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diff --git a/old/67810-0.txt b/old/67810-0.txt deleted file mode 100644 index fe8bc2f..0000000 --- a/old/67810-0.txt +++ /dev/null @@ -1,6156 +0,0 @@ -The Project Gutenberg eBook of Friends on the Shelf, by Bradford -Torrey - -This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and -most other parts of the world 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. If you are not located in the United States, you -will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before -using this eBook. - -Title: Friends on the Shelf - -Author: Bradford Torrey - -Release Date: April 10, 2022 [eBook #67810] - -Language: English - -Produced by: Emmanuel Ackerman, David E. Brown, and the Online - Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This - file was produced from images generously made available by - The Internet Archive) - -*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRIENDS ON THE SHELF *** - - - - - -Books by Mr. Torrey. - - - =FRIENDS ON THE SHELF.= 12mo, $1.25, _net_. Postage extra. - - =NATURE’S INVITATION.= 16mo, $1.10, _net_. Postpaid, $1.21. - - =THE CLERK OF THE WOODS.= 16mo, $1.10, _net_. Postpaid, $1.20. - - =FOOTING IT IN FRANCONIA.= 16mo, $1.10, _net_. Postpaid, $1.19. - - =EVERYDAY BIRDS.= Elementary Studies. With twelve colored - Illustrations reproduced from Audubon. Square 12mo, $1.00. - - =BIRDS IN THE BUSH.= 16mo, $1.25. - - =A RAMBLER’S LEASE.= 16mo, $1.25. - - =THE FOOT-PATH WAY.= 16mo, gilt top, $1.25. - - =A FLORIDA SKETCH-BOOK.= 16mo, $1.25. - - =SPRING NOTES FROM TENNESSEE.= 16mo, $1.25. - - =A WORLD OF GREEN HILLS.= 16mo, $1.25. - - - HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN & CO. - BOSTON AND NEW YORK. - - - - -FRIENDS ON THE SHELF - - - - - FRIENDS ON THE SHELF - - BY - BRADFORD TORREY - - - “I must get back to my friends on the shelf” - - _Edward FitzGerald_ - - [Illustration] - - - BOSTON AND NEW YORK - HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY - The Riverside Press, Cambridge - 1906 - - - - - COPYRIGHT 1906 BY BRADFORD TORREY - - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED - - _Published October 1906_ - - - - -CONTENTS - - - WILLIAM HAZLITT 1 - - EDWARD FITZGERALD 43 - - THOREAU 89 - - THOREAU’S DEMAND UPON NATURE 131 - - ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON 151 - - A RELISH OF KEATS 195 - - ANATOLE FRANCE 227 - - VERBAL MAGIC 275 - - QUOTABILITY 289 - - THE GRACE OF OBSCURITY 309 - - IN DEFENSE OF THE TRAVELER’S NOTEBOOK 319 - - CONCERNING THE LACK OF AN AMERICAN LITERATURE 329 - - - - -WILLIAM HAZLITT - - - - -WILLIAM HAZLITT - - -Happy is the man who enjoys _himself_. His are the true riches. Saving -physical pain and mortal illness, few evils can touch him. He may lose -friends and make enemies; all the powers of the world may seem to have -combined against him; he may work hard and fare worse; poverty may sit -at his table and share his bed; but he is not to be greatly pitied. -His good things are within. He enjoys him_self_. He has found the -secret that the rest of men are all, more or less consciously, looking -for,--how to be happy though miserable. It seems an easy method; -nothing could be less complicated: simply to enjoy one’s own mind. The -thing is to do it. - -Whether any one ever really accomplished the miracle for more than -brief intervals at once, a skeptic may doubt; but some have believed -themselves to have accomplished it; and in questions of this intimately -personal nature, the difference between faith and fact is small -and unimportant. It is of the essence of belief not to be disturbed -overmuch by theoretical objections. If I am happy, what is it to me -that my busybody of a neighbor across the way has settled it with -himself that I am not happy, and in the nature of the case cannot be? -Let my meddlesome neighbor mind his own affairs. The pudding is mine, -not his; and, with or without his leave, the proof of the pudding is in -the eating. - -These not very uncommonplace reflections are suggested by the -remembrance of what are reported to have been the last words of the -man whose name stands at the head of this paper. He was dying before -his time, in what the world, if it had happened to concern itself -about so inconsiderable an event, would have called rather squalid -circumstances. His life had mostly been cloudy. The greater part of -his fifty-two years had been spent in quarreling impartially with -friends and foes, and, strange to say (matters terrestrial being -habitually so out of joint), the logical result had followed. His -domestic experiences, too, had been little to his comfort and less to -his credit. So far as women were concerned, he had played the fool to -his heart’s content and his enemies’ amusement. Of his two wives (both -living), neither was now at his bedside. His purse was empty, or near -it. It was almost a question how he should be buried. Withal, as a man -more than ordinarily ambitious, he had never done the things he had -cared most to do; and now it was all over. And being always an eloquent -man, and having breath for one sentence more, he said, “Well, I have -had a happy life.” - -Nor need it be assumed that he was either lying or posing. With -abundance of misfortune and no lack of disappointment, with outward -things working pretty unanimously against him, he had enjoyed himself. -In a word, he remained to the last what he had been from the first, a -sentimentalist; and a sentimentalist, like a Christian, has joys that -the world knows not of. - -For a sentimentalist is one who, more than the majority of his fellows, -cultivates and relishes his emotions. They are the chief of his living, -the choicest of his crop, his “best of dearest and his only care;” as -why should they not be, since they give him the most of what he most -desires? Perhaps we should all be sentimentalists if we could. As it -is, the number of such is relatively small, though even at that they -may be said to be of various kinds, as their emotions are excited by -various classes of objects. - -If a man’s nature is religious, his sentimentalism, supposing him -to have been born with that gift, naturally takes on a religious -turn; he treasures the luxury of contrition and the raptures of -assured forgiveness. Like one of the earliest and most celebrated of -his kind, he can feed day and night upon tears,--having plentiful -occasion, perhaps, for such a watery diet,--and be the more ecstatic -in proportion as he sounds more and more deeply the unfathomable -depths of his unworthiness. This, in part at least, is what is meant -by the current phrase, “enjoying religion.” Devotional literature -bears unbroken witness to its reality and fervors, from the Psalms of -David down to the “Lives of the Saints” and the diaries of latter-day -Methodism. There is nothing sweeter to the finer sorts of human nature -than devotional self-effacement, whether it be sought as Nirvâna in -the silence of a Buddhist’s cell, or as a gift of special grace in -a tumultuous chorus of “Oh, to be nothing, nothing,” at a crowded -conventicle. Small wonder that the - - “willing soul would stay - In such a frame as this, - And sit and sing itself away - To everlasting bliss.” - -Small wonder, surely; for, say what you will (and the remark is not -half so much a truism as it sounds), one of the surest ways to be happy -is to have happy feelings. - -This cultivation of the religious sensibilities is probably the -commonest, as at its best it is certainly the noblest form of what, -meaning no offense,--though the word has been in bad company, and will -never recover from the smirch,--we have called sentimentalism. But -there are other forms, suited to other grades of human capacity, for -all men are not saints. - -There is, for example, especially in these modern times, a purely -poetic susceptibility to the charms of the natural world; so that the -favored subject of it, not every day, to be sure, but as often as the -mood is upon him, shall experience joys ineffable, - - “Trances of thought and mountings of the mind,” - -at the sight of an ordinary landscape or the meanest of common flowers. - -Of a much lower sort is the sentimentalism of such a man as Sterne; a -something not poetical, only half real, a kind of rhetorical trick, -never so neatly done, but still a trick, and whatever of genuine -feeling there is in it so alloyed with baser metal that even while you -enjoy to the very marrow the amazing perfection of the writing (for it -would be hard to name another book in which there are so many perfect -sentences to the page as in the “Sentimental Journey”),--even while -you feel all this, you feel also what a relief it would be to speak a -piece of your mind to the smirking, winking, face-making clergyman, who -has such pretty feelings, and makes such incomparably pretty copy out -of them, but who will by no means allow you to forget that he, as well -as another, is a man of flesh and blood (especially flesh), knowing a -thing or two of the world in spite of his cloth, and able, if he only -would (though of course he won’t), to play the rake as handsomely as -the next man. A strange candidate for holy orders he surely was, even -in a country where a parish is frankly recognized as a “living”! It is -a comfort to be assured, on the high authority of Mr. Bagehot, that the -only respect in which he resembled a clergyman of our own time was, -that he lost his voice and traveled abroad to find it. - -And once more, not to refine upon the point unduly, there are such -men as Rousseau and Hazlitt; not great poets, like Wordsworth, nor -mere professional dealers in the pathetic, like Sterne, but men of -literary genius very exceptionally endowed with the dangerous gift of -sensibility; which gift, wisely or unwisely, they have nourished and -made the most of, first for their own exquisite pleasure in it, and -afterward, it may well be, for the sake of its very considerable value -as a literary “asset.” - -Rousseau and Hazlitt, we say; for though the two are in some respects -greatly unlike, they are plainly of the same school. For better or -worse, the English boy came early under the Frenchman’s influence, -and, to his credit be it spoken, he was never slow to acknowledge -the debt thus incurred. His passion for the “New Éloise” was in time -outgrown, but the “Confessions” he “never tired of.” He loved to run -over in memory the dearer parts of them: Rousseau’s “first meeting with -Madame Warens, the pomp of sound with which he has celebrated her name, -beginning ‘Louise-Éléonore de Warens était une demoiselle de La Tour de -Pil, noble et ancienne famille de Vevai, ville du pays de Vaud’ (sounds -which we still tremble to repeat); his description of her person, her -angelic smile, her mouth of the size of his own; his walking out one -day while the bells were chiming to vespers, and anticipating in a sort -of waking dream the life he afterward led with her, in which months -and years, and life itself, passed away in undisturbed felicity; the -sudden disappointment of his hopes; his transport thirty years after at -seeing the same flower which they had brought home together from one -of their rambles near Chambéry; his thoughts in that long interval of -time; his suppers with Grimm and Diderot after he came to Paris; ... -his literary projects, his fame, his misfortunes, his unhappy temper; -his last solitary retirement on the lake and island of Bienne, with -his dog and his boat; his reveries and delicious musings there--all -these crowd into our minds with recollections which we do not choose to -express. There are no passages in the ‘New Éloise’ of equal force and -beauty with the best descriptions in the ‘Confessions,’ if we except -the excursion on the water, Julie’s last letter to St. Preux, and his -letter to her, recalling the days of their first love. We spent two -whole years in reading these two works, and (gentle reader, it was when -we were young) in shedding tears over them, - - ‘as fast as the Arabian trees - Their medicinal gums.’ - -They were the happiest years of our life. We may well say of them, -sweet is the dew of their memory, and pleasant the balm of their -recollection!” - -The whole passage is characteristic and illuminating. Hazlitt is -speaking of another, but as writers will and must, whether they mean it -or not, he is disclosing himself. The boyish reader’s tears, the grown -man’s trembling at the sound of the eloquent French words, and the -confession of the concluding sentence (which he repeated word for word -years afterward in the essay, “On Reading Old Books”)--here we have the -real Hazlitt, or rather one of the real Hazlitts. - -He was strong in memory. His very darkest times--and they were dark -enough--he could brighten with sunny recollections: of a painting, -it might be, seen twenty years before, and loved ever since; of a -favorite actor in a favorite part; of a book read in his youth (“the -greatest pleasure in life is that of reading, while we are young”); -of the birds that flitted about his path in happier mornings; of the -taste of frost-bitten barberries eaten thirty years before, when he -was five years old, on the side of King-Oak Hill, in Weymouth,[1] -Massachusetts, and never tasted since; of the tea-gardens at Walworth, -to which his father used to take him. Oh yes, he can see those gardens -still, though he no longer visits them. He has only to “unlock the -casket of memory,” and a new sense comes over him, as in a dream; his -eyes “dazzle,” his sensations are all “glossy, spruce, voluptuous, and -fine.” What luscious adjectives! And how shamelessly, like an innocent, -sweet-toothed child, he rolls them under his tongue! Their goodness is -inexpressible. But listen to him for another sentence or two, and see -what a favor of Providence it is for a writer of essays to be a lover -of his own feelings: “I see the beds of larkspur with purple eyes; -tall hollyhocks, red or yellow; the broad sunflowers, caked in gold, -with bees buzzing round them; wildernesses of pinks, and hot, glowing -peonies; poppies run to seed; the sugared lily, and faint mignonette, -all ranged in order, and as thick as they can grow; the box-tree -borders; the gravel walks, the painted alcove, the confectionery, the -clotted cream:--I think I see them now with sparkling looks; or have -they vanished while I have been writing this description of them? No -matter; they will return again when I least think of them. All that -I have observed since of flowers and plants and grass-plots seem to -me borrowed from ‘that first garden of my innocence’--to be slips and -scions stolen from that bed of memory.” - -How eloquent he grows! “Slips and scions stolen from that bed of -memory!” The very words, simple as they are, and homely as is their -theme, throb with emotion, and move as if to music. “Most eloquent of -English essayists,” his latest biographer pronounces him; and, whether -we agree with the judgment or not (sweeping assertions cost little, and -contribute to readability), at least we recognize the quality that the -biographer has in mind. - -A sentimentalist, of all men, knows how to live his good days over -again. Pleasure, to his thrifty way of thinking, is not a thing to be -enjoyed once, and so done with. He will eat his cake and have it too. -Nor shall it be the mere shadow of a feast. Nay, if there is to be any -difference to speak of, the second serving shall be better and more -substantial than the first. To him nothing else is quite so real as the -past. He rejoices in it as in an unchangeable, indefeasible possession. -“The past at least is secure.” If the present hour is dark and lonely -and friendless, he has only to run back and walk again in sunny, -flower-bespangled fields, hand in hand with his own boyhood. - -Such was Hazlitt’s practice as a sentimental economist, and it would -take an unusually bold Philistine, we think, to maintain that it -was altogether a bad one. The words that he wrote of Rousseau are -applicable to himself: “He seems to gather up the past moments of -his being like drops of honey-dew to distil a precious liquor from -them.” To vary a phrase of Mr. Pater’s, he is a master in the art of -impassioned recollection. - -It makes little difference where he is, or what circumstance sets him -going. He may be among the Alps. “Clarens is on my left,” he says, “the -Dent de Jamant is behind me, the rocks of Meillerie opposite: under -my feet is a green bank, enamelled with white and purple flowers, in -which a dewdrop here and there glitters with pearly light. Intent upon -the scene and upon the thoughts that stir within me, I conjure up the -cheerful passages of my life, and a crowd of happy images appear before -me.” Or he is in London, and hears the tinkle of the “Letter-Bell” as -it passes. “It strikes upon the ear, it vibrates to the brain, it wakes -me from the dream of time, it flings me back upon my first entrance -into life, the period of my first coming up to town, when all around -was strange, uncertain, adverse,--a hubbub of confused noises, a chaos -of shifting objects,--and when this sound alone, startling me with the -recollection of a letter I had to send to the friends I had lately -left, brought me as it were to myself, made me feel that I had links -still connecting me with the universe, and gave me hope and patience to -persevere. At that loud-tinkling, interrupted sound, the long line of -blue hills near the place where I was brought up waves in the horizon, -a golden sunset hovers over them, the dwarf oaks rustle their red -leaves in the evening breeze, and the road from Wem to Shrewsbury, by -which I first set out on my journey through life, stares me in the face -as plain, but, from time and change, as visionary and mysterious, as -the pictures in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’” - -“When a man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect,” -says Keats, “any one grand and spiritual passage serves him as a -starting-post towards all ‘the two-and-thirty Palaces.’” Yes, and some -men will go a good way on the same royal road, with no more spiritual -incitement than the passing of the postman. - -How fondly Hazlitt recalls the day of days when he met Coleridge, and -walked with him six miles homeward; when “the very milestones had ears, -and Hamer Hill stooped with all its pines, to listen to a poet as he -passed.” At the sixth milepost man and boy separated. “On my way back,” -says Hazlitt, “I had a sound in my ears--it was the voice of Fancy; -I had a light before me--it was the face of Poetry.” A second meeting -had been agreed upon, and meanwhile the boy’s soul was possessed by “an -uneasy, pleasurable sensation,” thinking of what was in store for him. -“During those months the chill breath of winter gave me a welcoming; -the vernal air was balm and inspiration to me. The golden sunsets, -the silver star of evening, lighted me on my way to new hopes and -prospects. _I was to visit Coleridge in the spring._” - -Verily, the words of the dying man begin to sound less paradoxical. -He _had_ been happy. If his buffetings and disappointments had been -more than fall to the lot of average humanity, so had been his joys -and his triumphs. He had more _capacity_ for joy. Therein, in great -part, lay his genius. To borrow a good word from Jeremy Taylor, all his -perceptions were “quick and full of relish.” Even his sorrows, once -they were far enough behind him, became only a purer and more ethereal -kind of bliss. So he tells us, in one of his later essays, how he loved -best of all to lie whole mornings on a sunny bank on Salisbury Plain, -with no object before him, neither knowing nor caring how the time -passed, his thoughts floating like motes before his half-shut eyes, or -some image of the past rushing by him--“Diana and her fawn, and all -the glories of the antique world.” “Then,” he adds, “I start away to -prevent the iron from entering my soul, and let fall some tears into -that stream of time which separates me farther and farther from all I -once loved.” Whether the tears were physical or metaphorical, whether -they wet the cheek or only the printed page, the man who shed them is -not, on their account, to be regarded as an object of commiseration. -Sadness that can be thus described, in words so like the fabled -nightingale’s song, “most musical, most melancholy,” is more to be -desired than much that goes by the name of pleasure, and the deeper and -more poignant the emotion, the more precious are its returns. - -Nobody ever understood this better than Hazlitt. His sentimentalism, -as we call it, was no ignorant, superficial gift of young-ladyish -sensibility. It had intellectual foundations. He felt because he -knew. He had been intimate with himself; he had cherished his own -consciousness. He remarks somewhere that the three perfect egotists -of the race were Rousseau, Wordsworth, and Benvenuto Cellini. He -would defy the world, he said, to name a fourth. But he might easily -enough have named the fourth himself, had not modesty--or something -else--prevented. If he had lived longer, he would perhaps have -written the fourth man’s autobiography; his formal autobiography, -that is to say. In fact, though not in name, he had already written -it; some might be ready to maintain (but they would be wrong) that -he had written little else. By “egotism” he meant not selfishness in -the more ordinary, mercantile acceptation of the word,--a lack of -benevolence, an extravagant desire to be better off than others in -the way of worldly “goods,”--but the very quality we have been trying -to show forth: absorption in one’s own mind, a profound and perpetual -consciousness of one’s own being, the habit of interfusing self and -outward things till distinctions of spirit and matter, finite and -infinite, self and the universe, are for the moment almost done away -with, and feeling is all in all. - -This, or something like this, was Hazlitt’s secret. This is the breath -of life that throbs in the best of his pages. Whatever subject he -handled, a prize-fight, a game of fives, a juggler’s trick, a play of -Shakespeare, a picture of Titian, the pleasure of painting, he did it -not simply _con amore_, or, as his newer critics say, with gusto (the -word is Hazlitt’s own--he wrote an essay about it), but as if the thing -were for the time being part and parcel of himself. And so, oftener -than is commonly to be expected of essay-writers, his sentences are not -so much vivid as alive. - -More than most men, he was alive himself. In Keats’s phrase, he felt -existence. There was no telling its preciousness to him. The essay “On -the Feeling of Immortality in Youth,” though at the end it breaks out -despairingly into something like the old cry, _Vanitas vanitatum_, is -filled to the brim with a passionate love of this present world. The -idea of leaving it is abhorrent to him. To think what he has been, and -what he has enjoyed, in those good days of his; days when he “looked -for hours at a Rembrandt without being conscious of the flight of -time;” days of the “full, pulpy feeling of youth, tasting existence and -every object in it.” What a bliss to be young! Then life is new, and, -for all we know of it, endless. As for old age and death, they are no -concern of ours. “Like a rustic at a fair, we are full of amazement and -rapture, and have no thought of going home, or that it will soon be -night.” Sentences like this must have been what Keats had in mind when -he spoke so lovingly of “distilled prose;” prose that bears repetition -and brooding over, like exquisite verse. Some sentences, indeed, are -better than whole books, and this of Hazlitt’s is one of them; as -fine, almost,--as purely “distilled,”--as that famous kindred one of -Sir William Temple: “When all is done, human life is, at the greatest -and the best, but like a froward child, that must be played with and -humored a little to keep it quiet till it falls asleep, and then the -care is over.” - -And since we are quoting (and few authors invite quotation more than -Hazlitt, as few have themselves quoted more constantly), let us please -ourselves with another sentence from the same essay,--a page-long -roll-call of a sentimental man’s beatitudes, turning at the close to a -sudden blackness of darkness:-- - -“To see the golden sun, the azure sky, the outstretched ocean; to walk -upon the green earth, and be lord of a thousand creatures; to look -down yawning precipices or over distant sunny vales; to see the world -spread out under one’s feet on a map; to bring the stars near; to -view the smallest insects through a microscope; to read history, and -consider the revolutions of empire and the successions of generations; -to hear of the glory of Tyre, of Sidon, of Babylon, and of Susa, and -to say all these were before me and are now nothing; to say I exist in -such a point of time and in such a point of space; to be a spectator -and a part of its ever-moving scene; to witness the change of season, -of spring and autumn, of winter and summer; to feel heat and cold, -pleasure and pain, beauty and deformity, right and wrong; to be -sensible to the accidents of nature; to consider the mighty world of -eye and ear; to listen to the stock-dove’s notes amid the forest deep; -to journey over moor and mountain; to hear the midnight sainted choir; -to visit lighted halls, or the cathedral’s gloom, or sit in crowded -theatres and see life itself mocked; to study the works of art and -refine the sense of beauty to agony; to worship fame, and to dream of -immortality; to look upon the Vatican, and to read Shakespeare; to -gather up the wisdom of the ancients, and to pry into the future; to -listen to the trump of war, the shout of victory; to question history -as to the movements of the human heart; to seek for truth; to plead the -cause of humanity; to overlook the world as if time and nature poured -their treasures at our feet--to be and to do all this, and then in a -moment to be nothing!” - -“To look upon the Vatican, and to read Shakespeare!” Once more we are -reminded of Keats, a man very different from Hazlitt in many ways, -but, like him, “a near neighbor to himself,” and a worshiper of -beauty. “Things real,” says Keats, “such as existences of sun, moon and -stars--and passages of Shakespeare.” - -Hazlitt’s nature was peculiarly intense, with the very slightest -admixture of those saner and commoner elements that keep our poor -humanity, in its ordinary manifestations, comparatively reasonable -and sweet. His years, from what we read of them, seem to have passed -in one long state of feverishness. He cannot have been a pleasant man -either for himself or for any one else to live with. Self-absorbed, -irascible, and proud, with little or no gift of humor (sentimentalists -as a class seem to be deficient in this quality, the case of Sterne to -the contrary notwithstanding; and Sterne’s humor is perhaps only an -additional reason for suspecting that his fine sentiments were mostly -literary), he had a splendid capacity for hating, and was possessed -of a kind of ugly courage that made it easy for him to speak with -extraordinary plainness of other men’s defects. If the men happened -to be his friends, so much the better. He professed, indeed, to like -a friend all the more for having “faults that one could talk about.” -“Put a pen in his hand,” says Mr. Birrell, “and he would say anything.” -Whatever he said or did, suffered or enjoyed, it was all with a kind of -passion. As the common saying is, there was no halfway work with him. -It could never be complained of him, as he complained of some other -writer, that his sentences wanted impetus. He understood the value of -surprise, and never balked at an extreme statement. Thus he would say, -in the coolest manner imaginable, “It is utterly impossible to persuade -an editor that he is nobody.” As if it really were! As if it were not -ten times nearer impossible to persuade a contributor that _he_ is -nobody! - -On his way to the famous prize-fight,--famous because he was -there,--spending the night at an inn crowded with the “Fancy,” he -overheard a “tall English yeoman” holding forth to those about him -concerning “rent, and taxes, and the price of corn.” One of his hearers -ventured at a certain point to interpose an objection, whereupon the -yeoman bore down upon him with the word, “Confound it, man, don’t be -insipid.” “Thinks I to myself,” says Hazlitt, “that’s a good phrase.” -And so it was, and quite in his own line. “There is no surfeiting on -gall,” he remarks somewhere, with admirable truth. He wrote an essay -upon “Cant and Hypocrisy,” another upon “Disagreeable People,” and -another upon the “Pleasure of Hating.” And he knew whereof he spake. -Sentimentalism--the Hazlitt brand of it, at any rate--is nothing like -sweetened water. “If any one wishes to see me quite calm,” he says, in -his emphatic manner, “they may cheat me in a bargain, or tread upon my -toes; but a truth repelled, a sophism repeated, totally disconcerts me, -and I lose all patience. I am not, in the ordinary acceptation of the -term, a good-natured man.” “Lamb,” he once remarked, “yearns after and -covets what soothes the frailty of human nature.” So did not Hazlitt. -Lamb delighted in people as such. Even their foibles--especially -their foibles, it would be truer to say--were pleasant to him. In -short, he was a humorist. Hazlitt’s first interest, on the other -hand, seems to have been in places and things,--including books and -pictures,--and his own thoughts about them. Of human beings he liked -personages, so called, men who have done something,--actors, painters, -authors, statesmen, and the like. As for the common run of his foolish -fellow-mortals, if their frailties were to be stroked, by all means let -it be done the wrong way. The operation might be less acceptable to the -patient, but it would probably do him more good, and would certainly be -more amusing to the operator and the lookers-on. - -No doubt the man experienced now and then a reaction from his -prevailing condition of feverishness. He must have had moods, we may -guess, when he saw the beauty and comfort of a quieter way of life. -Indeed, he has left one inimitable portrait of a character the exact -reverse of his own, a portrait drawn not bitterly nor grudgingly, but -in something not altogether unlike the affectionately quizzical spirit -of Lamb himself. He calls it the character of a bookworm. - -“The person I mean,” he says, “has an admiration for learning, if he -is only dazzled by its light. He lives among old authors, if he does -not enter much into their spirit. He handles the covers, and turns -over the page, and is familiar with the names and dates. He is busy -and self-involved. He hangs like a film and cobweb upon letters, or -is like the dust upon the outside of knowledge, which should not be -rudely brushed aside. He follows learning as its shadow; but as such, -he is respectable. He browses on the husk and leaves of books, as the -young fawn browses on the bark and leaves of trees. Such a one lives -all his life in a dream of learning, and has never once had his sleep -broken by a real sense of things. He believes implicitly in genius, -truth, virtue, liberty, because he finds the names of these things -in books. He thinks that love and friendship are the finest things -imaginable, both in practice and theory. The legend of good women is to -him no fiction.[2] When he steals from the twilight of his cell, the -scene breaks upon him like an illuminated missal, and all the people -he sees are but so many figures in a _camera obscura_. He reads the -world, like a favorite volume, only to find beauties in it, or like an -edition of some old work which he is preparing for the press, only to -make emendations in it, and correct the errors that have inadvertently -slipt in. He and his dog Tray are much the same honest, simple-hearted, -faithful, affectionate creatures--if Tray could but read! His mind -cannot take the impression of vice; but the gentleness of his nature -turns gall to milk. He would not hurt a fly. He draws the picture of -mankind from the guileless simplicity of his own heart; and when he -dies, his spirit will take its smiling leave, without ever having had -an ill thought of others, or the consciousness of one in itself!” - -It would have been for Hazlitt’s happiness, or at least for his -comfort, if he had possessed a grain or two of his bookworm’s -“guileless simplicity.” But things must be as they must. His name was -not Nathanael. He was “dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of -scorn,” and it was not in his nature to be patient and easy-going, -especially where anything so vitally essential as a difference of -opinion touching the character of Napoleon Bonaparte was concerned. He -had the qualities of his defects. If he was sometimes too peppery, he -was never insipid. - -Men write best of matters in which they are most interested and most -at home, and of Hazlitt we may say, speaking a little cynically, after -his own manner, that with all his multiplicity of topics, he wrote best -about his own feelings and his neighbors’ infirmities, though as for -the latter sort of material, to be sure, he did not confine himself -very strictly to that with which his fellow men furnished him. Proud -as he was, indeed (and here we may note another characteristic of the -sentimentalist), he had sometimes a really shocking lack of decent -personal reserve. During his infatuation with Miss Sarah Walker, as -all the world--or all the Hazlitt world--knows, he could not keep his -tongue in his head. He would even buttonhole a stranger on a street -corner, and unbosom his woes to him at full length in most unmanly -fashion: how he loved the girl, and how the girl would not love him, -and so on, and so on. And having perpetrated this almost incredible -absurdity, he would tell of it afterward; and then, to make matters -still worse, when he had recovered from his distemper (always a rapid -process in his case), he wrote a book about it. This book is reprinted, -all in fair type, in the latest and handsomest edition of his works; -but, thank Heaven, we are none of us bound to read it. Nor need we -take the whole miserable business too seriously, as if (except on its -literary side) it were anything so very far out of the common. It was -ridiculous, of course; but so are the love affairs of elderly men -generally. Their folly has passed into a proverb. As wise old Izaak -Walton--who had two excellent wives of his own, both “of distinguished -clerical connexion”--long ago expressed it, “love is a flattering -mischief,” “a passion that carries us to commit errors with as much -ease as whirlwinds move feathers.” The good man’s assonance would have -driven Flaubert insane, but his doctrine is consolatory. A feather may -surely be excused for slipping its cable before a whirlwind. - -It was only a year or two after the conclusion of this distressing -episode that Hazlitt, being in Italy, wrote one of the most delightful -of his essays, the one upon a sun-dial. - -“_Horas non numero nisi serenas_ is the motto of a sun-dial near -Venice,”--so he begins. Then, after descanting upon the exceeding -beauty and appropriateness of the Latin words, he falls foul of the -French people for the “less _sombre_ and less edifying” turn that they -are accustomed to give to similar matters. He has seen a clock in Paris -bearing a figure of Time seated in a boat, which Cupid is rowing along, -with the motto, _L’Amour fait passer le Temps_; a motto that the French -wits, it appears, have travestied into _Le Temps fait passer L’Amour_. -This is ingenious, he concedes (how could he help it?), but it lacks -sentiment. “I like people,” he declares, “who have something that they -love, and something that they hate.” The French “never arrive at the -classical--or the romantic.” The criticism may or may not be just (it -seems a hard saying), but what the average reader of the paragraph is -likely to be thinking of, if he happens to be familiar with the story -of Hazlitt’s own adventures with Cupid, is not any weakness of the -French people, but the amusing cleverness with which the Parisian wits -have hit off the weakness of a certain literary Englishman. Truly _Le -Temps fait passer L’Amour_,--sometimes with deplorable celerity,--on -both sides of the Channel. - -Naturally, however, nothing of this sort occurred to Hazlitt. His good -memory was like the sun-dial,--it counted none but the bright hours. -By this time he had almost forgotten both his unhappy passion and the -unhappier book that he wrote about it. - -And, indeed, it is time that _we_ forgot them. For one who has found -his profit in strolling up and down in Hazlitt’s essays at odd hours -for half a lifetime, it is little becoming to talk overmuch about the -man’s personal imperfections. It matters little to any of us now that -his temper was bad; that his passions too often betrayed him into -folly; that his faculties lacked a certain balance; that his _mal de -rêverie_, whether born with him or caught from his French master, -sometimes ran too feverish a course; that, in short, he had the not -unusual weaknesses of super-sensitive men. What does matter is that at -his best he wrote English prose as comparatively few have written it, -and in doing so said a world of bright and memorable things that no -one else could have said so well, even if it had ever occurred to any -one else to say them at all. If he was difficult to live with, that -is a question more than seventy years out of date; and no competent -reader ever brought a similar accusation against his essays. It has -been said of them more than once, to be sure, that they are not so -good as Lamb’s; but then, you may say that of all essays; and really -the comparison is futile, not to call it foolish. The men were nothing -alike; though even so, we may gladly agree with Mr. Henley’s comment, -that, as “dissimilars,” they “go gallantly and naturally together--_par -nobile fratrum_.” - -Perhaps Hazlitt sometimes wrote too much in haste, with hardly -sufficient care for those minute excellences that go to the making -of perfection, though he could talk edifyingly under that head, and -appears to have been the author of the clever parody, more clever than -true,--as cleverness is apt to be,-- - - “Learn to write slow: all other graces - Will follow in their proper places;” - -and it may be, as one of the cleverest of his admirers assures us, -that he was “really too witty.” Concerning points so nice as these, -it is hard for “honest and painful men” to feel certain. Haste has -the compensatory virtue of generating heat, while as for the having -too much wit, it is like having too much money, or more than one’s -share of personal beauty; serious misfortunes, both of them, beyond -a doubt (every one says so), but misfortunes to be put up with, at a -pinch, in a spirit of Christian resignation. All things considered, -too much is perhaps better than too little, and, for better or worse, -excess on both sides of the line is rather Hazlitt’s “note.” Of the -virtues of courage and obstinacy he possessed enough for two. We -applaud, even while we pity, to see how, all his life long, he stood -up for what he believed to be the truth, in spite of the frowns, and -worse than frowns, of all who in that day had it in their power to -blast the career of men in his profession. He was defamed and abused, -for political reasons,--all for that unlucky Bonapartean bee in his -bonnet,--as few men of letters have ever been, and to the last he did -not haul down his flag. Let so much be said in his honor. And whatever -else is forgotten, let the words of Charles Lamb be remembered: “I -should belie my own conscience if I said less than that I think W. H. -to be in his natural and healthy state one of the wisest and finest -spirits breathing.” The most virtuous of those who blame him may count -themselves happy ever to receive half so handsome a tribute from -so authoritative a source. Human nature is a tangled skein; moral -perfection is not to be encountered every day, even among critics. -To do one’s main stint well is probably as much as most of us can -reasonably hope for; and so much, assuredly, Hazlitt did; for his main -work, as we see it, was the writing of his few volumes of critical -and miscellaneous essays. Into these he put the breath of long life. -These are what count, seventy years after. Whoever begins with them, -recurs to them. Not one of them but comes under Lamb’s heading of -“take-downable.” - -As a matter of course, however, being a man of active mind and having -his living to make by his pen, he wrote many things besides these. He -began, indeed, with a metaphysical treatise,--a child of his youth (he -believed it a great discovery) for which he never ceased to cherish -an excusable fondness. This, on the authority of those who have read -it, or have talked with some who have done so, we take to be a rather -difficult and innutritious choke-pear, something to be safely left -alone by ordinary seekers after knowledge. Then, toward the end of his -career, he produced a four-volume life of Napoleon, which, on equally -good authority, we should think to have been a kind of anticipation or -foreshadowing of the modern “novel with a purpose.” His latest editors -go so far as to leave it out of their fine twelve-volume edition of -his works. Somewhere between these two attempts at immortality he -indulged himself in a book on grammar, intended especially to correct -the errors of Lindley Murray, more particularly, we believe, his -faulty definition of a noun as the name of an object. Fortunately or -otherwise, this work (every author of consequence has at least one -such) never got beyond the original (manuscript) edition. The making of -it seems a queer freak for a man of Hazlitt’s turn of mind; but then, -as Mr. Birrell observes, “grammar has its fascinations; and even such -men as John Milton and John Wesley, no less than William Cobbett and -William Hazlitt, succumbed to its charm.” And he might have added a -name more illustrious still,--the name of Julius Cæsar. - -All these longer works (including a “Reply to Malthus”) we consider -ourselves, as readers, at full liberty to skip. Furthermore, we -consider their merits or demerits to have no bearing whatever upon the -question of their author’s standing as an essayist. Like every man who -practices an art, he is entitled to be judged, not by his experiments -and failures, but by his successes. Wordsworth might have written a -thousand “Ecclesiastical Sonnets,” instead of only one hundred and -thirty odd, and every one of them might have been less imaginative -than the one before it, without making him any the less a true and -noble poet. For a poet, like the Pope, is infallible only when he is -inspired; at other times he may nod as well as another man. Moreover, -in the case of the poet, at least, the man himself may not be sure -whether or not, at any given moment, the divine afflatus is upon him. -It was Doctor Johnson, a poet himself, and the biographer of poets, -who said that it was easy enough to make verses; he had made a hundred -in a day; the difficulty was to know when you had made a good one. And -the same difficulty, in a less degree, is encountered by the maker of -prose essays. It is a wise father that knows his own child. Nor in such -a matter have a man’s contemporaries any great advantage over the man -himself. The folly of their judgments is proverbial. It is necessary -to wait. Apparently there is some strange virtue in the mere lapse of -time. “Time will tell,” the common people say; and the scholar has no -better wisdom. Hazlitt must stand his trial with the rest. Sooner or -later the years will render their verdict, though none of us may live -long enough to hear it. The best that can be said now is, that so far -the balloting seems to be strongly in his favor. - - - - -EDWARD FITZGERALD - - - - -EDWARD FITZGERALD - - -“I have been reading a good deal, but not much in the way of -knowledge.” So the future translator of Omar Khayyám wrote to a friend -in 1832, being then twenty-three years old, and two years out of -the University. The words may be taken as fairly descriptive of the -remaining fifty years of his life. He was always reading something, -but not with an eye to rank or scholarship. His old friends and -school-fellows one after another stepped into high place. Tennyson, -Thackeray, and Carlyle were names on every tongue; Spedding, less -talked about, was deep in a _magnum opus_; Thompson, Donne, Peacock, -Allen, and Cowell held positions of honor in church or college; but -FitzGerald had buried himself of set purpose in an insignificant, -out-of-the-way Suffolk village, and, by his own account of himself, was -dozing away his years in “visionary inactivity,”--in “the enjoyment of -old childish habits and sympathies.” - -Not less truly than his mates, however, as it now appears, he was -living his own life; and perhaps not less truly than the foremost of -them he was to come into lasting renown. Such are the “diversities of -operations,” through which the spirit of man develops and discloses -itself. - -FitzGerald came of an eccentric family. “We are all mad,” he wrote; and -his own share of the ancestral inheritance--mostly of an amiable and -amusing sort--early made itself evident. While he was at Cambridge, his -mother drove up to the college gate in her coach and four, and sent -for him to come down and see her; but he could not go,--his only pair -of shoes was at the cobbler’s. The Suffolk friend, from whom we have -this anecdote, adds that to the last FitzGerald was perfectly careless -of dress. “I can see him now,” he says, “walking down into Woodbridge, -with an old Inverness cape, a double-breasted flowered satin waistcoat, -slippers on his feet, and a handkerchief, very likely, tied over his -hat.” It was odd, no doubt, that a gentleman should dress in so -unconventional a manner; but it was much odder that he should write -to Mrs. Kemble a fortnight after the death of his brother, in 1879: -“I say but little of my brother’s death. We were very good friends, -of very different ways of thinking; I had not been within side his -lawn gates (three miles off) these dozen years (no fault of his), and -I did not enter them at his funeral--which you will very likely--and -properly--think wrong.” Only an eccentric man could have had occasion -to say that; and surely none but a very eccentric man _would_ have said -it. - -After leaving the University,--at which, by the way, he barely obtained -his degree,--he went to Paris (where he had spent part of his boyhood), -but stayed only a month or two; and on his return, having just passed -his majority, he wrote to Allen, “Tell Thackeray that he is never to -invite me to his house, as I intend never to go.” He would rather go -there than anywhere else, to be sure; but he has got “all sorts of -Utopian ideas” about society into his head, and is “going to become a -great bear.” In another man’s mouth this might have been merely the -expression of a passing whim; but whether FitzGerald meant the words -seriously or not, they were pretty accurately fulfilled. His friends -were of the noblest and truest, and his affection for them was of the -warmest and stanchest, no man’s more so; but he chose to live apart. - -“Why, sir,” said Doctor Johnson to Boswell, “you find no man, at all -intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, sir, when a man is -tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that -life can afford.” And Boswell, of course, responded Amen. “I can talk -twice as much in London as anywhere else,” he remarked, with Boswellian -simplicity. Possibly FitzGerald was less “intellectual” than the great -luminary and his satellite; or perhaps his intellectuality, such as it -was, ran less exclusively to talk.