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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of My Literary Passions by Howells
+#25 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: My Literary Passions
+
+Author: William Dean Howells
+
+Release Date: August, 2002  [Etext #3378]
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+[The actual date this file first posted = 03/27/01]
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of My Literary Passions by Howells
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+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of
+this file, for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before
+making an entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+MY LITERARY PASSIONS
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL.
+
+I.        THE BOOKCASE AT HOME
+II.       GOLDSMITH
+III.      CERVANTES
+IV.       IRVING
+V.        FIRST FICTION AND DRAMA
+VI.       LONGFELLOW'S "SPANISH STUDENT"
+VII.      SCOTT
+VIII.     LIGHTER FANCIES
+IX.       POPE
+X.        VARIOUS PREFERENCES
+XI.       UNCLE TOM'S CABIN
+XII.      OSSIAN
+XIII.     SHAKESPEARE
+XIV.      IK MARVEL
+XV.       DICKENS
+XVI.      WORDSWORTH, LOWELL, CHAUCER
+XVII.     MACAULAY.
+XVIII.    CRITICS AND REVIEWS.
+XIX.      A NON-LITERARY EPISODE
+XX.       THACKERAY
+XXI.      "LAZARILLO DE TORMES"
+XXII.     CURTIS, LONGFELLOW, SCHLEGEL
+XXIII.    TENNYSON
+XXIV.     HEINE
+XXV.      DE QUINCEY, GOETHE, LONGFELLOW.
+XXVI.     GEORGE ELIOT, HAWTHORNE, GOETHE, HEINE
+XXVII.    CHARLES READE
+XXVIII.   DANTE.
+XXIX.     GOLDONI, MANZONI, D'AZEGLIO
+XXX.      "PASTOR FIDO," "AMINTA," "ROMOLA," "YEAST," "PAUL FERROLL"
+XXXI.     ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN, BJORSTJERNE BJORNSON
+XXXII.    TOURGUENIEF, AUERBACH
+XXXIII.   CERTAIN PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES
+XXXIV.    VALDES, GALDOS, VERGA, ZOLA, TROLLOPE, HARDY
+XXXV.     TOLSTOY
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
+
+The papers collected here under the name of 'My Literary Passions' were
+printed serially in a periodical of such vast circulation that they might
+well have been supposed to have found there all the acceptance that could
+be reasonably hoped for them.  Nevertheless, they were reissued in a
+volume the year after they first appeared, in 1895, and they had a
+pleasing share of such favor as their author's books have enjoyed.  But
+it is to be doubted whether any one liked reading them so much as he
+liked writing them--say, some time in the years 1893 and 1894, in a New
+York flat, where he could look from his lofty windows over two miles and
+a half of woodland in Central Park, and halloo his fancy wherever he
+chose in that faery realm of books which he re-entered in reminiscences
+perhaps too fond at times, and perhaps always too eager for the reader's
+following.  The name was thought by the friendly editor of the popular
+publication where they were serialized a main part of such inspiration as
+they might be conjectured to have, and was, as seldom happens with editor
+and author, cordially agreed upon before they were begun.
+
+The name says, indeed, so exactly and so fully what they are that little
+remains for their bibliographer to add beyond the meagre historical
+detail here given.  Their short and simple annals could be eked out by
+confidences which would not appreciably enrich the materials of the
+literary history of their time, and it seems better to leave them to the
+imagination of such posterity as they may reach.  They are rather
+helplessly frank, but not, I hope, with all their rather helpless
+frankness, offensively frank.  They are at least not part of the polemic
+which their author sustained in the essays following them in this volume,
+and which might have been called, in conformity with 'My Literary
+Passions', by the title of 'My Literary Opinions' better than by the
+vague name which they actually wear.
+
+They deal, to be sure, with the office of Criticism and the art of
+Fiction, and so far their present name is not a misnomer.  It follows
+them from an earlier date and could not easily be changed, and it may
+serve to recall to an elder generation than this the time when their
+author was breaking so many lances in the great, forgotten war between
+Realism and Romanticism that the floor of the "Editor's Study" in
+Harper's Magazine was strewn with the embattled splinters.  The "Editor's
+Study" is now quite another place, but he who originally imagined it in
+1886, and abode in it until 1892, made it at once the scene of such
+constant offence that he had no time, if he had the temper, for defence.
+The great Zola, or call him the immense Zola, was the prime mover in the
+attack upon the masters of the Romanticistic school; but he lived to own
+that he had fought a losing fight, and there are some proofs that he was
+right.  The Realists, who were undoubtedly the masters of fiction in
+their passing generation, and who prevailed not only in France, but in
+Russia, in Scandinavia, in Spain, in Portugal, were overborne in all
+Anglo-Saxon countries by the innumerable hosts of Romanticism, who to
+this day possess the land; though still, whenever a young novelist does
+work instantly recognizable for its truth and beauty among us, he is seen
+and felt to have wrought in the spirit of Realism.  Not even yet,
+however, does the average critic recognize this, and such lesson as the
+"Editor's Study" assumed to teach remains here in all its essentials for
+his improvement.
+
+Month after month for the six years in which the "Editor's Study"
+continued in the keeping of its first occupant, its lesson was more or
+less stormily delivered, to the exclusion, for the greater part, of other
+prophecy, but it has not been found well to keep the tempestuous manner
+along with the fulminant matter in this volume.  When the author came to
+revise the material, he found sins against taste which his zeal for
+righteousness could not suffice to atone for.  He did not hesitate to
+omit the proofs of these, and so far to make himself not only a precept,
+but an example in criticism.  He hopes that in other and slighter things
+he has bettered his own instruction, and that in form and in fact the
+book is altogether less crude and less rude than the papers from which it
+has here been a second time evolved.
+
+The papers, as they appeared from month to month, were not the product of
+those unities of time and place which were the happy conditioning of
+'My Literary Passions.'  They could not have been written in quite so
+many places as times, but they enjoyed a comparable variety of origin.
+Beginning in Boston, they were continued in a Boston suburb, on the
+shores of Lake George, in a Western New York health resort, in Buffalo,
+in Nahant; once, twice, and thrice in New York, with reversions to
+Boston, and summer excursions to the hills and waters of New England,
+until it seemed that their author had at last said his say, and he
+voluntarily lapsed into silence with the applause of friends and enemies
+alike.
+
+The papers had made him more of the last than of the first, but not as
+still appears to him with greater reason.  At moments his deliverances
+seemed to stir people of different minds to fury in two continents, so
+far as they were English-speaking, and on the coasts of the seven seas;
+and some of these came back at him with such violent personalities as it
+is his satisfaction to remember that he never indulged in his attacks
+upon their theories of criticism and fiction.  His opinions were always
+impersonal; and now as their manner rather than their make has been
+slightly tempered, it may surprise the belated reader to learn that it
+was the belief of one English critic that their author had "placed
+himself beyond the pale of decency" by them.  It ought to be less
+surprising that, since these dreadful words were written of him, more
+than one magnanimous Englishman has penitently expressed to the author
+the feeling that he was not so far wrong in his overboldly hazarded
+convictions.  The penitence of his countrymen is still waiting
+expression, but it may come to that when they have recurred to the
+evidences of his offence in their present shape.
+
+KITTERY POINT, MAINE, July, 1909.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                           MY LITERARY PASSIONS
+
+
+
+I.  THE BOOKCASE AT HOME
+
+To give an account of one's reading is in some sort to give an account of
+one's life; and I hope that I shall not offend those who follow me in
+these papers, if I cannot help speaking of myself in speaking of the
+authors I must call my masters: my masters not because they taught me
+this or that directly, but because I had such delight in them that I
+could not fail to teach myself from them whatever I was capable of
+learning.  I do not know whether I have been what people call a great
+reader; I cannot claim even to have been a very wise reader; but I have
+always been conscious of a high purpose to read much more, and more
+discreetly, than I have ever really done, and probably it is from the
+vantage-ground of this good intention that I shall sometimes be found
+writing here rather than from the facts of the case.
+
+But I am pretty sure that I began right, and that if I had always kept
+the lofty level which I struck at the outset I should have the right to
+use authority in these reminiscences without a bad conscience.  I shall
+try not to use authority, however, and I do not expect to speak here of
+all my reading, whether it has been much or little, but only of those
+books, or of those authors that I have felt a genuine passion for.  I
+have known such passions at every period of my life, but it is mainly of
+the loves of my youth that I shall write, and I shall write all the more
+frankly because my own youth now seems to me rather more alien than that
+of any other person.
+
+I think that I came of a reading race, which has always loved literature
+in a way, and in spite of varying fortunes and many changes.  From a
+letter of my great-grandmother's written to a stubborn daughter upon some
+unfilial behavior, like running away to be married, I suspect that she
+was fond of the high-colored fiction of her day, for she tells the wilful
+child that she has "planted a dagger in her mother's heart," and I should
+not be surprised if it were from this fine-languaged lady that my
+grandfather derived his taste for poetry rather than from his father, who
+was of a worldly wiser mind.  To be sure, he became a Friend by
+Convincement as the Quakers say, and so I cannot imagine that he was
+altogether worldly; but he had an eye to the main chance: he founded the
+industry of making flannels in the little Welsh town where he lived, and
+he seems to have grown richer, for his day and place, than any of us have
+since grown for ours.  My grandfather, indeed, was concerned chiefly in
+getting away from the world and its wickedness.  He came to this country
+early in the nineteenth century and settled his family in a log-cabin in
+the Ohio woods, that they might be safe from the sinister influences of
+the village where he was managing some woollen-mills.  But he kept his
+affection for certain poets of the graver, not to say gloomier sort, and
+he must have suffered his children to read them, pending that great
+question of their souls' salvation which was a lifelong trouble to him.
+
+My father, at any rate, had such a decided bent in the direction of
+literature, that he was not content in any of his several economical
+experiments till he became the editor of a newspaper, which was then the
+sole means of satisfying a literary passion.  His paper, at the date when
+I began to know him, was a living, comfortable and decent, but without
+the least promise of wealth in it, or the hope even of a much better
+condition.  I think now that he was wise not to care for the advancement
+which most of us have our hearts set upon, and that it was one of his
+finest qualities that he was content with a lot in life where he was not
+exempt from work with his hands, and yet where he was not so pressed by
+need but he could give himself at will not only to the things of the
+spirit, but the things of the mind too.  After a season of scepticism he
+had become a religious man, like the rest of his race, but in his own
+fashion, which was not at all the fashion of my grandfather: a Friend who
+had married out of Meeting, and had ended a perfervid Methodist.  My
+father, who could never get himself converted at any of the camp-meetings
+where my grandfather often led the forces of prayer to his support, and
+had at last to be given up in despair, fell in with the writings of
+Emanuel Swedenborg, and embraced the doctrine of that philosopher with a
+content that has lasted him all the days of his many years.  Ever since I
+can remember, the works of Swedenborg formed a large part of his library;
+he read them much himself, and much to my mother, and occasionally a
+"Memorable Relation" from them to us children.  But he did not force them
+upon our notice, nor urge us to read them, and I think this was very
+well.  I suppose his conscience and his reason kept him from doing so.
+But in regard to other books, his fondness was too much for him, and when
+I began to show a liking for literature he was eager to guide my choice.
+
+His own choice was for poetry, and the most of our library, which was not
+given to theology, was given to poetry.  I call it the library now, but
+then we called it the bookcase, and that was what literally it was,
+because I believe that whatever we had called our modest collection of
+books, it was a larger private collection than any other in the town
+where we lived.  Still it was all held, and shut with glass doors, in a
+case of very few shelves.  It was not considerably enlarged during my
+childhood, for few books came to my father as editor, and he indulged
+himself in buying them even more rarely.  My grandfather's book store
+(it was also the village drug-store) had then the only stock of
+literature for sale in the place; and once, when Harper & Brothers' agent
+came to replenish it, be gave my father several volumes for review.  One
+of these was a copy of Thomson's Seasons, a finely illustrated edition,
+whose pictures I knew long before I knew the poetry, and thought them the
+most beautiful things that ever were.  My father read passages of the
+book aloud, and he wanted me to read it all myself.  For the matter of
+that he wanted me to read Cowper, from whom no one could get anything but
+good, and he wanted me to read Byron, from whom I could then have got no
+harm; we get harm from the evil we understand.  He loved Burns, too, and
+he used to read aloud from him, I must own, to my inexpressible
+weariness.  I could not away with that dialect, and I could not then feel
+the charm of the poet's wit, nor the tender beauty of his pathos.  Moore,
+I could manage better; and when my father read "Lalla Rookh" to my mother
+I sat up to listen, and entered into all the woes of Iran in the story of
+the "Fire Worshippers."  I drew the line at the "Veiled Prophet of
+Khorassan," though I had some sense of the humor of the poet's conception
+of the critic in "Fadladeen."  But I liked Scott's poems far better, and
+got from Ispahan to Edinburgh with a glad alacrity of fancy.  I followed
+the "Lady of the Lake" throughout, and when I first began to contrive
+verses of my own I found that poem a fit model in mood and metre.
+
+Among other volumes of verse on the top shelf of the bookcase, of which I
+used to look at the outside without penetrating deeply within, were
+Pope's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Dryden's Virgil,
+pretty little tomes in tree-calf, published by James Crissy in
+Philadelphia, and illustrated with small copper-plates, which somehow
+seemed to put the matter hopelessly beyond me.  It was as if they said to
+me in so many words that literature which furnished the subjects of such
+pictures I could not hope to understand, and need not try.  At any rate,
+I let them alone for the time, and I did not meddle with a volume of
+Shakespeare, in green cloth and cruelly fine print, which overawed me in
+like manner with its wood-cuts.  I cannot say just why I conceived that
+there was something unhallowed in the matter of the book; perhaps this
+was a tint from the reputation of the rather profligate young man from
+whom my father had it.  If he were not profligate I ask his pardon.  I
+have not the least notion who he was, but that was the notion I had of
+him, whoever he was, or wherever he now is.  There may never have been
+such a young man at all; the impression I had may have been pure
+invention of my own, like many things with children, who do not very
+distinctly know their dreams from their experiences, and live in the
+world where both project the same quality of shadow.
+
+There were, of course, other books in the bookcase, which my
+consciousness made no account of, and I speak only of those I remember.
+Fiction there was none at all that I can recall, except Poe's 'Tales of
+the Grotesque and the Arabesque' (I long afflicted myself as to what
+those words meant, when I might easily have asked and found out) and
+Bulwer's Last Days of Pompeii, all in the same kind of binding.  History
+is known, to my young remembrance of that library, by a History of the
+United States, whose dust and ashes I hardly made my way through; and by
+a 'Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada', by the ever dear and precious
+Fray Antonio Agapida, whom I was long in making out to be one and the
+same as Washington Irving.
+
+In school there was as little literature then as there is now, and I
+cannot say anything worse of our school reading; but I was not really
+very much in school, and so I got small harm from it.  The printing-
+office was my school from a very early date.  My father thoroughly
+believed in it, and he had his beliefs as to work, which he illustrated
+as soon as we were old enough to learn the trade he followed.  We could
+go to school and study, or we could go into the printing-office and work,
+with an equal chance of learning, but we could not be idle; we must do
+something, for our souls' sake, though he was willing enough we should
+play, and he liked himself to go into the woods with us, and to enjoy the
+pleasures that manhood can share with childhood.  I suppose that as the
+world goes now we were poor.  His income was never above twelve hundred a
+year, and his family was large; but nobody was rich there or then; we
+lived in the simple abundance of that time and place, and we did not know
+that we were poor.  As yet the unequal modern conditions were undreamed
+of (who indeed could have dreamed of them forty or fifty years ago?) in
+the little Southern Ohio town where nearly the whole of my most happy
+boyhood was passed.
+
+
+
+
+II.  GOLDSMITH
+
+When I began to have literary likings of my own, and to love certain
+books above others, the first authors of my heart were Goldsmith,
+Cervantes, and Irving.  In the sharply foreshortened perspective of the
+past I seem to have read them all at once, but I am aware of an order of
+time in the pleasure they gave me, and I know that Goldsmith came first.
+He came so early that I cannot tell when or how I began to read him, but
+it must have been before I was ten years old.  I read other books about
+that time, notably a small book on Grecian and Roman mythology, which I
+perused with such a passion for those pagan gods and goddesses that, if
+it had ever been a question of sacrificing to Diana, I do not really know
+whether I should have been able to refuse.  I adored indiscriminately all
+the tribes of nymphs and naiads, demigods and heroes, as well as the high
+ones of Olympus; and I am afraid that by day I dwelt in a world peopled
+and ruled by them, though I faithfully said my prayers at night, and fell
+asleep in sorrow for my sins.  I do not know in the least how Goldsmith's
+Greece came into my hands, though I fancy it must have been procured for
+me because of a taste which I showed for that kind of reading, and I can
+imagine no greater luck for a small boy in a small town of Southwestern
+Ohio well-nigh fifty years ago.  I have the books yet; two little, stout
+volumes in fine print, with the marks of wear on them, but without those
+dishonorable blots, or those other injuries which boys inflict upon books
+in resentment of their dulness, or out of mere wantonness.  I was always
+sensitive to the maltreatment of books; I could not bear to see a book
+faced down or dogs-eared or broken-backed.  It was like a hurt or an
+insult to a thing that could feel.
+
+Goldsmith's History of Rome came to me much later, but quite as
+immemorably, and after I had formed a preference for the Greek Republics,
+which I dare say was not mistaken.  Of course I liked Athens best, and
+yet there was something in the fine behavior of the Spartans in battle,
+which won a heart formed for hero-worship.  I mastered the notion of
+their communism, and approved of their iron money, with the poverty it
+obliged them to, yet somehow their cruel treatment of the Helots failed
+to shock me; perhaps I forgave it to their patriotism, as I had to
+forgive many ugly facts in the history of the Romans to theirs.  There
+was hardly any sort of bloodshed which I would not pardon in those days
+to the slayers of tyrants; and the swagger form of such as despatched a
+despot with a fine speech was so much to my liking that I could only
+grieve that I was born too late to do and to say those things.
+
+I do not think I yet felt the beauty of the literature which made them
+all live in my fancy, that I conceived of Goldsmith as an artist using
+for my rapture the finest of the arts; and yet I had been taught to see
+the loveliness of poetry, and was already trying to make it on my own
+poor account.  I tried to make verses like those I listened to when my
+father read Moore and Scott to my mother, but I heard them with no such
+happiness as I read my beloved histories, though I never thought then of
+attempting to write like Goldsmith.  I accepted his beautiful work as
+ignorantly as I did my other blessings.  I was concerned in getting at
+the Greeks and Romans, and I did not know through what nimble air and by
+what lovely ways I was led to them.  Some retrospective perception of
+this came long afterward when I read his essays, and after I knew all of
+his poetry, and later yet when I read the 'Vicar of Wakefield'; but for
+the present my eyes were holden, as the eyes of a boy mostly are in the
+world of art.  What I wanted with my Greeks and Romans after I got at
+them was to be like them, or at least to turn them to account in verse,
+and in dramatic verse at that.  The Romans were less civilized than the
+Greeks, and so were more like boys, and more to a boy's purpose.  I did
+not make literature of the Greeks, but I got a whole tragedy out of the
+Romans; it was a rhymed tragedy, and in octosyllabic verse, like the
+"Lady of the Lake."  I meant it to be acted by my schoolmates, but I am
+not sure that I ever made it known to them.  Still, they were not
+ignorant of my reading, and I remember how proud I was when a certain
+boy, who had always whipped me when we fought together, and so outranked
+me in that little boys' world, once sent to ask me the name of the Roman
+emperor who lamented at nightfall, when he had done nothing worthy, that
+he had lost a day.  The boy was going to use the story, in a composition,
+as we called the school themes then, and I told him the emperor's name; I
+could not tell him now without turning to the book.
+
+My reading gave me no standing among the boys, and I did not expect it to
+rank me with boys who were more valiant in fight or in play; and I have
+since found that literature gives one no more certain station in the
+world of men's activities, either idle or useful.  We literary folk try
+to believe that it does, but that is all nonsense.  At every period of
+life, among boys or men, we are accepted when they are at leisure, and
+want to be amused, and at best we are tolerated rather than accepted.
+I must have told the boys stories out of my Goldsmith's Greece and Rome,
+or it would not have been known that I had read them, but I have no
+recollection now of doing so, while I distinctly remember rehearsing the
+allegories and fables of the 'Gesta Romanorum', a book which seems to
+have been in my hands about the same time or a little later.  I had a
+delight in that stupid collection of monkish legends which I cannot
+account for now, and which persisted in spite of the nightmare confusion
+it made of my ancient Greeks and Romans.  They were not at all the
+ancient Greeks and Romans of Goldsmith's histories.
+
+I cannot say at what times I read these books, but they must have been
+odd times, for life was very full of play then, and was already beginning
+to be troubled with work.  As I have said, I was to and fro between the
+schoolhouse and the printing-office so much that when I tired of the one
+I must have been very promptly given my choice of the other.  The
+reading, however, somehow went on pretty constantly, and no doubt my love
+for it won me a chance for it.  There were some famous cherry-trees in
+our yard, which, as I look back at them, seem to have been in flower or
+fruit the year round; and in one of them there was a level branch where a
+boy could sit with a book till his dangling legs went to sleep, or till
+some idler or busier boy came to the gate and called him down to play
+marbles or go swimming.  When this happened the ancient world was rolled
+up like a scroll, and put away until the next day, with all its orators
+and conspirators, its nymphs and satyrs, gods and demigods; though
+sometimes they escaped at night and got into the boy's dreams.
+
+I do not think I cared as much as some of the other boys for the 'Arabian
+Nights' or 'Robinson Crusoe,' but when it came to the 'Ingenious
+Gentleman of La Mancha,' I was not only first, I was sole.
+
+Before I speak, however, of the beneficent humorist who next had my
+boyish heart after Goldsmith, let me acquit myself in full of my debt to
+that not unequal or unkindred spirit.  I have said it was long after I
+had read those histories, full of his inalienable charm, mere pot-boilers
+as they were, and far beneath his more willing efforts, that I came to
+know his poetry.  My father must have read the "Deserted Village" to us,
+and told us something of the author's pathetic life, for I cannot
+remember when I first knew of "sweet Auburn," or had the light of the
+poet's own troubled day upon the "loveliest village of the plain."
+The 'Vicar of Wakefield' must have come into my life after that poem and
+before 'The Traveler'.  It was when I would have said that I knew all
+Goldsmith; we often give ourselves credit for knowledge in this way
+without having any tangible assets; and my reading has always been very
+desultory.  I should like to say here that the reading of any one who
+reads to much purpose is always very desultory, though perhaps I had
+better not say so, but merely state the fact in my case, and own that I
+never read any one author quite through without wandering from him to
+others.  When I first read the 'Vicar of Wakefield' (for I have since
+read it several times, and hope yet to read it many times), I found its
+persons and incidents familiar, and so I suppose I must have heard it
+read.  It is still for me one of the most modern novels: that is to say,
+one of the best.  It is unmistakably good up to a certain point, and then
+unmistakably bad, but with always good enough in it to be forever
+imperishable.  Kindness and gentleness are never out of fashion; it is
+these in Goldsmith which make him our contemporary, and it is worth the
+while of any young person presently intending deathless renown to take a
+little thought of them.  They are the source of all refinement, and I do
+not believe that the best art in any kind exists without them.  The style
+is the man, and he cannot hide himself in any garb of words so that we
+shall not know somehow what manner of man he is within it; his speech
+betrayeth him, not only as to his country and his race, but more subtly
+yet as to his heart, and the loves and hates of his heart.  As to
+Goldsmith, I do not think that a man of harsh and arrogant nature, of
+worldly and selfish soul, could ever have written his style, and I do not
+think that, in far greater measure than criticism has recognized, his
+spiritual quality, his essential friendliness, expressed itself in the
+literary beauty that wins the heart as well as takes the fancy in his
+work.
+
+I should have my reservations and my animadversions if it came to close
+criticism of his work, but I am glad that he was the first author I
+loved, and that even before I knew I loved him I was his devoted reader.
+I was not consciously his admirer till I began to read, when I was
+fourteen, a little volume of his essays, made up, I dare say, from the
+'Citizen of the World' and other unsuccessful ventures of his.  It
+contained the papers on Beau Tibbs, among others, and I tried to write
+sketches and studies of life in their manner.  But this attempt at
+Goldsmith's manner followed a long time after I tried to write in the
+style of Edgar A. Poe, as I knew it from his 'Tales of the Grotesque
+erred Arabesque.'  I suppose the very poorest of these was the "Devil in
+the Belfry," but such as it was I followed it as closely as I could in
+the "Devil in the Smoke-Pipes"; I meant tobacco-pipes.  The resemblance
+was noted by those to whom I read my story; I alone could not see it or
+would not own it, and I really felt it a hardship that I should be found
+to have produced an imitation.
+
+It was the first time I had imitated a prose writer, though I had
+imitated several poets like Moore, Campbell, and Goldsmith himself.
+I have never greatly loved an author without wishing to write like him.
+I have now no reluctance to confess that, and I do not see why I should
+not say that it was a long time before I found it best to be as like
+myself as I could, even when I did not think so well of myself as of some
+others.  I hope I shall always be able and willing to learn something
+from the masters of literature and still be myself, but for the young
+writer this seems impossible.  He must form himself from time to time
+upon the different authors he is in love with, but when he has done this
+he must wish it not to be known, for that is natural too.  The lover
+always desires to ignore the object of his passion, and the adoration
+which a young writer has for a great one is truly a passion passing the
+love of women.  I think it hardly less fortunate that Cervantes was one
+of my early passions, though I sat at his feet with no more sense of his
+mastery than I had of Goldsmith's.
+
+
+
+
+III.  CERVANTES
+
+I recall very fully the moment and the place when I first heard of 'Don
+Quixote,' while as yet I could not connect it very distinctly with
+anybody's authorship.  I was still too young to conceive of authorship,
+even in my own case, and wrote my miserable verses without any notion of
+literature, or of anything but the pleasure of seeing them actually come
+out rightly rhymed and measured.  The moment was at the close of a
+summer's day just before supper, which, in our house, we had lawlessly
+late, and the place was the kitchen where my mother was going about her
+work, and listening as she could to what my father was telling my brother
+and me and an apprentice of ours, who was like a brother to us both, of a
+book that he had once read.  We boys were all shelling peas, but the
+story, as it went on, rapt us from the poor employ, and whatever our
+fingers were doing, our spirits were away in that strange land of
+adventures and mishaps, where the fevered life of the knight truly
+without fear and without reproach burned itself out.  I dare say that my
+father tried to make us understand the satirical purpose of the book.
+I vaguely remember his speaking of the books of chivalry it was meant to
+ridicule; but a boy could not care for this, and what I longed to do at
+once was to get that book and plunge into its story.  He told us at
+random of the attack on the windmills and the flocks of sheep, of the
+night in the valley of the fulling-mills with their trip-hammers, of the
+inn and the muleteers, of the tossing of Sancho in the blanket, of the
+island that was given him to govern, and of all the merry pranks at the
+duke's and duchess's, of the liberation of the galley-slaves, of the
+capture of Mambrino's helmet, and of Sancho's invention of the enchanted
+Dulcinea, and whatever else there was wonderful and delightful in the
+most wonderful and delightful book in the world.  I do not know when or
+where my father got it for me, and I am aware of an appreciable time that
+passed between my hearing of it and my having it.  The event must have
+been most important to me, and it is strange I cannot fix the moment when
+the precious story came into my hands; though for the matter of that
+there is nothing more capricious than a child's memory, what it will hold
+and what it will lose.
+
+It is certain my Don Quixote was in two small, stout volumes not much
+bigger each than my Goldsmith's 'Greece', bound in a sort of law-calf,
+well fitted to withstand the wear they were destined to undergo.  The
+translation was, of course, the old-fashioned version of Jervas, which,
+whether it was a closely faithful version or not, was honest eighteenth-
+century English, and reported faithfully enough the spirit of the
+original.  If it had any literary influence with me the influence must
+have been good.  But I cannot make out that I was sensible of the
+literature; it was the forever enchanting story that I enjoyed.
+I exulted in the boundless freedom of the design; the open air of that
+immense scene, where adventure followed adventure with the natural
+sequence of life, and the days and the nights were not long enough for
+the events that thronged them, amidst the fields and woods, the streams
+and hills, the highways and byways, hostelries and hovels, prisons and
+palaces, which were the setting of that matchless history.  I took it as
+simply as I took everything else in the world about me.  It was full of
+meaning that I could not grasp, and there were significances of the kind
+that literature unhappily abounds in, but they were lost upon my
+innocence.  I did not know whether it was well written or not; I never
+thought about that; it was simply there in its vast entirety, its
+inexhaustible opulence, and I was rich in it beyond the dreams of
+avarice.
+
+My father must have told us that night about Cervantes as well as about
+his 'Don Quixote', for I seem to have known from the beginning that he
+was once a slave in Algiers, and that he had lost a hand in battle, and I
+loved him with a sort of personal affection, as if he were still living
+and he could somehow return my love.  His name and nature endeared the
+Spanish name and nature to me, so that they were always my romance, and
+to this day I cannot meet a Spanish man without clothing him in something
+of the honor and worship I lavished upon Cervantes when I was a child.
+While I was in the full flush of this ardor there came to see our school,
+one day, a Mexican gentleman who was studying the American system of
+education; a mild, fat, saffron man, whom I could almost have died to
+please for Cervantes' and Don Quixote's sake, because I knew he spoke
+their tongue.  But he smiled upon us all, and I had no chance to
+distinguish myself from the rest by any act of devotion before the
+blessed vision faded, though for long afterwards, in impassioned
+reveries, I accosted him and claimed him kindred because of my fealty,
+and because I would have been Spanish if I could.
+
+I would not have had the boy-world about me know anything of these fond
+dreams; but it was my tastes alone, my passions, which were alien there;
+in everything else I was as much a citizen as any boy who had never heard
+of Don Quixote.  But I believe that I carried the book about with me most
+of the time, so as not to lose any chance moment of reading it.  Even in
+the blank of certain years, when I added little other reading to my
+store, I must still have been reading it.  This was after we had removed
+from the town where the earlier years of my boyhood were passed, and I
+had barely adjusted myself to the strange environment when one of my
+uncles asked me to come with him and learn the drug business, in the
+place, forty miles away, where he practised medicine.  We made the long
+journey, longer than any I have made since, in the stage-coach of those
+days, and we arrived at his house about twilight, he glad to get home,
+and I sick to death with yearning for the home I had left.  I do not know
+how it was that in this state, when all the world was one hopeless
+blackness around me, I should have got my 'Don Quixote' out of my bag;
+I seem to have had it with me as an essential part of my equipment for my
+new career. Perhaps I had been asked to show it, with the notion of
+beguiling me from my misery; perhaps I was myself trying to drown my
+sorrows in it.  But anyhow I have before me now the vision of my sweet
+young aunt and her young sister looking over her shoulder, as they stood
+together on the lawn in the summer evening light.  My aunt held my Don
+Quixote open in one hand, while she clasped with the other the child she
+carried on her arm.  She looked at the book, and then from time to time
+she looked at me, very kindly but very curiously, with a faint smile, so
+that as I stood there, inwardly writhing in my bashfulness, I had the
+sense that in her eyes I was a queer boy.  She returned the book without
+comment, after some questions, and I took it off to my room, where the
+confidential friend of Cervantes cried himself to sleep.
