which the book just mentioned derived its title lay near to his heart.
+No one felt more strongly than he the importance of art of all kinds, but
+especially of literary art, for the uplifting of a nation.  No one saw
+more distinctly the absolute necessity of its fullest recognition in a
+moneymaking age and in a money-making land, if the spread of the dry rot
+of moral deterioration were to be prevented.  The ampler horizon it
+presented, the loftier ideals it set up, the counteracting agency it
+supplied to the sordidness of motive and act which, left unchecked, was
+certain to overwhelm the national spirit--all these were enforced by him
+again and again with clearness and effectiveness.  His essays of this
+kind will never be popular in the sense in which are his other writings.
+But no thoughtful man will rise up from reading them without having
+gained a vivid conception of the part which literature plays in the life
+of even the humblest, and without a deeper conviction of its necessity to
+any healthy development of the character of a people.
+
+During the early part of his purely literary career a large proportion of
+Warner's collected writings, which then appeared, were first published in
+the Atlantic Monthly.  But about fourteen years before his death he
+became closely connected with Harper's Magazine.  From May, 1886, to
+March, 1892, he conducted the Editor's Drawer of that periodical.  The
+month following this last date he succeeded William Dean Howells as the
+contributor of the Editor's Study.  This position he held until July,
+1898.  The scope of this department was largely expanded after the death
+of George William Curtis in the summer of 1892, and the consequent
+discontinuance of the Editor's Easy Chair.  Comments upon other topics
+than those to which his department was originally devoted, especially
+upon social questions, were made a distinct feature.  His editorial
+connection with the magazine naturally led to his contributing to it
+numerous articles besides those which were demanded by the requirements
+of the position he held.  Nearly all these, as well as those which
+appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, are indicated in the bibliographical
+notes prefixed to the separate works.
+
+There were, however, other literary enterprises in which he was
+concerned; for the calls upon him were numerous, his own appetite for
+work was insatiable, and his activity was indefatigable.  In 1881 he
+assumed the editorship of the American Men of Letters series.  This he
+opened with his own biography of Washington Irving, the resemblance
+between whom and himself has been made the subject of frequent remark.
+Later he became the editor-in-chief of the thirty odd volumes which make
+up the collection entitled "The World's Best Literature."  To this he
+contributed several articles of his own and carefully allotted and
+supervised the preparation of a large number of others.  The labor he put
+upon the editing of this collection occupied him a great deal of the time
+from 1895 to 1898.
+
+But literature, though in it lay his chief interest, was but one of the
+subjects which employed his many-sided activity.  He was constantly
+called upon for the discharge of civic duties.  The confidence felt by
+his fellow-citizens in his judgment and taste was almost equal to the
+absolute trust reposed in his integrity.  The man who establishes a
+reputation for the possession of these qualities can never escape from
+bearing the burdens which a good character always imposes.  If any work
+of art was ordered by the state, Warner was fairly certain to be chosen a
+member of the commission selected to decide upon the person who was to do
+it and upon the way it was to be done.  By his fellow-townsmen he was
+made a member of the Park Commission.  Such were some of the duties
+imposed; there were others voluntarily undertaken.  During the latter
+years of his life he became increasingly interested in social questions,
+some of which partook of a semi-political character.  One of the subjects
+which engaged his attention was the best method to be adopted for
+elevating the character and conduct of the negro population of the
+country.  He recognized the gravity of the problem with which the nation
+had to deal and the difficulties attending its solution.  One essay on
+the subject was prepared for the meeting held at Washington in May, 1900,
+of the American Social Science Association, of which he was president.
+He was not able to be there in person.  The disease which was ultimately
+to strike him down had already made its preliminary attack.  His address
+was accordingly read for him.  It was a subject of special regret that he
+could not be present to set forth more fully his views; for the debate,
+which followed the presentation of his paper, was by no means confined to
+the meeting, but extended to the press of the whole country.  Whether the
+conclusions he reached were right or wrong, they were in no case adopted
+hastily nor indeed without the fullest consideration.
+
+But a more special interest of his lay in prison reform.  The subject had
+engaged his attention long before he published anything in connection
+with it.  Later one of the earliest articles he wrote for Harper's
+Magazine was devoted to it.  It was in his thoughts just before his
+death.  He was a member of the Connecticut commission on prisons, of the
+National Prison Association, and a vice-president of the New York
+Association for Prison Reform.  A strong advocate of the doctrine of the
+indeterminate sentence, he had little patience with many of the judicial
+outgivings on that subject.  To him they seemed opinions inherited, not
+formed, and in most cases were nothing more than the result of prejudice
+working upon ignorance.  This particular question was one which he
+purposed to make the subject of his address as president of the Social
+Science Association, at its annual meeting in 1901.  He never lived to
+complete what he had in mind.
+
+During his later years the rigor of the Northern winter had been too
+severe for Warner's health.  He had accordingly found it advisable to
+spend as much of this season as he could in warmer regions.  He visited
+at various times parts of the South, Mexico, and California.  He passed
+the winter of 1892-93 at Florence; but he found the air of the valley of
+the Arno no perceptible improvement upon that of the valley of the
+Connecticut.  In truth, neither disease nor death entertains a prejudice
+against any particular locality.  This fact he was to learn by personal
+experience.  In the spring of 1899, while at New Orleans, he was stricken
+by pneumonia which nearly brought him to the grave.  He recovered, but it
+is probable that the strength of his system was permanently impaired,
+and with it his power of resisting disease.  Still his condition was not
+such as to prevent him from going on with various projects he had been
+contemplating or from forming new ones.  The first distinct warning of
+the approaching end was the facial paralysis which suddenly attacked him
+in April, 1900, while on a visit to Norfolk, Va.  Yet even from that he
+seemed to be apparently on the full road to recovery during the following
+summer.
+
+It was in the second week of October, 1900, that Warner paid me a visit
+of two or three days.  He was purposing to spend the winter in Southern
+California, coming back to the East in ample time to attend the annual
+meeting of the Social Science Association.  His thoughts were even then
+busy with the subject of the address which, as president, he was to
+deliver on that occasion.  It seemed to me that I had never seen him when
+his mind was more active or more vigorous.  I was not only struck by the
+clearness of his views--some of which were distinctly novel, at least to
+me--but by the felicity and effectiveness with which they were put.
+
+Never, too, had I been more impressed with the suavity, the
+agreeableness, the general charm of his manner.  He had determined during
+the coming winter to learn to ride the wheel, and we then and there
+planned to take a bicycle trip during the following summer, as we had
+previously made excursions together on horseback.  When we parted, it was
+with the agreement that we should meet the next spring in Washington and
+fix definitely upon the time and region of our intended ride.  It was on
+a Saturday morning that I bade him good-by, apparently in the best of
+health and spirits.  It was on the evening of the following Saturday--
+October 20th--that the condensed, passionless, relentless message which
+the telegraph transmits, informed me that he had died that afternoon.
+
+That very day he had lunched at a friend's, where were gathered several
+of his special associates who had chanced to come together at the same
+house, and then had gone to the office of the Hartford Courant.  There
+was not the slightest indication apparent of the end that was so near.
+After the company broke up, he started out to pay a visit to one of the
+city parks, of which he was a commissioner.  On his way thither, feeling
+a certain faintness, he turned aside into a small house whose occupants
+he knew, and asked to sit down for a brief rest, and then, as the
+faintness increased, to lie undisturbed on the lounge for a few minutes.
+The few minutes passed, and with them his life.  In the strictest sense
+of the words, he had fallen asleep.  From one point of view it was an
+ideal way to die.  To the individual, death coming so gently, so
+suddenly, is shorn of all its terrors.  It is only those who live to
+remember and to lament that the suffering comes which has been spared the
+victim.  Even to them, however, is the consolation that though they may
+have been fully prepared for the coming of the inevitable event, it would
+have been none the less painful when it actually came.
+
+Warner as a writer we all know.  The various and varying opinions
+entertained about the quality and value of his work do not require notice
+here.  Future times will assign him his exact position in the roll of
+American authors, and we need not trouble ourselves to anticipate, as we
+shall certainly not be able to influence, its verdict.  But to only a
+comparatively few of those who knew him as a writer was it given to know
+him as a man; to still fewer to know him in that familiarity of intimacy
+which reveals all that is fine or ignoble in a man's personality.  Scanty
+is the number of those who will come out of that severest of ordeals so
+successfully as he.  The same conclusion would be reached, whether we
+were to consider him in his private relations or in his career as a man
+of letters.  Among the irritable race of authors no one was freer from
+petty envy or jealousy.  During many years of close intercourse, in which
+he constantly gave utterance to his views both of men and things with
+absolute unreserve, I recall no disparaging opinion ever expressed of any
+writer with whom he had been compared either for praise or blame.  He had
+unquestionably definite and decided opinions.  He would point out that
+such or such a work was above or below its author's ordinary level; but
+there was never any ill-nature in his comment, no depreciation for
+depreciation's sake.  Never in truth was any one more loyal to his
+friends.  If his literary conscience would not permit him to say anything
+in favor of something which they had done, he usually contented himself
+with saying nothing.  Whatever failing there was on his critical side was
+due to this somewhat uncritical attitude; for it is from his particular
+friends that the writer is apt to get the most dispassionate
+consideration and sometimes the coldest commendation.  It was a part of
+Warner's generous recognition of others that he was in all sincerity
+disposed to attribute to those he admired and to whom he was attached an
+ability of which some of them at least were much inclined to doubt their
+own possession.
+
+Were I indeed compelled to select any one word which would best give the
+impression, both social and literary, of Warner's personality, I should
+be disposed to designate it as urbanity.  That seems to indicate best the
+one trait which most distinguished him either in conversation or writing.
+Whatever it was, it was innate, not assumed.  It was the genuine outcome
+of the kindliness and broad-mindedness of his nature and led him to
+sympathize with men of all positions in life and of all kinds of ability.
+It manifested itself in his attitude towards every one with whom he came
+in contact.  It led him to treat with fullest consideration all who were
+in the least degree under his direction, and converted in consequence the
+toil of subordinates into a pleasure.  It impelled him to do unsought
+everything which lay in his power for the success of those in whom he
+felt interest.  Many a young writer will recall his words of
+encouragement at some period in his own career when the quiet
+appreciation of one meant more to him than did later the loud applause of
+many.  As it was in public, so it was in private life.  The generosity of
+his spirit, the geniality and high-bred courtesy of his manner, rendered
+a visit to his home as much a social delight as his wide knowledge of
+literature and his appreciation of what was best in it made it an
+intellectual entertainment.
+
+THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE
+
+
+
+PRELIMINARY
+
+This paper was prepared and delivered at several of our universities as
+introductory to a course of five lectures which insisted on the value of
+literature in common life--some hearers thought with an exaggerated
+emphasis--and attempted to maintain the thesis that all genuine, enduring
+literature is the outcome of the time that produces it, is responsive to
+the general sentiment of its time; that this close relation to human life
+insures its welcome ever after as a true representation of human nature;
+and that consequently the most remunerative method of studying a
+literature is to study the people for whom it was produced.
+Illustrations of this were drawn from the Greek, the French, and the
+English literatures.  This study always throws a flood of light upon the
+meaning of the text of an old author, the same light that the reader
+unconsciously has upon contemporary pages dealing with the life with
+which he is familiar.  The reader can test this by taking up his
+Shakespeare after a thorough investigation of the customs, manners, and
+popular life of the Elizabethan period.  Of course the converse is true
+that good literature is an open door into the life and mode of thought of
+the time and place where it originated.
+
+
+
+
+THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE
+
+I hade a vision once--you may all have had a like one--of the stream of
+time flowing through a limitless land.  Along its banks sprang up in
+succession the generations of man.  They did not move with the stream-
+they lived their lives and sank away; and always below them new
+generations appeared, to play their brief parts in what is called
+history--the sequence of human actions.  The stream flowed on, opening
+for itself forever a way through the land.  I saw that these successive
+dwellers on the stream were busy in constructing and setting afloat
+vessels of various size and form and rig--arks, galleys, galleons,
+sloops, brigs, boats propelled by oars, by sails, by steam.  I saw the
+anxiety with which each builder launched his venture, and watched its
+performance and progress.  The anxiety was to invent and launch something
+that should float on to the generations to come, and carry the name of
+the builder and the fame of his generation.  It was almost pathetic,
+these puny efforts, because faith always sprang afresh in the success of
+each new venture.  Many of the vessels could scarcely be said to be
+launched at all; they sank like lead, close to the shore.  Others floated
+out for a time, and then, struck by a flaw in the wind, heeled over and
+disappeared.  Some, not well put together, broke into fragments in the
+bufleting of the waves.  Others danced on the flood, taking the sun on
+their sails, and went away with good promise of a long voyage.  But only
+a few floated for any length of time, and still fewer were ever seen by
+the generation succeeding that which launched them.  The shores of the
+stream were strewn with wrecks; there lay bleaching in the sand the ribs
+of many a once gallant craft.
+
+Innumerable were the devices of the builders to keep their inventions
+afloat.  Some paid great attention to the form of the hull, others to the
+kind of cargo and the loading of it, while others--and these seemed the
+majority--trusted more to some new sort of sail, or new fashion of
+rudder, or new application of propelling power.  And it was wonderful to
+see what these new ingenuities did for a time, and how each generation
+was deceived into the belief that its products would sail on forever.
+But one fate practically came to the most of them.  They were too heavy,
+they were too light, they were built of old material, and they went to
+the bottom, they went ashore, they broke up and floated in fragments.
+And especially did the crafts built in imitation of something that had
+floated down from a previous generation come to quick disaster.  I saw
+only here and there a vessel, beaten by weather and blackened by time
+--so old, perhaps, that the name of the maker was no longer legible; or
+some fragments of antique wood that had evidently come from far up the
+stream.  When such a vessel appeared there was sure to arise great
+dispute about it, and from time to time expeditions were organized to
+ascend the river and discover the place and circumstances of its origin.
+Along the banks, at intervals, whole fleets of boats and fragments had
+gone ashore, and were piled up in bays, like the driftwood of a subsided
+freshet.  Efforts were made to dislodge these from time to time and set
+them afloat again, newly christened, with fresh paint and sails, as if
+they stood a better chance of the voyage than any new ones.  Indeed, I
+saw that a large part of the commerce of this river was, in fact, the old
+hulks and stranded wrecks that each generation had set afloat again.
+As I saw it in this foolish vision, how pathetic this labor was from
+generation to generation; so many vessels launched; so few making a
+voyage even for a lifetime; so many builders confident of immortality; so
+many lives outlasting this coveted reputation!  And still the
+generations, each with touching hopefulness, busied themselves with this
+child's play on the banks of the stream; and still the river flowed on,
+whelming and wrecking the most of that so confidently committed to it,
+and bearing only here and there, on its swift, wide tide, a ship, a boat,
+a shingle.
+
+These hosts of men whom I saw thus occupied since history began were
+authors; these vessels were books; these heaps of refuse in the bays were
+great libraries.  The allegory admits of any amount of ingenious
+parallelism.  It is nevertheless misleading; it is the illusion of an
+idle fancy.  I have introduced it because it expresses, with some
+whimsical exaggeration--not much more than that of "The Vision of Mirza"
+--the popular notion about literature and its relation to human life.
+In the popular conception, literature is as much a thing apart from life
+as these boats on the stream of time were from the existence, the
+struggle, the decay of the generations along the shore.  I say in the
+popular conception, for literature is wholly different from this, not
+only in its effect upon individual lives, but upon the procession of
+lives upon this earth; it is not only an integral part of all of them,
+but, with its sister arts, it is the one unceasing continuity in history.
+Literature and art are not only the records and monuments made by the
+successive races of men, not only the local expressions of thought and
+emotion, but they are, to change the figure, the streams that flow on,
+enduring, amid the passing show of men, reviving, transforming, ennobling
+the fleeting generations.  Without this continuity of thought and
+emotion, history would present us only a succession of meaningless
+experiments.  The experiments fail, the experiments succeed--at any rate,
+they end--and what remains for transmission, for the sustenance of
+succeeding peoples?  Nothing but the thought and emotion evolved and
+expressed.  It is true that every era, each generation, seems to have its
+peculiar work to do; it is to subdue the intractable earth, to repel or
+to civilize the barbarians, to settle society in order, to build cities,
+to amass wealth in centres, to make deserts bloom, to construct edifices
+such as were never made before, to bring all men within speaking distance
+of each other--lucky if they have anything to say when that is
+accomplished--to extend the information of the few among the many, or to
+multiply the means of easy and luxurious living.  Age after age the world
+labors for these things with the busy absorption of a colony of ants in
+its castle of sand.  And we must confess that the process, such, for
+instance, as that now going on here--this onset of many peoples, which is
+transforming the continent of America--is a spectacle to excite the
+imagination in the highest degree.  If there were any poet capable of
+putting into an epic the spirit of this achievement, what an epic would
+be his!  Can it be that there is anything of more consequence in life
+than the great business in hand, which absorbs the vitality and genius of
+this age?  Surely, we say, it is better to go by steam than to go afoot,
+because we reach our destination sooner--getting there quickly being a
+supreme object.  It is well to force the soil to yield a hundred-fold,
+to congregate men in masses so that all their energies shall be taxed to
+bring food to themselves, to stimulate industries, drag coal and metal
+from the bowels of the earth, cover its surface with rails for swift-
+running carriages, to build ever larger palaces, warehouses, ships.
