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diff --git a/24435.txt b/24435.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..42c6871 --- /dev/null +++ b/24435.txt @@ -0,0 +1,2184 @@ +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. + + +PRINTED IN UNITED STATES OF AMERICA + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Four Americans, by Henry A. 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