+
+In the morning I rose up and told them I could not stand it, and I was
+going home.  Nothing they could say availed, and my uncle went down to
+the stage-office with me and took my passage back.
+
+The horror of cholera was then in the land; and we heard in the stage-
+office that a man lay dead of it in the hotel overhead.  But my uncle led
+me to his drugstore, where the stage was to call for me, and made me
+taste a little camphor; with this prophylactic, Cervantes and I somehow
+got home together alive.
+
+The reading of 'Don Quixote' went on throughout my boyhood, so that I
+cannot recall any distinctive period of it when I was not, more or less,
+reading that book.  In a boy's way I knew it well when I was ten, and a
+few years ago, when I was fifty, I took it up in the admirable new
+version of Ormsby, and found it so full of myself and of my own
+irrevocable past that I did not find it very gay.  But I made a great
+many discoveries in it; things I had not dreamt of were there, and must
+always have been there, and other things wore a new face, and made a new
+effect upon me.  I had my doubts, my reserves, where once I had given it
+my whole heart without question, and yet in what formed the greatness of
+the book it seemed to me greater than ever.  I believe that its free and
+simple design, where event follows event without the fettering control of
+intrigue, but where all grows naturally out of character and conditions,
+is the supreme form of fiction; and I cannot help thinking that if we
+ever have a great American novel it must be built upon some such large
+and noble lines.  As for the central figure, Don Quixote himself, in his
+dignity and generosity, his unselfish ideals, and his fearless devotion
+to them, he is always heroic and beautiful; and I was glad to find in my
+latest look at his history that I had truly conceived of him at first,
+and had felt the sublimity of his nature.  I did not want to laugh at him
+so much, and I could not laugh at all any more at some of the things done
+to him.  Once they seemed funny, but now only cruel, and even stupid, so
+that it was strange to realize his qualities and indignities as both
+flowing from the same mind.  But in my mature experience, which threw a
+broader light on the fable, I was happy to keep my old love of an author
+who had been almost personally, dear to me.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+IRVING
+
+I have told how Cervantes made his race precious to me, and I am sure
+that it must have been he who fitted me to understand and enjoy the
+American author who now stayed me on Spanish ground and kept me happy in
+Spanish air, though I cannot trace the tie in time and circumstance
+between Irving and Cervantes.  The most I can make sure of is that I read
+the 'Conquest of Granada' after I read Don Quixote, and that I loved the
+historian so much because I had loved the novelist much more.  Of course
+I did not perceive then that Irving's charm came largely from Cervantes
+and the other Spanish humorists yet unknown to me, and that he had formed
+himself upon them almost as much as upon Goldsmith, but I dare say that
+this fact had insensibly a great deal to do with my liking.  Afterwards I
+came to see it, and at the same time to see what was Irving's own in
+Irving; to feel his native, if somewhat attenuated humor, and his
+original, if somewhat too studied grace.  But as yet there was no
+critical question with me.  I gave my heart simply and passionately to
+the author who made the scenes of that most pathetic history live in my
+sympathy, and companioned me with the stately and gracious actors in
+them.
+
+I really cannot say now whether I loved the Moors or the Spaniards more.
+I fought on both sides; I would not have had the Spaniards beaten, and
+yet when the Moors lost I was vanquished with them; and when the poor
+young King Boabdil (I was his devoted partisan and at the same time a
+follower of his fiery old uncle and rival, Hamet el Zegri) heaved the
+Last Sigh of the Moor, as his eyes left the roofs of Granada forever, it
+was as much my grief as if it had burst from my own breast.  I put both
+these princes into the first and last historical romance I ever wrote.
+I have now no idea what they did in it, but as the story never came to a
+conclusion it does not greatly matter.  I had never yet read an
+historical romance that I can make sure of, and probably my attempt must
+have been based almost solely upon the facts of Irving's history.  I am
+certain I could not have thought of adding anything to them, or at all
+varying them.
+
+In reading his 'Chronicle' I suffered for a time from its attribution to
+Fray Antonio Agapida, the pious monk whom he feigns to have written it,
+just as in reading 'Don Quixote' I suffered from Cervantes masquerading
+as the Moorish scribe, Cid Hamet Ben Engeli.  My father explained the
+literary caprice, but it remained a confusion and a trouble for me, and I
+made a practice of skipping those passages where either author insisted
+upon his invention.  I will own that I am rather glad that sort of thing
+seems to be out of fashion now, and I think the directer and franker
+methods of modern fiction will forbid its revival.  Thackeray was fond of
+such open disguises, and liked to greet his reader from the mask of
+Yellowplush and Michael Angelo Titmarsh, but it seems to me this was in
+his least modern moments.
+
+My 'Conquest of Granada' was in two octavo volumes, bound in drab boards,
+and printed on paper very much yellowed with time at its irregular edges.
+I do not know when the books happened in my hands.  I have no remembrance
+that they were in any wise offered or commended to me, and in a sort of
+way they were as authentically mine as if I had made them.  I saw them at
+home, not many months ago, in my father's library (it has long outgrown
+the old bookcase, which has gone I know not where), and upon the whole I
+rather shrank from taking them down, much more from opening them, though
+I could not say why, unless it was from the fear of perhaps finding the
+ghost of my boyish self within, pressed flat like a withered leaf,
+somewhere between the familiar pages.
+
+When I learned Spanish it was with the purpose, never yet fulfilled, of
+writing the life of Cervantes, although I have since had some forty-odd
+years to do it in.  I taught myself the language, or began to do so, when
+I knew nothing of the English grammar but the prosody at the end of the
+book.  My father had the contempt of familiarity with it, having himself
+written a very brief sketch of our accidence, and he seems to have let me
+plunge into the sea of Spanish verbs and adverbs, nouns and pronouns, and
+all the rest, when as yet I could not confidently call them by name, with
+the serene belief that if I did not swim I would still somehow get ashore
+without sinking.  The end, perhaps, justified him, and I suppose I did
+not do all that work without getting some strength from it; but I wish I
+had back the time that it cost me; I should like to waste it in some
+other way.  However, time seemed interminable then, and I thought there
+would be enough of it for me in which to read all Spanish literature; or,
+at least, I did not propose to do anything less.
+
+I followed Irving, too, in my later reading, but at haphazard, and with
+other authors at the same time.  I did my poor best to be amused by his
+'Knickerbocker History of New York', because my father liked it so much,
+but secretly I found it heavy; and a few years ago when I went carefully
+through it again.  I could not laugh.  Even as a boy I found some other
+things of his uphill work.  There was the beautiful manner, but the
+thought seemed thin; and I do not remember having been much amused by
+'Bracebridge Hall', though I read it devoutly, and with a full sense that
+it would be very 'comme il faut' to like it.  But I did like the 'Life of
+Goldsmith'; I liked it a great deal better than the more authoritative
+'Life by Forster', and I think there is a deeper and sweeter sense of
+Goldsmith in it.  Better than all, except the 'Conquest of Granada',
+I liked the 'Legend of Sleepy Hollow' and the story of Rip Van Winkle,
+with their humorous and affectionate caricatures of life that was once of
+our own soil and air; and the 'Tales of the Alhambra', which transported
+me again, to the scenes of my youth beside the Xenil.  It was long after
+my acquaintance with his work that I came to a due sense of Irving as an
+artist, and perhaps I have come to feel a full sense of it only now, when
+I perceive that he worked willingly only when he worked inventively.
+At last I can do justice to the exquisite conception of his 'Conquest of
+Granada', a study of history which, in unique measure, conveys not only
+the pathos, but the humor of one of the most splendid and impressive
+situations in the experience of the race.  Very possibly something of the
+severer truth might have been sacrificed to the effect of the pleasing
+and touching tale, but I do not under stand that this was really done.
+Upon the whole I am very well content with my first three loves in
+literature, and if I were to choose for any other boy I do not see how I
+could choose better than Goldsmith and Cervantes and Irving, kindred
+spirits, and each not a master only, but a sweet and gentle friend, whose
+kindness could not fail to profit him.
+
+
+
+
+V.  FIRST FICTION AND DRAMA
+
+In my own case there followed my acquaintance with these authors certain
+Boeotian years, when if I did not go backward I scarcely went forward in
+the paths I had set out upon.  They were years of the work, of the over-
+work, indeed, which falls to the lot of so many that I should be ashamed
+to speak of it except in accounting for the fact.  My father had sold his
+paper in Hamilton and had bought an interest in another at Dayton, and we
+were all straining our utmost to help pay for it.  My daily tasks began
+so early and ended so late that I had little time, even if I had the
+spirit, for reading; and it was not till what we thought ruin, but what
+was really release, came to us that I got back again to my books.  Then
+we went to live in the country for a year, and that stress of toil, with
+the shadow of failure darkening all, fell from me like the horror of an
+evil dream.  The only new book which I remember to have read in those two
+or three years at Dayton, when I hardly remember to have read any old
+ones, was the novel of 'Jane Eyre,' which I took in very imperfectly, and
+which I associate with the first rumor of the Rochester Knockings, then
+just beginning to reverberate through a world that they have not since
+left wholly at peace.  It was a gloomy Sunday afternoon when the book
+came under my hand; and mixed with my interest in the story was an
+anxiety lest the pictures on the walls should leave their nails and come
+and lay themselves at my feet; that was what the pictures had been doing
+in Rochester and other places where the disembodied spirits were
+beginning to make themselves felt.  The thing did not really happen in my
+case, but I was alone in the house, and it might very easily have
+happened.
+
+If very little came to me in those days from books, on the other hand my
+acquaintance with the drama vastly enlarged itself.  There was a hapless
+company of players in the town from time to time, and they came to us for
+their printing.  I believe they never paid for it, or at least never
+wholly, but they lavished free passes upon us, and as nearly as I can
+make out, at this distance of time, I profited by their generosity, every
+night.  They gave two or three plays at every performance to houses
+ungratefully small, but of a lively spirit and impatient temper that
+would not brook delay in the representation; and they changed the bill
+each day.  In this way I became familiar with Shakespeare before I read
+him, or at least such plays of his as were most given in those days, and
+I saw "Macbeth" and "Hamlet," and above all "Richard III.," again and
+again.  I do not know why my delight in those tragedies did not send me
+to the volume of his plays, which was all the time in the bookcase at
+home, but I seem not to have thought of it, and rapt as I was in them I
+am not sure that they gave me greater pleasure, or seemed at all finer,
+than "Rollo," "The Wife," "The Stranger," "Barbarossa," "The Miser of
+Marseilles," and the rest of the melodramas, comedies, and farces which I
+saw at that time.  I have a notion that there were some clever people in
+one of these companies, and that the lighter pieces at least were well
+played, but I may be altogether wrong.  The gentleman who took the part
+of villain, with an unfailing love of evil, in the different dramas, used
+to come about the printing-office a good deal, and I was puzzled to find
+him a very mild and gentle person.  To be sure he had a mustache, which
+in those days devoted a man to wickedness, but by day it was a blond
+mustache, quite flaxen, in fact, and not at all the dark and deadly thing
+it was behind the footlights at night.  I could scarcely gasp in his
+presence, my heart bounded so in awe and honor of him when he paid a
+visit to us; perhaps he used to bring the copy of the show-bills.  The
+company he belonged to left town in the adversity habitual with them.
+
+Our own adversity had been growing, and now it became overwhelming.  We
+had to give up the paper we had struggled so hard to keep, but when the
+worst came it was not half so bad as what had gone before.  There was no
+more waiting till midnight for the telegraphic news, no more waking at
+dawn to deliver the papers, no more weary days at the case, heavier for
+the doom hanging over us.  My father and his brothers had long dreamed of
+a sort of family colony somewhere in the country, and now the uncle who
+was most prosperous bought a milling property on a river not far from
+Dayton, and my father went out to take charge of it until the others
+could shape their business to follow him.  The scheme came to nothing
+finally, but in the mean time we escaped from the little city and its
+sorrowful associations of fruitless labor, and had a year in the country,
+which was blest, at least to us children, by sojourn in a log-cabin,
+while a house was building for us.
+
+
+
+
+VI.  LONGFELLOW'S "SPANISH STUDENT"
+
+This log-cabin had a loft, where we boys slept, and in the loft were
+stored in barrels the books that had now begun to overflow the bookcase.
+I do not know why I chose the loft to renew my long-neglected friendship
+with them.  The light could not have been good, though if I brought my
+books to the little gable window that overlooked the groaning and
+whistling gristmill I could see well enough.  But perhaps I liked the
+loft best because the books were handiest there, and because I could be
+alone.  At any rate, it was there that I read Longfellow's "Spanish
+Student," which I found in an old paper copy of his poems in one of the
+barrels, and I instantly conceived for it the passion which all things
+Spanish inspired in me.  As I read I not only renewed my acquaintance
+with literature, but renewed my delight in people and places where I had
+been happy before those heavy years in Dayton.  At the same time I felt a
+little jealousy, a little grudge, that any one else should love them as
+well as I, and if the poem had not been so beautiful I should have hated
+the poet for trespassing on my ground.  But I could not hold out long
+against the witchery of his verse.  The "Spanish Student" became one of
+my passions; a minor passion, not a grand one, like 'Don Quixote' and the
+'Conquest of Granada', but still a passion, and I should dread a little
+to read the piece now, lest I should disturb my old ideal of its beauty.
+The hero's rogue servant, Chispa, seemed to me, then and long afterwards,
+so fine a bit of Spanish character that I chose his name for my first
+pseudonym when I began to write for the newspapers, and signed my
+legislative correspondence for a Cincinnati paper with it.  I was in love
+with the heroine, the lovely dancer whose 'cachucha' turned my head,
+along with that of the cardinal, but whose name even I have forgotten,
+and I went about with the thought of her burning in my heart, as if she
+had been a real person.
+
+
+
+
+VII.  SCOTT
+
+All the while I was bringing up the long arrears of play which I had not
+enjoyed in the toil-years at Dayton, and was trying to make my Spanish
+reading serve in the sports that we had in the woods and by the river.
+We were Moors and Spaniards almost as often as we were British and
+Americans, or settlers and Indians.  I suspect that the large, mild boy,
+the son of a neighboring farmer, who mainly shared our games, had but a
+dim notion of what I meant by my strange people, but I did my best to
+enlighten him, and he helped me make a dream out of my life, and did his
+best to dwell in the region of unrealities where I preferably had my
+being; he was from time to time a Moor when I think he would rather have
+been a Mingo.
+
+I got hold of Scott's poems, too, in that cabin loft, and read most of
+the tales which were yet unknown to me after those earlier readings of my
+father's.  I could not say why "Harold the Dauntless" most took my fancy;
+the fine, strongly flowing rhythm of the verse had a good deal to do with
+it, I believe.  I liked these things, all of them, and in after years I
+liked the "Lady of the Lake" more and more, and from mere love of it got
+great lengths of it by heart; but I cannot say that Scott was then or
+ever a great passion with me.  It was a sobered affection at best, which
+came from my sympathy with his love of nature, and the whole kindly and
+humane keeping of his genius.  Many years later, during the month when I
+was waiting for my passport as Consul for Venice, and had the time on my
+hands, I passed it chiefly in reading all his novels, one after another,
+without the interruption of other reading.  'Ivanhoe' I had known before,
+and the 'Bride of Lammermoor' and 'Woodstock', but the rest had remained
+in that sort of abeyance which is often the fate of books people expect
+to read as a matter of course, and come very near not reading at all, or
+read only very late.  Taking them in this swift sequence, little or
+nothing of them remained with me, and my experience with them is against
+that sort of ordered and regular reading, which I have so often heard
+advised for young people by their elders.  I always suspect their elders
+of not having done that kind of reading themselves.
+
+For my own part I believe I have never got any good from a book that I
+did not read lawlessly and wilfully, out of all leading and following,
+and merely because I wanted to read it; and I here make bold to praise
+that way of doing.  The book which you read from a sense of duty, or
+because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you.
+It may happen that it will yield you an unexpected delight, but this will
+be in its own unentreated way and in spite of your good intentions.
+Little of the book read for a purpose stays with the reader, and this is
+one reason why reading for review is so vain and unprofitable.  I have
+done a vast deal of this, but I have usually been aware that the book was
+subtly withholding from me the best a book can give, since I was not
+reading it for its own sake and because I loved it, but for selfish ends
+of my own, and because I wished to possess myself of it for business
+purposes, as it were.  The reading that does one good, and lasting good,
+is the reading that one does for pleasure, and simply and unselfishly,
+as children do.  Art will still withhold herself from thrift, and she
+does well, for nothing but love has any right to her.
+
+Little remains of the events of any period, however vivid they were in
+passing.  The memory may hold record of everything, as it is believed,
+but it will not be easily entreated to give up its facts, and I find
+myself striving in vein to recall the things that I must have read that
+year in the country.  Probably I read the old things over; certainly I
+kept on with Cervantes, and very likely with Goldsmith.  There was a
+delightful history of Ohio, stuffed with tales of the pioneer times,
+which was a good deal in the hands of us boys; and there was a book of
+Western Adventure, full of Indian fights and captivities, which we wore
+to pieces.  Still, I think that it was now that I began to have a
+literary sense of what I was reading.  I wrote a diary, and I tried to
+give its record form and style, but mostly failed.  The versifying which
+I was always at was easier, and yielded itself more to my hand.  I should
+be very glad to, know at present what it dealt with.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.  LIGHTER FANCIES
+
+When my uncles changed their minds in regard to colonizing their families
+at the mills, as they did in about a year, it became necessary for my
+father to look about for some new employment, and he naturally looked in
+the old direction.  There were several schemes for getting hold of this
+paper and that, and there were offers that came to nothing.  In that day
+there were few salaried editors in the country outside of New York, and
+the only hope we could have was of some place as printers in an office
+which we might finally buy.  The affair ended in our going to the State
+capital, where my father found work as a reporter of legislative
+proceedings for one of the daily journals, and I was taken into the
+office as a compositor.  In this way I came into living contact with
+literature again, and the daydreams began once more over the familiar
+cases of type.  A definite literary ambition grew up in me, and in the
+long reveries of the afternoon, when I was distributing my case,
+I fashioned a future of overpowering magnificence and undying celebrity.
+I should be ashamed to say what literary triumphs I achieved in those
+preposterous deliriums.  What I actually did was to write a good many
+copies of verse, in imitation, never owned, of Moore and Goldsmith, and
+some minor poets, whose work caught my fancy, as I read it in the
+newspapers or put it into type.
+
+One of my pieces, which fell so far short of my visionary performances as
+to treat of the lowly and familiar theme of Spring, was the first thing I
+ever had in print.  My father offered it to the editor of the paper I
+worked on, and I first knew, with mingled shame and pride, of what he had
+done when I saw it in the journal.  In the tumult of my emotions I
+promised myself that if I got through this experience safely I would
+never suffer anything else of mine to be published; but it was not long
+before I offered the editor a poem myself.  I am now glad to think it
+dealt with so humble a fact as a farmer's family leaving their old home
+for the West.  The only fame of my poem which reached me was when another
+boy in the office quoted some lines of it in derision.  This covered me
+with such confusion that I wonder that I did not vanish from the earth.
+At the same time I had my secret joy in it, and even yet I think it was
+attempted in a way which was not false or wrong.  I had tried to sketch
+an aspect of life that I had seen and known, and that was very well
+indeed, and I had wrought patiently and carefully in the art of the poor
+little affair.
+
+My elder brother, for whom there was no place in the office where I
+worked, had found one in a store, and he beguiled the leisure that light
+trade left on his hands by reading the novels of Captain Marryat.  I read
+them after him with a great deal of amusement, but without the passion
+that I bestowed upon my favorite authors.  I believe I had no critical
+reserves in regard to them, but simply they did not take my fancy.
+Still, we had great fun with Japhet in 'Search of a Father', and with
+'Midshipman Easy', and we felt a fine physical shiver in the darkling
+moods of 'Snarle-yow the Dog-Fiend.'  I do not remember even the names of
+the other novels, except 'Jacob Faithful,' which I chanced upon a few
+years ago and found very, hard reading.
+
+We children who were used to the free range of woods and fields were
+homesick for the country in our narrow city yard, and I associate with
+this longing the 'Farmer's Boy of Bloomfield,' which my father got for
+me.  It was a little book in blue cloth, and there were some mild wood-
+cuts in it.  I read it with a tempered pleasure, and with a vague
+resentment of its trespass upon Thomson's ground in the division of its
+parts under the names of the seasons.  I do not know why I need have felt
+this.  I was not yet very fond of Thomson.  I really liked Bloomfield
+better; for one thing, his poem was written in the heroic decasyllabics
+which I preferred to any other verse.
+
+
+
+
+IX.  POPE
+
+I infer, from the fact of this preference that I had already begun to
+read Pope, and that I must have read the "Deserted Village" of Goldsmith.
+I fancy, also, that I must by this time have read the Odyssey, for the
+"Battle of the Frogs and Mice" was in the second volume, and it took me
+so much that I paid it the tribute of a bald imitation in a mock-heroic
+epic of a cat fight, studied from the cat fights in our back yard, with
+the wonted invocation to the Muse, and the machinery of partisan gods and
+goddesses.  It was in some hundreds of verses, which I did my best to
+balance as Pope did, with a caesura falling in the middle of the line,
+and a neat antithesis at the end.
+
+The story of the Odyssey charmed me, of course, and I had moments of
+being intimate friends with Ulysses, but I was passing out of that phase,
+and was coming to read more with a sense of the author, and less with a
+sense of his characters as real persons; that is, I was growing more
+literary, and less human.  I fell in love with Pope, whose life I read
+with an ardor of sympathy which I am afraid he hardly merited.  I was of
+his side in all his quarrels, as far as I understood them, and if I did
+not understand them I was of his side anyway.  When I found that he was a
+Catholic I was almost ready to abjure the Protestant religion for his
+sake; but I perceived that this was not necessary when I came to know
+that most of his friends were Protestants.  If the truth must be told,
+I did not like his best things at first, but long remained chiefly
+attached to his rubbishing pastorals, which I was perpetually imitating,
+with a whole apparatus of swains and shepherdesses, purling brooks,
+enamelled meads, rolling years, and the like.
+
+After my day's work at the case I wore the evening away in my boyish
+literary attempts, forcing my poor invention in that unnatural kind, and
+rubbing and polishing at my wretched verses till they did sometimes take
+on an effect, which, if it was not like Pope's, was like none of mine.
+With all my pains I do not think I ever managed to bring any of my
+pastorals to a satisfactory close.  They all stopped somewhere about
+halfway.  My swains could not think of anything more to say, and the
+merits of my shepherdesses remained undecided.  To this day I do not know
+whether in any given instance it was the champion of Chloe or of Sylvia
+that carried off the prize for his fair, but I dare say it does not much
+matter.  I am sure that I produced a rhetoric as artificial and treated
+of things as unreal as my master in the art, and I am rather glad that I
+acquainted myself so thoroughly with a mood of literature which, whatever
+we may say against it, seems to have expressed very perfectly a mood of
+civilization.
+
+The severe schooling I gave myself was not without its immediate use.
+I learned how to choose between words after a study of their fitness,
+and though I often employed them decoratively and with no vital sense of
+their qualities, still in mere decoration they had to be chosen
+intelligently, and after some thought about their structure and meaning.
+I could not imitate Pope without imitating his methods, and his method
+was to the last degree intelligent.  He certainly knew what he was doing,
+and although I did not always know what I was doing, he made me wish to
+know, and ashamed of not knowing.  There are several truer poets who
+might not have done this; and after all the modern contempt of Pope, he
+seems to me to have been at least one of the great masters, if not one of
+the great poets.  The poor man's life was as weak and crooked as his
+frail, tormented body, but he had a dauntless spirit, and he fought his
+way against odds that might well have appalled a stronger nature.
+I suppose I must own that he was from time to time a snob, and from time
+to time a liar, but I believe that he loved the truth, and would have
+liked always to respect himself if he could.  He violently revolted,
+now and again, from the abasement to which he forced himself, and he
+always bit the heel that trod on him, especially if it was a very high,
+narrow heel, with a clocked stocking and a hooped skirt above it.
+I loved him fondly at one time, and afterwards despised him, but now I am
+not sorry for the love, and I am very sorry for the despite.  I humbly,
+own a vast debt to him, not the least part of which is the perception
+that he is a model of ever so much more to be shunned than to be followed
+in literature.
+
+He was the first of the writers of great Anna's time whom I knew, and he
+made me ready to understand, if he did not make me understand at once,
+the order of mind and life which he belonged to.  Thanks to his
+pastorals, I could long afterwards enjoy with the double sense requisite
+for full pleasure in them, such divinely excellent artificialities at
+Tasso's "Aminta" and Guarini's "Pastor Fido"; things which you will
+thoroughly like only after you are in the joke of thinking how people
+once seriously liked them as high examples of poetry.
+
+Of course I read other things of Pope's besides his pastorals, even at
+the time I read these so much.  I read, or not very easily or willingly
+read at, his 'Essay on Man,' which my father admired, and which he
+probably put Pope's works into my hands to have me read; and I read the
+'Dunciad,' with quite a furious ardor in the tiresome quarrels it
+celebrates, and an interest in its machinery, which it fatigues me to
+think of.  But it was only a few years ago that I read the 'Rape of the
+Lock,' a thing perfect of its kind, whatever we may choose to think of
+the kind.  Upon the whole I think much better of the kind than I once
+did, though still not so much as I should have thought if I had read the
+poem when the fever of my love for Pope was at the highest.
+
+It is a nice question how far one is helped or hurt by one's
+idealizations of historical or imaginary characters, and I shall not try
+to answer it fully.  I suppose that if I once cherished such a passion
+for Pope personally that I would willingly have done the things that he
+did, and told the lies, and vented the malice, and inflicted the
+cruelties that the poor soul was full of, it was for the reason, partly,
+that I did not see these things as they were, and that in the glamour of
+his talent I was blind to all but the virtues of his defects, which he
+certainly had, and partly that in my love of him I could not take sides
+against him, even when I knew him to be wrong.  After all, I fancy not
+much harm comes to the devoted boy from his enthusiasms for this
+imperfect hero or that.  In my own case I am sure that I distinguished as
+to certain sins in my idols.  I could not cast them down or cease to
+worship them, but some of their frailties grieved me and put me to secret
+shame for them.  I did not excuse these things in them, or try to believe
+that they were less evil for them than they would have been for less
+people.  This was after I came more or less to the knowledge of good and
+evil.  While I remained in the innocence of childhood I did not even
+understand the wrong.  When I realized what lives some of my poets had
+led, how they were drunkards, and swindlers, and unchaste, and untrue,
+I lamented over them with a sense of personal disgrace in them, and to
+this day I have no patience with that code of the world which relaxes
+itself in behalf of the brilliant and gifted offender; rather he should
+suffer more blame. The worst of the literature of past times, before an
+ethical conscience began to inform it, or the advance of the race
+compelled it to decency, is that it leaves the mind foul with filthy
+images and base thoughts; but what I have been trying to say is that the
+boy, unless he is exceptionally depraved beforehand, is saved from these
+through his ignorance.  Still I wish they were not there, and I hope the
+time will come when the beast-man will be so far subdued and tamed in us
+that the memory of him in literature shall be left to perish; that what
+is lewd and ribald in the great poets shall be kept out of such editions
+as are meant for general reading, and that the pedant-pride which now
+perpetuates it as an essential part of those poets shall no longer have
+its way.  At the end of the ends such things do defile, they do corrupt.
+We may palliate them or excuse them for this reason or that, but that is
+the truth, and I do not see why they should not be dropped from
+literature, as they were long ago dropped from the talk of decent people.
+The literary histories might keep record of them, but it is loath some to
+think of those heaps of ordure, accumulated from generation to
+generation, and carefully passed down from age to age as something
+precious and vital, and not justly regarded as the moral offal which they
+are.
+
+During the winter we passed at Columbus I suppose that my father read
+things aloud to us after his old habit, and that I listened with the
+rest.  I have a dim notion of first knowing Thomson's 'Castle of
+Indolence' in this way, but I was getting more and more impatient of
+having things read to me.  The trouble was that I caught some thought or
+image from the text, and that my fancy remained playing with that while
+the reading went on, and I lost the rest.  But I think the reading was
+less in every way than it had been, because his work was exhausting and
+his leisure less.  My own hours in the printing-office began at seven and
+ended at six, with an hour at noon for dinner, which I often used for
+putting down such verses as had come to me during the morning.  As soon
+as supper was over at night I got out my manuscripts, which I kept in
+great disorder, and written in several different hands on several
+different kinds of paper, and sawed, and filed, and hammered away at my
+blessed Popean heroics till nine, when I went regularly to bed, to rise
+again at five.  Sometimes the foreman gave me an afternoon off on
+Saturdays, and though the days were long the work was not always
+constant, and was never very severe.  I suspect now the office was not so
+prosperous as might have been wished.  I was shifted from place to place
+in it, and there was plenty of time for my day-dreams over the
+distribution of my case.  I was very fond of my work, though, and proud
+of my swiftness and skill in it.  Once when the perplexed foreman could
+not think of any task to set me he offered me a holiday, but I would not
+take it, so I fancy that at this time I was not more interested in my art
+of poetry than in my trade of printing.  What went on in the office
+interested me as much as the quarrels of the Augustan age of English
+letters, and I made much more record of it in the crude and shapeless
+diary which I kept, partly in verse and partly in prose, but always of a
+distinctly lower literary kind than that I was trying otherwise to write.
+There must have been some mention in it of the tremendous combat with wet
+sponges I saw there one day between two of the boys who hurled them back
+and forth at each other.  This amiable fray, carried on during the
+foreman's absence, forced upon my notice for the first time the boy who
+has come to be a name well-known in literature.  I admired his vigor as a
+combatant, but I never spoke to him at that time, and I never dreamed
+that he, too, was effervescing with verse, probably as fiercely as
+myself.  Six or seven years later we met again, when we had both become
+journalists, and had both had poems accepted by Mr. Lowell for the
+Atlantic Monthly, and then we formed a literary friendship which
+eventuated in the joint publication of a volume of verse.  'The Poems of
+Two Friends' became instantly and lastingly unknown to fame; the West
+waited, as it always does, to hear what the East should say; the East
+said nothing, and two-thirds of the small edition of five hundred came
+back upon the publisher's hands.  I imagine these copies were "ground up"
+in the manner of worthless stock, for I saw a single example of the book
+quoted the other day in a book-seller's catalogue at ten dollars, and I
+infer that it is so rare as to be prized at least for its rarity.  It was
+a very pretty little book, printed on tinted paper then called "blush,"
+in the trade, and it was manufactured in the same office where we had
+once been boys together, unknown to each other.  Another boy of that time
+had by this time become foreman in the office, and he was very severe
+with us about the proofs, and sent us hurting messages on the margin.