+This gigantic achievement strikes the imagination.
+
+If the world in which you live happens to be the world of books, if your
+pursuit is to know what has been done and said in the world, to the end
+that your own conception of the value of life may be enlarged, and that
+better things may be done and said hereafter, this world and this pursuit
+assume supreme importance in your mind.  But you can in a moment place
+yourself in relations--you have not to go far, perhaps only to speak to
+your next neighbor--where the very existence of your world is scarcely
+recognized.  All that has seemed to you of supreme importance is ignored.
+You have entered a world that is called practical, where the things that
+we have been speaking of are done; you have interest in it and sympathy
+with it, because your scheme of life embraces the development of ideas
+into actions; but these men of realities have only the smallest
+conception of the world that seems to you of the highest importance;
+and, further, they have no idea that they owe anything to it, that it has
+ever influenced their lives or can add anything to them.  And it may
+chance that you have, for the moment, a sense of insignificance in the
+small part you are playing in the drama going forward.  Go out of your
+library, out of the small circle of people who talk of books, who are
+engaged in research, whose liveliest interest is in the progress of
+ideas, in the expression of thought and emotion that is in literature;
+go out of this atmosphere into a region where it does not exist, it may
+be into a place given up to commerce and exchange, or to manufacturing,
+or to the development of certain other industries, such as mining, or the
+pursuit of office--which is sometimes called politics.  You will speedily
+be aware how completely apart from human life literature is held to be,
+how few people regard it seriously as a necessary element in life,
+as anything more than an amusement or a vexation.  I have in mind a
+mountain district, stripped, scarred, and blackened by the ruthless
+lumbermen, ravished of its forest wealth; divested of its beauty, which
+has recently become the field of vast coal-mining operations.  Remote
+from communication, it was yesterday an exhausted, wounded, deserted
+country.  Today audacious railways are entering it, crawling up its
+mountain slopes, rounding its dizzy precipices, spanning its valleys on
+iron cobwebs, piercing its hills with tunnels.  Drifts are opened in its
+coal seams, to which iron tracks shoot away from the main line; in the
+woods is seen the gleam of the engineer's level, is heard the rattle of
+heavily-laden wagons on the newly-made roads; tents are pitched, uncouth
+shanties have sprung up, great stables, boarding-houses, stores,
+workshops; the miner, the blacksmith, the mason, the carpenter have
+arrived; households have been set up in temporary barracks, children are
+already there who need a school, women who must have a church and
+society; the stagnation has given place to excitement, money has flowed
+in, and everywhere are the hum of industry and the swish of the goad of
+American life.  On this hillside, which in June was covered with oaks,
+is already in October a town; the stately trees have been felled; streets
+are laid out and graded and named; there are a hundred dwellings, there
+are a store, a post-office, an inn; the telegraph has reached it, and the
+telephone and the electric light; in a few weeks more it will be in size
+a city, with thousands of people--a town made out of hand by drawing men
+and women from other towns, civilized men and women, who have voluntarily
+put themselves in a position where they must be civilized over again.
+
+This is a marvelous exhibition of what energy and capital can do.  You
+acknowledge as much to the creators of it.  You remember that not far
+back in history such a transformation as this could not have been wrought
+in a hundred years.  This is really life, this is doing something in the
+world, and in the presence of it you can see why the creators of it
+regard your world, which seemed to you so important, the world whose
+business is the evolution and expression of thought and emotion, as
+insignificant.  Here is a material addition to the business and wealth of
+the race, here employment for men who need it, here is industry replacing
+stagnation, here is the pleasure of overcoming difficulties and
+conquering obstacles.  Why encounter these difficulties?  In order that
+more coal may be procured to operate more railway trains at higher speed,
+to supply more factories, to add to the industrial stir of modern life.
+The men who projected and are pushing on this enterprise, with an
+executive ability that would maintain and manoeuvre an army in a
+campaign, are not, however, consciously philanthropists, moved by the
+charitable purpose of giving employment to men, or finding satisfaction
+in making two blades of grass grow where one grew before.  They enjoy no
+doubt the sense of power in bringing things to pass, the feeling of
+leadership and the consequence derived from its recognition; but they
+embark in this enterprise in order that they may have the position and
+the luxury that increased wealth will bring, the object being, in most
+cases, simply material advantages--sumptuous houses, furnished with all
+the luxuries which are the signs of wealth, including, of course,
+libraries and pictures and statuary and curiosities, the most showy
+equipages and troops of servants; the object being that their wives shall
+dress magnificently, glitter in diamonds and velvets, and never need to
+put their feet to the ground; that they may command the best stalls in
+the church, the best pews in the theatre, the choicest rooms in the inn,
+and--a consideration that Plato does not mention, because his world was
+not our world--that they may impress and reduce to obsequious deference
+the hotel clerk.
+
+This life--for this enterprise and its objects are types of a
+considerable portion of life--is not without its ideal, its hero, its
+highest expression, its consummate flower.  It is expressed in a word
+which I use without any sense of its personality, as the French use the
+word Barnum--for our crude young nation has the distinction of adding a
+verb to the French language, the verb to barnum--it is expressed in the
+well-known name Croesus.  This is a standard--impossible to be reached
+perhaps, but a standard.  If one may say so, the country is sown with
+seeds of Croesus, and the crop is forward and promising.  The interest
+to us now in the observation of this phase of modern life is not in the
+least for purposes of satire or of reform.  We are inquiring how wholly
+this conception of life is divorced from the desire to learn what has
+been done and said to the end that better things may be done and said
+hereafter, in order that we may understand the popular conception of the
+insignificant value of literature in human affairs.  But it is not aside
+from our subject, rather right in its path, to take heed of what the
+philosophers say of the effect in other respects of the pursuit of
+wealth.
+
+One cause of the decay of the power of defense in a state, says the
+Athenian Stranger in Plato's Laws--one cause is the love of wealth, which
+wholly absorbs men and never for a moment allows them to think of
+anything but their private possessions; on this the soul of every citizen
+hangs suspended, and can attend to nothing but his daily gain; mankind
+are ready to learn any branch of knowledge and to follow any pursuit
+which tends to this end, and they laugh at any other; that is the reason
+why a city will not be in earnest about war or any other good and
+honorable pursuit.
+
+The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals, says
+Socrates, in the Republic, is the ruin of democracy.  They invent illegal
+modes of expenditure; and what do they or their wives care about the law?
+
+"And then one, seeing another's display, proposes to rival him, and thus
+the whole body of citizens acquires a similar character.
+
+"After that they get on in a trade, and the more they think of making a
+fortune, the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are
+placed together in the balance, the one always rises as the other falls.
+
+"And in proportion as riches and rich men are honored in the state,
+virtue and the virtuous are dishonored.
+
+"And what is honored is cultivated, and that which has no honor is
+neglected.
+
+"And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become
+lovers of trade and money, and they honor and reverence the rich man and
+make a ruler of him, and dishonor the poor man.
+
+"They do so."
+
+The object of a reasonable statesman (it is Plato who is really speaking
+in the Laws) is not that the state should be as great and rich as
+possible, should possess gold and silver, and have the greatest empire by
+sea and land.
+
+The citizen must, indeed, be happy and good, and the legislator will seek
+to make him so; but very rich and very good at the same time he cannot
+be; not at least in the sense in which many speak of riches.  For they
+describe by the term "rich" the few who have the most valuable
+possessions, though the owner of them be a rogue.  And if this is true,
+I can never assent to the doctrine that the rich man will be happy: he
+must be good as well as rich.  And good in a high degree and rich in a
+high degree at the same time he cannot be.  Some one will ask, Why not?
+And we shall answer, Because acquisitions which come from sources which
+are just and unjust indifferently are more than double those which come
+from just sources only; and the sums which are expended neither honorably
+nor disgracefully are only half as great as those which are expended
+honorably and on honorable purposes.  Thus if one acquires double and
+spends half, the other, who is in the opposite case and is a good man,
+cannot possibly be wealthier than he.  The first (I am speaking of the
+saver, and not of the spender) is not always bad; he may indeed in some
+cases be utterly bad, but as I was saying, a good man he never is.
+For he who receives money unjustly as well as justly, and spends neither
+justly nor unjustly, will be a rich man if he be also thrifty.  On the
+other hand, the utterly bad man is generally profligate, and therefore
+poor; while he who spends on noble objects, and acquires wealth by just
+means only, can hardly be remarkable for riches any more than he can be
+very poor.  The argument, then, is right in declaring that the very rich
+are not good, and if they are not good they are not happy.
+
+And the conclusion of Plato is that we ought not to pursue any occupation
+to the neglect of that for which riches exist--"I mean," he says, "soul
+and body, which without gymnastics and without education will never be
+worth anything; and therefore, as we have said not once but many times,
+the care of riches should have the last place in our thoughts."
+
+Men cannot be happy unless they are good, and they cannot be good unless
+the care of the soul occupies the first place in their thoughts.  That is
+the first interest of man; the interest in the body is midway; and last
+of all, when rightly regarded, is the interest about money.
+
+The majority of mankind reverses this order of interests, and therefore
+it sets literature to one side as of no practical account in human life.
+More than this, it not only drops it out of mind, but it has no
+conception of its influence and power in the very affairs from which it
+seems to be excluded.  It is my purpose to show not only the close
+relation of literature to ordinary life, but its eminent position in
+life, and its saving power in lives which do not suspect its influence
+or value.  Just as it is virtue that saves the state, if it be saved,
+although the majority do not recognize it and attribute the salvation of
+the state to energy, and to obedience to the laws of political economy,
+and to discoveries in science, and to financial contrivances; so it is
+that in the life of generations of men, considered from an ethical and
+not from a religious point of view, the most potent and lasting influence
+for a civilization that is worth anything, a civilization that does not
+by its own nature work its decay, is that which I call literature.  It is
+time to define what we mean by literature.  We may arrive at the meaning
+by the definition of exclusion.  We do not mean all books, but some
+books; not all that is written and published, but only a small part of
+it.  We do not mean books of law, of theology, of politics, of science,
+of medicine, and not necessarily books of travel, or adventure, or
+biography, or fiction even.  These may all be ephemeral in their nature.
+The term belles-lettres does not fully express it, for it is too narrow.
+In books of law, theology, politics, medicine, science, travel,
+adventure, biography, philosophy, and fiction there may be passages that
+possess, or the whole contents may possess, that quality which comes
+within our meaning of literature.  It must have in it something of the
+enduring and the universal.  When we use the term art, we do not mean the
+arts; we are indicating a quality that may be in any of the arts.  In art
+and literature we require not only an expression of the facts in nature
+and in human life, but of feeling, thought, emotion.  There must be an
+appeal to the universal in the race.  It is, for example, impossible for
+a Christian today to understand what the religious system of the
+Egyptians of three thousand years ago was to the Egyptian mind, or to
+grasp the idea conveyed to a Chinaman's thought in the phrase, "the
+worship of the principle of heaven"; but the Christian of today
+comprehends perfectly the letters of an Egyptian scribe in the time of
+Thotmes III., who described the comical miseries of his campaign with as
+clear an appeal to universal human nature as Horace used in his 'Iter
+Brundusium;' and the maxims of Confucius are as comprehensible as the
+bitter-sweetness of Thomas a Kempis.  De Quincey distinguishes between
+the literature of knowledge and the literature of power.  The definition
+is not exact; but we may say that the one is a statement of what is
+known, the other is an emanation from the man himself; or that one may
+add to the sum of human knowledge, and the other addresses itself to a
+higher want in human nature than the want of knowledge.  We select and
+set aside as literature that which is original, the product of what we
+call genius.  As I have said, the subject of a production does not always
+determine the desired quality which makes it literature.  A biography may
+contain all the facts in regard to a man and his character, arranged in
+an orderly and comprehensible manner, and yet not be literature; but it
+may be so written, like Plutarch's Lives or Defoe's account of Robinson
+Crusoe, that it is literature, and of imperishable value as a picture of
+human life, as a satisfaction to the want of the human mind which is
+higher than the want of knowledge.  And this contribution, which I desire
+to be understood to mean when I speak of literature, is precisely the
+thing of most value in the lives of the majority of men, whether they are
+aware of it or not.  It may be weighty and profound; it may be light, as
+light as the fall of a leaf or a bird's song on the shore; it may be the
+thought of Plato when he discourses of the character necessary in a
+perfect state, or of Socrates, who, out of the theorem of an absolute
+beauty, goodness, greatness, and the like, deduces the immortality of the
+soul; or it may be the lovesong of a Scotch plowman: but it has this one
+quality of answering to a need in human nature higher than a need for
+facts, for knowledge, for wealth.
+
+In noticing the remoteness in the popular conception of the relation of
+literature to life, we must not neglect to take into account what may be
+called the arrogance of culture, an arrogance that has been emphasized,
+in these days of reaction from the old attitude of literary
+obsequiousness, by harsh distinctions and hard words, which are paid back
+by equally emphasized contempt.  The apostles of light regard the rest of
+mankind as barbarians and Philistines, and the world retorts that these
+self-constituted apostles are idle word-mongers, without any sympathy
+with humanity, critics and jeerers who do nothing to make the conditions
+of life easier.  It is natural that every man should magnify the circle
+of the world in which he is active and imagine that all outside of it is
+comparatively unimportant.  Everybody who is not a drone has his
+sufficient world.  To the lawyer it is his cases and the body of law,
+it is the legal relation of men that is of supreme importance; to the
+merchant and manufacturer all the world consists in buying and selling,
+in the production and exchange of products; to the physician all the
+world is diseased and in need of remedies; to the clergyman speculation
+and the discussion of dogmas and historical theology assume immense
+importance; the politician has his world, the artist his also, and the
+man of books and letters a realm still apart from all others.  And to
+each of these persons what is outside of his world seems of secondary
+importance; he is absorbed in his own, which seems to him all-embracing.
+To the lawyer everybody is or ought to be a litigant; to the grocer the
+world is that which eats, and pays--with more or less regularity; to the
+scholar the world is in books and ideas.  One realizes how possessed he
+is with his own little world only when by chance he changes his
+profession or occupation and looks back upon the law, or politics, or
+journalism, and sees in its true proportion what it was that once
+absorbed him and seemed to him so large.  When Socrates discusses with
+Gorgias the value of rhetoric, the use of which, the latter asserts,
+relates to the greatest and best of human things, Socrates says: I dare
+say you have heard men singing--at feasts the old drinking-song, in which
+the singers enumerate the goods of life-first, health; beauty next;
+thirdly, wealth honestly acquired.  The producers of these things--the
+physician, the trainer, the money-maker--each in turn contends that his
+art produces the greatest good.  Surely, says the physician, health is
+the greatest good; there is more good in my art, says the trainer, for my
+business is to make men beautiful and strong in body; and consider, says
+the money-maker, whether any one can produce a greater good than wealth.
+But, insists Gorgias, the greatest good of men, of which I am the
+creator, is that which gives men freedom in their persons, and the power
+of ruling over others in their several states--that is, the word which
+persuades the judge in the court, or the senators in the council, or the
+citizens in the assembly: if you have the power of uttering this word,
+you will have the physician your slave, and the trainer your slave, and
+the moneymaker of whom you talk will be found to gather treasures, not
+for himself, but for those who are able to speak and persuade the
+multitude.
+
+What we call life is divided into occupations and interest, and the
+horizons of mankind are bounded by them.  It happens naturally enough,
+therefore, that there should be a want of sympathy in regard to these
+pursuits among men, the politician despising the scholar, and the scholar
+looking down upon the politician, and the man of affairs, the man of
+industries, not caring to conceal his contempt for both the others.
+And still more reasonable does the division appear between all the world
+which is devoted to material life, and the few who live in and for the
+expression of thought and emotion.  It is a pity that this should be so,
+for it can be shown that life would not be worth living divorced from the
+gracious and ennobling influence of literature, and that literature
+suffers atrophy when it does not concern itself with the facts and
+feelings of men.