[3] At all events, he hated London as -a place of residence; and even when he paid it a visit, he was always -in such feverish and ludicrous haste to get away that he was sure to -leave his calls and errands no more than half done. “I long to spread -wing and fly into the kind clear air of the country,” he writes on one -occasion of this sort. “I see nobody in the streets half so handsome -as Mr. Reynolds of our parish.... A great city is a deadly plague.... -I get radishes to eat for breakfast of a morning; with them comes a -savor of earth that brings all the delicious gardens of the world back -into one’s soul, and almost draws tears from one’s eyes.” In the mouth -of a man of social position, University training, and independent -fortune,--who had lived in Paris, and was only thirty-five years -old,--language like this bespeaks a born rustic and recluse, not to say -a philosopher. And such FitzGerald was. - -Not that he craved a life in the wilderness (being neither a John -the Baptist nor a René), or had any extraordinary appreciation of -the beauties of nature, so called. There was little of Wordsworth or -of Thoreau in his composition, or, if there was, it seldom found -expression; but he detested crowds, was ill at ease in society, and -having a bent toward homely solitude, was independent enough to follow -it. It must seem queer to his old friends, he knew, but he preferred -to “poke about in the country,” using his books, as ladies do their -knitting work, to pass the time away. Here is one of his days, a day of -“glorious sunshine:”-- - -“All the morning I read about Nero in Tacitus, lying at full length on -a bench in the garden: a nightingale singing, and some red anemones -eyeing the sun manfully not far off. A funny mixture all this: Nero, -and the delicacy of spring; all very human, however. Then at half past -one lunch on Cambridge cream cheese; then a ride over hill and dale: -then spudding up some weeds from the grass: and then coming in, I sit -down to write to you, my sister winding red worsted from the back of -a chair, and the most delightful little girl in the world chattering -incessantly. So runs the world away. You think I live in epicurean -ease: but this happens to be a jolly day: one isn’t always well, or -tolerably good, the weather is not always clear, nor nightingales -singing, nor Tacitus full of pleasant atrocity. But such as life is, I -believe I have got hold of a good end of it.” - -Sometimes, it must be owned, he seemed not quite to approve of his -own choice. “Men ought to have an ambition to stir and travel, and -fill their heads and senses.” So he says once, in an unusual mood -of something like penitence. Even then, however, he concludes, -characteristically, “but so it is.” There speaks the real FitzGerald. -He is what he is, what he was made: a man without ambition; a man -incapable, from first to last, of taking himself seriously. He -could never have said, as Tennyson did in his youth, and in effect -for all his life, “I mean to be famous.” If FitzGerald meant to be -anything,--which is doubtful,--he meant to be obscure. The wonder -of it all is that his life was beautiful, his spirit sweet, and his -posthumous reward celebrity. - -He had little or none of the melancholy which so generally accompanies -the union of exceptional powers with an enfeebled will and a -comparative intellectual sterility. For one thing, he seems to have -been spared the persecution of friends. As he expected little of -himself, so they expected little of him. Unlike most men of a kindred -sort--men of whom Gray and Amiel may stand as typical examples--he was -left to go his own gait. Nobody wrote to him week after week, chiding -him for his indolence and entreating him to produce a masterpiece. -Happy man that he was, his youth had held out no promise of such -production, and so his subsequent course was not clouded by the shadow -of a promise unfulfilled. If he was down in the country letting the -moss grow over him, why, it was only “old Fitz,” from whom nobody had -ever looked for anything very different. So Thackeray, Tennyson, and -the rest seem to have thought. And so thought the man himself. Life -was worth living; oh yes; and he had “got hold of a good end of it;” -but it was hardly a thing to disquiet one’s self about. He set little -value upon time or money, and correspondingly little upon his own -gifts. There were always hours enough, and more than enough, for the -nothings he had to do; his income was sufficient; if it declined,--as -it did,--it was no matter, he had only to reduce his expenditures; -he never earned a penny, or considered the possibility of doing so; -and withal, he was not made to write anything himself, but to please -himself with the writings of others. - -He was born of the school of Epicurus. His aim was to pass the time -quietly; pitching his desires low, never overmuch in earnest, taking -things as they came,-- - - “Crowning the present, doubting of the rest;” - -“not a hero, not even a philosopher, but a quiet, humane, and prudent -man;” cultivating no enthusiasm, and aiming at no perfection. For -fifty years he seems to have been a consistent vegetarian. Like the -master of his school,--whom he seldom or never mentions, and of whom -he perhaps as seldom thought,--he subsisted mostly on bread, and drank -wine sparingly. Such a diet gave him lightness of spirits, he said,--a -better thing, surely, than any tickling of the palate. - -With his liking for the country--in which, again, he was at one with -his unrecognized master--went a strong and persistent preference for -the society of common people. For correspondents he had always scholars -and men of note, the best of his time, and many of them; for daily -associates he chose a sailor, a village clergyman’s family, and an old -woman or two. One of the greatest men he had ever known was his sailor, -the captain of his yacht,--“my captain,” he calls him; “a gentleman -of nature’s grandest type,” “fit to be king of a kingdom as well as -of a lugger.” From Lowestoft he sends word to Laurence, the portrait -painter, “I came here a few days ago, for the benefit of my old doctor, -the sea, and my captain’s company, which is as good.” One who knew -him at the time of his intimacy with Bernard Barton, the Quaker poet -(fortunate Quaker, with Lamb and FitzGerald both writing letters to -him!), describes him as living in a little cottage at Boulge, a mile -from the village, on the edge of his father’s park, with no companion -save a parrot and a Skye terrier. Such domestic duties as he did not -attend to with his own hands were performed by an “old-fashioned -Suffolk woman.” It was at this period that FitzGerald--then -thirty-three years old--wrote to Barton, “I believe I should like to -live in a small house just outside a pleasant English town all the days -of my life, making myself useful in a humble way, reading my books, and -playing a rubber of whist at night.” And it may be added that few men -have ever come nearer to realizing their own dream. - -The Hall was mostly unoccupied in those days, though “the great -lady”--FitzGerald’s mother--would be there once in a while, and “would -drive about in a coach of four black horses.” So says the son of the -village rector, who adds that FitzGerald “used to walk by himself, -slowly, with a Skye terrier.” The rector’s son (a grandson, by-the-bye, -of the poet Crabbe) was rather afraid of his “grave, middle-aged” -neighbor. “He seemed a proud and very punctilious man ... never very -happy or light-hearted, though his conversation was most amusing -sometimes.” On this last point we have also the testimony of his -housekeeper, the “old-fashioned Suffolk woman” before mentioned. “So -kind he was,” she says; “not never one to make no obstacles. Such a -joking gentleman he was, too!” All his dependents, indeed, speak of his -kindness. A boy of the village, who was employed to read to him in the -evening during his later years, told Mr. Groome[4] “how Mr. FitzGerald -always gave him plenty of plum cake, and how they used to play piquet -together. Only sometimes a tame mouse would come out and sit on the -table, and then not a card must be dropped.” “A pretty picture,” Mr. -Groome calls it. And so say we. - -As to the picture of FitzGerald’s manner of life taken as a whole, it -will be thought “pretty” or not according to the prepossessions of the -reader. To many it will seem in all respects amiable, a refreshment -to read about. Why should a man not be what he was made to be? If he -likes the heat of battle, let him fight, so that he does it fairly -and with those who enjoy the same game. If another man cares not to -be strenuous, but only to pass his day innocently, with pleasure to -himself and harm to nobody else,--why, the world is big enough; let him -be at liberty to sit in his corner and see the crowd go by. - - “‘An hour we have,’ thou saidst. ‘Ah, waste it well.’” - -And after all, the idler may reach the goal as soon as some who hurry. -The race ought to be his who has trained hardest and run hardest; -and it would be, perhaps, if the world were logically and properly -governed; but things being as they are, the experience of mankind seems -to show a measure of truth in the old Hebrew paradox, “The race is not -to the swift.” Whether it is or not, the question had no particular -interest for FitzGerald. His thoughts were not of winning a prize. -His temperament had put him out of the competition. Temperament is -fatality; and he was content to have it so. “It is not my talent,” he -said, “to take the tide at its flow.” In his “predestined Plot of Dust -and Soul” the vine of worldly prudence had never struck root. - -He was peculiar in other ways. He was constitutionally a skeptic. Many -things which he had been taught to believe seemed to him insufficiently -established; improbable, if not incredible. The Master of Trinity wrote -of him and of one of his dearest friends, “Two of the purest-living -men among my intimates, FitzGerald and Spedding, were prisoners in -Doubting Castle all their lives, or at least the last half of them.” -The language is euphemistic. Some calamities are so deeply felt that it -is natural to veil allusion to them under metaphor. His friends, the -Master means to say, had lost their faith in the tenets of the English -Church. “A great problem,” he pronounces it. And such it surely was: -that two such men--“pure-living men!”--should doubt of matters which -to so many bishops, priests, and deacons are the very certainties of -existence. But so it is. Some men seem to be born for unbelief; and out -of that number a few are so non-conformative, so perverse, or so honest -as to live according to their lights. Concerning questions of this -kind FitzGerald said little either in public or private. An unheroic, -peace-loving man, who wishes to slip through the world unnoticed, -naturally keeps some thoughts to himself, growing them, to borrow -Keats’s phrase, in “a philosophic back-garden.” He reasoned about them, -it would seem, in a quiet spirit, patient, perhaps half indifferent, -being happily free from any corroding curiosity as to the origin and -destiny of things. In that regard Nature had been good to him. What -could not be known, he could get on without knowing. Why wear out -one’s teeth in champing an iron bit? He spoke his mind, anonymously, -in his translation of the Omar Khayyám quatrains,--which are perhaps -rather more skeptical than the book of Ecclesiastes,--and once, at -least, he shut the lips of a man whom he thought a meddler. The rector -of Woodbridge, we are told by Mr. Groome, called on FitzGerald to -express his regret at never seeing him at church. We may surmise that -the “regret” was expressed in a rather lofty and dogmatic tone, a tone -not unnatural, surely, in the case of one clothed with supernatural -authority. “Sir,” said FitzGerald, whose fondness for clergymen’s -society was one of his marked characteristics, “you might have -conceived that a man has not come to my years without thinking much of -these things. I believe I may say that I have reflected on them fully -as much as yourself. You need not repeat this visit.” - -His correspondence, by which mainly the world knows him, is full of -interesting revelations. His whims and foibles, and his own gentle -amusement over them; his bookish likes and dislikes, one as hearty as -the other; his affection for his friends, whose weak points he could -sometimes lay a pretty sharp finger on, notwithstanding, frankness -being almost always one of an odd man’s virtues; his delight in the -sea and in his garden (“Don’t you love the oleander? I rather worship -mine,” he writes to Mrs. Kemble); his pottering over translations from -the Spanish, the Persian, and the Greek (“all very well; only very -little affairs:” he feels “ashamed” when his friend Thompson inquires -about them); his music, wherein his taste was simple but difficult (he -played without technique and sang without a voice, loving to “recollect -some of ‘Fidelio’ on the pianoforte,” and counting it more enjoyable -“to perform in one’s head one of Handel’s choruses” than to hear most -Exeter Hall performances),--all these things, and many more, come -out in his letters, which are never anything _but_ letters, written -to please his friends,--and himself,--with no thought of anything -beyond that. In them we see his life passing. He is trifling it away; -but no matter. He might do more with it, perhaps; but _cui bono_? At -the end of his summer touring he writes: “A little Bedfordshire--a -little Northamptonshire--a little more folding of the hands--the same -faces--the same fields--the same thoughts occurring at the same turns -of road--this is all I have to tell of; nothing at all added--but the -summer gone. My garden is covered with yellow and brown leaves; and a -man is digging up the garden beds before my window, and will plant some -roots and bulbs for next year. My parsons come and smoke with me.” What -age does the reader give to the author of this paragraph, so full of -afternoon shadows? He was thirty-five. - -But if he was an idle fellow, careful for nothing, poor in spirit, -contented to be the hindmost, devil or no devil, “reading a little, -dreaming a little, playing a little, smoking a little,” doing whatever -he did “a little,” he was not without a kind of faith in his own -capacity. He knew, or believed that he knew, what he was good for. -“I am a man of taste,” he said more than once. If he could not write -poetry,--taste being only “the feminine of genius,”--he knew it when -he saw it. He read books with his own eyes, not half so common or -easy a trick as many would suppose. And having read a book in that -unconventional way, it was by no means to be taken for granted that -he would like it, though its author might be one of his dearest -friends. And if he failed to like it, he seldom failed to say so. If -he commended a book,--a new book, that is,--it was apt to be with a -mixture of criticism. He cared little or nothing for flattery himself, -and was magnanimous enough to assume (an enormous assumption) that -literary workers in general were equally high-minded. If one friend -sends another a book of his own writing, the best course for the -second man is merely to acknowledge its receipt, unless he has some -fault to indicate! This he sets down quite simply as his belief and -ordinary practice. It was the more comfortable way for both parties, -he thought. Perhaps he thought, too, that it was the more conducive to -habits of truthfulness. (Others might conclude that its most immediate -and permanent effect would be to discourage the circulation of authors’ -copies.) If he considered Mr. Lowell’s odes to lack wings, he told Mr. -Lowell so. If his taste was offended by the style of the “Moosehead -Journal” (“too clever by half”), he told Mr. Lowell of that also. Why -not? Great men did not resent truth-speaking, but were thankful for -it. He was full of wonder and sorrow when he saw Tennyson--who had -stopped at Woodbridge for a day to visit him, after a separation of -twenty years--fretted by the “Quarterly’s” unfavorable comments. If -Tennyson had lived an active life, like Scott and Shakespeare, he would -have done more and talked about it less. He recalls Scott’s saying to -Lockhart, “You know that I don’t care a curse about what I write;” -and he believed that it was not far otherwise with Shakespeare. “Even -old Wordsworth, wrapt up in his mountain mists, and proud as he was, -was above all this vain disquietude.” If a man is not greater than the -greatest things he does, the less said about him and them the better. -His work should drop from him like fruit from a tree. Henceforth let -the world look after it, if it is worth looking after. The tree should -have other business. - -To say that FitzGerald lived in accordance with his own doctrine -in this regard is to say that he lived like a man of dignity and -high self-respect,--like an old-fashioned man,--sometimes called a -gentleman,--one is tempted to say: a man who would cut off his hand -sooner than solicit a vote, or angle for a compliment, or whimper -over a criticism. Old-fashioned he certainly was,--old-fashioned and -conservative. He liked old books, old music, old places, old friends. -The adjective is constantly on the point of his pen as a word of -endearment: “old Alfred,” “old Thackeray,” “old Spedding”--“dear old -Jem.” So, writing to Mrs. Kemble from the seacoast, he says, “Why -it happens that I so often write to you from here, I scarce know; -only that one comes with few books, perhaps, and the sea somehow -talks to one of old things;” which was not an unhandsome tribute to -an old friend, though the old friend was a woman. He was a “little -Englander,” as the word is now. For a nation, as for an individual, -great estates were, he thought, more a trouble than a blessing. “Once -more I say, would we were a little, peaceful, unambitious, trading -nation, like--the Dutch!” Men of taste are naturally conservatives and -moderates. - -Not that FitzGerald was too nice for the world he lived in. His -carelessness about dress, his contentment with mean lodgings, and his -liking for the plainest and homeliest service and companionship have -already been touched upon. Even in the matter of reading, while he held -pretty strictly to the classics (not meaning the Greek and the Latin -in particular), he cherished one bit of freakishness: a great fondness -for the “Newgate Calendar”! “I don’t ever wish to see and hear these -things tried; but when they are in print, I like to sit in court then, -and see the judges, counsel, prisoners, crowd; hear the lawyers’ -objections, the murmur in the court, etc.” So he writes to his friend -Allen, at fifty-six. And the passion remained with him, as most things -do that are part of a man’s life at fifty odd; for fourteen years later -he writes to Mrs. Kemble, as of a matter well understood among his -friends: “I like, you know, a good murder; but in its place-- - - ‘The charge is prepared; the lawyers are met-- - The judges all ranged, a terrible show.’”[5] - -It may be that on this point he was not so very eccentric. Certainly -our newspaper editors give the general public credit for having -a reasonably good appetite for capital cases. And FitzGerald’s -weakness--if it was a weakness--is curiously matched by what we are -told of another eminent translator, the man to whom we owe our English -Plato and Thucydides. A shy student, Mr. Tollemache says, happened to -sit next to Jowett at dinner, and having hard work to maintain the -conversation, as such men often had, in Jowett’s unresponsive company, -stumbled upon the subject of murder. “To his surprise the Master -rose to the bait, mentioned some _causes célèbres_, and dropped all -formality.” Naturally the young Oxonian was surprised; but when he -spoke of the incident to a man who knew the Master of Balliol better -than he, the latter said, “If you can get Jowett to talk of murders, he -will go off like a house on fire.” - -There is something of the savage ancestor in all of us. We are wrong, -perhaps, to feel astonished that men of the cloister, studious men, -never called upon to kill so much as a superfluous kitten, should -find an agreeable excitement in a dramatic, second-hand tickling of -certain half-dormant sensibilities. If it is ghastly good fun to read -of murder in Scott or Dumas, why not in the “Newgate Calendar”? Who -knows how many tender-hearted, white-handed scholars would enjoy the -spectacle of a prize-fight, if only the amusement were a few shades -more respectable in the public eye? And how long is it since we saw -college men falling over one another in a mad rush to enlist for -battle, every one in a fever of anxiety lest he should be too late, and -so be debarred from the unusual pleasure of killing and being killed? - -No! When FitzGerald called himself a man of taste, he did not mean -to confess himself an intellectual prig, with a schoolmaster’s eye -for petty failings and a super-refined disrelish for everything short -of perfection. As for perfection, indeed, he did not much expect it, -whether in human beings or in their works; and when he found it, he -did not always like it. He thought some other things were better. He -preferred genius to art: that is to say, he enjoyed high qualities, -though accompanied by defects, better than lower qualities cultivated -to a state of flawlessness. “The grandest things,” he believed, “do -not depend on delicate finish.” Thus in poetry he admired a score of -Béranger’s almost perfect songs, but would have given them all for a -score of Burns’s couplets, stanzas, or single lines scattered among -“his quite _im_perfect lyrics.” Burns had so much more genius, so -much more inspiration. In the same way FitzGerald had little patience -with some perfect novels,--with Miss Austen’s, to be more specific. -They _were_ perfect; yes, he had no thought of denying that; but they -did not interest him. Even Trollope’s were more to his mind, with all -their caricature and carelessness. Miss Austen is “capital as far as -she goes; but she never goes out of the parlor.” “If Magnus Troil, or -Jack Bunce, or even one of Fielding’s brutes, would but dash in upon -the gentility and swear a round oath or two!” Cowell, he adds, reads -Miss Austen at night after his Sanskrit studies. “It composes him, like -gruel.” - -There is no doubt of it, FitzGerald was old-fashioned, especially -as a novel-reader. He doted on Clarissa Harlowe, “that wonderful -and aggravating Clarissa Harlowe,” and he read Dickens. “A little -Shakespeare--a cockney Shakespeare, if you will ... a piece of pure -genius.” So he breaks out after a chapter of Copperfield. “I have -been sunning myself in Dickens,” he says at another time. A pretty -compliment that, for any man. It is good to hear his praise of Scott. -Even those who can no longer abide that romancer themselves--for there -are such, unaccountable as the fact may seem to happier men--may well -feel a touch of warmth at FitzGerald’s fire. He read fiction--as he -read everything else--for pleasure; and in English no other fiction -pleased him so much, taking the years together, as Sir Walter’s. In -1871 he has been reading “The Pirate” again. He knows it is not one -of the best, but he is glad to find how much he likes it; nay, that -is below the mark, how he “wonders and delights in it.” “With all its -faults, often mere carelessness, what a broad Shakespearean daylight -over it all, and all with no effort.” He finished it with sadness, -thinking he might never read it again. - -And as he was always reading Scott, and as often praising him, so he -was always reading and praising Don Quixote. In 1867 he has been on his -yacht. “I have had Don Quixote, Boccaccio, and my dear Sophocles (once -more) for company on board: the first of these so delightful that I got -to love the very dictionary in which I had to look out the words: yes, -and often the same words over and over again. The book really seemed -to me the most delightful of all books: Boccaccio delightful too, but -millions of miles behind; in fact, a whole planet away.” In 1876 his -mind is the same. “I have taken refuge from the Eastern Question in -Boccaccio.... I suppose one must read this in Italian as my dear Don in -Spanish: the language of each fitting the subject ‘like a glove.’ But -there is nothing to come up to the Don and his Man.” - -Bookishness of this affectionate, enthusiastic sort, constantly -recurring, would be enough of itself to give the letters a welcome; for -every reader loves to hear books praised at first hand, the man rather -than the critic speaking, even though they be such as lie outside the -too narrow limits of his own appreciation. Happiness is contagious, and -it is better than nothing, as was said just now, to warm one’s self at -another’s fire. - -FitzGerald’s relations with books (with _his_ books) were those of a -lover. He can never say all he feels about Virgil. Horace he is unable -to care about, in spite of his good sense, elegance, and occasional -force. “He never made my eyes wet as Virgil does.” When he reads -“Comus” and “Lycidas,” even at seventy, it is “with wonder and a sort -of awe.” Surely he was a man of taste; born to be an appreciator of -other men’s good work. - -And because he was a man of taste,--or partly for that reason,--his -praise, even in its warmest and most personal expression (like the -words just quoted about Virgil), has not only no taint of affectation, -but no suggestion of sentimentality. With him, as with all healthy -souls, feeling was a matter of moments; it came in jets, not in a -stream; and its outgiving was always with a note of unconsciousness, of -deep and absolute sincerity. His life, inward and outward, was pitched -in a low key. He never complained, let what would happen; he had too -much of “old Omar’s consolation” for that (too much fatalism, that is); -his own weaknesses, even, he took as they were; why regret what was -past mending? but his prevailing mood was anything but rhapsodical. -All the more effective, therefore, are the outbursts--frequent, but -never more than a sentence or two together--in which he utters himself -touching those best of all companions, his “friends on the shelf.” - -The most striking instance of this affectionate absorption, this -falling in love with a book, as one cannot help calling it, occurred -in the last decade of his life. In the summer of 1875, when his health -seemed to be failing, and he was beginning, as he said, to “smell the -ground,” he suddenly became enamored of Madame de Sévigné. Till then, -in spite of his favorite Sainte-Beuve, he had kept aloof from her, -repelled by her perpetual harping on her daughter. Now he finds that -“it is all genuine, and the same intense feeling expressed in a hundred -natural yet graceful ways; and beside all this such good sense, good -feeling, humor, love of books and country life, as makes her certainly -the queen of all letter-writers.” - -The next spring he wishes he had the “Go” in him; he would visit his -dear Sévigné’s Rochers, as he would Abbotsford and Stratford. The -“fine creature,” much more alive to him than most friends, has been -his companion at the seashore. She now occupies Montaigne’s place, -and worthily; “she herself a lover of Montaigne, and with a spice of -his free thought and speech in her.” He sometimes laments not having -known her before; but reflects that “perhaps such an acquaintance -comes in best to cheer one toward the end.” Henceforward, year after -year, in spring especially, he talks of the dear lady’s charms. “My -blessed Sévigné,” “my dear old Sévigné,” he calls her; “welcome as the -flowers of May.” Like the best of Scott’s characters, she is real and -present to him. “When my oracle last night was reading to me of Dandie -Dinmont’s blessed visit to Bertram in Portanferry gaol, I said--‘I -know it’s Dandie, and I shouldn’t be at all surprised to see him come -into this room.’ No--no more than--Madame de Sévigné! I suppose it is -scarce right to live so among shadows; but after near seventy years so -passed, _que voulez-vous_?” One thinks of what Emerson said, that there -is creative reading as well as creative writing. - -As is true of all readers, every kind of human capacity being limited, -FitzGerald found many likely books lying mysteriously outside the -range of his sympathies. He loved Longfellow (and so “could not call -him Mister”) and admired Emerson (with qualifications--“I don’t like -the ‘Humble Bee,’ and won’t like the ‘Humble Bee’”); and he delighted -in Lowell (the critical essays), and “rather loved” Holmes; but he -“could never take to that man of true genius, Hawthorne.” “I will have -another shot,” he said. But it was useless. He confesses his failure to -Professor Norton. “I feel sure the fault must be mine, as I feel about -Goethe, who is yet a sealed book to me.” He expects to “die ungoethed, -so far as poetry goes.” He supposes there is a screw loose in him on -this point. Again he writes: “I have failed in another attempt at -‘Gil Blas.’ I believe I see its easy grace, humor, etc. But it is -(like La Fontaine) too thin a wine for me: all sparkling with little -adventures, but no one to care about; no color, no breadth, like my -dear Don, whom I shall return to forthwith.” Happy reader, who could -give so pretty a reason for the want of faith that was in him. If he -lacked patience to write formal criticism, he had the neatest kind of -knack at critical _obiter dicta_. - -Books were his best friends; or, if that be too much to say, they -were the ones that he liked best to have about him. As for human -intimates,--well, it is hard to know how to express it, but he seemed, -especially as he grew older, not to crave very much of their society. -He loved to write to them,--not too often, lest they should be troubled -about replying,--but he would never visit them; and what is stranger, -he cared little, nay, he almost dreaded, to have them visit him. His -house he devoted to his nieces, for such part of the year as they -chose to occupy it, reserving but one room to himself. This serves -for “parlor, bedroom and all,” he tells Mrs. Kemble; “which I really -prefer, as it reminds me of the cabin of my dear little ship--mine -no more.” Still the house is large enough. If any of his friends, -Tennyson, Spedding, Carlyle, Mr. Lowell, Mr. Norton, or who not, -should happen to be in the neighborhood, he would be delighted, truly -delighted, to see them; but none of them must ever undertake the -journey on purpose. He couldn’t render it worth their while, and it -would really make him unhappy. He was never in danger of forgetting -them, and he had no fear of their forgetting him. If they suffered, -he suffered with them. If one of them died, he wrote of him in the -tenderest and most poignant strain. - -In January, 1864, all his letters are full of Thackeray, whose death -had occurred on the day before Christmas. He sits “moping about him,” -reading his books and the few of his letters that he has preserved. -He writes to Laurence: “I am surprised almost to find how much I am -thinking of him: so little as I had seen him for the last ten years; -not once for the last five. I had been told--by you, for one--that he -was spoiled. I am glad therefore that I have scarce seen him since he -was ‘old Thackeray.’ I keep reading his ‘Newcomes’ of nights, and as it -were hear him saying so much of it; and it seems to me as if he might -be coming up my stairs, and about to come (singing) into my room, as in -old Charlotte Street thirty years ago.”[6] - -Hear him again as he writes of Spedding, the wisest man he has ever -known, “a Socrates in life and in death,” who has been run over by a -cab in London, and is dying at the hospital: “My dear old Spedding, -though I have not seen him these twenty years and more, and probably -should never see him again; but he lives, his old self, in my heart of -hearts; and all I hear of him does but embellish the recollection of -him, if it could be embellished; for he is but the same that he was -from a boy, all that is best in heart and head, a man that would be -incredible had one not known him.” And when all is over, and Laurence -sends him tidings of the event, this is his answer: “It was very, very -good of you to think of writing to me at all on this occasion: much -more, writing to me so fully, almost more fully than I dared at first -to read: though all so delicately and as you always write. It is over! -I shall not write about it. He was all you say.” How perfect! And how -it goes to the quick! - -Not for want of heart, surely, did such a man choose the companionship -of books rather than of his fellows. He was born to be a solitary, or -believed that he was; at all events, it was too late now for him to be -anything else. Whether nature or he had made his bed, it was made, and -henceforth he must lie in it. “Twenty years’ solitude,” he says to Mrs. -Kemble, “makes me very shy.” And he writes to Sir Frederick Pollock, -who has proposed to visit him, that he feels nervous at the prospect -of meeting old friends, “after all these years.” He fears they will -not find him in person what he is by letter. Every recluse knows that -trouble. With books it was another story. In their presence he felt -no misgivings, no palsying diffidence. They would never expect of him -what he could not render, nor find him altered from his old self. If -he happened to be awkward or dull, as he often was, they would never -know it. And really, with them on his shelves, and with his habit of -living by himself, he did not need intellectual society,--just a few -commonplace, kindly, more or less sensible bodies to speak with in a -neighborly way about the weather, the crops, or the day’s events, and -to play cards with of an evening. He was one of the fortunates--or -unfortunates--who have a “talent for dullness.” The word is his own. -“I really do like to sit in this doleful place with a good fire, a cat -and dog on the rug, and an old woman in the kitchen.” He reveled in the -pleasures of memory. He loved his friends as they were years ago,--“old -Thackeray,” “old Jem,” “old Alfred,”--and only hoped they would love -him in the same manner. - -So his letters are full of the books he has been reading, rather -than of the people he has been talking with. But what of his own -books, especially of the one that has made him famous? About that, -it must be said at once, the correspondence tells comparatively -little. His Persian studies were only an episode in his life, -interesting enough at the time, but not a continuous passion, like, -for instance, his reading of Crabbe, and his long persisted in--never -relinquished--attempt to secure for that half-forgotten Suffolk poet -the honor rightfully belonging to him. Concerning that pious attempt, -as concerning a possible republication of some of his translations -from the Spanish and the Greek, he left directions with his literary -executor; but not a word about Omar Khayyám. - -The whole Persian business, indeed, if one may speak of it so, appears -to have been largely a matter of friendship, or at least to have been -begun as such. Cowell had become absorbed in that language, and enticed -his old Spanish pupil to follow him. The first mention of the subject -to be found in the published letters occurs in 1853. FitzGerald has -ordered Eastwick’s “Gulistan:” “for I believe I shall potter out so -much Persian.” Two months afterward he writes to Frederic Tennyson: -“I amuse myself with poking out some Persian which E. Cowell would -inaugurate me with. I go on with it because it is a point in common -with him, and enables us to study a little together.” Friendly feeling -has served the world many a good turn, but rarely a better one than -this. - -Three or four years later comes the first reference to Omar. “Old -Omar,” he says, “rings like true metal.” Now he is translating the -quatrains, though he has little to say about them. He finds it -amusing to “take what liberties he likes with these Persians,” who, -he thinks, are not poets enough to frighten one from so doing. On a -1st of July he writes: “June over! A thing I think of with Omar-like -sorrow.” Then he is preparing to send some of the more innocent of the -quatrains to “Fraser’s Magazine,” the editor of which has asked him -for a contribution. He has begun to look upon Omar as rather more his -property than Cowell’s. “He and I are more akin, are we not?” he writes -to his teacher. “You see all his beauty, but you don’t feel _with_ him -in some respects as I do.” He is taking all pains, not for literalness, -but to make the thing _live_. It _must_ live; if not with Omar’s life, -why, then, with the translator’s. And live it did, and does,-- - - “The rose of Iran on an English stock.” - -The Fraser story is well known,--a classical example of the rejection -of a future classic. The editor took the manuscript, but kept it in its -pigeonhole (“Thou knowest not which shall prosper” being as true a text -for editors as for other men--“Sir,” said Doctor Johnson, “a fallible -being will fail somewhere”), and at last FitzGerald asked it back, -added something to it, and printed it anonymously. This was in 1859. -He gave one copy to Cowell (who “was naturally alarmed at it; he being -a very religious man”), one copy to George Borrow, and one--a good -while afterward--to “old Donne.” Some copies he kept for himself. The -remainder, two hundred, more or less, he presented to Mr. Quaritch, who -had printed them for him, and who worked them off upon his customers, -as best he could, mostly at two cents apiece. - -In the course of the next few years three other editions were -printed--all anonymously--for the sake of alterations and additions (a -man of taste is sure to be a patient reviser), but there is next to -nothing about them in the letters. No one cares for such things, the -translator says. He hardly knows why he prints them, only that he likes -to make an end of the matter. So he writes to Cowell. As for the rest -of his correspondents, they are more likely to be