+Perhaps he thought we might be going to take on airs, and perhaps we
+might have taken on airs if the fate of our book had been different.
+As it was I really think we behaved with sufficient meekness, and after
+thirty four or five years for reflection I am still of a very modest mind
+about my share of the book, in spite of the price it bears in the book-
+seller's catalogue.  But I have steadily grown in liking for my friend's
+share in it, and I think that there is at present no American of twenty-
+three writing verse of so good a quality, with an ideal so pure and high,
+and from an impulse so authentic as John J. Piatt's were then.  He
+already knew how to breathe into his glowing rhyme the very spirit of the
+region where we were both native, and in him the Middle West has its true
+poet, who was much more than its poet, who had a rich and tender
+imagination, a lovely sense of color, and a touch even then securely and
+fully his own.  I was reading over his poems in that poor little book a
+few days ago, and wondering with shame and contrition that I had not at
+once known their incomparable superiority to mine.  But I used then and
+for long afterwards to tax him with obscurity, not knowing that my own
+want of simplicity and directness was to blame for that effect.
+My reading from the first was such as to enamour me of clearness, of
+definiteness; anything left in the vague was intolerable to me; but my
+long subjection to Pope, while it was useful in other ways, made me so
+strictly literary in my point of view that sometimes I could not see what
+was, if more naturally approached and without any technical
+preoccupation, perfectly transparent.  It remained for another great
+passion, perhaps the greatest of my life, to fuse these gyves in which I
+was trying so hard to dance, and free me forever from the bonds which I
+had spent so much time and trouble to involve myself in.  But I was not
+to know that passion for five or six years yet, and in the mean time I
+kept on as I had been going, and worked out my deliverance in the
+predestined way.  What I liked then was regularity, uniformity,
+exactness.  I did not conceive of literature as the expression of life,
+and I could not imagine that it ought to be desultory, mutable, and
+unfixed, even if at the risk of some vagueness.
+
+
+
+
+X.  VARIOUS PREFERENCES
+
+My father was very fond of Byron, and I must before this have known that
+his poems were in our bookcase.  While we were still in Columbus I began
+to read them, but I did not read so much of them as could have helped me
+to a truer and freer ideal.  I read "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,"
+and I liked its vulgar music and its heavy-handed sarcasm.  These would,
+perhaps, have fascinated any boy, but I had such a fanaticism for
+methodical verse that any variation from the octosyllabic and
+decasyllabic couplets was painful to me.  The Spencerian stanza, with its
+rich variety of movement and its harmonious closes, long shut "Childe
+Harold" from me, and whenever I found a poem in any book which did not
+rhyme its second line with its first I read it unwillingly or not at all.
+
+This craze could not last, of course, but it lasted beyond our stay in
+Columbus, which ended with the winter, when the Legislature adjourned,
+and my father's employment ceased.  He tried to find some editorial work
+on the paper which had printed his reports, but every place was full, and
+it was hopeless to dream of getting a proprietary interest in it.  We had
+nothing, and we must seek a chance where something besides money would
+avail us.  This offered itself in the village of Ashtabula, in the
+northeastern part of the State, and there we all found ourselves one
+moonlight night of early summer.  The Lake Shore Railroad then ended at
+Ashtabula, in a bank of sand, and my elder brother and I walked up from
+the station, while the rest of the family, which pretty well filled the
+omnibus, rode.  We had been very happy at Columbus, as we were apt to be
+anywhere, but none of us liked the narrowness of city streets, even so
+near to the woods as those were, and we were eager for the country again.
+We had always lived hitherto in large towns, except for that year at the
+Mills, and we were eager to see what a village was like, especially a
+village peopled wholly by Yankees, as our father had reported it.  I must
+own that we found it far prettier than anything we had known in Southern
+Ohio, which we were so fond of and so loath to leave, and as I look back
+it still seems to me one of the prettiest little places I have ever
+known, with its white wooden houses, glimmering in the dark of its elms
+and maples, and their silent gardens beside each, and the silent, grass-
+bordered, sandy streets between them.  The hotel, where we rejoined our
+family, lurked behind a group of lofty elms, and we drank at the town
+pump before it just for the pleasure of pumping it.
+
+The village was all that we could have imagined of simply and sweetly
+romantic in the moonlight, and when the day came it did not rob it of its
+charm.  It was as lovely in my eyes as the loveliest village of the
+plain, and it had the advantage of realizing the Deserted Village without
+being deserted.
+
+
+
+
+XI.  UNCLE TOM'S CABIN
+
+The book that moved me most, in our stay of six months at Ashtabula, was
+then beginning to move the whole world more than any other book has moved
+it.  I read it as it came out week after week in the old National Era,
+and I broke my heart over Uncle Tom's Cabin, as every one else did.  Yet
+I cannot say that it was a passion of mine like Don Quixote, or the other
+books that I had loved intensely.  I felt its greatness when I read it
+first, and as often as I have read it since, I have seen more and more
+clearly that it was a very great novel.  With certain obvious lapses in
+its art, and with an art that is at its best very simple, and perhaps
+primitive, the book is still a work of art.  I knew this, in a measure
+then, as I know it now, and yet neither the literary pride I was
+beginning to have in the perception of such things, nor the powerful
+appeal it made to my sympathies, sufficed to impassion me of it.  I could
+not say why this was so.  Why does the young man's fancy, when it lightly
+turns to thoughts of love, turn this way and not that?  There seems no
+more reason for one than for the other.
+
+Instead of remaining steeped to the lips in the strong interest of what
+is still perhaps our chief fiction, I shed my tribute of tears, and went
+on my way.  I did not try to write a story of slaver, as I might very
+well have done; I did not imitate either the make or the manner of Mrs.
+Stowe's romance; I kept on at my imitation of Pope's pastorals, which I
+dare say I thought much finer, and worthier the powers of such a poet as
+I meant to be.  I did this, as I must have felt then, at some personal
+risk of a supernatural kind, for my studies were apt to be prolonged into
+the night after the rest of the family had gone to bed, and a certain
+ghost, which I had every reason to fear, might very well have visited the
+small room given me to write in.  There was a story, which I shrank from
+verifying, that a former inmate of our house had hung himself in it, but
+I do not know to this day whether it was true or not.  The doubt did not
+prevent him from dangling at the door-post, in my consciousness, and many
+a time I shunned the sight of this problematical suicide by keeping my
+eyes fastened on the book before me.  It was a very simple device, but
+perfectly effective, as I think any one will find who employs it in like
+circumstances; and I would really like to commend it to growing boys
+troubled as I was then.
+
+I never heard who the poor soul was, or why he took himself out of the
+world, if he really did so, or if he ever was in it; but I am sure that
+my passion for Pope, and my purpose of writing pastorals, must have been
+powerful indeed to carry me through dangers of that kind.  I suspect that
+the strongest proof of their existence was the gloomy and ruinous look of
+the house, which was one of the oldest in the village, and the only one
+that was for rent there.  We went into it because we must, and we were to
+leave it as soon as we could find a better.  But before this happened we
+left Ashtabula, and I parted with one of the few possibilities I have
+enjoyed of seeing a ghost on his own ground, as it were.
+
+I was not sorry, for I believe I never went in or came out of the place,
+by day or by night, without a shudder, more or less secret; and at least,
+now, we should be able to get another house.
+
+
+
+
+XII.  OSSIAN
+
+Very likely the reading of Ossian had something to do with my morbid
+anxieties.  I had read Byron's imitation of him before that, and admired
+it prodigiously, and when my father got me the book--as usual I did not
+know where or how he got it--not all the tall forms that moved before the
+eyes of haunted bards in the dusky vale of autumn could have kept me from
+it.  There were certain outline illustrations in it, which were very good
+in the cold Flaxman manner, and helped largely to heighten the
+fascination of the poems for me.  They did not supplant the pastorals of
+Pope in my affections, and they were never the grand passion with me that
+Pope's poems had been.
+
+I began at once to make my imitations of Ossian, and I dare say they were
+not windier and mistier than the original.  At the same time I read the
+literature of the subject, and gave the pretensions of Macpherson an
+unquestioning faith.  I should have made very short work of any one who
+had impugned the authenticity of the poems, but happily there was no one
+who held the contrary opinion in that village, so far as I knew, or who
+cared for Ossian, or had even heard of him.  This saved me a great deal
+of heated controversy with my contemporaries, but I had it out in many
+angry reveries with Dr. Johnson and others, who had dared to say in their
+time that the poems of Ossian were not genuine lays of the Gaelic bard,
+handed down from father to son, and taken from the lips of old women in
+Highland huts, as Macpherson claimed.
+
+In fact I lived over in my small way the epoch of the eighteenth century
+in which these curious frauds found polite acceptance all over Europe,
+and I think yet that they were really worthier of acceptance than most of
+the artificialities that then passed for poetry.  There was a light of
+nature in them, and this must have been what pleased me, so long-shut up
+to the studio-work of Pope.  But strangely enough I did not falter in my
+allegiance to him, or realize that here in this free form was a
+deliverance, if I liked, from the fetters and manacles which I had been
+at so much pains to fit myself with.  Probably nothing would then have
+persuaded me to put them off permanently, or to do more than lay them
+aside for the moment while I tried that new stop and that new step.
+
+I think that even then I had an instinctive doubt whether formlessness
+was really better than formality.  Something, it seems to me, may be
+contained and kept alive in formality, but in formlessness everything
+spills and wastes away.  This is what I find the fatal defect of our
+American Ossian, Walt Whitman, whose way is where artistic madness lies.
+He had great moments, beautiful and noble thoughts, generous aspirations,
+and a heart wide and warm enough for the whole race, but he had no
+bounds, no shape; he was as liberal as the casing air, but he was often
+as vague and intangible.  I cannot say how long my passion for Ossian
+lasted, but not long, I fancy, for I cannot find any trace of it in the
+time following our removal from Ashtabula to the county seat at
+Jefferson.  I kept on with Pope, I kept on with Cervantes, I kept on with
+Irving, but I suppose there was really not substance enough in Ossian to
+feed my passion, and it died of inanition.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.  SHAKESPEARE
+
+The establishment of our paper in the village where there had been none
+before, and its enlargement from four to eight pages, were events so
+filling that they left little room for any other excitement but that of
+getting acquainted with the young people of the village, and going to
+parties, and sleigh rides, and walks, and drives, and picnics, and
+dances, and all the other pleasures in which that community seemed to
+indulge beyond any other we had known.  The village was smaller than the
+one we had just left, but it was by no means less lively, and I think
+that for its size and time and place it had an uncommon share of what has
+since been called culture.  The intellectual experience of the people was
+mainly theological and political, as it was everywhere in that day, but
+there were several among them who had a real love for books, and when
+they met at the druggist's, as they did every night, to dispute of the
+inspiration of the Scriptures and the principles of the Free Soil party,
+the talk sometimes turned upon the respective merits of Dickens and
+Thackeray, Gibbon and Macaulay, Wordsworth and Byron.  There were law
+students who read "Noctes Ambrosianae," the 'Age of Reason', and Bailey's
+"Festus," as well as Blackstone's 'Commentaries;' and there was a public
+library in that village of six hundred people, small but very well
+selected, which was kept in one of the lawyers' offices, and was free to
+all.  It seems to me now that the people met there oftener than they do
+in most country places, and rubbed their wits together more, but this may
+be one of those pleasing illusions of memory which men in later life are
+subject to.
+
+I insist upon nothing, but certainly the air was friendlier to the tastes
+I had formed than any I had yet known, and I found a wider if not deeper
+sympathy with them.  There was one of our printers who liked books, and
+we went through 'Don Quixote' together again, and through the 'Conquest
+of Granada', and we began to read other things of Irving's.  There was a
+very good little stock of books at the village drugstore, and among those
+that began to come into my hands were the poems of Dr. Holmes, stray
+volumes of De Quincey, and here and there minor works of Thackeray.
+I believe I had no money to buy them, but there was an open account,
+or a comity, between the printer and the bookseller, and I must have been
+allowed a certain discretion in regard to getting books.
+
+Still I do not think I went far in the more modern authors, or gave my
+heart to any of them.  Suddenly, it was now given to Shakespeare, without
+notice or reason, that I can recall, except that my friend liked him too,
+and that we found it a double pleasure to read him together.  Printers in
+the old-time offices were always spouting Shakespeare more or less, and I
+suppose I could not have kept away from him much longer in the nature of
+things.  I cannot fix the time or place when my friend and I began to
+read him, but it was in the fine print of that unhallowed edition of
+ours, and presently we had great lengths of him by heart, out of
+"Hamlet," out of "The Tempest," out of "Macbeth," out of "Richard III.,"
+out of "Midsummer-Night's Dream," out of the "Comedy of Errors," out of
+"Julius Caesar," out of "Measure for Measure," out of "Romeo and Juliet,"
+out of "Two Gentlemen of Verona."
+
+These were the plays that we loved, and must have read in common, or at
+least at the same time: but others that I more especially liked were the
+Histories, and among them particularly were the Henrys, where Falstaff
+appeared.  This gross and palpable reprobate greatly took my fancy.
+I delighted in him immensely, and in his comrades, Pistol, and Bardolph,
+and Nym.  I could not read of his death without emotion, and it was a
+personal pang to me when the prince, crowned king, denied him: blackguard
+for blackguard, I still think the prince the worse blackguard.  Perhaps I
+flatter myself, but I believe that even then, as a boy of sixteen,
+I fully conceived of Falstaff's character, and entered into the author's
+wonderfully humorous conception of him.  There is no such perfect
+conception of the selfish sensualist in literature, and the conception is
+all the more perfect because of the wit that lights up the vice of
+Falstaff, a cold light without tenderness, for he was not a good fellow,
+though a merry companion.  I am not sure but I should put him beside
+Hamlet, and on the name level, for the merit of his artistic
+completeness, and at one time I much preferred him, or at least his
+humor.
+
+As to Falstaff personally, or his like, I was rather fastidious, and
+would not have made friends with him in the flesh, much or little.
+I revelled in all his appearances in the Histories, and I tried to be as
+happy where a factitious and perfunctory Falstaff comes to life again in
+the "Merry Wives of Windsor," though at the bottom of my heart I felt the
+difference.  I began to make my imitations of Shakespeare, and I wrote 57
+out passages where Falstaff and Pistol and Bardolph talked together, in
+that Ercles vein which is so easily caught.  This was after a year or two
+of the irregular and interrupted acquaintance with the author which has
+been my mode of friendship with all the authors I have loved.  My worship
+of Shakespeare went to heights and lengths that it had reached with no
+earlier idol, and there was a supreme moment, once, when I found myself
+saying that the creation of Shakespeare was as great as the creation of a
+planet.
+
+There ought certainly to be some bound beyond which the cult of favorite
+authors should not be suffered to go.  I should keep well within the
+limit of that early excess now, and should not liken the creation of
+Shakespeare to the creation of any heavenly body bigger, say, than one of
+the nameless asteroids that revolve between Mars and Jupiter.  Even this
+I do not feel to be a true means of comparison, and I think that in the
+case of all great men we like to let our wonder mount and mount, till it
+leaves the truth behind, and honesty is pretty much cast out as ballast.
+A wise criticism will no more magnify Shakespeare because he is already
+great than it will magnify any less man.  But we are loaded down with the
+responsibility of finding him all we have been told he is, and we must do
+this or suspect ourselves of a want of taste, a want of sensibility.  At
+the same time, we may really be honester than those who have led us to
+expect this or that of him, and more truly his friends.  I wish the time
+might come when we could read Shakespeare, and Dante, and Homer, as
+sincerely and as fairly as we read any new book by the least known of our
+contemporaries.  The course of criticism is towards this, but when I
+began to read Shakespeare I should not have ventured to think that he was
+not at every moment great.  I should no more have thought of questioning
+the poetry of any passage in him than of questioning the proofs of holy
+writ.  All the same, I knew very well that much which I read was really
+poor stuff, and the persons and positions were often preposterous.  It is
+a great pity that the ardent youth should not be permitted and even
+encouraged to say this to himself, instead of falling slavishly before a
+great author and accepting him at all points as infallible.  Shakespeare
+is fine enough and great enough when all the possible detractions are
+made, and I have no fear of saying now that he would be finer and greater
+for the loss of half his work, though if I had heard any one say such a
+thing then I should have held him as little better than one of the
+wicked.
+
+Upon the whole it was well that I had not found my way to Shakespeare
+earlier, though it is rather strange that I had not.  I knew him on the
+stage in most of the plays that used to be given.  I had shared the
+conscience of Macbeth, the passion of Othello, the doubt of Hamlet; many
+times, in my natural affinity for villains, I had mocked and suffered
+with Richard III.
+
+Probably no dramatist ever needed the stage less, and none ever brought
+more to it.  There have been few joys for me in life comparable to that
+of seeing the curtain rise on "Hamlet," and hearing the guards begin to
+talk about the ghost; and yet how fully this joy imparts itself without
+any material embodiment!  It is the same in the whole range of his plays:
+they fill the scene, but if there is no scene they fill the soul.  They
+are neither worse nor better because of the theatre.  They are so great
+that it cannot hamper them; they are so vital that they enlarge it to
+their own proportions and endue it with something of their own living
+force.  They make it the size of life, and yet they retire it so wholly
+that you think no more of it than you think of the physiognomy of one who
+talks importantly to you.  I have heard people say that they would rather
+not see Shakespeare played than to see him played ill, but I cannot agree
+with them.  He can better afford to be played ill than any other man that
+ever wrote.  Whoever is on the stage, it is always Shakespeare who is
+speaking to me, and perhaps this is the reason why in the past I can
+trace no discrepancy between reading his plays and seeing them.
+
+The effect is so equal from either experience that I am not sure as to
+some plays whether I read them or saw them first, though as to most of
+them I am aware that I never saw them at all; and if the whole truth must
+be told there is still one of his plays that I have not read, and I
+believe it is esteemed one of his greatest.  There are several, with all
+my reading of others, that I had not read till within a few years; and I
+do not think I should have lost much if I, had never read "Pericles" and
+"Winter's Tale."
+
+In those early days I had no philosophized preference for reality in
+literature, and I dare say if I had been asked, I should have said that
+the plays of Shakespeare where reality is least felt were the most
+imaginative; that is the belief of the puerile critics still; but I
+suppose it was my instinctive liking for reality that made the great
+Histories so delightful to me, and that rendered "Macbeth" and "Hamlet"
+vital in their very ghosts and witches.  There I found a world
+appreciable to experience, a world inexpressibly vaster and grander than
+the poor little affair that I had only known a small obscure corner of,
+and yet of one quality with it, so that I could be as much at home and
+citizen in it as where I actually lived.  There I found joy and sorrow
+mixed, and nothing abstract or typical, but everything standing for
+itself, and not for some other thing.  Then, I suppose it was the
+interfusion of humor through so much of it, that made it all precious and
+friendly.  I think I had a native love of laughing, which was fostered in
+me by my father's way of looking at life, and had certainly been
+flattered by my intimacy with Cervantes; but whether this was so or not,
+I know that I liked best and felt deepest those plays and passages in
+Shakespeare where the alliance of the tragic and the comic was closest.
+Perhaps in a time when self-consciousness is so widespread, it is the
+only thing that saves us from ourselves.  I am sure that without it I
+should not have been naturalized to that world of Shakespeare's
+Histories, where I used to spend so much of my leisure, with such a sense
+of his own intimate companionship there as I had nowhere else.  I felt
+that he must somehow like my being in the joke of it all, and that in his
+great heart he had room for a boy willing absolutely to lose himself in
+him, and be as one of his creations.
+
+It was the time of life with me when a boy begins to be in love with the
+pretty faces that then peopled this world so thickly, and I did not fail
+to fall in love with the ladies of that Shakespeare-world where I lived
+equally.  I cannot tell whether it was because I found them like my
+ideals here, or whether my ideals acquired merit because of their
+likeness to the realities there; they appeared to be all of one degree of
+enchanting loveliness; but upon the whole I must have preferred them in
+the plays, because it was so much easier to get on with them there; I was
+always much better dressed there; I was vastly handsomer; I was not
+bashful or afraid, and I had some defects of these advantages to contend
+with here.
+
+That friend of mine, the printer whom I have mentioned, was one with me
+in a sense of the Shakespearean humor, and he dwelt with me in the sort
+of double being I had in those two worlds.  We took the book into the
+woods at the ends of the long summer afternoons that remained to us when
+we had finished our work, and on the shining Sundays of the warm, late
+spring, the early, warm autumn, and we read it there on grassy slopes or
+heaps of fallen leaves; so that much of the poetry is mixed for me with a
+rapturous sense of the out-door beauty of this lovely natural world.
+We read turn about, one taking the story up as the other tired, and as we
+read the drama played itself under the open sky and in the free air with
+such orchestral effects as the soughing woods or some rippling stream
+afforded.  It was not interrupted when a squirrel dropped a nut on us
+from the top of a tall hickory; and the plaint of a meadow-lark prolonged
+itself with unbroken sweetness from one world to the other.
+
+But I think it takes two to read in the open air.  The pressure of walls
+is wanted to keep the mind within itself when one reads alone; otherwise
+it wanders and disperses itself through nature.  When my friend left us
+for want of work in the office, or from the vagarious impulse which is so
+strong in our craft, I took my Shakespeare no longer to the woods and
+fields, but pored upon him mostly by night, in the narrow little space
+which I had for my study, under the stairs at home.  There was a desk
+pushed back against the wall, which the irregular ceiling eloped down to
+meet behind it, and at my left was a window, which gave a good light on
+the writing-leaf of my desk.  This was my workshop for six or seven
+years, and it was not at all a bad one; I have had many since that were
+not so much to the purpose; and though I would not live my life over, I
+would willingly enough have that little study mine again.  But it is gone
+an utterly as the faces and voices that made home around it, and that I
+was fierce to shut out of it, so that no sound or sight should molest me
+in the pursuit of the end which I sought gropingly, blindly, with very
+little hope, but with an intense ambition, and a courage that gave way
+under no burden, before no obstacle.  Long ago changes were made in the
+low, rambling house which threw my little closet into a larger room; but
+this was not until after I had left it many years; and as long as I
+remained a part of that dear and simple home it was my place to read, to
+write, to muse, to dream.
+
+I sometimes wish in these later years that I had spent less time in it,
+or that world of books which it opened into; that I had seen more of the
+actual world, and had learned to know my brethren in it better.  I might
+so have amassed more material for after use in literature, but I had to
+fit myself to use it, and I suppose that this was what I was doing, in my
+own way, and by such light as I had.  I often toiled wrongly and
+foolishly; but certainly I toiled, and I suppose no work is wasted.  Some
+strength, I hope, was coming to me, even from my mistakes, and though I
+went over ground that I need not have traversed, if I had not been left
+so much to find the way alone, yet I was not standing still, and some of
+the things that I then wished to do I have done.  I do not mind owning
+that in others I have failed.  For instance, I have never surpassed
+Shakespeare as a poet, though I once firmly meant to do so; but then, it
+is to be remembered that very few other people have surpassed him, and
+that it would not have been easy.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.  IK MARVEL
+
+My ardor for Shakespeare must have been at its height when I was between
+sixteen and seventeen years old, for I fancy when I began to formulate my
+admiration, and to try to measure his greatness in phrases, I was less
+simply impassioned than at some earlier time.  At any rate, I am sure
+that I did not proclaim his planetary importance in creation until I was
+at least nineteen.  But even at an earlier age I no longer worshipped at
+a single shrine; there were many gods in the temple of my idolatry, and I
+bowed the knee to them all in a devotion which, if it was not of one
+quality, was certainly impartial.  While I was reading, and thinking, and
+living Shakespeare with such an intensity that I do not see how there
+could have been room in my consciousness for anything else, there seem to
+have been half a dozen other divinities there, great and small, whom I
+have some present difficulty in distinguishing.  I kept Irving, and
+Goldsmith, and Cervantes on their old altars, but I added new ones, and
+these I translated from the contemporary: literary world quite as often
+as from the past.  I am rather glad that among them was the gentle and
+kindly Ik Marvel, whose 'Reveries of a Bachelor' and whose 'Dream Life'
+the young people of that day were reading with a tender rapture which
+would not be altogether surprising, I dare say, to the young people of
+this.  The books have survived the span of immortality fixed by our
+amusing copyright laws, and seem now, when any pirate publisher may
+plunder their author, to have a new life before them.  Perhaps this is
+ordered by Providence, that those who have no right to them may profit by
+them, in that divine contempt of such profit which Providence so often
+shows.
+
+I cannot understand just how I came to know of the books, but I suppose
+it was through the contemporary criticism which I was then beginning to
+read, wherever I could find it, in the magazines and newspapers; and I
+could not say why I thought it would be very 'comme il faut' to like
+them.  Probably the literary fine world, which is always rubbing
+shoulders with the other fine world, and bringing off a little of its
+powder and perfume, was then dawning upon me, and I was wishing to be of
+it, and to like the things that it liked; I am not so anxious to do it
+now.  But if this is true, I found the books better than their friends,
+and had many a heartache from their pathos, many a genuine glow of
+purpose from their high import, many a tender suffusion from their
+sentiment.  I dare say I should find their pose now a little old-
+fashioned.  I believe it was rather full of sighs, and shrugs and starts,
+expressed in dashes, and asterisks, and exclamations, but I am sure that
+the feeling was the genuine and manly sort which is of all times and
+always the latest wear.  Whatever it was, it sufficed to win my heart,
+and to identify me with whatever was most romantic and most pathetic in
+it.  I read 'Dream Life' first--though the 'Reveries of a Bachelor' was
+written first, and I believe is esteemed the better book--and 'Dream
+Life' remains first in my affections.  I have now little notion what it
+was about, but I love its memory.  The book is associated especially in
+my mind with one golden day of Indian summer, when I carried it into the
+woods with me, and abandoned myself to a welter of emotion over its page.
+I lay, under a crimson maple, and I remember how the light struck through
+it and flushed the print with the gules of the foliage.  My friend was
+away by this time on one of his several absences in the Northwest, and I
+was quite alone in the absurd and irrelevant melancholy with which I read
+myself and my circumstances into the book.  I began to read them out
+again in due time, clothed with the literary airs and graces that I
+admired in it, and for a long time I imitated Ik Marvel in the voluminous
+letters I wrote my friend in compliance with his Shakespearean prayer:
+
+          "To Milan let me hear from thee by letters,
+          Of thy success in love, and what news else
+          Betideth here in absence of thy friend;
+          And I likewise will visit thee with mine."
+
+Milan was then presently Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Verona was our little
+village; but they both served the soul of youth as well as the real
+places would have done, and were as really Italian as anything else in
+the situation was really this or that.  Heaven knows what gaudy
+sentimental parade we made in our borrowed plumes, but if the travesty
+had kept itself to the written word it would have been all well enough.
+My misfortune was to carry it into print when I began to write a story,
+in the Ik Marvel manner, or rather to compose it in type at the case, for
+that was what I did; and it was not altogether imitated from Ik Marvel
+either, for I drew upon the easier art of Dickens at times, and helped
+myself out with bald parodies of Bleak House in many places.  It was all
+very well at the beginning, but I had not reckoned with the future
+sufficiently to have started with any clear ending in my mind, and as I
+went on I began to find myself more and more in doubt about it.  My
+material gave out; incidents failed me; the characters wavered and
+threatened to perish on my hands.  To crown my misery there grew up an
+impatience with the story among its readers, and this found its way to me
+one day when I overheard an old farmer who came in for his paper say that
+he did not think that story amounted to much.  I did not think so either,
+but it was deadly to have it put into words, and how I escaped the mortal
+effect of the stroke I do not know.  Somehow I managed to bring the
+wretched thing to a close, and to live it slowly into the past.  Slowly
+it seemed then, but I dare say it was fast enough; and there is always
+this consolation to be whispered in the ear of wounded vanity, that the
+world's memory is equally bad for failure and success; that if it will
+not keep your triumphs in mind as you think it ought, neither will it
+long dwell upon your defeats.  But that experience was really terrible.
+It was like some dreadful dream one has of finding one's self in battle
+without the courage needed to carry one creditably through the action,
+or on the stage unprepared by study of the part which one is to appear
+in.  I have hover looked at that story since, so great was the shame and
+anguish that I suffered from it, and yet I do not think it was badly
+conceived, or attempted upon lines that were mistaken.  If it were not
+for what happened in the past I might like some time to write a story on
+the same lines in the future.
+
+
+
+
+XV.  DICKENS
+
+What I have said of Dickens reminds me that I had been reading him at the
+same time that I had been reading Ik Marvel; but a curious thing about
+the reading of my later boyhood is that the dates do not sharply detach
+themselves one from another.  This may be so because my reading was much
+more multifarious than it had been earlier, or because I was reading
+always two or three authors at a time.  I think Macaulay a little
+antedated Dickens in my affections, but when I came to the novels of that
+masterful artist (as I must call him, with a thousand reservations as to
+the times when he is not a master and not an artist), I did not fail to
+fall under his spell.
+
+This was in a season of great depression, when I began to feel in broken
+health the effect of trying to burn my candle at both ends.  It seemed
+for a while very simple and easy to come home in the middle of the
+afternoon, when my task at the printing-office was done, and sit down to
+my books in my little study, which I did not finally leave until the
+family were in bed; but it was not well, and it was not enough that I
+should like to do it.  The most that can be said in defence of such a
+thing is that with the strong native impulse and the conditions it was
+inevitable.  If I was to do the thing I wanted to do I was to do it in
+that way, and I wanted to do that thing, whatever it was, more than I
+wanted to do anything else, and even more than I wanted to do nothing.
+I cannot make out that I was fond of study, or cared for the things I was
+trying to do, except as a means to other things.  As far as my pleasure
+went, or my natural bent was concerned, I would rather have been
+wandering through the woods with a gun on my shoulder, or lying under a
+tree, or reading some book that cost me no sort of effort.  But there was
+much more than my pleasure involved; there was a hope to fulfil, an aim
+to achieve, and I could no more have left off trying for what I hoped and
+aimed at than I could have left off living, though I did not know very
+distinctly what either was.  As I look back at the endeavor of those days
+much of it seems mere purblind groping, wilful and wandering.  I can see
+that doing all by myself I was not truly a law to myself, but only a sort
+of helpless force.