+
+If the poet lives in a world apart from the vulgar, the most lenient
+apprehension of him is that his is a sort of fool's paradise.  One of the
+most curious features in the relation of literature to life is this, that
+while poetry, the production of the poet, is as necessary to universal
+man as the atmosphere, and as acceptable, the poet is regarded with that
+mingling of compassion and undervaluation, and perhaps awe, which once
+attached to the weak-minded and insane, and which is sometimes expressed
+by the term "inspired idiot."  However the poet may have been petted and
+crowned, however his name may have been diffused among peoples, I doubt
+not that the popular estimate of him has always been substantially what
+it is today.  And we all know that it is true, true in our individual
+consciousness, that if a man be known as a poet and nothing else, if his
+character is sustained by no other achievement than the production of
+poetry, he suffers in our opinion a loss of respect.  And this is only
+recovered for him after he is dead, and his poetry is left alone to speak
+for his name.  However fond my lord and lady were of the ballad, the
+place of the minstrel was at the lower end of the hall.  If we are pushed
+to say why this is, why this happens to the poet and not to the producers
+of anything else that excites the admiration of mankind, we are forced to
+admit that there is something in the poet to sustain the popular judgment
+of his in utility.  In all the occupations and professions of life there
+is a sign put up, invisible--but none the less real, and expressing an
+almost universal feeling--"No poet need apply."  And this is not because
+there are so many poor poets; for there are poor lawyers, poor soldiers,
+poor statesmen, incompetent business men; but none of the personal
+disparagement attaches to them that is affixed to the poet.  This popular
+estimate of the poet extends also, possibly in less degree, to all the
+producers of the literature that does not concern itself with knowledge.
+It is not our care to inquire further why this is so, but to repeat that
+it is strange that it should be so when poetry is, and has been at all
+times, the universal solace of all peoples who have emerged out of
+barbarism, the one thing not supernatural and yet akin to the
+supernatural, that makes the world, in its hard and sordid conditions,
+tolerable to the race.  For poetry is not merely the comfort of the
+refined and the delight of the educated; it is the alleviator of poverty,
+the pleasure-ground of the ignorant, the bright spot in the most dreary
+pilgrimage.  We cannot conceive the abject animal condition of our race
+were poetry abstracted; and we do not wonder that this should be so when
+we reflect that it supplies a want higher than the need for food, for
+raiment, or ease of living, and that the mind needs support as much as
+the body.  The majority of mankind live largely in the imagination, the
+office or use of which is to lift them in spirit out of the bare physical
+conditions in which the majority exist.  There are races, which we may
+call the poetical races, in which this is strikingly exemplified.  It
+would be difficult to find poverty more complete, physical wants less
+gratified, the conditions of life more bare than among the Oriental
+peoples from the Nile to the Ganges and from the Indian Ocean to the
+steppes of Siberia.  But there are perhaps none among the more favored
+races who live so much in the world of imagination fed by poetry and
+romance.  Watch the throng seated about an Arab or Indian or Persian
+story-teller and poet, men and women with all the marks of want, hungry,
+almost naked, without any prospect in life of ever bettering their sordid
+condition; see their eyes kindle, their breathing suspended, their tense
+absorption; see their tears, hear their laughter, note their excitement
+as the magician unfolds to them a realm of the imagination in which they
+are free for the hour to wander, tasting a keen and deep enjoyment that
+all the wealth of Croesus cannot purchase for his disciples.  Measure,
+if you can, what poetry is to them, what their lives would be without it.
+To the millions and millions of men who are in this condition, the bard,
+the story-teller, the creator of what we are considering as literature,
+comes with the one thing that can lift them out of poverty, suffering--
+all the woe of which nature is so heedless.
+
+It is not alone of the poetical nations of the East that this is true,
+nor is this desire for the higher enjoyment always wanting in the savage
+tribes of the West.  When the Jesuit Fathers in 1768 landed upon the
+almost untouched and unexplored southern Pacific coast, they found in the
+San Gabriel Valley in Lower California that the Indians had games and
+feasts at which they decked themselves in flower garlands that reached to
+their feet, and that at these games there were song contests which
+sometimes lasted for three days.  This contest of the poets was an old
+custom with them.  And we remember how the ignorant Icelanders, who had
+never seen a written character, created the splendid Saga, and handed it
+down from father to son.  We shall scarcely find in Europe a peasantry
+whose abject poverty is not in some measure alleviated by this power
+which literature gives them to live outside it.  Through our sacred
+Scriptures, through the ancient storytellers, through the tradition which
+in literature made, as I said, the chief continuity in the stream of
+time, we all live a considerable, perhaps the better, portion of our
+lives in the Orient.  But I am not sure that the Scotch peasant, the
+crofter in his Highland cabin, the operative in his squalid tenement-
+house, in the hopelessness of poverty, in the grime of a life made twice
+as hard as that of the Arab by an inimical climate, does not owe more to
+literature than the man of culture, whose material surroundings are
+heaven in the imagination of the poor.  Think what his wretched life
+would be, in its naked deformity, without the popular ballads, without
+the romances of Scott, which have invested his land for him, as for us,
+with enduring charm; and especially without the songs of Burns, which
+keep alive in him the feeling that he is a man, which impart to his
+blunted sensibility the delicious throb of spring-songs that enable him
+to hear the birds, to see the bits of blue sky-songs that make him tender
+of the wee bit daisy at his feet--songs that hearten him when his heart
+is fit to break with misery.  Perhaps the English peasant, the English
+operative, is less susceptible to such influences than the Scotch or the
+Irish; but over him, sordid as his conditions are, close kin as he is to
+the clod, the light of poetry is diffused; there filters into his life,
+also, something of that divine stream of which we have spoken, a dialect
+poem that touches him, the leaf of a psalm, some bit of imagination,
+some tale of pathos, set afloat by a poor writer so long ago that it has
+become the common stock of human tradition-maybe from Palestine, maybe
+from the Ganges, perhaps from Athens--some expression of real emotion,
+some creation, we say, that makes for him a world, vague and dimly
+apprehended, that is not at all the actual world in which he sins and
+suffers.  The poor woman, in a hut with an earth floor, a reeking roof, a
+smoky chimney, barren of comfort, so indecent that a gentleman would not
+stable his horse in it, sits and sews upon a coarse garment, while she
+rocks the cradle of an infant about whom she cherishes no illusions that
+his lot will be other than that of his father before him.  As she sits
+forlorn, it is not the wretched hovel that she sees, nor other hovels
+like it--rows of tenements of hopeless poverty, the ale-house, the gin-
+shop, the coal-pit, and the choking factory--but:
+
+               "Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood
+               Stand dressed in living green"
+
+for her, thanks to the poet.  But, alas for the poet there is not a
+peasant nor a wretched operative of them all who will not shake his head
+and tap his forehead with his forefinger when the poor poet chap passes
+by.  The peasant has the same opinion of him that the physician, the
+trainer, and the money-lender had of the rhetorician.
+
+The hard conditions of the lonely New England life, with its religious
+theories as sombre as its forests, its rigid notions of duty as difficult
+to make bloom into sweetness and beauty as the stony soil, would have
+been unendurable if they had not been touched with the ideal created by
+the poet.  There was in creed and purpose the virility that creates a
+state, and, as Menander says, the country which is cultivated with
+difficulty produces brave men; but we leave out an important element in
+the lives of the Pilgrims if we overlook the means they had of living
+above their barren circumstances.  I do not speak only of the culture
+which many of them brought from the universities, of the Greek and Roman
+classics, and what unworldly literature they could glean from the
+productive age of Elizabeth and James, but of another source, more
+universally resorted to, and more powerful in exciting imagination and
+emotion, and filling the want in human nature of which we have spoken.
+They had the Bible, and it was more to them, much more, than a book of
+religion, than a revelation of religious truth, a rule for the conduct of
+life, or a guide to heaven.  It supplied the place to them of the
+Mahabharata to the Hindoo, of the story-teller to the Arab.  It opened to
+them a boundless realm of poetry and imagination.
+
+What is the Bible?  It might have sufficed, accepted as a book of
+revelation, for all the purposes of moral guidance, spiritual
+consolation, and systematized authority, if it had been a collection of
+precepts, a dry code of morals, an arsenal of judgments, and a treasury
+of promises.  We are accustomed to think of the Pilgrims as training
+their intellectual faculties in the knottiest problems of human
+responsibility and destiny, toughening their mental fibre in wrestling
+with dogmas and the decrees of Providence, forgetting what else they drew
+out of the Bible: what else it was to them in a degree it has been to few
+peoples many age.  For the Bible is the unequaled record of thought and
+emotion, the reservoir of poetry, traditions, stories, parables,
+exaltations, consolations, great imaginative adventure, for which the
+spirit of man is always longing.  It might have been, in warning examples
+and commands, all-sufficient to enable men to make a decent pilgrimage on
+earth and reach a better country; but it would have been a very different
+book to mankind if it had been only a volume of statutes, and if it
+lacked its wonderful literary quality.  It might have enabled men to
+reach a better country, but not, while on earth, to rise into and live in
+that better country, or to live in a region above the sordidness of
+actual life.  For, apart from its religious intention and sacred
+character, the book is so written that it has supremely in its history,
+poetry, prophecies, promises, stories, that clear literary quality that
+supplies, as certainly no other single book does, the want in the human
+mind which is higher than the want of facts or knowledge.
+
+The Bible is the best illustration of the literature of power, for it
+always concerns itself with life, it touches it at all points.  And this
+is the test of any piece of literature--its universal appeal to human
+nature.  When I consider the narrow limitations of the Pilgrim
+households, the absence of luxury, the presence of danger and hardship,
+the harsh laws--only less severe than the contemporary laws of England
+and Virginia--the weary drudgery, the few pleasures, the curb upon the
+expression of emotion and of tenderness, the ascetic repression of
+worldly thought, the absence of poetry in the routine occupations and
+conditions, I can feel what the Bible must have been to them.  It was an
+open door into a world where emotion is expressed, where imagination can
+range, where love and longing find a language, where imagery is given to
+every noble and suppressed passion of the soul, where every aspiration
+finds wings.  It was history, or, as Thucydides said, philosophy teaching
+by example; it was the romance of real life; it was entertainment
+unfailing; the wonder-book of childhood, the volume of sweet sentiment to
+the shy maiden, the sword to the soldier, the inciter of the youth to
+heroic enduring of hardness, it was the refuge of the aged in failing
+activity.  Perhaps we can nowhere find a better illustration of the true
+relation of literature to life than in this example.
+
+Let us consider the comparative value of literature to mankind.
+By comparative value I mean its worth to men in comparison with other
+things of acknowledged importance, such as the creation of industries,
+the government of States, the manipulation of the politics of an age,
+the achievements in war and discovery, and the lives of admirable men.
+It needs a certain perspective to judge of this aright, for the near and
+the immediate always assume importance.  The work that an age has on
+hand, whether it be discovery, conquest, the wars that determine
+boundaries or are fought for policies, the industries that develop a
+country or affect the character of a people, the wielding of power, the
+accumulation of fortunes, the various activities of any given
+civilization or period, assume such enormous proportions to those engaged
+in them that such a modest thing as the literary product seems
+insignificant in comparison; and hence it is that the man of action
+always holds in slight esteem the man of thought, and especially the
+expresser of feeling and emotion, the poet and the humorist.  It is only
+when we look back over the ages, when civilizations have passed or
+changed, over the rivalries of States, the ambitions and enmities of men,
+the shining deeds and the base deeds that make up history, that we are
+enabled to see what remains, what is permanent.  Perhaps the chief result
+left to the world out of a period of heroic exertion, of passion and
+struggle and accumulation, is a sheaf of poems, or the record by a man of
+letters of some admirable character.  Spain filled a large place in the
+world in the sixteenth century, and its influence upon history is by no
+means spent yet; but we have inherited out of that period nothing, I dare
+say, that is of more value than the romance of Don Quixote.  It is true
+that the best heritage of generation from generation is the character of
+great men; but we always owe its transmission to the poet and the writer.
+Without Plato there would be no Socrates.  There is no influence
+comparable in human life to the personality of a powerful man, so long as
+he is present to his generation, or lives in the memory of those who felt
+his influence.  But after time has passed, will the world, will human
+life, that is essentially the same in all changing conditions, be more
+affected by what Bismarck did or by what Goethe said?
+
+We may without impropriety take for an illustration of the comparative
+value of literature to human needs the career of a man now living.  In
+the opinion of many, Mr. Gladstone is the greatest Englishman of this
+age.  What would be the position of the British empire, what would be the
+tendency of English politics and society without him, is a matter for
+speculation.  He has not played such a role for England and its neighbors
+as Bismarck has played for Germany and the Continent, but he has been one
+of the most powerful influences in molding English action.  He is the
+foremost teacher.  Rarely in history has a nation depended more upon a
+single man, at times, than the English upon Gladstone, upon his will, his
+ability, and especially his character.  In certain recent crises the
+thought of losing him produced something like a panic in the English
+mind, justifying in regard to him, the hyperbole of Choate upon the death
+of Webster, that the sailor on the distant sea would feel less safe--
+as if a protecting providence had been withdrawn from the world.  His
+mastery of finance and of economic problems, his skill in debate, his
+marvelous achievements in oratory, have extorted the admiration of his
+enemies.  There is scarcely a province in government, letters, art, or
+research in which the mind can win triumphs that he has not invaded and
+displayed his power in; scarcely a question in politics, reform, letters,
+religion, archaeology, sociology, which he has not discussed with
+ability.  He is a scholar, critic, parliamentarian, orator, voluminous
+writer.  He seems equally at home in every field of human activity--a man
+of prodigious capacity and enormous acquirements.  He can take up, with a
+turn of the hand, and always with vigor, the cause of the Greeks, Papal
+power, education, theology, the influence of Egypt on Homer, the effect
+of English legislation on King O'Brien, contributing something noteworthy
+to all the discussions of the day.  But I am not aware that he has ever
+produced a single page of literature.  Whatever space he has filled in
+his own country, whatever and however enduring the impression he has made
+upon English life and society, does it seem likely that the sum total of
+his immense activity in so many fields, after the passage of so many
+years, will be worth to the world as much as the simple story of Rab and
+his Friends?  Already in America I doubt if it is.  The illustration
+might have more weight with some minds if I contrasted the work of this
+great man--as to its answering to a deep want in human nature--with a
+novel like 'Henry Esmond' or a poem like 'In Memoriam'; but I think it is
+sufficient to rest it upon so slight a performance as the sketch by
+Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh.  For the truth is that a little page of
+literature, nothing more than a sheet of paper with a poem written on it,
+may have that vitality, that enduring quality, that adaptation to life,
+that make it of more consequence to all who inherit it than every
+material achievement of the age that produced it.  It was nothing but a
+sheet of paper with a poem on it, carried to the door of his London
+patron, for which the poet received a guinea, and perhaps a seat at the
+foot of my lord's table.  What was that scrap compared to my lord's
+business, his great establishment, his equipages in the Park, his
+position in society, his weight in the House of Lords, his influence in
+Europe?  And yet that scrap of paper has gone the world over; it has been
+sung in the camp, wept over in the lonely cottage; it has gone with the
+marching regiments, with the explorers--with mankind, in short, on its
+way down the ages, brightening, consoling, elevating life; and my lord,
+who regarded as scarcely above a menial the poet to whom he tossed the
+guinea--my lord, with all his pageantry and power, has utterly gone and
+left no witness.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Relation of Literature to Life, by Warner
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Relation of Literature to Life by Warner
+#21 in our series by Charles Dudley Warner
+
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+Title: Relation of Literature to Life
+
+Author: Charles Dudley Warner
+
+Release Date: March, 2002  [Etext #3117]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of Relation of Literature to Life, by Warner
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+
+THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE
+
+By Charles Dudley Warner
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH BY THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY.
+THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE
+
+
+
+BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
+
+The county of Franklin in Northwestern Massachusetts, if not rivaling in
+certain ways the adjoining Berkshire, has still a romantic beauty of its
+own.  In the former half of the nineteenth century its population was
+largely given up to the pursuit of agriculture, though not under
+altogether favorable conditions.  Manufactures had not yet invaded the
+region either to add to its wealth or to defile its streams.  The
+villages were small, the roads pretty generally wretched save in summer,
+and from many of the fields the most abundant crop that could be gathered
+was that of stones.
+
+The character of the people conformed in many ways to that of the soil.
+The houses which lined the opposite sides of the single street, of which
+the petty places largely consisted, as well as the dwellings which dotted
+the country, were the homes of men who possessed in fullness many of the
+features, good and bad, that characterized the Puritan stock to which
+they belonged.  There was a good deal of religion in these rural
+communities and occasionally some culture.  Still, as a rule, it must be
+confessed, there would be found in them much more of plain living than of
+high thinking.  Broad thinking could hardly be said to exist at all.
+By the dwellers in that region Easter had scarcely even been heard of;
+Christmas was tolerated after a fashion, but was nevertheless looked upon
+with a good deal of suspicion as a Popish invention.  In the beliefs of
+these men several sins not mentioned in the decalogue took really, if
+unconsciously, precedence of those which chanced to be found in that
+list.  Dancing was distinctly immoral; card-playing led directly to
+gambling with all its attendant evils; theatre-going characterized the
+conduct of the more disreputable denizens of great cities.  Fiction was
+not absolutely forbidden; but the most lenient regarded it as a great
+waste of time, and the boy who desired its solace on any large scale was
+under the frequent necessity of seeking the seclusion of the haymow.
