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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Four Americans, by Henry A. Beers
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Four Americans
+       Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman
+
+Author: Henry A. Beers
+
+Release Date: January 26, 2008 [EBook #24435]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FOUR AMERICANS ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Martin Pettit and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was
+produced from images generously made available by The
+Internet Archive/American Libraries.)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+FOUR AMERICANS
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+REPRINTS FROM THE YALE REVIEW
+
+[Illustration: Separator]
+
+_A Book of Yale Review Verse_
+
+1917
+
+_War Poems from The Yale Review_
+
+1918
+
+_War Poems from The Yale Review_
+
+(_Second Edition_)
+
+1919
+
+_Four Americans: Roosevelt, Hawthorne, Emerson, Whitman_
+
+1919
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+
+
+
+FOUR AMERICANS
+
+ROOSEVELT
+HAWTHORNE
+EMERSON
+WHITMAN
+
+
+BY
+
+HENRY A. BEERS
+
+AUTHOR OF
+
+STUDIES IN AMERICAN LITERATURE
+A HISTORY OF ENGLISH ROMANTICISM
+
+[Illustration: Shield, scroll: LUX ET VERITAS]
+
+NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT
+PUBLISHED FOR THE YALE REVIEW
+
+BY THE
+
+YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
+MDCCCCXX
+
+
+
+
+COPYRIGHT, 1919, BY
+YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
+
+
+First published, 1919
+Second printing, 1920
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+                                   PAGE
+
+  I. Roosevelt as Man of Letters      7
+
+ II. Fifty Years of Hawthorne        33
+
+III. A Pilgrim in Concord            59
+
+ IV. A Wordlet about Whitman         85
+
+
+
+
+ROOSEVELT AS MAN OF LETTERS
+
+
+In a club corner, just after Roosevelt's death, the question was asked
+whether his memory would not fade away, when the living man, with his
+vivid personality, had gone. But no: that personality had stamped itself
+too deeply on the mind of his generation to be forgotten. Too many
+observers have recorded their impressions; and already a dozen
+biographies and memoirs have appeared. Besides, he is his own recorder.
+He published twenty-six books, a catalogue of which any professional
+author might be proud; and a really wonderful feat when it is remembered
+that he wrote them in the intervals of an active public career as Civil
+Service Commissioner, Police Commissioner, member of his state
+legislature, Governor of New York, delegate to the National Republican
+Convention, Colonel of Rough Riders, Assistant Secretary of the Navy,
+Vice-President and President of the United States.
+
+Perhaps in some distant future he may become a myth or symbol, like
+other mighty hunters of the beast, Nimrod and Orion and Tristram of
+Lyonesse. Yet not so long as "African Game Trails" and the "Hunting
+Trips of a Ranchman" endure, to lift the imagination to those noble
+sports denied to the run of mortals by poverty, feebleness, timidity,
+the engrossments of the humdrum, everyday life, or lack of enterprise
+and opportunity. Old scraps of hunting song thrill us with the great
+adventure: "In the wild chamois' track at break of day"; "We'll chase
+the antelope over the plain"; "Afar in the desert I love to ride"; and
+then we go out and shoot at a woodchuck, with an old double-barrelled
+shotgun--and miss! If Roosevelt ever becomes a poet, it is while he is
+among the wild creatures and wild landscapes that he loved: in the
+gigantic forests of Brazil, or the almost unnatural nature of the
+Rockies and the huge cattle ranches of the plains, or on the limitless
+South African veldt, which is said to give a greater feeling of infinity
+than the ocean even.
+
+Roosevelt was so active a person--not to say so noisy and conspicuous;
+he so occupied the centre of every stage, that, when he died, it was as
+though a wind had fallen, a light had gone out, a military band had
+stopped playing. It was not so much the death of an individual as a
+general lowering in the vitality of the nation. America was less
+America, because he was no longer here. He should have lived twenty
+years more had he been willing to go slow, to loaf and invite his soul,
+to feed that mind of his in a wise passiveness. But there was no repose
+about him, and his pleasures were as strenuous as his toils. John
+Burroughs tells us that he did not care for fishing, the contemplative
+man's recreation. No contemplation for him, but action; no angling in a
+clear stream for a trout or grayling; but the glorious, dangerous
+excitement of killing big game--grizzlies, lions, African buffaloes,
+mountain sheep, rhinoceroses, elephants. He never spared himself: he
+wore himself out. But doubtless he would have chosen the crowded hour of
+glorious life--or strife, for life and strife were with him the same.
+
+He was above all things a fighter, and the favorite objects of his
+denunciation were professional pacifists, nice little men who had let
+their muscles get soft, and nations that had lost their fighting edge.
+Aggressive war, he tells us in "The Winning of the West," is not always
+bad. "Americans need to keep in mind the fact that, as a nation, they
+have erred far more often in not being willing enough to fight than in
+being too willing." "Cowardice," he writes elsewhere, "in a race, as in
+an individual, is the unpardonable sin." Is this true? Cowardice is a
+weakness, perhaps a disgraceful weakness: a defect of character which
+makes a man contemptible, just as foolishness does. But it is not a sin
+at all, and surely not an unpardonable one. Cruelty, treachery, and
+ingratitude are much worse traits, and selfishness is as bad. I have
+known very good men who were cowards; men that I liked and trusted but
+who, from weakness of nerves or other physical causes--perhaps from
+prenatal influences--were easily frightened and always constitutionally
+timid. The Colonel was a very pugnacious man: he professed himself to be
+a lover of peace--and so did the Kaiser--but really he enjoyed the
+_gaudium certaminis_, as all bold spirits do.
+
+In the world-wide sense of loss which followed his death, some rather
+exaggerated estimates made themselves heard. A preacher announced that
+there had been only two great Americans, one of whom was Theodore
+Roosevelt. An editor declared that the three greatest Americans were
+Washington, Lincoln, and Roosevelt. But not all great Americans have
+been in public life; and, of those who have, very few have been
+Presidents of the United States. What is greatness? Roosevelt himself
+rightly insists on character as the root of the matter. Still character
+alone does not make a man great. There are thousands of men in common
+life, of sound and forceful character, who never become great, who are
+not even potentially great. To make them such, great abilities are
+needed, as well as favoring circumstances. In his absolute manner--a
+manner caught perhaps partly from Macaulay, for whose qualities as a
+writer he had a high and, I think, well-justified regard--he pronounces
+Cromwell the greatest Englishman of the seventeenth century. Was he so?
+He was the greatest English soldier and magistrate of that century; but
+how about Bacon and Newton, about Shakespeare and Milton?
+
+Let us think of a few other Americans who, in their various fields,
+might perhaps deserve to be entitled great. Shall we say Jonathan
+Edwards, Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, John Marshall, Robert
+Fulton, S. F. B. Morse, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Daniel Webster, Horace
+Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, Admiral Farragut, General W. T. Sherman,
+James Russell Lowell, Nathaniel Hawthorne, General Robert E. Lee? None
+of these people were Presidents of the United States. But to the man in
+the street there is something imposing about the office and title of a
+chief magistrate, be he emperor, king, or elected head of a republic. It
+sets him apart. Look at the crowds that swarm to get a glimpse of the
+President when he passes through, no matter whether it is George
+Washington or Franklin Pierce.
+
+It might be safer, on the whole, to say that the three names in
+question are those of our greatest presidents, not of the greatest
+Americans. And even this comparison might be questioned. Some, for
+example, might assert the claims of Thomas Jefferson to rank with the
+others. Jefferson was a man of ideas who made a strong impression on his
+generation. He composed the Declaration of Independence and founded the
+Democratic party and the University of Virginia. He had a more flexible
+mind than Washington, though not such good judgment; and he had
+something of Roosevelt's alert interest in a wide and diversified range
+of subjects. But the latter had little patience with Jefferson. He may
+have respected him as the best rider and pistol shot in Virginia; but in
+politics he thought him a theorist and doctrinaire imbued with the
+abstract notions of the French philosophical deists and democrats.
+Jefferson, he thought, knew nothing and cared nothing about military
+affairs. He let the army run down and preferred to buy Louisiana rather
+than conquer it, while he dreamed of universal fraternity and was the
+forerunner of the Dove of Peace and the League of Nations.
+
+Roosevelt, in fact, had no use for philosophy or speculative thought
+which could not be reduced to useful action. He was an eminently
+practical thinker. His mind was without subtlety, and he had little
+imagination. A life of thought for its own sake; the life of a dreamer
+or idealist; a life like that of Coleridge, with his paralysis of will
+and abnormal activity of the speculative faculty, eternally spinning
+metaphysical cobwebs, doubtless seemed to the author of "The Strenuous
+Life" a career of mere self-indulgence. It is not without significance
+that, with all his passion for out of doors, for wild life and the study
+of bird and beast, he nowhere, so far as I can remember, mentions
+Thoreau,[A] who is far and away our greatest nature writer. Doubtless he
+may have esteemed him as a naturalist, but not as a transcendentalist or
+as an impracticable faddist who refused to pay taxes because
+Massachusetts enforced the fugitive slave law. We are told that his
+fellow historian, Francis Parkman, had a contempt for philosophers like
+Emerson and Thoreau and an admiration for writers such as Scott and
+Cooper who depicted scenes of bold adventure. The author of "The Oregon
+Trail" and the author of "African Game Trails" had a good deal in
+common, especially great force of will--you see it in Parkman's jaw. He
+was a physical wreck and did his work under almost impossible
+conditions; while Roosevelt had built up an originally sickly
+constitution into a physique of splendid vigor.
+
+Towards the critical intellect, as towards the speculative, Roosevelt
+felt an instinctive antagonism. One of his most characteristic
+utterances is the address delivered at the Sorbonne, April 30, 1910,
+"Citizenship in a Republic." Here, amidst a good deal of moral
+commonplace--wise and sensible for the most part, but sufficiently
+platitudinous--occurs a burst of angry eloquence. For he was always at
+his strongest when scolding somebody. His audience included the
+intellectual _elite_ of France; and he warns it against the besetting
+sin of university dons and the learned and lettered class in general, a
+supercilious, patronizing attitude towards the men of action who are
+doing the rough work of the world. Critics are the object of his
+fiercest denunciation. "A cynical habit of thought and speech, a
+readiness to criticise work which the critic himself never tries to
+perform, an intellectual aloofness which will not accept contact with
+life's realities--all these are marks, not, as the possessor would fain
+think, of superiority, but of weakness.... It is not the critic who
+counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or
+where the doer of deeds could have done them better.... Shame on the man
+of cultivated taste who permits refinement to develop into a
+fastidiousness that unfits him for doing the rough work of a workaday
+world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves there is but a small
+field of usefulness open for the men of cloistered life who shrink from
+contact with their fellows."
+
+The speaker had seemingly himself been stung by criticism; or he was
+reacting against Matthew Arnold, the celebrated "Harvard indifference,"
+and the cynical talk of the clubs.
+
+We do not expect our Presidents to be literary men and are
+correspondingly gratified when any of them shows signs of almost human
+intelligence in spheres outside of politics. Of them all, none touched
+life at so many points, or was so versatile, picturesque, and generally
+interesting a figure as the one who has just passed away. Washington was
+not a man of books. A country gentleman, a Virginia planter and
+slave-owner, member of a landed aristocracy, he had the limited
+education of his class and period. Rumor said that he did not write his
+own messages. And there is a story that John Quincy Adams, regarding a
+portrait of the father of his country, exclaimed, "To think that that
+old wooden head will go down in history as a great man!" But this was
+the comment of a Boston Brahmin, and all the Adamses had bitter tongues.