+
+I studied Latin because I believed that I should read the Latin authors,
+and I suppose I got as much of the language as most school-boys of my
+age, but I never read any Latin author but Cornelius Nepos.  I studied
+Greek, and I learned so much of it as to read a chapter of the Testament,
+and an ode of Anacreon.  Then I left it, not because I did not mean to go
+farther, or indeed stop short of reading all Greek literature, but
+because that friend of mine and I talked it over and decided that I could
+go on with Greek any time, but I had better for the present study German,
+with the help of a German who had come to the village.  Apparently I was
+carrying forward an attack on French at the same time, for I distinctly
+recall my failure to enlist with me an old gentleman who had once lived a
+long time in France, and whom I hoped to get at least an accent from.
+Perhaps because he knew he had no accent worth speaking of, or perhaps
+because he did not want the bother of imparting it, he never would keep
+any of the engagements he made with me, and when we did meet he so
+abounded in excuses and subterfuges that he finally escaped me, and I was
+left to acquire an Italian accent of French in Venice seven or eight
+years later.  At the same time I was reading Spanish, more or less,
+but neither wisely nor too well.  Having had so little help in my
+studies, I had a stupid pride in refusing all, even such as I might have
+availed myself of, without shame, in books, and I would not read any
+Spanish author with English notes.  I would have him in an edition wholly
+Spanish from beginning to end, and I would fight my way through him
+single-handed, with only such aid as I must borrow from a lexicon.
+
+I now call this stupid, but I have really no more right to blame the boy
+who was once I than I have to praise him, and I am certainly not going to
+do that.  In his day and place he did what he could in his own way; he
+had no true perspective of life, but I do not know that youth ever has
+that.  Some strength came to him finally from the mere struggle,
+undirected and misdirected as it often was, and such mental fibre as he
+had was toughened by the prolonged stress.  It could be said, of course,
+that the time apparently wasted in these effectless studies could have
+been well spent in deepening and widening a knowledge of English
+literature never yet too great, and I have often said this myself; but
+then, again, I am not sure that the studies were altogether effectless.
+I have sometimes thought that greater skill had come to my hand from them
+than it would have had without, and I have trusted that in making known
+to me the sources of so much English, my little Latin and less Greek have
+enabled me to use my own speech with a subtler sense of it than I should
+have had otherwise.
+
+But I will by no means insist upon my conjecture.  What is certain is
+that for the present my studies, without method and without stint, began
+to tell upon my health, and that my nerves gave way in all manner of
+hypochondriacal fears.  These finally resolved themselves into one,
+incessant, inexorable, which I could escape only through bodily fatigue,
+or through some absorbing interest that took me out of myself altogether
+and filled my morbid mind with the images of another's creation.
+
+In this mood I first read Dickens, whom I had known before in the reading
+I had listened to.  But now I devoured his books one after another as
+fast as I could read them.  I plunged from the heart of one to another,
+so as to leave myself no chance for the horrors that beset me.  Some of
+them remain associated with the gloom and misery of that time, so that
+when I take them up they bring back its dreadful shadow.  But I have
+since read them all more than once, and I have had my time of thinking
+Dickens, talking Dickens, and writing Dickens, as we all had who lived in
+the days of the mighty magician.  I fancy the readers who have come to
+him since he ceased to fill the world with his influence can have little
+notion how great it was.  In that time he colored the parlance of the
+English-speaking race, and formed upon himself every minor talent
+attempting fiction.  While his glamour lasted it was no more possible for
+a young novelist to escape writing Dickens than it was for a young poet
+to escape writing Tennyson.  I admired other authors more; I loved them
+more, but when it came to a question of trying to do something in fiction
+I was compelled, as by a law of nature, to do it at least partially in
+his way.
+
+All the while that he held me so fast by his potent charm I was aware
+that it was a very rough magic now and again, but I could not assert my
+sense of this against him in matters of character and structure.  To
+these I gave in helplessly; their very grotesqueness was proof of their
+divine origin, and I bowed to the crudest manifestations of his genius in
+these kinds as if they were revelations not to be doubted without
+sacrilege.  But in certain small matters, as it were of ritual, I
+suffered myself to think, and I remember boldly speaking my mind about
+his style, which I thought bad.
+
+I spoke it even to the quaint character whom I borrowed his books from,
+and who might almost have come out of his books.  He lived in Dickens in
+a measure that I have never known another to do, and my contumely must
+have brought him a pang that was truly a personal grief.  He forgave it,
+no doubt because I bowed in the Dickens worship without question on all
+other points.  He was then a man well on towards fifty, and he had come
+to America early in life, and had lived in our village many years,
+without casting one of his English prejudices, or ceasing to be of a
+contrary opinion on every question, political, religious and social.
+He had no fixed belief, but he went to the service of his church whenever
+it was held among us, and he revered the Book of Common Prayer while he
+disputed the authority of the Bible with all comers.  He had become a
+citizen, but he despised democracy, and achieved a hardy consistency only
+by voting with the pro-slavery party upon all measures friendly to the
+institution which he considered the scandal and reproach of the American
+name.  From a heart tender to all, he liked to say wanton, savage and
+cynical things, but he bore no malice if you gainsaid him.  I know
+nothing of his origin, except the fact of his being an Englishman, or
+what his first calling had been; but he had evolved among us from a
+house-painter to an organ-builder, and he had a passionate love of music.
+He built his organs from the ground up, and made every part of them with
+his own hands; I believe they were very good, and at any rate the
+churches in the country about took them from him as fast as he could make
+them.  He had one in his own house, and it was fine to see him as he sat
+before it, with his long, tremulous hands outstretched to the keys, his
+noble head thrown back and his sensitive face lifted in the rapture of
+his music.  He was a rarely intelligent creature, and an artist in every
+fibre; and if you did not quarrel with his manifold perversities, he was
+a delightful companion.
+
+After my friend went away I fell much to him for society, and we took
+long, rambling walks together, or sat on the stoop before his door,
+or lounged over the books in the drug-store, and talked evermore of
+literature.  He must have been nearly three times my age, but that did
+not matter; we met in the equality of the ideal world where there is
+neither old nor young, any more than there is rich or poor.  He had read
+a great deal, but of all he had read he liked Dickens best, and was
+always coming back to him with affection, whenever the talk strayed.
+He could not make me out when I criticised the style of Dickens; and when
+I praised Thackeray's style to the disadvantage of Dickens's he could
+only accuse me of a sort of aesthetic snobbishness in my preference.
+Dickens, he said, was for the million, and Thackeray was for the upper
+ten thousand.  His view amused me at the time, and yet I am not sure that
+it was altogether mistaken.
+
+There is certainly a property in Thackeray that somehow flatters the
+reader into the belief that he is better than other people.  I do not
+mean to say that this was why I thought him a finer writer than Dickens,
+but I will own that it was probably one of the reasons why I liked him
+better; if I appreciated him so fully as I felt, I must be of a finer
+porcelain than the earthen pots which were not aware of any particular
+difference in the various liquors poured into them.  In Dickens the
+virtue of his social defect is that he never appeals to the principle
+which sniffs, in his reader.  The base of his work is the whole breadth
+and depth of humanity itself.  It is helplessly elemental, but it is not
+the less grandly so, and if it deals with the simpler manifestations of
+character, character affected by the interests and passions rather than
+the tastes and preferences, it certainly deals with the larger moods
+through them.  I do not know that in the whole range of his work he once
+suffers us to feel our superiority to a fellow-creature through any
+social accident, or except for some moral cause.  This makes him very fit
+reading for a boy, and I should say that a boy could get only good from
+him.  His view of the world and of society, though it was very little
+philosophized, was instinctively sane and reasonable, even when it was
+most impossible.
+
+We are just beginning to discern that certain conceptions of our
+relations to our fellow-men, once formulated in generalities which met
+with a dramatic acceptation from the world, and were then rejected by it
+as mere rhetoric, have really a vital truth in them, and that if they
+have ever seemed false it was because of the false conditions in which we
+still live.  Equality and fraternity, these are the ideals which once
+moved the world, and then fell into despite and mockery, as unrealities;
+but now they assert themselves in our hearts once more.
+
+Blindly, unwittingly, erringly as Dickens often urged them, these ideals
+mark the whole tendency of his fiction, and they are what endear him to
+the heart, and will keep him dear to it long after many a cunninger
+artificer in letters has passed into forgetfulness.  I do not pretend
+that I perceived the full scope of his books, but I was aware of it in
+the finer sense which is not consciousness.  While I read him, I was in a
+world where the right came out best, as I believe it will yet do in this
+world, and where merit was crowned with the success which I believe will
+yet attend it in our daily life, untrammelled by social convention or
+economic circumstance.  In that world of his, in the ideal world, to
+which the real world must finally conform itself, I dwelt among the shows
+of things, but under a Providence that governed all things to a good end,
+and where neither wealth nor birth could avail against virtue or right.
+Of course it was in a way all crude enough, and was already contradicted
+by experience in the small sphere of my own being; but nevertheless it
+was true with that truth which is at the bottom of things, and I was
+happy in it.  I could not fail to love the mind which conceived it, and
+my worship of Dickens was more grateful than that I had yet given any
+writer.  I did not establish with him that one-sided understanding which
+I had with Cervantes and Shakespeare; with a contemporary that was not
+possible, and as an American I was deeply hurt at the things he had said
+against us, and the more hurt because I felt that they were often so
+just.  But I was for the time entirely his, and I could not have wished
+to write like any one else.
+
+I do not pretend that the spell I was under was wholly of a moral or
+social texture.  For the most part I was charmed with him because he was
+a delightful story-teller; because he could thrill me, and make me hot
+and cold; because he could make me laugh and cry, and stop my pulse and
+breath at will.  There seemed an inexhaustible source of humor and pathos
+in his work, which I now find choked and dry; I cannot laugh any more at
+Pickwick or Sam Weller, or weep for little Nell or Paul Dombey; their
+jokes, their griefs, seemed to me to be turned on, and to have a
+mechanical action.  But beneath all is still the strong drift of a
+genuine emotion, a sympathy, deep and sincere, with the poor, the lowly,
+the unfortunate.  In all that vast range of fiction, there is nothing
+that tells for the strong, because they are strong, against the weak,
+nothing that tells for the haughty against the humble, nothing that tells
+for wealth against poverty.  The effect of Dickens is purely democratic,
+and however contemptible he found our pseudo-equality, he was more truly
+democratic than any American who had yet written fiction.  I suppose it
+was our instinctive perception in the region of his instinctive
+expression, that made him so dear to us, and wounded our silly vanity so
+keenly through our love when he told us the truth about our horrible sham
+of a slave-based freedom.  But at any rate the democracy is there in his
+work more than he knew perhaps, or would ever have known, or ever
+recognized by his own life.  In fact, when one comes to read the story of
+his life, and to know that he was really and lastingly ashamed of having
+once put up shoe-blacking as a boy, and was unable to forgive his mother
+for suffering him to be so degraded, one perceives that he too was the
+slave of conventions and the victim of conditions which it is the highest
+function of his fiction to help destroy.
+
+I imagine that my early likes and dislikes in Dickens were not very
+discriminating.  I liked 'David Copperfield,' and 'Barnaby Rudge,' and
+'Bleak House,' and I still like them; but I do not think I liked them
+more than 'Dombey & Son,' and 'Nicholas Nickleby,' and the 'Pickwick
+Papers,' which I cannot read now with any sort of patience, not to speak
+of pleasure.  I liked 'Martin Chuzzlewit,' too, and the other day I read
+a great part of it again, and found it roughly true in the passages that
+referred to America, though it was surcharged in the serious moods, and
+caricatured in the comic.  The English are always inadequate observers;
+they seem too full of themselves to have eyes and ears for any alien
+people; but as far as an Englishman could, Dickens had caught the look of
+our life in certain aspects.  His report of it was clumsy and farcical;
+but in a large, loose way it was like enough; at least he had caught the
+note of our self-satisfied, intolerant, and hypocritical provinciality,
+and this was not altogether lost in his mocking horse-play.
+
+I cannot make out that I was any the less fond of Dickens because of it.
+I believe I was rather more willing to accept it as a faithful
+portraiture then than I should be now; and I certainly never made any
+question of it with my friend the organ-builder.  'Martin Chuzzlewit' was
+a favorite book with him, and so was the 'Old Curiosity Shop.'  No doubt
+a fancied affinity with Tom Pinch through their common love of music made
+him like that most sentimental and improbable personage, whom he would
+have disowned and laughed to scorn if he had met him in life; but it was
+a purely altruistic sympathy that he felt with Little Nell and her
+grandfather.  He was fond of reading the pathetic passages from both
+books, and I can still hear his rich, vibrant voice as it lingered in
+tremulous emotion on the periods he loved.  He would catch the volume up
+anywhere, any time, and begin to read, at the book-store, or the harness-
+shop, or the law-office, it did not matter in the wide leisure of a
+country village, in those days before the war, when people had all the
+time there was; and he was sure of his audience as long as he chose to
+read.  One Christmas eve, in answer to a general wish, he read the
+'Christmas Carol' in the Court-house, and people came from all about to
+hear him.
+
+He was an invalid and he died long since, ending a life of suffering in
+the saddest way.  Several years before his death money fell to his
+family, and he went with them to an Eastern city, where he tried in vain
+to make himself at home.  He never ceased to pine for the village be had
+left, with its old companionships, its easy usages, its familiar faces;
+and he escaped to it again and again, till at last every tie was severed,
+and he could come back no more.  He was never reconciled to the change,
+and in a manner he did really die of the homesickness which deepened an
+hereditary taint, and enfeebled him to the disorder that carried him.
+off.  My memories of Dickens remain mingled with my memories of this
+quaint and most original genius, and though I knew Dickens long before I
+knew his lover, I can scarcely think of one without thinking of the
+other.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.  WORDSWORTH, LOWELL, CHAUCER
+
+Certain other books I associate with another pathetic nature, of whom the
+organ-builder and I were both fond.  This was the young poet who looked
+after the book half of the village drug and book store, and who wrote
+poetry in such leisure as he found from his duties, and with such
+strength as he found in the disease preying upon him.  He must have been
+far gone in consumption when I first knew him, for I have no recollection
+of a time when his voice was not faint and husky, his sweet smile wan,
+and his blue eyes dull with the disease that wasted him away,
+
+               "Like wax in the fire,
+               Like snow in the sun."
+
+People spoke of him as once strong and vigorous, but I recall him fragile
+and pale, gentle, patient, knowing his inexorable doom, and not hoping or
+seeking to escape it.  As the end drew near he left his employment and
+went home to the farm, some twenty miles away, where I drove out to see
+him once through the deep snow of a winter which was to be his last.
+My heart was heavy all the time, but he tried to make the visit pass
+cheerfully with our wonted talk about books.  Only at parting, when he
+took my hand in his thin, cold clasp, he said, "I suppose my disease is
+progressing," with the patience he always showed.
+
+I did not see him again, and I am not sure now that his gift was very
+distinct or very great.  It was slight and graceful rather, I fancy,
+and if he had lived it might not have sufficed to make him widely known,
+but he had a real and a very delicate sense of beauty in literature,
+and I believe it was through sympathy with his preferences that I came
+into appreciation of several authors whom I had not known, or had not
+cared for before.  There could not have been many shelves of books in
+that store, and I came to be pretty well acquainted with them all before
+I began to buy them.  For the most part, I do not think it occurred to me
+that they were there to be sold; for this pale poet seemed indifferent to
+the commercial property in them, and only to wish me to like them.
+
+I am not sure, but I think it was through some volume which I found in
+his charge that I first came to know of De Quincey; he was fond of
+Dr. Holmes's poetry; he loved Whittier and Longfellow, each represented
+in his slender stock by some distinctive work.  There were several stray
+volumes of Thackeray's minor writings, and I still have the 'Yellowplush
+Papers' in the smooth red cloth (now pretty well tattered) of Appleton's
+Popular Library, which I bought there. But most of the books were in the
+famous old brown cloth of Ticknor & Fields, which was a warrant of
+excellence in the literature it covered.  Besides these there were
+standard volumes of poetry, published by Phillips & Sampson, from worn-
+out plates; for a birthday present my mother got me Wordsworth in this
+shape, and I am glad to think that I once read the "Excursion" in it,
+for I do not think I could do so now, and I have a feeling that it is
+very right and fit to have read the "Excursion."  To be honest, it was
+very hard reading even then, and I cannot truthfully pretend that I have
+ever liked Wordsworth except in parts, though for the matter of that,
+I do not suppose that any one ever did.  I tried hard enough to like
+everything in him, for I had already learned enough to know that I ought
+to like him, and that if I did not, it was a proof of intellectual and
+moral inferiority in me.  My early idol, Pope, had already been tumbled
+into the dust by Lowell, whose lectures on English Poetry had lately been
+given in Boston, and had met with my rapturous acceptance in such
+newspaper report as I had of them.  So, my preoccupations were all in
+favor of the Lake School, and it was both in my will and my conscience to
+like Wordsworth.  If I did not do so it was not my fault, and the fault
+remains very much what it first was.
+
+I feel and understand him more deeply than I did then, but I do not think
+that I then failed of the meaning of much that I read in him, and I am
+sure that my senses were quick to all the beauty in him.  After suffering
+once through the "Excursion" I did not afflict myself with it again,
+but there were other poems of his which I read over and over, as I fancy
+it is the habit of every lover of poetry to do with the pieces he is fond
+of.  Still, I do not make out that Wordsworth was ever a passion of mine;
+on the other hand, neither was Byron.  Him, too, I liked in passages and
+in certain poems which I knew before I read Wordsworth at all; I read him
+throughout, but I did not try to imitate him, and I did not try to
+imitate Wordsworth.
+
+Those lectures of Lowell's had a great influence with me, and I tried to
+like whatever they bade me like, after a fashion common to young people
+when they begin to read criticisms; their aesthetic pride is touched;
+they wish to realize that they too can feel the fine things the critic
+admires.  From this motive they do a great deal of factitious liking;
+but after all the affections will not be bidden, and the critic can only
+avail to give a point of view, to enlighten a perspective.  When I read
+Lowell's praises of him, I had all the will in the world to read Spencer,
+and I really meant to do so, but I have not done so to this day, and as
+often as I have tried I have found it impossible.  It was not so with
+Chaucer, whom I loved from the first word of his which I found quoted in
+those lectures, and in Chambers's 'Encyclopaedia of English Literature,'
+which I had borrowed of my friend the organ-builder.
+
+In fact, I may fairly class Chaucer among my passions, for I read him
+with that sort of personal attachment I had for Cervantes, who resembled
+him in a certain sweet and cheery humanity.  But I do not allege this as
+the reason, for I had the same feeling for Pope, who was not like either
+of them.  Kissing goes by favor, in literature as in life, and one cannot
+quite account for one's passions in either; what is certain is, I liked
+Chaucer and I did not like Spencer; possibly there was an affinity
+between reader and poet, but if there was I should be at a loss to name
+it, unless it was the liking for reality; and the sense of mother earth
+in human life.  By the time I had read all of Chaucer that I could find
+in the various collections and criticisms, my father had been made a
+clerk in the legislature, and on one of his visits home he brought me the
+poet's works from the State Library, and I set about reading them with a
+glossary.  It was not easy, but it brought strength with it, and lifted
+my heart with a sense of noble companionship.
+
+I will not pretend that I was insensible to the grossness of the poet's
+time, which I found often enough in the poet's verse, as well as the
+goodness of his nature, and my father seems to have felt a certain
+misgiving about it.  He repeated to me the librarian's question as to
+whether he thought he ought to put an unexpurgated edition in the hands
+of a boy, and his own answer that he did not believe it would hurt me.
+It was a kind of appeal to me to make the event justify him, and I
+suppose he had not given me the book without due reflection.  Probably he
+reasoned that with my greed for all manner of literature the bad would
+become known to me along with the good at any rate, and I had better know
+that he knew it.
+
+The streams of filth flow down through the ages in literature, which
+sometimes seems little better than an open sewer, and, as I have said,
+I do not see why the time should not come when the noxious and noisome
+channels should be stopped; but the base of the mind is bestial, and so
+far the beast in us has insisted upon having his full say.  The worst of
+lewd literature is that it seems to give a sanction to lewdness in the
+life, and that inexperience takes this effect for reality: that is the
+danger and the harm, and I think the fact ought not to be blinked.
+Compared with the meaner poets the greater are the cleaner, and Chaucer
+was probably safer than any other English poet of his time, but I am not
+going to pretend that there are not things in Chaucer which a boy would
+be the better for not reading; and so far as these words of mine shall be
+taken for counsel, I am not willing that they should unqualifiedly praise
+him.  The matter is by no means simple; it is not easy to conceive of a
+means of purifying the literature of the past without weakening it, and
+even falsifying it, but it is best to own that it is in all respects just
+what it is, and not to feign it otherwise.  I am not ready to say that
+the harm from it is positive, but you do get smeared with it, and the
+filthy thought lives with the filthy rhyme in the ear, even when it does
+not corrupt the heart or make it seem a light thing for the reader's
+tongue and pen to sin in kind.
+
+I loved my Chaucer too well, I hope, not to get some good from the best
+in him; and my reading of criticism had taught me how and where to look
+for the best, and to know it when I had found it.  Of course I began to
+copy him.  That is, I did not attempt anything like his tales in kind;
+they must have seemed too hopelessly far away in taste and time, but I
+studied his verse, and imitated a stanza which I found in some of his
+things and had not found elsewhere; I rejoiced in the freshness and
+sweetness of his diction, and though I felt that his structure was
+obsolete, there was in his wording something homelier and heartier than
+the imported analogues that had taken the place of the phrases he used.
+
+I began to employ in my own work the archaic words that I fancied most,
+which was futile and foolish enough, and I formed a preference for the
+simpler Anglo-Saxon woof of our speech, which was not so bad.  Of course,
+being left so much as I was to my own whim in such things, I could not
+keep a just mean; I had an aversion for the Latin derivatives which was
+nothing short of a craze.  Some half-bred critic whom I had read made me
+believe that English could be written without them, and had better be
+written so, and I did not escape from this lamentable error until I had
+produced with weariness and vexation of spirit several pieces of prose
+wholly composed of monosyllables.  I suspect now that I did not always
+stop to consider whether my short words were not as Latin by race as any
+of the long words I rejected, and that I only made sure they were short.
+
+The frivolous ingenuity which wasted itself in this exercise happily
+could not hold out long, and in verse it was pretty well helpless from
+the beginning.  Yet I will not altogether blame it, for it made me know,
+as nothing else could, the resources of our tongue in that sort; and in
+the revolt from the slavish bondage I took upon myself I did not go so
+far as to plunge into any very wild polysyllabic excesses.  I still like
+the little word if it says the thing I want to say as well as the big
+one, but I honor above all the word that says the thing.  At the same
+time I confess that I have a prejudice against certain words that I
+cannot overcome; the sight of some offends me, the sound of others, and
+rather than use one of those detested vocables, even when I perceive that
+it would convey my exact meaning, I would cast about long for some other.
+I think this is a foible, and a disadvantage, but I do not deny it.
+
+An author who had much to do with preparing me for the quixotic folly in
+point was that Thomas Babington Macaulay, who taught simplicity of
+diction in phrases of as "learned length and thundering sound," as any he
+would have had me shun, and who deplored the Latinistic English of
+Johnson in terms emulous of the great doctor's orotundity and
+ronderosity.  I wonder now that I did not see how my physician avoided
+his medicine, but I did not, and I went on to spend myself in an endeavor
+as vain and senseless as any that pedantry has conceived.  It was none
+the less absurd because I believed in it so devoutly, and sacrificed
+myself to it with such infinite pains and labor.  But this was long after
+I read Macaulay, who was one of my grand passions before Dickens or
+Chaucer.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.  MACAULAY
+
+One of the many characters of the village was the machinist who had his
+shop under our printing-office when we first brought our newspaper to the
+place, and who was just then a machinist because he was tired of being
+many other things, and had not yet made up his mind what he should be
+next.  He could have been whatever he turned his agile intellect and his
+cunning hand to; he had been a schoolmaster and a watch-maker, and I
+believe an amateur doctor and irregular lawyer; he talked and wrote
+brilliantly, and he was one of the group that nightly disposed of every
+manner of theoretical and practical question at the drug-store; it was
+quite indifferent to him which side he took; what he enjoyed was the
+mental exercise.  He was in consumption, as so many were in that region,
+and he carbonized against it, as he said; he took his carbon in the
+liquid form, and the last time I saw him the carbon had finally prevailed
+over the consumption, but it had itself become a seated vice; that was
+many years since, and it is many years since he died.
+
+He must have been known to me earlier, but I remember him first as he
+swam vividly into my ken, with a volume of Macaulay's essays in his hand,
+one day.  Less figuratively speaking, he came up into the printing-office
+to expose from the book the nefarious plagiarism of an editor in a
+neighboring city, who had adapted with the change of names and a word or
+two here and there, whole passages from the essay on Barere, to the
+denunciation of a brother editor.  It was a very simple-hearted fraud,
+and it was all done with an innocent trust in the popular ignorance which
+now seems to me a little pathetic; but it was certainly very barefaced,
+and merited the public punishment which the discoverer inflicted by means
+of what journalists call the deadly parallel column.  The effect ought
+logically to have been ruinous for the plagiarist, but it was really
+nothing of the kind.  He simply ignored the exposure, and the comments of
+the other city papers, and in the process of time he easily lived down
+the memory of it and went on to greater usefulness in his profession.
+
+But for the moment it appeared to me a tremendous crisis, and I listened
+as the minister of justice read his communication, with a thrill which
+lost itself in the interest I suddenly felt in the plundered author.
+Those facile and brilliant phrases and ideas struck me as the finest
+things I had yet known in literature, and I borrowed the book and read it
+through.  Then I borrowed another volume of Macaulay's essays, and
+another and another, till I had read them every one.  It was like a long
+debauch, from which I emerged with regret that it should ever end.
+
+I tried other essayists, other critics, whom the machinist had in his
+library, but it was useless; neither Sidney Smith nor Thomas Carlyle
+could console me; I sighed for more Macaulay and evermore Macaulay.  I
+read his History of England, and I could measurably console myself with
+that, but only measurably; and I could not go back to the essays and read
+them again, for it seemed to me I had absorbed them so thoroughly that I
+had left nothing unenjoyed in them.  I used to talk with the machinist
+about them, and with the organ-builder, and with my friend the printer,
+but no one seemed to feel the intense fascination in them that I did, and
+that I should now be quite unable to account for.
+
+Once more I had an author for whom I could feel a personal devotion, whom
+I could dream of and dote upon, and whom I could offer my intimacy in
+many an impassioned revery.  I do not think T. B. Macaulay would really
+have liked it; I dare say he would not have valued the friendship of the
+sort of a youth I was, but in the conditions he was helpless, and I
+poured out my love upon him without a rebuff.  Of course I reformed my
+prose style, which had been carefully modelled upon that of Goldsmith and
+Irving, and began to write in the manner of Macaulay, in short, quick
+sentences, and with the prevalent use of brief Anglo-Saxon words, which
+he prescribed, but did not practise.  As for his notions of literature, I
+simply accepted them with the feeling that any question of them would
+have been little better than blasphemy.
+
+For a long time he spoiled my taste for any other criticism; he made it
+seem pale, and poor, and weak; and he blunted my sense to subtler
+excellences than I found in him.  I think this was a pity, but it was a
+thing not to be helped, like a great many things that happen to our hurt
+in life; it was simply inevitable.  How or when my frenzy for him began
+to abate I cannot say, but it certainly waned, and it must have waned
+rapidly, for after no great while I found myself feeling the charm of
+quite different minds, as fully as if his had never enslaved me.  I
+cannot regret that I enjoyed him so keenly as I did; it was in a way a
+generous delight, and though he swayed me helplessly whatever way he
+thought, I do not think yet that he swayed me in any very wrong way.  He
+was a bright and clear intelligence, and if his light did not go far, it
+is to be said of him that his worst fault was only to have stopped short
+of the finest truth in art, in morals, in politics.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.  CRITICS AND REVIEWS
+
+What remained to me from my love of Macaulay was a love of criticism,
+and I read almost as much in criticism as I read in poetry and history
+and fiction.  It was of an eccentric doctor, another of the village
+characters, that I got the works of Edgar A. Poe; I do not know just how,
+but it must have been in some exchange of books; he preferred
+metaphysics.  At any rate I fell greedily upon them, and I read with no
+less zest than his poems the bitter, and cruel, and narrow-minded
+criticisms which mainly filled one of the volumes.  As usual, I accepted
+them implicitly, and it was not till long afterwards that I understood
+how worthless they were.
+
+I think that hardly less immoral than the lubricity of literature, and
+its celebration of the monkey and the goat in us, is the spectacle such
+criticism affords of the tigerish play of satire.  It is monstrous that
+for no offence but the wish to produce something beautiful, and the
+mistake of his powers in that direction, a writer should become the prey
+of some ferocious wit, and that his tormentor should achieve credit by
+his lightness and ease in rending his prey; it is shocking to think how
+alluring and depraving the fact is to the young reader emulous of such
+credit, and eager to achieve it.  Because I admired these barbarities of
+Poe's, I wished to irritate them, to spit some hapless victim on my own
+spear, to make him suffer and to make the reader laugh.  This is as far
+as possible from the criticism that enlightens and ennobles, but it is
+still the ideal of most critics, deny it as they will; and because it is
+the ideal of most critics criticism still remains behind all the other
+literary arts.
+
+I am glad to remember that at the same time I exulted in these ferocities
+I had mind enough and heart enough to find pleasure in the truer and
+finer work, the humaner work of other writers, like Hazlitt, and Leigh
+Hunt, and Lamb, which became known to me at a date I cannot exactly fix.
+I believe it was Hazlitt whom I read first, and he helped me to clarify
+and formulate my admiration of Shakespeare as no one else had yet done;
+Lamb helped me too, and with all the dramatists, and on every hand I was
+reaching out for light that should enable me to place in literary history
+the authors I knew and loved.
+
+I fancy it was well for me at this period to have got at the four great
+English reviews, the Edinburgh, the Westminster, the London Quarterly,
+and the North British, which I read regularly, as well as Blackwood's
+Magazine.  We got them in the American editions in payment for printing
+the publisher's prospectus, and their arrival was an excitement, a joy,
+and a satisfaction with me, which I could not now describe without having
+to accuse myself of exaggeration.  The love of literature, and the hope
+of doing something in it, had become my life to the exclusion of all
+other interests, or it was at least the great reality, and all other
+things were as shadows.  I was living in a time of high political tumult,
+and I certainly cared very much for the question of slavery which was
+then filling the minds of men; I felt deeply the shame and wrong of our
+Fugitive Slave Law; I was stirred by the news from Kansas, where the
+great struggle between the two great principles in our nationality was
+beginning in bloodshed; but I cannot pretend that any of these things
+were more than ripples on the surface of my intense and profound interest
+in literature.  If I was not to live by it, I was somehow to live for it.