+
+But however rigid and stern the beliefs of men might be, nature was there
+always charming, not only in her summer beauty, but even in her wildest
+winter moods.  Narrow, too, as might be the views of the members of these
+communities about the conduct of life, there was ever before the minds of
+the best of them an ideal of devotion to duty, an earnest all-pervading
+moral purpose which implanted the feeling that neither personal success
+nor pleasure of any sort could ever afford even remotely compensation for
+the neglect of the least obligation which their situation imposed.
+It was no misfortune for any one, who was later to be transported to a
+broader horizon and more genial air, to have struck the roots of his
+being in a soil where men felt the full sense of moral responsibility for
+everything said or done, and where the conscience was almost as sensitive
+to the suggestion of sin as to its actual accomplishment.
+
+It was amidst such surroundings that Charles Dudley Warner was born on
+the 12th of September, 1829.  His birthplace was the hill town of
+Plainfield, over two thousand feet above the level of the sea.
+His father, a farmer, was a man of cultivation, though not college-bred.
+He died when his eldest son had reached the age of five, leaving to his
+widow the care of two children.  Three years longer the family continued
+to remain on the farm.  But however delightful the scenery of the country
+might be, its aesthetic attractions did not sufficiently counterbalance
+its agricultural disadvantages.  Furthermore, while the summers were
+beautiful on this high table land, the winters were long and dreary in
+the enforced solitude of a thinly settled region.  In consequence, the
+farm was sold after the death of the grandfather, and the home broken up.
+The mother with her two children, went to the neighboring village of
+Charlemont on the banks of the Deerfield.  There the elder son took up
+his residence with his guardian and relative, a man of position and
+influence in the community, who was the owner of a large farm.  With him
+he stayed until he was twelve years old, enjoying all the pleasures and
+doing all the miscellaneous jobs of the kind which fall to the lot of a
+boy brought up in an agricultural community.
+
+The story of this particular period of his life was given by Warner in a
+work which was published about forty years later.  It is the volume
+entitled "Being a Boy."  Nowhere has there been drawn a truer or more
+vivid picture of rural New England.  Nowhere else can there be found such
+a portrayal of the sights and sounds, the pains and pleasures of life on
+a farm as seen from the point of view of a boy.  Here we have them all
+graphically represented: the daily "chores" that must be looked after;
+the driving of cows to and from the pasture; the clearing up of fields
+where vegetation struggled with difficulty against the prevailing stones;
+the climbing of lofty trees and the swaying back and forth in the wind on
+their topmost boughs; the hunting of woodchucks; the nutting excursions
+of November days, culminating in the glories of Thanksgiving; the romance
+of school life, over which vacations, far from being welcomed with
+delight, cast a gloom as involving extra work; the cold days of winter
+with its deep or drifting snows, the mercury of the thermometer clinging
+with fondness to zero, even when the sun was shining brilliantly; the
+long chilling nights in which the frost carved fantastic structures on
+the window-panes; the eager watching for the time when the sap would
+begin to run in the sugar-maples; the evenings given up to reading, with
+the inevitable inward discontent at being sent to bed too early; the
+longing for the mild days of spring to come, when the heavy cowhide boots
+could be discarded, and the boy could rejoice at last in the covering for
+his feet which the Lord had provided.  These and scores of similar
+descriptions fill up the picture of the life furnished here.  It was
+nature's own school wherein was to be gained the fullest intimacy with
+her spirit.  While there was much which she could not teach, there was
+also much which she alone could teach.  From his communion with her the
+boy learned lessons which the streets of crowded cities could never have
+imparted.
+
+At the age of twelve this portion of his education came to an end.
+The family then moved to Cazenovia in Madison county in Central New York,
+from which place Warner's mother had come, and where her immediate
+relatives then resided.  Until he went to college this was his home.
+There he attended a preparatory school under the direction of the
+Methodist Episcopal Church, which was styled the Oneida Conference
+Seminary.  It was at this institution that he fitted mainly for college;
+for to college it had been his father's dying wish that he should go,
+and the boy himself did not need the spur of this parting injunction.
+A college near his home was the excellent one of Hamilton in the not
+distant town of Clinton in the adjoining county of Oneida.  Thither he
+repaired in 1848, and as he had made the best use of his advantages, he
+was enabled to enter the sophomore class.  He was graduated in 1851.
+
+But while fond of study he had all these years been doing something
+besides studying.  The means of the family were limited, and to secure
+the education he desired, not only was it necessary to husband the
+resources he possessed, but to increase them in every possible way.
+Warner had all the American boy's willingness to undertake any occupation
+not in itself discreditable.  Hence to him fell a full share of those
+experiences which have diversified the early years of so many men who
+have achieved success.  He set up type in a printing office; he acted as
+an assistant in a bookstore; he served as clerk in a post-office.  He was
+thus early brought into direct contact with persons of all classes and
+conditions of life.
+
+The experience gave to his keenly observant mind an insight into the
+nature of men which was to be of special service to him in later years.
+Further, it imparted to him a familiarity with their opinions and hopes
+and aspirations which enabled him to understand and sympathize with
+feelings in which he did not always share.
+
+During the years which immediately followed his departure from college,
+Warner led the somewhat desultory and apparently aimless life of many
+American graduates whose future depends upon their own exertions and
+whose choice of a career is mainly determined by circumstances.  From the
+very earliest period of his life he had been fond of reading.  It was an
+inherited taste.  The few books he found in his childhood's home would
+have been almost swept out of sight in the torrent, largely of trash,
+which pours now in a steady stream into the humblest household.  But the
+books, though few, were of a high quality; and because they were few they
+were read much, and their contents became an integral part of his
+intellectual equipment.  Furthermore, these works of the great masters,
+with which he became familiar, set for him a standard by which to test
+the value of whatever he read, and saved him even in his earliest years
+from having his taste impaired and his judgment misled by the vogue of
+meretricious productions which every now and then gain popularity for the
+time.  They gave him also a distinct bent towards making literature his
+profession.  But literature, however pleasant and occasionally profitable
+as an avocation, was not to be thought of as a vocation.  Few there are
+at any period who have succeeded in finding it a substantial and
+permanent support; at that time and in this country such a prospect was
+practically hopeless for any one.  It is no matter of surprise,
+therefore, that Warner, though often deviating from the direct path,
+steadily gravitated toward the profession of law.
+
+Still, even in those early days his natural inclination manifested
+itself.  The Knickerbocker Magazine was then the chosen organ to which
+all young literary aspirants sent their productions.  To it even in his
+college days Warner contributed to some extent, though it would doubtless
+be possible now to gather out of this collection but few pieces which,
+lacking his own identification, could be assigned to him positively.
+At a later period he contributed articles to Putnam's Magazine, which
+began its existence in 1853.  Warner himself at one time, in that period
+of struggle and uncertainty, expected to become an editor of a monthly
+which was to be started in Detroit.  But before the magazine was actually
+set on foot the inability of the person who projected it to supply the
+necessary means for carrying it on prevented the failure which would
+inevitably have befallen a venture of that sort, undertaken at that time
+and in that place.  Yet he showed in a way the native bent of his mind by
+bringing out two years after his graduation from college a volume of
+selections from English and American authors entitled "The Book of
+Eloquence."  This work a publisher many years afterward took advantage of
+his later reputation to reprint.
+
+This unsettled period of his life lasted for several years.  He was
+resident for a while in various places.  Part of the time he seems to
+have been in Cazenovia; part of the time in New York; part of the time in
+the West.  One thing in particular there was which stood in the way of
+fixing definitely his choice of a profession.  This was the precarious
+state of his health, far poorer then than it was in subsequent years.
+Warner, however, was never at any period of his life what is called
+robust.  It was his exceeding temperance in all things which enabled him
+to venture upon the assumption and succeed in the accomplishment of tasks
+which men, physically far stronger than he, would have shrunk from under-
+taking, even had they been possessed of the same abilities.  But his
+condition, part of that time, was such that it led him to take a course
+of treatment at the sanatorium in Clifton Springs.  It became apparent,
+however, that life in the open air, for a while at least, was the one
+thing essential.  Under the pressure of this necessity he secured a
+position as one of an engineering party engaged in the survey of a
+railway in Missouri.  In that occupation he spent a large part of 1853
+and 1854.  He came back from this expedition restored to health.  With
+that result accomplished, the duty of settling definitely upon what he
+was to do became more urgent.  Among other things he did, while living
+for a while with his uncle in Binghamton, N. Y., he studied law in the
+office of Daniel S. Dickinson.
+
+In the Christmas season of 1854 he went with a friend on a visit to
+Philadelphia and stayed at the house of Philip M. Price, a prominent
+citizen of that place who was engaged, among other things, in the
+conveyancing of real estate.  It will not be surprising to any one who
+knew the charm of his society in later life to be told that he became at
+once a favorite with the older man.  The latter was advanced in years,
+he was anxious to retire from active business.  Acting under his advice,
+Warner was induced to come to Philadelphia in 1855 and join him, and to
+form subsequently a partnership in legal conveyancing with another young
+man who had been employed in Mr. Price's office.  Thus came into being
+the firm of Barton and Warner.  Their headquarters were first in Spring
+Garden Street and later in Walnut Street.  The future soon became
+sufficiently assured to justify Warner in marriage, and in October, 1856,
+he was wedded to Susan Lee, daughter of William Elliott Lee of New York
+City.
+
+But though in a business allied to the law, Warner was not yet a lawyer.
+His occupation indeed was only in his eyes a temporary makeshift while he
+was preparing himself for what was to be his real work in life.
+Therefore, while supporting himself by carrying on the business of
+conveyancing, he attended the courses of study at the law department of
+the University of Pennsylvania, during the academic years of 1856-57 and
+1857-58.  From that institution he received the degree of bachelor of law
+in 1858--often misstated 1856--and was ready to begin the practice of
+his, profession.
+
+In those days every young man of ability and ambition was counseled to go
+West and grow up with the country, and was not unfrequently disposed to
+take that course of his own accord.  Warner felt the general impulse.
+He had contemplated entering, in fact had pretty definitely made up his
+mind to enter, into a law partnership with a friend in one of the smaller
+places in that region.  But on a tour, somewhat of exploration, he
+stopped at Chicago.  There he met another friend, and after talking over
+the situation with him he decided to take up his residence in that city.
+So in 1858 the law-firm of Davenport and Warner came into being.
+It lasted until 1860.  It was not exactly a favorable time for young men
+to enter upon the practice of this profession.  The country was just
+beginning to recover from the depression which had followed the
+disastrous panic of 1857; but confidence was as yet far from being
+restored.  The new firm did a fairly good business; but while there was
+sufficient work to do, there was but little money to pay for it.  Still
+Warner would doubtless have continued in the profession had he not
+received an offer, the acceptance of which determined his future and
+changed entirely his career.
+
+Hawley, now United States Senator from Connecticut, was Warner's senior
+by a few years.  He had preceded him as a student at the Oneida
+Conference Seminary and at Hamilton College.  Practicing law in Hartford,
+he had started in 1857, in conjunction with other leading citizens, a
+paper called the Evening Press.  It was devoted to the advocacy of the
+principles of the Republican party, which was at that time still in what
+may be called the formative state of its existence.  This was a period in
+which for some years the dissolution had been going on of the two old
+parties which had divided the country.  Men were changing sides and were
+aligning themselves anew according to their views on questions which were
+every day assuming greater prominence in the minds of all.  There was
+really but one great subject talked about or thought about.  It split
+into opposing sections the whole land over which was lowering the grim,
+though as yet unrecognizable, shadow of civil war.  The Republican party
+had been in existence but a very few years, but in that short time it had
+attracted to its ranks the young and enthusiastic spirits of the North,
+just as to the other side were impelled the members of the same class in
+the South.  The intellectual contest which preceded the physical was
+stirring the hearts of all men.  Hawley, who was well aware of Warner's
+peculiar ability, was anxious to secure his co-operation and assistance.
+He urged him to come East and join him in the conduct of the new
+enterprise he had undertaken.
+
+Warner always considered that he derived great benefit from his
+comparatively limited study and practice of law; and that the little time
+he had given up to it had been far from being misspent.  But the opening
+which now presented itself introduced him to a field of activity much
+more suited to his talents and his tastes.  He liked the study of law
+better than its practice; for his early training had not been of a kind
+to reconcile him to standing up strongly for clients and causes that he
+honestly believed to be in the wrong.  Furthermore, his heart, as has
+been said, had always been in literature; and though journalism could
+hardly be called much more than a half-sister, the one could provide the
+support which the other could never promise with certainty.  So in 1860
+Warner removed to Hartford and joined his friend as associate editor of
+the newspaper he had founded.  The next year the war broke out.  Hawley
+at once entered the army and took part in the four years' struggle.  His
+departure left Warner in editorial charge of the paper, into the conduct
+of which he threw himself with all the earnestness and energy of his
+nature, and the ability, both political and literary, displayed in its
+columns gave it at once a high position which it never lost.
+
+At this point it may be well to give briefly the few further salient
+facts of Warner's connection with journalism proper.  In 1867 the owners
+of the Press purchased the Courant, the well-known morning paper which
+had been founded more than a century before, and consolidated the Press
+with it.  Of this journal, Hawley and Warner, now in part proprietors,
+were the editorial writers.  The former, who had been mustered out of the
+army with the rank of brevet Major-General, was soon diverted from
+journalism by other employments.  He was elected Governor, he became a
+member of Congress, serving successively in both branches.  The main
+editorial responsibility for the conduct of the paper devolved in
+consequence upon Warner, and to it he gave up for years nearly all his
+thought and attention.  Once only during that early period was his labor
+interrupted for any considerable length of time.  In May, 1868, he set
+out on the first of his five trips across the Atlantic.  He was absent
+nearly a year.  Yet even then he cannot be said to have neglected his
+special work.  Articles were sent weekly from the other side, describing
+what he saw and experienced abroad.  His active connection with the paper
+he never gave up absolutely, nor did his interest in it ever cease.
+But after he became connected with the editorial staff of Harpers
+Magazine the contributions he made to his journal were only occasional
+and what may be called accidental.
+
+When 1870 came, forty years of Warner's life had gone by, and nearly
+twenty years since he had left college.  During the latter ten years of
+this period he had been a most effective and forcible leader-writer on
+political and social questions, never more so than during the storm and
+stress of the Civil War.  Outside of these topics he had devoted a great
+deal of attention to matters connected with literature and art.  His
+varied abilities were fully recognized by the readers of the journal he
+edited.
+
+But as yet there was little or no recognition outside.  It is no easy
+matter to tell what are the influences, what the circumstances, which
+determine the success of a particular writer or of a particular work.
+Hitherto Warner's repute was mainly confined to the inhabitants of a
+provincial capital and its outlying and dependent towns.  However
+cultivated the class to which his writings appealed--and as a class it
+was distinctly cultivated--their number was necessarily not great.  To
+the country at large what he did or what he was capable of doing was not
+known at all.  Some slight efforts he had occasionally put forth to
+secure the publication of matter he had prepared.  He experienced the
+usual fate of authors who seek to introduce into the market literary
+wares of a new and better sort.  His productions did not follow
+conventional lines.  Publishers were ready to examine what he offered,
+and were just as ready to declare that these new wares were of a nature
+in which they were not inclined to deal.
+
+But during 1870 a series of humorous articles appeared in the Hartford
+Courant, detailing his experiences in the cultivation of a garden.
+Warner had become the owner of a small place then almost on the outskirts
+of the city.  With the dwelling-house went the possession of three acres
+of land.  The opportunity thus presented itself of turning into a
+blessing the primeval curse of tilling the soil, in this instance not
+with a hoe, but with a pen.  These articles detailing his experiences
+excited so much amusement and so much admiration that a general desire
+was manifested that they should receive a more permanent life than that
+accorded to articles appearing in the columns of newspapers, and should
+reach a circle larger than that to be found in the society of the
+Connecticut capital.  Warner's previous experience had not disposed him
+to try his fortunes with the members of the publishing fraternity.
+In fact he did not lay so much stress upon the articles as did his
+readers and friends.  He always insisted that he had previously written
+other articles which in his eyes certainly were just as good as they, if
+not better.
+
+It so chanced that about this time Henry Ward Beecher came to Hartford to
+visit his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe.  Warner was invited to meet him.
+In the course of the conversation the articles just mentioned were
+referred to by some one of those present.  Beecher's curiosity was
+aroused and he expressed a desire to see them.  To him they were
+accordingly sent for perusal.  No sooner had he run through them than he
+recognized in them the presence of a rare and delicate humor which struck
+a distinctly new note in American literature.  It was something he felt
+which should not be confined to the knowledge of any limited circle.
+He wrote at once to the publisher James T. Fields, urging the production
+of these articles in book form.  Beecher's recommendation in those days
+was sufficient to insure the acceptance of any book by any publisher.