interested in other -things,--his garden, his boat, his reading. By 1863 he is pretty well -tired of everything Persian. “Oh dear,” he says to his teacher, “when -I look at Homer, Dante and Virgil, Æschylus, Shakespeare, etc., those -Orientals look--silly! Don’t resent my saying so. _Don’t_ they?” An -English masterpiece had been made, but neither the maker of it nor any -one else had yet suspected the fact. - -The merits of the work seem to have been first publicly recognized in -1869 by Mr. Charles Eliot Norton, in an article contributed to the -“North American Review.” “The work of a poet inspired by the work of -a poet,” he pronounces it; “not a copy, but a reproduction, not a -translation, but the redelivery of a poetic inspiration.” “There is -probably nothing in the mass of English translations or reproductions -of the poetry of the East to be compared with this little volume in -point of value as _English_ poetry. In the strength of rhythmical -structure, in force of expression, in musical modulation, and in -mastery of language, the external character of the verse corresponds -with the still rarer qualities of imagination and of spiritual -discernment which it displays.” - -It would be pleasant to know how appreciation of this kind, coming -unexpectedly from a stranger over seas, affected the still anonymous, -obscurity-loving translator; but if he ever read it, or, having read -it, said anything about it, the letters make no sign. He and his work -were still comfortably obscure. His old friend Carlyle heard not a word -about the matter till 1873, when Professor Norton, who meanwhile had -somehow discovered the name of the man he had been praising, mentioned -the poem to him, and insisted upon giving him a copy. Carlyle, much -pleased, at once wrote to FitzGerald a letter which was undoubtedly -meant to be very kind and handsome, but which, read in the light of the -present, sounds a little perfunctory, and even a bit patronizing. The -translation, he says, is a “meritorious and successful performance.” -We can almost fancy that we are listening to a good-natured but -truthful man who feels it his duty to speak well of a pretty good -composition written by a fairly bright grammar school boy. - -It was all one to FitzGerald. Perhaps he thought the compliment as good -as he deserved. He was getting old--as he had been doing for the last -twenty-five years. Persian poetry was little or nothing to him now--“a -ten years’ dream.” The fruit had dropped from the tree; let the earth -care for it. So he returns to his Crabbe, to Sainte-Beuve, to Madame de -Sévigné, to Don Quixote, to Wesley’s Journal, and the rest. Such little -time as he has to live, he will live quietly. And ten years afterward, -when he died,--suddenly, as he had always hoped,--some one put on his -gravestone that most Omaric of Scripture texts, “It is He that hath -made us, and not we ourselves.” Perhaps the words were of his own -choosing. Certainly no others could have suited him so well. If he had -been eccentric, idle, unambitious, ease-loving, incapable, a pitcher -“leaning all awry,” he had been what the Potter made him. - - “The Ball no question makes of Ayes and Noes, - But Here or There as strikes the Player goes; - And He that tossed you down into the Field, - He knows about it all--HE knows--HE knows!” - -Since his death his fame has increased mightily. All the world reads -Omar Khayyám and praises FitzGerald. “His strange genius, so fitfully -and coyly revealed, has given a new quality to English verse, almost -all recent manifestations of which it pervades.” So says one of the -later historians of our nineteenth century literature. And the man -himself thought he had done nothing! Truly the race is not to the swift. - - “Behold the Grace of Allah comes and goes - As to Itself is good: and no one knows - Which way it turns: in that mysterious Court - Not he most finds who furthest travels for ’t, - For one may crawl upon his knees Life-long, - And yet may never reach, or all go wrong: - Another just arriving at the Place - He toiled for, and--the Door shut in his Face: - Whereas Another, scarcely gone a Stride, - And suddenly--Behold he is inside!” - - - - -THOREAU - - - - -THOREAU - - “Whoever will do his own work aright will find that his first - lesson is to know what he is, and that which is proper to himself; - and whoever rightly understands himself will never mistake another - man’s work for his own, but will love and improve himself above all - other things, will refuse superfluous employments, and reject all - unprofitable thoughts and propositions.” - MONTAIGNE. - - -It lay at the root of Thoreau’s peculiarity that he insisted upon -being himself. Having certain opinions, he held them; having certain -tastes, he encouraged them; having a certain faculty, he made the -most of it: all of which, natural and reasonable as it may sound, is -as far as possible from what is expected of the average citizen, who -may be almost anything he will, to be sure, if he will first observe -the golden rule of good society, to be “like other folks.” Society -is still a kind of self-constituted militia, a mutual protective -association,--an army, in short; and in an army, as everybody knows, -the first duty of man is to keep step. - -What made matters worse in Thoreau’s case was, that his tastes and -opinions, on which he so stoutly insisted, were in themselves far out -of the common. Not only would he be himself, enough, under present -conditions, to make almost any man an oddity, but the “himself” was -essentially a very queer person. He liked solitude; in other words, he -liked to think. He loved the society of trees and all manner of growing -things. He found fellowship in them, they were of his kin; which is not -at all the same as to say that he enjoyed looking at them as objects -of beauty. He lived in a world of his own, a world of ideas, and was -strangely indifferent to much that other men found absorbing. He could -get along without a daily newspaper, but not without a daily walk. He -spent hours and hours of honest daylight in what looked for all the -world like idleness; and he did it industriously and on principle. -He was more anxious to live well--according to an inward standard of -his own--than to lodge well, or to dress well, or to stand well with -his townsmen. A good name, even, was relatively unimportant. He found -easy sundry New Testament scriptures which the church would still be -stumbling over, only that it has long since worn a smooth path round -them. - -He set a low value on money. It _might_ be of service to him, he once -confessed, underscoring the doubt, but in general he accepted poverty -as the better part. “We are often reminded,” he said, “that if there -were bestowed on us the wealth of Crœsus, our aims must still be the -same, and our means essentially the same.” Houses and lands, even, as -he considered them, were often no better than incumbrances. Some of his -well-to-do, highly respected, self-satisfied neighbors were as good as -in prison, he thought. In what sense were men to be called free, if -their “property” had put them under bonds to stay in such and such a -place and do only such and such things? Life was more than meat, as he -reckoned, and having trained himself to “strict business habits” (his -own words), he did not believe in swapping a better thing for a poorer -one. To him it was amazing that hard-headed, sensible men should stand -at a desk the greater part of their days, and “glimmer and rust, and -finally go out there.” “If they _know_ anything,” he exclaimed, “what -under the sun do they do that for?” He speaks as if the question were -unanswerable; but no doubt many readers will find it easy enough, -the only real difficulty being a deplorable scarcity of desks. For -Thoreau’s part, at any rate, other men might save dollars if they -would; he meant to save his soul. It should not glimmer and rust and go -out, if a manly endeavor was good for anything. And he saved it. To the -end he kept it alive; and though he died young, he lived a long life -and did a long life’s work, and what is more to the present purpose, he -left behind him a long memory. - -His economies, which were so many and so rigorous, were worthy of a -man. In kind, they were such as any man must practice who, having a -task assigned him, is set upon doing it. If the river is to run the -mill, it must contract itself. The law is general. To make sure of the -best we must put away not only whatever is bad, but many things that of -themselves are good,--a right hand, if need be, or a right eye, said -one of old. For the artist, indeed, as for the saint,--for all seekers -after perfection, that is,--the good and the best are often the most -uncompromising of opposites, by no means to be entertained under the -same roof. Manage it as we will, to receive one is to dismiss the other. - -Rightly considered, Thoreau’s singularity consisted, not in his -lodging in a cabin, nor in his wearing coarse clothes, nor in his -non-observance of so-called social amenities, nor even in his passion -for the wild, but in his view of the world and of his own place -in it. He was a poet-naturalist, an idealist, an individualist, a -transcendental philosopher, what you will; but first of all he was a -prophet. “I am the voice of one crying in the wilderness,” he might -have said; and the locusts and wild honey followed as things of course. -It followed, also, that the fathers neglected him,--stoning having gone -out of fashion,--and the children garnish his sepulchre. A prophet is a -very worthy person--after he is dead. Then come biographies, eulogies, -and new editions of his works, including his journals and private -letters. Fame is a plant that blossoms on graves; as a manual of such -botany might say, “a late-flowering perennial, nowhere common, to be -looked for in old cemeteries.” - -A prophet, a writer, a student of nature: this was Thoreau, and the -three were one. - -He preached faith, simplicity, devotion to the ideal; and with all a -prophet’s freedom he denounced everything antagonistic to these. He was -not one of those nice people who are contented to speak handsomely of -God and say nothing about the devil. It was not in his nature to halt -between two opinions. He could always say yes or no--especially no. As -was said of Pascal, there were no middle terms in his philosophy. - -Withal, no man was more of a believer and less of a skeptic. Faith -and hope, “infinite expectation,” were his daily breath. Charity was -his, also, but less conspicuously, and after a pattern of his own, -philanthropy, as he saw it practiced, being one of his prime aversions. -He knew not the meaning of pessimism. The world was good. “I am -grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual.” To the -final hour existence was a boon to him. “For joy I could embrace the -earth,” he declared, though he seldom indulged himself in emotional -expression; “I shall delight to be buried in it.” “It was not possible -to be sad in his presence,” said his sister, speaking of his last -illness. His may have been “a solitary and critical way of living,” to -quote Emerson’s careful phrase, but in his work there is little trace -of anything morbid or unwholesome. Some who might hesitate to rank -themselves among his disciples keep by them a copy of “Walden,” or the -“Week,” to dip into for refreshment and invigoration when life runs -low and desire begins to fail. Readers of this kind please him better, -we may guess, if he knows of them, than those who skim his pages for -the natural history and the scenery. Such is the fate of prophets. The -fulminations and entreaties of Isaiah are now highly recommended as -specimens of Oriental _belles-lettres_. Yet worse things may befall -a man than to be partially appreciated. As Thoreau himself said: “It -is the characteristic of great poems that they will yield of their -sense in due proportion to the hasty and the deliberate reader. To the -practical they will be common sense, and to the wise wisdom; as either -the traveler may wet his lips, or an army may fill its water-casks at a -full stream.” His own was hardly a “full stream,” perhaps; a mountain -brook rather than one of the world’s rivers; clear, cold, running from -the spring, untainted by the swamp; less majestic than the Amazons, but -not less unfailing, and for those who can climb, and who know the taste -of purity, infinitely sweeter to drink from. - -Simplicity of life and devotion to the ideal, the one a means to the -other,--these he would preach, in season and, if possible, out of -season. “Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity! I say, let your affairs -be as two or three, and not a hundred or a thousand; instead of a -million count half a dozen, and keep your accounts on your thumb-nail.” -This, which, after all, is nothing but the old doctrine of the one -thing needful,--since it is one mark of a prophet that he deals not -in novelties, but in truth,--all this spiritual economy is connected -at the root with Thoreau’s belief in free will, his vital assurance -that the nobility or meanness of a man’s life is committed largely to -his own choice. He may waste it on the trivial, or spend it on the -essential. There is “no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable -ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor.” And what -a man is inwardly, that to _him_ will the world be outwardly; his mood -affects the very “quality of the day.” Could anything be truer or -more finely suggested? For himself, Thoreau was determined to get the -goodness out of time as it passed. He refused to be hurried. The hour -was too precious. “If the bell rings, why should we run?” Neither would -he knowingly take up with a second-best, or be put off with a sham,--as -if there were nothing real. He would not “drive a nail into mere lath -and plastering,” he declared. Such a deed would keep him awake nights. -A very reasonable and practical kind of doctrine, certainly, whether -it be called transcendentalism or common sense. Perhaps we discredit -it with a long word by way of refusing the obligation it would lay us -under. - -And possibly it is for a similar reason that the world in general -has agreed to regard Thoreau not as a preacher of righteousness, but -as an interpreter of nature. For those who have settled down to take -things as they are, having knocked under and gone with the stream, in -Thoreau’s language, it is pleasanter to read of beds of water-lilies -flashing open at sunrise, or of a squirrel’s pranks upon a bough, than -of daily aspiration after an ideal excellence. Whatever the reason, -Thoreau is to the many a man who lived out of doors, and wrote of -outdoor things. - -His attainments as a naturalist have been by turns exaggerated and -belittled, one extreme following naturally upon the other. As for the -exaggeration, nothing else was to be expected, things being as they -were. It is what happens in every such case. If a man knows some of -the birds, his neighbors, who know none of them, celebrate him at once -as an ornithologist. If he is reputed to “analyze” flowers,--pull them -to pieces under a pocket-lens, and by means of a key find out their -polysyllabic names,--he straightway becomes famous as a botanist; all -of which is a little as if the ticket-seller and the grocer’s clerk -should be hailed as financiers because of their facility in making -change. - -Thoreau knew his local fauna and flora after a method of his own, a -method which, for lack of a better word, may be called sympathetic. -Nobody was ever more successful in getting inside of a bird; and that, -from his point of view and for his purpose,--and not less for ours -who read him,--was the one important thing. After that it mattered -little if some of his flying neighbors escaped his notice altogether, -while others led him a vain chase year after year, and are still, -in his published journals, a puzzle to readers. Who knows what his -night warbler was, or, with certainty, his seringo bird? The latter, -indeed, a native of his own Concord hay-fields, he seems to have been -pretty well acquainted with as a bird; its song was familiar to him, -and less frequently he caught sight of the singer itself perched -upon a fence-post or threading its way through the grass; but he had -found no means of ascertaining its name, and so was driven to the -primitive expedient of christening it with an invention of his own. -His description of its appearance and notes leaves us in no great -doubt as to its identity; probably it was the savanna sparrow; but how -completely in the dark he himself was upon this point may be gathered -from an entry in his journal of 1854. He had gone to Nantucket, in late -December, and there saw, running along the ruts, flocks of “a gray, -bunting-like bird about the size of the snow-bunting. Can it be the -seaside finch,” he asks, “or the savanna sparrow, or the shore lark?” -Savanna sparrow, or shore lark! A Baldwin apple, or a russet! But what -then? There are gaps in every scholar’s knowledge, and the man who has -“named _all_ the birds without a gun” is yet to be heard from. It is -fair to remind ourselves, also, that Thoreau’s studies in this line -were pursued under limitations and disadvantages to which the amateur -of our later day is happily a stranger. Ornithologically, it is a long -time since Thoreau’s death, though it is less than forty-five years. - -If any be disposed to insist, as some have insisted, that he made -no discoveries (he discovered a new way of writing about nature, for -one thing), and was more curious than scientific in his spirit and -method as an observer, it is perhaps sufficient to reply that he -cultivated his own field. From first to last he refused the claims of -science,--whether rightly or wrongly is not here in question,--and with -the exception of one or two brief essays wrote nothing directly upon -natural history. He worshiped Nature, even while he played the spy -upon her, fearing her enchantments and “looking at her with the side -of his eye.” Run over the titles of his books: “A Week on the Concord -and Merrimack Rivers,” “Walden,” “The Maine Woods,” “Cape Cod,” “A -Yankee in Canada,” “Excursions.” The first two are studies in high and -plain living,--practical philosophy, spiritual economy, the right use -of society and solitude, books and nature. The rest are narratives of -travel, with a record of what the traveler saw and thought and felt. -In “Excursions,” to be sure, there is an early paper on “The Natural -History of Massachusetts,” to which, by straining a point, we may add -one on “The Succession of Forest Trees,” another on “Autumnal Tints,” -and still another on “Wild Apples.” Elsewhere, though the landscape is -sure to be carefully studied, it is always a landscape with figures. In -truth, while he wrote so much of outward nature, and so often seemed to -find his fellow-mortals no better than intruders upon the scene, his -real subject was man. “Man is all in all,” he says; “Nature nothing -but as she draws him out and reflects him.” And again he said, “Any -affecting human event may blind our eyes to natural objects.” - -The latter sentence was written shortly after the death of John Brown, -in whose fate Thoreau had been so completely absorbed that his old -Concord world, when he came back to it, had almost a foreign look to -him, and he remarked with a start of surprise that the little grebe -was still diving in the river. With all his devotion to nature and -philosophy, it was the “human event” that really concerned him. But -of course he had ideas of his own as to what constituted an event. As -for men’s so-called affairs, and all that passes current under the -name of news, nothing could be less eventful; for all such things he -could never sufficiently express his contempt. “In proportion as our -inward life fails,” he says, “we go more constantly and desperately to -the post-office.” And he adds, in that peculiarly airy manner of his -to which one is tempted sometimes to apply the old Yankee adjective -“toplofty,” “I would not run round the corner to see the world blow -up.” After which, the reader whose bump of incuriosity is less highly -developed may console himself by remembering that when a powder-mill -blew up in the next town, Thoreau, hearing the noise, ran downstairs, -jumped into a wagon, and drove post-haste to the scene of the disaster. -So true is it that it is - - “the most difficult of tasks to keep - Heights which the soul is competent to gain.” - -Careful economist as Thoreau was, bravely as he trusted his own -intuitions and kept to his own path, much as he preached simplicity -and heroically as he practiced it, he shared the common lot and fell -short of his own ideal. Life is never quite so simple as he attempted -to make it, and he, like other men, was conscious of a divided mind. -He had by nature a bias toward the investigation of natural phenomena, -a passion for particulars, which, if he had been less a poet and -philosopher, might have made him a man of science. He knew it, and was -inwardly chafed by it. Perhaps it was because of this chafing that -he fell into the habit of speaking so almost spitefully of science -and scientific men. Not to lay stress upon his frequent paradoxes -about the superiority of superstition to knowledge, the advantages of -astrology over astronomy, the slight importance of precision in matters -of detail (“I can afford to be inaccurate”),--to say nothing of these -things, which, taken as they were meant, are not without a measure of -truth, and with which no lover of Thoreau will be much disposed to -quarrel (those who cannot abide the nudge of a paradox or an inch or -two of exaggeration may as well let him alone), it is plain that in -certain moods, especially in his later years, his own semi-scientific -researches were felt to be a hindrance to the play of his higher -faculties. “It is impossible for the same person to see things from -the poet’s point of view and that of the man of science,” he writes in -1842. “Man cannot afford to be a naturalist,” he says again, in 1853. -“I feel that I am dissipated by so many observations.... Oh, for a -little Lethe!” And a week afterward he falls into the same strain, in -a tone of reminiscence that is of the very rarest with him. “Ah, those -youthful days,” he breaks out, “are they never to return? when the -walker does not too enviously observe particulars, but sees, hears, -scents, tastes, and feels only himself, the phenomena that showed -themselves in him, his expanding body, his intellect and heart. No worm -or insect, quadruped or bird, confined his view, but the unbounded -universe was his. A bird has now become a mote in his eye.” What -devotee of natural science, if he be also a man of sensibility and -imagination, does not feel the sincerity of this cry? - -But having delivered himself thus passionately, what does the diarist -set down next? Without a break he goes on: “Dug into what I take to be -a woodchuck’s burrow in the low knoll below the cliffs. It was in the -side of the hill, and sloped gently downward at first diagonally into -the hill about five feet, perhaps westerly, then turned and ran north -about three feet, then northwest further into the hill four feet, then -north again four feet, then northeast I know not how far, the last five -feet, perhaps, ascending,”--with as much more of the same tenor and -equally detailed. A laughable paragraph, surely, to follow a lament -over a too envious observation of particulars; with its “perhaps” four -times repeated, its five feet westerly, three feet northerly, and so -on, like a conveyancer’s description of a wood-lot: and all about a -hole in the ground, which he “took to be” a woodchuck’s burrow! - -In vain shall a man bestir himself to run away from his own instincts. -In vain, in such a warfare, shall he trust to the freedom of the will. -Happily for himself, and happily for the world, Thoreau, though he -“could not afford to be a naturalist,” could never cease from his “too -envious observation.” - -By inclination and habit he liked to see and do things for himself, -as if they had never been seen or done before. That was one mark of -his individualistic temper, not to say a chief mark of his genius. -He describes in his journal an experiment in making sugar from the -sap of red maple trees. Here, too, he goes into the minutest details, -not omitting the size of the holes he bored and the frequency with -which the drops fell,--about as fast as his pulse beat. His father, he -mentions (the son was then forty years old), chided him for wasting his -time. There was no occasion for the experiment, the father thought; it -was well known that the thing could be done; and as for the sugar, it -could be bought cheaper at the village shop. “He said it took me from -my studies,” the journal records. “I said that I made it my study, -and felt as if I had been to a university.” If fault-finding is in -order, an individualist prefers to administer it on his own account. -One remembers Thoreau’s characteristic declaration that he had never -received the first word of valuable counsel from any of his elders. -In the present instance, surely, as much as this must be said for -him,--that by habits of this unpractical-seeming kind knowledge is made -peculiarly one’s own, and, old or new, keeps something of the freshness -of discovery upon it. The critic may smile, but even he will not -dispute the charm of writing done in such a spirit,--the very spirit in -which the old books were written, in the childhood of the world. - -Even the edibility of white-oak acorns affected Thoreau, at the age of -forty, as a new fact. So far as his feeling about it was concerned, -the fruit might have been that morning created. “The whole world is -sweeter” to him for having “discovered” it. “To have found two Indian -gouges and tasted sweet acorns, is it not enough for one afternoon?” he -asks himself. And the next day, shrewd economist and exaggerator that -he is, he tries his new dainty again, and behold, a second discovery: -the acorns “appear to dry sweet!” One need not be a critic, but only a -homely-witted, country-bred Yankee, to smile at this. But indeed, it -is a relief to be able to smile now and then at one who held himself -so high and aloof,--“a Switzer on the edge of the glacier,” as he -called himself; who found no wisdom too lofty for him, no companionship -quite lofty enough; and who, in his longing for something better than -the best, could exclaim, “Give me a sentence which no intelligence -can understand.” Not that we feel any diminution of our respect or -affection; but it pleases us to have met our Switzer for once on -something near our own level. In an author, as in a friend, an amiable -weakness, if there be strength enough behind it, is only another point -of attraction. - -As a writer, Thoreau is by himself. There are no other books like -“Walden” and the “Week.” The reader may like them or leave them (unless -he is pretty sure of himself, he may be advised to try “Walden” -first), he will find nowhere else the same combination of pure nature -and austere philosophy. It is hard even to see with what to compare -them, or to conceive of any one else as having written them. If Marcus -Aurelius, with half his sweetness of temper eliminated, and something -of sharpness, together with liberal measures of cool intellectuality, -injected, could have been united with Gilbert White, rather less -radically transformed, and if the resultant complex person had made -it his business to write, we can perhaps imagine that his work would -not have been in all respects unlike that of the sage of Walden; in -saying which we have but taken a circuitous course back to our former -position, that Thoreau was a man of his own kind. - -He was an author from the beginning. Of that, as he said himself, he -was never in doubt. His ceaseless observation of nature--which some -have decried as lacking purpose and method--and his daily journal were -deliberately chosen means to that end. “Here have I been these forty -years learning the language of these fields that I may the better -express myself.” That was what he aimed at, let his subject be what it -might,--to express _himself_. - -Few writers have ever treated their work more seriously, or studied -their art more industriously. He talked sometimes, to be sure, as -if there were no art about it. To listen to him in such a mood, one -might suppose that the fact and the thought were the only things to -be considered, and that language followed of itself. Such was neither -his belief nor his practice. But he was one of the fortunate ones who -by taking pains can produce an effect of easiness; who can recast and -recast a sentence, and in the end leave it looking as if it had dropped -from a running pen. One of the fortunates, we say; for an air of -innocent unconsciousness is as becoming in a sentence as in a face. - -On this point a useful study in contrasts might be made between -Thoreau and a man who gladly acknowledged him as one of his masters. -“Upon me,” says Robert Louis Stevenson, “this pure, narrow, sunnily -ascetic Thoreau had exercised a great charm. I have scarce written ten -sentences since I was introduced to him, but his influence might be -somewhere detected by a close observer.” The observer would need to be -very close indeed, the majority of Stevensonians will think, but that, -true or false, is nothing to the purpose here. Stevenson and Thoreau -both made writing a lifelong study, and with exceedingly diverse -results. The Scotchman’s style is the finer, but then it is sometimes -in danger of becoming _super_fine. We may not wish it different. Such -work must be as it is. It could hardly be better without being worse, -the writing of fine prose being always a question of compromises, a -gain here for a loss there, a choice of imperfections; perfect prose -being in fact impossible, except in the briefest snatches. But surely -Stevenson’s gift was not an absolute naturalness and transparency, -such as lets the thought show through on the instant, and leaves the -beauty of the verbal medium to catch the attention afterward, if the -reader will. “For love of lovely words,” an artist of Stevenson’s -temperament, however sound his theories, may sometimes find it hard to -make a righteous choice between the music of an exquisite cadence and -the pure expressiveness of a halting phrase. The author of “Walden” had -his literary temptations, but not of this kind. Let the phrase halt, -so long as it expressed a sturdy truth in sturdy fashion. As for that -homely quality--“careless country talk”--which Thoreau prayed for, and -in good measure received, it is questionable whether Stevenson ever -sought it, though he would no doubt have assented to Thoreau’s words: -“Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the -reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art.” - -Thoreau, indeed, first as a spiritual economist, and next as an artist, -had a natural relish for the common and the plain. Every landscape that -was dreary enough, as he says of Cape Cod, had a certain beauty in his -eyes. Whether in literature or in life, he preferred the beauty that is -inherent,--the beauty of the thing itself. Ornament, beauty laid on, -did not much attract him. Among persons, it was the wilder-seeming, the -less tamed and cultivated, with whom he liked to converse, and whose -sayings he oftenest recorded. Though they might be crabbed specimens, -“run all to thorn and rind, and crowded out of shape by adverse -circumstances, like the third chestnut in the burr,” they were still -what nature had made them. Even a crowd pleased him, if it was composed -of the right materials,--that is to say, if it was rude enough. Thus -he, a hermit, took pleasure in the autumnal cattle-show. With what a -touch of affection he lays on the colors! “The wind goes hurrying down -the country, gleaning every loose straw that is left in the fields, -while every farmer lad, too, appears to scud before it,--having donned -his best pea-jacket and pepper-and-salt waistcoat, his unbent trousers, -outstanding rigging of duck, or kerseymere, or corduroy, and his furry -hat withal,--to country fairs and cattle-shows, to that Rome among the -villages where the treasures of the year are gathered. All the land -over they go leaping the fences with their tough, idle palms, which -have never learned to hang by their sides, amid the low of calves and -the bleating of sheep,--Amos, Abner, Elnathan, Elbridge,-- - - ‘From steep pine-bearing mountains to the plain.’ - -I love these sons of earth, every mother’s son of them.” It is worth -while to see the country’s people, he thinks, and even the “supple -vagabond,” who is “sure to appear on the least rumor of such a -gathering, and the next day to disappear, and go into his hole like -the seventeen-year locust.” - -For the average (uninitiated) reader, be it said, there is nothing -better in Thoreau than his thumb-nail sketches of humble, every-day -humanity; as there is no part of his work, not even his denunciation -of worldly conformity, or his picturing of nature’s moods, which is -done with more absolute good will. A man need not be an idealist, a -naturalist, or anything else out of the ordinary, to like the Canadian -woodchopper, for example, cousin to the pine and the rock, who never -was tired in his life, and, stranger still, sometimes acted as if he -were “thinking for himself and expressing his own opinions;” or the old -fisherman, always haunting the river in serene afternoons, and “almost -rustling with the sedge;” or the Cape Cod wrecker, whose face was “like -an old sail endowed with life,”--one of the Pilgrims, perhaps, who had -“kept on the back side of the Cape and let the centuries go by;” or the -free-spoken Wellfleet oysterman, “a poor good-for-nothing crittur,” now -“under petticoat government,” who yet remembered George Washington as -“a r-a-ther large and portly-looking man, with a pretty good leg as he -sat on his horse;” or the iron-jawed Nauset woman, who seemed to be -shouting at you through a breaker, and who looked “as if it made her -head ache to live;” or the country soldier boy on his way to muster, -in full regimentals, with shouldered musket and military step, who -in a lonely place in the woods is suddenly abashed at the sight of a -stranger approaching, and finds himself hard put to it to get by in -anything like military order. - -With men like these, natural men, Thoreau found himself at home; he -described them almost as sympathetically as if they had been so many -woodchucks or hen-hawks. As he said of his own boyhood, they were “part -and parcel of nature” itself. As for fine manners parading about in -fine clothes, how should he, a rustic jealous of his rusticity, presume -to know what, if anything, might be going on under all that broadcloth? -Reality was the chief of his ideals. The shabbiest of it was more to -the purpose than a masquerade. - -Whether it would have been better for him had his taste been more -liberal in this respect is a question about which it might be -useless to speculate. Breadth may easily be sought at too great an -expense, especially by one who has a distinct and highly individual -work to accomplish. First of all, such a man must be himself. His -imperfections, even, must be of his own kind, twin-born with his better -qualities, a certain lack of complaisance being one of the likeliest -and, in the strict sense, most appropriate. But that some of Thoreau’s -private and hasty remarks, in his letters and journals, about the -meanness of his fellow-creatures, the more “respectable” among them, -especially, might profitably have been left unprinted, is less open to -doubt. They were expressions of moods rather than of convictions, it -is fair to assume, and in any event would never have been printed by -their author, one of whose cravings was for some kind of india-rubber -that would rub out at once all which it cost him so many perusals and -so much reluctance to erase. It is pretty hard justice that holds a man -publicly to everything he scribbles in private,--as if no allowance -were to be made for whim and the provocation of the moment. The charm -of a journal, as Thoreau says, consists in a “certain greenness.” -It is “a record of experiences and growth, not a preserve of things -well done or said.” After which it may be confessed that even from -“Walden” and the “Week,” published in the author’s lifetime, it is -possible to discover that charity and sweetness were not among his most -distinguishing characteristics. Taste him after Gilbert White, and -contrast the mellowness of the one with the sharp, assertive, acidulous -quality of the other. Thoreau was a wild apple, and would have been -proud of the name, suggestive of that “tang and smack” which he so -feelingly celebrated. “Nonesuches” and “seek-no-furthers” were very -tame and forgettable, he thought, as compared with the wildings, even -the acrid and the puckery among which he begrudged to the cider-mill. -It is in part this very “tang and smack,” we may be sure, that makes -his books keep so well in Time’s literary cellar. - -His humor, especially, “indispensable pledge of sanity,” as he calls -it, is of that best of fruity flavors, a pleasant sour. Some, indeed, -emulating his own fertility in paradox, have maintained that he had no -humor, while others have rebuked him for priggishly excluding it from -his later work. Did such critics never read “Cape Cod”? There, surely, -Thoreau gave his natural drollery full play,--an almost antinomian -liberty, to take a word out of those ecclesiastical histories, with -the reading of which, under his umbrella, he so patiently enlivened -his sandy march from Orleans to Provincetown. “As I sat on a hill one -sultry Sunday afternoon,” he says, “the meeting-house windows being -open, my meditations were interrupted by the noise of a preacher who -shouted like a boatswain, profaning the quiet atmosphere, and who, I -fancied, must have taken off his coat. Few things could have been more -disgusting or disheartening. I wished the tithing-man would stop him.” -Charles Lamb himself could hardly have bettered the delicious, biting -absurdity of that final touch. It was not this Boanergian minister, -but a man of an earlier generation, of whom we are told that he wrote -a “Body of Divinity,” “a book frequently sneered at, particularly by -those who have read it.” - -The whole Cape, past and present, was looked at half quizzically by -its inland visitor. The very houses “seemed, like mariners ashore, -to have sat right down to enjoy the firmness of the land, without -studying their postures or habiliments,”--a description not to be fully -appreciated except by those who have seen a Cape Cod village, with its -buildings dropped here and there at haphazard upon the sand. Here, -as everywhere, he was hungry for particulars; now improvising a rude -quadrant with which to calculate the height of the bank at Highland -Light, now, by ingenious but “not impertinent” questions, and for his -private satisfaction only, getting at the contents of a schoolboy’s -dinner-pail,--the homeliest facts being always “the most acceptable to -an inquiring mind.” Thoreau’s mother, by-the-bye, had some reputation -as a gossip. - -His work, humorous or serious, transcendental or matter-of-fact, is -all the fruit of his own tree. Whatever its theme, nature or man, -it is all of one spirit. Think what you will of it, it is never -insipid. As his friend Channing said, it has its “stoical merits,” its -“uncomfortableness.” Well might its author express his sympathy with -the barberry bush, whose business is to ripen its fruit, not to sweeten -it,--and to protect it with thorns. “Seek the lotus, and take a draught -of rapture,” was Margaret Fuller’s rather high-flown advice to him; -yet she too perceived that his mind was “not a soil for the citron -and the rose, but for the whortleberry, the pine, or the heather.” In -all his books it would be next to impossible to find a pretty phrase -or a sentimental one. He resorted to nature--in his less inquisitive -hours--for the mood into which it put him, the invigoration, the -serenity, the mental activity it communicated. But his pleasure in it, -as compared with Wordsworth’s or Hazlitt’s, to take very dissimilar -examples, was mostly an intellectual affair, the reader is tempted -to say, though the remark needs qualification. One remembers such a -passage as that descriptive of a winter twilight in Yellow Birch Swamp, -where the gleams of the birches, as he came to one after another of -them, “each time made his heart beat faster.” Yet even here we are told -of his ecstasy rather than made to feel it; and in general, surely, -though he valued his emotions, and went to the woods and fields to -enjoy them, they were such emotions as belonged to a pretty stoical -sort of Epicurean; less rapturous than Wordsworths, less tender than -Hazlitt’s, and with no trace of the brooding melancholy which makes the -charm of books like Obermann and the journal of Amiel. He delighted in -artless country music (it does not appear that he ever heard any other, -and of course he felicitated himself upon this as upon all the rest of -his poverty; it was only the depraved ear, he thought, that needed the -opera), but let any reader try to imagine him writing this bit out of -one of Hazlitt’s essays:-- - -“I remember once strolling along the margin of a stream, skirted with -willows and plashy sedges, in one of those low, sheltered valleys on -Salisbury Plain, where the monks of former ages had planted chapels and -built hermits’ cells. There was a little parish church near, but tall -elms and quivering alders hid it from sight, when, all of a sudden, -I was startled by the sound of the full organ pealing on the ear, -accompanied by rustic voices and the willing quire of village maids -and children. It rose, indeed, ‘like an exhalation of rich distilled -perfumes.’ The dew from a thousand pastures was gathered in its -softness; the silence of a thousand years spoke in it. It came upon the -heart like the calm beauty of death; fancy caught the sound, and faith -mounted on it to the skies. It filled the valley like a mist, and still -poured out its endless chant, and still it swells upon the ear, and -wraps me in a golden trance, drowning the noisy tumult of the world!” - -Here is another spirit than Thoreau’s, another voice, another kind -of prose--prose with the throb and even the accent of poetry. Stoics -and spiritual economists do not write in this strain, nor is this the -manner of a too envious observer of particulars. For better or worse, -the prose of our poet-naturalist went squarely on its feet. His fancy -might be never so nimble; conceit and paradox might fairly make a -cloud about him; but he essayed no flights. If his heart beat faster at -some beauty of sight or sound, he said so quietly, with no change of -voice, and passed on. As far as the mere writing went, it was done in -straightforward, honest fashion, as if a man rather than an author held -the pen. - -Thoreau believed in well-packed sentences, each carrying its own -weight, expressive of its own thought, rememberable and quotable. Of -the beauties of a flowing style he had heard something too much. In -practice, nevertheless, whether through design or by some natural -felicity, he steered a middle course. The sentences might be complete -in themselves, detachable, able to stand alone, but the paragraph never -lacked a logical and even a formal cohesion. It was not a collection -of “infinitely repellent particles,” nor even a “basket of nuts.” A -great share of the writer’s art, as he taught it, lay in leaving out -the unessential,--the getting in of the essential having first been -taken for granted. As for readers, in his more exalted moods he wished -to write so well that there would be few to appreciate him; sometimes, -indeed, he seemed to desire no readers at all. He speaks with stern -disapproval of such as trouble themselves upon that point, and “would -fain have one reader before they die.” A lamentable weakness, truly. - -In his present estate, however, let us hope that he carries himself -a shade less haughtily, and is not above an innocent pleasure in the -spread of his earthly fame, in new readers and new editions, and such -choicely limited popularity as befits a classic. Even in his lifetime, -as Emerson tells the story, he once tried to believe that something in -his lecture might interest a little girl who told him she was going to -hear it if it wasn’t to be one of those old philosophical things that -she didn’t care about; and this although he had just been maintaining, -characteristically, that whatever succeeded with an audience must be -bad. He speaks somewhere against luxurious books, with superfluous -paper and marginal embellishments. His taste was Spartan in those days. -But he was never a stickler for consistency, and we may indulge a -comfortable assurance that he takes no offense now at the sight of his -Cape Cod journey--in which he worked so hard on that soft, leg-tiring -Back-Side beach to get the ocean into him--decked out in colors and set -forth sumptuously in two volumes. It is a very modest author who fears -that his text will be outshone by any pictures, no matter how splendid. -But who would have thought it, fifty years ago,--a book by the hermit -of Walden in an _édition de luxe_, to lie on parlor tables! If only his -father and his brother John could have seen it! - -Thoreau believed in himself and in the soundness of his work. He -coveted readers, and believed that he should have them. Without -question he wrote for the future, and foresaw himself safe from -oblivion. Emerson regretted Henry’s want of ambition, we are told. He -might have spared himself. “Show me a man who consults his genius,” -said Thoreau, “and you have shown me a man who cannot be advised.” And -he was the man. He was following an ambition of his own. If he did not -keep step with his companions, it was because he “heard a different -drummer.” His ambition, and what seemed his wayward singularity, have -been justified by the event. His “strange, self-centred, solitary -figure, unique in the annals of literature,” is in no danger of being -forgotten. But what is most cheering about his present increasing -vogue, especially in England, is that it arises from the very quality -that Thoreau himself most prized, the innermost thing in him,--the -loftiness and purity of his thought. Simplicity, faith, devotion to -the essential and the permanent,--these were never more needed than -now. These he taught, and, by a happy fate, he linked them with those -natural themes that change not with time, and so can never become -obsolete. - - - - -THOREAU’S DEMAND UPON NATURE - - - - -THOREAU’S DEMAND UPON NATURE - - -“I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness.” -So Thoreau began an article in “The Atlantic Monthly” forty-four years -ago. He wished to make an extreme statement, he declared, in hope of -making an emphatic one. Like idealists in general,--like Jesus in -particular,--he believed in omitting qualifications and exceptions. -Those were matters certain to be sufficiently insisted upon by the -orthodox and the conservative, the minister and the school committee. - -In an attempt at an extreme statement, Thoreau was very unlikely to -fail. Thanks to an inherited aptitude and years of practice, there have -been few to excel him with the high lights. In his hands exaggeration -becomes one of the fine arts. We will not call it the finest art; his -own best work would teach us better than that; but such as it is, with -him to hold the brush, it would be difficult to imagine anything more -effective. When he praises a quaking swamp as the most desirable of -dooryards, or has visions of a people so enlightened as to burn all -their fences and leave all the forests to grow, who shall contend with -him? And yet the sympathetic reader--the only reader--knows what is -meant, and what is not meant, and finds it good; as he finds it good -when he is bidden to resist not a thief, or to hate his father and -mother. - -Thoreau’s love for the wild--not to be confounded with a liking for -natural history or an appreciation of scenery--was as natural and -unaffected as a child’s love of sweets. It belonged to no one part of -his life. It finds utterance in all his books, but is best expressed, -most feelingly and simply, and therefore most convincingly, in his -journal, especially in such an entry as that of January 7, 1857, a -bitterly cold, windy day, with snow blowing,--one of the days when -“all animate things are reduced to their lowest terms.” Thoreau has -been out, nevertheless, for his afternoon walk, “through the woods -toward the cliffs along the side of the Well Meadow field.” Contact -with Nature, even in this her severest mood, has given a quickening yet -restraining grace to his pen. Now, there is no question of “emphasis,” -no plotting for an “extreme statement,” no thought of dull readers, for -whom the truth must be shown large, as it were, by some magic-lantern -process. How differently he speaks! “Might I aspire to praise the -moderate nymph Nature,” he says, “I must be like her, moderate.” - -The passage is too long for quotation in full. “There is nothing so -sanative, so poetic,” he writes, “as a walk in the woods and fields -even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. Nothing so inspires me, -and excites such serene and profitable thought.... Alone in distant -woods or fields, in unpretending sprout-lands or pastures tracked by -rabbits, even in a bleak and, to most, cheerless day like this, when a -villager would be thinking of his inn, I come to myself, I once more -feel myself grandly related. This cold and solitude are friends of -mine.... I get away a mile or two from the town, into the stillness -and solitude of nature, with rocks, trees, weeds, snow about me. I -enter some glade in the woods, perchance, where a few weeds and dry -leaves alone lift themselves above the surface of the snow, and it is -as if I had come to an open window. I see out and around myself.... -This stillness, solitude, wildness of nature is a kind of thoroughwort -or boneset to my intellect. This is what I go out to seek. It is as if -I always met in those places some grand, serene, immortal, infinitely -encouraging, though invisible companion, and walked with him.” - -Four days later, dwelling still upon his “success in solitary and -distant woodland walking outside the town,” he says: “I do not go -there to get my dinner, but to get that sustenance which dinners only -preserve me to enjoy, without which dinners are a vain repetition.... -I never chanced to meet with any man so cheering and elevating and -encouraging, so infinitely suggestive, as the stillness and solitude of -the Well Meadow field.” - -Language like this, though all may perceive the beauty and feel the -sincerity of it, is to be understood only by those who are of the -speaker’s kin. It describes a country which no man knows unless he has -been there. It expresses life, not theory, and calls for life on the -part of the hearer. - -And if the appeal be made to this tribunal, the language used here -and so often elsewhere, by Thoreau, touching the relative inferiority -of human society will neither give offense nor seem in any wise -extravagant or morbid. Thoreau knew Emerson; he had lived in the same -house with him; but even Emerson’s companionship was less stimulating -to him than Nature’s own. Well, and how is it with ourselves, who have -the best of Emerson in his books? Much as these may have done for us, -have we never had seasons of communion with the life of the universe -itself when even Emerson’s words would have seemed an intrusion? Is not -the voice of the world, when we can hear it, better than the voice of -any man interpreting the world? Is it not better to hear for ourselves -than to be told what another has heard? When the forest speaks things -ineffable, and the soul hears what even to itself it can never -utter,--for such an hour there is no book, there never will be. And if -we wish not a book, no more do we wish the author of a book. We are -in better company. In such hours,--too few, alas!--though we be the -plainest of plain people, our own emotions are of more value than any -talk. We know, in our measure, what Thoreau-- - - “An early unconverted Saint”-- - -was seeking words for when he said, “I feel my Maker blessing me.” - -To him, as to many another man, visitations of this kind came oftenest -in wild and solitary places. Small wonder, then, that he loved to -go thither. Small wonder that he found the pleasures of society -unsatisfying in the comparison. There he communed, not with himself -nor with his fellow, but with the “Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe.” -And when it is objected that this ought not to have been true, that he -ought to have found the presence of men more elevating and stimulating -than the presence of “inanimate” nature, we must take the liberty to -believe that the critic speaks of that whereof he knows nothing. To -revert to our own figure, he has never lived in Thoreau’s country. - -Thoreau was wedded to Nature not so much for her beauty as for delight -in her high companionableness. There was more of Wordsworth than of -Keats or Ruskin in him. He was more philosopher than poet, perhaps we -may say. He loved spirit rather than form and color, though for these -also his eye was better than most. Being a stoic, a born economist, -a child of the pinched and frozen North, he felt most at home with -Nature in her dull seasons. His delight in a wintry day was typical. -He loved his mistress best when she was most like himself; as he said -of human friendships, “I love that one with whom I sympathize, be she -‘beautiful’ or otherwise, of excellent mind or not.” The swamp, the -desert, the wilderness, these he especially celebrated. He began by -thinking that nothing could be too wild for him; and even in his later -years, notably in the “Atlantic” essay above quoted, he sometimes blew -the same heroic strain. By this time, however, he knew and confessed, -to himself at least, that there was another side to the story; that -there was a dreariness beyond even his ready appreciation. More than -once we find in his diary expressions like this, in late November: “Now -a man will eat his heart, if ever, now while the earth is bare, barren, -and cheerless, and we have the coldness of winter without the variety -of ice and snow.” - -And what was true of seasons was, in the long run, equally true of -places. Let them be wild, by all means, yet not too wild. When he -returned from the Maine woods, he had seen, for the time being, enough -of the wilderness. It was a relief to get back to the smooth but still -varied landscape of eastern Massachusetts. That, for a permanent -residence, seemed to him incomparably better than an unbroken forest. -The poet must live open to the sky and the wind; his road must be -prepared for him; and yet, “not only for strength, but for beauty, the -poet must, from time to time, travel the logger’s path and the Indian’s -trail, to drink at some new and more bracing fountain of the Muses.” -In short, the poet should live in Concord, and only once in a while -seek the inspirations of the outer wilderness. - -What we have called Thoreau’s stoicism (knowing very well that he was -not a stoic, except in some partial, looser meaning of the word), his -liking for plainness and low expense, is perhaps at the base of one -of his rarest excellencies as a writer upon nature,--his reserve and -moderation. In statement, it is true, he could extravagate like a -master. He boasts, as well he may, of his prowess in that direction; -but in tone and sentiment, when it came to dealing, not with ethics or -philosophy, but with the mistress of his affections, he kept always -decently within bounds. He had a very sprightly fancy, when he chose -to give it play; but he had with it, and controlling it, a prevailing -sobriety, the tempering grace of good sense. “The alder,” he says, “is -one of the prettiest trees and shrubs in the winter. It is evidently so -full of life, with its conspicuously pretty red catkins dangling from -it on all sides. It seems to dread the winter less than other plants. -It has a certain heyday and cheery look, less stiff than most, with -more of the flexible grace of summer. With those dangling clusters of -red catkins which it switches in the face of winter, it brags for all -vegetation. It is not daunted by the cold, but still hangs gracefully -over the frozen stream.” - -Most admirable, thrown in thus by the way, amid unaffected, -matter-of-fact description and every-day sense, and with its homely -“brags” and “switches” to hold it true,--to save it from a touch of -foppery, a shade too much of prettiness. How differently some writers -have dealt with similar themes: men so afraid of the commonplace as to -be incapable of saying a thing in so many words, though it were only -to mention the day of the week; men whose every other sentence must -contain a “felicity;” whose pages are as full of floweriness and dainty -conceits as a milliner’s window; who surfeit you with confections, till -you think of bread and water as a feast. Whether Thoreau’s temperance -is to be credited to the restraints of stoical philosophy or to plain -good taste, it is a virtue to be thankful for. - -With him the study of nature was not an amusement, nor even a more or -less serious occupation for leisure hours, but the work of his life; -a work to which he gave himself from year’s end to year’s end, as -faithfully and laboriously, and with as definite a purpose,--a crop -as truly in his eye,--as any Concord farmer gave himself to his farm. -He was no amateur, no dilettante, no conscious hobbyist, laughing -between times at his own absorption. His sense of a mission was as -unquestioning as Wordsworth’s, though happily there went with it a -sense of humor that preserved it in good measure from over-emphasis and -damaging iteration. - -In degree, if not in kind, this wholehearted, lifelong devotion was -something new. It was one of Thoreau’s originalities. To what a pitch -he carried it, how serious and all-controlling it was, the pages of -his journal bear continual witness. His was a Puritan conscience. He -could never do his work well enough. After a eulogy of winter buds, -“impregnable, vivacious willow catkins, but half asleep along the -twigs” (there, again, is fancy of an uncloying type), he breaks out: -“How healthy and vivacious must he be who would treat of these things. -You must love the crust of the earth on which you dwell more than the -sweet crust of any bread or cake; you must be able to extract nutriment -out of a sand heap.” “Must” was a great word with Thoreau. In hard -times, especially, he braced himself with it. “The winter, cold and -bound out as it is, is thrown to us like a bone to a famishing dog, -and we are expected to get the marrow out of it. While the milkmen in -the outskirts are milking so many scores of cows before sunrise, these -winter mornings, it is our task to milk the winter itself. It is true -it is like a cow that is dry, and our fingers are numb, and there is -none to wake us up.... But the winter was not given us for no purpose. -We must thaw its cold with our genialness. We are tasked to find out -and appropriate all the nutriment it yields. If it is a cold and hard -season, its fruit no doubt is the more concentrated and nutty.” - -In these winter journalizings, we not only have example and proof of -the earnestness with which Thoreau pursued his outdoor studies, but -are shown their method and their sufficient object. He was to be a -writer, and nature was to be his theme, or, more exactly, his medium -of expression. He required, therefore, in the way of raw material, a -considerable store of outward knowledge,--knowledge of the outside or -aspect of things,--classified, for convenience, as botany, ornithology, -entomology, and the like; but after this, and infinitely more than -this, he needed a living, deepening intimacy with the life of the -world itself. For observation of the ways of plants and animals, of -the phases of earth and sky, he had endless patience and all necessary -sharpness of sense; work of this kind was easy,--he could do it in some -good degree to his satisfaction; the vexatious thing about it was that -it readily became too absorbing; but his real work, his _hard_ work, -the work that was peculiarly his, that taxed his capacities to the -full, and even so was never accomplished, this work was not an amassing -of relative knowledge, an accumulation of facts, a familiarizing of -himself with appearances, but a perfecting of sympathy, the organ or -means of that absolute knowledge which alone he found indispensable, -which alone he cared greatly to communicate. There, except at rare -moments, he was to the last below his ideal. His “task” was never done. -His union with nature was never complete. - -The measure of this union was gauged, as we have seen already, by its -spiritual and emotional effects, by the mental states it brought him -into; as the religious mystic measures the success of his prayers. He -walked in the old Carlisle road, as the saint goes to his knees, to -“put off worldly thoughts.” The words are his own. There, when the hour -favored him, he “sauntered near to heaven’s gate.” - -It must be only too evident that success of this transcendental quality -is not to be counted upon as one counts upon finding specimens for a -botanical box. There is no comparison between scientific pursuits, so -called, and this kind of supernatural history. For this, as Thoreau -says, “you must be in a different state from common.” “If it were -required to know the position of the fruit dots or the character -of the indusium, nothing could be easier than to ascertain it; but -if it is required that you be affected by ferns, that they amount -to anything, signify anything, to you, that they be another sacred -scripture and revelation to you, helping to redeem your life, this end -is not so easily accomplished.” - -This, then, it was for which Thoreau was ever on the alert; this -was the prize set before him; this he required of ferns and clouds, -of birds and swamps and deserted roads,--that they should stir him -inwardly, that they should do something to redeem his life, or, as -he said elsewhere, to affect the quality of the day. For this he -cultivated the “fellowship of the seasons,” a fellowship on which no -man ever made larger drafts. Even when nature seemed to be getting -“thumbed like an old spelling-book,” even in the month that tempted -him sometimes to “eat his heart,” he still “sat the bench with perfect -contentment, unwilling to exchange the familiar vision that was to be -unrolled for any treasure or heaven that could be imagined.” A new -November was a novelty more tempting than any voyage to Europe or even -to another world. “Young men have not learned the phases of nature:” so -he comforted himself, when the fervors and inspirations of youth seemed -at times to be waning: “I would know when in the year to expect certain -thoughts and moods, as the sportsman knows when to look for plover.” - -Here, as everywhere with Thoreau, nature, in his ultimate conception of -it, was nothing of itself. Everything is for man. This belief underlies -all his writing upon natural themes, and, as well, all his personal -dealings with the natural world. His idlest wanderings, whether in the -Maine forests or in Well Meadow field, were made serious by it. To -judge him by his own testimony, he seems to have known comparatively -little of a careless, purposeless, childish delight in nature for -its own sake. Nature was a better kind of book; and books were for -improvement. In this respect he was sophisticated from his youth, like -some model of “early piety.” Nature was not his playground, but his -study, his Bible, his closet, his means of grace. As we have said, and -as Channing long ago implied, his was a Puritan conscience. He must -get at the heart of things, sparing no pains nor time, holding through -thick and thin to the devotee’s faith: “To him that knocketh it shall -be opened.” In this spirit he waited upon nature and the motions of -his own genius. Patience, solitude, stillness, sincerity, and a quiet -mind,--these were the instruments of his art. With them, not with -prying sharp-sightedness, was the secret to be won. In his own phrase, -characteristic in its homely expressiveness, if you would appreciate a -phenomenon, though it be only a fern, you must “camp down beside it.” -And you must invent no distinctions of great and small. The humming of -a gnat must be as significant as the music of the spheres. - -Was he too serious for his own good, whether as man or as writer? And -did he sometimes feel himself so? Was he whipping his own fault when he -spoke against conscientious, duty-ridden people, and praised - - “simple laboring folk - Who love their work, - Whose virtue is a song”? - -It is not impossible, of course. But he, too, loved his work,--loved -it so well as perhaps to need no playtime. Some have said that he -made too much of his “thoughts and moods,” that he was unwholesomely -beset with the idea of self-improvement. Others have thought that he -would have written better books had he stuck closer to science, and -paid less court to poetry and Buddhistic philosophy. Such objections -and speculations are futile. He did his work, and with it enriched -the world. In the strictest sense it was his _own_ work. If his ideal -escaped him, he did better than most in that he still pursued it. - - - - -ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON - - - - -ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON - - -Stevenson was one of the happy few: he knew his life’s business from -childhood. He was to write books. Happier still, and one of even -a smaller minority, he early discovered that authorship is an art -requiring a long and rigorous apprenticeship; that, if a man is to -write, he must first study how, putting himself under tuition and -devoting himself to practice; that an author no more than a pianist can -begin with “pieces” and a public performance. In short, Stevenson had -from the beginning an idea of literary composition as a fine art,--an -art not to be picked up some pleasant day by the roadside (as later -in life he essayed, for whim’s sake, to pick up the art of writing -music), nor carried away, as a matter of course, along with other more -or less useful odds and ends of knowledge, from the grammar school or -university, but to be acquired, if at all, by years on years of drill. -Another man may write “well enough,” and perhaps successfully, so far -as material rewards go, by nature and the rule of thumb; but the artist -aims at perfection,--perfection for its own sake. That aim, the pursuit -of that ideal, is what _makes_ him an artist. And such was Stevenson. - -“All through my boyhood and youth,” he says, “I was known and pointed -out for the pattern of an idler; and yet I was always busy on my own -private end, which was to learn to write. I kept always two books in -my pocket, one to read, one to write in. As I walked, my mind was busy -fitting what I saw with appropriate words; when I sat by the roadside, -I would either read, or a pencil and a penny-version book would be in -my hand, to note down the features of the scene or commemorate some -halting stanzas.” - -So he “lived with words.” And the point of the confession is that -these “childish tasks,” as he calls them in another place, were done -“consciously for practice.” “I had vowed that I would learn to write. -That was a proficiency that tempted me; and I practiced to acquire it, -as men learn to whittle, in a wager with myself.” - -But he did more than to practice. A man does not learn to whittle, or -to paint, or to play the flute, by the primitive process of merely -trying his hand, be it ever so patiently. The fine arts are no longer -things to be invented, every man for himself. Others have whittled and -painted; one generation has bequeathed its increment of skill to the -next; here and there a master has arisen, and the masters have set up a -standard; and now, the standard being established, the essential matter -is, not to paint or write to the satisfaction of village critics, but -to prove one’s self a workman beside the best of the craft. For this -there needs acquaintance with the masters’ work,--such acquaintance, -or so young Stevenson was persuaded, as could come from nothing but -an imitative study of it. And he set himself to imitate. He had never -heard the dictum, or he disbelieved it, that a boy should read the best -writers, but pattern after nobody. Wherever he saw excellence of a kind -that appealed to him, he took it for the time being as his model, a -mark to aim at. This he did consciously and unashamed. - -Such a course would never give him originality; but no matter. For the -present it was not originality he was seeking; he was not yet writing -books: he was learning his trade. Whether, having learned it, he -should turn out to have original genius to go with his knowledge and -put it to use, was a question that the event alone could determine. -Originality is a gift of the gods; it is born with a man, or it is not -born with him. The technique of a prose style, on the other hand, could -be learned, and Stevenson’s present business was to learn it, in the -only way of which he had any knowledge, the way in which his masters -themselves had learned it,--practice based on imitation.[7] - -How could the boy have done better? He was called to write; he had “the -love of words” which, as he says, marks the writer’s vocation; and for -such a boy “to work grossly at the trade, to forget sentiment, to think -of his material and nothing else, is, for a while at least, the king’s -highway of progress.” Yes, “for a while;” and after the while, if he is -not merely one of the many that are called, but one of the few that are -chosen, he will have found his own line, and such originality as nature -endowed him with at birth (or before) will declare itself in the way -appointed. - -Stevenson had the name of an idler, he tells us, and it must be said -that he wore it jauntily,--as he wore his old clothes. Whatever he -did or failed to do, it would have been hard to catch him without -defense. He wrote “An Apology for Idlers,” which, as he confided to -a correspondent, was “an apology for R. L. S.;” and to this day it -sounds like a good one. It would do many a hard-working man and useful -member of society a service to read it. He believed that, for the young -especially, a certain kind and measure of idleness is a profitable kind -of industry; while they are seemingly unemployed they may perchance be -learning something that is really worth while: “to play the fiddle, -to know a good cigar, or to speak with ease and opportunity to all -varieties of men.” - -For himself, like many another man of genius, he was very little of -a scholar in the traditional sense of the word. What the schools had -taken upon themselves to teach were mostly not the things that he had -taken upon himself to learn. At the university he devised “an extensive -and highly rational system of truantry,” and no one “ever had more -certificates (of attendance) for less education.” Like his antitype in -Mr. Barrie’s novel, he could always find a way. No doubt his personal -attractiveness counted for much here, as it did everywhere. One of -his earlier teachers had pronounced him “without exception the most -delightful boy he ever knew;” and his mother’s testimony is that his -masters found it pleasanter to talk with him than to teach him. How -his wits and his fine gift of plausibility helped him over a hard -place in one of the last of his examinations--for admission to the -bar--is related as from himself, by Mr. Balfour. The subject in hand -was “Ethical and Metaphysical Philosophy,” and a certain book had been -prescribed. “The examiner asked me a question,” Stevenson says, “and -I had to say to him, ‘I beg your pardon, but I do not understand your -phraseology.’ ‘It’s the text-book,’ he said. ‘Yes; but you couldn’t -possibly expect me to read so poor a book as that.’ He laughed like -a hunchback, and then put the question in another form. I had been -reading Mayne, and answered him by the historical method. They were -probably the most curious answers ever given in the subject. I don’t -know what he thought of them, but they got me through.” - -It is a good story, and thoroughly characteristic. There was nothing -academic in Stevenson’s turn of mind, whether in youth or manhood. -“I was inclined to regard any professor as a joke,” he remarks, in -his “Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin,” and the words may be taken as fairly -expressive of his attitude toward the whole business of what is called -education. The last thing he meant to be was a conventional man,--“a -consistent first-class passenger in life,”--and why should he disquiet -himself over a conventional training? Allow him his own subject and his -own method, and he would be studious with anybody. - -So throughout his early years, as we have seen, he studied the art -of authorship. Then, as happens to all artists, came the critical -point of production or non-production. Would the plant so sedulously -watered and tended, so promising in the leaf, prove to be fertile or -sterile? Having so lofty an idea of his art, so exalted a standard of -excellence in it, would he go on indefinitely putting himself off with -preparations, “prelusory gymnastic,” as he saw so many painters doing -at Barbizon (“snoozers” instead of painters, covering their walls with -studies, and never coming to the picture), and as is so easy for art -students of all kinds to do, or, having learned the handling of his -tools, would he set himself to use them in the performance of a man’s -work? - -Such a question is by no means one that answers itself. In any -particular case there is perhaps more than an even chance that the -student will never have the industry, the courage, and the intellectual -and moral stuff to accomplish, or even seriously put his hand to, -any of the great things for which he has so long been making ready. -Stevenson himself, from all that appears, may have had at the beginning -a period when the issue hung more or less in doubt. “I remember a -time,” he wrote afterward, “when I was very idle, and lived and -profited by that humor.” Now, he says, the case is different with him, -he knows not why. Perhaps it is “a change of age.” He made many slight -efforts at reform, “had a thousand skirmishes to keep himself at work -upon particular mornings;” the life of Goethe affected him, as did also -some noble remarks of Balzac, but he was never conscious of a struggle, -“never registered a vow, nor seemingly had anything personally to -do with the matter.” “I came about like a well-handled ship,” he -concludes. “There stood at the wheel that unknown steersman whom we -call God.” - -In his twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth year, at all events, he was really -getting under way, though for the present, as was becoming, with small -ventures; and from that time, except for the frequent occasions when -illness and the likelihood of speedy death constrained him to “twiddle -his fingers and play patience,” he kept his pen busy as few men of -anything like his physical disabilities and his roving disposition -have ever done. For it is important to note that he was by inheritance -a wanderer. Even had his health allowed it, he could never have sat -month after month at the same desk, turning off so many hundred words -as his daily stint. Once, when he has lived for six months at Davos, -he writes to his friend Colvin that he is in a bad way,--a result, he -believes, of having been too long in one place. “That tells on my old -gypsy nature; like a violin hung up, I begin to lose what music there -was in me.” And when his mother complained that he was little at home, -he bade her not be vexed at his nomadic habits. “I _must_ be a bit of a -vagabond; it’s your own fault, after all, isn’t it? You shouldn’t have -had a tramp for a son.” - -For a man who had studied authorship, and wished to write not mainly -from books, but from the experience of his own mind and body, this -ineradicable gypsy strain was of the highest value. How much it -imported to Stevenson should be evident even to those who know his -books only by the backs of them. Bodily health excepted, he had -all the qualifications of a traveler. Happy man that he was, he -was always a boy, rich to the last in some of the best of youthful -virtues,--buoyancy, curiosity, “interest in the whole page of -experience,” and the capacity for surprise. The world for him was never -an old story. When he saw a ship or a train of cars, he wished himself -aboard. Discomforts and dangers were nothing; nay, they could be turned -into excellent fun, and after that into almost as excellent copy. His -spirit was habitually strung up to out-of-door pitch, to borrow his own -expression. He felt “the incommunicable thrill of things.” Not for him -a staid life in drawing-rooms or city clubs. He would be out in the -open, “where men still live a man’s life.” At forty he wrote his own -formula thus: “0.55 artist, 0.45 adventurer.” Near the same time, being -just from the island of Molokai, where he had played croquet with -seven leper girls (and would not wear gloves, though cautioned to that -effect, lest it should make the girls unhappy to be reminded of their -condition), he writes to a friend: “This climate; these voyagings; -these landfalls at dawn; new islands peaking from the morning bank; new -forested harbors; new passing alarms of squalls and surf; new interests -of gentle natives,--the whole tale of my life is better to me than any -poem.” A lucky combination it was, both for the man himself and for the -world of readers,--fifty-five per cent artist, and forty-five per cent -adventurer. - -And the adventures, of course, need not be so extraordinarily -venturesome, with an artist’s pen to put them on the paper. In 1887 -Stevenson had been once more at the gates of death with hemorrhages, -this time so often repeated that they had ceased almost to be exciting, -and were rather grown tiresome; and when the doctors prescribed another -change of climate, he sailed for America. The steamer turned out to be -loaded with cattle,--“a ship with no style on, and plenty of sailors -to talk to;” and this is how the consumptive patient describes the -voyage: “I was so happy on board that ship, I could not have believed -it possible. We had the beastliest weather, and many discomforts; but -the mere fact of its being a tramp-ship gave us many comforts; we could -cut about with the men and officers, stay in the wheel-house, discuss -all manner of things, and really be a little at sea.... My heart -literally sang.... It is worth having lived these last years, partly -because I have written some better books, which is always pleasant, but -chiefly to have had the joy of this voyage.” - -Later, in the South Seas, he ran more than once upon the very edge -of shipwreck, but always with the same brave heart and the same -gayety. “We had a near squeak,” he writes to a friend, after one such -experience. “The reefs were close in with, my eye! what a surf! The -pilot thought we were gone, and the captain had a boat cleared, when a -lucky squall came to our rescue. My wife, hearing the order given about -the boats, remarked to my mother, ‘Isn’t that nice? We shall soon be -ashore!’ Thus does the female mind unconsciously skirt along the verge -of eternity.” And thus, be it added, does the artistic masculine mind -turn even the face of death itself “to favor and to prettiness.” - -By this time Stevenson had almost settled it with himself that he -should never again leave the sea. “My poor grandfather, it is from him -that I inherit the taste, I fancy, and he was round many islands in his -day; but I, please God, shall beat him at that before the recall is -sounded.... Life is far better fun than people dream who fall asleep -among the chimney-stacks and telegraph wires.” One feels like saying -again, What a blessing it was for the world that a man so perennially -boyish, so endowed with the capacity for enjoyment, so conscious of his -life, so incurably in love with the romantic side of things, was also -the master of a style and an industrious lover of the art of writing! - -His remark, quoted above, about the “plenty of sailors to talk to” -suggests another thing: his exceeding fondness for rubbing elbows -with what are called, inappropriately enough, common people,--people -who have lived free from the leveling, uniformity-producing, -character-dulling, commonizing influences of too many books and an -excess of social sophistication. This, too, was a real fairy’s gift -to a man destined for literature. “He was of a conversible temper” -(he is speaking of himself in his youth), “and insatiably curious -in the aspects of life.” Like Will o’ the Mill, “he had a taste for -other people, and other people had a taste for him.” As we read of his -journeyings hither and thither, and the friends he made almost as often -as he opened his mouth, we are reminded of what David Balfour’s father -said of his offspring: “He is a steady lad and a canny goer; and I -doubt not he will come safe, and be well liked where he goes.” Perhaps -it was from his own experience that Stevenson was writing when he said -that a boy might learn in his truant hours “to know a good cigar, or to -speak with ease and opportunity to all varieties of men.” - -Stevenson’s books, the narratives of travel and the essays not less -than the novels,--perhaps even more,--are galleries of portraits. -Wherever he went, he found men: not caricatures, mere burlesques -and oddities, cheap material for print, creatures of a single crying -peculiarity, so easily drawn and, for one reading, so “effective;” nor -lay figures simply, wire frames (literature is populated with them) -on which to hang “the trappings of composition;” but breathing men, -full, like the rest of us, of complexity and paradox, nobly designed, -perhaps, but--still like the rest of us--more or less spoiled in the -making; men who had known, each for himself, the war in the members -(happy for them if they knew it still!), and had drunk, every one, of -the mingled cup of tragedy and comedy. He loved the sight of them; -their talk, wise or foolish, was music to his ears; and the queerest -and ugliest of them, under his capable and affectionate hand, wear -something of a human grace upon the canvas. - -It is a great gallery. Who that has ever walked there will forget the -old soldier turned beggar, the borrower of poets’ books?