+
+If I thought of taking up some other calling it was as a means only;
+literature was always the end I had in view, immediately or finally.
+I did not see how it was to yield me a living, for I knew that almost all
+the literary men in the country had other professions; they were editors,
+lawyers, or had public or private employments; or they were men of
+wealth; there was then not one who earned his bread solely by his pen in
+fiction, or drama, or history, or poetry, or criticism, in a day when
+people wanted very much less butter on their bread than they do now.
+But I kept blindly at my studies, and yet not altogether blindly, for,
+as I have said, the reading I did had more tendency than before, and I
+was beginning to see authors in their proportion to one another, and to
+the body of literature.
+
+The English reviews were of great use to me in this; I made a rule of
+reading each one of them quite through.  To be sure I often broke this
+rule, as people are apt to do with rules of the kind; it was not possible
+for a boy to wade through heavy articles relating to English politics and
+economics, but I do not think I left any paper upon a literary topic
+unread, and I did read enough politics, especially in Blackwood's, to be
+of Tory opinions; they were very fit opinions for a boy, and they did not
+exact of me any change in regard to the slavery question.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.  A NON-LITERARY EPISODE
+
+I suppose I might almost class my devotion to English reviews among my
+literary passions, but it was of very short lease, not beyond a year or
+two at the most.  In the midst of it I made my first and only essay aside
+from the lines of literature, or rather wholly apart from it.  After some
+talk with my father it was decided, mainly by myself, I suspect, that I
+should leave the printing-office and study law; and it was arranged with
+the United States Senator who lived in our village, and who was at home
+from Washington for the summer, that I was to come into his office.  The
+Senator was by no means to undertake my instruction himself; his nephew,
+who had just begun to read law, was to be my fellow-student, and we were
+to keep each other up to the work, and to recite to each other, until we
+thought we had enough law to go before a board of attorneys and test our
+fitness for admission to the bar.
+
+This was the custom in that day and place, as I suppose it is still in
+most parts of the country.  We were to be fitted for practice in the
+courts, not only by our reading, but by a season of pettifogging before
+justices of the peace, which I looked forward to with no small shrinking
+of my shy spirit; but what really troubled me most, and was always the
+grain of sand between my teeth, was Blackstone's confession of his own
+original preference for literature, and his perception that the law was
+"a jealous mistress," who would suffer no rival in his affections.
+I agreed with him that I could not go through life with a divided
+interest; I must give up literature or I must give up law.  I not only
+consented to this logically, but I realized it in my attempt to carry on
+the reading I had loved, and to keep at the efforts I was always making
+to write something in verse or prose, at night, after studying law all
+day.  The strain was great enough when I had merely the work in the
+printing-office; but now I came home from my Blackstone mentally fagged,
+and I could not take up the authors whom at the bottom of my heart I
+loved so much better.  I tried it a month, but almost from the fatal day
+when I found that confession of Blackstone's, my whole being turned from
+the "jealous mistress" to the high minded muses: I had not only to go
+back to literature, but I had also to go back to the printing-office.
+I did not regret it, but I had made my change of front in the public eye,
+and I felt that it put me at a certain disadvantage with my fellow-
+citizens; as for the Senator, whose office I had forsaken, I met him now
+and then in the street, without trying to detain him, and once when he
+came to the printing-office for his paper we encountered at a point where
+we could not help speaking.  He looked me over in my general effect of
+base mechanical, and asked me if I had given up the law; I had only to
+answer him I had, and our conference ended.  It was a terrible moment for
+me, because I knew that in his opinion I had chosen a path in life, which
+if it did not lead to the Poor House was at least no way to the White
+House.  I suppose now that he thought I had merely gone back to my trade,
+and so for the time I had; but I have no reason to suppose that he judged
+my case narrow-mindedly, and I ought to have had the courage to have the
+affair out with him, and tell him just why I had left the law; we had
+sometimes talked the English reviews over, for he read them as well as I,
+and it ought not to have been impossible for me to be frank with him;
+but as yet I could not trust any one with my secret hope of some day
+living for literature, although I had already lived for nothing else.
+I preferred the disadvantage which I must be at in his eyes, and in the
+eyes of most of my fellow-citizens; I believe I had the applause of the
+organ-builder, who thought the law no calling for me.
+
+In that village there was a social equality which, if not absolute, was
+as nearly so as can ever be in a competitive civilization; and I could
+have suffered no slight in the general esteem for giving up a profession
+and going back to a trade; if I was despised at all it was because I had
+thrown away the chance of material advancement; I dare say some people
+thought I was a fool to do that.  No one, indeed, could have imagined the
+rapture it was to do it, or what a load rolled from my shoulders when I
+dropped the law from them.  Perhaps Sinbad or Christian could have
+conceived of my ecstatic relief; yet so far as the popular vision reached
+I was not returning to literature, but to the printing business, and I
+myself felt the difference.  My reading had given me criterions different
+from those of the simple life of our village, and I did not flatter
+myself that my calling would have been thought one of great social
+dignity in the world where I hoped some day to make my living.
+My convictions were all democratic, but at heart I am afraid I was a
+snob, and was unworthy of the honest work which I ought to have felt it
+an honor to do; this, whatever we falsely pretend to the contrary, is the
+frame of every one who aspires beyond the work of his hands.  I do not
+know how it had become mine, except through my reading, and I think it
+was through the devotion I then had for a certain author that I came to a
+knowledge not of good and evil so much as of common and superfine.
+
+
+
+
+XX.  THACKERAY
+
+It was of the organ-builder that I had Thackeray's books first.  He knew
+their literary quality, and their rank in the literary, world; but I
+believe he was surprised at the passion I instantly conceived for them.
+He could not understand it; he deplored it almost as a moral defect in
+me; though he honored it as a proof of my critical taste.  In a certain
+measure he was right.
+
+What flatters the worldly pride in a young man is what fascinates him
+with Thackeray.  With his air of looking down on the highest, and
+confidentially inviting you to be of his company in the seat of the
+scorner he is irresistible; his very confession that he is a snob, too,
+is balm and solace to the reader who secretly admires the splendors he
+affects to despise.  His sentimentality is also dear to the heart of
+youth, and the boy who is dazzled by his satire is melted by his easy
+pathos.  Then, if the boy has read a good many other books, he is taken
+with that abundance of literary turn and allusion in Thackeray; there is
+hardly a sentence but reminds him that he is in the society of a great
+literary swell, who has read everything, and can mock or burlesque life
+right and left from the literature always at his command.  At the same
+time he feels his mastery, and is abjectly grateful to him in his own
+simple love of the good for his patronage of the unassuming virtues.
+It is so pleasing to one's 'vanity, and so safe, to be of the master's
+side when he assails those vices and foibles which are inherent in the
+system of things, and which one can contemn with vast applause so long as
+one does not attempt to undo the conditions they spring from.
+
+I exulted to have Thackeray attack the aristocrats, and expose their
+wicked pride and meanness, and I never noticed that he did not propose to
+do away with aristocracy, which is and must always be just what it has
+been, and which cannot be changed while it exists at all.  He appeared to
+me one of the noblest creatures that ever was when he derided the shams
+of society; and I was far from seeing that society, as we have it, was
+necessarily a sham; when he made a mock of snobbishness I did not know
+but snobbishness was something that might be reached and cured by
+ridicule.  Now I know that so long as we have social inequality we shall
+have snobs; we shall have men who bully and truckle, and women who snub
+and crawl.  I know that it is futile to, spurn them, or lash them for
+trying to get on in the world, and that the world is what it must be from
+the selfish motives which underlie our economic life.  But I did not know
+these things then, nor for long afterwards, and so I gave my heart to
+Thackeray, who seemed to promise me in his contempt of the world a refuge
+from the shame I felt for my own want of figure in it.  He had the effect
+of taking me into the great world, and making me a party to his splendid
+indifference to titles, and even to royalties; and I could not see that
+sham for sham he was unwittingly the greatest sham of all.
+
+I think it was 'Pendennis' I began with, and I lived in the book to the
+very last line of it, and made its alien circumstance mine to the
+smallest detail.  I am still not sure but it is the author's greatest
+book, and I speak from a thorough acquaintance with every line he has
+written, except the Virginians, which I have never been able to read
+quite through; most of his work I have read twice, and some of it twenty
+times.
+
+After reading 'Pendennis' I went to 'Vanity Fair,' which I now think the
+poorest of Thackeray's novels--crude, heavy-handed, caricatured.  About
+the same time I revelled in the romanticism of 'Henry Esmond,' with its
+pseudo-eighteenth-century sentiment, and its appeals to an overwrought
+ideal of gentlemanhood and honor.  It was long before I was duly revolted
+by Esmond's transfer of his passion from the daughter to the mother whom
+he is successively enamoured of.  I believe this unpleasant and
+preposterous affair is thought one of the fine things in the story; I do
+not mind owning that I thought it so myself when I was seventeen; and if
+I could have found a Beatrix to be in love with, and a Lady Castlewood to
+be in love with me, I should have asked nothing finer of fortune.
+The glamour of Henry Esmond was all the deeper because I was reading the
+'Spectator' then, and was constantly in the company of Addison, and
+Steele, and Swift, and Pope, and all the wits at Will's, who are
+presented evanescently in the romance.  The intensely literary keeping,
+as well as quality, of the story I suppose is what formed its highest
+fascination for me; but that effect of great world which it imparts to
+the reader, making him citizen, and, if he will, leading citizen of it,
+was what helped turn my head.
+
+This is the toxic property of all Thackeray's writing.  He is himself
+forever dominated in imagination by the world, and even while he tells
+you it is not worth while he makes you feel that it is worth while.  It
+is not the honest man, but the man of honor, who shines in his page; his
+meek folk are proudly meek, and there is a touch of superiority, a glint
+of mundane splendor, in his lowliest.  He rails at the order of things,
+but he imagines nothing different, even when he shows that its baseness,
+and cruelty, and hypocrisy are well-nigh inevitable, and, for most of
+those who wish to get on in it, quite inevitable.  He has a good word for
+the virtues, he patronizes the Christian graces, he pats humble merit on
+the head; he has even explosions of indignation against the insolence and
+pride of birth, and purse-pride.  But, after all, he is of the world,
+worldly, and the highest hope he holds out is that you may be in the
+world and despise its ambitions while you compass its ends.
+
+I should be far from blaming him for all this.  He was of his time; but
+since his time men have thought beyond him, and seen life with a vision
+which makes his seem rather purblind.  He must have been immensely in
+advance of most of the thinking and feeling of his day, for people then
+used to accuse his sentimental pessimism of cynical qualities which we
+could hardly find in it now.  It was the age of intense individualism,
+when you were to do right because it was becoming to you, say, as a
+gentleman, and you were to have an eye single to the effect upon your
+character, if not your reputation; you were not to do a mean thing
+because it was wrong, but because it was mean.  It was romanticism
+carried into the region of morals.  But I had very little concern then as
+to that sort of error.
+
+I was on a very high esthetic horse, which I could not have conveniently
+stooped from if I had wished; it was quite enough for me that Thackeray's
+novels were prodigious works of art, and I acquired merit, at least with
+myself, for appreciating them so keenly, for liking them so much.  It
+must be, I felt with far less consciousness than my formulation of the
+feeling expresses, that I was of some finer sort myself to be able to
+enjoy such a fine sort.  No doubt I should have been a coxcomb of some
+kind, if not that kind, and I shall not be very strenuous in censuring
+Thackeray for his effect upon me in this way.  No doubt the effect was
+already in me, and he did not so much produce it as find it.
+
+In the mean time he was a vast delight to me, as much in the variety of
+his minor works--his 'Yellowplush,' and 'Letters of Mr. Brown,' and
+'Adventures of Major Gahagan,' and the 'Paris Sketch Book,' and the
+'Irish Sketch Book,' and the 'Great Hoggarty Diamond,' and the 'Book of
+Snobs,' and the 'English Humorists,' and the 'Four Georges,' and all the
+multitude of his essays, and verses, and caricatures--as in the spacious
+designs of his huge novels, the 'Newcomes,' and 'Pendennis,' and 'Vanity
+Fair,' and 'Henry Esmond,' and 'Barry Lyndon.'
+
+There was something in the art of the last which seemed to me then, and
+still seems, the farthest reach of the author's great talent.  It is
+couched, like so much of his work, in the autobiographic form, which next
+to the dramatic form is the most natural, and which lends itself with
+such flexibility to the purpose of the author.  In 'Barry Lyndon' there
+is imagined to the life a scoundrel of such rare quality that he never
+supposes for a moment but he is the finest sort of a gentleman; and so,
+in fact, he was, as most gentlemen went in his day.  Of course, the
+picture is over-colored; it was the vice of Thackeray, or of Thackeray's
+time, to surcharge all imitations of life and character, so that a
+generation apparently much slower, if not duller than ours, should not
+possibly miss the artist's meaning.  But I do not think it is so much
+surcharged as 'Esmond;' 'Barry Lyndon' is by no manner of means so
+conscious as that mirror of gentlemanhood, with its manifold self-
+reverberations; and for these reasons I am inclined to think he is the
+most perfect creation of Thackeray's mind.
+
+I did not make the acquaintance of Thackeray's books all at once, or even
+in rapid succession, and he at no time possessed the whole empire of my
+catholic, not to say, fickle, affections, during the years I was
+compassing a full knowledge and sense of his greatness, and burning
+incense at his shrine.  But there was a moment when he so outshone and
+overtopped all other divinities in my worship that I was effectively his
+alone, as I have been the helpless and, as it were, hypnotized devotee of
+three or four others of the very great.  From his art there flowed into
+me a literary quality which tinged my whole mental substance, and made it
+impossible for me to say, or wish to say, anything without giving it the
+literary color.  That is, while he dominated my love and fancy, if I had
+been so fortunate as to have a simple concept of anything in life, I must
+have tried to give the expression of it some turn or tint that would
+remind the reader of books even before it reminded him of men.
+
+It is hard to make out what I mean, but this is a try at it, and I do not
+know that I shall be able to do better unless I add that Thackeray, of
+all the writers that I have known, is the most thoroughly and profoundly
+imbued with literature, so that when he speaks it is not with words and
+blood, but with words and ink.  You may read the greatest part of
+Dickens, as you may read the greatest part of Hawthorne or Tolstoy, and
+not once be reminded of literature as a business or a cult, but you can
+hardly read a paragraph, hardly a sentence, of Thackeray's without being
+reminded of it either by suggestion or downright allusion.
+
+I do not blame him for this; he was himself, and he could not have been
+any other manner of man without loss; but I say that the greatest talent
+is not that which breathes of the library, but that which breathes of the
+street, the field, the open sky, the simple earth.  I began to imitate
+this master of mine almost as soon as I began to read him; this must be,
+and I had a greater pride and joy in my success than I should probably
+have known in anything really creative; I should have suspected that, I
+should have distrusted that, because I had nothing to test it by, no
+model; but here before me was the very finest and noblest model, and I
+had but to form my lines upon it, and I had produced a work of art
+altogether more estimable in my eyes than anything else could have been.
+I saw the little world about me through the lenses of my master's
+spectacles, and I reported its facts, in his tone and his attitude, with
+his self-flattered scorn, his showy sighs, his facile satire.  I need not
+say I was perfectly satisfied with the result, or that to be able to
+imitate Thackeray was a much greater thing for me than to have been able
+to imitate nature.  In fact, I could have valued any picture of the life
+and character I knew only as it put me in mind of life and character as
+these had shown themselves to me in his books.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.  "LAZARILLO DE TORMES"
+
+At the same time, I was not only reading many books besides Thackeray's,
+but I was studying to get a smattering of several languages as well as I
+could, with or without help.  I could now manage Spanish fairly well, and
+I was sending on to New York for authors in that tongue.  I do not
+remember how I got the money to buy them; to be sure it was no great sum;
+but it must have been given me out of the sums we were all working so
+hard to make up for the debt, and the interest on the debt (that is
+always the wicked pinch for the debtor!), we had incurred in the purchase
+of the newspaper which we lived by, and the house which we lived in.
+I spent no money on any other sort of pleasure, and so, I suppose, it was
+afforded me the more readily; but I cannot really recall the history of
+those acquisitions on its financial side.  In any case, if the sums I
+laid out in literature could not have been comparatively great, the
+excitement attending the outlay was prodigious.
+
+I know that I used to write on to Messrs. Roe Lockwood & Son, New York,
+for my Spanish books, and I dare say that my letters were sufficiently
+pedantic, and filled with a simulated acquaintance with all Spanish
+literature.  Heaven knows what they must have thought, if they thought
+anything, of their queer customer in that obscure little Ohio village;
+but he could not have been queerer to them than to his fellow-villagers,
+I am sure.  I haunted the post-office about the time the books were due,
+and when I found one of them in our deep box among a heap of exchange
+newspapers and business letters, my emotion was so great that it almost
+took my breath.  I hurried home with the precious volume, and shut myself
+into my little den, where I gave myself up to a sort of transport in it.
+These books were always from the collection of Spanish authors published
+by Baudry in Paris, and they were in saffron-colored paper cover, printed
+full of a perfectly intoxicating catalogue of other Spanish books which I
+meant to read, every one, some time.  The paper and the ink had a certain
+odor which was sweeter to me than the perfumes of Araby.  The look of the
+type took me more than the glance of a girl, and I had a fever of longing
+to know the heart of the book, which was like a lover's passion.  Some
+times I did not reach its heart, but commonly I did.  Moratin's 'Origins
+of the Spanish Theatre,' and a large volume of Spanish dramatic authors,
+were the first Spanish books I sent for, but I could not say why I sent
+for them, unless it was because I saw that there were some plays of
+Cervantes among the rest.  I read these and I read several comedies of
+Lope de Vega, and numbers of archaic dramas in Moratin's history, and I
+really got a fairish perspective of the Spanish drama, which has now
+almost wholly faded from my mind.  It is more intelligible to me why I
+should have read Conde's 'Dominion of the Arabs in Spain;' for that was
+in the line of my reading in Irving, which would account for my pleasure
+in the 'History of the Civil Wars of Granada;' it was some time before I
+realized that the chronicles in this were a bundle of romances and not
+veritable records; and my whole study in these things was wholly
+undirected and unenlightened.  But I meant to be thorough in it, and I
+could not rest satisfied with the Spanish-English grammars I had; I was
+not willing to stop short of the official grammar of the Spanish Academy.
+I sent to New York for it, and my booksellers there reported that they
+would have to send to Spain for it.  I lived till it came to hand through
+them from Madrid; and I do not understand why I did not perish then from
+the pride and joy I had in it.
+
+But, after all, I am not a Spanish scholar, and can neither speak nor
+write the language.  I never got more than a good reading use of it,
+perhaps because I never really tried for more.  But I am very glad of
+that, because it has been a great pleasure to me, and even some profit,
+and it has lighted up many meanings in literature, which must always have
+remained dark to me.  Not to speak now of the modern Spanish writers whom
+it has enabled me to know in their own houses as it were, I had even in
+that remote day a rapturous delight in a certain Spanish book, which was
+well worth all the pains I had undergone to get at it.  This was the
+famous picaresque novel, 'Lazarillo de Tormes,' by Hurtado de Mendoza,
+whose name then so familiarized itself to my fondness that now as I write
+it I feel as if it were that of an old personal friend whom I had known
+in the flesh.  I believe it would not have been always comfortable to
+know Mendoza outside of his books; he was rather a terrible person; he
+was one of the Spanish invaders of Italy, and is known in Italian history
+as the Tyrant of Sierra.  But at my distance of time and place I could
+safely revel in his friendship, and as an author I certainly found him a
+most charming companion.  The adventures of his rogue of a hero, who
+began life as the servant and accomplice of a blind beggar, and then
+adventured on through a most diverting career of knavery, brought back
+the atmosphere of Don Quixote, and all the landscape of that dear wonder-
+world of Spain, where I had lived so much, and I followed him with all
+the old delight.
+
+I do not know that I should counsel others to do so, or that the general
+reader would find his account in it, but I am sure that the intending
+author of American fiction would do well to study the Spanish picaresque
+novels; for in their simplicity of design he will find one of the best
+forms for an American story.  The intrigue of close texture will never
+suit our conditions, which are so loose and open and variable; each man's
+life among us is a romance of the Spanish model, if it is the life of a
+man who has risen, as we nearly all have, with many ups and downs.  The
+story of 'Latzarillo' is gross in its facts, and is mostly "unmeet for
+ladies," like most of the fiction in all languages before our times; but
+there is an honest simplicity in the narration, a pervading humor, and a
+rich feeling for character that gives it value.
+
+I think that a good deal of its foulness was lost upon me, but I
+certainly understood that it would not do to present it to an American
+public just as it was, in the translation which I presently planned to
+make. I went about telling the story to people, and trying to make them
+find it as amusing as I did, but whether I ever succeeded I cannot say,
+though the notion of a version with modifications constantly grew with
+me, till one day I went to the city of Cleveland with my father.  There
+was a branch house of an Eastern firm of publishers in that place, and I
+must have had the hope that I might have the courage to propose a
+translation of Lazarillo to them.  My father urged me to try my fortune,
+but my heart failed me.  I was half blind with one of the headaches that
+tormented me in those days, and I turned my sick eyes from the sign,
+"J. P. Jewett & Co., Publishers," which held me fascinated, and went home
+without at least having my much-dreamed-of version of Lazarillo refused.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.  CURTIS, LONGFELLOW, SCHLEGEL
+
+I am quite at a loss to know why my reading had this direction or that in
+those days.  It had necessarily passed beyond my father's suggestion, and
+I think it must have been largely by accident or experiment that I read
+one book rather than another.  He made some sort of newspaper arrangement
+with a book-store in Cleveland, which was the means of enriching our home
+library with a goodly number of books, shop-worn, but none the worse for
+that, and new in the only way that books need be new to the lover of
+them.  Among these I found a treasure in Curtis's two books, the 'Nile
+Notes of a Howadji,' and the 'Howadji in Syria.'  I already knew him by
+his 'Potiphar Papers,' and the ever-delightful reveries which have since
+gone under the name of 'Prue and I;' but those books of Eastern travel
+opened a new world of thinking and feeling.  They had at once a great
+influence upon me.  The smooth richness of their diction; the amiable
+sweetness of their mood, their gracious caprice, the delicacy of their
+satire (which was so kind that it should have some other name), their
+abundance of light and color, and the deep heart of humanity underlying
+their airiest fantasticality, all united in an effect which was different
+from any I had yet known.
+
+As usual, I steeped myself in them, and the first runnings of my fancy
+when I began to pour it out afterwards were of their flavor.  I tried to
+write like this new master; but whether I had tried or not, I should
+probably have done so from the love I bore him.  He was a favorite not
+only of mine, but of all the young people in the village who were reading
+current literature, so that on this ground at least I had abundant
+sympathy.  The present generation can have little notion of the deep
+impression made upon the intelligence and conscience of the whole nation
+by the 'Potiphar Papers,' or how its fancy was rapt with the 'Prue and I'
+sketches, These are among the most veritable literary successes we have
+had, and probably we who were so glad when the author of these beautiful
+things turned aside from the flowery paths where he led us, to battle for
+freedom in the field of politics, would have felt the sacrifice too great
+if we could have dreamed it would be life-long.  But, as it was, we could
+only honor him the more, and give him a place in our hearts which he
+shared with Longfellow.
+
+This divine poet I have never ceased to read.  His Hiawatha was a new
+book during one of those terrible Lake Shore winters, but all the other
+poems were old friends with me by that time.  With a sister who is no
+longer living I had a peculiar affection for his pretty and touching and
+lightly humorous tale of 'Kavanagh,' which was of a village life enough
+like our own, )in some things, to make us know the truth of its delicate
+realism.  We used to read it and talk it fondly over together, and I
+believe some stories of like make and manner grew out of our pleasure in
+it.  They were never finished, but it was enough to begin them, and there
+were few writers, if any, among those I delighted in who escaped the
+tribute of an imitation.  One has to begin that way, or at least one had
+in my day; perhaps it is now possible for a young writer to begin by
+being himself; but for my part, that was not half so important as to be
+like some one else.  Literature, not life, was my aim, and to reproduce
+it was my joy and my pride.
+
+I was widening my knowledge of it helplessly and involuntarily, and I was
+always chancing upon some book that served this end among the great
+number of books that I read merely for my pleasure without any real
+result of the sort.  Schlegel's 'Lectures on Dramatic Literature' came
+into my hands not long after I had finished my studies in the history of
+the Spanish theatre, and it made the whole subject at once luminous.
+I cannot give a due notion of the comfort this book afforded me by the
+light it cast upon paths where I had dimly made my way before, but which
+I now followed in the full day.
+
+Of course, I pinned my faith to everything that Schlegel said.
+I obediently despised the classic unities and the French and Italian
+theatre which had perpetuated them, and I revered the romantic drama
+which had its glorious course among the Spanish and English poets, and
+which was crowned with the fame of the Cervantes and the Shakespeare whom
+I seemed to own, they owned me so completely.  It vexes me now to find
+that I cannot remember how the book came into my hands, or who could have
+suggested it to me.  It is possible that it may have been that artist who
+came and stayed a month with us while she painted my mother's portrait.
+She was fresh from her studies in New York, where she had met authors and
+artists at the house of the Carey sisters, and had even once seen my
+adored Curtis somewhere, though she had not spoken with him.  Her talk
+about these things simply emparadised me; it lifted me into a heaven of
+hope that I, too, might some day meet such elect spirits and converse
+with them face to face.  My mood was sufficiently foolish, but it was not
+such a frame of mind as I can be ashamed of; and I could wish a boy no
+happier fortune than to possess it for a time, at least.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.  TENNYSON
+
+I cannot quite see now how I found time for even trying to do the things
+I had in hand more or less.  It is perfectly clear to me that I did none
+of them well, though I meant at the time to do none of them other than
+excellently.  I was attempting the study of no less than four languages,
+and I presently added a fifth to these.  I was reading right and left in
+every direction, but chiefly in that of poetry, criticism, and fiction.
+From time to time I boldly attacked a history, and carried it by a 'coup
+de main,' or sat down before it for a prolonged siege.  There was
+occasionally an author who worsted me, whom I tried to read and quietly
+gave up after a vain struggle, but I must say that these authors were
+few.  I had got a very fair notion of the range of all literature, and
+the relations of the different literatures to one another, and I knew
+pretty well what manner of book it was that I took up before I committed
+myself to the task of reading it.  Always I read for pleasure, for the
+delight of knowing something more; and this pleasure is a very different
+thing from amusement, though I read a great deal for mere amusement, as I
+do still, and to take my mind away from unhappy or harassing thoughts.
+There are very few things that I think it a waste of time to have read;
+I should probably have wasted the time if I had not read them, and at the
+period I speak of I do not think I wasted much time.
+
+My day began about seven o'clock, in the printing-office, where it took
+me till noon to do my task of so many thousand ems, say four or five.
+Then we had dinner, after the simple fashion of people who work with
+their hands for their dinners.  In the afternoon I went back and
+corrected the proof of the type I had set, and distributed my case for
+the next day.  At two or three o'clock I was free, and then I went home
+and began my studies; or tried to write something; or read a book.
+We had supper at six, and after that I rejoiced in literature, till I
+went to bed at ten or eleven.  I cannot think of any time when I did not
+go gladly to my books or manuscripts, when it was not a noble joy as well
+as a high privilege.
+
+But it all ended as such a strain must, in the sort of break which was
+not yet known as nervous prostration.  When I could not sleep after my
+studies, and the sick headaches came oftener, and then days and weeks of
+hypochondriacal misery, it was apparent I was not well; but that was not
+the day of anxiety for such things, and if it was thought best that I
+should leave work and study for a while, it was not with the notion that
+the case was at all serious, or needed an uninterrupted cure.  I passed
+days in the woods and fields, gunning or picking berries; I spent myself
+in heavy work; I made little journeys; and all this was very wholesome
+and very well; but I did not give up my reading or my attempts to write.
+No doubt I was secretly proud to have been invalided in so great a cause,
+and to be sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, rather than by
+some ignoble ague or the devastating consumption of that region.  If I
+lay awake, noting the wild pulsations of my heart, and listening to the
+death-watch in the wall, I was certainly very much scared, but I was not
+without the consolation that I was at least a sufferer for literature.
+At the same time that I was so horribly afraid of dying, I could have
+composed an epitaph which would have moved others to tears for my
+untimely fate.  But there was really not impairment of my constitution,
+and after a while I began to be better, and little by little the health
+which has never since failed me under any reasonable stress of work
+established itself.
+
+I was in the midst of this unequal struggle when I first became
+acquainted with the poet who at once possessed himself of what was best
+worth having in me.  Probably I knew of Tennyson by extracts, and from
+the English reviews, but I believe it was from reading one of Curtis's
+"Easy Chair" papers that I was prompted to get the new poem of "Maud,"
+which I understood from the "Easy Chair" was then moving polite youth in
+the East.  It did not seem to me that I could very well live without that
+poem, and when I went to Cleveland with the hope that I might have
+courage to propose a translation of Lazarillo to a publisher it was with
+the fixed purpose of getting "Maud" if it was to be found in any book-
+store there.
+
+I do not know why I was so long in reaching Tennyson, and I can only
+account for it by the fact that I was always reading rather the earlier
+than the later English poetry.  To be sure I had passed through what I
+may call a paroxysm of Alexander Smith, a poet deeply unknown to the
+present generation, but then acclaimed immortal by all the critics, and
+put with Shakespeare, who must be a good deal astonished from time to
+time in his Elysian quiet by the companionship thrust upon him.  I read
+this now dead-and-gone immortal with an ecstasy unspeakable; I raved of
+him by day, and dreamed of him by night; I got great lengths of his
+"Life-Drama" by heart; and I can still repeat several gorgeous passages
+from it; I would almost have been willing to take the life of the sole
+critic who had the sense to laugh at him, and who made his wicked fun in
+Graham's Magazine, an extinct periodical of the old extinct Philadelphian
+species.  I cannot tell how I came out of this craze, but neither could
+any of the critics who led me into it, I dare say.  The reading world is
+very susceptible of such-lunacies, and all that can be said is that at a
+given time it was time for criticism to go mad over a poet who was
+neither better nor worse than many another third-rate poet apotheosized
+before and since.  What was good in Smith was the reflected fire of the
+poets who had a vital heat in them; and it was by mere chance that I
+bathed myself in his second-hand effulgence.  I already knew pretty well
+the origin of the Tennysonian line in English poetry; Wordsworth, and
+Keats, and Shelley; and I did not come to Tennyson's worship a sudden
+convert, but my devotion to him was none the less complete and exclusive.
+Like every other great poet he somehow expressed the feelings of his day,
+and I suppose that at the time he wrote "Maud" he said more fully what
+the whole English-speaking race were then dimly longing to utter than any
+English poet who has lived.