+Mr. Fields agreed to bring out the work, provided the great preacher
+would prefix an introduction.  This he promised to do and did; though in
+place of the somewhat more formal piece he was asked to write, he sent
+what he called an introductory letter.
+
+The series of papers published under the title of "My Summer in a Garden"
+came out at the very end of 1870, with the date of 1871 on the title-
+page.  The volume met with instantaneous success.  It was the subject of
+comment and conversation everywhere and passed rapidly through several
+editions.  There was a general feeling that a new writer had suddenly
+appeared, with a wit and wisdom peculiarly his own, precisely like which
+nothing had previously existed in our literature.  To the later editions
+of the work was added an account of a cat which had been presented to the
+author by the Stowes.  For that reason it was given from the Christian
+name of the husband of the novelist the title of Calvin.  To this John
+was sometimes prefixed, as betokening from the purely animal point of
+view a certain resemblance to the imputed grimness and earnestness of the
+great reformer.  There was nothing in the least exaggerated in the
+account which Warner gave of the character and conduct of this really
+remarkable member of the feline race.  No biography was ever truer; no
+appreciation was ever more sympathetic; and in the long line of cats none
+was ever more worthy to have his story truly and sympathetically told.
+All who had the fortune to see Calvin in the flesh will recognize the
+accuracy with which his portrait was drawn.  All who read the account of
+him, though not having seen him, will find it one of the most charming of
+descriptions.  It has the fullest right to be termed a cat classic.
+
+With the publication of "My Summer in a Garden" Warner was launched upon
+a career of authorship which lasted without cessation during the thirty
+years that remained of his life.  It covered a wide field.  His interests
+were varied and his activity was unremitting.  Literature, art, and that
+vast diversity of topics which are loosely embraced under the general
+name of social science--upon all these he had something fresh to say, and
+he said it invariably with attractiveness and effect.  It mattered little
+what he set out to talk about, the talk was sure to be full both of
+instruction and entertainment.  No sooner had the unequivocal success of
+his first published work brought his name before the public than he was
+besieged for contributions by conductors of periodicals of all sorts; and
+as he had ideas of his own upon all sorts of subjects, he was constantly
+furnishing matter of the most diverse kind for the most diverse
+audiences.
+
+As a result, the volumes here gathered together represent but a limited
+portion of the work he accomplished.  All his life, indeed, Warner was
+not only an omnivorous consumer of the writings of others, but a constant
+producer.  The manifestation of it took place in ways frequently known to
+but few.  It was not merely the fact that as an editor of a daily paper
+he wrote regularly articles on topics of current interest to which he
+never expected to pay any further attention; but after his name became
+widely known and his services were in request everywhere, he produced
+scores of articles, some long, some short, some signed, some unsigned,
+of which he made no account whatever.  One looking through the pages of
+contemporary periodical literature is apt at any moment to light upon
+pieces, and sometimes upon series of them, which the author never took
+the trouble to collect.  Many of those to which his name was not attached
+can no longer be identified with any approach to certainty.  About the
+preservation of much that he did--and some of it belonged distinctly to
+his best and most characteristic work--he was singularly careless, or it
+may be better to say, singularly indifferent.
+
+If I may be permitted to indulge in the recital of a personal experience,
+there is one incident I recall which will bring out this trait in a
+marked manner.  Once on a visit to him I accompanied him to the office of
+his paper.  While waiting for him to discharge certain duties there, and
+employing myself in looking over the exchanges, I chanced to light upon a
+leading article on the editorial page of one of the most prominent of the
+New York dailies.  It was devoted to the consideration of some recent
+utterances of a noted orator who, after the actual mission of his life
+had been accomplished, was employing the decline of it in the
+exploitation of every political and economic vagary which it had entered
+into the addled brains of men to evolve.  The article struck me as one of
+the most brilliant and entertaining of its kind I had ever read; it was
+not long indeed before it appeared that the same view of it was taken by
+many others throughout the country.  The peculiar wit of the comment, the
+keenness of the satire made so much of an impression upon me that I
+called Warner away from his work to look at it.  At my request he hastily
+glanced over it, but somewhat to my chagrin failed to evince any
+enthusiasm about it.  On our way home I again spoke of it and was a good
+deal nettled at the indifference towards it which he manifested.
+It seemed to imply that my critical judgment was of little value; and
+however true might be his conclusion on that point, one does not enjoy
+having the fact thrust too forcibly upon the attention in the familiarity
+of conversation.  Resenting therefore the tone he had assumed, I took
+occasion not only to reiterate my previously expressed opinion somewhat
+more aggressively, but also went on to insinuate that he was himself
+distinctly lacking in any real appreciation of what was excellent.  He
+bore with me patiently for a while.  "Well, sonny," he said at last,
+"since you seem to take the matter so much to heart, I will tell you in
+confidence that I wrote the piece myself."  I found that this was not
+only true in the case just specified, but that while engaged in preparing
+articles for his own paper he occasionally prepared them for other
+journals.  No one besides himself and those immediately concerned, ever
+knew anything about the matter.  He never asserted any right to these
+pieces, he never sought to collect them, though some of them exhibited
+his happiest vein of humor.  Unclaimed, unidentified, they are swept into
+that wallet of oblivion in which time stows the best as well as the worst
+of newspaper production.
+
+The next volume of Warner's writings that made its appearance was
+entitled "Saunterings." It was the first and, though good of its kind,
+was by no means the best of a class of productions in which he was to
+exhibit signal excellence.  It will be observed that of the various works
+comprised in this collective edition, no small number consist of what by
+a wide extension of the phrase may be termed books of travel.  There are
+two or three which fall strictly under that designation.  Most of them,
+however, can be more properly called records of personal experience and
+adventure in different places and regions, with the comments on life and
+character to which they gave rise.
+
+Books of travel, if they are expected to live, are peculiarly hard to
+write.  If they come out at a period when curiosity about the region
+described is predominant, they are fairly certain, no matter how
+wretched, to achieve temporary success.  But there is no kind of literary
+production to which, by the very law of its being, it is more difficult
+to impart vitality.  Paradoxical as it may seem, it is perfectly true
+that the greatest hinderance to their permanent interest is the
+information they furnish.  The more full, specific and even accurate that
+is, the more rapidly does the work containing it lose its value.  The
+fresher knowledge conveyed by a new, and it may be much inferior book,
+crowds out of circulation those which have gone before.  The changed or
+changing conditions in the region traversed renders the information
+previously furnished out of date and even misleading.  Hence the older
+works come in time to have only an antiquarian interest.  Their pages are
+consulted only by that very limited number of persons who are anxious to
+learn what has been and view with stolid indifference what actually is.
+Something of this transitory nature belongs to all sketches of travel.
+It is the one great reason why so very few of the countless number of
+such works, written, and sometimes written by men of highest ability, are
+hardly heard of a few years after publication.  Travels form a species of
+literary production in which great classics are exceedingly rare.
+
+From this fatal characteristic, threatening the enduring life of such
+works, most of Warner's writings of this sort were saved by the method of
+procedure he followed.  He made it his main object not to give facts but
+impressions.  All details of exact information, everything calculated to
+gratify the statistical mind or to quench the thirst of the seeker for
+purely useful information, he was careful, whether consciously or
+unconsciously, to banish from those volumes of his in which he followed
+his own bent and felt himself under no obligation to say anything but
+what he chose.  Hence these books are mainly a record of views of men and
+manners made by an acute observer on the spot, and put down at the moment
+when the impression created was most vivid, not deferred till familiarity
+had dulled the sense of it or custom had caused it to be disregarded.
+Take as an illustration the little book entitled "Baddeck," one of the
+slightest of his productions in this field.  It purports to be and is
+nothing more than an account of a two weeks' tour made to a Cape Breton
+locality in company with the delightful companion to whom it was
+dedicated.  You take it up with the notion that you are going to acquire
+information about the whole country journeyed over, you are beguiled at
+times with the fancy that you are getting it.  In the best sense it may
+be said that you do get it; for it is the general impression of the
+various scenes through which the expedition leads the travelers that is
+left upon the mind, not those accurate details of a single one of them
+which the lapse of a year might render inaccurate.  It is to the credit
+of the work therefore than one gains from it little specific knowledge.
+In its place are the reflections both wise and witty upon life, upon the
+characters of the men that are met, upon the nature of the sights that
+are seen.
+
+This is what constitutes the enduring charm of the best of these pictures
+of travel which Warner produced.  It is perhaps misleading to assert that
+they do not furnish a good deal of information.  Still it is not the sort
+of information which the ordinary tourist gives and which the cultivated
+reader resents and is careful not to remember.  Their dominant note is
+rather the quiet humor of a delightful story-teller, who cannot fail to
+say something of interest because he has seen so much; and who out of his
+wide and varied observation selects for recital certain sights he has
+witnessed, certain experiences he has gone through, and so relates them
+that the way the thing is told is even more interesting than the thing
+told.  The chief value of these works does not accordingly depend upon
+the accidental, which passes.  Inns change and become better or worse.
+Facilities for transportation increase or decrease.  Scenery itself
+alters to some extent under the operation of agencies brought to bear
+upon it for its own improvement or for the improvement of something else.
+But man's nature remains a constant quantity.  Traits seen here and now
+are sure to be met with somewhere else, and even in ages to come.  Hence
+works of this nature, embodying descriptions of men and manners, always
+retain something of the freshness which characterized them on the day of
+their appearance.
+
+Of these productions in which the personal element predominates, and
+where the necessity of intruding information is not felt as a burden,
+those of Warner's works which deal with the Orient take the first rank.
+The two--"My Winter on the Nile" and "In the Levant"--constitute the
+record of a visit to the East during the years 1875 and 1876.
+
+They would naturally have of themselves the most permanent value,
+inasmuch as the countries described have for most educated men an abiding
+interest.  The lifelike representation and graphic characterization which
+Warner was apt to display in his traveling sketches were here seen at
+their best, because nowhere else did he find the task of description more
+congenial.  Alike the gorgeousness and the squalor of the Orient appealed
+to his artistic sympathies.  Egypt in particular had for him always a
+special fascination.  Twice he visited it--at the time just mentioned and
+again in the winter of 1881-82.  He rejoiced in every effort made to
+dispel the obscurity which hung over its early history.  No one, outside
+of the men most immediately concerned, took a deeper interest than he in
+the work of the Egyptian Exploration Society, of which he was one of the
+American vice-presidents.  To promoting its success he gave no small
+share of time and attention.  Everything connected with either the past
+or the present of the country had for him an attraction.  A civilization
+which had been flourishing for centuries, when the founder of Israel was
+a wandering sheik on the Syrian plains or in the hill-country of Canaan;
+the slow unraveling of records of dynasties of forgotten kings; the
+memorials of Egypt's vanished greatness and the vision of her future
+prosperity these and things similar to these made this country, so
+peculiarly the gift of the Nile, of fascinating interest to the modern
+traveler who saw the same sights which had met the eyes of Herodotus
+nearly twenty-five hundred years before.
+
+To the general public the volume which followed--"In the Levant"--was
+perhaps of even deeper interest.  At all events it dealt with scenes and
+memories with which every reader, educated or uneducated, had
+associations.  The region through which the founder of Christianity
+wandered, the places he visited, the words he said in them, the acts he
+did, have never lost their hold over the hearts of men, not even during
+the periods when the precepts of Christianity have had the least
+influence over the conduct of those who professed to it their allegiance.
+In the Levant, too, were seen the beginnings of commerce, of art, of
+letters, in the forms in which the modern world best knows them.  These,
+therefore, have always made the lands about the eastern Mediterranean an
+attraction to cultivated men and the interest of the subject accordingly
+reinforced the skill of the writer.
+
+There are two or three of these works which can not be included in the
+class just described.  They were written for the specific purpose of
+giving exact information at the time.  Of these the most noticeable are
+the volumes entitled "South and West" and the account of Southern
+California which goes under the name of "Our Italy."  They are the
+outcome of journeys made expressly with the intent of investigating and
+reporting upon the actual situation and apparent prospects of the places
+and regions described.  As they were written to serve an immediate
+purpose, much of the information contained in them tends to grow more and
+more out of date as time goes on; and though of value to the student
+of history, these volumes must necessarily become of steadily diminishing
+interest to the ordinary reader.  Yet it is to be said of them that while
+the pill of useful information is there, it has at least been sugar-
+coated.  Nor can we afford to lose sight of the fact that the widely-
+circulated articles, collected under the title of "South and West," by
+the spirit pervading them as well as by the information they gave, had a
+marked effect in bringing the various sections of the country into a
+better understanding of one another, and in imparting to all a fuller
+sense of the community they possessed in profit and loss, in honor and
+dishonor.
+
+It is a somewhat singular fact that these sketches of travel led Warner
+incidentally to enter into an entirely new field of literary exertion.
+This was novel-writing.  Something of this nature he had attempted in
+conjunction with Mark Twain in the composition of "The Gilded Age," which
+appeared in 1873.  The result, however, was unsatisfactory to both the
+collaborators.  Each had humor, but the humor of each was fundamentally
+different.  But the magazine with which Warner had become connected was
+desirous that he should prepare for it an account of some of the
+principal watering-places and summer resorts of the country.  Each was to
+be visited in turn and its salient features were to be described.  It was
+finally suggested that this could be done most effectively by weaving
+into a love story occurrences that might happen at a number of these
+places which were made the subjects of description.  The principal
+characters were to take their tours under the personal conduct of the
+novelist.  They were to go to the particular spots selected North and
+South, according to the varying seasons of the year.  It was a somewhat
+novel way of, visiting resorts of this nature; there are those to whom it
+will seem altogether more agreeable than would be the visiting of them in
+person.  Hence appeared in 1886 the articles which were collected later
+in the volume entitled "Their Pilgrimage."
+
+Warner executed the task which had been assigned him with his wonted
+skill.  The completed work met with success--with so much success indeed
+that he was led later to try his fortune further in the same field and
+bring out the trilogy of novels which go under the names respectively of
+"A Little Journey in the World," "The Golden House," and "That Fortune."
+Each of these is complete in itself, each can be read by itself; but the
+effect of each and of the whole series can be best secured by reading
+them in succession.  In the first it is the story of how a great fortune
+was made in the stock market; in the second, how it was fraudulently
+diverted from the object for which it was intended; and in the third, how
+it was most beneficially and satisfactorily lost.  The scene of the last
+novel was laid in part in Warner's early home in Charlemont.  These works
+were produced with considerable intervals of time between their
+respective appearances, the first coming out in 1889 and the third ten
+years later.  This detracted to some extent from the popularity which
+they would have attained had the different members followed one another
+rapidly.  Still, they met with distinct success, though it has always
+been a question whether this success was due so much to the story as to
+the shrewd observation and caustic wit which were brought to bear upon
+what was essentially a serious study of one side of American social life.
+
+The work with which Warner himself was least satisfied was his life of
+Captain John Smith, which came out in 18881.  It was originally intended
+to be one of a series of biographies of noted men, which were to give the
+facts accurately but to treat them humorously.  History and comedy,
+however, have never been blended successfully, though desperate attempts
+have occasionally been made to achieve that result.  Warner had not long
+been engaged in the task before he recognized its hopelessness.  For its
+preparation it required a special study of the man and the period, and
+the more time he spent upon the preliminary work, the more the humorous
+element tended to recede.  Thus acted on by two impulses, one of a light
+and one of a grave nature, he moved for a while in a sort of diagonal
+between the two to nowhere in particular; but finally ended in treating
+the subject seriously.
+
+In giving himself up to a biography in which he had no special interest,
+Warner felt conscious that he could not interest others.  His forebodings
+were realized.  The work, though made from a careful study of original
+sources, did not please him, nor did it attract the public.  The attempt
+was all the more unfortunate because the time and toil he spent upon it
+diverted him from carrying out a scheme which had then taken full
+possession of his thoughts.  This was the production of a series of
+essays to be entitled "Conversations on Horseback."  Had it been worked
+up as he sketched it in his mind, it would have been the outdoor
+counterpart of his "Backlog Studies."  Though in a measure based upon a
+horseback ride which he took in Pennsylvania in 1880, the incidents of
+travel as he outlined its intended treatment would have barely furnished
+the slightest of backgrounds.  Captain John Smith, however, interfered
+with a project specially suited to his abilities and congenial to his
+tastes.  That he did so possibly led the author of his life to exhibit a
+somewhat hostile attitude towards his hero.  When the biography was
+finished, other engagements were pressing upon his attention.  The
+opportunity of taking up and completing the projected series of essays
+never presented itself, though the subject lay in his mind for a long
+time and he himself believed that it would have turned out one of the
+best pieces of work he ever did.