--“the wreck -of an athletic man, tall, gaunt, and bronzed; far gone in consumption, -with that disquieting smile of the mortally stricken in his face; but -still active afoot, still with the brisk military carriage, the ready -military salute.” We can see him, “striding forward uphill, his staff -now clapped to the ribs of his deep, resonant chest, now swinging in -the air with the remembered jauntiness of the private soldier; and all -the while his toes looking out of his boots, and his shirt looking -out of his elbows, and death looking out of his smile, and his big, -crazy frame shaken by accesses of cough.” His honest head may have -been “very nearly empty, his intellect like a child’s,” but he loved -the unexpected words and the moving cadence of good verse. We know -his talk; a little more, and we should hear it: “Keats,--John Keats, -sir,--he was a very fine poet.” - -A book like “The Amateur Emigrant” is full of such sketches, every one -done from life, and hit off with a perfection that might well render -it and the volume, as foolish mortals say, “immortal.” It would be -long to enumerate them, though it is a short book. There is Jones the -Welshman, for example,--“my excellent friend Mr. Jones,” owner and -dispenser of the Golden Oil; “hovering round inventions like a bee -over a flower, and living in a dream of patents.” He had been rich, -and now was poor, but, like all dabblers in patents, he had “a nature -that looked forward.” “If the sky were to fall to-morrow, I should look -to see Jones, the day following, perched on a step-ladder and getting -things to rights.” What _we_ should have cared most to see was Mr. -Jones and Mr. Stevenson walking the deck by the hour and dissecting -their neighbors; for Jones was first of all a student of character. -“Whenever a quaint or human trait slipped out in conversation, you -might have seen Jones and me exchanging glances; and we could hardly -go to bed in comfort till we had exchanged notes and discussed the -day’s experience. We were then like a couple of anglers comparing a -day’s kill.” And there is the fiddler, “carrying happiness about with -him in his fiddle-case,” a “white-faced Orpheus cheerily playing to an -audience of white-faced women,” with his fiery bit of a brother, who -“made a god of the fiddler,” and was determined that everybody else -should do the same; and Mackay, the cynic and debater, who professed -to believe in nothing but what had to do with food (“that’s the bottom -and the top”), but who once grew so eager in maintaining this noble -thesis that he slipped the meal hour, and was compelled, with a smile -of shamefacedness, to go without his tea; and Barney the Irishman, -the universal favorite, so natural and happy, with his “tight little -figure, unquenchable gayety, and indefatigable good will,” who could -sing most acceptably and play all manner of innocent pranks, but whose -“drab clothes were immediately missing from the group” when, after the -ladies had retired, some one struck up an indecent song; and the sick -man (poor soul), who thought it was “by” with him, and who had a good -house at home, and “no call to be here;” and the two stowaways, so fond -of each other, yet so strikingly contrasted,--one so ready to work for -his passage, the other “a skulker in the grain,” and like the devil -himself for lying. - -And besides these there are numbers more nearly or quite as telling; -but they must be let pass, though it is pleasant to pick good things -out of a book that, comparatively speaking, seems to have been little -made of, either by the author or by his admirers. To one of these, at -least, “The Amateur Emigrant” seems, not one of Stevenson’s greatest -books, indeed, but certainly one of the most enjoyable, say on the -sixth or eighth reading. - -It is a point of grace with any writer, and a very _sine qua non_ -with the essayist, that he should be able to speak often of himself -without offense, as Montaigne and Lamb did, to mention two shining -and incontestable examples. And the trick (though it is not a trick, -but an admirable quality, and almost as far as honesty from being -common) is none of your easy ones. To begin with, the venturer on such -an experiment must be interested in himself, which is by no means an -ordinary happening. Most men, we may say, count for nullities under -this head; they recognize their outward presentments in the glass, -no doubt, and are letter-perfect with their names and occupations; -but for a knowledge of their inner selves, the story of their real -lives, the “wonderful pageant of consciousness,” one might almost -as well interrogate the lamp-post on the next corner. They have -never kept company with their own thoughts, nor been in the least -degree inquisitive about them. Life, as they live it, is a matter of -externals, of eating and drinking and being clothed, of getting and -spending more or less money, of being amused, of movings up or down on -a social ladder. As for the past, the past of themselves,--which with -another man is his dearest possession,--it is mainly as if it had never -been. They must have had a boy’s dreams once, one would think, but that -was long, long ago, and the dreamer is dead, and his dreams with him. - -But if a man is to tell the world about himself, and charm it into -attention, he must not only be in love with his subject; he must have -a natural frankness, an unaffected and almost unconscious delight in -self-revelation,--tempered by a decent sense of personal privacy,--such -as infallibly commends itself and makes its way, the listener cannot -tell how. In other words, and in a good sense, the man must be still a -boy, endowed with a boy’s winning attributes, and entitled, therefore, -to something of a boy’s privilege. And with all the rest, and among the -most important, he must be favored with the gracious quality of humor. -Of all talk whatsoever, talk about one’s self must not be too serious. -No man (or none but a great poet) can safely indulge in it unless it -is natural for him to see the funny side of his own foibles, and at -the right minute to make his point at his own expense. All of which is -perhaps no more than to say that the writer in the first person must be -a man of taste, knowing (a wisdom which nobody under the sun can teach -him) what to say and what not to say, and, chiefest of all, how and -when to say it. - -Stevenson did not talk of himself so freely as Montaigne (how could he, -in these proper days?) nor, the present scribe being judge, so adorably -as Lamb. Nature herself is little likely to hit the white centre of -perfection twice, and we shall perhaps see another Shakespeare as soon -as another Lamb; but few have loved a personal theme better, and in the -handling of it there were none among the living to surpass him. He had -every qualification for the work. A pity he died at forty-four,--a pity -in every aspect of the case, but especially when it is considered what -treasures of youthful reminiscence he would have left behind him had -he lived even to the approaches of old age. Such a devotee of his own -past should have been spared to see it through a bluer haze. Yet even -in middle life how fair it looked to him, and how lovingly he laid its -colors as he transferred the picture to the page! Hear him speak of -his grandfather, in a passage no better than is common with him, and -dealing with nothing out of the ordinary:-- - -“Now I often wonder what I have inherited from this old minister. I -must suppose, indeed, that he was fond of preaching sermons, and so am -I, though I never heard it maintained that either of us loved to hear -them. He sought health in his youth in the Isle of Wight, and I have -sought it in both hemispheres; but whereas he found and kept it, I am -still on the quest. He was a great lover of Shakespeare, whom he read -aloud, I have been told, with taste; well, I love my Shakespeare, also, -and am persuaded I can read him well, though I own I never have been -told so. He made embroidery, designing his own patterns; and in that -kind of work I never made anything but a kettle-holder in Berlin wool, -and an odd garter of knitting, which was as black as the chimney before -I had done with it. He loved port, and nuts, and porter; and so do I, -but they agreed better with my grandfather, which seems to me a breach -of contract. He had chalkstones in his fingers; and these in good -time I may inherit, but I would much rather have inherited his noble -presence. Try as I please, I cannot join myself on with the reverend -doctor; and all the while, no doubt, and even as I write the phrase, he -moves in my blood, and whispers words to me, and sits efficient in the -very knot and centre of my being.” - -A man could talk of himself in that strain till the sun put the stars -out, and nobody would vote him tiresome or blame him for an egotist. -Yes, a misfortune it was that he could not have lived to write a dozen -books full of essays like “The Manse,” “Old Mortality,” “Memoirs -of an Islet,” and especially “A Gossip on a Novel of Dumas’s.” So -appreciative a reader and so entertaining a talker could never have -wearied us with gossip of his favorite books, “the inner circle of his -intimates;” and the more first-personal and confidential he became, the -better we should have liked it. - -Well, since we cannot have the finished essays, we will be the -more thankful for the letters. How good they are!--so varied, so -spontaneous, so free-spoken, so humanly wise and so deliciously -nonsensical; now bubbling over with jest, now touching the deepest -springs of thought and action; fit expression of a man who was himself -both Ariel and Prospero; “an old, stern, unhappy devil of a Norseman,” -yet with “always some childishness on hand;” the “grandson of the -Manse,” who would rise from the grave to preach, and has “scarce broken -a commandment to mention,” yet owning it as his darling wish to be a -pirate. Whim and opinion, settled conviction and passing mood, alike -find utterance in them; and best of all, perhaps, many of them are most -engagingly rich in matter connected with his own pursuit. A selection -of these in a handy volume (why must letters always be put up in a form -too cumbersome for lovers’ convenience, as if they, more than other -books, were expected to stand forever upon a shelf?) would go far to -supply the place of that treatise on “The Art of Literature” which -their author spoke so frequently of making. - -Here would be found a letter to Mr. Marcel Schwob, a letter one page -long, but weighty with the subtlest and pithiest criticism, not of Mr. -Schwob’s writings alone (that might not seem so very important), but -of writing in general, and in particular of Stevenson’s. For it is -impossible to read it without perceiving that the critic is passing -judgment (no unkind one) upon his own early books of sentimental -travel. His correspondent has sent him a volume of verses. He has read -it through twice, and is reading it again,--a handsome compliment, to -start with. It is essentially graceful, he says, but is a thing of -promise rather than a thing final in itself. “You have yet to give to -us--and I am expecting it with impatience--something of a larger gait; -something daylit, not twilit; something with the colors of life, not -the flat tints of a temple illumination; something that shall be _said_ -with all the clearnesses and the trivialities of speech, not _sung_ -like a semi-articulate lullaby. It will not please yourself as well, -but it will please others better. It will be more of a whole, more -worldly, more nourished, more commonplace--and not so pretty, perhaps -not even so beautiful. No man knows better than I that, as we go on -in life, we must part from prettiness and the graces. We but attain -qualities to lose them; life is a series of farewells, even in art; -even our proficiencies are deciduous and evanescent. So here with these -exquisite pieces, ... you will perhaps never excel them.... Well, you -will do something else, and of that I am in expectation.” - -Happy poet! to be caressed so affectionately and lanced so beneficently -with one stroke of the master’s hand; and happy critic, no less! having -sentences of this quality to drop without a second thought, like -small change from the hand of wealth, into the oblivion of private -correspondence. - -In truth, Stevenson could afford to be generous; he had always good -things enough and to spare. His was a mind incessantly active. He was -always covering paper. If only disease would leave him strength enough -to hold the pen, he could be trusted to keep it going. Ideas thronged -upon him; books by the dozen, one may almost say, stood waiting for him -to make them. The more wonder that, with all this excess of fertility, -he could yet rewrite and rewrite, and then write again, still on the -search for perfection. Surely the artist was strong in him. - -His fame was of slow growth, surprising as the fact seems now, till he -wrote novels. These, as all the world knows, since all the world reads -them, are nothing like the ordinary modern novel of carpet knights and -pairs of happy or unhappy lovers. They are romances in the heroic vein, -spun mostly of a single thread, with no lack of high lights, plenty of -blood-letting, a good spice of humor, dialogue that is closely pared -and talks of itself, character displayed in action, not dissected, and -movement to delight the lover of a story. - -The lode was struck, almost by accident, when Stevenson’s schoolboy -stepson son, backed by another “schoolboy in disguise,”--namely, -Stevenson’s father,--begged him to “write something interesting.” The -response to this reasonable request was “Treasure Island,” which not -only filled the schoolboys’ bill, but captivated so stout-hearted a -disbeliever in things romantic as Mr. Henry James. As it was this story -that introduced its author to a wider public, he used to speak of it -(possibly with a shade of irony, though that does not certainly appear) -as his first book. - -It may be that the gift of romance was the highest of his endowments. -Some, at least, have thought so, and have reckoned the novels as -not only the most popular, but the greatest of his works. As to the -choice among them, the question of their comparative excellence among -themselves, that is a matter not under discussion here, the writer -of the present paper having no sort of competency for dealing with -it. His own special delight is in “David Balfour” (the two parts) and -“Treasure Island.” These he hopes to read--now and then a chapter, -if no more--as long as he reads anything. He likes the men--and the -women,--and he likes the talk. Mr. James’s comment upon “Treasure -Island,” that one seems to be reading it over a schoolboy’s shoulder, -strikes him as extremely ingenious and pretty, but he is conscious -of nothing of that nature himself. He reads it, if he may be allowed -to say so, on his own hook, and for the time being is himself the -schoolboy,--which may or may not be the better fun. He likes the story -and the pictures,--for every chapter _is_ a picture,--and he likes the -writing. - -Concerning this last point, so often discussed, what shall be said? -As Stevenson’s nature was complex and his themes varied, so he wrote -in many keys. His prose was never “far from variation and quick -change.” When he put pen to any work,--essay, travel, sketch, tragedy, -or comedy,--the first thing was to strike “the essential note.” He -would not begin a funeral march in A major, nor a sailor’s hornpipe -in C minor; a requiem for the friend of his youth was one thing, and -a description of his fellow passengers in the steerage was another: -and, strange to tell, here and there a wise critic, wise above what -is written, has discovered in this change of key proof of a want of -originality. “Behold,” he cries, “the man has no style of his own; -to-day he writes in one manner, and to-morrow in another.” The same -sharp-eyed reviewers are certain to be troubled because Stevenson talks -freely of style, openly professing to have cultivated one,--to have -cared not only for what he said, but almost or quite as much for the -way in which he said it. “How can a man be concerned with the niceties -of expression, and yet be true to himself?” they seem ready to ask. A -question to which, it must be admitted, there is no answer, or none -worth the offering to any who need to ask for it. - -To be greatly occupied with matters of form is doubtless to subject -one’s self to peril. Careful writing may easily become mannered (as -careless writing also may, and with less excuse); but what then? Danger -is the common lot. An author, not less than other men, must face it, -whether he will or no. He may choose between one set of pitfalls and -another, but he will find no path without them. As for the risk of -mannerism, Stevenson escaped it substantially unharmed. Compared with -some of the more famous of his style-loving contemporaries, he may be -said to have come off without a scratch. Whether his style is better or -worse than theirs (and touching a point so delicate an unprofessional -critic may prudently reserve his opinion) is a different matter; at -least, it is less tagged with peculiarity. It was formed, as style -should be, by the study of many models, not of one; and it has many -virtues, including in good measure one of the highest, rarest, and most -elusive, the quality of pleasurableness, or charm,--a quality not to be -acquired by labor, nor to be exactly defined; a something added to a -thing already complete, like the bloom on the grape or the perfume of -the rose. - -If the style has failings, also; if one feels now and then, in the -more closely wrought of the essays especially, a certain excess of -precision, a seeming hardness of outline, a lack, shall we say, of -flexibility; if, after a time, one experiences a sensation as of -walking in too continuously strong a light, with the sun, as it were, -standing still at high noon; if one misses those momentary glimpses -of invisible truth, those hints and adumbrations of things beyond the -writer’s and the reader’s ken (a feeling as if twilight were coming on, -and shadows were falling across the page), those touches of distance -and mystery which make the peculiar attractiveness of another order of -writing; if this, and perhaps more than this (an occasional want of -absolute success in the use of the file; a failure, that is to say, -to leave the phrase looking only the more unstudied for the labor -bestowed upon it),--if things like these are felt at times by the -sensitive reader, what does it all signify but that, in the perception -and expression of truth, as in the making of moral character, one -excellence of necessity excludes or dwarfs another, and perfection -is still to seek? As the French martyr said (“a dread confession,” -Stevenson called it, in one of his moods), “Prose is never done.” - -The estimate which the author himself placed upon his style (though -this is a point of little consequence) seems not to have been exalted. -He had his gift, he knew, and had done his best to improve it; but -other men had greater ones. He was an enthusiastic reader, and while -still fresh from the enjoyment of “A Window in Thrums,” he wrote to Mr. -Barrie: “There are two of us now [two Scotchmen] that the Shirra might -have patted on the head. And please do not think, when I seem thus to -bracket myself with you, that I am wholly blinded with vanity. Jess is -beyond my frontier line; I could not touch her skirt; I have no such -glamour of twilight on my pen. I am a capable artist; but it begins to -look to me as if you were a man of genius. Take care of yourself for my -sake.” - -A handsome thing for a man to write, and a pleasant thing for his -lovers to remember, but, as we say, not to be interpreted too -strictly, as if it settled anything. The more considerable a man’s -gifts, the more likely he is to speak disparagingly of them. To take -his own word for it, Stevenson was a poor letter-writer, “essentially -and originally incapable.” So he assures one of his correspondents; -and then, the mood coming on him, he proceeds to cover page after -page with the very scintillations of epistolary genius,--compliment, -gossip, humor, brilliant description, verbal felicities, sweetness of -personal feeling, everything, in short, that goes to the making of a -perfect letter. No doubt he smiled at the incongruity of the thing as -he folded the sheet (for no doubt he knew he had done well), but what -shall we conclude as to the value of an honest author’s depreciatory -judgment of his own work? If it is not a proverb, it ought to be, that -self-dispraise goes little ways. - -The welcome of Stevenson to his younger Scotch contemporary was -characteristic of the man. In all his letters there is not a glimmer of -professional jealousy nor a word of belittling criticism. With all his -boyishness,--partly because of it, it might be truer to say,--he had a -manly heart. Generosity and courage were matters of course with him, -native to the blood. In his novels there is plenty--some would say a -superfluity--of battle, murder, and sudden death; Cut and Thrust were -two of his favorite heroes; he loved the breath of danger, and when, -for the first and last time, he saw armed men taking the field, “the -old aboriginal awoke” in him, and he sniffed the air like a war horse; -he could be stern as the Judgment Day itself against injustice and -cruelty; in such a cause he would break a lance, though all the world -should call him, what he was once overheard to call himself, another -Don Quixote; but withal, few men were ever more tender-hearted. At -twenty-one, as he told the story more than twenty years afterward, he -enjoyed a great day of fishing; the trout so many and so hungry that in -his eagerness he forgot to kill them one by one as he took them from -the water. In the small hours of the night his conscience smote him; -he saw the fishes “still kicking in their agony;” and he never fished -again. Whoever was in distress was sure not only of his sympathy, but -of his hand and purse. He would walk the streets of a city half the -night with a lost child in his arms, invalid though he was; and when -he comes to clear the land of his new South Sea domain, he wonders -whether any one else ever felt toward Nature just as he does. He pities -the vines and grasses that he uproots: “their struggles go to my heart -like supplications.” Since his death, says his biographer, the native -chiefs--“gentle barbarians,” truly--have forbidden the use of firearms -on the hillside where he is buried, “that the birds may live there -undisturbed.” - -Stevenson believed in the supremacy of the soul. He would not be put -down by things material. Many years he lived face to face with death, -and to the last his testimony was that he found his life good. To a -critic who thought him too little appreciative of the darker side -of human existence he wrote: “If you have had trials, sickness, the -approach of death, the alienation of friends, poverty at the heels, -and have not felt your soul turn round upon these things and spurn them -under, you must be very differently made from me, and, I earnestly -believe, from the majority of men.” Such was his brave confession; and -his life, from all we see of it, was in full accordance with his faith. -It might be said of him what Lowell said of Chaucer: he was “so truly -pious that he could be happy in the best world that God chose to make.” - -Toward the last, it is true, he fell into a state of depression, and -for a time was alarmingly unlike his old self. His power of work seemed -to be gone, and the “complicated miseries” that surrounded him weighed -hard upon his spirits. Even then, however, he protested his belief in -“an ultimate decency of things; ay, and if I woke in hell, should still -believe it.” This was his natural religion, which the early loss of his -ancestral creed--that “damnatory creed” with which his childhood was -“pestered almost to madness”--had only deepened and irradiated. And the -dark and sterile mood was no more than a mood, after all. Soon he was -writing again, more successfully than ever. And then, with everything -bright before him, his powers working at their easiest and best, his -prayer for “courage, gayety, and the quiet mind” fully answered, all at -once the end came. The brief candle, that so often had flickered and -burned low, was suddenly blown out. He had gone round more islands than -his lighthouse-building grandfather, as it amused him once to boast, -and now, like his grandfather, he had reached “the end of all his -cruising.” - - “Home is the sailor, home from sea, - And the hunter home from the hill.” - -Over his grave, almost before his body could be lowered into it, -there rose the inevitable buzz of critical surmise and questioning. -Human nature is impatient. It believes in ranks and orders, and must -have the labels on at once. Were Stevenson’s books really great, it -desired to know,--as great as those of such and such another man? Or -were his admirers--whose regrets and acclamations, it must be owned, -made at that minute a pretty busy chorus--setting him on too lofty a -pedestal and stirring about him too dense a “dust of praise”? A few -disinterested souls seemed surely to believe it, and were in great -perturbation accordingly. To listen to them one might have supposed -that the very foundations were being destroyed. And then what should -the righteous do? - -They need not have troubled themselves. The world will last a long -time yet, and our little breath of praise or blame will speedily blow -itself out and be forgotten. As was said of Hazlitt, so it must be said -of Stevenson: Time will tell. Not that it will of necessity tell the -truth; since what we dignify as the verdict of Time is, after all, in a -certain way of looking at it, nothing but the opinion of the majority; -but at least it will have the force of a last word,--there will be -nobody to dispute it. - -Meanwhile, there is no reason in the nature of things why those who -admire Stevenson, or any other contemporary, should be frightened out -of saying so. Our judgment may be wrong, of course; but also it may -be right; and right or wrong, if it be modestly held, there can be no -law against its utterance. And if we are to speak at all, we must speak -while we can,--unless, to be sure, we are to call no man happy till -after _we_ are dead. - - - - -A RELISH OF KEATS - - - - -A RELISH OF KEATS - - -In all the writing of genius, which is a power that possesses its -so-called possessor rather than is possessed by him, there is much that -seems like accident. Many things--all the best ones, it might not be -too much to say--are contributed by the pen rather than by the man. -The man had never thought of them; it was no more within his intention -to write them than to write another “Hamlet;” and suddenly there they -are before him on the paper. The handwriting is his, but as to where -the words came from, he can tell hardly more than his most illiterate -neighbor. From No-Man’s-Land, if you please to say so. - -Keats was proudly conscious of this mystery. There is nothing, -indeed, upon which he, or any poet, could half so reasonably -felicitate himself. His divinest verses, he knew it and owned it, -were traced for him by “the magic hand of chance.” A great thing, -a power almost omnipotent, is this that we call by that convenient, -ignorance-disguising name. It made not only Keats’s verses, but -Keats himself. Otherwise how explain him?--son of a stable-keeper, a -play-loving, belligerent, unstudious boy, a surgeon’s apprentice at -fifteen, dead at twenty-six, and before that--and henceforth--one of -the chief glories of England, a poet, “with Shakespeare.” - -He himself suspected nothing of his gift, so far as appears, till -he was eighteen. Then he read the “Fairy Queen,” fell under its -enchantment, and immediately, or very soon, minding an inward call, -began trying his own hand at verses. At first they were no more than -verses, “neither precocious nor particularly promising,” says Mr. -Colvin; things that a man takes a certain pleasure in doing,-- - - “There is a pleasure in poetic pains - Which only poets know,”-- - -and finds, it may be, a certain kind of profit in doing, but sees to be -of no value as soon as they are done. - -At twenty the vein began to show the gold. He assayed the shining -particles, for by this time he had been reading Shakespeare and -Milton, and knew a line of poetry when he saw it,[8] and, like the -man in the parable, he did not hesitate. He knew what he wanted. He -would sell all that he had and buy that field. “I begin,” he said, in -one of the earliest of his extant letters,--“I begin to fix my eye -upon one horizon.” He would be a poet, because he must. He would not -be a surgeon, because he must not. He had done well in his studies, -we are told, and was in good repute at the hospital, whither by this -time he had gone; but a voice was speaking within him, and there was -never an hour but he heard it. “The other day, during the lecture,” he -said, “there came a sunbeam into the room, and with it a whole troop -of creatures floating in the ray; and I was off with them to Oberon -and fairy-land.” “My last operation,” he tells another correspondent, -“was the opening of a man’s temporal artery. I did it with the utmost -nicety, but reflecting on what passed through my mind at the time, my -dexterity seemed a miracle, and I never took up the lancet again.” - -It was a bold stroke,--no prudent adviser would have borne him out in -it,--to forsake everything else to be a poet. But never was a luckier -one. He had but four or five years to live, and (a comfort indeed to -think of!) he did not waste them in making ready to earn a living he -was never to have. It was a plain case of losing one’s life to find it. - -Only four or five years, but with what a zest he lived them! Misgivings -no doubt he had, enough and to spare. Now and then, to use his own -words, he was pretty well “down in the mouth.” “I have been in such a -state of mind,” he writes to Haydon, “as to read over my lines and hate -them. I am one that ‘gathers samphire, dreadful trade’--the Cliff of -Poesy towers above me.” He knew also the canker of pecuniary difficulty -(“like a nettle leaf or two in your bed,” his own expression is); and -then, when he was but beginning his work, there fell on him the stroke -of a mortal disease, recognized as such from almost the first moment. -But in spite of all, and through it all, what a fire he kept burning! -How gloriously happy he often was! He hungered and thirsted after -beauty, and he had the blessedness that rewards such a craving. For -blessedness (and that is the best of it) consists perfectly with a low -estate and all manner of outward misfortune. It can do without gold, -and even without health. As for resting in comforts and toys, easiness -and fine clothes, a great aim, if it does nothing else for a man, will -at least save him from that pitch of vulgarity. A great aim is of -itself a great part of the true riches. As Keats said, having found it -out early, “our prime objects are a refuge as well as a passion.” - -Such delight as the right men must always take in some of his -letters!--especially, perhaps, some of the earlier ones, written in the -period of his first fervors as a reader. He had never been a bookish -boy (and no very serious harm done, it may be--for himself, at any -rate, he was no believer in precocity), and now, when he fell all at -once upon the great poets, it was as if he had been born again. What a -relish he has! How he smacks his lips over a line of Shakespeare,--who -“has left nothing to say about nothing or anything.” Here was a poet -who read the works of poets. Possibly if he had lived to be old, -he might have changed his practice in this regard, finding his own -works sufficient, as other elderly poets have before now been charged -with doing. As it is, his raptures make one think again and again of -Hazlitt’s outburst, “The greatest pleasure in life is that of reading, -while we are young;” which, if it does not hit the white, is at least -well within the outer circle.[9] - -His method was unblushingly epicurean. Like a bee in a field of -flowers, he was always stopping to suck the sweetness of a line. -For that very purpose he was there. The happy boy! He had found out -what books were made for. For a second time, nay, rather, for the -first time, he had learned to read. A great discovery!--old as the -hills and new as the morning. But new or old, a great discovery. -For an intellectual youth there is none to match it, as there is no -schoolmaster to teach it. And with what a gusto he describes the -process! You would think he had found Aladdin’s lamp. His fancy cannot -see it from sides enough; as a child dances about a new toy, and can -never be done with looking. - -“I had an idea,” he says, “that a man might pass a very pleasant life -in this manner. Let him on a certain day read a certain page of full -poesy or distilled prose, and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, -and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and -dream upon it: until it becomes stale. But when will it do so? Never. -When man has arrived at a certain ripeness in intellect, any one grand -and spiritual passage serves him as a starting-post towards all ‘the -two-and-thirty palaces.’ How happy is such a voyage of conception, what -delicious diligent indolence! A doze upon a sofa does not hinder it, -and a nap upon clover engenders ethereal finger-pointings; the prattle -of a child gives it wings, and the converse of middle-age a strength to -beat them; a strain of music conducts to ‘an odd angle of the Isle,’ -and when the leaves whisper, it puts a girdle round the earth.” - -This he calls a “sparing touch of noble books.” It is too much to -be expected, of course, that readers in general, whose idea of -intellectual delights is of a new novel every other day, should be -contented with a method so parsimonious. If this is what you call -epicureanism, they might say, pray count us among the Stoics. And for -all that, as applied to Keats’s own practice, “epicurean” was the right -word. - -What he would have been at forty or fifty, there is no telling. For -the present he was not much concerned with whole poems as works of -great constructive art. He was of an age to be (what Edward FitzGerald -is said to have always been) “more of a connoisseur than a critic, -a taster of fragrant essences, an inhaler of subtle aromas.” He -loved beauty as at that stage he mostly found it (as the bee finds -sweetness), in the individual flower, thinking far more of that than of -the plant’s symmetrical structure, or the composition of the landscape. -In this particular he resembled Lamb, who, if he called himself “an -author by fits,” was no less truly a reader by fits. “I can vehemently -applaud,” he said with characteristic, half-true self-depreciation, “or -perversely stickle, at _parts_; but I cannot grasp at a whole.” - -It was an admission of defect--he meant it so; but it is no slander -to say that lovers of poetry are in general of substantially the same -mind. Their taste is selective. They love short poems, or the beauties -of long ones. Many of them have confessed as much, and many others -could do no less were they called into the box. Lowell, whose standing -as a critic nobody questions, though some may be bold enough, or -“perverse” enough, now the man is dead, to rule him out of the class -of poets, bids us remember how few long poems will bear consecutive -reading. “For my part,” he says, “I know of but one,--the ‘Odyssey.’” -And Samuel Johnson, who, great critic or not, had “a good deal of -literature,” told Boswell, “that from his earliest years he loved to -read poetry, but hardly ever read any poem to an end.” - -The boy Keats, then, was not so utterly out of the way, at all events -he was not without the support of good company, in taking for his own -the motto of Ariel,-- - - “Where the bee sucks, there suck I.” - -And a good time he had of it; reading and idling, reading and writing, -not too much in a hurry, no busier than a bee, following his bent, -finding Shakespeare and the “Paradise Lost” every day greater wonders -to him; looking upon fine phrases like a lover; more and more convinced -that “fine writing, next to fine doing, is the top thing in the world.” - -“Next to fine doing,” he said,--and meant it; for his life and his -own doings chimed with the word. Nor does the word, even as a verbal -confession of faith, stand alone. On the testimony of his friends, -and on the testimony of his letters, Keats was no selfish weakling, -no puny luxuriator in his own emotions, no mere hectic taster and -maker of phrases. He worshiped beauty; he was born a poet, and rightly -enough he followed his genius; but he was born also affectionate and -generous; in his nature there was much of that glorious something which -we call chivalry; and he knew as well as all the preachers could tell -him that in any true assize high conduct must always bear away the -palm. No more than the apostle of old had he any “poor vanity that -works of genius were the first things. No! for that sort of probity and -disinterestedness which such men as Bailey possess does hold and grasp -the tiptop of any spiritual honors that can be paid to anything in this -world.” Truly said, of this world or any other; for many things may be -great, but the greatest of all is charity. - -It might almost have been expected that genius so sudden in its -flowering, so amazingly exceptional, as Keats’s, one of the wonders -of human history, would be attended by some strain of disease, some -taint, more or less pronounced, of mental or moral unsoundness. It is -the more to be rejoiced in, therefore, that his nature, mental, moral, -and physical (except for the tuberculosis which he doubtless contracted -from his mother, over whom, in her last illness, he, a boy of fifteen, -watched with all a son’s and daughter’s faithfulness), was to all -appearance eminently sane and normal. As a boy, undersized though he -was, he would always be fighting (which is normal, surely), and as a -man he showed habitually, with one distressing exception, a manly, -self-respecting spirit. - -The single exception has to do with his passion for Fanny Brawne, -concerning which it may be enough to say that when a man is head over -ears in love with a pretty girl, or a girl whom he thinks pretty, -and is by her, or by some perversity of Fate, put off, he is _never_ -sane. The letters that Keats wrote to his inamorata may have been, as -his friendly critic says, “the letters of a surgeon’s apprentice.” -For ourselves we will take the critic’s word for it. We have never -read them (in our opinion it was indecent or worse to print them), -nor should we feel sure of our ability to tell in what respect the -love letters of a young doctor might be expected to differ from those -of a young schoolmaster or a young duke of the realm. To be crazy -is to be crazy. Enough to say that they were not the letters of the -poet Keats. Alas, alas! What a tragedy is human life! What a weak and -silly thing is the human heart! A man sees a girl’s face, and behold, -he is no longer a reasonable being; his peace of mind is gone, his -work hindered, his day shortened, his fame tarnished, his name a -laughing-stock. It is that which hath been, and it is that which shall -be. As was said of old, so one may feel like saying still, “A man hath -no preëminence above a beast; for all is vanity.” - -And for all that, considering Keats’s genius, its early development and -its miraculous quality, and comparing him with men of his own kind, -we must account him on the whole a man surprisingly well-balanced -and sane. Call the roll of his famous poetic contemporaries, and few -of them will be found saner. Good Archdeacon Bailey, who had abundant -opportunity to know, said that common sense was “a conspicuous part of -his character.” Of how many of the others would it ever have occurred -to any one to say the like? - -He seems not to have been either crotchety or boastful, though he -believed in aiming high, and made no scruple of professing, in so many -words, that he “would rather fail than not be among the greatest.” -Born fighter that he was, born, too, of the _genus irritabile vatum_ -(“when I have any little vexation,” he once wrote, with Lamb-like -exaggeration, “it grows in five minutes into a theme for Sophocles”), -he loved peace, and in the Biblical phrase pursued it, for which Mr. -Arnold, it is pleasant to see, awards him full credit; but he was not -to be trodden upon, he held the popular judgment of poetry in something -like contempt (as all poets do, it is to be presumed), and he would -not be crowded too hard even by the chiefest of his brethren. The -most thoroughgoing Wordsworthian must read with amusement, if not with -temptations to applause, the few clever sentences in which the youthful -aspirant for poetic honors, in one of his letters, hits off some of -that great man’s foibles. He has no thought of denying Wordsworth’s -grandeur, he declares; but not for the sake of a few fine imaginative -or domestic passages will he “be bullied into a certain philosophy -engendered in the whims of an egoist.” “Every man,” he goes on, “has -his speculations, but every man does not brood and peacock over them -till he makes a false coinage and deceives himself.... We hate poetry -that has a palpable design upon us, and, if we do not agree, seems -to put its hand into its breeches pocket. Poetry should be great and -unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle -it or amaze it with itself--but with its subject. How beautiful are the -retired flowers!--how would they lose their beauty were they to throng -into the highway, crying out, ‘Admire me, I am a violet! Dote upon me, -I am a primrose!’” - -To another correspondent he expresses a fear that Wordsworth has gone -away from town “rather huffed” about something or other, the nature of -which does not precisely appear; but adds that he ought not to expect -but that every man of worth should be “as proud as himself;” a remark -concerning which we are bound to acknowledge, loyal Wordsworthians as -within reason we esteem ourselves, that we rather like the sound of it. - -An artist cannot well be without some of the defects--or what more -steady-going, lower-flying people are wont to account the defects--that -go naturally, if not of necessity, with the artistic temperament. -For one thing, he must work more or less by fits and starts. Poems -are not to be made--unless it be by a Southey--as a shoemaker makes -shoes, so many strokes to the minute. It is a wonder how much Keats -accomplished in his few years, and this even if we take no reckoning -of his experiments and failures; but there were times, of course, when -he could do nothing, and then, equally of course, he could invent the -prettiest kind of excuses for himself, excuses that were themselves -hardly less than works of genius. At such a minute he would say, for -instance, “Neither Poetry, nor Ambition, nor Love have any alertness -of countenance as they pass by me; they seem rather like figures on a -Greek vase.” Or, if the beauty of the morning operated upon a sense -of idleness, he would declare it “more noble to sit like Jove than to -fly like Mercury.” “Let us open our leaves like a flower,” he would -say, “and be passive and receptive; budding patiently under the eye -of Apollo and taking hints from every noble insect that favors us -with a visit.... I have not read any books--the Morning said I was -right--I had no idea but of the Morning, and the Thrush said I was -right--seeming to say,-- - - “‘O fret not after knowledge--I have none, - And yet my song comes native with the warmth, - O fret not after knowledge--I have none, - And yet the Evening listens.’” - -Not that he was ever foolish enough to despise knowledge, or trust -overmuch to impulses “from a vernal wood,” as if a poet could subsist -on inspiration. A few weeks after the date of the letter just quoted, -a letter which he himself qualified before he was done as “a mere -sophistication,” we find him renouncing a proposed pleasure trip. There -is but one thing to prevent his going, he tells his correspondent. “I -know nothing,” he says, “I have read nothing, and I mean to follow -Solomon’s directions, ‘Get learning, get understanding.’ I find earlier -days are gone by--I find that I can have no enjoyment in the world but -continual drinking of knowledge.... There is but one way for me. The -road lies through application, study, and thought. I will pursue it.” - -But as we counted it fortunate that he had already had the courage -to forsake everything else for the pursuit of poetry, so we must be -thankful that now, feeling his educational deficiencies, he did not do -what nine professors out of ten, had he had the ill-fortune to consult -them, would--very properly, no doubt--have advised him to do; that is -to say, cease production for the time being and devote himself to -study. That would have been a loss irreparable. His sun was so soon to -go down! A mercy it was that he made hay while it shone. - -For much of the hay that he made was as good as the sun ever shone on. -That it was a short season’s crop may pass unsaid. It is not within -the possibilities of human nature, however miraculously endowed, to -be mature at twenty-five. Enough, surely, if at that age a man has -done a good bit of work of the rarest, divinest quality, work that, -within its range and scope, the greatest and ripest genius could never -dream of bettering. That is Keats’s glory. So much as that one need -not be either a poet or a critic to affirm; the critics and poets have -agreed to affirm it for us. If Tennyson said, as reported, that “Keats, -with his high spiritual vision, would have been, if he had lived, the -greatest of us all; there is something magical and of the innermost -soul of poetry in almost everything which he wrote;” and if Arnold put -him, in two words, “with Shakespeare,” why, then, for the present, at -least, the case is judged, and we who are neither poets nor critics, -but only tasters and relishers, can have no call to argue it. - -So much being admitted, however, it is not to be assumed that here is -an end of things. One may still like to talk a little. Hearing him -praised, one may still say,-- - - “‘’Tis so, ’tis true,’ - And to the most of praise add something more.” - -Life would be a dull affair for the smaller men if comment and side -remark were forever debarred as soon as the bigwigs had settled the -main contention. - -Leaving on one side, then, the odes and other pieces which by -universal consent are perfect, or as nearly so as consists with human -frailty,[10] let us content ourselves with intimating the profit which -readers of a proper youthfulness and other needful, not over-critical, -qualifications may derive from some of the other and longer poems, -which by the same common consent, as well as by the acknowledgment of -the man who wrote them, are in every sense imperfect. - -Indeed, there are few things in Keats’s letters more interesting in -themselves, or more characteristic of their author, than his apologies -for these same longer pieces, especially for “Endymion.” - -“Why endeavor after a long poem?” he has heard some one ask. And this -is his answer:-- - -“Do not the lovers of poetry like to have a little region to wander in, -where they may pick and choose, and in which the images are so numerous -that many are forgotten and found new in a second reading; which may be -food for a week’s stroll in the summer? Do not they like this better -than what they can read through before Mrs. Williams comes downstairs? -a morning work at most.” - -Evidently his “lovers of poetry” are of the tribe of those whose -practice we have heard him describing as “a sparing touch of noble -books;” lovers rather than critics or students; browsers and -ruminators; not determined upon devouring whole forests, or even entire -trees, but content with getting here and there the goodness of a leaf -or the sweetness of a blossom. He foresees that “Endymion” is doomed -to be in one way a failure; he knows that his mind at present, in its -nonage, is “like a pack of scattered cards.” The words are his own. -Yet he confides that there will be poetry in his long poem, and that -the right spirits will find it. And so they do. He has touched their -disposition to a nicety. They love to “wander in it.” They may never -have tried very hard to follow the story; they may not care to read -any special student’s supposed discoveries as to just how this part of -the action is related to that or the other. But they like the poetry. -They never read the poem, or read _in_ it, without finding some. They -do not wish it shorter, nor are they conscious of any very sharp regret -that it is not better. Wisely or unwisely, they accept it as it is, and -are thankful that the young man wrote it, and, having written it, took -nobody’s advice against printing it. If they read _in_ it, as we say, -why, that is mostly what they do with the “Fairy Queen” and “Paradise -Lost.” It may be the fault of the poem, or it may be the fault of the -reader; or it may be nobody’s fault. - -In the case of “Endymion,” indeed, it requires no exceptional acumen to -perceive that the work hangs feebly together, that its construction, -its architectonic, if that be the word, is defective past all mending. -“Utterly incoherent,” is Mr. Arnold’s dictum, and for ourselves we have -no inclination to dispute him. Our fault or the poet’s, we have always -found it so. But like Mr. Arnold, we feel the breath of genius blowing -through it, and therefore, as we say, we find in it not infrequently an -hour of good reading. - -Such reading, it has sometimes seemed to us (and the poet’s apology, -now we think of it, comes to much the same thing), is like walking in -a forest, where we cannot see the wood for the trees. All about us -they stand, dwindling away and away as we look, till, whichever way -we turn, there is no looking farther. Above our heads is a canopy of -interlacing branches,-- - - “overwove - By many a summer’s silent fingering,”-- - -through which, densely as it is woven, steals here and there a sunbeam -to play upon the carpet underneath. In such a place we know little and -care less whither we may be going. Standing still is a good progress. -Not a step but something offers itself,--a flower, a bed of moss, a -trailing, berry-covered vine, a tuft of ferns. A brook talks to us, -a bird sings to us, a vista invites us, a leafy spray, as we brush -against it, whispers of beauty and the summer. These, and trifles like -these, are what we could specify. All of them together do not make the -forest, yet the least of them is not only part of the forest, but is -what it is because of the forest. The soul of the forest speaks through -it. How incomparably significant becomes of a sudden every common -sound. If two branches but rub together, we must stop and listen. If -a thrush whistles, we could stand forever to hear it. Not a sight or -sound of them all would mean the same, or anything like the same, if -it were encountered in the open and by itself. It is the old lesson. -The sparrow’s note must come from the alder bough, the shell must be -seen on the beach with the tide rippling over it. - -And the magical verse, if it is to exercise its full charm, must be -found, not in a book of extracts, nor as a fragment, but at home in its -native surroundings. It must have been born in the poem, and we must -discover it there! The poem which has made the verse must also have put -us into the mood to receive it. How often have all readers found this -true by its opposite. How often a line quoted is a line from which the -glory seems to have departed, a line _dépaysé!_--as the tree, the bird, -the leaf, if we see them in the open country and in the mood of the -open country, can never be the same as if we saw them in the forest and -in the mood which the forest induces. - -We think, then, that the poet’s plea is sound; that his long poem, -whatever its shortcomings, is abundantly justified as a good place -to wander about in; that there is poetry (one of the rare things of -the world) in it which never would have been produced elsewhere, and -which, now that it has been produced, can only be appreciated when -read, as scientific men say, _in situ_. To transfer its beauties to a -commonplace book would be like putting roses into a herbarium, or, more -justly, perhaps, like setting a seashell on a parlor mantel. - -In the long poem, too, as in the forest, though we were near forgetting -to speak of it, there is always the chance of finding something -unexpected; a line, an epithet, an image, that seems to have come into -being since we were last here. Every perusal is thus a kind of voyage -of discovery. It is as if the season had changed. New flowers have -blossomed, new birds have come from the South, and the wood is a new -place. - -In all the work of genius, as we began by saying, there is no small -part that seems to come from almost anywhere rather than from the mind -and intention of the writer. And the more genius, we must believe, the -more of this appearance of what is known (or unknown) as inspiration. -Yet, in the case of Keats, a man of genius all compact, one has only -to read his letters to see (and glad we must be to see it) that, for -all his youthfulness and comparatively slight acquaintance with books, -he was pretty well aware of himself, having withal a kind of philosophy -of life and many shrewd ideas concerning the poetic art. His gift was -no external, detachable thing, an influence of which he could give -no account, and over which he had no control, like, shall we say, -the inscrutable, uncanny, unrelated mathematical faculty of a Zerah -Colburn, a thing by itself, significant of no general capacity on the -part of its possessor. The man _himself_ was a genius. - -And being such, he was safest when he followed his own leadings. When -he humbled himself to write what he hoped men would pay for, as, under -pressure of his brother’s and sister’s need, he persuaded himself -he might do (“the very corn which is now so beautiful, as if it had -only took to ripening yesterday, is for the market; so, why should -I be delicate?”), he was mostly wasting his time. “I have great -hope of success,” he writes, “because I make use of my judgment more -deliberately than I have yet done.” It was a vain dependence. “Live -and learn,” says the proverb. And, prose men or poets, the brightest -must mind the lesson. But Keats, alas! could not live. He was “born for -death,” and was already marked. His work, the best of it, was already -finished. Racked and broken, devoured by the very madness of passion -and wasting away with incurable disease, his tale henceforth is pure -tragedy. If his passion was a weakness,--and no doubt it was,--to -colder-blooded men a state of mind incredible, and to Pharisees and -fools a thing to mock at,--so let us call it, and there be done. It was -past cure, so much is certain. Here and there in his letters there are -still gleams of brightness, sad touches of pleasantry. To his sister, -about whose health he is continually in a fever, lest she should be -going as his mother and his brother Tom have gone (and he himself far -on the road), he is always a little improved, always making the most -of the doctor’s words of encouragement; but between times, to some -other correspondent, he shows for a moment the plague that is consuming -his life. It is heart-breaking to hear him. “If I had any chance of -recovery, this passion would kill me.” He cannot name the one of whom -he is night and day thinking. “I am afraid to write to her--to receive -a letter from her--to see her handwriting would break my heart.” Even -to see her name written would be more than he could bear. “Oh, Brown, I -have coals of fire in my breast. It surprises me that the human heart -is capable of containing and bearing so much misery.” - -And strange it is how cruel a price a man can be made to pay for what, -at the worst, is only a piece of natural foolishness. - - “Well and wisely said the Greek, - Be thou faithful, but not fond; - To the altar’s foot thy fellow seek, - The Furies wait beyond.” - -Never man found this truer than Keats. - -There is but one letter more,--dated a month later, and addressed to -the same friend. This time the dying man knows that he is taking -leave, though he still quotes a doctor’s soothing diagnosis. He is -bringing his philosophy to bear, he says; if he recovers, he will do -thus and so; but if not, all his faults will be forgiven. And then: -“Write to George [his brother] as soon as you receive this, and tell -him how I am, as far as you can guess; and also a note to my sister, -who walks about my imagination like a ghost, she is so like Tom. I can -scarcely bid you good-bye, even in a letter. I always made an awkward -bow. God bless you!” - -How wasteful is Nature! Once or twice in an age, one man out of -millions, she brings forth a poet; and then, while his powers are still -budding, she sends on them a sudden blight, and anon cuts him down. -Wasteful, we say. But who can tell? Perhaps she also, like the rest of -us, is doing what she can, and, like the rest of us, is disappointed -when she fails. - - - - -ANATOLE FRANCE - - - - -ANATOLE FRANCE - - -M. Anatole France is a writer who is continually saying something. His -thought is always breaking into bloom. He is not one of those who, on -the ground of weightiness of matter, or other supposed excellence, -have taken out a license to be dull. All his pages have light in them. -His readers not only know in which direction they are going,--a great -comfort, not always vouchsafed to such travelers,--but are made to -enjoy the journey, having a thousand sights to look at by the way. It -is an author’s business, he considers, to make his truth beautiful; and -nothing is beautiful but what is easy. An artist who knows his trade -will “not so much exact attention as surprise it.” - -It sounds like a good creed; and the style of his writing answers -to it. Its qualities are the classical French qualities,--neatness, -precision, ease, moderation, lightness of touch, lucidity. In sum, -it is such a style as comes of good breeding. He is clever without -being smart, and pointed without emphasis. As for that dreadful -something which goes by the name of rhetoric, you may search his -twenty-odd volumes through without finding trace of it. His method is -old-fashioned, his masters are the old masters. Brilliancy, surprise, -felicities, originalities,--yes, indeed, he has all these and more, -but he knows how to wear them. They are all natural to him. “Elegant, -facile, rapid,” he says; “there you have the perfect politeness of a -writer.” Obscurity, difficulty, is to his way of thinking but a kind of -bad manners. - -He was born to enjoy beautiful things, one would say; elected before -the cradle to a life of scholastic quietness and leisure: a dilettante -and a saunterer, loving old streets, old shops, old books, the old -literatures, fond of out-of-the-way and useless learning, the very type -and pattern of an aimless reader and dreamer. And so, to take his word -for it, he appears to have begun. Those were his best days. Then he was -most himself. So, in certain moods, at least, it seems to him now. Of -that time he is thinking when he says, “I lived happy years without -writing. I led a contemplative and solitary life, the memory of which -is still infinitely sweet to me. Then, as I studied nothing, I learned -much. In fact, it is in strolling that one makes beautiful intellectual -and moral discoveries.” - -The old book-stalls on the Paris quays,--one wonders how many scores -of times he has an affectionate word to say for them in his various -books. Even in one of the earlier essays of “La Vie Littéraire” he -apologizes for what is already becoming a frequent reference. “Let -me tell you,” he breaks out, “that I can never pass over these quays -without experiencing a trouble full of joy and sadness, because I was -born here, because I spent my childhood here, and because the familiar -faces that I saw here formerly are now forever vanished. I say this in -spite of myself, from a habit of saying simply what I think, about that -of which I think. One is never quite sincere without being a little -wearisome. But I have a hope that, if I speak of myself, those who -listen to me will think only of themselves; so that I shall please -them while pleasing myself. I was brought up on this quay in the midst -of books, by humble and simple people, of whose memory I am the only -guardian. When I am gone they will be as if they had never been. My -soul is all full of their relics.” - -He runs a risk of being wearisome, he says. But that is merely a -grace-note of French politeness, to be taken as it is meant, and -answered after its kind. Indeed, he knows better. It was he who -said of Renan that his most charming book was his little volume of -youthful reminiscence, because he had put most of himself into it. -And of M. Anatole France it is equally true that although he has an -abundance of ideas, and loves not only his own past but the past of the -world,--especially of all mystics, heretics, skeptics, enthusiasts, and -saints,--yet he never comes quite so close to his reader as when his -talk grows most intimate. It is what we who read are always after, the -man behind the pen. If he will really tell us about himself, about -his inner, true self, which we blindly feel must be somehow very like -another self, more interesting still, with which we seldom succeed in -coming face to face, although, according to the accepted theory of -things, it is, or ought to be, our nearest neighbor,--if he will really -tell us something, little matter what, that is actually true about -himself, we will sit up till morning to listen to him. It seems an easy -way to be interesting, does it not? And so indeed it is, for the right -man; for the really fine things are always easy,--if one can do them at -all. - -There intrudes the doubt; for if success in personal reminiscence is -easy, failure is ten times easier. Of course a man must have taste, -an innate or well-bred sense of the fitness of things; and so a brook -must have banks, to save it from degeneration and loss. But what if -the stream itself be muddy, if it have no movement, no sparkle, no -variety, if it do not by turns ripple over sunny shallows, loiter in -comfortable eddies, and deepen and darken in dream-inviting pools? Or -what if the banks be straight-cut and formal, till what should have -been a brook is little better than a ditch? What if taste has become -propriety, and propriety has hardened into primness, and the writing -or the talk is without the breath of life? Yes, success is easy, and -it is also impossible. As the art of man never made a mountain brook, -so instruction never by itself made a writer. The rain must fall from -heaven, and readability (and _hearability_ likewise, since writing and -talking are but two forms of the one thing) must come from the same -source, or, as Emerson said, by nature. - -If a man is to disclose himself, he must first have known something -about himself, a pitch of intelligence by no means to be taken for -granted; he must be one of the relatively few who are affectionately -cognizant of their own feelings, who delight in their own view of -things, who have felt, loved, suffered, and enjoyed, to whom life and -the world have been inwardly real and interesting, for whom their own -past especially is like a fair landscape, here in full sunshine, there -flecked with shadows, but all a picture of loveliness and a thing to -dream over. - -In reminiscence, as in painting, the subject must be somewhat removed, -loss of detail yielding a gain in beauty, since, in the one case, as -in the other, what we seek is not an inventory, but a picture. This, -or something like this, is what Renan had in mind when in beginning -his “Souvenirs” he remarked that what a man says of himself is always -poetry. For his own part, he declares, he has no thought of furnishing -matter for _post-mortem_ biographical sketches. He is going to tell the -truth (mostly), but not the kind of truth of which biography is made. -Biography and personal reminiscence are two things, and can never be -written in the same tone. Many things, he tells us, have been put into -his book on purpose to provoke a smile. If custom had permitted, he -would more than once have written on the margin of the page: _cum grano -salis_. - -One thinks of Charles Lamb, though in general the two men had -wonderfully little in common. How dearly he loved to talk of -himself, hiding the while behind some modestly transparent veil of -mystification! And how dearly we love to play the innocent game with -him, seeing perfectly what is going on, but, as children do, making -pretense of being deceived. Better than almost any one else he had the -winsome gift of half-serious, tenderly humorous self-disclosure. As -Renan said, it is all poetry, and always with something to smile at. - -All this because of one of M. Anatole France’s many stray bits of -gossipy reminiscence concerning the old quays of Paris and his boyish -adventures among them! Such trifles are characteristic; they connote -other qualities, and of themselves show us one side of the man and the -writer. He loves his own life, especially his real life, the happy -years that lie behind him. The power to see them is to him a matter -of wonderment, a kind of miracle, a true fairy’s gift. If he could -see the future with the same distinctness, the fact would be hardly -more astonishing, and probably it would be much less beneficent. So he -tells himself in one of those rare and precious moods when the soul -seems preternaturally awake, and the commonest every-day objects wear -a look of newness and mystery till we are taken with a kind of inward -shivering as if we had been seeing ghosts. - -For the more connected story of his youthful memories one must turn, of -course, to the two volumes expressly devoted to them, “Le Livre de Mon -Ami” and “Pierre Nozière.” That he should have written _two_ such books -is significant of the hold that his childhood still has upon him. But -the two are none too many. How delicious they are!--full of tenderness -and humor, every sentence true to the pitch, and the writing perfect. -And how many pictures they leave with us! The woman in white and her -lover with the black whiskers. The ragged street urchin, Alphonse, -whom the well-fed, well-dressed house boy envied and pitied by turns, -till one day he (the good boy) pilfered a bunch of grapes from the -sideboard, lowered them out of the window by a string, and called upon -little Alphonse to take them; which the suspicious Alphonse proceeded -to do with a sudden twitch at the cord (such rudeness!), after which, -turning up his face to the window, he thrust out his tongue, put his -thumb to his nose, and ran off with the dainty. “My little friends had -not accustomed me to such fashions,” the good boy confides to us. And -then, to heighten his sense of disappointment (how commonly grown-up -human benevolence is similarly disrewarded!), he bethought himself that -he must tell his mother of his pious theft. She would chide him, he -feared. And like a good mother she did, but with laughter in her eyes. - -“‘We ought to give away our own good things, not those of another,’ she -said; ‘and we must know how to give.’ - -“‘That is the secret of happiness,’ added my father, ‘and few know it.’ - -“He knew it, my father.” - -The books are full of such pictures, seen first by the child, and now -seen again, losing nothing of their color, through the eyes of the man -of forty; full, too, of a boy’s dreams and ambitions. Now he will be a -famous saint (like every boy, he is bound to be famous somehow), and -instantly he sets about it with fastings, an improvised hair shirt, and -even an attempt, ingloriously brought to nought by the strong arms of -the housemaid, to play the rôle of Simeon Stylites in the kitchen. What -with this muscular, unsympathetic maid,--who also tore his hair shirt -from him,--and his father, equally unsympathetic, who pronounced him -“stupid,” the boy had a bad day of it, and by night-fall, as he says, -“recognized that it is very difficult to be a saint while living with -one’s family. I understood why St. Anthony and St. Jerome went into the -desert to dwell among lions and satyrs; and I resolved to retire the -next day to a hermitage.” And so he did, choosing a labyrinth in the -neighboring Jardin des Plantes. - -A few years later, wiser now and more worldly-minded, he is determined -to set up catalogues like his old friend Father Le Beau; and soon (joy -on the top of joy, and audacity almost past confession) he determines -that he will some day print them, and _read the proofs_! Beyond that -he can conceive of no higher felicity (though he has since learned, -through the confidences of a blasé literary acquaintance, that “one -wearies of everything in this world, even of correcting proofs!”). - -Needless to say, he did not become a cataloguer, more than he had -become a saint; but good Father Le Beau, for all that, determined his -boyish admirer’s vocation, inspiring him with “a love for the things of -the mind and with a weakness for writing;” inspiring him, also, with -a passion for the past and with “ingenious curiosities,” and, by the -example of intellectual labor regularly performed without fatigue and -without worry, filling him from childhood with a desire to work and -instruct himself. “It is thanks to him,” he concludes, “that I have -become in my own way a great reader, a zealous annotator of ancient -texts, and a scribbler of memoirs that will never see the light.” - -Good Father Le Beau! How plainly we can see him at his pleasant task, -and the small boy beside him taking his lesson! And if any be ready to -smile at the childish story, as if it were nothing _but_ a childish -story,--well, there is difference in readers. To some, let us hope, the -simple adventures of a boy’s mind, dreaming on things to come, will -seem quite as entertaining, and even quite as instructive and morally -profitable, as some more highly seasoned adventures of a man who covets -his neighbor’s wife, or a woman who covets her neighbor’s husband. - -Of books recounting the pleasures and miseries of illicit passion -modern literature surely suffers no lack; and truth to tell, M. -Anatole France himself (the more’s the pity) has contributed to an -already full stock two or three examples not easily to be outdone in -piquancy of situation or freedom of speech. Concerning these no account -is to be taken here. Enough to say that they are unspeakable,--in -English,--though, not to do them injustice, it should be added that -neither “Le Lys Rouge,” nor even “Histoire Comique,” for all its -misleading, pleasant-sounding title, makes the path to the everlasting -bonfire look in the remotest degree alluring. The old truth, old -as man, that “to be carnally minded is death,” is nowhere more -convincingly set forth than in the modern French novel, whether it be -Balzac’s, Flaubert’s, Maupassant’s, Bourget’s, or Anatole France’s. - -It is unfortunate, we must think, for our author’s reputation and -vogue outside of his own country, that not only the two of his books -just now named, but at least three others, though in a less degree, -are unfitted for full translation into English, or even to be left in -their original tongue upon the open shelves of public libraries or on -the family table. But what then? They were not written _virginibus -puerisque_, their author would say, and even their freest parts treat -of nothing worse than every newspaper is obliged somehow to chronicle, -however it may veil its language, and nothing worse, perhaps, than is -readily allowed in the English classics, especially in the books of the -Bible and the writings of Shakespeare. Wonderful is the effect of time -and distance! We gaze upon nude statues of the old Greeks and Romans -without a shiver, but the representation of an American President bare -only to the waist--as one may see, in all kinds of weather, poor -unhappy-looking George Washington sitting in front of the national -capitol--affects us with a painful sense of discomfort, not to say of -positive indecency. - -M. Anatole France, as has been said, seems by birth and early -predilection to have been devoted to a career of studious leisure. He -would always be contented, one would have thought, to be a looker-on -at the game of life, sitting by the wayside, book in hand, and -watching the world go past; taking it all as a show; never so much as -considering the possibility of entering for any of the prizes that -more ambitious men run for, nor concerned very much as to who should -win or who lose; hardly so much as an observer; a spectator rather, -as he said himself; “in love,” as he said again, “with the eternal -illusion that wraps us round,” but only as an illusion; cultivating -his own garden,--like M. Bergeret, who delighted to cut the leaves of -books, esteeming it wise to make for one’s self pleasures appropriate -to one’s profession; at the most a collector of old books, and a teller -of old tales; a lover of Virgil, a disciple of Epicurus, a friend of -quietness, and a worshiper of the Graces. - -Such we imagine M. Anatole France to have been when he wrote his -earlier volumes, including the one which the majority of readers would -probably name as the most beautiful of them all, “Le Crime de Sylvestre -Bonnard.” The dear old savant tells his own story, talking now to his -cat, now to his friendly despot of a housekeeper, now to good Madame de -Gabry, now, best of all, to himself. The whole story is, as it were, -overheard by the reader, and surely there never was, nor ever will be, -a prettier revelation of an old man’s soul. - -Like Renan, and like M. Anatole France, Sylvestre Bonnard, Member of -the Institute, has a natural sense of humor, and if he does not put -into his narrative things on purpose to make us smile, it is only -because he is in no way thinking of us. He smiles often enough himself, -his own oddities and blunders as an absent-minded scholar--since, -like Cowper’s Mr. Bull, he “has too much genius to have a good -memory”--providing him with abundant occasion; and we smile with him. -We love him for his goodness, and we listen delighted to all his -philosophy. If he is not a saint, he is something better,--or if not -better, more interesting and lovable,--a man so humanly sweet, so -simple-hearted, so pure-minded, so bright in his talk, so admirable in -his kindness, so adorable a confesser of his own foibles, that there is -no resisting him. Dear old celibate!--who had loved a pair of blue eyes -in his youth, and had been true to their memory ever since! Verily, he -had his reward. Never man awaited the sunset with a better grace. - -The man who drew this character was surely at peace with the world -and with himself. Life had so far been to him mostly a fair-weather -stroll in a pleasant country. And the same may be said, with some -grains of qualification, of the man who wrote the weekly articles -that went to the making of the four volumes of “La Vie Littéraire.” -These are not things to last, it may be, like “Le Crime de Sylvestre -Bonnard,” which, if one may be so simple as to prophesy, can hardly -fail to become a classic; but for the present they must afford to many -readers, if not a keener, yet a more various, delight. They are books -of extraordinary interest, in whatever light one may view them. As we -turn them over, remarking here and there the pages that at different -times have especially pleased us, we find ourselves saying again and -again, Oh, that we had such books in English, and on English subjects! -If there were in Great Britain or in the United States a writer who -could, week by week, furnish one of our newspapers with pieces of -literary criticism or bookish causerie of this enchanting quality; -so light, so graceful, so original, so suggestive, so full of happy -surprises, so bright with humor and philosophy, so perfect in form -and temper, and so satisfying in substance! Yes, if there were! How -quickly we would all subscribe for that newspaper! The articles might -deal, as M. Anatole France’s often do, with books that we have never -read and have no thought of reading; it would not greatly matter. If -the subject in hand were nothing but a text-book or an encyclopædia, -a letter from an inquisitive correspondent, or a play of marionettes, -the talk about it would be literature. And real literature, served to -us fresh every Sunday morning! The very thought is an exhilaration. We -are not to be understood as implying that excellent literary criticism -is not more or less often written in English, and on both sides of the -water. The question is not of moderately sound, reasonably instructive, -workmanlike articles, proper enough to be read and forgotten, but of -essays full of charm, full of genius, full of poetry,--essays in which, -to adapt a saying of Thoreau, we do _not_ miss the hue of the mind, -essays that of themselves are in the truest sense little masterpieces -of the literary art. - -He had never thought of doing such things. His old publisher, Calmann -Lévy, “rather friend than publisher,” who had welcomed him in his -obscurity, and smiled at his first humble successes, had for years been -chiding his indolence and dunning him for another book. But he was -in love with his idle ways and distrustful of his capacity. He was -then living those “happy years without writing,” of which we have seen -him cherishing so fond a remembrance. But now came the manager of “Le -Temps,” a man accustomed to have his way, and behold, the dreamer’s -pen is again covering paper. “I believe you have a talisman,” the new -critic says to the editor, in dedicating to him the first of the four -resulting volumes. “You do whatever you will. You have made of me a -periodical and regular writer. You have triumphed over my indolence. -You have utilized my reveries and coined my wits into gold. I hold you -for an incomparable economist.” - -Such are the services of journalism to literature! A man never writes -better, or more easily, than when regular work--not too pressing--keeps -his hand in play. So Sir Walter Scott, hag-ridden by debt, if he -finished a novel in the morning began another in the afternoon, -because, as he explained, it was less difficult to keep the machine -running than to start it again after a rest. - -In this same dedicatory epistle to M. Hébrard are to be found some of -the brightest and most characteristic things that M. Anatole France -has ever written about his own nature and habits, as well as about his -ideas of critics and criticism. For talking about himself, as we have -before said, and as the reader must have discovered even from our few -quotations, he has the prettiest kind of talent. “You are very easy to -live with,” he tells M. Hébrard. “You never find fault with me. But I -do not flatter myself. You saw at once that nothing great was to be -expected, and that it was best not to torment me. For that reason you -left me to say what I pleased. One day you remarked of me to a common -friend,-- - -“‘He is a mocking Benedictine.’ - -“We understand ourselves very imperfectly, but I think your definition -is a good one. I seem to myself to be a philosophical monk. At heart -I belong to an _abbaye de Thélème_, where the rule is comfortable and -obedience easy, where one has no great degree of faith, perhaps, but is -sure to be very pious.” - -There is nobody like a skeptic, he continues (he is echoing -Montaigne), for always observing the moralities and being a good -citizen. “A skeptic never rebels against existing laws, because he has -no expectation that any power will be able to make good ones. He knows -that much must be pardoned to the Republic;” that rulers at the best -count for little; that, as Montaigne said, most things in this world -do themselves, the Fates finding the way. Still he advises his manager -never to confide his political columns to any Thelemite. The gentle -spirit of melancholy that he would spread over everything would be a -discouragement to honest readers. Ministers are not to be sustained by -philosophy. “As for myself,” he adds, “I maintain a suitable modesty -and restrict myself to criticism.” - -And then, in two sentences, one of which has attained almost to the -rank of a familiar quotation, he defines criticism and the critic. - -“As I understand it, and as you allow me to practice it, criticism, -like philosophy and history, is a sort of romance, and all romance, -rightly taken, is an autobiography. The good critic is he who narrates -the adventures of his own mind in its intercourse with masterpieces.” - -To be quite frank, he declares, the critic should begin his discourse -by saying: “Gentlemen, I am going to speak about myself apropos of -Shakespeare, apropos of Racine, or of Pascal, or of Goethe. It is a -fine occasion.” - -And here, of course, the battle is joined between the two schools of -critics: the subjective, or impressionistic, so called, on one side, -and the objective, or scientific, so called, on the other. - -Into this controversy (which, like many another, may yet turn out to -be concerned with words rather than with things) we feel no call to -enter. Like our author himself, we desire to maintain the modesty that -is fitting to us. We content ourselves, therefore, with some random -comments upon “La Vie Littéraire,” which to our taste is one of the -most delightfully readable books of recent times. Having read it and -reread it, we are (somewhat ignorantly, to be sure, having nothing -like an exhaustive acquaintance with universal current literature) -very much of Mr. Edmund Gosse’s opinion when he says of M. Anatole -France that he is perhaps “the most interesting intelligence at this -moment working in the field of letters.” The word “perhaps,” it will be -noticed, is outside the double commas. A genuinely modest man likes to -make a show of his modesty even in his use of quotations. - -Whether criticism in general, as critics in general write it, ought to -be of one school or another, subject to personal impression or subject -to rule, one thing is beyond dispute: the singular charm, one feels -almost like saying the incomparable charm, of “La Vie Littéraire” lies -in its intimate, individual quality. It is not a set of formulas, nor -even a thesaurus of literary opinions and estimates. It is the voice of -a man, speaking as a man. As you listen, you see his mind at work; you -know what he thinks about, and how he thinks about it; what he enjoys -best and oftenest, what trains his reveries naturally fall into; how -the world looks to him, past, present, and future. He does not set -himself to reveal himself; when men do that, they mostly fail; his -mind _plays_ before you. Above all things, he is an ironist. There is -nothing, least of all anything in himself or concerning himself, that -he cannot smile at, though there may be tears in his eyes at the same -moment. He admires, and can perfectly express his admiration; and when -he despises, he is no more at a loss. The more he knows, the more he -is ignorant,--and the more he wonders. He is full of modern knowledge, -and he loves of all things a fairy tale. Shakespeare delights him, and -he cannot say well enough nor times enough how greatly he enjoys the -marionettes. - -It can hardly have been an accident (and yet, for aught we know, it -may have been, since accident often seems to be no more foolish than -the rest of us) that his first “Times” essay was concerned with a -representation of “Hamlet,” and the second with the latest story of M. -Jules Lemaître. Both the Danish prince and the martyr Sérénus were men -oppressed and finally overcome by a sense of the mystery of things, -having ideas, almost in excess, and being so skillful in debate that -they could never come to a conclusion. Like horses and politicians, -they needed blinders, and for lack of them could not keep a straight -course. - -Both make a lively appeal to our critic’s sympathy. In his own way -he is sufficiently like them. And so what ought, on one theory, to -have been a dissertation upon Shakespeare’s conception of Hamlet’s -character, runs of its own will into an address to the Dane himself. He -is so real to the Frenchman that the two go home together, as it were, -after the play, and the Frenchman, having sat silent so long, finds his -heart full and his tongue suddenly unloosed. - -First he must apologize to Hamlet for the audience, some part of which, -as he may have noticed, seemed a trifle inattentive and light. Hamlet -must not lay this to heart. “It was an audience of Frenchmen and -Frenchwomen,” he should remember. “You were not in evening dress, you -had no amorous intrigue in the world of high finance, and you wore no -flower in your buttonhole. For that reason the ladies coughed a little -in their boxes while eating candied fruits. Your adventures could not -interest them. They were not worldly adventures; they were only human -adventures. Besides, you force people to think, and that is an offense -which will never be pardoned to you here.” - -Still there were a few among the spectators who were profoundly moved, -a few by whom the melancholy Dane is preferred before all other beings -ever created by the breath of genius. The critic himself, by a happy -chance, sat near one such, M. Auguste Dorchain. “He understands you, my -prince, as he understands Racine, because he is himself a poet.” - -And then, after a little, he concludes by confiding to Hamlet what a -mystery and contradiction the world continues to find him, though he is -the universal man, the man of all times and all countries, though he is -exactly like the rest of us, “a man living in the midst of universal -evil.” It is just because he is like the rest of us, indeed, that -we find his character a thing so impossible to grasp. It is because -we do not understand ourselves that we cannot understand him. His -very inconsistencies and contradictions are the sign of his profound -humanity. “You are prompt and slow, audacious and timid, benevolent and -cruel; you believe and you doubt; you are wise, and above everything -else you are insane. In a word, you live. Who of us does not resemble -you in something? Who of us thinks without contradiction, and acts -without inconsistency? Who of us is not insane? Who of us but says to -you with a mixture of pity, of sympathy, of admiration, and of horror, -‘Goodnight, sweet prince; and flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!’” - -This may not be great Shakespearean criticism; certainly it bears no -very striking resemblance to the ordinary German article that walks -abroad under that name; but at least it is good reading, and so far as -may be possible in a few sentences, it may be thought to go somewhat -near to the heart of the matter. - -As for the Sérénus of M. Jules Lemaître, he, too, is a thinker and -dreamer set to live in difficult conditions. He, too, is caught in -contradictory currents, and finds it impossible to make the shore. For -him, as for Hamlet, death is the only way out. His creator, of whom M. -Anatole France loves to talk, is himself a born skeptic, always asking, -under one ingenious form and another, the question of the old Roman -functionary, “What is truth?” and never getting an answer. Like his -friend and critic, “he loves believers and believes not.” It may have -been he of whom it is remarked, somewhere, that he has “a mind full -of ironic curiosity.” We have been turning the volumes over in search -of the phrase. We did not find it, but we found ourselves repeating -the word with which we began: “M. Anatole France is a writer who is -continually saying something.” It seems to us truer than ever; and it -seems a considerable merit. - -In the course of our search we fell anew upon the essay dealing -with that amazing book, the “Journal” of the Goncourt brothers. It -is no very enlivening subject, one would say, but the essay is of -the brightest, sparkling from end to end with those “good things” -concerning which the scientific critic may say what he will, so long -as the impressionistic critic will be kind enough to furnish them for -our delectation. As plain untheoretical readers, we are thankful to be -interested. - -Of all books, as we know already, M. Anatole France believes in -personal memoirs. In his opinion writers are seldom so likely to be -well inspired as when they speak of themselves. La Fontaine’s pigeon -had good reason to say:-- - - “Mon voyage dépeint - Vous sera d’un plaisir