+
+One need not question the greatness of Browning in owning the fact that
+the two poets of his day who preeminently voiced their generation were
+Tennyson and Longfellow; though Browning, like Emerson, is possibly now
+more modern than either.  However, I had then nothing to do with
+Tennyson's comparative claim on my adoration; there was for the time no
+parallel for him in the whole range of literary divinities that I had
+bowed the knee to.  For that while, the temple was not only emptied of
+all the other idols, but I had a richly flattering illusion of being his
+only worshipper.  When I came to the sense of this error, it was with the
+belief that at least no one else had ever appreciated him so fully, stood
+so close to him in that holy of holies where he wrought his miracles.
+
+I say tawdily and ineffectively and falsely what was a very precious and
+sacred experience with me.  This great poet opened to me a whole world of
+thinking and feeling, where I had my being with him in that mystic
+intimacy, which cannot be put into words.  I at once identified myself
+not only with the hero of the poem, but in some so with the poet himself,
+when I read "Maud"; but that was only the first step towards the lasting
+state in which his poetry has upon the whole been more to me than that of
+any other poet.  I have never read any other so closely and continuously,
+or read myself so much into and out of his verse.  There have been times
+and moods when I have had my questions, and made my cavils, and when it
+seemed to me that the poet was less than I had thought him; and certainly
+I do not revere equally and unreservedly all that he has written; that
+would be impossible.  But when I think over all the other poets I have
+read, he is supreme above them in his response to some need in me that he
+has satisfied so perfectly.
+
+Of course, "Maud" seemed to me the finest poem I had read, up to that
+time, but I am not sure that this conclusion was wholly my own; I think
+it was partially formed for me by the admiration of the poem which I felt
+to be everywhere in the critical atmosphere, and which had already
+penetrated to me.  I did not like all parts of it equally well, and some
+parts of it seemed thin and poor (though I would not suffer myself to say
+so then), and they still seem so.  But there were whole passages and
+spaces of it whose divine and perfect beauty lifted me above life.  I did
+not fully understand the poem then; I do not fully understand it now, but
+that did not and does not matter; for there something in poetry that
+reaches the soul by other enues than the intelligence.  Both in this poem
+and others of Tennyson, and in every poet that I have loved, there are
+melodies and harmonies enfolding significance that appeared long after I
+had first read them, and had even learned them by heart; that lay weedy
+in my outer ear and were enough in their Mere beauty of phrasing, till
+the time came for them to reveal their whole meaning.  In fact they could
+do this only to later and greater knowledge of myself and others, as
+every one must recognize who recurs in after-life to a book that he read
+when young; then he finds it twice as full of meaning as it was at first.
+
+I could not rest satisfied with "Maud"; I sent the same summer to
+Cleveland for the little volume which then held all the poet's work, and
+abandoned myself so wholly to it, that for a year I read no other verse
+that I can remember.  The volume was the first of that pretty blue-and-
+gold series which Ticknor & Fields began to publish in 1856, and which
+their imprint, so rarely affixed to an unworthy book, at once carried far
+and wide.  Their modest old brown cloth binding had long been a quiet
+warrant of quality in the literature it covered, and now this splendid
+blossom of the bookmaking art, as it seemed, was fitly employed to convey
+the sweetness and richness of the loveliest poetry that I thought the
+world had yet known.  After an old fashion of mine, I read it
+continuously, with frequent recurrences from each new poem to some that
+had already pleased me, and with a most capricious range among the
+pieces.  "In Memoriam" was in that book, and the "Princess"; I read the
+"Princess" through and through, and over and over, but I did not then
+read "In Memoriam" through, and I have never read it in course; I am not
+sure that I have even yet read every part of it.  I did not come to the
+"Princess," either, until I had saturated my fancy and my memory with
+some of the shorter poems, with the "Dream of Fair Women," with the
+"Lotus-Eaters," with the "Miller's Daughter," with the "Morte d'Arthur,"
+with "Edwin Morris, or The Lake," with "Love and Duty," and a score of
+other minor and briefer poems.  I read the book night and day, in-doors
+and out, to myself and to whomever I could make listen.  I have no words
+to tell the rapture it was to me; but I hope that in some more articulate
+being, if it should ever be my unmerited fortune to meet that 'sommo
+poeta' face to face, it shall somehow be uttered from me to him, and he
+will understand how completely he became the life of the boy I was then.
+I think it might please, or at least amuse, that lofty ghost, and that he
+would not resent it, as he would probably have done on earth.  I can well
+understand why the homage of his worshippers should have afflicted him
+here, and I could never have been one to burn incense in his earthly
+presence; but perhaps it might be done hereafter without offence.
+I eagerly caught up and treasured every personal word I could find about
+him, and I dwelt in that sort of charmed intimacy with him through his
+verse, in which I could not presume nor he repel, and which I had enjoyed
+in turn with Cervantes and Shakespeare, without a snub from them.
+
+I have never ceased to adore Tennyson, though the rapture of the new
+convert could not last.  That must pass like the flush of any other
+passion.  I think I have now a better sense of his comparative greatness,
+but a better sense of his positive greatness I could not have than I had
+at the beginning; and I believe this is the essential knowledge of a
+poet.  It is very well to say one is greater than Keats, or not so great
+as Wordsworth; that one is or is not of the highest order of poets like
+Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe; but that does not mean anything of
+value, and I never find my account in it.  I know it is not possible for
+any less than the greatest writer to abide lastingly in one's life.  Some
+dazzling comer may enter and possess it for a day, but he soon wears his
+welcome out, and presently finds the door, to be answered with a not-at-
+home if he knocks again.  But it was only this morning that I read one of
+the new last poems of Tennyson with a return of the emotion which he
+first woke in me well-nigh forty years ago.  There has been no year of
+those many when I have not read him and loved him with something of the
+early fire if not all the early conflagration; and each successive poem
+of his has been for me a fresh joy.
+
+He went with me into the world from my village when I left it to make my
+first venture away from home.  My father had got one of those legislative
+clerkships which used to fall sometimes to deserving country editors when
+their party was in power, and we together imagined and carried out a
+scheme for corresponding with some city newspapers.  We were to furnish a
+daily, letter giving an account of the legislative proceedings which I
+was mainly to write up from material he helped me to get together.  The
+letters at once found favor with the editors who agreed to take them, and
+my father then withdrew from the work altogether, after telling them who
+was doing it.  We were afraid they might not care for the reports of a
+boy of nineteen, but they did not seem to take my age into account, and I
+did not boast of my youth among the lawmakers.  I looked three or four
+years older than I was; but I experienced a terrible moment once when a
+fatherly Senator asked me my age.  I got away somehow without saying, but
+it was a great relief to me when my twentieth birthday came that winter,
+and I could honestly proclaim that I was in my twenty-first year.
+
+I had now the free range of the State Library, and I drew many sorts of
+books from it.  Largely, however, they were fiction, and I read all the
+novels of Bulwer, for whom I had already a great liking from 'The
+Caxtons' and 'My Novel.'  I was dazzled by them, and I thought him a
+great writer, if not so great a one as he thought himself.  Little or
+nothing of those romances, with their swelling prefaces about the poet
+and his function, their glittering criminals, and showy rakes and rogues
+of all kinds, and their patrician perfume and social splendor, remained
+with me; they may have been better or worse; I will not attempt to say.
+If I may call my fascination with them a passion at all, I must say that
+it was but a fitful fever.  I also read many volumes of Zschokke's
+admirable tales, which I found in a translation in the Library, and I
+think I began at the same time to find out De Quincey.  These authors I
+recall out of the many that passed through my mind almost as tracelessly
+as they passed through my hands.  I got at some versions of Icelandic
+poems, in the metre of "Hiawatha"; I had for a while a notion of studying
+Icelandic, and I did take out an Icelandic grammar and lexicon, and
+decided that I would learn the language later.  By this time I must have
+begun German, which I afterwards carried so far, with one author at
+least, as to find in him a delight only second to that I had in Tennyson;
+but as yet Tennyson was all in all to me in poetry.  I suspect that I
+carried his poems about with me a great part of the time; I am afraid
+that I always had that blue-and-gold Tennyson in my pocket; and I was
+ready to draw it upon anybody, at the slightest provocation.  This is the
+worst of the ardent lover of literature: he wishes to make every one else
+share his rapture, will he, nill he.  Many good fellows suffered from my
+admiration of this author or that, and many more pretty, patient maids.
+I wanted to read my favorite passages, my favorite poems to them; I am
+afraid I often did read, when they would rather have been talking; in the
+case of the poems I did worse, I repeated them.  This seems rather
+incredible now, but it is true enough, and absurd as it is, it at least
+attests my sincerity.  It was long before I cured myself of so pestilent
+a habit; and I am not yet so perfectly well of it that I could be safely
+trusted with a fascinating book and a submissive listener.  I dare say I
+could not have been made to understand at this time that Tennyson was not
+so nearly the first interest of life with other people as he was with me;
+I must often have suspected it, but I was helpless against the wish to
+make them feel him as important to their prosperity and well-being as he
+was to mine.  My head was full of him; his words were always behind my
+lips; and when I was not repeating his phrase to myself or to some one
+else, I was trying to frame something of my own as like him as I could.
+It was a time of melancholy from ill-health, and of anxiety for the
+future in which I must make my own place in the world.  Work, and hard
+work, I had always been used to and never afraid of; but work is by no
+means the whole story.  You may get on without much of it, or you may do
+a great deal, and not get on.  I was willing to do as much of it as I
+could get to do, but I distrusted my health, somewhat, and I had many
+forebodings, which my adored poet helped me to transfigure to the
+substance of literature, or enabled me for the time to forget.  I was
+already imitating him in the verse I wrote; he now seemed the only worthy
+model for one who meant to be as great a poet as I did.  None of the
+authors whom I read at all displaced him in my devotion, and I could not
+have believed that any other poet would ever be so much to me.  In fact,
+as I have expressed, none ever has been.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.  HEINE
+
+That winter passed very quickly and happily for me, and at the end of the
+legislative session I had acquitted myself so much to the satisfaction of
+one of the newspapers which I wrote for that I was offered a place on it.
+I was asked to be city editor, as it was called in that day, and I was to
+have charge of the local reporting.  It was a great temptation, and for a
+while I thought it the greatest piece of good fortune.  I went down to
+Cincinnati to acquaint myself with the details of the work, and to fit
+myself for it by beginning as reporter myself.  One night's round of the
+police stations with the other reporters satisfied me that I was not
+meant for that work, and I attempted it no farther.  I have often been
+sorry since, for it would have made known to me many phases of life that
+I have always remained ignorant of, but I did not know then that life was
+supremely interesting and important.  I fancied that literature, that
+poetry was so; and it was humiliation and anguish indescribable to think
+of myself torn from my high ideals by labors like those of the reporter.
+I would not consent even to do the office work of the department, and the
+proprietor and editor who was more especially my friend tried to make
+some other place for me.  All the departments were full but the one I
+would have nothing to do with, and after a few weeks of sufferance and
+suffering I turned my back on a thousand dollars a year, and for the
+second time returned to the printing-office.
+
+I was glad to get home, for I had been all the time tormented by my old
+malady of homesickness.  But otherwise the situation was not cheerful for
+me, and I now began trying to write something for publication that I
+could sell.  I sent off poems and they came back; I offered little
+translations from the Spanish that nobody wanted.  At the same time I
+took up the study of German, which I must have already played with, at
+such odd times as I could find.  My father knew something of it, and that
+friend of mine among the printers was already reading it and trying to
+speak it.  I had their help with the first steps so far as the
+recitations from Ollendorff were concerned, but I was impatient to read
+German, or rather to read one German poet who had seized my fancy from
+the first line of his I had seen.
+
+This poet was Heinrich Heine, who dominated me longer than any one author
+that I have known.  Where or when I first acquainted myself with his most
+fascinating genius, I cannot be sure, but I think it was in some article
+of the Westminster Review, where several poems of his were given in
+English and German; and their singular beauty and grace at once possessed
+my soul.  I was in a fever to know more of him, and it was my great good
+luck to fall in with a German in the village who had his books.  He was a
+bookbinder, one of those educated artisans whom the revolutions of 1848
+sent to us in great numbers.  He was a Hanoverian, and his accent was
+then, I believe, the standard, though the Berlinese is now the accepted
+pronunciation.  But I cared very little for accent; my wish was to get at
+Heine with as little delay as possible; and I began to cultivate the
+friendship of that bookbinder in every way.  I dare say he was glad of
+mine, for he was otherwise quite alone in the village, or had no
+companionship outside of his own family.  I clothed him in all the
+romantic interest I began to feel for his race and language, which new
+took the place of the Spaniards and Spanish in my affections.  He was a
+very quick and gay intelligence, with more sympathy for my love of our
+author's humor than for my love of his sentiment, and I can remember very
+well the twinkle of his little sharp black eyes, with their Tartar slant,
+and the twitching of his keenly pointed, sensitive nose, when we came to
+some passage of biting satire, or some phrase in which the bitter Jew had
+unpacked all the insult of his soul.
+
+We began to read Heine together when my vocabulary had to be dug almost
+word by word out of the dictionary, for the bookbinder's English was
+rather scanty at the best, and was not literary.  As for the grammar, I
+was getting that up as fast as I could from Ollendorff, and from other
+sources, but I was enjoying Heine before I well knew a declension or a
+conjugation.  As soon as my task was done at the office, I went home to
+the books, and worked away at them until supper.  Then my bookbinder and
+I met in my father's editorial room, and with a couple of candles on the
+table between us, and our Heine and the dictionary before us, we read
+till we were both tired out.
+
+The candles were tallow, and they lopped at different angles in the flat
+candlesticks heavily loaded with lead, which compositors once used.
+It seems to have been summer when our readings began, and they are
+associated in my memory with the smell of the neighboring gardens, which
+came in at the open doors and windows, and with the fluttering of moths,
+and the bumbling of the dorbugs, that stole in along with the odors.
+I can see the perspiration on the shining forehead of the bookbinder as
+he looks up from some brilliant passage, to exchange a smile of triumph
+with me at having made out the meaning with the meagre facilities we had
+for the purpose; he had beautiful red pouting lips, and a stiff little
+branching mustache above them, that went to the making of his smile.
+Sometimes, in the truce we made with the text, he told a little story of
+his life at home, or some anecdote relevant to our reading, or quoted a
+passage from some other author.  It seemed to me the make of a high
+intellectual banquet, and I should be glad if I could enjoy anything as
+much now.
+
+We walked home as far as his house, or rather his apartment over one of
+the village stores; and as he mounted to it by an outside staircase, we
+exchanged a joyous "Gute Nacht," and I kept on homeward through the dark
+and silent village street, which was really not that street, but some
+other, where Heine had been, some street out of the Reisebilder, of his
+knowledge, or of his dream.  When I reached home it was useless to go to
+bed.  I shut myself into my little study, and went over what we had read,
+till my brain was so full of it that when I crept up to my room at last,
+it was to lie down to slumbers which were often a mere phantasmagory of
+those witching Pictures of Travel.
+
+I was awake at my father's call in the morning, and before my mother had
+breakfast ready I had recited my lesson in Ollendorff to him.  To tell
+the truth, I hated those grammatical studies, and nothing but the love of
+literature, and the hope of getting at it, could ever have made me go
+through them.  Naturally, I never got any scholarly use of the languages
+I was worrying at, and though I could once write a passable literary
+German, it has all gone from me now, except for the purposes of reading.
+It cost me so much trouble, however, to dig the sense out of the grammar
+and lexicon, as I went on with the authors I was impatient to read, that
+I remember the words very well in all their forms and inflections, and I
+have still what I think I may call a fair German vocabulary.
+
+The German of Heine, when once you are in the joke of his capricious
+genius, is very simple, and in his poetry it is simple from the first,
+so that he was, perhaps, the best author I could have fallen in with if I
+wanted to go fast rather than far.  I found this out later, when I
+attempted other German authors without the glitter of his wit or the
+lambent glow of his fancy to light me on my hard way.  I should find it
+hard to say just why his peculiar genius had such an absolute fascination
+for me from the very first, and perhaps I had better content myself with
+saying simply that my literary liberation began with almost the earliest
+word from him; for if he chained me to himself he freed me from all other
+bondage.  I had been at infinite pains from time to time, now upon one
+model and now upon another, to literarify myself, if I may make a word
+which does not quite say the thing for me.  What I mean is that I had
+supposed, with the sense at times that I was all wrong, that the
+expression of literature must be different from the expression of life;
+that it must be an attitude, a pose, with something of state or at least
+of formality in it; that it must be this style, and not that; that it
+must be like that sort of acting which you know is acting when you see it
+and never mistake for reality.  There are a great many children,
+apparently grown-up, and largely accepted as critical authorities, who
+are still of this youthful opinion of mine.  But Heine at once showed me
+that this ideal of literature was false; that the life of literature was
+from the springs of the best common speech and that the nearer it could
+be made to conform, in voice, look and gait, to graceful, easy,
+picturesque and humorous or impassioned talk, the better it was.
+
+He did not impart these truths without imparting certain tricks with
+them, which I was careful to imitate as soon as I began to write in his
+manner, that is to say instantly.  His tricks he had mostly at second-
+hand, and mainly from Sterne, whom I did not know well enough then to
+know their origin.  But in all essentials he was himself, and my final
+lesson from him, or the final effect of all my lessons from him, was to
+find myself, and to be for good or evil whatsoever I really was.
+
+I kept on writing as much like Heine as I could for several years,
+though, and for a much longer time than I should have done if I had
+ever become equally impassioned of any other author.
+
+Some traces of his method lingered so long in my work that nearly ten
+years afterwards Mr. Lowell wrote me about something of mine that
+he had been reading: "You must sweat the Heine out of your bones as
+men do mercury," and his kindness for me would not be content with less
+than the entire expulsion of the poison that had in its good time saved
+my life.  I dare say it was all well enough not to have it in my bones
+after it had done its office, but it did do its office.
+
+It was in some prose sketch of mine that his keen analysis had found the
+Heine, but the foreign property had been so prevalent in my earlier work
+in verse that he kept the first contribution he accepted from me for the
+Atlantic Monthly a long time, or long enough to make sure that it was not
+a translation of Heine.  Then he printed it, and I am bound to say that
+the poem now justifies his doubt to me, in so much that I do not see why
+Heine should not have had the name of writing it if he had wanted.  His
+potent spirit became immediately so wholly my "control," as the mediums
+say, that my poems might as well have been communications from him so far
+as any authority of my own was concerned; and they were quite like other
+inspirations from the other world in being so inferior to the work of the
+spirit before it had the misfortune to be disembodied and obliged to use
+a medium.  But I do not think that either Heine or I had much lasting
+harm from it, and I am sure that the good, in my case at least, was one
+that can only end with me.  He undid my hands, which had taken so much
+pains to tie behind my back, and he forever persuaded me that though it
+may be ingenious and surprising to dance in chains, it is neither pretty
+nor useful.
+
+
+
+
+XXV.  DE QUINCEY, GOETHE, LONGFELLOW
+
+Another author who was a prime favorite with me about this time was De
+Quincey, whose books I took out of the State Library, one after another,
+until I had read them all.  We who were young people of that day thought
+his style something wonderful, and so indeed it was, especially in those
+passages, abundant everywhere in his work, relating to his own life with
+an intimacy which was always-more rather than less.  His rhetoric there,
+and in certain of his historical studies, had a sort of luminous
+richness, without losing its colloquial ease.  I keenly enjoyed this
+subtle spirit, and the play of that brilliant intelligence which lighted
+up so many ways of literature with its lambent glow or its tricksy
+glimmer, and I had a deep sympathy with certain morbid moods and
+experiences so like my own, as I was pleased to fancy.  I have not looked
+at his Twelve Caesars for twice as many years, but I should be greatly
+surprised to find it other than one of the greatest historical monographs
+ever written.  His literary criticisms seemed to me not only exquisitely
+humorous, but perfectly sane and just; and it delighted me to have him
+personally present, with the warmth of his own temperament in regions of
+cold abstraction; I am not sure that I should like that so much now.  De
+Quincey was hardly less autobiographical when he wrote of Kant, or the
+Flight of the Crim-Tartars, than when he wrote of his own boyhood or the
+miseries of the opium habit.  He had the hospitable gift of making you at
+home with him, and appealing to your sense of comradery with something of
+the flattering confidentiality of Thackeray, but with a wholly different
+effect.
+
+In fact, although De Quincey was from time to time perfunctorily Tory,
+and always a good and faithful British subject, he was so eliminated from
+his time and place by his single love for books, that one could be in his
+company through the whole vast range of his writings, and come away
+without a touch of snobbishness; and that is saying a great deal for an
+English writer.  He was a great little creature, and through his intense
+personality he achieved a sort of impersonality, so that you loved the
+man, who was forever talking-of himself, for his modesty and reticence.
+He left you feeling intimate with him but by no means familiar; with all
+his frailties, and with all those freedoms he permitted himself with the
+lives of his contemporaries, he is to me a figure of delicate dignity,
+and winning kindness.  I think it a misfortune for the present generation
+that his books have fallen into a kind of neglect, and I believe that
+they will emerge from it again to the advantage of literature.
+
+In spite of Heine and Tennyson, De Quincey had a large place in my
+affections, though this was perhaps because he was not a poet; for more
+than those two great poets there was then not much room.  I read him the
+first winter I was at Columbus, and when I went down from the village the
+next winter, to take up my legislative correspondence again, I read him
+more than ever.  But that was destined to be for me a very disheartening
+time.  I had just passed through a rheumatic fever, which left my health
+more broken than before, and one morning shortly after I was settled in
+the capital, I woke to find the room going round me like a wheel.  It was
+the beginning of a vertigo which lasted for six months, and which I began
+to fight with various devices and must yield to at last.  I tried
+medicine and exercise, but it was useless, and my father came to take my
+letters off my hands while I gave myself some ineffectual respites.
+I made a little journey to my old home in southern Ohio, but there and
+everywhere, the sure and firm-set earth waved and billowed under my feet,
+and I came back to Columbus and tried to forget in my work the fact that
+I was no better.  I did not give up trying to read, as usual, and part of
+my endeavor that winter was with Schiller, and Uhland, and even Goethe,
+whose 'Wahlverwandschaften,' hardly yielded up its mystery to me.  To
+tell the truth, I do not think that I found my account in that novel.
+It must needs be a disappointment after Wilhelm Meister, which I had read
+in English; but I dare say my disappointment was largely my own fault;
+I had certainly no right to expect such constant proofs and instances of
+wisdom in Goethe as the unwisdom of his critics had led me to hope for.
+I remember little or nothing of the story, which I tried to find very
+memorable, as I held my, sick way through it.  Longfellow's "Miles
+Standish" came out that winter, and I suspect that I got vastly more real
+pleasure from that one poem of his than I found in all my German authors
+put together, the adored Heine always excepted; though certainly I felt
+the romantic beauty of 'Uhland,' and was aware of something of Schiller's
+generous grandeur.
+
+Of the American writers Longfellow has been most a passion with me, as
+the English, and German, and Spanish, and Russian writers have been.  I
+am sure that this was largely by mere chance.  It was because I happened,
+in such a frame and at such a time, to come upon his books that I loved
+them above those of other men as great.  I am perfectly sensible that
+Lowell and Emerson outvalue many of the poets and prophets I have given
+my heart to; I have read them with delight and with a deep sense of their
+greatness, and yet they have not been my life like those other, those
+lesser, men.  But none of the passions are reasoned, and I do not try to
+account for my literary preferences or to justify them.
+
+I dragged along through several months of that winter, and did my best to
+carry out that notable scheme of not minding my vertigo.  I tried doing
+half-work, and helping my father with the correspondence, but when it
+appeared that nothing would avail, he remained in charge of it, till the
+close of the session, and I went home to try what a complete and
+prolonged rest would do for me.  I was not fit for work in the printing-
+office, but that was a simpler matter than the literary work that was
+always tempting me.  I could get away from it only by taking my gun and
+tramping day after day through the deep, primeval woods.  The fatigue was
+wholesome, and I was so bad a shot that no other creature suffered loss
+from my gain except one hapless wild pigeon.  The thawing snow left the
+fallen beechnuts of the autumn before uncovered among the dead leaves,
+and the forest was full of the beautiful birds.  In most parts of the
+middle West they are no longer seen, except in twos or threes, but once
+they were like the sands of the sea for multitude.  It was not now the
+season when they hid half the heavens with their flight day after day;
+but they were in myriads all through the woods, where their iridescent
+breasts shone like a sudden untimely growth of flowers when you came upon
+them from the front.  When they rose in fright, it was like the upward
+leap of fire, and with the roar of flame.  I use images which, after all,
+are false to the thing I wish to express; but they must serve.  I tried
+honestly enough to kill the pigeons, but I had no luck, or too much, till
+I happened to bring down one of a pair that I found apart from the rest
+in a softy tree-top.  The poor creature I had widowed followed me to the
+verge of the woods, as I started home with my prey, and I do not care to
+know more personally the feelings of a murderer than I did then.  I tried
+to shoot the bird, but my aim was so bad that I could not do her this
+mercy, and at last she flew away, and I saw her no more.
+
+The spring was now opening, and I was able to keep more and more with
+Nature, who was kinder to me than I was to her other children, or wished
+to be, and I got the better of my malady, which gradually left me for no
+more reason apparently than it came upon me.  But I was still far from
+well, and I was in despair of my future.  I began to read again--
+I suppose I had really never altogether stopped.  I borrowed from my
+friend the bookbinder a German novel, which had for me a message of
+lasting cheer.  It was the 'Afraja' of Theodore Mugge, a story of life in
+Norway during the last century, and I remember it as a very lovely story
+indeed, with honest studies of character among the Norwegians, and a
+tender pathos in the fate of the little Lap heroine Gula, who was perhaps
+sufficiently romanced.  The hero was a young Dane, who was going up among
+the fiords to seek his fortune in the northern fisheries; and by a
+process inevitable in youth I became identified with him, so that I
+adventured, and enjoyed, and suffered in his person throughout.  There
+was a supreme moment when he was sailing through the fiords, and finding
+himself apparently locked in by their mountain walls without sign or hope
+of escape, but somehow always escaping by some unimagined channel, and
+keeping on.  The lesson for him was one of trust and courage; and I, who
+seemed to be then shut in upon a mountain-walled fiord without inlet or
+outlet, took the lesson home and promised myself not to lose heart again.
+It seems a little odd that this passage of a book, by no means of the
+greatest, should have had such an effect with me at a time when I was no
+longer so young as to be unduly impressed by what I read; but it is true
+that I have never since found myself in circumstances where there seemed
+to be no getting forward or going back, without a vision of that fiord
+scenery, and then a rise of faith, that if I kept on I should, somehow,
+come out of my prisoning environment.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI.  GEORGE ELIOT, HAWTHORNE, GOETHE, HEINE
+
+I got back health enough to be of use in the printing office that autumn,
+and I was quietly at work there with no visible break in my surroundings
+when suddenly the whole world opened to me through what had seemed an
+impenetrable wall.  The Republican newspaper at the capital had been
+bought by a new management, and the editorial force reorganized upon a
+footing of what we then thought metropolitan enterprise; and to my great
+joy and astonishment I was asked to come and take a place in it.  The
+place offered me was not one of lordly distinction; in fact, it was
+partly of the character of that I had already rejected in Cincinnati,
+but I hoped that in the smaller city its duties would not be so odious;
+and by the time I came to fill it, a change had taken place in the
+arrangements so that I was given charge of the news department.  This
+included the literary notices and the book reviews, and I am afraid that
+I at once gave my prime attention to these.
+
+It was an evening paper, and I had nearly as much time for reading and
+study as I had at home.  But now society began to claim a share of this
+leisure, which I by no means begrudged it.  Society was very charming in
+Columbus then, with a pretty constant round of dances and suppers, and an
+easy cordiality, which I dare say young people still find in it
+everywhere.  I met a great many cultivated people, chiefly young ladies,
+and there were several houses where we young fellows went and came almost
+as freely as if they were our own.  There we had music and cards, and
+talk about books, and life appeared to me richly worth living; if any one
+had said this was not the best planet in the universe I should have
+called him a pessimist, or at least thought him so, for we had not the
+word in those days.  A world in which all those pretty and gracious women
+dwelt, among the figures of the waltz and the lancers, with chat between
+about the last instalment of 'The Newcomes,' was good enough world for
+me; I was only afraid it was too good.  There were, of course, some girls
+who did not read, but few openly professed indifference to literature,
+and there was much lending of books back and forth, and much debate of
+them.  That was the day when 'Adam Bede' was a new book, and in this I
+had my first knowledge of that great intellect for which I had no
+passion, indeed, but always the deepest respect, the highest honor; and
+which has from time to time profoundly influenced me by its ethics.
+
+I state these things simply and somewhat baldly; I might easily refine
+upon them, and study that subtle effect for good and for evil which young
+people are always receiving from the fiction they read; but this its not
+the time or place for the inquiry, and I only wish to own that so far as
+I understand it, the chief part of my ethical experience has been from
+novels.  The life and character I have found portrayed there have
+appealed always to the consciousness of right and wrong implanted in me;
+and from no one has this appeal been stronger than from George Eliot.
+Her influence continued through many years, and I can question it now
+only in the undue burden she seems to throw upon the individual, and her
+failure to account largely enough for motive from the social environment.
+There her work seems to me unphilosophical.
+
+It shares whatever error there is in its perspective with that of
+Hawthorne, whose 'Marble Faun' was a new book at the same time that 'Adam
+Bede' was new, and whose books now came into my life and gave it their
+tinge.  He was always dealing with the problem of evil, too, and I found
+a more potent charm in his more artistic handling of it than I found in
+George Eliot.  Of course, I then preferred the region of pure romance
+where he liked to place his action; but I did not find his instances the
+less veritable because they shone out in
+
+          "The light that never was on sea or land."
+
+I read the 'Marble Faun' first, and then the 'Scarlet Letter,' and then
+the 'House of Seven Gables,' and then the 'Blithedale Romance;' but I
+always liked best the last, which is more nearly a novel, and more
+realistic than the others.  They all moved me with a sort of effect such
+as I had not felt before.  They veers so far from time and place that,
+although most of them related to our country and epoch, I could not
+imagine anything approximate from them; and Hawthorne himself seemed a
+remote and impalpable agency, rather than a person whom one might
+actually meet, as not long afterward happened with me.  I did not hold
+the sort of fancied converse with him that I held with ether authors,
+and I cannot pretend that I had the affection for him that attracted me
+to them.  But he held me by his potent spell, and for a time he dominated
+me as completely as any author I have read.  More truly than any other
+American author he has been a passion with me, and lately I heard with a
+kind of pang a young man saying that he did not believe I should find the
+'Scarlet Letter' bear reading now.  I did not assent to the possibility,
+but the notion gave me a shiver of dismay.  I thought how much that book
+had been to me, how much all of Hawthorne's books had been, and to have
+parted with my faith in their perfection would have been something I
+would not willingly have risked doing.