+
+It was unfortunate.  For to me--and very likely to many others if not to
+most--Warner's strength lay above all in essay-writing.  What he
+accomplished in this line was almost invariably pervaded by that genial
+grace which makes work of the kind attractive, and he exhibited
+everywhere in it the delicate but sure touch which preserves the just
+mean between saying too much and too little.  The essay was in his
+nature, and his occupation as a journalist had developed the tendency
+towards this form of literary activity, as well as skill in its
+manipulation.  Whether he wrote sketches of travel, or whether he wrote
+fiction, the scene depicted was from the point of view of the essayist
+rather than from that of the tourist or of the novelist.  It is this
+characteristic which gives to his work in the former field its enduring
+interest.  Again in his novels, it was not so much the story that was in
+his thoughts as the opportunity the varying scenes afforded for amusing
+observations upon manners, for comments upon life, sometimes good-
+natured, sometimes severe, but always entertaining, and above all, for
+serious study of the social problems which present themselves on every
+side for examination.  This is distinctly the province of the essayist,
+and in it Warner always displayed his fullest strength.
+
+We have seen that his first purely humorous publication of this nature
+was the one which made him known to the general public.  It was speedily
+followed, however, by one of a somewhat graver character, which became at
+the time and has since remained a special favorite of cultivated readers.
+This is the volume entitled "Backlog Studies."  The attractiveness of
+this work is as much due to the suggestive social and literary
+discussions with which it abounds as to the delicate and refined humor
+with which the ideas are expressed.  Something of the same
+characteristics was displayed in the two little volumes of short pieces
+dealing with social topics, which came out later under the respective
+titles of "As We Were Saying," and "As We Go."  But there was a deeper
+and more serious side of his nature which found utterance in several of
+his essays, particularly in some which were given in the form of
+addresses delivered at various institutions of learning.  They exhibit
+the charm which belongs to all his writings; but his feelings were too
+profoundly interested in the subjects considered to allow him to give
+more than occasional play to his humor.  Essays contained in such a
+volume, for instance, as "The Relation of Literature to Life" will not
+appeal to him whose main object in reading is amusement.  Into them
+Warner put his deepest and most earnest convictions.  The subject from
+which the book just mentioned derived its title lay near to his heart.
+No one felt more strongly than he the importance of art of all kinds, but
+especially of literary art, for the uplifting of a nation.  No one saw
+more distinctly the absolute necessity of its fullest recognition in a
+moneymaking age and in a money-making land, if the spread of the dry rot
+of moral deterioration were to be prevented.  The ampler horizon it
+presented, the loftier ideals it set up, the counteracting agency it
+supplied to the sordidness of motive and act which, left unchecked, was
+certain to overwhelm the national spirit--all these were enforced by him
+again and again with clearness and effectiveness.  His essays of this
+kind will never be popular in the sense in which are his other writings.
+But no thoughtful man will rise up from reading them without having
+gained a vivid conception of the part which literature plays in the life
+of even the humblest, and without a deeper conviction of its necessity to
+any healthy development of the character of a people.
+
+During the early part of his purely literary career a large proportion of
+Warner's collected writings, which then appeared, were first published in
+the Atlantic Monthly.  But about fourteen years before his death he
+became closely connected with Harper's Magazine.  From May, 1886, to
+March, 1892, he conducted the Editor's Drawer of that periodical.  The
+month following this last date he succeeded William Dean Howells as the
+contributor of the Editor's Study.  This position he held until July,
+1898.  The scope of this department was largely expanded after the death
+of George William Curtis in the summer of 1892, and the consequent
+discontinuance of the Editor's Easy Chair.  Comments upon other topics
+than those to which his department was originally devoted, especially
+upon social questions, were made a distinct feature.  His editorial
+connection with the magazine naturally led to his contributing to it
+numerous articles besides those which were demanded by the requirements
+of the position he held.  Nearly all these, as well as those which
+appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, are indicated in the bibliographical
+notes prefixed to the separate works.
+
+There were, however, other literary enterprises in which he was
+concerned; for the calls upon him were numerous, his own appetite for
+work was insatiable, and his activity was indefatigable.  In 1881 he
+assumed the editorship of the American Men of Letters series.  This he
+opened with his own biography of Washington Irving, the resemblance
+between whom and himself has been made the subject of frequent remark.
+Later he became the editor-in-chief of the thirty odd volumes which make
+up the collection entitled "The World's Best Literature."  To this he
+contributed several articles of his own and carefully allotted and
+supervised the preparation of a large number of others.  The labor he put
+upon the editing of this collection occupied him a great deal of the time
+from 1895 to 1898.
+
+But literature, though in it lay his chief interest, was but one of the
+subjects which employed his many-sided activity.  He was constantly
+called upon for the discharge of civic duties.  The confidence felt by
+his fellow-citizens in his judgment and taste was almost equal to the
+absolute trust reposed in his integrity.  The man who establishes a
+reputation for the possession of these qualities can never escape from
+bearing the burdens which a good character always imposes.  If any work
+of art was ordered by the state, Warner was fairly certain to be chosen a
+member of the commission selected to decide upon the person who was to do
+it and upon the way it was to be done.  By his fellow-townsmen he was
+made a member of the Park Commission.  Such were some of the duties
+imposed; there were others voluntarily undertaken.  During the latter
+years of his life he became increasingly interested in social questions,
+some of which partook of a semi-political character.  One of the subjects
+which engaged his attention was the best method to be adopted for
+elevating the character and conduct of the negro population of the
+country.  He recognized the gravity of the problem with which the nation
+had to deal and the difficulties attending its solution.  One essay on
+the subject was prepared for the meeting held at Washington in May, 1900,
+of the American Social Science Association, of which he was president.
+He was not able to be there in person.  The disease which was ultimately
+to strike him down had already made its preliminary attack.  His address
+was accordingly read for him.  It was a subject of special regret that he
+could not be present to set forth more fully his views; for the debate,
+which followed the presentation of his paper, was by no means confined to
+the meeting, but extended to the press of the whole country.  Whether the
+conclusions he reached were right or wrong, they were in no case adopted
+hastily nor indeed without the fullest consideration.
+
+But a more special interest of his lay in prison reform.  The subject had
+engaged his attention long before he published anything in connection
+with it.  Later one of the earliest articles he wrote for Harper's
+Magazine was devoted to it.  It was in his thoughts just before his
+death.  He was a member of the Connecticut commission on prisons, of the
+National Prison Association, and a vice-president of the New York
+Association for Prison Reform.  A strong advocate of the doctrine of the
+indeterminate sentence, he had little patience with many of the judicial
+outgivings on that subject.  To him they seemed opinions inherited, not
+formed, and in most cases were nothing more than the result of prejudice
+working upon ignorance.  This particular question was one which he
+purposed to make the subject of his address as president of the Social
+Science Association, at its annual meeting in 1901.  He never lived to
+complete what he had in mind.
+
+During his later years the rigor of the Northern winter had been too
+severe for Warner's health.  He had accordingly found it advisable to
+spend as much of this season as he could in warmer regions.  He visited
+at various times parts of the South, Mexico, and California.  He passed
+the winter of 1892-93 at Florence; but he found the air of the valley of
+the Arno no perceptible improvement upon that of the valley of the
+Connecticut.  In truth, neither disease nor death entertains a prejudice
+against any particular locality.  This fact he was to learn by personal
+experience.  In the spring of 1899, while at New Orleans, he was stricken
+by pneumonia which nearly brought him to the grave.  He recovered, but it
+is probable that the strength of his system was permanently impaired,
+and with it his power of resisting disease.  Still his condition was not
+such as to prevent him from going on with various projects he had been
+contemplating or from forming new ones.  The first distinct warning of
+the approaching end was the facial paralysis which suddenly attacked him
+in April, 1900, while on a visit to Norfolk, Va.  Yet even from that he
+seemed to be apparently on the full road to recovery during the following
+summer.
+
+It was in the second week of October, 1900, that Warner paid me a visit
+of two or three days.  He was purposing to spend the winter in Southern
+California, coming back to the East in ample time to attend the annual
+meeting of the Social Science Association.  His thoughts were even then
+busy with the subject of the address which, as president, he was to
+deliver on that occasion.  It seemed to me that I had never seen him when
+his mind was more active or more vigorous.  I was not only struck by the
+clearness of his views--some of which were distinctly novel, at least to
+me--but by the felicity and effectiveness with which they were put.
+
+Never, too, had I been more impressed with the suavity, the
+agreeableness, the general charm of his manner.  He had determined during
+the coming winter to learn to ride the wheel, and we then and there
+planned to take a bicycle trip during the following summer, as we had
+previously made excursions together on horseback.  When we parted, it was
+with the agreement that we should meet the next spring in Washington and
+fix definitely upon the time and region of our intended ride.  It was on
+a Saturday morning that I bade him good-by, apparently in the best of
+health and spirits.  It was on the evening of the following Saturday--
+October 20th--that the condensed, passionless, relentless message which
+the telegraph transmits, informed me that he had died that afternoon.
+
+That very day he had lunched at a friend's, where were gathered several
+of his special associates who had chanced to come together at the same
+house, and then had gone to the office of the Hartford Courant.  There
+was not the slightest indication apparent of the end that was so near.
+After the company broke up, he started out to pay a visit to one of the
+city parks, of which he was a commissioner.  On his way thither, feeling
+a certain faintness, he turned aside into a small house whose occupants
+he knew, and asked to sit down for a brief rest, and then, as the
+faintness increased, to lie undisturbed on the lounge for a few minutes.
+The few minutes passed, and with them his life.  In the strictest sense
+of the words, he had fallen asleep.  From one point of view it was an
+ideal way to die.  To the individual, death coming so gently, so
+suddenly, is shorn of all its terrors.  It is only those who live to
+remember and to lament that the suffering comes which has been spared the
+victim.  Even to them, however, is the consolation that though they may
+have been fully prepared for the coming of the inevitable event, it would
+have been none the less painful when it actually came.
+
+Warner as a writer we all know.  The various and varying opinions
+entertained about the quality and value of his work do not require notice
+here.  Future times will assign him his exact position in the roll of
+American authors, and we need not trouble ourselves to anticipate, as we
+shall certainly not be able to influence, its verdict.  But to only a
+comparatively few of those who knew him as a writer was it given to know
+him as a man; to still fewer to know him in that familiarity of intimacy
+which reveals all that is fine or ignoble in a man's personality.  Scanty
+is the number of those who will come out of that severest of ordeals so
+successfully as he.  The same conclusion would be reached, whether we
+were to consider him in his private relations or in his career as a man
+of letters.  Among the irritable race of authors no one was freer from
+petty envy or jealousy.  During many years of close intercourse, in which
+he constantly gave utterance to his views both of men and things with
+absolute unreserve, I recall no disparaging opinion ever expressed of any
+writer with whom he had been compared either for praise or blame.  He had
+unquestionably definite and decided opinions.  He would point out that
+such or such a work was above or below its author's ordinary level; but
+there was never any ill-nature in his comment, no depreciation for
+depreciation's sake.  Never in truth was any one more loyal to his
+friends.  If his literary conscience would not permit him to say anything
+in favor of something which they had done, he usually contented himself
+with saying nothing.  Whatever failing there was on his critical side was
+due to this somewhat uncritical attitude; for it is from his particular
+friends that the writer is apt to get the most dispassionate
+consideration and sometimes the coldest commendation.  It was a part of
+Warner's generous recognition of others that he was in all sincerity
+disposed to attribute to those he admired and to whom he was attached an
+ability of which some of them at least were much inclined to doubt their
+own possession.
+
+Were I indeed compelled to select any one word which would best give the
+impression, both social and literary, of Warner's personality, I should
+be disposed to designate it as urbanity.  That seems to indicate best the
+one trait which most distinguished him either in conversation or writing.
+Whatever it was, it was innate, not assumed.  It was the genuine outcome
+of the kindliness and broad-mindedness of his nature and led him to
+sympathize with men of all positions in life and of all kinds of ability.
+It manifested itself in his attitude towards every one with whom he came
+in contact.  It led him to treat with fullest consideration all who were
+in the least degree under his direction, and converted in consequence the
+toil of subordinates into a pleasure.  It impelled him to do unsought
+everything which lay in his power for the success of those in whom he
+felt interest.  Many a young writer will recall his words of
+encouragement at some period in his own career when the quiet
+appreciation of one meant more to him than did later the loud applause of
+many.  As it was in public, so it was in private life.  The generosity of
+his spirit, the geniality and high-bred courtesy of his manner, rendered
+a visit to his home as much a social delight as his wide knowledge of
+literature and his appreciation of what was best in it made it an
+intellectual entertainment.
+
+THOMAS R. LOUNSBURY.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE
+
+
+
+PRELIMINARY
+
+This paper was prepared and delivered at several of our universities as
+introductory to a course of five lectures which insisted on the value of
+literature in common life--some hearers thought with an exaggerated
+emphasis--and attempted to maintain the thesis that all genuine, enduring
+literature is the outcome of the time that produces it, is responsive to
+the general sentiment of its time; that this close relation to human life
+insures its welcome ever after as a true representation of human nature;
+and that consequently the most remunerative method of studying a
+literature is to study the people for whom it was produced.
+Illustrations of this were drawn from the Greek, the French, and the
+English literatures.  This study always throws a flood of light upon the
+meaning of the text of an old author, the same light that the reader
+unconsciously has upon contemporary pages dealing with the life with
+which he is familiar.  The reader can test this by taking up his
+Shakespeare after a thorough investigation of the customs, manners, and
+popular life of the Elizabethan period.  Of course the converse is true
+that good literature is an open door into the life and mode of thought of
+the time and place where it originated.
+
+
+
+
+THE RELATION OF LITERATURE TO LIFE
+
+I hade a vision once--you may all have had a like one--of the stream of
+time flowing through a limitless land.  Along its banks sprang up in
+succession the generations of man.  They did not move with the stream-
+they lived their lives and sank away; and always below them new
+generations appeared, to play their brief parts in what is called
+history--the sequence of human actions.  The stream flowed on, opening
+for itself forever a way through the land.  I saw that these successive
+dwellers on the stream were busy in constructing and setting afloat
+vessels of various size and form and rig--arks, galleys, galleons,
+sloops, brigs, boats propelled by oars, by sails, by steam.  I saw the
+anxiety with which each builder launched his venture, and watched its
+performance and progress.  The anxiety was to invent and launch something
+that should float on to the generations to come, and carry the name of
+the builder and the fame of his generation.  It was almost pathetic,
+these puny efforts, because faith always sprang afresh in the success of
+each new venture.  Many of the vessels could scarcely be said to be
+launched at all; they sank like lead, close to the shore.  Others floated
+out for a time, and then, struck by a flaw in the wind, heeled over and
+disappeared.  Some, not well put together, broke into fragments in the
+bufleting of the waves.  Others danced on the flood, taking the sun on
+their sails, and went away with good promise of a long voyage.  But only
+a few floated for any length of time, and still fewer were ever seen by
+the generation succeeding that which launched them.  The shores of the
+stream were strewn with wrecks; there lay bleaching in the sand the ribs
+of many a once gallant craft.
+
+Innumerable were the devices of the builders to keep their inventions
+afloat.  Some paid great attention to the form of the hull, others to the
+kind of cargo and the loading of it, while others--and these seemed the
+majority--trusted more to some new sort of sail, or new fashion of
+rudder, or new application of propelling power.  And it was wonderful to
+see what these new ingenuities did for a time, and how each generation
+was deceived into the belief that its products would sail on forever.
+But one fate practically came to the most of them.  They were too heavy,
+they were too light, they were built of old material, and they went to
+the bottom, they went ashore, they broke up and floated in fragments.
+And especially did the crafts built in imitation of something that had
+floated down from a previous generation come to quick disaster.  I saw
+only here and there a vessel, beaten by weather and blackened by time
+--so old, perhaps, that the name of the maker was no longer legible; or
+some fragments of antique wood that had evidently come from far up the
+stream.  When such a vessel appeared there was sure to arise great
+dispute about it, and from time to time expeditions were organized to
+ascend the river and discover the place and circumstances of its origin.
+Along the banks, at intervals, whole fleets of boats and fragments had
+gone ashore, and were piled up in bays, like the driftwood of a subsided
+freshet.  Efforts were made to dislodge these from time to time and set
+them afloat again, newly christened, with fresh paint and sails, as if
+they stood a better chance of the voyage than any new ones.  Indeed, I
+saw that a large part of the commerce of this river was, in fact, the old
+hulks and stranded wrecks that each generation had set afloat again.
+As I saw it in this foolish vision, how pathetic this labor was from
+generation to generation; so many vessels launched; so few making a
+voyage even for a lifetime; so many builders confident of immortality; so
+many lives outlasting this coveted reputation!  And still the
+generations, each with touching hopefulness, busied themselves with this
+child's play on the banks of the stream; and still the river flowed on,
+whelming and wrecking the most of that so confidently committed to it,
+and bearing only here and there, on its swift, wide tide, a ship, a boat,
+a shingle.
+
+These hosts of men whom I saw thus occupied since history began were
+authors; these vessels were books; these heaps of refuse in the bays were
+great libraries.  The allegory admits of any amount of ingenious
+parallelism.  It is nevertheless misleading; it is the illusion of an
+idle fancy.  I have introduced it because it expresses, with some
+whimsical exaggeration--not much more than that of "The Vision of Mirza"
+--the popular notion about literature and its relation to human life.