+Washington was, of course, a very great man, though not by virtue of any
+intellectual brilliancy, but of his strong character, his immense
+practical sagacity and common sense, his leadership of men.
+
+As to Lincoln, we know through what cold obstruction he struggled up
+into the light, educating himself to be one of the soundest statesmen
+and most effective public speakers of his day--or any day. There was an
+inborn fineness or sensitiveness in Lincoln, a touch of the artist (he
+even wrote verses) which contrasts with the phlegm of his illustrious
+contemporary, General Grant. The latter had a vein of coarseness, of
+commonness rather, in his nature; evidenced by his choice of associates
+and his entire indifference to "the things of the mind." He was almost
+illiterate and only just a gentleman. Yet by reason of his dignified
+modesty and simplicity, he contrived to write one of the best of
+autobiographies.
+
+Roosevelt had many advantages over his eminent predecessors. Of old
+Knickerbocker stock, with a Harvard education, and the habit of good
+society, he had means enough to indulge in his favorite pastimes. To
+run a cattle ranch in Dakota, lead a hunting party in Africa and an
+exploring expedition in Brazil, these were wide opportunities, but he
+fully measured up to them. Mr. W. H. Hays, chairman of the Republican
+National Committee, said of him, "He had more knowledge about more
+things than any other man." Well, not quite that. We have all known
+people who made a specialty of omniscience. If a man can speak two
+languages besides his own and can read two more fairly well, he is at
+once credited with knowing half a dozen foreign tongues as well as he
+knows English. Let us agree, however, that Roosevelt knew a lot about a
+lot of things. He was a rapid and omnivorous reader, reading a book with
+his finger tips, gutting it of its contents, as he did the birds that he
+shot, stuffed, and mounted; yet not inappreciative of form, and
+accustomed to recommend much good literature to his countrymen. He took
+an eager interest in a large variety of subjects, from Celtic poetry and
+the fauna and flora of many regions to simplified spelling and the split
+infinitive.
+
+A young friend of mine was bringing out, for the use of schools and
+colleges, a volume of selections from the English poets, all learnedly
+annotated, and sent me his manuscript to look over. On a passage about
+the bittern bird he had made this note, "The bittern has a harsh,
+throaty cry." Whereupon I addressed him thus: "Throaty nothing! You are
+guessing, man. If Teddy Roosevelt reads your book--and he reads
+everything--he will denounce you as a nature faker and put you down for
+membership in the Ananias Club. Recall what he did to Ernest
+Seton-Thompson and to that minister in Stamford, Connecticut. Remember
+how he crossed swords with Mr. Scully touching the alleged dangerous
+nature of the ostrich and the early domestication of the peacock. So far
+as I know, the bittern thing has no voice at all. His real stunt is as
+follows. He puts his beak down into the swamp, in search of insects and
+snails or other marine life--_est-ce que je sais?_--and drawing in the
+bog-water through holes in his beak, makes a booming sound which is most
+impressive. Now do not think me an ornithologist or a bird sharp.
+Personally I do not know a bittern from an olive-backed thrush. But I
+have read some poetry, and I remember what Thomson says in 'The
+Seasons':
+
+
+     The bittern knows his time with bill ingulf'd
+     To shake the sounding marsh.
+
+
+See also 'The Lady of the Lake':
+
+
+     And the bittern sound his drum,
+     Booming from the sedgy shallow.
+
+
+See even old Chaucer who knew a thing or two about birds, _teste_ his
+'Parlament of Foules,' admirably but strangely edited by Lounsbury,
+whose indifference to art was only surpassed by his hostility to nature.
+Says Chaucer:
+
+
+     And as a bytoure bumblith in the myre."
+
+
+My friend canceled his note. It is, of course, now established that the
+bittern "booms"--not in the mud--but in the air.
+
+Mr. Roosevelt was historian, biographer, essayist, and writer of
+narrative papers on hunting, outdoor life, and natural history, and in
+all these departments did solid, important work. His "Winning of the
+West" is little, if at all, inferior in historical interest to the
+similar writings of Parkman and John Fiske. His "History of the Naval
+War of 1812" is an astonishing performance for a young man of
+twenty-four, only two years out of college. For it required a careful
+sifting of evidence and weighing of authorities. The job was done with
+patient thoroughness, and the book is accepted, I believe, as
+authoritative. It is to me a somewhat tedious tale. One sea fight is
+much like another, a record of meaningless slaughter.
+
+Of the three lives, those of Gouverneur Morris, T. H. Benton, and Oliver
+Cromwell, I cannot speak with confidence, having read only the last. I
+should guess that the life of Benton was written more _con amore_ than
+the others, for the frontier was this historian's favorite scene. The
+life of Cromwell is not so much a formal biography as a continuous essay
+in interpretation of a character still partly enigmatic in spite of all
+the light that so many acute psychologists have shed upon it. It is a
+relief to read for once a book which is without preface, footnote, or
+reference. It cannot be said that the biographer contributes anything
+very new to our knowledge of his subject. The most novel features of his
+work are the analogies that he draws between situations in English and
+American political history. These are usually ingenious and
+illuminating, sometimes a little misleading; as where he praises
+Lincoln's readiness to acquiesce in the result of the election in 1864
+and to retire peaceably in favor of McClellan; contrasting it with
+Cromwell's dissolution of his Parliaments and usurpation of the supreme
+power. There was a certain likeness in the exigencies, to be sure, but a
+broad difference between the problems confronting the two rulers.
+Lincoln was a constitutional President with strictly limited powers,
+bound by usage and precedent. For him to have kept his seat by military
+force, in defiance of a Democratic majority, would have been an act of
+treason. But the Lord Protector held a new office, unknown to the old
+constitution of England and with ill-defined powers. A revolution had
+tossed him to the top and made him dictator. He was bound to keep the
+peace in unsettled times, to keep out the Stuarts, to keep down the
+unruly factions. If Parliament would not help, he must govern without
+it. Carlyle thought that he had no choice.
+
+Roosevelt's addresses, essays, editorials, and miscellaneous papers,
+which fill many volumes, are seldom literary in subject, and certainly
+not in manner. He was an effective speaker and writer, using plain,
+direct, forcible English, without any graces of style. In these papers
+he is always the moralist, earnest, high-minded, and the preacher of
+many gospels: the gospel of the strenuous life; the gospel of what used
+to be called "muscular Christianity"; the gospel of large families; of
+hundred per cent Americanism; and, above all, of military preparedness.
+I am not here concerned with the President's political principles, nor
+with the specific measures that he advocated. I will only say, to guard
+against suspicion of unfair prejudice, that, as a Democrat, a
+freetrader, a state-rights man, individualist, and anti-imperialist, I
+naturally disapproved of many acts of his administration, of the
+administration of his predecessor, and of his party in general. I
+disapproved, and still do, of the McKinley and Payne-Aldrich tariffs; of
+the Spanish war--most avoidable of wars--with its sequel, the conquest
+of the Philippines; above all, of the seizure of the Panama Canal zone.
+
+But let all that pass: I am supposed to be dealing with my subject as
+man of letters. As such the Colonel of the Rough Riders was the high
+commander-in-chief of rough writers. He never persuaded his readers into
+an opinion--he bullied them into it. When he gnashed his big teeth and
+shook his big stick,
+
+
+     ... The bold Ascalonite
+     Fled from his iron ramp; old warriors turned
+     Their plated backs under his heel;
+
+
+mollycoddles, pussy-footers, professional pacifists, and nice little men
+who had lost their fighting edge, all scuttled to cover. He called
+names, he used great violence of language. For instance, a certain
+president of a woman's college had "fatuously announced ... that it was
+better to have one child brought up in the best way than several not
+thus brought up." The woman making this statement, wrote the Colonel,
+"is not only unfit to be at the head of a female college, but is not fit
+to teach the lowest class in a kindergarten; for such teaching is not
+merely folly, but a peculiarly repulsive type of mean and selfish
+wickedness." And again: "The man or woman who deliberately avoids
+marriage ... is in effect a criminal against the race and should be an
+object of contemptuous abhorrence by all healthy people."
+
+Now, I am not myself an advocate of race suicide but I confess to a
+feeling of sympathy with the lady thus denounced, whose point of view
+is, at least, comprehensible. Old Malthus was not such an ass as some
+folks think. It is impossible not to admire Roosevelt's courage,
+honesty, and wonderful energy: impossible to keep from liking the man
+for his boyish impulsiveness, camaraderie, sporting blood, and hatred of
+a rascal. But it is equally impossible for a man of any spirit to keep
+from resenting his bullying ways, his intolerance of quiet, peaceable
+people and persons of an opposite temperament to his own. Even nice,
+timid little men who have let their bodies get soft do not like to be
+bullied. It puts their backs up. His ideal of character was manliness, a
+sound ideal, but he insisted too much upon the physical side of it,
+"red-bloodedness" and all that. Those poor old fat generals in
+Washington who had been enjoying themselves at their clubs, playing
+bridge and drinking Scotch highballs! He made them all turn out and ride
+fifty miles a day.
+
+Mr. Roosevelt produced much excellent literature, but no masterpieces
+like Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and Second Inaugural. Probably his
+sketches of ranch life and of hunting trips in three continents will be
+read longest and will keep their freshness after the public questions
+which he discussed have lost interest and his historical works have been
+in part rewritten. In these outdoor papers, besides the thrilling
+adventures which they--very modestly--record, there are even passages of
+descriptive beauty and chapters of graphic narrative, like the tale of
+the pursuit and capture of the three robbers who stole the boats on the
+Missouri River, which belonged to the Roosevelt ranch. This last would
+be a capital addition to school readers and books of selected standard
+prose.
+
+Senator Lodge and other friends emphasize the President's sense of
+humor. He had it, of course. He took pains to establish the true reading
+of that famous retort, "All I want out of you is common civility and
+damned little of that." He used to repeat with glee Lounsbury's
+witticism about "the infinite capability of the human mind to resist the
+introduction of knowledge." I wonder whether he knew of that other good
+saying of Lounsbury's about the historian Freeman's being, in his own
+person, a proof of the necessity of the Norman Conquest. He had, at all
+events, a just and high estimate of the merits of my brilliant
+colleague. "Heu quanto minus est cum reliquis versari quam tui
+meminisse!" But Roosevelt was not himself a humorist, and his writings
+give little evidence of his possession of the faculty. Lincoln, now, was
+one of the foremost American humorists. But Roosevelt was too strenuous
+for the practice of humor, which implies a certain relaxation of mind: a
+detachment from the object of immediate pursuit: a superiority to
+practical interests which indulges itself in the play of thought; and,
+in the peculiarly American form of it, a humility which inclines one to
+laugh at himself. Impossible to fancy T. R. making the answer that
+Lincoln made to an applicant for office: "I haven't much influence with
+this administration." As for that variety of humor that is called irony,
+it demands a duplicity which the straight-out-speaking Roosevelt could
+not practise. He was like Epaminondas in the Latin prose composition
+book, who was such a lover of truth that he never told a falsehood even
+in jest--_ne joco quidem_.
+
+The only instance of his irony that I recall--there may be others--is
+the one recorded by Mr. Leupp in his reply to Senator Gorman, who had
+charged that the examiners of the Civil Service Commission had turned
+down "a bright young man" in the city of Baltimore, an applicant for the
+position of letter-carrier, "because he could not tell the most direct
+route from Baltimore to Japan." Hereupon the young Civil Service
+Commissioner challenged the senator to verify his statement, but Mr.