+
+Of course there is always something fatally weak in the scheme of the
+pure romance, which, after the color of the contemporary mood dies out of
+it, leaves it in danger of tumbling into the dust of allegory; and
+perhaps this inherent weakness was what that bold critic felt in the
+'Scarlet Letter.'  But none of Hawthorne's fables are without a profound
+and distant reach into the recesses of nature and of being.  He came back
+from his researches with no solution of the question, with no message,
+indeed, but the awful warning, "Be true, be true," which is the burden of
+the Scarlet Letter; yet in all his books there is the hue of thoughts
+that we think only in the presence of the mysteries of life and death.
+It is not his fault that this is not intelligence, that it knots the brow
+in sorer doubt rather than shapes the lips to utterance of the things
+that can never be said.  Some of his shorter stories I have found thin
+and cold to my later reading, and I have never cared much for the 'House
+of Seven Gables,' but the other day I was reading the 'Blithedale
+Romance' again, and I found it as potent, as significant, as sadly and
+strangely true as when it first enthralled my soul.
+
+In those days when I tried to kindle my heart at the cold altar of
+Goethe, I did read a great deal of his prose and somewhat of his poetry,
+but it was to be ten years yet before I should go faithfully through with
+his Faust and come to know its power.  For the present, I read 'Wilhelm
+Meister' and the 'Wahlverwandschaften,' and worshipped him much at
+second-hand through Heine.  In the mean time I invested such Germans as
+I met with the halo of their national poetry, and there was one lady of
+whom I heard with awe that she had once known my Heine.  When I came to
+meet her, over a glass of the mild egg-nog which she served at her house
+on Sunday nights, and she told me about Heine, and how he looked, and
+some few things he said, I suffered an indescribable disappointment; and
+if I could have been frank with myself I should have owned to a fear that
+it might have been something like that, if I had myself met the poet in
+the flesh, and tried to hold the intimate converse with him that I held
+in the spirit.  But I shut my heart to all such misgivings and went on
+reading him much more than I read any other German author.  I went on
+writing him too, just as I went on reading and writing Tennyson.  Heine
+was always a personal interest with me, and every word of his made me
+long to have had him say it to me, and tell me why he said it.  In a poet
+of alien race and language and religion I found a greater sympathy than I
+have experienced with any other.  Perhaps the Jews are still the chosen
+people, but now they bear the message of humanity, while once they bore
+the message of divinity.  I knew the ugliness of Heine's nature: his
+revengefulness, and malice, and cruelty, and treachery, and uncleanness;
+and yet he was supremely charming among the poets I have read.  The
+tenderness I still feel for him is not a reasoned love, I must own; but,
+as I am always asking, when was love ever reasoned?
+
+I had a room-mate that winter in Columbus who was already a contributor
+to the Atlantic Monthly, and who read Browning as devotedly as I read
+Heine.  I will not say that he wrote him as constantly, but if that had
+been so, I should not have cared.  What I could not endure without pangs
+of secret jealousy was that he should like Heine, too, and should read
+him, though it was but an arm's-length in an English version.  He had
+found the origins of those tricks and turns of Heine's in 'Tristram
+Shandy' and the 'Sentimental Journey;' and this galled me, as if he had
+shown that some mistress of my soul had studied her graces from another
+girl, and that it was not all her own hair that she wore.  I hid my
+rancor as well as I could, and took what revenge lay in my power by
+insinuating that he might have a very different view if he read Heine in
+the original.  I also made haste to try my own fate with the Atlantic,
+and I sent off to Mr.  Lowell that poem which he kept so long in order to
+make sure that Heine had not written it, as well as authorized it.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII.  CHARLES READE
+
+This was the winter when my friend Piatt and I made our first literary
+venture together in those 'Poems of Two Friends;' which hardly passed the
+circle of our amity; and it was altogether a time of high literary
+exaltation with me.  I walked the streets of the friendly little city by
+day and by night with my head so full of rhymes and poetic phrases that
+it seemed as if their buzzing might have been heard several yards away;
+and I do not yet see quite how I contrived to keep their music out of my
+newspaper paragraphs.  Out of the newspaper I could not keep it, and from
+time to time I broke into verse in its columns, to the great amusement of
+the leading editor, who knew me for a young man with a very sharp tooth
+for such self-betrayals in others.  He wanted to print a burlesque review
+he wrote of the 'Poems of Two Friends' in our paper, but I would not
+suffer it.  I must allow that it was very, funny, and that he was always
+a generous friend, whose wounds would have been as faithful as any that
+could have been dealt me then.  He did not indeed care much for any
+poetry but that of Shakespeare and the 'Ingoldsby Legends;' and when one
+morning a State Senator came into the office with a volume of Tennyson,
+and began to read,
+
+          "The poet in a golden clime was born,
+          With golden stars above;
+          Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn
+          The love of love,"
+
+he hitched his chair about, and started in on his leader for the day.
+
+He might have been more patient if he had known that this State Senator
+was to be President Garfield.  But who could know anything of the
+tragical history that was so soon to follow that winter of 1859-60?
+Not I; at least I listened rapt by the poet and the reader, and it seemed
+to me as if the making and the reading of poetry were to go on forever,
+and that was to be all there was of it.  To be sure I had my hard little
+journalistic misgivings that it was not quite the thing for a State
+Senator to come round reading Tennyson at ten o'clock in the morning, and
+I dare say I felt myself superior in my point of view, though I could not
+resist the charm of the verse.  I myself did not bring Tennyson to the
+office at that time.  I brought Thackeray, and I remember that one day
+when I had read half an hour or so in the 'Book of Snobs,' the leading
+editor said frankly, Well, now, he guessed we had had enough of that.
+He apologized afterwards as if he were to blame, and not I, but I dare
+say I was a nuisance with my different literary passions, and must have
+made many of my acquaintances very tired of my favorite authors.  I had
+some consciousness of the fact, but I could not help it.
+
+I ought not to omit from the list of these favorites an author who was
+then beginning to have his greatest vogue, and who somehow just missed of
+being a very great one.  We were all reading his jaunty, nervy, knowing
+books, and some of us were questioning whether we ought not to set him
+above Thackeray and Dickens and George Eliot, 'tulli quanti', so great
+was the effect that Charles Reade had with our generation.  He was a man
+who stood at the parting of the ways between realism and romanticism, and
+if he had been somewhat more of a man he might have been the master of a
+great school of English realism; but, as it was, he remained content to
+use the materials of realism and produce the effect of romanticism.  He
+saw that life itself infinitely outvalued anything that could be feigned
+about it, but its richness seemed to corrupt him, and he had not the
+clear, ethical conscience which forced George Eliot to be realistic when
+probably her artistic prepossessions were romantic.
+
+As yet, however, there was no reasoning of the matter, and Charles Reade
+was writing books of tremendous adventure and exaggerated character,
+which he prided himself on deriving from the facts of the world around
+him.  He was intoxicated with the discovery he had made that the truth
+was beyond invention, but he did not know what to do with the truth in
+art after he had found it in life, and to this day the English mostly do
+not.  We young people were easily taken with his glittering error, and we
+read him with much the same fury, that he wrote.  'Never Too Late to
+Mend;' 'Love Me Little, Love Me Long;' 'Christie Johnstone;' 'Peg
+Woffington;' and then, later, 'Hard Cash,' 'The Cloister and the Hearth,'
+'Foul Play,' 'Put Yourself in His Place'--how much they all meant once,
+or seemed to mean!
+
+The first of them, and the other poems and fictions I was reading, meant
+more to me than the rumors of war that were then filling the air, and
+that so soon became its awful actualities.  To us who have our lives so
+largely in books the material world is always the fable, and the ideal
+the fact.  I walked with my feet on the ground, but my head was in the
+clouds, as light as any of them.  I neither praise nor blame this fact;
+but I feel bound to own it, for that time, and for every time in my life,
+since the witchery of literature began with me.
+
+Those two happy winters in Columbus, when I was finding opportunity and
+recognition, were the heydey of life for me.  There has been no time like
+them since, though there have been smiling and prosperous times a plenty;
+for then I was in the blossom of my youth, and what I had not I could
+hope for without unreason, for I had so much of that which I had most
+desired.  Those times passed, and there came other times, long years of
+abeyance, and waiting, and defeat, which I thought would never end, but
+they passed, too.
+
+I got my appointment of Consul to Venice, and I went home to wait for my
+passport and to spend the last days, so full of civic trouble, before I
+should set out for my post.  If I hoped to serve my country there and
+sweep the Confederate cruisers from the Adriatic, I am afraid my prime
+intent was to add to her literature and to my own credit.  I intended,
+while keeping a sleepless eye out for privateers, to write poems.
+concerning American life which should eclipse anything yet done in that
+kind, and in the mean time I read voraciously and perpetually, to make
+the days go swiftly which I should have been so glad to have linger.  In
+this month I devoured all the 'Waverley novels,' but I must have been
+devouring a great many others, for Charles Reade's 'Christie Johnstone'
+is associated with the last moment of the last days.
+
+A few months ago I was at the old home, and I read that book again,
+after not looking at it for more than thirty years; and I read it with
+amazement at its prevailing artistic vulgarity, its prevailing aesthetic
+error shot here and there with gleams of light, and of the truth that
+Reade himself was always dimly groping for.  The book is written
+throughout on the verge of realism, with divinations and conjectures
+across its border, and with lapses into the fool's paradise of
+romanticism, and an apparent content with its inanity and impossibility.
+But then it was brilliantly new and surprising; it seemed to be the last
+word that could be said for the truth in fiction; and it had a spell that
+held us like an anesthetic above the ache of parting, and the anxiety for
+the years that must pass, with all their redoubled chances, before our
+home circle could be made whole again.  I read on, and the rest listened,
+till the wheels of the old stage made themselves heard in their approach
+through the absolute silence of the village street.  Then we shut the
+book and all went down to the gate together, and parted under the pale
+sky of the October night.  There was one of the home group whom I was not
+to see again: the young brother who died in the blossom of his years
+before I returned from my far and strange sojourn.  He was too young then
+to share our reading of the novel, but when I ran up to his room to bid
+him good-by I found him awake, and, with aching hearts, we bade each
+other good-by forever!
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII.  DANTE
+
+I ran through an Italian grammar on my way across the Atlantic, and from
+my knowledge of Latin, Spanish, and French, I soon had a reading
+acquaintance with the language.  I had really wanted to go to Germany,
+that I might carry forward my studies in German literature, and I first
+applied for the consulate at Munich.  The powers at Washington thought it
+quite the same thing to offer me Rome; but I found that the income of the
+Roman consulate would not give me a living, and I was forced to decline
+it.  Then the President's private secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr.
+John Hay, who did not know me except as a young Westerner who had written
+poems in the Atlantic Monthly, asked me how I would like Venice, and
+promised that they would have the salary put up to a thousand a year,
+under the new law to embarrass privateers.  It was really put up to
+fifteen hundred, and with this income assured me I went out to the city
+whose influence changed the whole course of my literary life.
+
+No privateers ever came, though I once had notice from Turin that the
+Florida had been sighted off Ancona; and I had nearly four years of
+nearly uninterrupted leisure at Venice, which I meant to employ in
+reading all Italian literature, and writing a history of the republic.
+The history, of course, I expected would be a long affair, and I did not
+quite suppose that I could despatch the literature in any short time;
+besides, I had several considerable poems on hand that occupied me a good
+deal, and worked at these as well as advanced myself in Italian,
+preparatory to the efforts before me.
+
+I had already a slight general notion of Italian letters from Leigh Hunt,
+and from other agreeable English Italianates; and I knew that I wanted to
+read not only the four great poets, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso,
+but that whole group of burlesque poets, Pulci, Berni, and the rest, who,
+from what I knew of them, I thought would be even more to my mind.  As a
+matter of fact, and in the process of time, I did read somewhat of all
+these, but rather in the minor than the major way; and I soon went off
+from them to the study of the modern poets, novelists, and playwrights
+who interested me so much more.  After my wonted fashion I read half a
+dozen of these authors together, so that it would be hard to say which I
+began with, but I had really a devotion to Dante, though not at that
+time, or ever for the whole of Dante.  During my first year in Venice I
+met an ingenious priest, who had been a tutor in a patrician family, and
+who was willing to lead my faltering steps through the "Inferno."  This
+part of the "Divine Comedy" I read with a beginner's carefulness, and
+with a rapture in its beauties, which I will whisper the reader do not
+appear in every line.
+
+Again I say it is a great pity that criticism is not honest about the
+masterpieces of literature, and does not confess that they are not every
+moment masterly, that they are often dull and tough and dry, as is
+certainly the case with Dante's.  Some day, perhaps, we shall have this
+way of treating literature, and then the lover of it will not feel
+obliged to browbeat himself into the belief that if he is not always
+enjoying himself it is his own fault.  At any rate I will permit myself
+the luxury of frankly saying that while I had a deep sense of the majesty
+and grandeur of Dante's design, many points of its execution bored me,
+and that I found the intermixture of small local fact and neighborhood
+history in the fabric of his lofty creation no part of its noblest
+effect.  What is marvellous in it is its expression of Dante's
+personality, and I can never think that his personalities enhance its
+greatness as a work of art.  I enjoyed them, however, and I enjoyed them
+the more, as the innumerable perspectives of Italian history began to
+open all about me.  Then, indeed, I understood the origins if I did not
+understand the aims of Dante, which there is still much dispute about
+among those who profess to know them clearly.  What I finally perceived
+was that his poem came through him from the heart of Italian life, such
+as it was in his time, and that whatever it teaches, his poem expresses
+that life, in all its splendor and squalor, its beauty and deformity, its
+love and its hate.
+
+Criticism may torment this sense or that sense out of it, but at the end
+of the ends the " Divine Comedy " will stand for the patriotism of
+medieval Italy, as far as its ethics is concerned, and for a profound and
+lofty ideal of beauty, as far as its aesthetics is concerned.  This is
+vague enough and slight enough, I must confess, but I must confess also
+that I had not even a conception of so much when I first read the
+"Inferno."  I went at it very simply, and my enjoyment of it was that
+sort which finds its account in the fine passages, the brilliant
+episodes, the striking pictures.  This was the effect with me of all the
+criticism which I had hitherto read, and I am not sure yet that the
+criticism which tries to be of a larger scope, and to see things "whole,"
+is of any definite effect.  As a matter of fact we see nothing whole,
+neither life nor art.  We are so made, in soul and in sense, that we can
+deal only with parts, with points, with degrees; and the endeavor to
+compass any entirety must involve a discomfort and a danger very
+threatening to our intellectual integrity.
+
+Or if this postulate is as untenable as all the others, still I am very
+glad that I did not then lose any fact of the majesty, and beauty, and
+pathos of the great certain measures for the sake of that fourth
+dimension of the poem which is not yet made palpable or visible.  I took
+my sad heart's fill of the sad story of "Paolo and Francesca," which I
+already knew in Leigh Hunt's adorable dilution, and most of the lines
+read themselves into my memory, where they linger yet.  I supped on the
+horrors of Ugolino's fate with the strong gust of youth, which finds
+every, exercise of sympathy a pleasure.  My good priest sat beside me in
+these rich moments, knotting in his lap the calico handkerchief of the
+snuff-taker, and entering with tremulous eagerness into my joy in things
+that he had often before enjoyed.  No doubt he had an inexhaustible
+pleasure in them apart from mine, for I have found my pleasure in them
+perennial, and have not failed to taste it as often as I have read or
+repeated any of the great passages of the poem to myself.  This pleasure
+came often from some vital phrase, or merely the inspired music of a
+phrase quite apart from its meaning.  I did not get then, and I have not
+got since, a distinct conception of the journey through Hell, and as
+often as I have tried to understand the topography of the poem I have
+fatigued myself to no purpose, but I do not think the essential meaning
+was lost upon me.
+
+I dare say my priest had his notion of the general shape and purport,
+the gross material body of the thing, but he did not trouble me with it,
+while we sat tranced together in the presence of its soul.  He seemed,
+at times, so lost in the beatific vision, that he forgot my stumblings in
+the philological darkness, till I appealed to him for help.  Then he
+would read aloud with that magnificent rhythm the Italians have in
+reading their verse, and the obscured meaning would seem to shine out of
+the mere music of the poem, like the color the blind feel in sound.
+
+I do not know what has become of him, but if he is like the rest of the
+strange group of my guides, philosophers, and friends in literature--the
+printer, the organ-builder, the machinist, the drug-clerk, and the
+bookbinder--I am afraid he is dead.  In fact, I who was then I, might be
+said to be dead too, so little is my past self like my present self in
+anything but the "increasing purpose" which has kept me one in my love of
+literature.  He was a gentle and kindly man, with a life and a longing,
+quite apart from his vocation, which were never lived or fulfilled.
+I did not see him after he ceased to read Dante with me, and in fact I
+was instructed by the suspicions of my Italian friends to be careful how
+I consorted with a priest, who might very well be an Austrian spy.
+I parted with him for no such picturesque reason, for I never believed
+him other than the truest and faithfulest of friends, but because I was
+then giving myself more entirely to work in which he could not help me.
+
+Naturally enough this was a long poem in the terza rima of the "Divina
+Commedia," and dealing with a story of our civil war in a fashion so
+remote that no editor would print it.  This was the first fruits and the
+last of my reading of Dante, in verse, and it was not so like Dante as I
+would have liked to make it; but Dante is not easy to imitate; he is too
+unconscious, and too single, too bent upon saying the thing that is in
+him, with whatever beauty inheres in it, to put on the graces that others
+may catch.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX.  GOLDONI, MANZONI, D'AZEGLIO
+
+However, this poem only shared the fate of nearly, all the others that I
+wrote at this time; they came back to me with unfailing regularity from
+all the magazine editors of the English-speaking world; I had no success
+with any of them till I sent Mr. Lowell a paper on recent Italian comedy
+for the North American Review, which he and Professor Norton had then
+begun to edit.  I was in the mean time printing the material of Venetian
+Life and the Italian Journeys in a Boston newspaper after its rejection
+by the magazines; and my literary life, almost without my willing it, had
+taken the course of critical observance of books and men in their
+actuality.
+
+That is to say, I was studying manners, in the elder sense of the word,
+wherever I could get at them in the frank life of the people about me,
+and in such literature of Italy as was then modern.  In this pursuit I
+made a discovery that greatly interested me, and that specialized my
+inquiries.  I found that the Italians had no novels which treated of
+their contemporary life; that they had no modern fiction but the
+historical romance.  I found that if I wished to know their life from
+their literature I must go to their drama, which was even then
+endeavoring to give their, stage a faithful picture of their
+civilization.  There was even then in the new circumstance of a people
+just liberated from every variety of intellectual repression and
+political oppression, a group of dramatic authors, whose plays were not
+only delightful to see but delightful to read, working in the good
+tradition of one of the greatest realists who has ever lived, and
+producing a drama of vital strength and charm.  One of them, whom I by no
+means thought the best, has given us a play, known to all the world,
+which I am almost ready to think with Zola is the greatest play of modern
+times; or if it is not so, I should be puzzled to name the modern drama
+that surpasses "La Morte Civile" of Paolo Giacometti.  I learned to know
+all the dramatists pretty well, in the whole range of their work, on the
+stage and in the closet, and I learned to know still better, and to love
+supremely, the fine, amiable genius whom, as one of them said, they did
+not so much imitate as learn from to imitate nature.
+
+This was Carlo Goldoni, one of the first of the realists, but antedating
+conscious realism so long as to have been born at Venice early in the
+eighteenth century, and to have come to his hand-to-hand fight with the
+romanticism of his day almost before that century had reached its noon.
+In the early sixties of our own century I was no more conscious of his
+realism than he was himself a hundred years before; but I had eyes in my
+head, and I saw that what he had seen in Venice so long before was so
+true that it was the very life of Venice in my own day; and because I
+have loved the truth in art above all other things, I fell instantly and
+lastingly in love with Carlo Goldoni.  I was reading his memoirs, and
+learning to know his sweet, honest, simple nature while I was learning to
+know his work, and I wish that every one who reads his plays would read
+his life as well; one must know him before one can fully know them.  I
+believe, in fact, that his autobiography came into my hands first.  But,
+at any rate, both are associated with the fervors and languors of that
+first summer in Venice, so that I cannot now take up a book of Goldoni's
+without a renewed sense of that sunlight and moonlight, and of the sounds
+and silences of a city that is at once the stillest and shrillest in the
+world.
+
+Perhaps because I never found his work of great ethical or aesthetical
+proportions, but recognized that it pretended to be good only within its
+strict limitations, I recur to it now without that painful feeling of a
+diminished grandeur in it, which attends us so often when we go back to
+something that once greatly pleased us.  It seemed to me at the time that
+I must have read all his comedies in Venice, but I kept reading new ones
+after I came home, and still I can take a volume of his from the shelf,
+and when thirty years are past, find a play or two that I missed before.
+Their number is very great, but perhaps those that I fancy I have not
+read, I have really read once or more and forgotten.  That might very
+easily be, for there is seldom anything more poignant in any one of them
+than there is in the average course of things.  The plays are light and
+amusing transcripts from life, for the most part, and where at times they
+deepen into powerful situations, or express strong emotions, they do so
+with persons so little different from the average of our acquaintance
+that we do not remember just who the persons are.
+
+There is no doubt but the kindly playwright had his conscience, and meant
+to make people think as well as laugh.  I know of none of his plays that
+is of wrong effect, or that violates the instincts of purity, or insults
+common sense with the romantic pretence that wrong will be right if you
+will only paint it rose-color.  He is at some obvious pains to "punish
+vice and reward virtue," but I do not mean that easy morality when I
+praise his; I mean the more difficult sort that recognizes in each man's
+soul the arbiter not of his fate surely, but surely of his peace.  He
+never makes a fool of the spectator by feigning that passion is a reason
+or justification, or that suffering of one kind can atone for wrong of
+another.  That was left for the romanticists of our own century to
+discover; even the romanticists whom Goldoni drove from the stage, were
+of that simpler eighteenth-century sort who had not yet liberated the
+individual from society, but held him accountable in the old way.  As for
+Goldoni himself, he apparently never dreams of transgression; he is of
+rather an explicit conventionality in most things, and he deals with
+society as something finally settled.  How artfully he deals with it,
+how decently, how wholesomely, those who know ,Venetian society of the
+eighteenth century historically, will perceive when they recall the
+adequate impression he gives of it without offence in character or
+language or situation.  This is the perpetual miracle of his comedy,
+that it says so much to experience and worldly wisdom, and so little to
+inexperience and worldly innocence.  No doubt the Serenest Republic was
+very strict with the theatre, and suffered it to hold the mirror up to
+nature only when nature was behaving well, or at least behaving as if
+young people were present.  Yet the Italians are rather plain-spoken, and
+they recognize facts which our company manners at least do not admit the
+existence of.  I should say that Goldoni was almost English, almost
+American, indeed, in his observance of the proprieties, and I like this
+in him; though the proprieties are not virtues, they are very good
+things, and at least are better than the improprieties.
+
+This, however, I must own, had not a great deal to do with my liking him
+so much, and I should be puzzled to account for my passion, as much in
+his case as in most others.  If there was any reason for it, perhaps it
+was that he had the power of taking me out of my life, and putting me
+into the lives of others, whom I felt to be human beings as much as
+myself.  To make one live in others, this is the highest effect of
+religion as well as of art, and possibly it will be the highest bliss we
+shall ever know.  I do not pretend that my translation was through my
+unselfishness; it was distinctly through that selfishness which perceives
+that self is misery; and I may as well confess here that I do not regard
+the artistic ecstasy as in any sort noble.  It is not noble to love the
+beautiful, or to live for it, or by it; and it may even not be refining.
+I would not have any reader of mine, looking forward to some aesthetic
+career, suppose that this love is any merit in itself; it may be the
+grossest egotism.  If you cannot look beyond the end you aim at, and seek
+the good which is not your own, all your sacrifice is to yourself and not
+of yourself, and you might as well be going into business.  In itself and
+for itself it is no more honorable to win fame than to make money, and
+the wish to do the one is no more elevating than the wish to do the
+other.
+
+But in the days I write of I had no conception of this, and I am sure
+that my blindness to so plain a fact kept me even from seeking and
+knowing the highest beauty in the things I worshipped.  I believe that if
+I had been sensible of it I should hays read much more of such humane
+Italian poets and novelists as Manzoni and D'Azeglio, whom I perceived to
+be delightful, without dreaming of them in the length and breadth of
+their goodness.  Now and then its extent flashed upon me, but the glimpse
+was lost to my retroverted vision almost as soon as won.  It is only in
+thinking back to there that I can realize how much they might always have
+meant to me.  They were both living in my time in Italy, and they were
+two men whom I should now like very much to have seen, if I could have
+done so without that futility which seems to attend every effort to pay
+one's duty to such men.
+
+The love of country in all the Italian poets and romancers of the long
+period of the national resurrection ennobled their art in a measure which
+criticism has not yet taken account of.  I conceived of its effect then,
+but I conceived of it as a misfortune, a fatality; now I am by no means
+sure that it was so; hereafter the creation of beauty, as we call it, for
+beauty's sake, may be considered something monstrous.  There is forever a
+poignant meaning in life beyond what mere living involves, and why should
+not there be this reference in art to the ends beyond art?
+The situation, the long patience, the hope against hope, dignified and
+beautified the nature of the Italian writers of that day, and evoked from
+them a quality which I was too little trained in their school to
+appreciate.  But in a sort I did feel it, I did know it in them all, so
+far as I knew any of them, and in the tragedies of Manzoni, and in the
+romances of D'Azeglio, and yet more in the simple and modest records of
+D'Azeglio's life published after his death, I profited by it, and
+unconsciously prepared myself for that point of view whence all the arts
+appear one with all the uses, and there is nothing beautiful that is
+false.
+
+I am very glad of that experience of Italian literature, which I look
+back upon as altogether wholesome and sanative, after my excesses of
+Heine.  No doubt it was all a minor affair as compared with equal
+knowledge of French literature, and so far it was a loss of time.  It is
+idle to dispute the general positions of criticism, and there is no
+useful gainsaying its judgment that French literature is a major
+literature and Italian a minor literature in this century; but whether
+this verdict will stand for all time, there may be a reasonable doubt.
+Criterions may change, and hereafter people may look at the whole affair
+so differently that a literature which went to the making of a people
+will not be accounted a minor literature, but will take its place with
+the great literary movements.
+
+I do not insist upon this possibility, and I am far from defending myself
+for liking the comedies of Goldoni better than the comedies of Moliere,
+upon purely aesthetic grounds, where there is no question as to the
+artistic quality.  Perhaps it is because I came to Moliere's comedies
+later, and with my taste formed for those of Goldoni; but again, it is
+here a matter of affection; I find Goldoni for me more sympathetic, and
+because he is more sympathetic I cannot do otherwise than find him more
+natural, more true.  I will allow that this is vulnerable, and as I say,
+I do not defend it.  Moliere has a place in literature infinitely loftier
+than Goldoni's; and he has supplied types, characters, phrases, to the
+currency of thought, and Goldoni has supplied none.  It is, therefore,
+without reason which I can allege that I enjoy Goldoni more.  I am
+perfectly willing to be rated low for my preference, and yet I think that
+if it had been Goldoni's luck to have had the great age of a mighty
+monarchy for his scene, instead of the decline of an outworn republic,
+his place in literature might have been different.
+
+
+
+
+XXX.  "PASTOR FIDO," "AMINTA," "ROMOLA," "YEAST," "PAUL FERROLL"
+
+I have always had a great love for the absolutely unreal, the purely
+fanciful in all the arts, as well as of the absolutely real; I like the
+one on a far lower plane than the other, but it delights me, as a
+pantomime at a theatre does, or a comic opera, which has its being wholly
+outside the realm of the probabilities.  When I once transport myself to
+this sphere I have no longer any care for them, and if I could I would
+not exact of them an allegiance which has no concern with them.  For this
+reason I have always vastly enjoyed the artificialities of pastoral
+poetry; and in Venice I read with a pleasure few serious poems have given
+me the "Pastor Fido" of Guarini.  I came later but not with fainter zest
+to the "Aminta" of Tasso, without which, perhaps, the "Pastor Fido" would
+not have been, and I revelled in the pretty impossibilities of both these
+charming effects of the liberated imagination.
+
+I do not the least condemn that sort of thing; one does not live by
+sweets, unless one is willing to spoil one's digestion; but one may now
+and then indulge one's self without harm, and a sugar-plum or two after
+dinner may even be of advantage.  What I object to is the romantic thing
+which asks to be accepted with all its fantasticality on the ground of
+reality; that seems to me hopelessly bad.  But I have been able to dwell
+in their charming out-land or no-land with the shepherds and
+shepherdesses and nymphs, satyrs, and fauns, of Tasso and Guarini, and I
+take the finest pleasure in their company, their Dresden china loves and
+sorrows, their airy raptures, their painless throes, their polite
+anguish, their tears not the least salt, but flowing as sweet as the
+purling streams of their enamelled meadows.  I wish there were more of
+that sort of writing; I should like very much to read it.
+
+The greater part of my reading in Venice, when I began to find that I
+could not help writing about the place, was in books relating to its life
+and history, which I made use of rather than found pleasure in.  My
+studies in Italian literature were full of the most charming interest,
+and if I had to read a good many books for conscience' sake, there were a
+good many others I read for their own sake.  They were chiefly poetry;
+and after the first essays in which I tasted the classic poets, they were
+chiefly the books of the modern poets.
+
+For the present I went no farther in German literature, and I recurred to
+it in later years only for deeper and fuller knowledge of Heine; my
+Spanish was ignored, as all first loves are when one has reached the age
+of twenty-six.  My English reading was almost wholly in the Tauchnitz
+editions, for otherwise English books were not easily come at then and
+there.  George Eliot's 'Romola' was then new, and I read it again and
+again with the sense of moral enlargement which the first fiction to
+conceive of the true nature of evil gave all of us who were young in that
+day.  Tito Malema was not only a lesson, he was a revelation, and I
+trembled before him as in the presence of a warning and a message from
+the only veritable perdition.  His life, in which so much that was good
+was mixed, with so much that was bad, lighted up the whole domain of
+egotism with its glare, and made one feel how near the best and the worst
+were to each other, and how they sometimes touched without absolute
+division in texture and color.  The book was undoubtedly a favorite of
+mine, and I did not see then the artistic falterings in it which were
+afterwards evident to me.
+
+There were not Romolas to read all the time, though, and I had to devolve
+upon inferior authors for my fiction the greater part of the time.  Of
+course, I kept up with 'Our Mutual Friend,' which Dickens was then
+writing, and with 'Philip,' which was to be the last of Thackeray.  I was
+not yet sufficiently instructed to appreciate Trollope, and I did not
+read him at all.