+In the popular conception, literature is as much a thing apart from life
+as these boats on the stream of time were from the existence, the
+struggle, the decay of the generations along the shore.  I say in the
+popular conception, for literature is wholly different from this, not
+only in its effect upon individual lives, but upon the procession of
+lives upon this earth; it is not only an integral part of all of them,
+but, with its sister arts, it is the one unceasing continuity in history.
+Literature and art are not only the records and monuments made by the
+successive races of men, not only the local expressions of thought and
+emotion, but they are, to change the figure, the streams that flow on,
+enduring, amid the passing show of men, reviving, transforming, ennobling
+the fleeting generations.  Without this continuity of thought and
+emotion, history would present us only a succession of meaningless
+experiments.  The experiments fail, the experiments succeed--at any rate,
+they end--and what remains for transmission, for the sustenance of
+succeeding peoples?  Nothing but the thought and emotion evolved and
+expressed.  It is true that every era, each generation, seems to have its
+peculiar work to do; it is to subdue the intractable earth, to repel or
+to civilize the barbarians, to settle society in order, to build cities,
+to amass wealth in centres, to make deserts bloom, to construct edifices
+such as were never made before, to bring all men within speaking distance
+of each other--lucky if they have anything to say when that is
+accomplished--to extend the information of the few among the many, or to
+multiply the means of easy and luxurious living.  Age after age the world
+labors for these things with the busy absorption of a colony of ants in
+its castle of sand.  And we must confess that the process, such, for
+instance, as that now going on here--this onset of many peoples, which is
+transforming the continent of America--is a spectacle to excite the
+imagination in the highest degree.  If there were any poet capable of
+putting into an epic the spirit of this achievement, what an epic would
+be his!  Can it be that there is anything of more consequence in life
+than the great business in hand, which absorbs the vitality and genius of
+this age?  Surely, we say, it is better to go by steam than to go afoot,
+because we reach our destination sooner--getting there quickly being a
+supreme object.  It is well to force the soil to yield a hundred-fold,
+to congregate men in masses so that all their energies shall be taxed to
+bring food to themselves, to stimulate industries, drag coal and metal
+from the bowels of the earth, cover its surface with rails for swift-
+running carriages, to build ever larger palaces, warehouses, ships.
+This gigantic achievement strikes the imagination.
+
+If the world in which you live happens to be the world of books, if your
+pursuit is to know what has been done and said in the world, to the end
+that your own conception of the value of life may be enlarged, and that
+better things may be done and said hereafter, this world and this pursuit
+assume supreme importance in your mind.  But you can in a moment place
+yourself in relations--you have not to go far, perhaps only to speak to
+your next neighbor--where the very existence of your world is scarcely
+recognized.  All that has seemed to you of supreme importance is ignored.
+You have entered a world that is called practical, where the things that
+we have been speaking of are done; you have interest in it and sympathy
+with it, because your scheme of life embraces the development of ideas
+into actions; but these men of realities have only the smallest
+conception of the world that seems to you of the highest importance;
+and, further, they have no idea that they owe anything to it, that it has
+ever influenced their lives or can add anything to them.  And it may
+chance that you have, for the moment, a sense of insignificance in the
+small part you are playing in the drama going forward.  Go out of your
+library, out of the small circle of people who talk of books, who are
+engaged in research, whose liveliest interest is in the progress of
+ideas, in the expression of thought and emotion that is in literature;
+go out of this atmosphere into a region where it does not exist, it may
+be into a place given up to commerce and exchange, or to manufacturing,
+or to the development of certain other industries, such as mining, or the
+pursuit of office--which is sometimes called politics.  You will speedily
+be aware how completely apart from human life literature is held to be,
+how few people regard it seriously as a necessary element in life,
+as anything more than an amusement or a vexation.  I have in mind a
+mountain district, stripped, scarred, and blackened by the ruthless
+lumbermen, ravished of its forest wealth; divested of its beauty, which
+has recently become the field of vast coal-mining operations.  Remote
+from communication, it was yesterday an exhausted, wounded, deserted
+country.  Today audacious railways are entering it, crawling up its
+mountain slopes, rounding its dizzy precipices, spanning its valleys on
+iron cobwebs, piercing its hills with tunnels.  Drifts are opened in its
+coal seams, to which iron tracks shoot away from the main line; in the
+woods is seen the gleam of the engineer's level, is heard the rattle of
+heavily-laden wagons on the newly-made roads; tents are pitched, uncouth
+shanties have sprung up, great stables, boarding-houses, stores,
+workshops; the miner, the blacksmith, the mason, the carpenter have
+arrived; households have been set up in temporary barracks, children are
+already there who need a school, women who must have a church and
+society; the stagnation has given place to excitement, money has flowed
+in, and everywhere are the hum of industry and the swish of the goad of
+American life.  On this hillside, which in June was covered with oaks,
+is already in October a town; the stately trees have been felled; streets
+are laid out and graded and named; there are a hundred dwellings, there
+are a store, a post-office, an inn; the telegraph has reached it, and the
+telephone and the electric light; in a few weeks more it will be in size
+a city, with thousands of people--a town made out of hand by drawing men
+and women from other towns, civilized men and women, who have voluntarily
+put themselves in a position where they must be civilized over again.
+
+This is a marvelous exhibition of what energy and capital can do.  You
+acknowledge as much to the creators of it.  You remember that not far
+back in history such a transformation as this could not have been wrought
+in a hundred years.  This is really life, this is doing something in the
+world, and in the presence of it you can see why the creators of it
+regard your world, which seemed to you so important, the world whose
+business is the evolution and expression of thought and emotion, as
+insignificant.  Here is a material addition to the business and wealth of
+the race, here employment for men who need it, here is industry replacing
+stagnation, here is the pleasure of overcoming difficulties and
+conquering obstacles.  Why encounter these difficulties?  In order that
+more coal may be procured to operate more railway trains at higher speed,
+to supply more factories, to add to the industrial stir of modern life.
+The men who projected and are pushing on this enterprise, with an
+executive ability that would maintain and manoeuvre an army in a
+campaign, are not, however, consciously philanthropists, moved by the
+charitable purpose of giving employment to men, or finding satisfaction
+in making two blades of grass grow where one grew before.  They enjoy no
+doubt the sense of power in bringing things to pass, the feeling of
+leadership and the consequence derived from its recognition; but they
+embark in this enterprise in order that they may have the position and
+the luxury that increased wealth will bring, the object being, in most
+cases, simply material advantages--sumptuous houses, furnished with all
+the luxuries which are the signs of wealth, including, of course,
+libraries and pictures and statuary and curiosities, the most showy
+equipages and troops of servants; the object being that their wives shall
+dress magnificently, glitter in diamonds and velvets, and never need to
+put their feet to the ground; that they may command the best stalls in
+the church, the best pews in the theatre, the choicest rooms in the inn,
+and--a consideration that Plato does not mention, because his world was
+not our world--that they may impress and reduce to obsequious deference
+the hotel clerk.
+
+This life--for this enterprise and its objects are types of a
+considerable portion of life--is not without its ideal, its hero, its
+highest expression, its consummate flower.  It is expressed in a word
+which I use without any sense of its personality, as the French use the
+word Barnum--for our crude young nation has the distinction of adding a
+verb to the French language, the verb to barnum--it is expressed in the
+well-known name Croesus.  This is a standard--impossible to be reached
+perhaps, but a standard.  If one may say so, the country is sown with
+seeds of Croesus, and the crop is forward and promising.  The interest
+to us now in the observation of this phase of modern life is not in the
+least for purposes of satire or of reform.  We are inquiring how wholly
+this conception of life is divorced from the desire to learn what has
+been done and said to the end that better things may be done and said
+hereafter, in order that we may understand the popular conception of the
+insignificant value of literature in human affairs.  But it is not aside
+from our subject, rather right in its path, to take heed of what the
+philosophers say of the effect in other respects of the pursuit of
+wealth.
+
+One cause of the decay of the power of defense in a state, says the
+Athenian Stranger in Plato's Laws--one cause is the love of wealth, which
+wholly absorbs men and never for a moment allows them to think of
+anything but their private possessions; on this the soul of every citizen
+hangs suspended, and can attend to nothing but his daily gain; mankind
+are ready to learn any branch of knowledge and to follow any pursuit
+which tends to this end, and they laugh at any other; that is the reason
+why a city will not be in earnest about war or any other good and
+honorable pursuit.
+
+The accumulation of gold in the treasury of private individuals, says
+Socrates, in the Republic, is the ruin of democracy.  They invent illegal
+modes of expenditure; and what do they or their wives care about the law?
+
+"And then one, seeing another's display, proposes to rival him, and thus
+the whole body of citizens acquires a similar character.
+
+"After that they get on in a trade, and the more they think of making a
+fortune, the less they think of virtue; for when riches and virtue are
+placed together in the balance, the one always rises as the other falls.
+
+"And in proportion as riches and rich men are honored in the state,
+virtue and the virtuous are dishonored.
+
+"And what is honored is cultivated, and that which has no honor is
+neglected.
+
+"And so at last, instead of loving contention and glory, men become
+lovers of trade and money, and they honor and reverence the rich man and
+make a ruler of him, and dishonor the poor man.
+
+"They do so."
+
+The object of a reasonable statesman (it is Plato who is really speaking
+in the Laws) is not that the state should be as great and rich as
+possible, should possess gold and silver, and have the greatest empire by
+sea and land.
+
+The citizen must, indeed, be happy and good, and the legislator will seek
+to make him so; but very rich and very good at the same time he cannot
+be; not at least in the sense in which many speak of riches.  For they
+describe by the term "rich" the few who have the most valuable
+possessions, though the owner of them be a rogue.  And if this is true,
+I can never assent to the doctrine that the rich man will be happy: he
+must be good as well as rich.  And good in a high degree and rich in a
+high degree at the same time he cannot be.  Some one will ask, Why not?
+And we shall answer, Because acquisitions which come from sources which
+are just and unjust indifferently are more than double those which come
+from just sources only; and the sums which are expended neither honorably
+nor disgracefully are only half as great as those which are expended
+honorably and on honorable purposes.  Thus if one acquires double and
+spends half, the other, who is in the opposite case and is a good man,
+cannot possibly be wealthier than he.  The first (I am speaking of the
+saver, and not of the spender) is not always bad; he may indeed in some
+cases be utterly bad, but as I was saying, a good man he never is.
+For he who receives money unjustly as well as justly, and spends neither
+justly nor unjustly, will be a rich man if he be also thrifty.  On the
+other hand, the utterly bad man is generally profligate, and therefore
+poor; while he who spends on noble objects, and acquires wealth by just
+means only, can hardly be remarkable for riches any more than he can be
+very poor.  The argument, then, is right in declaring that the very rich
+are not good, and if they are not good they are not happy.
+
+And the conclusion of Plato is that we ought not to pursue any occupation
+to the neglect of that for which riches exist--"I mean," he says, "soul
+and body, which without gymnastics and without education will never be
+worth anything; and therefore, as we have said not once but many times,
+the care of riches should have the last place in our thoughts."
+
+Men cannot be happy unless they are good, and they cannot be good unless
+the care of the soul occupies the first place in their thoughts.  That is
+the first interest of man; the interest in the body is midway; and last
+of all, when rightly regarded, is the interest about money.
+
+The majority of mankind reverses this order of interests, and therefore
+it sets literature to one side as of no practical account in human life.
+More than this, it not only drops it out of mind, but it has no
+conception of its influence and power in the very affairs from which it
+seems to be excluded.  It is my purpose to show not only the close
+relation of literature to ordinary life, but its eminent position in
+life, and its saving power in lives which do not suspect its influence
+or value.  Just as it is virtue that saves the state, if it be saved,
+although the majority do not recognize it and attribute the salvation of
+the state to energy, and to obedience to the laws of political economy,
+and to discoveries in science, and to financial contrivances; so it is
+that in the life of generations of men, considered from an ethical and
+not from a religious point of view, the most potent and lasting influence
+for a civilization that is worth anything, a civilization that does not
+by its own nature work its decay, is that which I call literature.  It is
+time to define what we mean by literature.  We may arrive at the meaning
+by the definition of exclusion.  We do not mean all books, but some
+books; not all that is written and published, but only a small part of
+it.  We do not mean books of law, of theology, of politics, of science,
+of medicine, and not necessarily books of travel, or adventure, or
+biography, or fiction even.  These may all be ephemeral in their nature.
+The term belles-lettres does not fully express it, for it is too narrow.
+In books of law, theology, politics, medicine, science, travel,
+adventure, biography, philosophy, and fiction there may be passages that
+possess, or the whole contents may possess, that quality which comes
+within our meaning of literature.  It must have in it something of the
+enduring and the universal.  When we use the term art, we do not mean the
+arts; we are indicating a quality that may be in any of the arts.  In art
+and literature we require not only an expression of the facts in nature
+and in human life, but of feeling, thought, emotion.  There must be an
+appeal to the universal in the race.  It is, for example, impossible for
+a Christian today to understand what the religious system of the
+Egyptians of three thousand years ago was to the Egyptian mind, or to
+grasp the idea conveyed to a Chinaman's thought in the phrase, "the
+worship of the principle of heaven"; but the Christian of today
+comprehends perfectly the letters of an Egyptian scribe in the time of
+Thotmes III., who described the comical miseries of his campaign with as
+clear an appeal to universal human nature as Horace used in his 'Iter
+Brundusium;' and the maxims of Confucius are as comprehensible as the
+bitter-sweetness of Thomas a Kempis.  De Quincey distinguishes between
+the literature of knowledge and the literature of power.  The definition
+is not exact; but we may say that the one is a statement of what is
+known, the other is an emanation from the man himself; or that one may
+add to the sum of human knowledge, and the other addresses itself to a
+higher want in human nature than the want of knowledge.  We select and
+set aside as literature that which is original, the product of what we
+call genius.  As I have said, the subject of a production does not always
+determine the desired quality which makes it literature.  A biography may
+contain all the facts in regard to a man and his character, arranged in
+an orderly and comprehensible manner, and yet not be literature; but it
+may be so written, like Plutarch's Lives or Defoe's account of Robinson
+Crusoe, that it is literature, and of imperishable value as a picture of
+human life, as a satisfaction to the want of the human mind which is
+higher than the want of knowledge.  And this contribution, which I desire
+to be understood to mean when I speak of literature, is precisely the
+thing of most value in the lives of the majority of men, whether they are
+aware of it or not.  It may be weighty and profound; it may be light, as
+light as the fall of a leaf or a bird's song on the shore; it may be the
+thought of Plato when he discourses of the character necessary in a
+perfect state, or of Socrates, who, out of the theorem of an absolute
+beauty, goodness, greatness, and the like, deduces the immortality of the
+soul; or it may be the lovesong of a Scotch plowman: but it has this one
+quality of answering to a need in human nature higher than a need for
+facts, for knowledge, for wealth.
+
+In noticing the remoteness in the popular conception of the relation of
+literature to life, we must not neglect to take into account what may be
+called the arrogance of culture, an arrogance that has been emphasized,
+in these days of reaction from the old attitude of literary
+obsequiousness, by harsh distinctions and hard words, which are paid back
+by equally emphasized contempt.  The apostles of light regard the rest of
+mankind as barbarians and Philistines, and the world retorts that these
+self-constituted apostles are idle word-mongers, without any sympathy
+with humanity, critics and jeerers who do nothing to make the conditions
+of life easier.  It is natural that every man should magnify the circle
+of the world in which he is active and imagine that all outside of it is
+comparatively unimportant.  Everybody who is not a drone has his
+sufficient world.  To the lawyer it is his cases and the body of law,
+it is the legal relation of men that is of supreme importance; to the
+merchant and manufacturer all the world consists in buying and selling,
+in the production and exchange of products; to the physician all the
+world is diseased and in need of remedies; to the clergyman speculation
+and the discussion of dogmas and historical theology assume immense
+importance; the politician has his world, the artist his also, and the
+man of books and letters a realm still apart from all others.  And to
+each of these persons what is outside of his world seems of secondary
+importance; he is absorbed in his own, which seems to him all-embracing.
+To the lawyer everybody is or ought to be a litigant; to the grocer the
+world is that which eats, and pays--with more or less regularity; to the
+scholar the world is in books and ideas.  One realizes how possessed he
+is with his own little world only when by chance he changes his
+profession or occupation and looks back upon the law, or politics, or
+journalism, and sees in its true proportion what it was that once
+absorbed him and seemed to him so large.  When Socrates discusses with
+Gorgias the value of rhetoric, the use of which, the latter asserts,
+relates to the greatest and best of human things, Socrates says: I dare
+say you have heard men singing--at feasts the old drinking-song, in which
+the singers enumerate the goods of life-first, health; beauty next;
+thirdly, wealth honestly acquired.  The producers of these things--the
+physician, the trainer, the money-maker--each in turn contends that his
+art produces the greatest good.  Surely, says the physician, health is
+the greatest good; there is more good in my art, says the trainer, for my
+business is to make men beautiful and strong in body; and consider, says
+the money-maker, whether any one can produce a greater good than wealth.