+Gorman preserved a dignified silence. Then the Commissioner overwhelmed
+him in a public letter from which Mr. Leupp quotes the closing passage,
+beginning thus: "High-minded, sensitive Mr. Gorman! Clinging, trustful
+Mr. Gorman! Nothing could shake his belief in that 'bright young man.'
+Apparently he did not even yet try to find out his name--if he had a
+name," and so on for nearly a page. Excellent fooling, but a bit too
+long and heavy-handed for the truest ironic effect.
+
+Many of our Presidents, however little given to the use of the pen, have
+been successful coiners of phrases--phrases that have stuck: "entangling
+alliances," "era of good feeling," "innocuous desuetude," "a condition,
+not a theory." Lincoln was happiest at this art, and there is no need to
+mention any of the scores of pungent sayings which he added to the
+language and which are in daily use. President Roosevelt was no whit
+behind in this regard. All recognize and remember the many phrases to
+which he gave birth or currency: "predatory wealth," "bull moose," "hit
+the line hard," "weasel words," "my hat is in the ring," and so on. He
+took a humorous delight in mystifying the public with recondite
+allusions, sending everyone to the dictionary to look out "Byzantine
+logothete," and to the Bible and cyclopedia to find Armageddon.
+
+Roosevelt is alleged to have had a larger personal following than any
+other man lately in public life. What a testimony to his popularity is
+the "teddy bear"; and what a sign of the universal interest, hostile or
+friendly, which he excited in his contemporaries, is the fact that Mr.
+Albert Shaw was able to compile a caricature life of him presenting many
+hundred pictures! There was something German about Roosevelt's
+standards. In this last war he stood heart and soul for America and her
+allies against Germany's misconduct. But he admired the Germans'
+efficiency, their highly organized society, their subordination of the
+individual to the state. He wanted to Prussianize this great peaceful
+republic by introducing universal obligatory military service. He
+insisted, like the Germans, upon the _Hausfrau's_ duty to bear and rear
+many children. If he had been a German, it seems possible that, with his
+views as to the right of strong races to expand, by force if necessary,
+he might have justified the seizure of Silesia, the partition of
+Poland, the _Drang nach Osten_, and maybe even the invasion of
+Belgium--as a military measure.
+
+And so of religion and the church, which Germans regard as a department
+of government. Our American statesman, of course, was firmly in favor of
+the separation of church and state and of universal toleration. But he
+advises everyone to join the church, some church, any old church; not
+because one shares its beliefs--creeds are increasingly unimportant--but
+because the church is an instrument of social welfare, and a man can do
+more good in combination with his fellows than when he stands alone.
+There is much truth in this doctrine, though it has a certain naivete,
+when looked at from the standpoint of the private soul and its spiritual
+needs.
+
+As in the church, so in the state, he stood for the associative
+principle as opposed to an extreme individualism. He was a practical
+politician and therefore an honest partisan, feeling that he could work
+more efficiently for good government within party lines than outside
+them. He resigned from the Free Trade League because his party was
+committed to the policy of protection. In 1884 he supported his party's
+platform and candidate, instead of joining the Mugwumps and voting for
+Cleveland, though at the National Republican Convention, to which he
+went as a delegate, he had opposed the nomination of Blaine. I do not
+believe that his motive in this decision was selfish, or that he quailed
+under the snap of the party lash because he was threatened with
+political death in case he disobeyed. Theodore Roosevelt was nobody's
+man. He thought, as he frankly explained, that one who leaves his
+faction for every slight occasion, loses his influence and his power for
+good. Better to compromise, to swallow some differences and to stick to
+the crowd which, upon the whole and in the long run, embodies one's
+convictions. This is a comprehensible attitude, and possibly it is the
+correct one for the man in public life who is frequently a candidate for
+office. Yet I wish he could have broken with his party and voted for
+Cleveland. For, ironically enough, it was Roosevelt himself who
+afterward split his party and brought in Wilson and the Democrats.
+
+Disregarding his political side and considering him simply as man of
+letters, one seeks for comparisons with other men of letters who were at
+once big sportsmen and big writers; Christopher North, for example:
+"Christopher in his Aviary" and "Christopher in his Shooting Jacket."
+The likeness here is only a very partial one, to be sure. The American
+was like the Scotchman in his athleticism, high spirits, breezy
+optimism, love of the open air, intense enjoyment of life. But he had
+not North's roystering conviviality and uproarious Toryism; and the
+kinds of literature that they cultivated were quite unlike.
+
+Charles Kingsley offers a closer resemblance, though the differences
+here are as numerous as the analogies. Roosevelt was not a clergyman,
+and not a creative writer, a novelist, or poet. His temperament was not
+very similar to Kingsley's. Yet the two shared a love for bold
+adventure, a passion for sport, and an eager interest in the life of
+animals and plants. Sport with Kingsley took the shape of trout fishing
+and of riding to hounds, not of killing lions with the rifle. He was
+fond of horses and dogs; associated democratically with gamekeepers,
+grooms, whippers-in, poachers even; as Roosevelt did with cowboys,
+tarpon fishers, wilderness guides, beaters, trappers, and all whom Walt
+Whitman calls "powerful uneducated persons," loving them for their
+pluck, coolness, strength, and skill. Kingsley's "At Last, a Christmas
+in the West Indies," exhibits the same curiosity as to tropical botany
+and zoology that Roosevelt shows in his African and Brazilian journeys.
+Not only tastes, but many ideals and opinions the two men had in
+common. "Parson Lot," the Chartist and Christian Socialist, had the same
+sympathy with the poor and the same desire to improve the condition of
+agricultural laborers and London artisans which led Roosevelt to promote
+employers' liability laws and other legislation to protect the
+workingman from exploitation by conscienceless wealth. Kingsley, like
+Roosevelt, was essentially Protestant. Neither he nor Mr. Roosevelt
+liked asceticism or celibacy. As a historian, Kingsley did not rank at
+all with the author of "The Winning of the West" and the "Naval War of
+1812." On the other hand, if Roosevelt had written novels and poetry, I
+think he would have rejoiced greatly to write "Westward Ho," "The Last
+Buccaneer," and "Ode to the North-East Wind."
+
+In fine, whatever lasting fortune may be in store for Roosevelt's
+writings, the disappearance of his vivid figure leaves a blank in the
+contemporary scene. And those who were against him can join with those
+who were for him in slightly paraphrasing Carlyle's words of dismissal
+to Walter Scott, "Theodore Roosevelt, pride of all Americans, take our
+proud and sad farewell."
+
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+[A] Mr. Edwin Carty Ranck, of the Roosevelt Memorial Committee,
+calls attention to the following sentence, which I had overlooked: "As a
+woodland writer, Thoreau comes second only to Burroughs."--"The
+Wilderness Hunter," p. 261.
+
+
+
+
+FIFTY YEARS OF HAWTHORNE
+
+
+Hawthorne was an excellent critic of his own writings. He recognizes
+repeatedly the impersonal and purely objective nature of his fiction. R.
+H. Hutton once called him the ghost of New England; and those who love
+his exquisite, though shadowy, art are impelled to give corporeal
+substance to this disembodied spirit: to draw him nearer out of his
+chill aloofness, by associating him with people and places with which
+they too have associations.
+
+I heard Colonel Higginson say, in a lecture at Concord, that if a few
+drops of redder blood could have been added to Hawthorne's style, he
+would have been the foremost imaginative writer of his century. The
+ghosts in "The AEneid" were unable to speak aloud until they had drunk
+blood. Instinctively, then, one seeks to infuse more red corpuscles into
+the somewhat anaemic veins of these tales and romances. For Hawthorne's
+fiction is almost wholly ideal. He does not copy life like Thackeray,
+whose procedure is inductive: does not start with observed characters,
+but with an imagined problem or situation of the soul, inventing
+characters to fit. There is always a dreamy quality about the action:
+no violent quarrels, no passionate love scenes. Thus it has been often
+pointed out that in "The Scarlet Letter" we do not get the history of
+Dimmesdale's and Hester's sin: not the passion itself, but only its
+sequels in the conscience. So in "The House of the Seven Gables," and
+"The Marble Faun," a crime has preceded the opening of the story, which
+deals with the working out of the retribution.
+
+When Hawthorne handled real persons, it was in the form of the character
+sketch--often the satirical character sketch,--as in the introduction to
+"The Scarlet Letter" which scandalized the people of Salem. If he could
+have made a novel out of his custom-house acquaintances, he might have
+given us something less immaterial. He felt the lack of solidity in his
+own creations: the folly of constructing "the semblance of a world out
+of airy matter"; the "value hidden in petty incidents and ordinary
+characters." "A better book than I shall ever write was there," he
+confesses, but "my brain wanted the insight and my hand the cunning to
+transcribe it."
+
+Now and then, when he worked from observation, or utilized his own
+experiences, a piece of drastic realism results. The suicide of Zenobia
+is transferred, with the necessary changes, from a long passage in "The
+American Note Books," in which he tells of going out at night, with his
+neighbors, to drag for the body of a girl who had drowned herself in the
+Concord. Yet he did not refrain the touch of symbolism even here. There
+is a wound on Zenobia's breast, inflicted by the pole with which
+Hollingsworth is groping the river bottom.
+
+And this is why one finds his "American Note Books" quite as interesting
+reading as his stories. Very remarkable things, these note books. They
+have puzzled Mr. James, who asks what the author would be at in them,
+and suggests that he is writing letters to himself, or practising his
+hand at description. They are not exactly a _journal in-time_; nor are
+they records of thought, like Emerson's ten volumes of journals. They
+are carefully composed, and are full of hints for plots, scenes,
+situations, characters, to be later worked up. In the three collections,
+"Twice-Told Tales," "Mosses from an Old Manse," and "The Snow Image,"
+there are, in round numbers, a hundred tales and sketches; and Mr.
+Conway has declared that, in the number of his original plots, no modern
+author, save Browning, has equalled Hawthorne. Now, the germ of many, if
+not most, of these inventions may be found in some brief jotting--a
+paragraph, or a line or two--in "The American Note Books."
+
+Yet it is not as literary material that these notes engage me most--by
+far the greater portion were never used,--but as records of observation
+and studies of life. I will even acknowledge a certain excitement when
+the diarist's wanderings lead him into my own neighborhood, however
+insignificant the result. Thus, in a letter from New Haven in 1830, he
+writes, "I heard some of the students at Yale College conjecturing that
+I was an Englishman." Mr. Lathrop thinks that it was on this trip
+through Connecticut that he hit upon his story, "The Seven Vagabonds,"
+the scene of which is near Stamford, in the van of a travelling showman,
+where the seven wanderers take shelter during a thunderstorm. How
+quaintly true to the old provincial life of back-country New England are
+these figures--a life that survives to-day in out-of-the-way places.
+Holgrave, the young daguerreotypist in "The House of the Seven Gables,"
+a type of the universal Yankee, had practised a number of these queer
+trades: had been a strolling dentist, a lecturer on mesmerism, a
+salesman in a village store, a district schoolmaster, editor of a
+country newspaper; and "had subsequently travelled New England and the
+Middle States, as a peddler, in the employment of a Connecticut
+manufactory of Cologne water and other essences." The Note Books tell us
+that, at North Adams in 1838, the author foregathered with a
+surgeon-dentist, who was also a preacher of the Baptist persuasion: and
+that, on the stage-coach between Worcester and Northampton, they took up
+an essence-vender who was peddling anise-seed, cloves, red-cedar,
+wormwood, opodeldoc, hair-oil, and Cologne water. Do you imagine that
+the essence-peddler is extinct? No, you may meet his covered wagon
+to-day on lonely roads between the hill-villages of Massachusetts and
+Connecticut.