extrême. - Je dirai: ‘J’étais là; telle chose m’avint:’ - Vous y croirez être vous-même.” - -Even a cold writer like Marmontel gets a hold upon us “as soon as he -begins to tell about a little Limousin who read the Georgics in a -garden where the bees were murmuring,”--because he was the boy, and -the bees were those whose honey he ate, the same which he saw his aunt -warming in the hollow of her hand, and refreshing with a drop of wine, -when the cold had benumbed them. As for St. Augustine’s “Confessions,” -so called, our essayist has no very exalted opinion of them. The great -doctor, he thinks, hardly confesses enough. Worse yet, he hates his -sins; and, in the way of literature, “nothing spoils a confession like -repentance.” - -But Rousseau, “poor great Jean-Jacques,” “whose soul held so many -miseries and grandeurs,”--he surely made no half-hearted confession. -“He acknowledged his own faults and those of other people with -marvelous facility. It cost him nothing to tell the truth. However vile -and ignoble it might be, he knew that he could render it touching and -beautiful. He had secrets for that, the secrets of genius, which, like -fire, purifies everything.” - -But we must be done with quotation, though the matter that offers -itself is fairly without end. Especially one would be glad to cite -some of the essayist’s reminiscences of the men he has known: some of -them famous, like Flaubert, “a pessimist full of enthusiasm,” who “had -the good part of the things of this world, in that he could admire;” -Jules Sandeau, whom the critic, when a child, used to meet on the -quays of Paris, which are “the adopted country of all men of thought -and taste;” and dear old Barbey d’Aurévilly, so queerly dressed, so -profane a believer, “so frightfully Satanic and so adorably childish;” -and others,--and these among the best,--two or three priests, in -particular,--never heard of except in our author’s pages. - -One would like, also, to speak of his favorite heterodox theory -touching the fallible nature of posterity as a judge of works of -art; of the fun that he pokes so effectively at the new school of -symbolists and decadents (small wonder they do not love him); of his -ideas upon language, upon history, upon the grossness of Zola,--with -which he as an artist has no patience,--upon the exalted rank of the -critical essay, upon the educational value of the humanities. These -and many other things have their place in the four volumes, and every -one is touched with grace and something of originality. Everywhere the -personal note makes itself heard. It is a voice, not the scratching of -a pen, that we listen to, the voice of a man who never forgets that -he was once a child. He has lived in Eden. We all begin, he tells -himself, where Adam began. “In those blessed hours,” he says, “I have -seen thistles springing up amid heaps of stones in little sunny streets -where birds were singing; and I tell you the truth, it was Paradise.” - -The two or three years during which he was contributing weekly articles -to “Le Temps” were not quite of this heavenly quality, we may safely -presume; in the inevitable course of things the gates of Eden must -for some time have been already closed against him; but if one is to -judge by his books of the period, meaning to include among them “La -Rôtisserie de la Reine Pédauque,” “Les Opinions de M. Jérôme Coignard,” -and “Le Jardin d’Épicure,”--three of the best and most characteristic, -though the two first named are not for readers afflicted with what -a French critic calls _pudeur livresque_,--they were still years of -quietness and a reasonably full content. He was writing and studying -more than formerly, to be sure, and of course, by his own showing, was -learning so much the less; but, taking everything into account, he and -the world, for all its badness, were pulling pretty well together. - -Since then, somehow, we cannot profess to know exactly how or why, a -change appears to have come over him; a change not altogether for the -worse, nor altogether for the better. Life, in his eyes, is no longer -so bright as it was. He is more serious, more satirical, less disposed -to mind his rhyme and let the river run under the bridge; a little out -of conceit with his old rôle of saunterer and looker-on. He seems to -have heard a drum-beat, and if there is to be a fight, he will, after a -rather independent fashion of his own, bear a hand in it. Perhaps this -is the manlier part. At all events, there is no quarreling with it, and -the evil days on which Anatole France has fallen (“_le perfide Anatole -France_,” as we are told that his political enemies--a strange word for -use in connection with the author of “Sylvestre Bonnard” and “Le Jardin -d’Épicure”--are accustomed to call him) have borne their full share of -fruit. - -His second manner, to call it so, is like his first in this regard, -that its most successful creation is an old scholar. M. Bergeret is -Sylvestre Bonnard with a difference, as the present Anatole France, is -the old Anatole France with a difference. It strikes us as almost a -pleasantry of Fate that these two leading characters should stand thus -as representatives of their creator’s two selves, or, if one prefers to -express it so, of their creator’s one self in his two periods of calm -and storm. - -Sylvestre Bonnard’s life ran an even course. Its incidents were no -more than the windings and falls of a quiet brook,--just enough to -keep it wholesomely alive and give it a desirable diversity and -picturesqueness. The world was good to him; and he thanked it. If -he did not marry the girl with the pair of blue eyes,--the eyes _de -pervenche_,--he was happier in his bachelorhood than the majority -of men are in their married condition, and doubly happy toward the -last, when time and chance (with more or less of human assistance) -brought him his heart’s desire in the opportunity to care for his lost -Clementine’s grandchild. His professional successes were according to -his taste: he was a member of the Institute, an authority upon ancient -texts, and in his old age the happy author of a book upon a new hobby. - -Such was the life of a savant as M. Anatole France conceived it before -the world was too much with him, before “Nationalists” and “Royalists” -had begun to look askance upon him, and call him traitor. - -M. Bergeret, like M. Bonnard, is a man of kindly nature, a scholar, -and a lover of peace, but life to him, as to Shelley, has been -“dealt in another measure;” a disloyal wife, uncongenial daughters, -squalor in his house, disappointment in his calling, lack of favor -with his colleagues and superiors, and, to fill his cup, the Dreyfus -controversy, which makes him a target for stoning. - -And in the midst of it all, notwithstanding it all, what a dear old -soul, and what an interesting talker!--so amiably philosophical, so -keen in his thrusts, so sly in his humor, so fond of good company, his -own and his dog’s included, and, in spite of his weaknesses, so equal -to the occasion! If he is irreligious, according to his neighbors’ -standards, it is at least “with decency and good taste.” - -The four volumes in which he figures (“Histoire Contemporaine,” they -are jointly called), like all the works of their author, are crammed -with clever sayings. There is no great story, of course, though some of -the incidents are many shades too lively to be set in modest English -type; but the characterization and the dialogue are of the best,--in -the good Yankee sense of the word, “complete.” - -For its full appreciation the book--it is really one, in spite of its -four titles--demands a more familiar acquaintance with the ins and -outs of current French politics than the average American reader is -likely to bring to it. There are so many wheels within wheels, and the -intrigues are made, of set purpose on the author’s part, to turn upon -desires and considerations so almost incredibly sordid and petty! It is -a comedy; we are bound to laugh; but it is also a horror, and is meant -to be. Satire was never more biting. The game of provincial politics, -bishop-making and all, is played with merciless particularity before -the reader’s eyes; and if he fails to follow some of the moves with -perfect intelligence, he sees only too well the smallness and baseness -and cruelty of the whole; a game in which a matron’s honor is no more -than a pawn upon the chessboard, to be given and taken without so -much as an extra pulse-beat, even an extra pulse-beat of her own. If -it be true, or within a thousand miles of true,--well, to repeat the -saying of one of old, a critic accounted wise in his day, “man hath no -preëminence above a beast!” - -Poor M. Bergeret! He ought to have been so happy! Like his human -creator, he was born for life in a cloister, some Abbaye de Thélème, -where he should have had nothing to do but to read his books, say his -prayers, mind a few cabbages, perhaps, and be quiet; and instead of -that, here he is passing his days in such a turmoil that he experiences -a kind of joy on finding himself in the street, the one place where he -gets a taste of “that sweetest of good things, philosophical liberty.” -And with all the rest of his tribulations there falls upon him that -dreadful nightmare of the Dreyfus case. Neither he nor his neighbors -can let it alone. It is like the bitterness of aloes in all their -conversation. - -One resource he still has; one neighbor, better still, one housemate, -with whom he can discuss anything, even the “Affaire,” with no risk -of being stoned or misunderstood. His dog Riquet, though he “does not -understand irony” (a congenital deficiency, it must have been, with -such opportunities), is to our _Maître de Conférences à la Faculté des -Lettres_ a true friend in need. For that matter, indeed, M. Bergeret -is probably not the only man who has found it one of the best points -in a dog’s favor that you can say to him anything you please. If your -human neighbor stands in perishing need of wholesome truth, or if you -stand in sore need of expressing it to him, and if there happens to be -some not unnatural unwillingness on his part, or some momentary lack -of courage on yours, why, you have only to deliver your message to him -vicariously, as it were, to the sensible relief of your own mind, if -not to the edification of his. - -“Riquet,” said M. Bergeret, after a vain endeavor to make one of his -brother provincials submit himself to reason, “Riquet, your velvety -ears hear not him who speaks best, but him who speaks loudest.” And -Riquet, well used to his master’s conversational eccentricities, took -the compliment in good part; in much better part, at all events, than -any human interlocutor would have been likely to take it. For really, -unless one actually lost one’s temper, one could not say just that to a -neighbor and equal, especially if it happened to be true. - -For a heretic living among the orthodox there is nothing like keeping a -dog. So we were ready to say and leave it; but we bethink ourselves in -season that there is a more excellent way. Keep a dog, if you will, but -keep also the pen of a novelist. Then all your beliefs and half beliefs -and unbeliefs, all your benevolently contemptuous opinions of men and -of men’s institutions, all your treasures of irony and satire, dear as -these ever are to the man who possesses them, instead of being wasted -upon a pair of velvety ears, may be trumpeted to the world at large -through the lips of a third party, a “character,” so called, some M. -Bergeret, if you can invent him, or an Abbé Coignard. - -It is one of the best reasons for reading fiction, by the way, provided -it is written by a man of insight and force, that he is so much more -likely to tell us what he thinks when he is not compelled to speak in -his own person. - -A happy lot is the novelist’s. Such a more than angelic liberty as he -enjoys, so comfortably irresponsible and blameless as he is, whatever -happens! One thinks again of Jérôme Coignard, concerning whom too -little is finding its way into this paper. That grand old Christian and -reprobate, as we know, could live pretty much as he listed, and hold -pretty much such “opinions” as pleased him, at ease all the while in -the assurance that somewhere in a deep inner closet, fast under lock -and key, he preserved a faith in the Christian mysteries so perfect -and unsoiled--never having been subjected to any earthly contact--that -the good St. Peter, when the inevitable time should come, would be sure -to pass its possessor into the good place without a question. - -Yet it will never do for us to intimate that M. Anatole France has -sought to save either comfort or reputation by talking through a mask. -His theological, political, and socialistic heresies, if you call them -such, this being matter of opinion, have been too openly expounded, -and have brought him, as has already been told, too many enemies and -reproaches. The most that we started to say under this head was that -the storms into which the currents of the world have drifted him are -reflected in his “Histoire Contemporaine,” especially in the difference -between his M. Bergeret and his M. Bonnard. - -Of the two, M. Bergeret has the greater philosophic interest for us, as -well as the greater number of rememberable things to say to us. If the -reader wishes to see him in two highly contrasted situations, let him -turn to the wonderful chapter describing his sensations and behavior -immediately after detecting his wife’s infidelity, and the beautiful -one in which he and his more practical sister visit together the old -Paris mansion in which they had passed some portion of their childhood. -They were house-hunting at the time, and the Master, falling into one -of his far-away, philosophical moods, remarked, apropos of something or -nothing: “Time is a pure idea, and space is no more real than time.” -“That may be so,” answered his matter-of-fact, executive-minded sister, -“but it costs more in Paris.” - -Doctor Johnson called himself “an old struggler,” and the words come -unbidden into our minds as we review M. Bergeret’s story. To us, we -must confess, the old Latin professor seems almost as real a personage -as the Great Cham of literature himself. We hope he is happy in his new -post of honor at the Sorbonne. It was time, surely, that some of the -quails and the manna should be found in his basket. - -And now it is pleasant to add, by way of ending, that the latest -book of M. Anatole France seems to indicate that he also, as well -as the man of his creation, has come out into a larger place. His -mood is quieter and less satirical, though he is still many degrees -more serious than in the old days of “Thaïs” and “Sylvestre Bonnard.” -“Sur la Pierre Blanche” is a work of the rarest distinction; not -a book for the casual reader to hurry over in pursuit of a story -(in a loose way of speaking it may be characterized as a volume of -imaginary conversations), but one to be cherished and dwelt upon by -such as love the perfection of art and are not averse to knowing what -kind of thoughts visit a free-thinking, humanity-loving man, of a -philosophical, half-conservative, half-radical turn of mind, in these -days of social and political unrest, as he looks back upon the origins -of Christianity and forward into those new and presumably brighter eras -which we who live now may dream of, but never see. - -The motto of the book explains the significance of its title: “You -seem to have slept upon the white stone amongst the people of dreams.” -Toleration, the spread of peace, imperialism, the socialistic -evolution (following hard upon the capitalistic evolution, now at its -height, or passing), the yellow peril, so called, the white peril, -the future of Africa,--these are some of the larger and timelier -questions considered. In general, the thoughts of the book are those -of a scholar whose face is turned toward practical issues. The author -is not concerned with any Utopia,--absolute justice, by his theory, -being not a thing to be so much as hoped for,--but with some quite -possible amelioration of the existing order, and some gradual, natural, -irresistible approaches (irresistible because they are the work of -Nature herself) toward a state of society less unequal, not to say less -unendurable, than the present. - -Let those scoff who will; for ourselves we rejoice to see the man, like -the boy, “dreaming on things to come.” - -At the same time, we should not be sorry to believe that, in the heat -of writing, and out of the love, natural to all of us, of making facts -conform to theory, we may have laid a thought too much of emphasis -upon the alterations through which his mind has passed. His days, we -suspect, have, after all, been pretty closely bound each to each by -natural piety. We recall his fine saying about Renan, brought up in the -Roman Church and dying an unbeliever, that he changed little. “He was -like his native land, where clouds float across the sky, but the soil -is of granite, and oaks are deeply rooted.” - -Changed or unchanged, in his first manner or his second, Republican or -Nationalist, socialist, anti-imperialist, “intellectual,” or what not, -who will refuse to read a writer who can express himself after such a -fashion? - - - - -VERBAL MAGIC - - - - -VERBAL MAGIC - - -A music-lover and devoted concert-goer of my -acquaintance--“uninstructed, but sensitive,” to characterize him in -his own words--is accustomed to say that he distinguishes several -kinds of enjoyable music. One kind is interesting: here he puts the -work of composers so unlike as Berlioz and Brahms. Another kind is -exciting; under which head he ranks the greater part of Wagner and -the Bach fugues! And still another kind is charming. Whenever he uses -this last epithet, he adds an explanation, the word being now so worn -by indiscriminate handling as hardly to pass by itself at its full -face value. He means that the music thus described--heavenly music, he -sometimes calls it (of which his typical example seems to be Schubert’s -unfinished symphony)--has upon him an indescribable ravishing effect, -as if it really and literally charmed him. Exactly why this should -be, he does not profess to decide. All such compositions are highly -melodious and in some good degree simple; but then there is plenty -of other excellent music to which the same terms seem to be equally -applicable, which nevertheless lays him under no such spell. “I don’t -undertake to explain it,” he says; “so far as I am concerned, it is all -a matter of feeling.” - -Analogous to this is my own experience--and, I suppose, that of -readers in general--with certain fragments of poetry, which have for -me an ineffable and apparently inexhaustible charm. Other poetry is -beautiful, enjoyable, stimulating, everything that poetry ought to -be, except that it lacks this final something which, not to leave it -absolutely without a name, we may call magic. Whatever it be called, -it pertains not to any poet’s work as a whole, nor in strictness, I -think, to any poem as a whole, but to single verses or couplets. And -to draw the line still closer, verse of this magical quality--though -here, to be sure, I may be disclosing nothing but my own intellectual -limitations--is discoverable only in the work of a certain few poets. - -The secret of the charm is past finding out: so I like to believe, -at all events. Magic is magic; if it could be explained, it would be -something else; to use the word is to confess the thing beyond us. Such -verses were never written to order or by force of will, since genius -and our old friend--or enemy--“an infinite capacity for taking pains,” -so far from being one, are not even distantly related. The poet himself -could never tell how such perfection was wrought or whence it came; nor -is its natural history to be made out by any critic. The best we can do -with it is to enjoy it, thankful to have our souls refreshed and our -taste purified by its “heavenly alchemy;” as the best that our musical -friend can do with the unfinished symphony is to surrender himself to -its fascination, and be carried by it, as I have heard him more than -once express himself, up to “heaven’s gate.” - -And yet it is not in human nature to forego the asking of questions. -The mind will have its inquisitive moods, and sometimes it loves -to play, in a kind of make-believe, with mysteries which it has no -thought of solving,--a harmless and perhaps not unprofitable exercise, -if entered upon modestly and pursued without illusions. We may wonder -over things that interest us, and even go so far as to talk about them, -though we have no expectation of saying anything either new or final. - -Take, then, the famous lines from Wordsworth’s “Solitary Reaper:”-- - - “Will no one tell me what she sings?-- - Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow - For old, unhappy, far-off things, - And battles long ago.” - -The final couplet of this stanza is a typical example of what is here -meant by verbal magic. I am heartily of Mr. Swinburne’s mind when he -says of it, “In the whole expanse of poetry there can hardly be two -verses of more perfect and profound and exalted beauty;” although my -own slender acquaintance with literature as a whole would not have -justified me in so sweeping a mode of speech. The utmost that I could -have ventured to say would have been that I knew of no lines more -supremely, indescribably, perennially beautiful. Nor can I sympathize -with Mr. Courthope in his contention that the lines are nothing in -themselves, but depend for their “high quality” upon their association -with the image of the solitary reaper. On such a point the human -consciousness may possibly not be infallible; but at all events, it is -the best ground we have to go on, and unless I am strangely deluded, -my own delight is in the verses themselves, and not merely nor mainly -in their setting. Yet of what cheap and common materials they are -composed, and how artlessly they are put together! Nine every-day -words, such as any farmer might use, not a fine word among them, -following each other in the most unstudied manner--and the result -perfection! - -By the side of this example let us put another, equally familiar, from -Shakespeare:-- - - “We are such stuff - As dreams are made on, and our little life - Is rounded with a sleep.” - -Here, too, all the elements are of the plainest and commonest; and -yet these few short, homely words, every one in its natural prose -order, and not over-musical,--“such stuff” and “little life” being -almost cacophonous,--have a magical force, if I may presume for once -to speak in Mr. Swinburne’s tone, unsurpassable in the whole range of -literature. We hear them, if we _do_ hear them, and all things earthly -seem to melt and vanish. - -Not unlike them in their sudden effectiveness is a casual expression -of Burke’s. For in prose also, and even in a political pamphlet, if -the pamphleteer have a genius for words, an inspired and unexpected -phrase (and inspired phrases are always unexpected, that being one mark -of their divinity) may take the spirit captive. Thus, while Burke is -talking about the troubles of the time, being now in the opposition, -and blaming the government as in duty bound, suddenly he lets fall the -words, “Rank, and office, and title, and all the solemn plausibilities -of the world;” and for me, I know not whether others may be similarly -affected, politics and government are gone, an “insubstantial pageant -faded.” “All the solemn plausibilities of the world,” I say to myself, -and for the present, though I am hardly beyond the first page of the -pamphlet, I care not to read further; like Emerson at the play, who had -ears for nothing more after Hamlet’s question to the ghost:-- - - “What may this mean, - That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel - Revisit’st thus the glimpses of the moon?” - -I am writing simply as a lover of poetry, “uninstructed, but -sensitive,” not as a critic, having no semblance of claim to that -exalted title,--among the very highest, to my thinking, as the men who -wear it worthily are among the rarest; great critics, to this date, -having been fewer even than great poets; but I believe, or think I -believe, in the saying of one of the brightest of modern Frenchmen: “Le -bon critique est celui qui raconte les aventures de son âme au milieu -des chefs-d’œuvre.” So I delight in this adventure of Emerson’s mind in -the midst of “Hamlet,” as I do also in a similar one of Wordsworth’s, -who was wont to say, as reported by Hazlitt, that he could read -Milton’s description of Satan-- - - “Nor appeared - Less than Archangel ruined, and the excess - Of glory obscured”-- - -till he felt “a certain faintness come over his mind from a sense of -beauty and grandeur.” - -One thing, surely, we may say about verse of this miraculous quality: -it does not appeal first or principally to the ear; it is almost never -rich in melodic beauty, as such beauty is commonly estimated. It is -musical, no doubt, but after a secret manner of its own. Alliteration, -assonance, a pleasing alternation and interchange of vowel sounds, -all such crafty niceties are hidden, if not absent altogether,--so -completely hidden that the reader never thinks of them as either -present or absent.[11] The appeal is to the imagination, not to the -ear, and more is suggested than said. Such lines, along with their -simplicity of language, may well have something of mysteriousness. Yet -they must not puzzle the mind. The mystery must not be of the smaller -sort, that provokes questions. If the curiosity is teased in the -slightest to discover what the words mean, the spell is broken. There -is no enchantment in a riddle. - -Neither is there charm in an epigram, be it never so happy, nor in any -conceit or play upon words. - - “I could not love thee, Dear! so much, - Loved I not Honor more,”-- - -nothing of this kind, perfect as it is, will answer the test. Mere -cleverness might compass a thing like that. Indeed, the very cleverness -of it, its courtly gracefulness, its _manner_ (one seems to see the -bodily inflection and the wave of the hand that go with the phrase), -the spice of smartness in it, are enough to remove it instantly out of -the magic circle. Magical verse is neither pretty nor clever. It speaks -not of itself. If you think of _it_, the charm has failed. - -In my own case, in lines that are magical to me, the suggestion or -picture is generally of something remote from the present, a calling up -of deeds long done and men long vanished, or else a foreboding of that -future day when _all_ things will be past; a suggestion or picture that -brings an instant soberness,--reverie, melancholy, what you will,--that -is the most delicious fruit of recollection. It suits with this idea -that the verse has mostly a slow, meditative movement, produced, if the -reader chooses to pick it to pieces, by long vowels and natural pauses, -or by final and initial consonants standing opposite each other, and, -between them, holding the words apart; such a movement as that of the -Wordsworth couplet first quoted,-- - - “For old, unhappy, far-off things, - And battles long ago,”-- - -or as that of the still more familiar slow-running line from the -sonnets of Shakespeare,-- - - “Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang,”-- - -a movement that not merely harmonizes with the complexion of the -thought, but heightens it to an extraordinary degree. Not that the -poet wrote with that end consciously in view, or altered a syllable to -secure it. Wordsworth’s lines, it is safe guessing, were for this time -given to him, and dropped upon the paper as they are, faultless beyond -even his too meddlesome desire to alter and amend. Indeed, in this as -in all the best verse, it is not the metrical structure that produces -the imaginative result, but exactly the opposite. - -And here, as I think, we may gather a hint as to the impassable gulf -that separates inspired poetry from the very highest verse of the next -lower order. Take such a dainty bit of musical craftiness as this, the -first that offers itself for the purpose:-- - - “The splendor falls on castle walls - And snowy summits old in story: - The long light shakes across the lakes, - And the wild cataract leaps in glory. - Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, - Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.” - -Admirable after its kind, a kind of which it might seem unfair to say -that less is meant than meets the ear; but set it beside the Wordsworth -couplet, so easy, so simple,-- - - “Without all ornament, itself and true,”-- - -so inevitable and yet so impossible. One is cheap in its materials, -but divine in its birth and in its effect; the other is made of rare -and costly stuffs, but when all is done it _is_ made. Though it sound -old-fashioned to say so, there is no art like inspiration. - -The supreme achievement of poetic genius is not the writing of -beautiful passages, but the conception and evolution of great -poems,--the whole, even in a work of the imagination, being greater -than any of its parts; but poetic inspiration reaches its highest -jet, if we may so speak, its ultimate bloom, in occasional lines of -transcendent and, as human judgment goes, perfect loveliness. I should -like to see a rigorously sifted collection of such fragments, an -anthology of magical verse, nothing less than magic being admitted. It -would be a small volume,-- - - “Infinite riches in a little room;” - -but it would need an inspired reader to make it. - - - - -QUOTABILITY - - - - -QUOTABILITY - - -There is a kind of writing by which the reader is led along, perhaps -hurried along, if it be a narrative, without pause from beginning to -end. Everything follows directly from what has gone before; the mind -is held upon the same level of interest; and the impression produced -is, as it were, a single impression. There is another kind of writing, -which brings the reader now and then to a halt. He looks up from the -page, perhaps, fixing his eyes upon vacancy, and turning the thought, -or the expression of it, over in his mind; or he betakes himself to -a book of extracts and conveys a sentence or two into its keeping; -or, possibly, if he is one of the rare ones who buy books and read -with pencil in hand, he may indite a note on the margin of the leaf, -or at least set a mark there,--as one blazes a tree at the foot of -which treasure is buried. The author has said something,--something -in particular, fresh, surprising, original; something that seems to -have come from his own mind; a thing to be pondered over and returned -upon. For the moment there is no going further; the reader has turned -thinker, or is lost in a dream. It is as if a man had been walking down -a pleasant road bordered with hedges and fields, one much like another, -and now of a sudden has rounded a corner, and sees before him a lake -or a waterfall, something new, different, unexpected, at the sight of -which he stops as by instinct. Or you may say, it is as if a man had -been traveling steadily forward, thinking only of his journey’s end, -and all at once catches the shine of a gold piece in the path, or sees -by the wayside a flower so novel and beautiful that it must be stepped -aside for and looked at. - -We have had in America three writers, living in the same country -village at the same time, who exemplified in a really striking manner -these two styles of writing: Hawthorne on the one hand, and Emerson and -Thoreau on the other. - -Hawthorne’s work you may read from end to end without the temptation -to transfer so much as a line to the commonplace book. The road has -taken you through many interesting scenes, and past many a beautiful -landscape; you may have felt much and learned much; you might be -glad to turn back straightway and travel the course over again; but -you will have picked up no coin or jewel to put away in a cabinet. -This characteristic of Hawthorne is the more noteworthy because of -the moral quality of his work. A mere story-teller may naturally -keep his narrative on the go, as we say,--that is one of the chief -secrets of his art; but Hawthorne was not a mere story-teller. He was -a moralist,--Emerson himself hardly more so; yet he has never a moral -sentence. The fact is, he did not make sentences; he made books. The -story, not the sentence, nor even the paragraph or the chapter, was -the unit. The general truth--the moral--informed the work. Not only -was it not affixed as a label; it was not given anywhere a direct and -separable verbal expression. If the story does not convey it to you, -you will never get it. Hawthorne, in short, was what, for lack of a -better word, we may call a literary artist. - -Emerson and Thoreau, on the other hand, were journalizers. Their life -was not to create, but to think, to see, to read, and to set down -the results of it all, day by day. When Emerson would make a piece -of literature,--a lecture, or an essay, or even a book,--he sought -out related paragraphs from his diary, dove-tailed them together, -disguising the joints more or less successfully, as might happen,--it -was no great matter,--added collateral ideas as they occurred to him, -and the job was done. It was done the more easily because the journal -was not a receptacle for impressions hastily noted. Sentence and -paragraph had been assiduously finished to a word, turned this way and -that and settled finally into shape, before they went into it; for a -journal, with him, was not a collection of rough jewels, but a drawer -full of pearls and precious stones, each carefully cut and polished, -ready for the setting or the string. - -And what was true of Emerson was true in good degree of Thoreau, who -followed the same general method, but with a less pronounced and -continuous effect of discontinuity: partly, it would appear, because of -a difference in the turn of his mind (more given to reason, and less -to intuition), and partly because of the narrative form into which -his natural historical bent almost of necessity carried him,--a form -by which pages and whole chapters of his work are held pretty closely -together. - -If with Hawthorne we put Irving,--who was like him so far as the -point now under consideration is concerned, fluidity of style and -an absence of “passages,”--we have four of our American classics -in well-contrasted pairs. One pair, we may say, did work that was -like tapestry, woven throughout; the other’s product was rather like -patchwork,--composed of rare and valuable stuff, but still patchwork. - -This comparison, be it understood, is not to be taken as an attempt to -settle a question of comparative rank. A contrast is not of itself an -appraisal, nor a figure of speech an end of the argument. And after -all, if figures of speech are to be regarded, a floor of tiles may be -as beautiful, and even as “artistic,” as the finest of woven carpets. -Let comparisons go. We may study differences without exalting one or -depreciating another. Of the four writers now named, we are not to say -that any one was greater than all the rest. Each had his superiorities -and his inferiorities, the second necessary concomitants of the first; -for every virtue casts its shadow. - -Emerson, for his part, seems to have been keenly aware of the -disconnectedness of his work,--his “formidable tendency to the lapidary -style,” he terms it,--and even to have accepted it as a defect. “I dot -evermore in my endless journal, a line on every knowable in nature,” -he writes to Carlyle; “but the arrangement loiters long, and I get a -brick-kiln instead of a house.” That was one face of the medal; but his -“bricks” are now of more value than many another man’s streetful of -buildings. - -Thoreau, though he too had his humble moods, was in general more -self-reliant--or at least more self-assertive--than his older friend -and master. He _believed_ in the “lapidary style,” or in some wholesome -approach to it; and what he believed in he would stand up for. “We -hear it complained of some works of genius,” he says, “that they -have fine thoughts, but are irregular and have no flow. But even the -mountain peaks on the horizon are, to the eye of science, parts of one -range.” He is defending Emerson,--though he does not name him,--and, -indirectly, himself; and with the same end in view he goes on to praise -Sir Walter Raleigh, whose style, he says, has a natural emphasis, like -a man’s tread, “and a breathing space between the sentences.” And he -declares, correctly enough, that what the ignorant applaud as a “flow” -of style is much of it nothing but a “rapid trot.” - -One thing is certain: a man must work according to his own method. For -him that is the best method, and indeed the only one. Carlyle entreated -Emerson to “become concrete, and write in prose the straightest way.” -“I wish you would take an American Hero, one whom you really love; -and give us a History of him,--make an artistic bronze statue (in -good _words_) of his Life and him. I do indeed.” Thoreau’s appeal -to Emerson is for exactly the opposite: less art, if need be, and -less concreteness, but more “far-off heats,” more “star-dust and -undissolvable nebulæ.” To that end he turns Emerson’s own verse against -him. “From _his_ - - ‘lips of cunning fell - The thrilling Delphic oracle.’ - -And yet sometimes,-- - - We should not mind if on our ear there fell - Some less of cunning, more of oracle.” - -Clever critics, both of them, the Scotchman and the Yankee; but -meanwhile, between the two fires, Emerson kept on polishing pearls -and cutting cameos, with hardly so much as an attempt at an “artistic -bronze statue.” The author of the essay on “Self-Reliance” knew that a -man must work with his own mind, as he must wear his own face; that no -method is so good or so bad but that it may be damaged by an attempt to -make it as good as another’s. - -And admirable as artistic perfection and absolute unity are, there -remains a place, and a high place, for works of another order. All -the world, even the stickler for classical perfection, loves a good -sentence. Blessed is the writer who now and then makes one. We forgive -him for carelessness of construction, and, almost, for every other -literary fault, if once in a while--not _too_ infrequently--he packs -wit or wisdom into a score or so of memorable words. - -In speaking of a quotable style, we are not thinking of works like the -Wisdom of Solomon, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and the Thoughts -of Pascal and Joubert, books that are nothing but collections of -maxims and aphorisms; nor even of books like Bacon’s Essays or Amiel’s -Journal, that come near to falling under the same head. To find a happy -and pregnant sentence in such a place is like taking an apple out of a -dish and eating it at the table; to run upon one in the reading of a -_book_ is like plucking an apple from a wayside tree in the midst of -a half-day ramble, and munching it on the road. The fruit may be as -fair and well-flavored in the first case as in the second, but what a -difference in the relish of it! It is one thing to receive a coin over -the banker’s counter, and another to pick a nugget out of the gravel. -In reading, as well as anywhere else, a man enjoys the thrill of -discovery. - -Here, in great part, lies the enduring charm of an author like -Montaigne, who wrote without plan, rambling at his own sweet will, -never sticking to his text, and never so much as dreaming of unity or -anything else that could be called “artistic,” yet making a book to -live forever. As Sainte-Beuve says, you may open it at what page you -will, and be in what mood you may, and you are sure to find a wise -thought expressed in lively and durable phrase, a beautiful meaning -set in a single strong line. And the best of it all is that these fine -sentences, so detachable and memorable, are written like all the rest -of the essay, and are part and parcel of it. No attention is called to -them; they call no attention to themselves. They drop on the page, and -the pen runs on. Seemingly, it was as easy for the writer to set down -a “durable” phrase--done once for all and past all bettering--as to -mention the kind of fish he preferred or any other trivial every-day -matter. His good things are never tainted with smartness, the besetting -vice of sentence-makers in general, nor have they at all the appearance -of things designed to nudge the reader, to keep him awake, as if the -writer had said to himself, “Go to, let us brighten up the discussion a -bit.” - -A gift of this sort comes mostly by nature, but no one ever wrote -much and well without arriving at some pretty definite notions as to -the art of writing; and so it was with Montaigne. If his style was -discursive, formless, highly sententious, and yet to an extraordinary -degree familiar, he was not only aware of the fact, but gloried in it. -He loved a natural and plain way of speaking, he tells us; the same -on paper as in the mouth; juicy and sinewy (_succulent et nerveux_), -irregular, incontinuous and bold, every piece a body by itself,--“a -soldier-like style.” Fine words he had no place for. “May I never -use any other language than what is used in the markets of Paris!” he -exclaims. As for mere rhetoric, he held it cheap, as every good writer -does. Word painting, no matter how well done, is “easily obscured by -the lustre of a simple truth.” But a good sentence, a thing worth -saying and well said, he believed to be always in order. “If it is -not good for what went before nor for what comes after, it is good in -itself.” He praises Tacitus for being “full of sentences.” And therein, -perhaps, as in Thoreau’s eulogy of Sir Walter Raleigh, we may see the -author defending his own practice. There is no neater way of speaking -well of ourselves than by complimenting our own special virtues in -the person of another. In truth, however, Montaigne had no need to -apologize even with indirectness. His “good sentences” are not only -good in themselves, but good for what precedes and follows. They are -never stuck on nor thrust in. On the contrary, as has been already -observed, they are sure to be part of the very substance of the essay -itself. You will never find Montaigne writing or retaining a paragraph -for the sake of its snapper, like those authors of whom he said that -they would “go a mile out of their way to run after a fine word.” - -There is a natural relation, it would seem, between a quotable style -and a fondness for quoting. If a man’s own thought falls easily -into well-minted, separable phrases, he will almost of course be -appreciative of similar aphoristic turns of speech in the works of -others. So we find Montaigne’s pages bespattered from top to bottom -with extracts from the philosophers and poets of an older time. As -years passed, and successive editions of the book were published, the -quotations grew more and more numerous, till some of the essays seemed -in danger of losing their identity and becoming hardly more than leaves -out of a commonplace book. - -And as it was with the Frenchman, so was it with our two Concord -philosophers, Emerson and Thoreau. They were almost as fond of others’ -bright things as of their own. And the same may be said of their -contemporary and critic, Lowell, who, like them, was also a master -of the phrase, a putter forth of “stamped sentences,” like gold and -silver coins, as one of his admirers has called them. He, too, is -always offering us a nugget out of another man’s pack. All three of -these men, be it added, borrowed not only with freedom, but with great -advantage to their own work. They had a right to borrow, being in -good measure original in their very quotations, because, as has been -remarked of Montaigne, “they employed them only when they found in them -an idea of their own, or had been struck by them in a new and singular -manner.” - -But what a change when we turn to Hawthorne! His work is all of a -piece, woven in his own loom. As nobody quotes him, so he quotes -nobody. Inverted commas are as scarce on his pages as November violets -are in the Concord meadows. You will find them, but you will have to -search for them. On Thoreau’s page they are thick as violets in May. - -We were not undertaking to determine rank or to appraise values, -we said, but so much as this we will venture upon suggesting: that -a piece of pure art--“The Scarlet Letter,” if you will--is not on -that ground alone to be considered as worthier in itself, or better -assured of lasting honor, than some work less perfectly constructed, -but, it may be, more nobly inspired. In the final result of things, -literary merit and literary fame are not portioned out by any critical -yardstick. Lowell complained of Thoreau that “he had no artistic power -such as controls a great work to the serene balance of completeness.” -True enough. It is the same criticism which Carlyle, and Arnold after -him, brought against Emerson; in whose case, also, we need not dispute -the point. But Lowell said further of Thoreau, “His work gives me -the feeling of a sky full of stars;” and again: “As we read him, it -seems as if all-out-of-doors had kept a diary and become its own -Montaigne.... Compared with his, all other books of similar aim, even -White’s ‘Selborne,’ seem dry as a country clergyman’s meteorological -journal in an old almanac.” In other words, Thoreau was not an artist, -but he did something new, and something grandly worth doing. Emerson, -likewise, was not an artist; but the critic who tells us so tells us in -the same breath that Emerson’s essays are the most important work done -in English prose during their century. - -Whether Emerson will outlive Hawthorne, or Hawthorne outlive Emerson, -who can say? It would be rash guessing to attempt a prophecy. As for -Thoreau, there are some, perhaps, who would bid higher for his chance -of immortality than for that of either of his two famous townsmen. - -Let such things turn out as they may, Emerson and Thoreau have each -given to American literature, and better still to American life, -something that can never be lost, even though their works and their -names together should be forgotten; and they have done this partly -by reason of their very limitations, their making of sentences and -paragraphs--portable wisdom--instead of “artistic bronze statues.” -“Wisdom is the principal thing,” said an ancient writer; and an English -critic and statesman of our own day has uttered the same truth in -more modern fashion. “Aphorism or maxim,” says Mr. John Morley, “let -us remember that this wisdom of life is the true salt of literature; -that those books, at least in prose, are most nourishing which are most -richly stored with it; and that it is one of the main objects, apart -from the mere acquisition of knowledge, which men ought to seek in the -reading of books.” - -Yes, and it is one of the objects that men do seek; for the history -of literature proves abundantly that the world keeps a relish for -that which feeds the soul as well as for that which ministers to the -passion for beauty; if it crowns the literary artist, it has a wreath -also for his humbler brother--if he _is_ humbler--the originator and -disseminator of thought. For it is to be considered that a man with a -genius for writing is not therefore a man of original ideas, or indeed, -so far as the necessity of the case goes, of any ideas at all. His gift -may be--nay, perhaps is likely to be--purely artistic and literary, a -faculty for seeing and describing. Thus we read of Sterne that he was -a great author, “not because of great thoughts, for there is scarcely a -sentence in his writings which can be called a thought, ... but because -of his wonderful sympathy with and wonderful power of representing -simple human nature.” Obviously, it is not to such as he that we are to -go in search of wisdom. The man who furnishes us with that commodity, -the quotable man, be his rank higher or lower, is one who thinks, or, -lacking that, has an instinct for the discovery and expression of -thought,--a man under the friction of whose pen ideas crystallize into -handy and final shape, and so become current coin. - - - - -THE GRACE OF OBSCURITY - - - - -THE GRACE OF OBSCURITY - - -Clearness, directness, ease, precision,--these are literary virtues -of a homely and primary sort. Reserve, urbanity, depth, force, -suggestiveness,--these, too, are virtues, and happy the writer who has -them. He is master of his art. - -No good workman likes to be praised overmuch for the elementary -qualities. Let some things be taken for granted, or touched upon -lightly. Tell a schoolboy that he writes grammatically,--if you -can,--but not the editor of a newspaper. Almost as well confide to your -banker that you hold him for something better than a thief. “Simplicity -be cursed!” a sensitive writer used to exclaim, as book after book -elicited the same good-natured verdict. “They mean that I am simple, -easily seen through. Henceforth I will be muddy, seeing it is beyond me -to be deep.” But nature is inexorable, and with the next book it was -the same story. Probably there is not a line of his work over which -any two readers ever disputed as to its meaning. In vain shall such a -man dream of immortality. Great books, books to which readers return, -books that win vogue and maintain it, books for the study of which -societies are organized and about which libraries accumulate, must be -of a less flimsy texture,--in his own testy phrase, less “easily seen -through.” - -Consider the great classics of all races, the Bibles of the world. -Not one but abounds in dark sayings. What another book the Hebrew -Scriptures would be if the same text could never be interpreted in -more than one way, if some texts could ever be interpreted at all! How -much less matter for preaching! How much less motive for exegetical -research! And withal, how much less appeal to the deepest of human -instincts, the passion for the vague, the far-away, and the mysterious! - -All religious teachers, in so far as they are competent and sincere, -address themselves to this instinct. The worthier they are of their -calling, the better do they appreciate the value of paradox and -parable. The greatest of them made open profession of his purpose to -speak over the heads of his hearers; and his followers are still true -to his example in that particular, however they may have improved upon -it in other respects. They no longer encourage evil by turning the -other cheek to the smiter; not many of them foster indolence by selling -all that they have and giving to the poor; but without exception they -speak things hard to be understood. Therein, in part at least, lies -their power; for mankind craves a religion, a revelation of the unseen -and the unprovable, and is not to be put off with simple morality, with -such commonplace and worldly things as honesty, industry, purity, and -brotherly love. No church ever waxed great by the inculcation of these -humble, earthly, every-day virtues. - -In literature, the value of half-lights is recognized, consciously or -not, by all who dabble in foreign tongues. Indeed, so far, at least, -as amateurs are concerned, it is one of the chief encouragements to -linguistic studies, the heightened pleasure of reading in a language -but half understood. The imagination is put freshly in play, and -time-worn thoughts and too familiar sentiments are again almost as good -as new. Doudan, writing to a friend in trouble, drops suddenly into -English, with a sentence or two about the universality of misfortune. -“Commonplaces regain their truth in a strange language,” he explains; -“if we complain of ordinary evils, we ought to do it in Latin.” The -hint is worth taking. So long as we have something novel and important -to communicate, we may choose the simplest words. “Clearness is the -ornament of profound thoughts,” says Vauvenargues; but we need not -go quite so far as the same philosopher when he bids us reject all -thoughts that are “too feeble to bear a simple expression.” That would -be to reduce the literary product unduly. Joubert is a more comforting -adviser. “Banish from words all uncertainty of meaning,” he says, “and -you have made an end of poetry and eloquence.” “It is a great art,” he -adds, “the art of being agreeably ambiguous.” - -Such tributes to the vague are the more significant as coming from -Frenchmen, who, of all people, may be said to worship lucidity. Let us -add, then, the testimony of one of the younger French writers, a man of -our own day. “Humanity hardly attaches itself with passion to any works -of poetry and art,” says M. Anatole France, “unless some parts of them -are obscure and susceptible of diverse interpretations.” And in another -place in the same volume (“Le Jardin d’Épicure”) we come upon this -fine saying: “What life has of the best is the idea it gives us of an -unknown something which is not in it.” How true that is of literature, -also! The best thing we derive from a book is something that the author -never quite succeeded in putting into it. What good reader (and without -good reading there is no good writing) has not found a glimpse, a -momentary brightness as of something infinitely far off, more exciting -and memorable than whole pages of crystalline description? - -Vagueness like this is one of the noblest gifts of a writer. Artifice -cannot compass it. If a man would have it, let him pray for a soul, and -refresh himself continually with dreams and high imaginings. Then if, -in addition, he have genius, knowledge, and literary tact, there may -be hope for him. But even then the page must find the reader. - -Of vagueness of a lower order there is always plenty; some of it a -matter of individual temperament, some of it a matter of art, and some -a matter of a want of art. It is not to be despised, perhaps, since -it has utility and a marketable value. It results in the formation of -clubs, and so is promotive of social intercourse. It makes it worth -men’s while to read the same book twice, or even thrice, and so is -of use in relieving the tedium of the world. It renders unspeakable -service to worthy people who would fain have a fine taste in -literature, but for whom, as yet, it is more absorbing to guess riddles -than to read poems; and it is almost as good as a corruption of the -text to the favored few who have an eye for invisible meanings,--men -like the famous French philosopher who discovered extraordinary beauty -in certain profundities of Pascal, which turned out to be errors of a -copyist. - -This inferior kind of obscurity, like most things of a secondary -rank, is open to cultivation, although the greater number of those -who profit by such husbandry are slow to acknowledge the obligation. -A bright exception is found in Thoreau. He was one who believed -in telling the truth. “I do not suppose that I have attained to -obscurity,” he writes. But he was too modest by half. He did attain to -it, and in both kinds: sometimes in willful paradox and exaggeration, a -sort of “Come, now, good reader, no falling asleep!” and sometimes, but -less often,--for such visitations are rare with the best of men,--in -some quick, unstudied phrase that opens, as it were, an unsuspected -door within us, and makes us forget for the time being both the author -and his book. - -Perhaps it would be true to say that when men are most inspired, their -speech becomes most like Nature’s own,--inarticulate, and so capable of -expressing things inexpressible. What book, what line of verse, ever -evoked those unutterable feelings--feelings beyond even the _thought_ -of utterance--that are wakened in us now and then, in divinely -favorable moments, by the plash of waters or the sighing of winds? When -an author does aught of this kind for us, we must love and praise him, -let his shortcomings be what they will. If a man is great enough in -himself, or serviceable enough to us, we need not insist upon all the -minor perfections. - -For the rest, these things remain true: language is the work of -the people, and belongs to the people, however lexicographers and -grammarians may codify, and possibly, in rare instances, improve it. -Commonplaces are the staple of literature. The great books appeal -to men as men, not as scholars. A fog is not a cloud, though a man -with his feet in the mud may hug himself and say, “Look, how I soar!” -Preciosity is good for those that like it; they have their reward; but -to set up a conventicle, with passwords and a private creed, is not -to found a religion. In the long run, nothing is supremely beautiful -but genuine simplicity, which may be a perfection of nature or the -perfection of art; and the only obscurity that suits with it and sets -it off is occasional, unexpected, momentary,--a sudden excess of light -that flashes and is gone, surprising the writer first, and afterward -the reader. - - - - -IN DEFENSE OF THE TRAVELER’S NOTE-BOOK - - - - -IN DEFENSE OF THE TRAVELER’S NOTE-BOOK - - -It is a more or less common habit of Americans to cry out against -the conceit of foreigners, Englishmen especially, who, after a run -through “the States,” publish their impressions of the country. These -outcries--though that may seem too strong a word--are supposed to be -quite independent of the character of the comments in question, whether -favorable or unfavorable. In the tourist’s eyes, Americans may be an -uninteresting, boastful, worldly-minded people. The magnitude of our -lakes may not blind him to the imperfections of our newspapers, and -in spite of Niagara and the prairies, he may esteem our politicians, -for the most part, a vulgar and time-serving set. Whatever criticisms -of this sort he in his unwisdom may feel called upon to express are -likely to have their modicum of truth; at least they would have, if -any one but a foreigner were to utter them. Americans are not slow to -say similar things of each other, and especially of their public men. -Except on the Fourth of July, we are far from constituting anything -fairly to be called a mutual admiration society. The complaint, then, -is not that the tourist offers criticism of such and such a tenor, -but that he takes it upon himself to offer any criticism at all. -What business has he with “impressions of America” after a visit of -a month or two? And even if he has impressions, why should he be so -presumptuous as to print them? A great people cannot be understood -after this haphazard, percursory fashion. True; but the objection is -futile, if for no other reason, because it goes wide of the mark. The -question is not of understanding a people, but of having something to -say about them. - -Since the world began, men have traveled, and, having traveled, have -recounted their adventures. The two things go together, and are alike -inevitable. And the thing that hath been, it is that which shall be. -Some authors travel in other men’s books; some travel in the outward -and literal sense of the word; and both tell as good a story as -they can of the wonders they have seen. It is only here and there -a philosopher who can sit at home and spin his web out of his own -insides. Thoreau delighted to talk as if Concord were the centre and -sum of the world. Everything grew there, everything happened there. Why -should a Concord man ever stir beyond the town limits? Sure enough! -And yet what are Thoreau’s books but records of his journeys: “A Week -on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers;” “The Maine Woods;” “Cape Cod;” -“A Yankee in Canada;” “Excursions.” With him, as with the rest of us, -it was the volume he had just read that he liked to talk about; it was -the country he had just seen that his pen naturally busied itself with -describing. Even his one Concord book is really a book of travels. To -write it he went into camp, that he might study the world on its off -side, as it were, and feel his life new. - -In other words, for here we come to the pith of the matter, it is -the fresh impression that is vivid, and therefore will have itself -expressed. We may almost say that it is the only thing that can be -expressed. This is what Bagehot had in mind. “Those who know a place -or a person best,” he said, “are not those most likely to describe it -best; their knowledge is so familiar that they cannot bring it out in -words.” And this truth, partial though it be, and, like all truth, -liable to misunderstanding and abuse, is the scribbling tourist’s -encouragement, and, if he be supposed to need it, his perennial -justification. - -More than one scholar has failed to produce the great work that was -expected of him,--that he of all men seemed elected to produce,--simply -because he put off the doing of it till his knowledge should be -something like complete. So monumental a structure could not be too -carefully prepared for, he thought: a conscientiousness most scholarly -and honorable, but deadly in its result; for by the time he had laid -in his stores, he had lost the freshness of his enthusiasm; a palsy -had stricken his pen; and by and by the night came, and his knowledge -perished with him. - -Writers of travels, whatever their shortcomings, fall into no error -of this kind. They strike while the iron is hot; and whether their -subject be Africa or America, that is the true method. The value -of such literature depends on the observer’s alertness, fairness, -good sense, and general competency, rather than upon the length and -leisureliness of his journey. Time of itself never did much for a blind -man’s vision; and to come back to our Englishman, he may run through -America in a month, or spend a year in his note-taking, and in either -event he will discover only what he came prepared to discover. If the -photographic plate is sensitive enough, it may need but the briefest -exposure. And anyhow, let the picture turn out never so badly, no -irreparable harm is done. The object itself is not altered because its -portrait is drawn awry. What we have to dread is not the foreigner’s -unfair opinion of us, but our unfair opinion of the foreigner. It is -our own thoughts that do us injury, not other men’s thoughts about -us. And if this be too rare an atmosphere for comfortable every-day -breathing, we may come at a similar result on lower ground. Who are we, -that we should be treated better than the rest of the world? Must our -feelings never be hurt, because we are Americans? Have we never learned -that it is a man’s part to be thankful for intelligent and friendly -criticism, and to bear all other in silence? - -Let visitors to “the States,” then, be “impressed;” and let them print -their impressions, the more the better. Some of them will be shallow, -some of them unkindly and prejudiced, some, perhaps, ignorantly and -foolishly eulogistic. We shall be blamed for faults that are beyond -our mending, and praised for virtues that were never ours,--if such -virtues there be. At best, the criticism and the comment will fall a -little short of inerrancy; for perfection is one of the lost arts, even -in England; but in the sum many true things will be said, and in the -end the cause of truth will be forwarded; and possibly, if a thousand -English pens are thus employed, one of them may happen to make an -immortal picture of the Great Republic as it now is, and as it will -not be, for better or worse, a hundred years hence. Thus it is, at any -rate, by one lucky experimenter out of many, that immortal work is -done. - -Some critics, it is true, would have literature, even current -literature, to consist solely of such happy strokes. Let no man write -anything till he can write a masterpiece, they say. Yes, and let no -boy go near the water till he has learned to swim; and since crows -have waxed destructive, let cornfields be planted hereafter with no -outside rows; and lest malarial fevers should make an end of the human -race, let all plains and valleys be filled up, and nothing remain but -mountains. In short, seeing that failure has been the rule hitherto, -let us abolish rules, and get on with exceptions alone; a condition -of things curiously prefigured in certain Grammars of the Latin -Language, of a kind still sorrowfully remembered by elderly people. A -fine economy, surely, and well worth thinking about. But for the time -being, till dreams become substantial, this present evil world, as we -reverently call it, remembering its Creator, must be suffered to jog -along in its ancient, expensive, wasteful-seeming, happy-go-lucky, -highly-exceptionable manner: a million seeds, and one tree; a million -books, and one _chef-d’œuvre_. Classics are not yet produced of set -purpose, nor do they make their advent in royal isolation, starred and -wearing the laurel. They come, as was said just now, with the crowd, -the “spawn of the press,” if they come at all, and are only sifted out -by the slow hand of time. And meanwhile their humbler fellows, missing -of immortality, may nevertheless have their day and serve their turn. -Readers, fortunately or unfortunately, are of many grades, and even the -wisest of them--in some unwiser but not infrequent mood--desire not a -classic, but something a shade less excellent. “There is no book that -is acceptable, unless at certain seasons.” So said Milton; and the -saying is true, even of “Paradise Lost.” In the great sea of literature -there is room both for the big fish and for “the other fry.” Let us be -thankful; and if we are scribblers, by nature or by conceit, let us -scribble on. - - - - -CONCERNING THE LACK OF AN AMERICAN LITERATURE - - - - -CONCERNING THE LACK OF AN AMERICAN LITERATURE - - “Writers who have no past are pretty sure of having no - future.”--LOWELL. - - -It is an old story that the people of the United States have been slow -in achieving their intellectual independence. The British yoke has -remained upon our minds, though we have cast it off our necks. Our -literary men, especially, have deferred to English models and English -ideas. So we have been told till the tale has become monotonous. - -What everybody says must be true--perhaps; but even so, there may -be something to offer on the other side, or by way of extenuation, -although the man who should venture to offer it--such is the -peculiarity of the case and the perversity of human nature--might find -himself accounted unpatriotic for coming to the defense of his own -countrymen. - -In times past, assuredly, whatever may be true now, the condition of -things so much complained of was little reprehensible. Good or bad, it -was nothing more than was to have been expected as circumstances then -were. We had been English to begin with, and, for better or worse, the -English nature is not of a sort to be put off with a turn of the hand, -at the signing of a political document. It is self-evident, also, that -in the world of ideas every people, whether it will or no, must live -largely upon its ancestry. The utmost that any generation can hope to -do is to contribute its mite to the intellectual tradition. The better -part of its reading must be out of books that its predecessors have -sifted from the mass and handed down. If it adds a few of its own--two -or three, by good luck--to the permanent literature of the race, it -does all that can reasonably be demanded of it. And even so much as -this was hardly to be looked for from the American people during its -colonial period and for some decades afterwards, with a wilderness to -be subdued, savage neighbors to be held in check, and all the machinery -of civilization to be newly set up. Books are a record and criticism -of life, and those to whom life itself is an absorbing occupation are -not likely, unless they are almost insanely intellectual, to spend -any very considerable share of their days in work of a secondary and -postponable character. Life is more than criticism, and the best and -greatest people are those whose deeds give other people something to -write about. It is not to be wondered at, therefore, if American books -of a kind to be called literature were slow in coming; and we may -confess without shame that up to the year 1820 or thereabouts--say till -the advent of Irving and Cooper--the people of this country, if they -read anything better than sermons and almanacs, were obliged to depend -chiefly upon foreign authors. To which confession it may be added, -equally without shame, that even the works of Cooper and Irving were -scarcely sufficient of themselves to satisfy for many years together -the cravings of eager and serious minds. At all times and in all -countries, such minds, with the best will in the world to be loyal to -their own day, have been obliged to look mainly to old books. - -About the past, then, we need not spend time in mourning. If we play -our part as well as the fathers played theirs, we shall have no great -cause to blush. Since their day, what with Irving and Cooper and their -contemporaries and successors, there has been no dearth of books -written on this side of the water; but the complaint is still rife -that we have little or nothing in the way of a national literature: by -which it is meant, apparently, that our writers are not yet Americans, -or do not succeed in expressing the national spirit. Only the other -day, a critic, discoursing on “the conservatism and timidity of our -literature,” charged it against Lowell that “in his habits of writing -he continued English tradition,” whatever that may mean. “Our best -scholar” allowed his real self to speak but twice, we are given to -understand; then he spoke in dialect. His “Commemoration Ode” was a -splendid failure, because it was “imitative and secondary.” Whether it, -too, should have been written in dialect, we are not informed; but it -appears to be taken for granted that its failure, if it was a failure, -came, not from lack of genius or inspiration, but from deference to -foreign models. One cannot help wondering what Lowell himself would -have said to such a criticism: that he wrote in English and like an -Englishman because he dared not write in his own tongue and in his own -way. When a Scotchman complimented him upon his English,--“so like a -native’s,”--and asked him bluntly where he got it, he answered with -equal bluntness, in the words of the old song,-- - - “‘I got it in my mither’s wame.’” - -Yet Lowell, who spoke but twice in his own character, seems to have -done better than most of his fellows; for he and Curtis are the -only men of letters to find a place in a recent “Calendar of Great -Americans.” All their contemporaries and predecessors were either not -great, or else were something other than American,--cosmopolitan, -provincial, or English. Irving, Cooper, Poe, Bryant, Hawthorne, -Longfellow, Emerson, Whittier, Holmes, Prescott, Motley, Bancroft, -Parkman,--not one of these will bear the test. As for Emerson, he is -ruled out by name, because he was the “author of such thought as might -have been native to any clime.” He is of the world, and therefore not -American. It seems a hard judgment that the man who wrote “The Fortune -of the Republic,” “The Young American,” and the “Concord Hymn,”--the -man of whom it was recently said, so finely and so truly, that “he sent -ten thousand sons to the war,”--should find himself at this late hour -a man without a country. On such terms it is doubtful praise to be -called a cosmopolitan: and in view of such a ruling it becomes evident -that the exact nature of Americanism as a literary quality is yet to be -defined. Lowell’s attempt in that direction, by-the-bye, is probably -among the best. An American, according to Lowell’s idea of him,--so Mr. -James says,--was a man at once fresh and ripe. - -When it comes to practice, however, there is one American poet whose -literary patriotism was never called in question. The reference is of -course to Whitman. Listen to him, as he appeals to whoever “would -assume a place to teach or be a poet here in the States:”-- - - “Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America? - Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men? - Have you learned the physiology, phrenology, politics, geography, - pride, freedom, friendship of the land? its substratums and objects? - Have you considered the organic compact of the first day of the first - year of Independence, signed by the Commissioners, ratified by the - States, and read by Washington at the head of the army? - Have you possessed yourself of the Federal Constitution? - Do you see who have left all feudal processes and poems behind them, - and assumed the poems and processes of Democracy?” - -“Conservatism and timidity”! Here is one man, at all events, who is not -to be accused of “continuing English tradition.” He, if nobody else, -breathes a “haughty defiance of the Year One.” He may or may not be -“ripe;” he certainly is “fresh.” If there be some who fail to enjoy his -verse, there can be none who do not admire his courage. - -But surely it was not to be insisted upon, nor even expected, that -all American authors should break away thus suddenly and completely -from the past. Perhaps it was not even to be desired: partly because -variety is better than the best of sameness, and partly because so -abrupt a change might in the long run have hindered our emancipation. -Some readers would have been puzzled, others would have been offended. -Here and there one, at least, would have been ready to say, with -Wordsworth,-- - - “Me this unchartered freedom tires.” - -Little by little a reaction would have been produced, the “substratums -and objects” of the land would have suffered disastrous eclipse, -“feudal processes and poems” would have come in like a flood, and the -last state of the national mind would have been worse than the first. - -Nor can this extreme of revolt, or any approach to it, be thought -necessary to constitute an American writer. “American” and “rebel” are -not synonymous at this hour of the day. American literature, if we may -assert our American right to speak a truism roundly, is literature -written by Americans; that is to say, by the people of the United -States. In its subject it may be old or new, domestic or foreign; it -may be written in dialect,--sometimes called American,--or in English; -in any case, if it is literature at all, it is American literature. -And since there is already a body of such writing, we may venture -upon another capital letter, by the compositor’s leave, and speak of -it--still modestly, and remembering its youth--as American Literature. -For youthful it is, in the nature of the case, with its character but -imperfectly formed, and its full share of juvenile foibles; still -showing, as is inevitable and not discreditable, abundant traces of its -English origin. - -Thus far, it must be owned, it can boast little or no representation -among the supremely great of the earth. The genius of a new country -produces men of action rather than poets and philosophers. Washington -and Lincoln are names to shine in any company, but as yet the roll of -American authors contains few Homers and Shakespeares, and no great -number of Dantes and Miltons. Such as they are, however, they are -our own, and though in some cases we might have wished them more -“distinctively American,” we need not be in haste on that account -to tag them with a foreign label. Neither need we delude ourselves -with the notion that they might have been transcendent geniuses, -all of them, had they but stood up resolutely against the English -tradition. How to become a genius is one of the hard problems. There -is no likelihood that it can be solved by any process of intellectual -jingoism. The secret may consist partly in being one’s self; pretty -certainly it does not consist in being different from somebody else. -Between imitation and a set attempt to avoid imitation there is not so -very much to choose. Either of them stamps the work as secondary. As -for Homers and Shakespeares, we may remember for our comfort that names -like these are not to be found, in any country, among the living: they -never have been.[12] - -For our comfort, too, though not in the every-day sense of that -word, we do well to remind ourselves that as the greatness of our -American authors is but relative, so is the newness of our American -spirit. All that is called new is born of the old, and is itself in -part old. The movement of history is not by successive creations of -something out of nothing, but by the development of one thing from -another; and whether we like to believe it or not, this that we call -the American idea stands within the general law: it has been evolved, -or rather it is being evolved, out of what was before it. The public -mind, stirred by patriotic impulses and restive under criticism, may -clamor for originality, meaning by that absolute novelty, and North, -South, East, and West may exhaust themselves to answer the appeal: -we shall never see an absolutely new book, be it the “great American -novel” or anything else. As time goes on, we shall have, by the slow -processes of nature, a literature more and more distinctive, more and -more independent, and more and more unlike the English, more and more -American; but to the end its originality, like that of all literature, -will be but relative. Though men cross the sea, they can never escape -the spirit of their forerunners. Our very rebelliousness against -English domination is an English trait. The great American book, when -it comes, will not spring from virgin soil, but from seed, and the seed -will have had an age-long ancestry. “Works proceed from works,” says -a learned French critic; and the most searching of American critics -had something of the same thought in mind when he wrote, fifty years -ago, in response to inquiries “in Cambridge orations and elsewhere” -for “that great absentee,” an American literature, “A literature is no -man’s private concern, but a secular and generic result.” - -What then? Shall we cease effort, and leave it to blind law to work -out for us our intellectual salvation? That would be childish. Because -one thing is true, it does not follow that another and seemingly -contradictory thing may not be true likewise. The same Emerson who -spoke of literature as a “generic result,”--a word so anticipatory of -later thought as to seem like a flash of genius,--and therefore “no -man’s private concern,” was never done with proclaiming the power of -the individual soul and the omnipotence of individual faith. He never -scolded his countrymen; he cherished no illusion about the ability -of the American people or any other to hurry the accomplishment of a -“secular result;” but he, more than all others combined, enforced the -duty of American scholars to free themselves from the swaddling-clothes -of tradition; to live in the present, think in the present, believe in -the present, and speak always their own word. And the French critic -just now quoted, so modern in his point of view, so very different in -many respects from Emerson,--though Emerson, too, believed the laws -and powers of the intellect to be “facts in a natural history,” and -so “objects of science,”--was quoted but in part. “In literature as -in art,” he says, “the great operative cause--after the influence of -individuality--is that of works upon works.” The words are those of -M. Brunetière, who, in his attempt to apply to literary criticism the -methods of natural science, has seemed sometimes to allow more than -enough to the power of things over thought; yet he, too, treating -of the evolution of literary forms, gives the first place in that -evolution, not to changed conditions, nor to the germinal force of -great models, nor to the “moment,” a word on which he greatly insists, -but to the power of the individual. - -And where ought this power of the individual to be quickly and strongly -felt, if not in a democracy and in a new world? - -Like many other good things, nevertheless, individuality, though it may -properly be sought, is not to be gone after too directly,--as if it -could be carried by assault. Originality has often suffered violence, -it is true, but the violent have never taken it by force. We are not to -hope for intellectual life by any process of spontaneous generation; -nor are we to dread abjectly the influence of other minds over our own. -Individuality is a gift rarely lost, except by those who lose it before -they are born. Franklin, it is universally agreed, was an American of -the most pronounced type, one of our greatest and most original men. -His style, as Mr. James says of Lowell’s, was “an indefeasible part of -him;” yet all the world knows that he formed it, or believed that he -formed it, by a studious imitation of Addison. Originality is theirs -to whom it is given. With it a man may drench himself in the wisdom of -the ages, and take no harm; without it he may eschew books never so -jealously, and look into his own heart with never so complete a faith, -and come to no good. - -All of which is not to say that a scholar may not occupy himself too -much with the thoughts of others to the neglect of his own, or that -Americans as a people may not defer unreasonably to foreign standards. -Between the two extremes, excessive dependence upon tradition and a too -exclusive confidence in one’s own genius, there is a middle course. -If we cannot find it, then we are not yet ripe for a great national -literature, which must be the result of the old culture bestowed upon -new soil in a new time and under new conditions. - - - - - The Riverside Press - - _Electrotyped and printed by H. O. Houghton & Co._ - _Cambridge, Mass., U. S. A._ - - - - -FOOTNOTES: - - -[1] In this Old Colony town, though none of his English biographers -appear to know it, the boy Hazlitt lived in the Old North Parsonage, -in which had lived some time before a girl named Abigail Smith, -afterward better known as Abigail Adams, wife of the second President -of the United States, and mother of the sixth. For which fact, more -interesting to him than to his readers, it is to be feared, the present -writer is indebted to the researches of his old Weymouth schoolmate, -now President of the Weymouth Historical Society, Mr. John J. Loud. - -[2] As it was to Solomon and, by this time, to William Hazlitt. - -[3] “Mr. Johnson, indeed, as he was a very talking man himself, had an -idea that nothing promoted happiness so much as conversation.”--Mrs. -Piozzi. - -[4] Author of _Two Suffolk Friends_. - -[5] In a letter to his friend Pollock he says: “To-morrow I am going to -one of my great treats, namely, the Assizes at Ipswich: where I shall -see little Voltaire Jervis, and old Parke, who I trust will have the -gout, he bears it so Christianly.” - -[6] In connection with which it is good to remember that when -Thackeray, not long before he died, was asked by his daughter which of -his old friends he had loved most, he replied, “Why, dear old Fitz, -to be sure.” After FitzGerald’s death Tennyson wrote of him: “I had -no truer friend: he was one of the kindliest of men, and I have never -known one of so fine and delicate a wit.” - -[7] After he began writing, the question of an individual style took -on, as was inevitable, a different complexion. In his early days he -would not read Carlyle, and (more surprising) at forty or thereabout he -discontinued the reading of Livy; dreading in both cases an injury to -his own manner. - -[8] How largely he profited by his study of Spenser, Shakespeare, -Milton, and other poets, especially in the enrichment of his -vocabulary, is shown by Mr. E. de Sélincourt in the notes and -appendices to his recent admirable edition of Keats’s _Poems_. The -subject is interesting, and is treated in the most painstaking manner. - -[9] At this very time, by-the-bye, Hazlitt was lecturing, and Keats, -after hearing him, reports to his brother (February 14, 1818), -“Hazlitt’s last lecture was on Thomson, Cowper, and Crabbe. He praised -Thomson and Cowper, but he gave Crabbe an unmerciful licking.” - -[10] We speak thus without forgetting that an American poet once wrote -(what a reputable American periodical printed) a revised version of -one of the odes, just to show how easily Keats could be improved upon. -The good man might have been, though we believe he was not, brother to -the one of whom we have all heard, who declared his opinion that there -weren’t ten men in Boston who could have written Shakespeare’s plays. - -[11] Is there a possible connection between this fact and the further -one that really magical lines are seldom or never to be found in the -work of the more distinctively musical poets,--say in Coleridge, -Shelley, Tennyson, and Swinburne? - -[12] According to an eminent French critic, M. de Wyzewa, the United -States still has (since Whitman’s death, he means to say) two -poets,--Mr. Merril and Mr. Griffin. “Only two” is the critic’s phrase, -but the adverb need not disturb us. A busy people who have two poets at -once may count themselves rich. - - - - -TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES: - - - Italicized text is surrounded by underscores: _italics_. - - Emboldened text is surrounded by equals signs: =bold=. - - Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. - - Inconsistencies in hyphenation have been standardized. - -*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FRIENDS ON THE SHELF *** - -Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions will -be renamed. - -Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S. copyright -law means that no one owns a United States copyright in these works, -so the Foundation (and you!) can copy and distribute it in the -United States without permission and without paying copyright -royalties. Special rules, set forth in the General Terms of Use part -of this license, apply to copying and distributing Project -Gutenberg-tm electronic works to protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm -concept and trademark. 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