+But, insists Gorgias, the greatest good of men, of which I am the
+creator, is that which gives men freedom in their persons, and the power
+of ruling over others in their several states--that is, the word which
+persuades the judge in the court, or the senators in the council, or the
+citizens in the assembly: if you have the power of uttering this word,
+you will have the physician your slave, and the trainer your slave, and
+the moneymaker of whom you talk will be found to gather treasures, not
+for himself, but for those who are able to speak and persuade the
+multitude.
+
+What we call life is divided into occupations and interest, and the
+horizons of mankind are bounded by them.  It happens naturally enough,
+therefore, that there should be a want of sympathy in regard to these
+pursuits among men, the politician despising the scholar, and the scholar
+looking down upon the politician, and the man of affairs, the man of
+industries, not caring to conceal his contempt for both the others.
+And still more reasonable does the division appear between all the world
+which is devoted to material life, and the few who live in and for the
+expression of thought and emotion.  It is a pity that this should be so,
+for it can be shown that life would not be worth living divorced from the
+gracious and ennobling influence of literature, and that literature
+suffers atrophy when it does not concern itself with the facts and
+feelings of men.
+
+If the poet lives in a world apart from the vulgar, the most lenient
+apprehension of him is that his is a sort of fool's paradise.  One of the
+most curious features in the relation of literature to life is this, that
+while poetry, the production of the poet, is as necessary to universal
+man as the atmosphere, and as acceptable, the poet is regarded with that
+mingling of compassion and undervaluation, and perhaps awe, which once
+attached to the weak-minded and insane, and which is sometimes expressed
+by the term "inspired idiot."  However the poet may have been petted and
+crowned, however his name may have been diffused among peoples, I doubt
+not that the popular estimate of him has always been substantially what
+it is today.  And we all know that it is true, true in our individual
+consciousness, that if a man be known as a poet and nothing else, if his
+character is sustained by no other achievement than the production of
+poetry, he suffers in our opinion a loss of respect.  And this is only
+recovered for him after he is dead, and his poetry is left alone to speak
+for his name.  However fond my lord and lady were of the ballad, the
+place of the minstrel was at the lower end of the hall.  If we are pushed
+to say why this is, why this happens to the poet and not to the producers
+of anything else that excites the admiration of mankind, we are forced to
+admit that there is something in the poet to sustain the popular judgment
+of his in utility.  In all the occupations and professions of life there
+is a sign put up, invisible--but none the less real, and expressing an
+almost universal feeling--"No poet need apply."  And this is not because
+there are so many poor poets; for there are poor lawyers, poor soldiers,
+poor statesmen, incompetent business men; but none of the personal
+disparagement attaches to them that is affixed to the poet.  This popular
+estimate of the poet extends also, possibly in less degree, to all the
+producers of the literature that does not concern itself with knowledge.
+It is not our care to inquire further why this is so, but to repeat that
+it is strange that it should be so when poetry is, and has been at all
+times, the universal solace of all peoples who have emerged out of
+barbarism, the one thing not supernatural and yet akin to the
+supernatural, that makes the world, in its hard and sordid conditions,
+tolerable to the race.  For poetry is not merely the comfort of the
+refined and the delight of the educated; it is the alleviator of poverty,
+the pleasure-ground of the ignorant, the bright spot in the most dreary
+pilgrimage.  We cannot conceive the abject animal condition of our race
+were poetry abstracted; and we do not wonder that this should be so when
+we reflect that it supplies a want higher than the need for food, for
+raiment, or ease of living, and that the mind needs support as much as
+the body.  The majority of mankind live largely in the imagination, the
+office or use of which is to lift them in spirit out of the bare physical
+conditions in which the majority exist.  There are races, which we may
+call the poetical races, in which this is strikingly exemplified.  It
+would be difficult to find poverty more complete, physical wants less
+gratified, the conditions of life more bare than among the Oriental
+peoples from the Nile to the Ganges and from the Indian Ocean to the
+steppes of Siberia.  But there are perhaps none among the more favored
+races who live so much in the world of imagination fed by poetry and
+romance.  Watch the throng seated about an Arab or Indian or Persian
+story-teller and poet, men and women with all the marks of want, hungry,
+almost naked, without any prospect in life of ever bettering their sordid
+condition; see their eyes kindle, their breathing suspended, their tense
+absorption; see their tears, hear their laughter, note their excitement
+as the magician unfolds to them a realm of the imagination in which they
+are free for the hour to wander, tasting a keen and deep enjoyment that
+all the wealth of Croesus cannot purchase for his disciples.  Measure,
+if you can, what poetry is to them, what their lives would be without it.
+To the millions and millions of men who are in this condition, the bard,
+the story-teller, the creator of what we are considering as literature,
+comes with the one thing that can lift them out of poverty, suffering--
+all the woe of which nature is so heedless.
+
+It is not alone of the poetical nations of the East that this is true,
+nor is this desire for the higher enjoyment always wanting in the savage
+tribes of the West.  When the Jesuit Fathers in 1768 landed upon the
+almost untouched and unexplored southern Pacific coast, they found in the
+San Gabriel Valley in Lower California that the Indians had games and
+feasts at which they decked themselves in flower garlands that reached to
+their feet, and that at these games there were song contests which
+sometimes lasted for three days.  This contest of the poets was an old
+custom with them.  And we remember how the ignorant Icelanders, who had
+never seen a written character, created the splendid Saga, and handed it
+down from father to son.  We shall scarcely find in Europe a peasantry
+whose abject poverty is not in some measure alleviated by this power
+which literature gives them to live outside it.  Through our sacred
+Scriptures, through the ancient storytellers, through the tradition which
+in literature made, as I said, the chief continuity in the stream of
+time, we all live a considerable, perhaps the better, portion of our
+lives in the Orient.  But I am not sure that the Scotch peasant, the
+crofter in his Highland cabin, the operative in his squalid tenement-
+house, in the hopelessness of poverty, in the grime of a life made twice
+as hard as that of the Arab by an inimical climate, does not owe more to
+literature than the man of culture, whose material surroundings are
+heaven in the imagination of the poor.  Think what his wretched life
+would be, in its naked deformity, without the popular ballads, without
+the romances of Scott, which have invested his land for him, as for us,
+with enduring charm; and especially without the songs of Burns, which
+keep alive in him the feeling that he is a man, which impart to his
+blunted sensibility the delicious throb of spring-songs that enable him
+to hear the birds, to see the bits of blue sky-songs that make him tender
+of the wee bit daisy at his feet--songs that hearten him when his heart
+is fit to break with misery.  Perhaps the English peasant, the English
+operative, is less susceptible to such influences than the Scotch or the
+Irish; but over him, sordid as his conditions are, close kin as he is to
+the clod, the light of poetry is diffused; there filters into his life,
+also, something of that divine stream of which we have spoken, a dialect
+poem that touches him, the leaf of a psalm, some bit of imagination,
+some tale of pathos, set afloat by a poor writer so long ago that it has
+become the common stock of human tradition-maybe from Palestine, maybe
+from the Ganges, perhaps from Athens--some expression of real emotion,
+some creation, we say, that makes for him a world, vague and dimly
+apprehended, that is not at all the actual world in which he sins and
+suffers.  The poor woman, in a hut with an earth floor, a reeking roof, a
+smoky chimney, barren of comfort, so indecent that a gentleman would not
+stable his horse in it, sits and sews upon a coarse garment, while she
+rocks the cradle of an infant about whom she cherishes no illusions that
+his lot will be other than that of his father before him.  As she sits
+forlorn, it is not the wretched hovel that she sees, nor other hovels
+like it--rows of tenements of hopeless poverty, the ale-house, the gin-
+shop, the coal-pit, and the choking factory--but:
+
+              "Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood
+               Stand dressed in living green"
+
+for her, thanks to the poet.  But, alas for the poet there is not a
+peasant nor a wretched operative of them all who will not shake his head
+and tap his forehead with his forefinger when the poor poet chap passes
+by.  The peasant has the same opinion of him that the physician, the
+trainer, and the money-lender had of the rhetorician.
+
+The hard conditions of the lonely New England life, with its religious
+theories as sombre as its forests, its rigid notions of duty as difficult
+to make bloom into sweetness and beauty as the stony soil, would have
+been unendurable if they had not been touched with the ideal created by
+the poet.  There was in creed and purpose the virility that creates a
+state, and, as Menander says, the country which is cultivated with
+difficulty produces brave men; but we leave out an important element in
+the lives of the Pilgrims if we overlook the means they had of living
+above their barren circumstances.  I do not speak only of the culture
+which many of them brought from the universities, of the Greek and Roman
+classics, and what unworldly literature they could glean from the
+productive age of Elizabeth and James, but of another source, more
+universally resorted to, and more powerful in exciting imagination and
+emotion, and filling the want in human nature of which we have spoken.
+They had the Bible, and it was more to them, much more, than a book of
+religion, than a revelation of religious truth, a rule for the conduct of
+life, or a guide to heaven.  It supplied the place to them of the
+Mahabharata to the Hindoo, of the story-teller to the Arab.  It opened to
+them a boundless realm of poetry and imagination.
+
+What is the Bible?  It might have sufficed, accepted as a book of
+revelation, for all the purposes of moral guidance, spiritual
+consolation, and systematized authority, if it had been a collection of
+precepts, a dry code of morals, an arsenal of judgments, and a treasury
+of promises.  We are accustomed to think of the Pilgrims as training
+their intellectual faculties in the knottiest problems of human
+responsibility and destiny, toughening their mental fibre in wrestling
+with dogmas and the decrees of Providence, forgetting what else they drew
+out of the Bible: what else it was to them in a degree it has been to few
+peoples many age.  For the Bible is the unequaled record of thought and
+emotion, the reservoir of poetry, traditions, stories, parables,
+exaltations, consolations, great imaginative adventure, for which the
+spirit of man is always longing.  It might have been, in warning examples
+and commands, all-sufficient to enable men to make a decent pilgrimage on
+earth and reach a better country; but it would have been a very different
+book to mankind if it had been only a volume of statutes, and if it
+lacked its wonderful literary quality.  It might have enabled men to
+reach a better country, but not, while on earth, to rise into and live in
+that better country, or to live in a region above the sordidness of
+actual life.  For, apart from its religious intention and sacred
+character, the book is so written that it has supremely in its history,
+poetry, prophecies, promises, stories, that clear literary quality that
+supplies, as certainly no other single book does, the want in the human
+mind which is higher than the want of facts or knowledge.
+
+The Bible is the best illustration of the literature of power, for it
+always concerns itself with life, it touches it at all points.  And this
+is the test of any piece of literature--its universal appeal to human
+nature.  When I consider the narrow limitations of the Pilgrim
+households, the absence of luxury, the presence of danger and hardship,
+the harsh laws--only less severe than the contemporary laws of England
+and Virginia--the weary drudgery, the few pleasures, the curb upon the
+expression of emotion and of tenderness, the ascetic repression of
+worldly thought, the absence of poetry in the routine occupations and
+conditions, I can feel what the Bible must have been to them.  It was an
+open door into a world where emotion is expressed, where imagination can
+range, where love and longing find a language, where imagery is given to
+every noble and suppressed passion of the soul, where every aspiration
+finds wings.  It was history, or, as Thucydides said, philosophy teaching
+by example; it was the romance of real life; it was entertainment
+unfailing; the wonder-book of childhood, the volume of sweet sentiment to
+the shy maiden, the sword to the soldier, the inciter of the youth to
+heroic enduring of hardness, it was the refuge of the aged in failing
+activity.  Perhaps we can nowhere find a better illustration of the true
+relation of literature to life than in this example.
+
+Let us consider the comparative value of literature to mankind.
+By comparative value I mean its worth to men in comparison with other
+things of acknowledged importance, such as the creation of industries,
+the government of States, the manipulation of the politics of an age,
+the achievements in war and discovery, and the lives of admirable men.
+It needs a certain perspective to judge of this aright, for the near and
+the immediate always assume importance.  The work that an age has on
+hand, whether it be discovery, conquest, the wars that determine
+boundaries or are fought for policies, the industries that develop a
+country or affect the character of a people, the wielding of power, the
+accumulation of fortunes, the various activities of any given
+civilization or period, assume such enormous proportions to those engaged
+in them that such a modest thing as the literary product seems
+insignificant in comparison; and hence it is that the man of action
+always holds in slight esteem the man of thought, and especially the
+expresser of feeling and emotion, the poet and the humorist.  It is only
+when we look back over the ages, when civilizations have passed or
+changed, over the rivalries of States, the ambitions and enmities of men,
+the shining deeds and the base deeds that make up history, that we are
+enabled to see what remains, what is permanent.  Perhaps the chief result
+left to the world out of a period of heroic exertion, of passion and
+struggle and accumulation, is a sheaf of poems, or the record by a man of
+letters of some admirable character.  Spain filled a large place in the
+world in the sixteenth century, and its influence upon history is by no
+means spent yet; but we have inherited out of that period nothing, I dare
+say, that is of more value than the romance of Don Quixote.  It is true
+that the best heritage of generation from generation is the character of
+great men; but we always owe its transmission to the poet and the writer.
+Without Plato there would be no Socrates.  There is no influence
+comparable in human life to the personality of a powerful man, so long as
+he is present to his generation, or lives in the memory of those who felt
+his influence.  But after time has passed, will the world, will human
+life, that is essentially the same in all changing conditions, be more
+affected by what Bismarck did or by what Goethe said?
+
+We may without impropriety take for an illustration of the comparative
+value of literature to human needs the career of a man now living.  In
+the opinion of many, Mr. Gladstone is the greatest Englishman of this
+age.  What would be the position of the British empire, what would be the
+tendency of English politics and society without him, is a matter for
+speculation.  He has not played such a role for England and its neighbors
+as Bismarck has played for Germany and the Continent, but he has been one
+of the most powerful influences in molding English action.  He is the
+foremost teacher.  Rarely in history has a nation depended more upon a
+single man, at times, than the English upon Gladstone, upon his will, his
+ability, and especially his character.  In certain recent crises the
+thought of losing him produced something like a panic in the English
+mind, justifying in regard to him, the hyperbole of Choate upon the death
+of Webster, that the sailor on the distant sea would feel less safe--
+as if a protecting providence had been withdrawn from the world.  His
+mastery of finance and of economic problems, his skill in debate, his
+marvelous achievements in oratory, have extorted the admiration of his
+enemies.  There is scarcely a province in government, letters, art, or
+research in which the mind can win triumphs that he has not invaded and
+displayed his power in; scarcely a question in politics, reform, letters,
+religion, archaeology, sociology, which he has not discussed with
+ability.  He is a scholar, critic, parliamentarian, orator, voluminous
+writer.  He seems equally at home in every field of human activity--a man
+of prodigious capacity and enormous acquirements.  He can take up, with a
+turn of the hand, and always with vigor, the cause of the Greeks, Papal
+power, education, theology, the influence of Egypt on Homer, the effect
+of English legislation on King O'Brien, contributing something noteworthy
+to all the discussions of the day.  But I am not aware that he has ever
+produced a single page of literature.  Whatever space he has filled in
+his own country, whatever and however enduring the impression he has made
+upon English life and society, does it seem likely that the sum total of
+his immense activity in so many fields, after the passage of so many
+years, will be worth to the world as much as the simple story of Rab and
+his Friends?  Already in America I doubt if it is.  The illustration
+might have more weight with some minds if I contrasted the work of this
+great man--as to its answering to a deep want in human nature--with a
+novel like 'Henry Esmond' or a poem like 'In Memoriam'; but I think it is
+sufficient to rest it upon so slight a performance as the sketch by
+Dr. John Brown, of Edinburgh.  For the truth is that a little page of
+literature, nothing more than a sheet of paper with a poem written on it,
+may have that vitality, that enduring quality, that adaptation to life,
+that make it of more consequence to all who inherit it than every
+material achievement of the age that produced it.  It was nothing but a
+sheet of paper with a poem on it, carried to the door of his London
+patron, for which the poet received a guinea, and perhaps a seat at the
+foot of my lord's table.  What was that scrap compared to my lord's
+business, his great establishment, his equipages in the Park, his
+position in society, his weight in the House of Lords, his influence in
+Europe?  And yet that scrap of paper has gone the world over; it has been
+sung in the camp, wept over in the lonely cottage; it has gone with the
+marching regiments, with the explorers--with mankind, in short, on its
+way down the ages, brightening, consoling, elevating life; and my lord,
+who regarded as scarcely above a menial the poet to whom he tossed the
+guinea--my lord, with all his pageantry and power, has utterly gone and
+left no witness.
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Relation of Literature To Life
+by Charles Dudley Warner
+
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