+
+It was while living that strange life of seclusion at Old Salem,
+compared with which Thoreau's hermitage at Walden was like the central
+roar of Broadway, that Hawthorne broke away now and then from his
+solitude, and went rambling off in search of contacts with real life.
+Here is another item that he fetched back from Connecticut under date of
+September, 1838: "In Connecticut and also sometimes in Berkshire, the
+villages are situated on the most elevated ground that can be found, so
+that they are visible for miles around. Litchfield is a remarkable
+instance, occupying a high plain, without the least shelter from the
+winds, and with almost as wide an expanse of view as from a
+mountain-top. The streets are very wide--two or three hundred feet at
+least--with wide green margins, and sometimes there is a wide green
+space between two road tracks.... The graveyard is on the slope, and at
+the foot of a swell, filled with old and new gravestones, some of red
+freestone, some of gray granite, most of them of white marble and one of
+cast iron with an inscription of raised letters." Do I not know that
+wind-swept hilltop, those grassy avenues? Do I not know that ancient
+graveyard, and what names are on its headstones? Yes, even as the heart
+knoweth its own bitterness.
+
+As we go on in life, anniversaries become rather melancholy affairs. The
+turn of the year--the annual return of the day--birthdays or death-days
+or set festal occasions like Christmas or the New Year, bring reminders
+of loss and change. This is true of domestic anniversaries; while public
+literary celebrations, designed to recall to a forgetful generation the
+centenary or other dates in the lives of great writers, appear too often
+but milestones on the road to oblivion. Fifty years is too short a time
+to establish a literary immortality; and yet, if any American writer has
+already won the position of a classic, Hawthorne is that writer.
+Speaking in this country in 1883, Matthew Arnold said: "Hawthorne's
+literary talent is of the first order. His subjects are generally not to
+me subjects of the highest interest; but his literary talent is ... the
+finest, I think, which America has yet produced--finer, by much, than
+Emerson's." But how does the case stand to-day? I believe that
+Hawthorne's fame is secure as a whole, in spite of the fact that much of
+his work has begun to feel the disintegrating force of hostile
+criticism, and "the unimaginable touch of time."
+
+For one thing, American fiction, for the past fifty years, has been
+taking a direction quite the contrary of his. Run over the names that
+will readily occur of modern novelists and short-story writers, and ask
+yourself whether the vivid coloring of these realistic schools must not
+inevitably have blanched to a still whiter pallor those visionary tales
+of which the author long ago confessed that they had "the pale tints of
+flowers that blossomed in too retired a shade." With practice has gone
+theory; and now the critics of realism are beginning to nibble at the
+accepted estimates of Hawthorne. A very damaging bit of dissection is
+the recent essay by Mr. W. C. Brownell, one of the most acute and
+unsparingly analytic of American critics. It is full of cruelly clever
+things: for example, "Zenobia and Miriam linger in one's memory rather
+as brunettes than as women." And again, _a propos_ of Roger
+Chillingworth in "The Scarlet Letter,"--"His characters are not
+creations, but expedients." I admire these sayings; but they seem to me,
+like most epigrams, brilliant statements of half-truths. In general, Mr.
+Brownell's thesis is that Hawthorne was spoiled by allegory: that he
+abused his naturally rare gift of imagination by declining to grapple
+with reality, which is the proper material for the imagination, but
+allowing his fancy--an inferior faculty--to play with dreams and
+symbols; and that consequently he has left but one masterpiece.
+
+This is an old complaint. Long ago, Edgar Poe, who did not live to read
+"The Scarlet Letter," but who wrote a favorable review of "The
+Twice-Told Tales," advised the author to give up allegory. In 1880, Mr.
+Henry James wrote a life of Hawthorne for the English Men of Letters
+series. This was addressed chiefly to the English public and was thought
+in this country to be a trifle unsympathetic; in particular in its
+patronizing way of dwelling upon the thinness of the American social
+environment and the consequent provincialism of Hawthorne's books. The
+"American Note Books," in particular, seem to Mr. James a chronicle of
+small beer, and he marvels at the triviality of an existence which could
+reduce the diarist to recording an impression that "the aromatic odor of
+peat smoke in the sunny autumnal air is very pleasant." This peat-smoke
+entry has become proverbial, and is mentioned by nearly everyone who
+writes about Hawthorne. Yet on a recent rereading of James's biography,
+it seemed to me not so unsympathetic as I had remembered it; but, in
+effect, cordially appreciative. He touches, however, on this same point,
+of the effect on Hawthorne's genius of his allegorizing habit.
+"Hawthorne," says Mr. James, "was not in the least a realist--he was
+not, to my mind, enough of one." The biographer allows him a liberal
+share of imagination, but adds that most of his short tales are more
+fanciful than imaginative. "Hawthorne, in his metaphysical moods, is
+nothing if not allegorical, and allegory, to my sense, is quite one of
+the lighter exercises of the imagination. Many excellent judges, I know,
+have a great stomach for it; they delight in symbols and
+correspondences, in seeing a story told as if it were another and a very
+different story. I frankly confess that it has never seemed to me a
+first-rate literary form. It is apt to spoil two good things--a story
+and a moral."
+
+Except in that capital satire, "The Celestial Railroad," an ironical
+application of "The Pilgrim's Progress" to modern religion, Hawthorne
+seldom uses out-and-out allegory; but rather a more or less definite
+symbolism. Even in his full-length romances, this mental habit persists
+in the typical and, so to speak, algebraic nature of his figures and
+incidents. George Woodberry and others have drawn attention to the way
+in which his fancy clings to the physical image that represents the
+moral truth: the minister's black veil, emblem of the secret of every
+human heart; the print of a hand on the heroine's cheek in "The
+Birthmark," a sign of earthly imperfection which only death can
+eradicate; the mechanical butterfly in "The Artist of the Beautiful,"
+for which the artist no longer cares, when once he has embodied his
+thought. Zenobia in "The Blithedale Romance" has every day a hot-house
+flower sent down from a Boston conservatory and wears it in her hair or
+the bosom of her gown, where it seems to express her exotic beauty. It
+is characteristic of the romancer that he does not specify whether this
+symbolic blossom was a gardenia, an orchid, a tuberose, a japonica, or
+what it was. Thoreau, if we can imagine him writing a romance, would
+have added the botanical name.
+
+"Rappacini's Daughter" is a very representative instance of those
+"insubstantial fictions for the illustration of moral truths, not always
+of much moment." The suggestion of this tale we find in a quotation from
+Sir Thomas Browne in "The American Note Books" for 1837: "A story there
+passeth of an Indian King that sent unto Alexander a fair woman fed
+with aconite and other poisons, with this intent complexionally to
+destroy him." Here was one of those morbid situations, with a hint of
+psychological possibilities and moral applications, that never failed to
+fascinate Hawthorne. He let his imagination dwell upon it, and gradually
+evolved the story of a physician who made his own daughter the victim of
+a scientific experiment. In this tale, Mr. Brownell thinks, the
+narrative has no significance apart from the moral; and yet the moral is
+quite lost sight of in the development of the narrative, which might
+have been more attractive if told simply as a fairy tale. This is quite
+representative of Hawthorne's usual method. There is no explicit moral
+to "Rappacini's Daughter." But there are a number of parallels and
+applications open to the reader. He may make them, or he may abstain
+from making them as he chooses. Thus we are vaguely reminded of
+Mithridates, the Pontic King, who made himself immune to poisons by
+their daily employment. The doctor's theory, that every disease can be
+cured by the use of the appropriate poison, suggests the aconite and
+belladonna of the homeopathists and their motto, _similia similibus
+curantur_. Again we think of Holmes's novel "Elsie Venner," of the girl
+impregnated with the venom of the rattlesnake, whose life ended when the
+serpent nature died out of her; just as Beatrice, in Hawthorne's story,
+is killed by the powerful antidote which slays the poison. A very
+obvious incidental reflection is the cruelty of science, sacrificing its
+best loved object to its curiosity. And may we not turn the whole tale
+into a parable of the isolation produced by a peculiar and unnatural
+rearing, say in heterodox beliefs, or unconventional habits, unfitting
+the victim for society, making her to be shunned as dangerous?
+
+The lure of the symbolic and the marvelous tempted Hawthorne constantly
+to the brink of the supernatural. But here his art is delicate. The
+old-fashioned ghost is too robust an apparition for modern credulity.
+The modern ghost is a "clot on the brain." Recall the ghosts in Henry
+James's "The Turn of the Screw"--just a suspicion of evil presences. The
+true interpretation of that story I have sometimes thought to be, that
+the woman who saw the phantoms was mad. Hawthorne is similarly
+ambiguous. His apparently preternatural phenomena always admit of a
+natural explanation. The water of Maule's well may have turned bitter in
+consequence of an ancient wrong; but also perhaps because of a
+disturbance in the underground springs. The sudden deaths of Colonel
+and Judge Pyncheon may have been due to the old wizard's curse that "God
+would give them blood to drink"; or simply to an inherited tendency to
+apoplexy. _Did_ Donatello have furry, leaf-shaped ears, or was this
+merely his companions' teasing? Did old Mistress Hibben, the sister of
+Governor Bellingham of Massachusetts, attend witch meetings in the
+forest, and inscribe her name in the Black Man's book? Hawthorne does
+not say so, but only that the people so believed; and it is historical
+fact that she was executed as a witch. Was a red letter A actually seen
+in the midnight sky, or was it a freak of the aurora borealis? What did
+Chillingworth see on Dimmesdale's breast? The author will not tell us.
+But if it was the mark of the Scarlet Letter, may we not appeal to the
+phenomena of stigmatism: the print, for example, of the five wounds of
+Christ on the bodies of devotees? Hawthorne does not vouch for the truth
+of Alice Pyncheon's clairvoyant trances: he relates her story as a
+legend handed down in the Pyncheon family, explicable, if you please, on
+natural grounds--what was witchcraft in the seventeenth century having
+become mesmerism or hypnotism in the nineteenth.
+
+Fifty years after his death, Hawthorne is already a classic. For even
+Mr. Brownell allows him one masterpiece, and one masterpiece means an
+immortality. I suppose it is generally agreed that "The Scarlet Letter"
+is his _chef-d'oeuvre_. Certainly it is his most intensely conceived
+work, the most thoroughly fused and logically developed; and is free
+from those elements of fantasy, mystery, and unreality which enter into
+his other romances. But its unrelieved gloom, and the author's
+unrelaxing grasp upon his theme, make it less characteristic than some
+of his inferior works; and I think he was right in preferring "The House
+of the Seven Gables," as more fully representing all sides of his
+genius. The difference between the two is the difference between tragedy
+and romance. While we are riding the high horse of criticism and feeling
+virtuous, we will concede the superiority of the former _genre_; but
+when we give our literary conscience the slip, we yield ourselves again
+to the fascination of the haunted twilight.
+
+The antique gabled mansion in its quiet back street has the charm of the
+still-life sketches in the early books, such as "Sights from a Steeple,"
+"A Rill from the Town Pump," "Sunday at Home," and "The Toll-gatherer's
+Day." All manner of quaint figures, known to childhood, pass along that
+visionary street: the scissors grinder, town crier, baker's cart,
+lumbering stage-coach, charcoal vender, hand-organ man and monkey, a
+drove of cattle, a military parade--the "trainers," as we used to call
+them. Hawthorne had no love for his fellow citizens and took little part
+in the modern society of Salem. But he had struck deep roots into the
+soil of the old witch town, his birthplace and the home of generations
+of his ancestors. Does the reader know this ancient seaport, with its
+decayed shipping and mouldering wharves, its silted up harbor and idle
+custom-house, where Hawthorne served three years as surveyor of the
+port? Imposing still are the great houses around the square, built by
+retired merchants and shipmasters whose fortunes were made in the East
+India trade: with dark old drawing-rooms smelling of sandalwood and
+filled with cabinets of Oriental curiosities. Hawthorne had little to do
+with the aristocracy of Salem. But something of the life of these old
+families may be read in Mrs. Stoddard's novel "The Morgesons,"--a book
+which I am perpetually recommending to my friends, and they as
+perpetually refusing to read, returning my copy after a superficial
+perusal, with uncomplimentary comments upon my taste in fiction.
+
+Hawthorne's academic connections are of particular interest. It is
+wonderful that he and Longfellow should have been classmates at Bowdoin.
+Equally wonderful that Emerson's "Nature" and Hawthorne's "Mosses"
+should have been written in the same little room in the Old Manse at
+Concord. It gives one a sense of how small New England was then, and in
+how narrow a runway genius went. Bowdoin College in those days was a
+little country school on the edge of the Maine wilderness, only twenty
+years old, its few buildings almost literally planted down among the
+pine stumps. Hawthorne's class--1825--graduated but thirty-seven strong.
+And yet Hawthorne and Longfellow were not intimate in college but
+belonged to different sets. And twelve years afterward, when Longfellow
+wrote a friendly review of "Twice-Told Tales" in _The North American
+Review_, his quondam classmate addressed him in a somewhat formal letter
+of thanks as "Dear Sir." Later the relations of the two became closer,
+though never perhaps intimate. It was Hawthorne who handed over to
+Longfellow that story of the dispersion of the Acadian exiles of
+Grandpre, which became "Evangeline": a story which his friend Conolly
+had suggested to Hawthorne, as mentioned in "The American Note Books."
+The point which arrested Hawthorne's attention was the incident in the
+Bayou Teche, where Gabriel's boat passes in the night within a few feet
+of the bank on which Evangeline and her company are sleeping.
+
+This was one of those tricks of destiny that so often engaged
+Hawthorne's imagination: like the tale of "David Swan" the farmer's boy
+who, on his way to try his fortune in the city, falls asleep by a
+wayside spring. A rich and childless old couple stop to water their
+horse, are taken by his appearance and talk of adopting him, but drive
+away on hearing someone approaching. A young girl comes by and falls so
+much in love with his handsome face that she is tempted to waken him
+with a kiss, but she too is startled and goes on. Then a pair of tramps
+arrive and are about to murder him for his money, when they in turn are
+frightened off. Thus riches and love and death have passed him in his
+sleep; and he, all unconscious of the brush of the wings of fate,
+awakens and goes his way. Again, our romancer had read the common
+historical accounts of the great landslide which buried the inn in the
+Notch of the White Mountains. The names were known of all who had been
+there that night and had consequently perished--with one exception. One
+stranger had been present, who was never identified: Hawthorne's fancy
+played with this curious problem, and he made out of it his story of
+"The Ambitious Guest," a youth just starting on a brilliant career,
+entertaining the company around the fire, with excited descriptions of
+his hopes and plans; and then snuffed out utterly by ironic fate, and
+not even numbered among the missing.
+
+Tales like these are among the most characteristic and original of the
+author's works. And wherever we notice this quality in a story, we call
+it Hawthornish. "Peter Rugg, the Missing Man," is Hawthornish; so is
+"Peter Schemil, the Man without a Shadow"; or Balzac's "Peau de
+Chagrin"; or later work, some of it manifestly inspired by Hawthorne,
+like Stevenson's tale of a double personality, "Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
+Hyde"; or Edward Bellamy's "Dr. Heidenhoff's Process"--a process for
+ensuring forgetfulness of unpleasant things--a modern water of Lethe.
+Even some of James's early stories like "The Madonna of the Future" and
+"The Last of the Valerii," as well as Mr. Howells's "Undiscovered
+Country," have touches of Hawthorne.
+
+Emerson and Hawthorne were fellow townsmen for some years at Concord,
+and held each other in high regard. One was a philosophical idealist:
+the other, an artist of the ideal, who sometimes doubted whether the
+tree on the bank, or its image in the stream was the more real. But they
+took no impress from one another's minds. Emerson could not read his
+neighbor's romances. Their morbid absorption in the problem of evil
+repelled the resolute optimist. He thought the best thing Hawthorne ever
+wrote was his "Recollections of a Gifted Woman," the chapter in "Our Old
+Home" concerning Miss Delia Bacon, originator of the Baconian theory of
+Shakespeare, whom Hawthorne befriended with unfailing patience and
+courtesy during his Liverpool consulship.
+
+Hawthorne paid a fine tribute to Emerson in the introduction to "Mosses
+from an Old Manse," and even paid him the honor of quotation, contrary
+to his almost invariable practice. I cannot recall a half dozen
+quotations in all his works. I think he must have been principled
+against them. But he said he had come too late to Concord to fall under
+Emerson's influence. No risk of that, had he come earlier. There was a
+jealous independence in Hawthorne which resented the too close approach
+of an alien mind: a species of perversity even, that set him in
+contradiction to his environment. He always fought shy of literary
+people. During his Liverpool consulship, he did not make--apparently did
+not care to make--acquaintance with his intellectual equals. He did not
+meet Carlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Tennyson, Mill, Grote, Charles Reade,
+George Eliot, or any other first-class minds. He barely met the
+Brownings, but did not really come to know them till afterwards in
+Italy. Surrounded by reformers, abolitionists, vegetarians, comeouters
+and radicals of all gospels, he remained stubbornly conservative. He
+held office under three Democratic administrations, and wrote a campaign
+life of his old college friend Franklin Pierce when he ran for
+President. Commenting on Emerson's sentence that John Brown had made the
+gallows sacred like the cross, Hawthorne said that Brown was a
+blood-stained fanatic and justly hanged.
+
+This conservatism was allied with a certain fatalism, hopelessness, and
+moral indolence in Hawthorne's nature. Hollingsworth, in "The Blithedale
+Romance," is his picture of the one-ideaed reformer, sacrificing all to
+his hobby. Hollingsworth's hobby is prison reform, and characteristically
+Hawthorne gives us no details of his plan. It is vagueness itself, and
+its advocate is little better than a type. Holgrave again, in "The House
+of the Seven Gables," is the scornful young radical; and both he and
+Hollingsworth are guilty of the mistake of supposing that they can do
+anything directly to improve the condition of things. God will bring
+about amendment in his own good time. And this fatalism again is subtly
+connected with New England's ancestral creed--Calvinism. Hawthorne--it
+has been pointed out a hundred times--is the Puritan romancer. His tales
+are tales of the conscience: he is obsessed with the thought of sin,
+with the doctrines of foreordination and total depravity. In the
+theological library which he found stowed away in the garret of the Old
+Manse, he preferred the seventeenth-century folio volumes of Puritan
+divinity to the thin Unitarian sermons and controversial articles in the
+files of _The Christian Examiner_. The former, at least, had once been
+warm with a deep belief, however they had now "cooled down even to the
+freezing point." But "the frigidity of the modern productions" was
+"inherent." Hawthorne was never a church-goer and adhered to no
+particular form of creed. But speculatively he liked his religion thick.
+
+
+     The Psalm-tunes of the Puritan,
+       The songs that dared to go
+     Down searching through the abyss of man,
+       His deeps of conscious woe--
+
+
+spoke more profoundly to his soul than the easy optimism of liberal
+Christianity. Hawthorne was no transcendentalist: he went to Brook Farm,
+not as a Fourierite or a believer in the principles of association, but
+attracted by the novelty of this experiment at communal living, and by
+the interesting varieties of human nature there assembled: literary
+material which he used in "The Blithedale Romance." He complains slyly
+of Miss Fuller's transcendental heifer which hooked the other cows
+(though Colonel Higginson once assured me that this heifer was only a
+symbol, and that Margaret never really owned a heifer or cow of any
+kind).
+
+Mr. Lathrop proposed, as a rough formula for Hawthorne, Poe and Irving
+_plus_ something of his own. The resemblances and differences between
+Poe and Hawthorne are obvious. The latter never deals in physical
+horror: his morbidest tragedy is of a spiritual kind; while once
+only--in the story entitled "William Wilson"--Poe enters that field of
+ethical romance which Hawthorne constantly occupies. What he has in
+common with Irving is chiefly the attitude of spectatorship, and the
+careful refinement of the style, so different from the loud, brassy
+manner of modern writing. Hawthorne never uses slang, dialect, oaths, or
+colloquial idioms. The talk of his characters is book talk. Why is it
+that many of us find this old-fashioned elegance of Irving and Hawthorne
+irritating? Is it the fault of the writer or of the reader? Partly of
+the former, I think: that anxious finish, those elaborately rounded
+periods have something of the artificial, which modern naturalism has
+taught us to distrust. But also, I believe, the fault is largely our
+own. We have grown so nervous, in these latter generations, so used to
+short cuts, that we are impatient of anything slow. Cut out the
+descriptions, cut out the reflections, _coupez vos phrases_. Hawthorne's
+style was the growth of reverie, solitude, leisure--"fine old leisure,"
+whose disappearance from modern life George Eliot has lamented. On the
+walls of his study at the "Wayside" was written--though not by his own
+hand--the motto, "There is no joy but calm."
+
+Sentiment and humor do not lie so near the surface in Hawthorne as in
+Irving. He had a deep sense of the ridiculous, well shown in such
+sketches as "P's Correspondence" and "The Celestial Railroad"; or in the
+description of the absurd old chickens in the Pyncheon yard, shrunk by
+in-breeding to a weazened race, but retaining all their top-knotted
+pride of lineage. Hawthorne's humor was less genial than Irving's, and
+had a sharp satiric edge. There is no merriment in it. Do you remember
+that scene at the Villa Borghese, where Miriam and Donatello break into
+a dance and all the people who are wandering in the gardens join with
+them? The author meant this to be a burst of wild maenad gaiety. As such
+I do not recall a more dismal failure. It is cold at the heart of it.
+It has no mirth, but is like a dance without music: like a dance of deaf
+mutes that I witnessed once, pretending to keep time to the inaudible
+scrapings of a deaf and dumb fiddler.
+
+Henry James says that Hawthorne's stories are the only good American
+historical fiction; and Woodberry says that his method here is the same
+as Scott's. The truth of this may be admitted up to a certain point. Our
+Puritan romancer had certainly steeped his imagination in the annals of
+colonial New England, as Scott had done in his border legends. He was
+familiar with the documents--especially with Mather's "Magnalia," that
+great source book of New England poetry and romance. But it was not the
+history itself that interested him, the broad picture of an extinct
+society, the _tableau large de la vie_, which Scott delighted to paint;
+rather it was some adventure of the private soul. For example, Lowell
+had told him the tradition of the young hired man who was chopping wood
+at the backdoor of the Old Manse on the morning of the Concord fight;
+and who hurried to the battlefield in the neighboring lane, to find both
+armies gone and two British soldiers lying on the ground, one dead, the
+other wounded. As the wounded man raised himself on his knees and stared
+up at the lad, the latter, obeying a nervous impulse, struck him on the
+head with his axe and finished him. "The story," says Hawthorne, "comes
+home to me like truth. Oftentimes, as an intellectual and moral
+exercise, I have sought to follow that poor youth through his subsequent
+career and observe how his soul was tortured by the blood-stain.... This
+one circumstance has borne more fruit for me than all that history tells
+us of the fight." How different is this bit of pathology from the public
+feeling of Emerson's lines:
+
+
+     Spirit that made those heroes dare
+       To die and leave their children free,
+     Bid Time and Nature gently spare
+       The shaft we raise to them and thee.
+
+
+
+
+A PILGRIM IN CONCORD
+
+             Rura quae Liris quieta
+     Mordet aqua, taciturnus amnis.
+
+
+The Concord School of Philosophy opened its first session in the summer
+of 1879. The dust of late July lay velvet soft and velvet deep on all
+the highways; or, stirred by the passing wheel, rose in slow clouds, not
+unemblematic of the transcendental haze which filled the mental
+atmosphere thereabout.
+
+Of those who had made Concord one of the homes of the soul, Hawthorne
+and Thoreau had been dead many years--I saw their graves in Sleepy
+Hollow;--and Margaret Fuller had perished long ago by shipwreck on Fire
+Island Beach. But Alcott was still alive and garrulous; and Ellery
+Channing--Thoreau's biographer--was alive. Above all, the sage of
+Concord, "the friend and aider of those who would live in the spirit,"
+still walked his ancient haunts; his mind in many ways yet unimpaired,
+though sadly troubled by aphasia, or the failure of verbal memory. It
+was an instance of pathetic irony that in his lecture on "Memory,"
+delivered in the Town Hall, he was prompted constantly by his daughter.
+
+It seemed an inappropriate manner of arrival--the Fitchburg Railroad.
+One should have dropped down upon the sacred spot by parachute; or, at
+worst, have come on foot, with staff and scrip, along the Lexington
+pike, reversing the fleeing steps of the British regulars on that April
+day, when the embattled farmers made their famous stand. But I
+remembered that Thoreau, whose Walden solitude was disturbed by gangs of
+Irish laborers laying the tracks of this same Fitchburg Railroad,
+consoled himself with the reflection that hospitable nature made the
+intruder a part of herself. The embankment runs along one end of the
+pond, and the hermit only said:
+
+
+     It fills a few hollows
+     And makes banks for the swallows,
+     And sets the sand a-blowing
+     And the black-berries growing.
+
+
+Afterwards I witnessed, and participated in, a more radical profanation
+of these crystal waters, when two hundred of the dirtiest children in
+Boston, South-enders, were brought down by train on a fresh-air-fund
+picnic and washed in the lake just in front of the spot where Thoreau's
+cabin stood, after having been duly swung in the swings, teetered on
+the see-saws, and fed with a sandwich, a slice of cake, a pint of
+peanuts, and a lemonade apiece, by a committee of charitable ladies--one
+of whom was Miss Louisa Alcott, certainly a high authority on "Little
+Women" and "Little Men."
+
+Miss Alcott I had encountered on the evening of my first day in Concord,
+when I rang the door bell of the Alcott residence and asked if the seer
+was within. I fancied that there was a trace of acerbity in the manner
+of the tall lady who answered my ring, and told me abruptly that Mr.
+Alcott was not at home, and that I would probably find him at Mr.
+Sanborn's farther up the street. Perspiring philosophers with dusters
+and grip-sacks had been arriving all day and applying at the Alcott
+house for addresses of boarding houses and for instructions of all
+kinds; and Miss Louisa's patience may well have been tried. She did not
+take much stock in the School anyway. Her father was supremely happy.
+One of the dreams of his life was realized, and endless talk and
+soul-communion were in prospect. But his daughter's view of philosophy
+was tinged with irony, as was not unnatural in a high-spirited woman who
+had borne the burden of the family's support, and had even worked out in
+domestic service, while her unworldly parent was transcendentalizing
+about the country, holding conversation classes in western towns, from
+which after prolonged absences he sometimes brought home a dollar, and
+sometimes only himself. "Philosophy can bake no bread, but it can give
+us God, freedom, and immortality" read the motto--from Novalis--on the
+cover of the _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, published at Concord
+in those years, under the editorship of Mr. William T. Harris; but bread
+must be baked, for even philosophers must eat, and an occasional
+impatience of the merely ideal may be forgiven in the overworked
+practician.
+
+On Mr. Frank Sanborn's wide, shady verandah, I found Mr. Alcott, a most
+quaint and venerable figure, large in frame and countenance, with
+beautiful, flowing white hair. He moved slowly, and spoke deliberately
+in a rich voice. His face had a look of mild and innocent solemnity, and
+he reminded me altogether of a large benignant sheep or other ruminating
+animal. He was benevolently interested when I introduced myself as the
+first fruits of the stranger and added that I was from Connecticut. He
+himself was a native of the little hill town of Wolcott, not many miles
+from New Haven, and in youth had travelled through the South as a Yankee
+peddler. "Connecticut gave him birth," says Thoreau; "he peddled first
+her wares, afterwards, he declares, his brains."
+
+Mr. Sanborn was the secretary of the School, and with him I enrolled
+myself as a pupil and paid the very modest fee which admitted me to its
+symposia. Mr. Sanborn is well known through his contributions to Concord
+history and biography. He was for years one of the literary staff of
+_The Springfield Republican_, active in many reform movements, and an
+efficient member of the American Social Science Association. Almost from
+his house John Brown started on his Harper's Ferry raid, and people in
+Concord still dwell upon the exciting incident of Mr. Sanborn's arrest
+in 1860 as an accessory before the fact. The United States deputy
+marshal with his myrmidons drove out from Boston in a hack. They lured
+the unsuspecting abolitionist outside his door, on some pretext or
+other, clapped the handcuffs on him, and tried to get him into the hack.
+But their victim, planting his long legs one on each side of the
+carriage door, resisted sturdily, and his neighbors assaulted the
+officers with hue and cry. The town rose upon them. Judge Hoar hastily
+issued a habeas corpus returnable before the Massachusetts Supreme
+Court, and the baffled minions of the slave power went back to Boston.
+
+The School assembled in the Orchard House, formerly the residence of Mr.
+Alcott, on the Lexington road. Next door was the Wayside, Hawthorne's
+home for a number of years, a cottage overshadowed by the steep hillside
+that rose behind it, thick with hemlocks and larches. On the ridge of
+this hill was Hawthorne's "out door study," a foot path worn by his own
+feet, as he paced back and forth among the trees and thought out the
+plots of his romances. In 1879 the Wayside was tenanted by George
+Lathrop, who had married Hawthorne's daughter, Rose. He had already
+published his "Study of Hawthorne" and a volume of poems, "Rose and
+Rooftree." His novel, "An Echo of Passion," was yet to come, a book
+which unites something of modern realism with a delicately symbolic art
+akin to Hawthorne's own.
+
+A bust of Plato presided over the exercises of the School, and
+"Plato-Skimpole"--as Mr. Alcott was once nicknamed--made the opening
+address. I remember how impressively he quoted Milton's lines:
+
+
+     How charming is divine philosophy!
+     Not harsh and crabbed, as dull fools suppose,
+     But musical as is Apollo's lute.
+
+
+Our _piece de resistance_ was the course of lectures in which Mr. Harris
+expounded Hegel. But there were many other lecturers. Mrs. Edna Cheney
+talked to us about art; though all that I recall of her conversation is
+the fact that she pronounced _always olways_, and I wondered if that was
+the regular Boston pronunciation. Dr. Jones, the self-taught Platonist
+of Jacksonville, Illinois, interpreted Plato. Quite a throng of his
+disciples, mostly women, had followed him from Illinois and swelled the
+numbers of the Summer School. Once Professor Benjamin Peirce, the great
+Harvard mathematician, came over from Cambridge, and read us one of his
+Lowell Institute lectures, on the Ideality of Mathematics. He had a most
+distinguished presence and an eye, as was said, of black fire. The
+Harvard undergraduates of my time used to call him Benny Peirce; and on
+the fly leaves of their mathematical text books they would write, "Who
+steals my Peirce steals trash." Colonel T. W. Higginson read a single
+lecture on American literature, from which I carried away for future use
+a delightful story about an excellent Boston merchant who, being asked
+at a Goethe birthday dinner to make a few remarks, said that he "guessed
+that Go-ethe was the N. P. Willis of Germany."
+
+Colonel Higginson's lecture was to me a green oasis in the arid desert
+of metaphysics, but it was regarded by earnest truth-seekers in the
+class as quite irrelevant to the purposes of the course. The lecturer
+himself confided to me at the close of the session a suspicion that his
+audience cared more for philosophy than for literature. Once or twice
+Mr. Emerson visited the School, taking no part in its proceedings, but
+sitting patiently through the hour, and wearing what a newspaper
+reporter described as his "wise smile." After the lecture for the
+session was ended, the subject was thrown open to discussion and there
+was an opportunity to ask questions. Most of us were shy to speak out in
+that presence, feeling ourselves in a state of pupilage. Usually there
+would be a silence of several minutes, as at a Quaker meeting waiting
+for the spirit to move; and then Mr. Alcott would announce in his
+solemn, musical tones "I have a thought"; and after a weighty pause,
+proceed to some Orphic utterance. Alcott, indeed, was what might be
+called the leader on the floor; and he was ably seconded by Miss
+Elizabeth Peabody, the sister of Nathaniel Hawthorne's wife. Miss
+Peabody was well known as the introducer of the German kindergarten, and
+for her life-long zeal in behalf of all kinds of philanthropies and
+reforms. Henry James was accused of having caricatured her in his novel
+"The Bostonians," in the figure of the dear, visionary, vaguely
+benevolent old lady who is perpetually engaged in promoting "causes,"
+attending conventions, carrying on correspondence, forming committees,
+drawing up resolutions, and the like; and who has so many "causes" on
+hand at once that she gets them all mixed up and cannot remember which
+of her friends are spiritualists and which of them are concerned in
+woman's rights movements, temperance agitations, and universal peace
+associations. Mr. James denied that he meant Miss Peabody, whom he had
+never met or known. If so, he certainly divined the type. In her later
+years, Miss Peabody was nicknamed "the grandmother of Boston."
+
+I have to acknowledge, to my shame, that I was often a truant to the
+discussions of the School, which met three hours in the morning and
+three in the afternoon. The weather was hot and the air in the Orchard
+House was drowsy. There were many outside attractions, and more and more
+I was tempted to leave the philosophers to reason high--
+
+
+     Of providence, foreknowledge, will, and fate--
+     Fixed fate, free will, foreknowledge absolute--
+
+
+while I wandered off through the woods for a bath in Walden, some one
+and a half miles away, through whose transparent waters the pebbles on
+the bottom could be plainly seen at a depth of thirty feet. Sometimes I
+went farther afield to White Pond, described by Thoreau, or Baker Farm,
+sung by Ellery Channing. A pleasant young fellow at Miss Emma Barrett's
+boarding house, who had no philosophy, but was a great hand at picnics
+and boating and black-berrying parties, paddled me up the Assabeth, or
+North Branch, in his canoe, and drove me over to Longfellow's Wayside
+Inn at Sudbury. And so it happens that, when I look back at my fortnight
+at Concord, what I think of is not so much the murmurous auditorium of
+the Orchard House, as the row of colossal sycamores along the village
+sidewalk that led us thither, whose smooth, mottled trunks in the
+moonlight resembled a range of Egyptian temple columns. Or I haunt again
+at twilight the grounds of the Old Manse, where Hawthorne wrote his
+"Mosses," and the grassy lane beside it leading down to the site of the
+rude bridge and the first battlefield of the Revolution. Here were the
+headstones of the two British soldiers, buried where they fell; here the
+Concord monument erected in 1836:
+
+
+     On this green bank, by this soft stream
+       We set to-day a votive stone:
+     That memory may their deed redeem
+       When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
+
+
+In the field across the river was the spirited statue of the minuteman,
+designed by young Daniel Chester French, a Concord boy who has since
+distinguished himself as a sculptor in wider fields and more imposing
+works.
+
+The social life of Concord, judging from such glimpses as could be had
+of it, was peculiar. It was the life of a village community, marked by
+the friendly simplicity of country neighbors, but marked also by unusual
+intellectual distinction and an addiction to "the things of the mind."
+The town was not at all provincial, or what the Germans call
+_kleinstaedtisch_:--cosmopolitan, rather, as lying on the highway of
+thought. It gave one a thrill, for example, to meet Mr. Emerson coming
+from the Post Office with his mail, like any ordinary citizen. The petty
+constraint, the narrow standards of conduct which are sometimes the bane
+of village life were almost unknown. Transcendental freedom of
+speculation, all manner of heterodoxies, and the individual queernesses
+of those whom the world calls "cranks," had produced a general
+tolerance. Thus it was said, that the only reason why services were held
+in the Unitarian Church on Sunday was because Judge Hoar didn't quite
+like to play whist on that day. Many of the Concord houses have gardens
+bordering upon the river; and I was interested to notice that the boats
+moored at the bank had painted on their sterns plant names or bird
+names taken from the Concord poems--such as "The Rhodora," "The Veery,"
+"The Linnaea," and "The Wood Thrush." Many a summer hour I spent with
+Edward Hoar in his skiff, rowing, or sailing, or floating up and down on
+this soft Concord stream--Musketaquit, or "grass-ground river"--moving
+through miles of meadow, fringed with willows and button bushes, with a
+current so languid, said Hawthorne, that the eye cannot detect which way
+it flows. Sometimes we sailed as far as Fair Haven Bay, whose "dark and
+sober billows," "when the wind blows freshly on a raw March day,"
+Thoreau thought as fine as anything on Lake Huron or the northwest
+coast. Nor were we, I hope, altogether unperceiving of that other river
+which Emerson detected flowing underneath the Concord--
+
+
+     Thy summer voice, Musketaquit,
+       Repeats the music of the rain,
+     But sweeter rivers pulsing flit
+       Through thee as though through Concord plain....
+
+     I see the inundation sweet,
+       I hear the spending of the stream,
+     Through years, through men, through nature fleet,
+       Through love and thought, through power and dream.
+
+
+Edward Hoar had been Thoreau's companion in one of his visits to the
+Maine woods. He knew the flora and fauna of Concord as well as his
+friend the poet-naturalist. He had a large experience of the world, had
+run a ranch in New Mexico and an orange plantation in Sicily. He was not
+so well known to the public as his brothers, Rockwood Hoar, Attorney
+General in Grant's Cabinet, and the late Senator George Frisbie Hoar, of
+Worcester; but I am persuaded that he was just as good company; and,
+then, neither of these distinguished gentlemen would have wasted whole
+afternoons in eating the lotus along the quiet reaches of the
+Musketaquit with a stripling philosopher.
+
+The appetite for discussion not being fully satisfied by the stated
+meetings of the School in the Orchard House, the hospitable Concord
+folks opened their houses for informal symposia in the evenings. I was
+privileged to make one of a company that gathered in Emerson's library.
+The subject for the evening was Shakespeare, and Emerson read, by
+request, that mysterious little poem "The Phoenix and the Turtle,"
+attributed to Shakespeare on rather doubtful evidence, but included for
+some reason in Emerson's volume of favorite selections, "Parnassus." He
+began by saying that he would not himself have chosen this particular
+piece, but as it had been chosen for him he would read it. And this he
+did, with that clean-cut, refined enunciation and subtle distribution of
+emphasis which made the charm of his delivery as a lyceum lecturer. When
+he came to the couplet,
+
+
+     Truth may seem, but cannot be,
+     Beauty brag, but 'tis not she,
+
+
+I thought that I detected an idealistic implication in the lines which
+accounted for their presence in "Parnassus."
+
+That shy recluse, Ellery Channing, most eccentric of the
+transcendentalists, was not to be found at the School or the evening
+symposia. He had married a sister of Margaret Fuller, but for years he
+had lived alone and done for himself, and his oddities had increased
+upon him with the years. I had read and liked many of his poems--those
+poems so savagely cut up by Poe, when first published in 1843--and my
+expressed interest in these foundlings of the Muse gave me the
+opportunity to meet the author of "A Poet's Hope" at one hospitable
+table where he was accustomed to sup on a stated evening every week.
+
+The Concord Summer School of Philosophy went on for ten successive
+years, but I never managed to attend another session. A friend from New
+Haven, who was there for a few days in 1880, brought back the news that
+a certain young lady who was just beginning the study of Hegel the year
+before, had now got up to the second intention, and hoped in time to
+attain the sixth. I never got far enough in Mr. Harris's lectures to
+discover what Hegelian intentions were; but my friend spoke of them as
+if they were something like degrees in Masonry. In 1905 I visited
+Concord for the first and only time in twenty-six years. There is a good
+deal of philosophy in Wordsworth's Yarrow poems--
+
+
+     For when we're there, although 'tis fair,
+     'Twill be another Yarrow!--
+
+
+and I have heard it suggested that he might well have added to his
+trilogy, a fourth member, "Yarrow Unrevisited." There is a loss, though
+Concord bears the strain better than most places, I think. As we go on
+in life the world gets full of ghosts, and at the capital of
+transcendentalism I was peculiarly conscious of the haunting of these
+spiritual presences. Since I had been there before, Emerson and Alcott
+and Ellery Channing and my courteous host and companion, Edward Hoar,
+and my kind old landlady Miss Barrett--who had also been Emerson's
+landlady and indeed everybody's landlady in Concord, and whom her
+youngest boarders addressed affectionately as Emma--all these and many
+more had joined the sleepers in Sleepy Hollow. The town itself has
+suffered comparatively few changes. True there is a trolley line through
+the main street--oddly called "The Milldam," and in Walden wood I met an
+automobile not far from the cairn, or stone pile, which marks the site
+of Thoreau's cabin. But the woods themselves were intact and the limpid
+waters of the pond had not been tapped to furnish power for any electric
+light company. The Old Manse looked much the same, and so did the
+Wayside and the Orchard House. Not a tree was missing from the mystic
+ring of tall pines in front of Emerson's house at the fork of the
+Cambridge and Lexington roads. On the central square the ancient tavern
+was gone where I had lodged on the night of my arrival and where my
+host, a practical philosopher--everyone in Concord had his
+philosophy,--took a gloomy view of the local potentialities of the hotel
+business. He said there was nothing doing--some milk and asparagus were
+raised for the Boston market, but the inhabitants were mostly literary
+people. "I suppose," he added, "we've got the smartest literary man in
+the country living right here." "You mean Mr. Emerson," I suggested.
+"Yes, sir, and a gentleman too."
+
+"And Alcott?" I ventured.
+
+"Oh, Alcott! The best thing he ever did was his daughters."
+
+This inn was gone, but the still more ancient one across the square
+remains, the tavern where Major Pitcairn dined on the day of the
+Lexington fight, and from whose windows or door steps he is alleged by
+the history books to have cried to a group of embattled farmers,
+"Disperse, ye Yankee rebels."
+
+Concord is well preserved. Still there are subtle indications of the
+flight of time. For one thing, the literary pilgrimage business has
+increased, partly no doubt because trolleys, automobiles, and bicycles
+have made the town more accessible; but also because our literature is a
+generation older than it was in 1879. The study of American authors has
+been systematically introduced into the public schools. The men who made
+Concord famous are dead, but their habitat has become increasingly
+classic ground as they themselves have receded into a dignified,
+historic past. At any rate, the trail of the excursionist--the "cheap
+tripper," as he is called in England,--is over it all. Basket parties
+had evidently eaten many a luncheon on the first battle-field of the
+Revolution, and notices were posted about, asking the public not to
+deface the trees, and instructing them where to put their paper
+wrappers and _fragmenta regalia_. I could imagine Boston schoolma'ams
+pointing out to their classes, the minuteman, the monument, and other
+objects of interest, and calling for names and dates. The shores of
+Walden were trampled and worn in spots. There were springboards there
+for diving, and traces of the picnicker were everywhere. Trespassers
+were warned away from the grounds of the Old Manse and similar historic
+spots, by signs of "Private Property."
+
+Concord has grown more self-conscious under the pressure of all this
+publicity and resort. Tablets and inscriptions have been put up at
+points of interest. As I was reading one of these on the square, I was
+approached by a man who handed me a business card with photographs of
+the monument, the Wayside, the four-hundred-year-old oak, with
+information to the effect that Mr. ---- would furnish guides and livery
+teams about the town and to places as far distant as Walden Pond and
+Sudbury Inn. Thus poetry becomes an asset, and transcendentalism is
+exploited after the poet and the philosopher are dead. It took Emerson
+eleven years to sell five hundred copies of "Nature," and Thoreau's
+books came back upon his hands as unsalable and were piled up in the
+attic like cord-wood. I was impressed anew with the tameness of the
+Concord landscape. There is nothing salient about it: it is the average
+mean of New England nature. Berkshire is incomparably more beautiful.
+And yet those flat meadows and low hills and slow streams are dear to
+the imagination, since genius has looked upon them and made them its
+own. "The eye," said Emerson, "is the first circle: the horizon the
+second."
+
+And the Concord books--how do they bear the test of revisitation? To me,
+at least, they have--even some of the second-rate papers in the "Dial"
+have--now nearly fifty years since I read them first, that freshness
+which is the mark of immortality.
+
+
+     No ray is dimmed, no atom worn:
+       My oldest force is good as new;
+     And the fresh rose on yonder thorn
+       Gives back the bending heavens in dew.
+
+
+I think I do not mistake, and confer upon them the youth which was then
+mine. No, the morning light had touched their foreheads: the
+youthfulness was in _them_.
+
+Lately I saw a newspaper item about one of the thirty thousand literary
+pilgrims who are said to visit Concord annually. Calling upon Mr.
+Sanborn, he asked him which of the Concord authors he thought would last
+longest. The answer, somewhat to his surprise, was "Thoreau." I do not
+know whether this report is authentic; but supposing it true, it is not
+inexplicable. I will confess that, of recent years, I find myself
+reading Thoreau more and Emerson less. "Walden" seems to me more of a
+book than Emerson ever wrote. Emerson's was incomparably the larger
+nature, the more liberal and gracious soul. His, too, was the seminal
+mind; though Lowell was unfair to the disciple, when he described him as
+a pistillate blossom fertilized by the Emersonian pollen. For Thoreau
+had an originality of his own--a flavor as individual as the tang of the
+bog cranberry, or the wild apples which he loved. One secure advantage
+he possesses in the concreteness of his subject-matter. The master, with
+his abstract habit of mind and his view of the merely phenomenal
+character of the objects of sense, took up a somewhat incurious attitude
+towards details, not thinking it worth while to "examine too
+microscopically the universal tablet." The disciple, though he professed
+that the other world was all his art, had a sharp eye for this. Emerson
+was Nature's lover, but Thoreau was her scholar. Emerson's method was
+intuition, while Thoreau's was observation. He worked harder than
+Emerson and knew more,--that is, within certain defined limits. Thus he
+read the Greek poets in the original. Emerson, in whom there was a
+spice of indolence--due, say his biographers, to feeble health in early
+life, and the need of going slow,--read them in translations and excused
+himself on the ground that he liked to be beholden to the great English
+language.
+
+Compare Hawthorne's description, in the "Mosses," of a day spent on the
+Assabeth with Ellery Channing, with any chapter in Thoreau's "Week."
+Moonlight and high noon! The great romancer gives a dreamy, poetic
+version of the river landscape, musically phrased, pictorially composed,
+dissolved in atmosphere--a lovely piece of literary art, with the soft
+blur of a mezzotint engraving, say, from the designs by Turner in
+Rogers's "Italy." Thoreau, equally imaginative in his way, writes like a
+botanist, naturalist, surveyor, and local antiquary; and in a pungent,
+practical, business-like style--a style, as was said of Dante, in which
+words are things. Yet which of these was the true transcendentalist?
+
+Matthew Arnold's discourse on Emerson was received with strong dissent
+in Boston, where it was delivered, and in Concord, where it was read
+with indignation. The critic seemed to be taking away, one after
+another, our venerated master's claims as a poet, a man of letters, and
+a philosopher. What! Gray a great poet, and Emerson not! Addison a
+great writer, and Emerson not! Surely there are heights and depths in
+Emerson, an inspiring power, an originality and force of thought which
+are neither in Gray nor in Addison. And how can these denials be
+consistent with the sentence near the end of the discourse, pronouncing
+Emerson's essays the most important work done in English prose during
+the nineteenth century--more important than Carlyle's? A truly enormous
+concession this; how to reconcile it with those preceding blasphemies?
+
+Let not the lightning strike me if I say that I think Arnold was
+right--as he usually was right in a question of taste or critical
+discernment. For Emerson was essentially a prophet and theosophist, and
+not a man of letters, or creative artist. He could not have written a
+song or a story or a play. Arnold complains of his want of concreteness.
+The essay was his chosen medium, well-nigh the least concrete, the least
+literary of forms. And it was not even the personal essay, like Elia's,
+that he practised, but an abstract variety, a lyceum lecture, a
+moralizing discourse or sermon. For the clerical virus was strong in
+Emerson, and it was not for nothing that he was descended from eight
+generations of preachers. His concern was primarily with religion and
+ethics, not with the tragedy and comedy of personal lives, this motley
+face of things, _das bunte Menschenleben_. Anecdotes and testimonies
+abound to illustrate this. See him on his travels in Europe, least
+picturesque of tourists, hastening with almost comic precipitation past
+galleries, cathedrals, ancient ruins, Swiss alps, Como lakes, Rhine
+castles, Venetian lagoons, costumed peasants, "the great sinful streets
+of Naples"--and of Paris,--and all manner and description of local color
+and historic associations; hastening to meet and talk with "a few
+minds"--Landor, Wordsworth, Carlyle. Here he was in line, indeed, with
+his great friend, impatiently waving aside the art patter, with which
+Sterling filled his letters from Italy. "Among the windy gospels,"
+complains Carlyle, "addressed to our poor Century there are few louder
+than this of Art.... It is a subject on which earnest men ... had better
+... 'perambulate their picture-gallery with little or no speech.'"
+"Emerson has never in his life," affirms Mr. John Jay Chapman, "felt the
+normal appeal of any painting, or any sculpture, or any architecture, or
+any music. These things, of which he does not know the meaning in real
+life, he yet uses, and uses constantly, as symbols to convey ethical
+truths. The result is that his books are full of blind places, like the
+notes which will not strike on a sick piano." The biographers tell us
+that he had no ear for music and could not distinguish one tune from
+another; did not care for pictures nor for garden flowers; could see
+nothing in Dante's poetry nor in Shelley's, nor in Hawthorne's romances,
+nor in the novels of Dickens and Jane Austen. Edgar Poe was to him "the
+jingle man." Poe, of course, had no "message."
+
+I read, a number of years ago, some impressions of Concord by Roger
+Riordan, the poet and art critic. I cannot now put my hand, for purposes
+of quotation, upon the title of the periodical in which these appeared;
+but I remember that the writer was greatly amused, as well as somewhat
+provoked, by his inability to get any of the philosophers with whom he
+sought interviews to take an aesthetic view of any poem, or painting, or
+other art product. They would talk of its "message" or its "ethical
+content"; but as to questions of technique or beauty, they gently put
+them one side as unworthy to engage the attention of earnest souls.
+
+At the symposium which I have mentioned in Emerson's library, was
+present a young philosopher who had had the advantage of
+reading--perhaps in proof sheets--a book about Shakespeare by Mr. Denton
+J. Snider. He was questioned by some of the guests as to the character
+of the work, but modestly declined to essay a description of it in the
+presence of such eminent persons; venturing only to say that it "gave
+the ethical view of Shakespeare," information which was received by the
+company with silent but manifest approval.
+
+Yet, after all, what does it matter whether Emerson was singly any one
+of those things which Matthew Arnold says he was not--great poet, great
+writer, great philosophical thinker? These are matters of classification
+and definition. We know well enough the rare combination of qualities
+which made him our Emerson. Let us leave it there. Even as a formal
+verse-writer, when he does emerge from his cloud of encumbrances, it is
+in some supernal phrase such as only the great poets have the secret of:
+
+
+     Music pours on mortals its beautiful disdain;
+
+
+or:
+
+
+     Have I a lover who is noble and free?
+     I would he were nobler than to love me.
+
+
+
+
+A WORDLET ABOUT WHITMAN
+
+
+In this year many fames have come of age; among them, Lowell's and Walt
+Whitman's. As we read their centenary tributes, we are reminded that
+Lowell never accepted Whitman, who was piqued by the fact and referred
+to it a number of times in the conversations reported by the Boswellian
+Traubel. Whitmanites explain this want of appreciation as owing to
+Lowell's conventional literary standards.
+
+Now convention is one of the things that distinguish man from the
+inferior animals. Language is a convention, law is a convention; and so
+are the church and the state, morals, manners, clothing--_teste_ "Sartor
+Resartus." Shame is a convention: it is human. The animals are without
+shame, and so is Whitman. His "Children of Adam" are the children of our
+common father before he had tasted the forbidden fruit and discovered
+that he was naked.
+
+Poetry, too, has its conventions, among them, metre, rhythm, and rhyme,
+the choice of certain words, phrases, images, and topics, and the
+rejection of certain others. Lowell was conservative by nature and
+thoroughly steeped in the tradition of letters. Perhaps he was too
+tightly bound by these fetters of convention to relish their sudden
+loosening. I wonder what he would have thought of his kinswoman Amy's
+free verses if he had lived to read them.
+
+If a large, good-natured, clean, healthy animal could write poetry, it
+would write much such poetry as the "Leaves of Grass." It would tell how
+good it is to lie and bask in the warm sun; to stand in cool, flowing
+water, to be naked in the fresh air; to troop with friendly companions
+and embrace one's mate. "Leaves of Grass" is the poetry of pure
+sensation, and mainly, though not wholly, of physical sensation. In a
+famous passage the poet says that he wants to go away and live with the
+animals. Not one of them is respectable or sorry or conscientious or
+worried about its sins.
+
+But his poetry, though animal to a degree, is not unhuman. We do not
+know enough about the psychology of the animals to be sure whether, or
+not, they have any sense of the world as a whole. Does an elephant or an
+eagle perhaps, viewing some immense landscape, catch any glimpse of the
+universe, as an object of contemplation, apart from the satisfaction of
+his own sensual needs? Probably not. But Whitman, as has been said a
+hundred times, was "cosmic." He had an unequalled sense of the bigness
+of creation and of "these States." He owned a panoramic eye and a large
+passive imagination, and did well to loaf and let the tides of sensation
+flow over his soul, drawing out what music was in him without much care
+for arrangement or selection.
+
+I once heard an admirer of Walt challenged to name a single masterpiece
+of his production. Where was his perfect poem, his gem of flawless
+workmanship? He answered, in effect, that he didn't make masterpieces.
+His poetry was diffused, like the grass blades that symbolized for him
+our democratic masses.
+
+Of course, the man in the street thinks that Walt Whitman's stuff is not
+poetry at all, but just bad prose. He acknowledges that there are
+splendid lines, phrases, and whole passages. There is that one
+beginning, "I open my scuttle at night," and that glorious apostrophe to
+the summer night, "Night of south winds, night of the large, few stars."
+But, as a whole, his work is tiresome and without art. It is alive, to
+be sure, but so is protoplasm. Life is the first thing and form is
+secondary; yet form, too, is important. The musician, too lazy or too
+impatient to master his instrument, breaks it, and seizes a megaphone.
+Shall we call that originality or failure?
+
+It is also a commonplace that the democratic masses of America have
+never accepted Walt Whitman as their spokesman. They do not read him, do
+not understand or care for him. They like Longfellow, Whittier, and
+James Whitcomb Riley, poets of sentiment and domestic life, truly poets
+of the people. No man can be a spokesman for America who lacks a sense
+of humor, and Whitman was utterly devoid of it, took himself most
+seriously, posed as a prophet. I do not say that humor is a desirable
+quality. The thesis may even be maintained that it is a disease of the
+mind, a false way of looking at things. Many great poets have been
+without it--Milton for example. Shelley used to speak of "the withering
+and perverting power of comedy." But Shelley was slightly mad. At all
+events, our really democratic writers have been such as Mark Twain and
+James Whitcomb Riley. I do not know what Mark Twain thought of Walt, but
+I know what Riley thought of him. He thought him a grand humbug.
+Certainly if he had had any sense of humor he would not have peppered
+his poems so naively with foreign words, calling out "Camerado!" ever
+and anon, and speaking of a perfectly good American sidewalk as a
+"trottoir" _quasi Lutetia Parisii_. And if he had not had a streak of
+humbug in him, he would hardly have written anonymous puffs of his own
+poetry.
+
+But I am far from thinking Walt Whitman a humbug. He was a man of genius
+whose work had a very solid core of genuine meaning. It is good to read
+him in spots--he is so big and friendly and wholesome; he feels so good,
+like a man who has just had a cold bath and tingles with the joy of
+existence.
+
+Whitman was no humbug, but there is surely some humbug about the Whitman
+_culte_. The Whitmanites deify him. They speak of him constantly as a
+seer, a man of exalted intellect. I do not believe that he was a great
+thinker, but only a great feeler. Was he the great poet of America, or
+even a great poet at all? A great poet includes a great artist, and
+"Leaves of Grass," as has been pointed out times without number, is the
+raw material of poetry rather than the finished product.
+
+A friend of mine once wrote an article about Whitman, favorable on the
+whole, but with qualifications. He got back a copy of it through the
+mail, with the word "Jackass!" pencilled on the margin by some outraged
+Whitmaniac. I know what has been said and written in praise of old Walt
+by critics of high authority, and I go along with them a part of the
+way, but only a part. And I do not stand in terror of any critics,
+however authoritative; remembering how even the great Goethe was taken
+in by Macpherson's "Ossian." A very interesting paper might be written
+on what illustrious authors have said of each other: what Carlyle said
+of Newman, for instance; or what Walter Scott said of Joanna Baillie and
+the like.
+
+
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