+
+I got hold of Kingsley, and read 'Yeast,' and I think some other novels
+of his, with great relish, and without sensibility to his Charles
+Readeish lapses from his art into the material of his art.  But of all
+the minor fiction that I read at this time none impressed me so much as
+three books which had then already had their vogue, and which I knew
+somewhat from reviews.  They were Paul Ferroll, 'Why Paul Ferroll Killed
+His Wife,' and 'Day after Day.'  The first two were, of course, related
+to each other, and they were all three full of unwholesome force.  As to
+their aesthetic merit I will not say anything, for I have not looked at
+either of the books for thirty years.  I fancy, however, that their
+strength was rather of the tetanic than the titanic sort.  They made your
+sympathies go with the hero, who deliberately puts his wife to death for
+the lie she told to break off his marriage with the woman he had loved,
+and who then marries this tender and gentle girl, and lives in great
+happiness with her till her death.  Murder in the first degree is
+flattered by his fate up to the point of letting him die peacefully in
+Boston after these dealings of his in England; and altogether his story
+could not be commended to people with a morbid taste for bloodshed.
+Naturally enough the books were written by a perfectly good woman, the
+wife of an English clergyman, whose friends were greatly scandalized by
+them.  As a sort of atonement she wrote 'Day after Day,' the story of a
+dismal and joyless orphan, who dies to the sound of angelic music, faint
+and farheard, filling the whole chamber.  A carefuller study of the
+phenomenon reveals the fact that the seraphic strains are produced by the
+steam escaping from the hot-water bottles at the feet of the invalid.
+
+As usual, I am not able fully to account for my liking of these books,
+and I am so far from wishing to justify it that I think I ought rather to
+excuse it.  But since I was really greatly fascinated with them, and read
+them with an evergrowing fascination, the only honest thing to do is to
+own my subjection to them.  It would be an interesting and important
+question for criticism to study, that question why certain books at a.
+certain time greatly dominate our fancy, and others manifestly better
+have no influence with us.  A curious proof of the subtlety of these Paul
+Ferroll books in the appeal they made to the imagination is the fact that
+I came to them fresh from 'Romolo,' and full of horror for myself in
+Tito; yet I sympathized throughout with Paul Ferroll, and was glad when
+he got away.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI.  ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN, BJORSTJERNE BJORNSON
+
+On my return to America, my literary life immediately took such form that
+most of my reading was done for review.  I wrote at first a good many of
+the lighter criticisms in 'The Nation', at New York, and after I went to
+Boston to become the assistant editor of the 'Atlantic Monthly' I wrote
+the literary notices in that periodical for four or five years.
+
+It was only when I came into full charge of the magazine that I began to
+share these labors with others, and I continued them in some measure as
+long as I had any relation to it.  My reading for reading's sake, as I
+had hitherto done it, was at an end, and I read primarily for the sake of
+writing about the book in hand, and secondarily for the pleasure it might
+give me.  This was always considerable, and sometimes so great that I
+forgot the critic in it, and read on and on for pleasure.  I was master
+to review this book or that as I chose, and generally I reviewed only
+books I liked to read, though sometimes I felt that I ought to do a book,
+and did it from a sense of duty; these perfunctory criticisms I do not
+think were very useful, but I tried to make them honest.
+
+In a long sickness, which I had shortly after I went to live in
+Cambridge, a friend brought me several of the stories of Erckmann-
+Chatrian, whom people were then reading much more than they are now, I
+believe; and I had a great joy in them, which I have renewed since as
+often as I have read one of their books.  They have much the same quality
+of simple and sincerely moralized realism that I found afterwards in the
+work of the early Swiss realist, Jeremias Gotthelf, and very likely it
+was this that captivated my judgment.  As for my affections, battered and
+exhausted as they ought to have been in many literary passions, they
+never went out with fresher enjoyment than they did to the charming story
+of 'L'Ami Fritz,' which, when I merely name it, breathes the spring sun
+and air about me, and fills my senses with the beauty and sweetness of
+cherry blossoms.  It is one of the loveliest and kindest books that ever
+was written, and my heart belongs to it still; to be sure it belongs to
+several hundreds of other books in equal entirety.
+
+It belongs to all the books of the great Norwegian Bjorstjerne Bjornson,
+whose 'Arne,' and whose 'Happy Boy,' and whose 'Fisher Maiden' I read in
+this same fortunate sickness.  I have since read every other book of his
+that I could lay hands on: 'Sinnove Solbakken,' and 'Magnhild,' and
+'Captain Manzanca,' and 'Dust,' and 'In God's Ways,' and 'Sigurd,' and
+plays like "The Glove" and "The Bankrupt."  He has never, as some authors
+have, dwindled in my sense; when I open his page, there I find him as
+large, and free, and bold as ever.  He is a great talent, a clear
+conscience, a beautiful art.  He has my love not only because he is a
+poet of the most exquisite verity, but because he is a lover of men,
+with a faith in them such as can move mountains of ignorance,
+and dulness, and greed.  He is next to Tolstoy in his willingness to give
+himself for his kind; if he would rather give himself in fighting than in
+suffering wrong, I do not know that his self-sacrifice is less in degree.
+
+I confess, however, that I do not think of him as a patriot and a
+socialist when I read him; he is then purely a poet, whose gift holds me
+rapt above the world where I have left my troublesome and wearisome self
+for the time.  I do not know of any novels that a young endeavorer in
+fiction could more profitably read than his for their large and simple
+method, their trust of the reader's intelligence, their sympathy with
+life.  With him the problems are all soluble by the enlightened and
+regenerate will; there is no baffling Fate, but a helping God.  In
+Bjornson there is nothing of Ibsen's scornful despair, nothing of his
+anarchistic contempt, but his art is full of the warmth and color of a
+poetic soul, with no touch of the icy cynicism which freezes you in the
+other.  I have felt the cold fascination of Ibsen, too, and I should be
+far from denying his mighty mastery, but he has never possessed me with
+the delight that Bjornson has.
+
+In those days I read not only all the new books, but I made many forays
+into the past, and came back now and then with rich spoil, though I
+confess that for the most part I had my trouble for my pains; and I wish
+now that I had given the time I spent on the English classics to
+contemporary literature, which I have not the least hesitation in saying
+I like vastly better.  In fact, I believe that the preference for the
+literature of the past, except in the case of the greatest masters, is
+mainly the affectation of people who cannot otherwise distinguish
+themselves from the herd, and who wish very much to do so.
+
+There is much to be learned from the minor novelists and poets of the
+past about people's ways of thinking and feeling, but not much that the
+masters do not give you in better quality and fuller measure; and I
+should say, Read the old masters and let their schools go, rather than
+neglect any possible master of your own time.  Above all, I would not
+have any one read an old author merely that he might not be ignorant of
+him; that is most beggarly, and no good can come of it.  When literature
+becomes a duty it ceases to be a passion, and all the schoolmastering in
+the world, solemnly addressed to the conscience, cannot make the fact
+otherwise.  It is well to read for the sake of knowing a certain ground
+if you are to make use of your knowledge in a certain way, but it would
+be a mistake to suppose that this is a love of literature.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII.  TOURGUENIEF, AUERBACH
+
+In those years at Cambridge my most notable literary experience without
+doubt was the knowledge of Tourguenief's novels, which began to be
+recognized in all their greatness about the middle seventies.  I think
+they made their way with such of our public as were able to appreciate
+them before they were accepted in England; but that does not matter.  It
+is enough for the present purpose that 'Smoke,' and 'Lisa,' and 'On the
+Eve,' and 'Dimitri Roudine,' and 'Spring Floods,' passed one after
+another through my hands, and that I formed for their author one of the
+profoundest literary passions of my life.
+
+I now think that there is a finer and truer method than his, but in its
+way, Tourguenief's method is as far as art can go.  That is to say, his
+fiction is to the last degree dramatic.  The persons are sparely
+described, and briefly accounted for, and then they are left to transact
+their affair, whatever it is, with the least possible comment or
+explanation from the author.  The effect flows naturally from their
+characters, and when they have done or said a thing you conjecture why as
+unerringly as you would if they were people whom you knew outside of a
+book.  I had already conceived of the possibility of this from Bjornson,
+who practises the same method, but I was still too sunken in the gross
+darkness of English fiction to rise to a full consciousness of its
+excellence.  When I remembered the deliberate and impertinent moralizing
+of Thackeray, the clumsy exegesis of George Eliot, the knowing nods and
+winks of Charles Reade, the stage-carpentering and limelighting of
+Dickens, even the fine and important analysis of Hawthorne, it was with a
+joyful astonishment that I realized the great art of Tourguenief.
+
+Here was a master who was apparently not trying to work out a plot, who
+was not even trying to work out a character, but was standing aside from
+the whole affair, and letting the characters work the plot out.  The
+method was revealed perfectly in 'Smoke,' but each successive book of his
+that I read was a fresh proof of its truth, a revelation of its
+transcendent superiority.  I think now that I exaggerated its value
+somewhat; but this was inevitable in the first surprise.  The sane
+aesthetics of the first Russian author I read, however, have seemed more
+and more an essential part of the sane ethics of all the Russians I have
+read.  It was not only that Tourguenief had painted life truly, but that
+he had painted it conscientiously.
+
+Tourguenief was of that great race which has more than any other fully
+and freely uttered human nature, without either false pride or false
+shame in its nakedness.  His themes were oftenest those of the French
+novelist, but how far he was from handling them in the French manner and
+with the French spirit!  In his hands sin suffered no dramatic
+punishment; it did not always show itself as unhappiness, in the personal
+sense, but it was always unrest, and without the hope of peace.  If the
+end did not appear, the fact that it must be miserable always appeared.
+Life showed itself to me in different colors after I had once read
+Tourguenief ; it became more serious, more awful, and with mystical
+responsibilities I had not known before.  My gay American horizons were
+bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful.
+At the same time nature revealed herself to me through him with an
+intimacy she had not hitherto shown me.  There are passages in this
+wonderful writer alive with a truth that seems drawn from the reader's
+own knowledge; who else but Tourguenief and one's own most secret self
+ever felt all the rich, sad meaning of the night air drawing in at the
+open window, of the fires burning in the darkness on the distant fields?
+I try in vain to give some notion of the subtle sympathy with nature
+which scarcely put itself into words with him.  As for the people of his
+fiction, though they were of orders and civilizations so remote from my
+experience, they were of the eternal human types whose origin and
+potentialities every one may find in his own heart, and I felt their
+verity in every touch.
+
+I cannot describe the satisfaction his work gave me; I can only impart
+some sense of it, perhaps, by saying that it was like a happiness I had
+been waiting for all my life, and now that it had come, I was richly
+content forever.  I do not mean to say that the art of Tourguenief
+surpasses the art of Bjornson; I think Bjornson is quite as fine and
+true.  But the Norwegian deals with simple and primitive circumstances
+for the most part, and always with a small world; and the Russian has to
+do with human nature inside of its conventional shells, and his scene is
+often as large as Europe.  Even when it is as remote as Norway, it is
+still related to the great capitals by the history if not the actuality
+of the characters.  Most of Tourguenief's books I have read many times
+over, all of them I have read more than twice.  For a number of years I
+read them again and again without much caring for other fiction.  It was
+only the other day that I read Smoke through once more, with no
+diminished sense of its truth, but with somewhat less than my first
+satisfaction in its art.  Perhaps this was because I had reached the
+point through my acquaintance with Tolstoy where I was impatient even of
+the artifice that hid itself.  In 'Smoke' I was now aware of an artifice
+that kept out of sight, but was still always present somewhere, invisibly
+operating the story.
+
+I must not fail to own the great pleasure that I have had in some of the
+stories of Auerbach.  It is true that I have never cared greatly for 'On
+the Heights,' which in its dealing with royalties seems too far aloof
+from the ordinary human life, and which on the moral side finally fades
+out into a German mistiness.  But I speak of it with the imperfect
+knowledge of one who was never able to read it quite through, and I have
+really no right to speak of it.  The book of his that pleased me most was
+'Edelweiss,' which, though the story was somewhat too catastrophical,
+seemed to me admirably good and true.  I still think it very delicately
+done, and with a deep insight; but there is something in all Auerbach's
+work which in the retrospect affects me as if it dealt with pigmies.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII.  CERTAIN PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES
+
+I have always loved history, whether in the annals of peoples or in the
+lives of persons, and I have at all times read it.  I am not sure but I
+rather prefer it to fiction, though I am aware that in looking back over
+this record of my literary passions I must seem to have cared for very
+little besides fiction.  I read at the time I have just been speaking of,
+nearly all the new poetry as it came out, and I constantly recurred to it
+in its mossier sources, where it sprang from the green English ground, or
+trickled from the antique urns of Italy.
+
+I do not think that I have ever cared much for metaphysics, or to read
+much in that way, but from time to time I have done something of it.
+
+Travels, of course, I have read as part of the great human story, and
+autobiography has at times appeared to me the most delightful reading in
+the world; I have a taste in it that rejects nothing, though I have never
+enjoyed any autobiographies so much as those of such Italians as have
+reasoned of themselves.
+
+I suppose I have not been a great reader of the drama, and I do not know
+that I have ever greatly relished any plays but those of Shakespeare and
+Goldoni, and two or three of Beaumont and Fletcher, and one or so of
+Marlow's, and all of Ibsen's and Maeterlinck's.  The taste for the old
+English dramatists I believe I have never formed.
+
+Criticism, ever since I filled myself so full of it in my boyhood, I have
+not cared for, and often I have found it repulsive.
+
+I have a fondness for books of popular science, perhaps because they too
+are part of the human story.
+
+I have read somewhat of the theology of the Swedenborgian faith I was
+brought up in, but I have not read other theological works; and I do not
+apologize for not liking any.  The Bible itself was not much known to me
+at an age when most children have been obliged to read it several times
+over; the gospels were indeed familiar, and they have always been to me
+the supreme human story; but the rest of the New Testament I had not read
+when a man grown, and only passages of the Old Testament, like the story
+of the Creation, and the story of Joseph, and the poems of Job and
+Ecclesiastes, with occasional Psalms.  I therefore came to the Scriptures
+with a sense at once fresh and mature, and I can never be too glad that I
+learned to see them under the vaster horizon and in the truer
+perspectives of experience.
+
+Again as lights on the human story I have liked to read such books of
+medicine as have fallen in my way, and I seldom take up a medical
+periodical without reading of all the cases it describes, and in fact
+every article in it.
+
+But I did not mean to make even this slight departure from the main
+business of these papers, which is to confide my literary passions to the
+reader; he probably has had a great many of his own.  I think I may class
+the "Ring and the Book" among them, though I have never been otherwise a
+devotee of Browning.  But I was still newly home from Italy, or away from
+home, when that poem appeared, and whether or not it was because it took
+me so with the old enchantment of that land, I gave my heart promptly to
+it.  Of course, there are terrible longueurs in it, and you do get tired
+of the same story told over and over from the different points of view,
+and yet it is such a great story, and unfolded with such a magnificent
+breadth and noble fulness, that one who blames it lightly blames himself
+heavily.  There are certain books of it--"Caponsacchi's story,"
+"Pompilia's story," and "Count Guido's story"--that I think ought to rank
+with the greatest poetry ever written, and that have a direct, dramatic
+expression of the fact and character, which is without rival.  There is a
+noble and lofty pathos in the close of Caponsacchi's statement, an
+artless and manly break from his self-control throughout, that seems to
+me the last possible effect in its kind; and Pompilia's story holds all
+of womanhood in it, the purity, the passion, the tenderness, the
+helplessness.  But if I begin to praise this or any of the things I have
+liked, I do not know when I should stop.  Yes, as I think it over, the
+"Ring and the Book " appears to me one of the great few poems whose
+splendor can never suffer lasting eclipse, however it may have presently
+fallen into abeyance.  If it had impossibly come down to us from some
+elder time, or had not been so perfectly modern in its recognition of
+feeling and motives ignored by the less conscious poetry of the past, it
+might be ranked with the great epics.
+
+Of other modern poets I have read some things of William Morris, like the
+"Life and Death of Jason," the "Story of Gudrun," and the "Trial of
+Guinevere," with a pleasure little less than passionate, and I have
+equally liked certain pieces of Dante Rossetti.  I have had a high joy in
+some of the great minor poems of Emerson, where the goddess moves over
+Concord meadows with a gait that is Greek, and her sandalled tread
+expresses a high scorn of the india-rubber boots that the American muse
+so often gets about in.
+
+The "Commemoration Ode" of Lowell has also been a source from which I
+drank something of the divine ecstasy of the poet's own exalted mood, and
+I would set this level with the 'Biglow Papers,' high above all his other
+work, and chief of the things this age of our country shall be remembered
+by.  Holmes I always loved, and not for his wit alone, which is so
+obvious to liking, but for those rarer and richer strains of his in which
+he shows himself the lover of nature and the brother of men.  The deep
+spiritual insight, the celestial music, and the brooding tenderness of
+Whittier have always taken me more than his fierier appeals and his civic
+virtues, though I do not underrate the value of these in his verse.
+
+My acquaintance with these modern poets, and many I do not name because
+they are so many, has been continuous with their work, and my pleasure in
+it not inconstant if not equal.  I have spoken before of Longfellow as
+one of my first passions, and I have never ceased to delight in him; but
+some of the very newest and youngest of our poets have given me thrills
+of happiness, for which life has become lastingly sweeter.
+
+
+Long after I had thought never to read it--in fact when I was 'nel mezzo
+del cammin di nostra vita'--I read Milton's "Paradise Lost," and found in
+it a majestic beauty that justified to me the fame it wears, and eclipsed
+the worth of those lesser poems which I had ignorantly accounted his
+worthiest.  In fact, it was one of the literary passions of the time I
+speak of, and it shared my devotion for the novels of Tourguenief and
+(shall I own it?) the romances of Cherbuliez.  After all, it is best to
+be honest, and if it is not best, it is at least easiest; it involves the
+fewest embarrassing consequences; and if I confess the spell that the
+Revenge of Joseph Noirel cast upon me for a time, perhaps I shall be able
+to whisper the reader behind my hand that I have never yet read the
+"AEneid " of Virgil; the "Georgics," yes; but the "AEneid," no.  Some
+time, however, I expect to read it and to like it immensely.  That is
+often the case with things that I have held aloof from indefinitely.
+
+One fact of my experience which the reader may, find interesting is that
+when I am writing steadily I have little relish for reading.  I fancy,
+that reading is not merely a pastime when it is apparently the merest
+pastime, but that a certain measure of mind-stuff is used up in it, and
+that if you are using up all the mind stuff you have, much or little, in
+some other way, you do not read because you have not the mind-stuff for
+it.  At any rate it is in this sort only that I can account for my
+failure to read a great deal during four years of the amplest quiet that
+I spent in the country at Belmont, whither we removed from Cambridge.
+I had promised myself that in this quiet, now that I had given up
+reviewing, and wrote little or nothing in the magazine but my stories,
+I should again read purely for the pleasure of it, as I had in the early
+days before the critical purpose had qualified it with a bitter alloy.
+But I found that not being forced to read a number of books each month,
+so that I might write about them, I did not read at all, comparatively
+speaking.  To be sure I dawdled over a great many books that I had read
+before, and a number of memoirs and biographies, but I had no intense
+pleasure from reading in that time, and have no passions to record of it.
+It may have been a period when no new thing happened in literature deeply
+to stir one's interest; I only state the fact concerning myself, and
+suggest the most plausible theory I can think of.
+
+I wish also to note another incident, which may or may not have its
+psychological value.  An important event of these years was a long
+sickness which kept me helpless some seven or eight weeks, when I was
+forced to read in order to pass the intolerable time.  But in this misery
+I found that I could not read anything of a dramatic cast, whether in the
+form of plays or of novels.  The mere sight of the printed page, broken
+up in dialogue, was anguish.  Yet it was not the excitement of the
+fiction that I dreaded, for I consumed great numbers of narratives of
+travel, and was not in the least troubled by hairbreadth escapes, or
+shipwrecks, or perils from wild beasts or deadly serpents; it was the
+dramatic effect contrived by the playwright or novelist, and worked up to
+in the speech of his characters that I could not bear.  I found a like
+impossible stress from the Sunday newspaper which a mistaken friend sent
+in to me, and which with its scare-headings, and artfully wrought
+sensations, had the effect of fiction, as in fact it largely was.
+
+At the end of four years we went abroad again, and travel took away the
+appetite for reading as completely as writing did.  I recall nothing read
+in that year in Europe which moved me, and I think I read very little,
+except the local histories of the Tuscan cities which I afterwards wrote
+of.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV.  VALDES, GALDOS, VERGA, ZOLA, TROLLOPE, HARDY
+
+In fact, it was not till I returned, and took up my life again in Boston,
+in the old atmosphere of work, that I turned once more to books.  Even
+then I had to wait for the time when I undertook a critical department in
+one of the magazines, before I felt the rise of the old enthusiasm for an
+author.  That is to say, I had to begin reading for business again before
+I began reading for pleasure.  One of the first great pleasures which I
+had upon these terms was in the book of a contemporary Spanish author.
+This was the 'Marta y Maria' of Armando Palacio Valdes, a novelist who
+delights me beyond words by his friendly and abundant humor, his feeling
+for character, and his subtle insight.  I like every one of his books
+that I have read, and I believe that I have read nearly every one that he
+has written.  As I mention 'Riverito, Maximina, Un Idilio de un Inferno,
+La Hermana de San Sulpizio, El Cuarto Poder, Espuma,' the mere names
+conjure up the scenes and events that have moved me to tears and
+laughter, and filled me with a vivid sense of the life portrayed in them.
+I think the 'Marta y Maria' one of the most truthful and profound
+fictions I have read, and 'Maximina' one of the most pathetic, and
+'La Hermana de San Sulpizio' one of the most amusing.  Fortunately, these
+books of Valdes's have nearly all been translated, and the reader may
+test the matter in English; though it necessarily halts somewhat behind
+the Spanish.
+
+I do not know whether the Spaniards themselves rank Valdes with Galdos or
+not, and I have no wish to decide upon their relative merits.  They are
+both present passions of mine, and I may say of the 'Dona Perfecta' of
+Galdos that no book, if I except those of the greatest Russians, has
+given me a keener and deeper impression; it is infinitely pathetic, and
+is full of humor, which, if more caustic than that of Valdes, is not less
+delicious.  But I like all the books of Galdos that I have read, and
+though he seems to have worked more tardily out of his romanticism than
+Valdes, since be has worked finally into such realism as that of Leon
+Roch, his greatness leaves nothing to be desired.
+
+I have read one of the books of Emilia Pardo-Bazan, called 'Morrina,'
+which must rank her with the great realists of her country and age; she,
+too, has that humor of her race, which brings us nearer the Spanish than
+any other non-Anglo-Saxon people.
+
+A contemporary Italian, whom I like hardly less than these noble
+Spaniards, is Giovanni Verga, who wrote 'I Malavoglia,' or, as we call it
+in English, 'The House by the Medlar Tree': a story of infinite beauty,
+tenderness and truth.  As I have said before, I think with Zola that
+Giacometti, the Italian author of "La Morte Civile," has written almost
+the greatest play, all round, of modern times.
+
+But what shall I say of Zola himself, and my admiration of his epic
+greatness?  About his material there is no disputing among people of our
+Puritanic tradition.  It is simply abhorrent, but when you have once
+granted him his material for his own use, it is idle and foolish to deny
+his power.  Every literary theory of mine was contrary to him when I took
+up 'L'Assommoir,' though unconsciously I had always been as much of a
+realist as I could, but the book possessed me with the same fascination
+that I felt the other day in reading his 'L'Argent.'  The critics know
+now that Zola is not the realist he used to fancy himself, and he is full
+of the best qualities of the romanticism he has hated so much; but for
+what he is, there is but one novelist of our time, or of any, that
+outmasters him, and that is Tolstoy.  For my own part, I think that the
+books of Zola are not immoral, but they are indecent through the facts
+that they nakedly represent; they are infinitely more moral than the
+books of any other French novelist.  This may not be saying a great deal,
+but it is saying the truth, and I do not mind owning that he has been one
+of my great literary passions, almost as great as Flaubert, and greater
+than Daudet or Maupassant, though I have profoundly appreciated the
+exquisite artistry of both these.  No French writer, however, has moved
+me so much as the Spanish, for the French are wanting in the humor which
+endears these, and is the quintessence of their charm.
+
+You cannot be at perfect ease with a friend who does not joke, and I
+suppose this is what deprived me of a final satisfaction in the company
+of Anthony Trollope, who jokes heavily or not at all, and whom I should
+otherwise make bold to declare the greatest of English novelists; as it
+is, I must put before him Jane Austen, whose books, late in life, have
+been a youthful rapture with me.  Even without, much humor Trollope's
+books have been a vast pleasure to me through their simple truthfulness.
+Perhaps if they were more humorous they would not be so true to the
+British life and character present in them in the whole length and
+breadth of its expansive commonplaceness.  It is their serious fidelity
+which gives them a value unique in literature, and which if it were
+carefully analyzed would afford a principle of the same quality in an
+author who was undoubtedly one of the finest of artists as well as the
+most Philistine of men.
+
+I came rather late, but I came with all the ardor of what seems my
+perennial literary youth, to the love of Thomas Hardy, whom I first knew
+in his story 'A Pair of Blue Eyes.'  As usual, after I had read this book
+and felt the new charm in it, I wished to read the books of no other
+author, and to read his books over and over.  I love even the faults of
+Hardy; I will let him play me any trick he chooses (and he is not above
+playing tricks, when he seems to get tired of his story or perplexed with
+it), if only he will go on making his peasants talk, and his rather
+uncertain ladies get in and out of love, and serve themselves of every
+chance that fortune offers them of having their own way.  We shrink from
+the unmorality of the Latin races, but Hardy has divined in the heart of
+our own race a lingering heathenism, which, if not Greek, has certainly
+been no more baptized than the neo-hellenism of the Parisians.  His
+heroines especially exemplify it, and I should be safe in saying that his
+Ethelbertas, his Eustacias, his Elfridas, his Bathshebas, his Fancies,
+are wholly pagan.  I should not dare to ask how much of their charm came
+from that fact; and the author does not fail to show you how much harm,
+so that it is not on my conscience.  His people live very close to the
+heart of nature, and no one, unless it is Tourguenief, gives you a richer
+and sweeter sense of her unity with human nature.  Hardy is a great poet
+as well as a great humorist, and if he were not a great artist also his
+humor would be enough to endear him to me.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV.  TOLSTOY
+
+I come now, though not quite in the order of time, to the noblest of all
+these enthusiasms--namely, my devotion for the writings of Lyof Tolstoy.
+I should wish to speak of him with his own incomparable truth, yet I do
+not know how to give a notion of his influence without the effect of
+exaggeration.  As much as one merely human being can help another I
+believe that he has helped me; he has not influenced me in aesthetics
+only, but in ethics, too, so that I can never again see life in the way I
+saw it before I knew him. Tolstoy awakens in his reader the will to be a
+man; not effectively, not spectacularly, but simply, really.  He leads
+you back to the only true ideal, away from that false standard of the
+gentleman, to the Man who sought not to be distinguished from other men,
+but identified with them, to that Presence in which the finest gentleman
+shows his alloy of vanity, and the greatest genius shrinks to the measure
+of his miserable egotism.  I learned from Tolstoy to try character and
+motive by no other test, and though I am perpetually false to that
+sublime ideal myself, still the ideal remains with me, to make me ashamed
+that I am not true to it.  Tolstoy gave me heart to hope that the world
+may yet be made over in the image of Him who died for it, when all
+Caesars things shall be finally rendered unto Caesar, and men shall come
+into their own, into the right to labor and the right to enjoy the fruits
+of their labor, each one master of himself and servant to every other.
+He taught me to see life not as a chase of a forever impossible personal
+happiness, but as a field for endeavor towards the happiness of the whole
+human family; and I can never lose this vision, however I close my eyes,
+and strive to see my own interest as the highest good.  He gave me new
+criterions, new principles, which, after all, were those that are taught
+us in our earliest childhood, before we have come to the evil wisdom of
+the world.  As I read his different ethical books, 'What to Do,'
+'My Confession,' and 'My Religion,' I recognized their truth with a
+rapture such as I have known in no other reading, and I rendered them my
+allegiance, heart and soul, with whatever sickness of the one and despair
+of the other.  They have it yet, and I believe they will have it while I
+live.  It is with inexpressible astonishment that I bear them attainted
+of pessimism, as if the teaching of a man whose ideal was simple goodness
+must mean the prevalence of evil.  The way he showed me seemed indeed
+impossible to my will, but to my conscience it was and is the only
+possible way.  If there, is any point on which he has not convinced my
+reason it is that of our ability to walk this narrow way alone.  Even
+there he is logical, but as Zola subtly distinguishes in speaking of
+Tolstoy's essay on "Money," he is not reasonable.  Solitude enfeebles and
+palsies, and it is as comrades and brothers that men must save the world
+from itself, rather than themselves from the world.  It was so the
+earliest Christians, who had all things common, understood the life of
+Christ, and I believe that the latest will understand it so.
+
+I have spoken first of the ethical works of Tolstoy, because they are of
+the first importance to me, but I think that his aesthetical works are as
+perfect.  To my thinking they transcend in truth, which is the highest
+beauty, all other works of fiction that have been written, and I believe
+that they do this because they obey the law of the author's own life.
+His conscience is one ethically and one aesthetically; with his will to
+be true to himself he cannot be false to his knowledge of others.  I
+thought the last word in literary art had been said to me by the novels
+of Tourguenief, but it seemed like the first, merely, when I began to
+acquaint myself with the simpler method of Tolstoy.  I came to it by
+accident, and without any manner, of preoccupation in The Cossacks, one
+of his early books, which had been on my shelves unread for five or six
+years.  I did not know even Tolstoy's name when I opened it, and it was
+with a kind of amaze that I read it, and felt word by word, and line by
+line, the truth of a new art in it.
+
+I do not know how it is that the great Russians have the secret of
+simplicity.  Some say it is because they have not a long literary past
+and are not conventionalized by the usage of many generations of other
+writers, but this will hardly account for the brotherly directness of
+their dealing with human nature; the absence of experience elsewhere
+characterizes the artist with crudeness, and simplicity is the last
+effect of knowledge.  Tolstoy is, of course, the first of them in this
+supreme grace.  He has not only Tourguenief's transparency of style,
+unclouded by any mist of the personality which we mistakenly value in
+style, and which ought no more to be there than the artist's personality
+should be in a portrait; but he has a method which not only seems without
+artifice, but is so.  I can get at the manner of most writers, and tell
+what it is, but I should be baffled to tell what Tolstoy's manner is;
+perhaps he has no manner.  This appears to me true of his novels, which,
+with their vast variety of character and incident, are alike in their
+single endeavor to get the persons living before you, both in their
+action and in the peculiarly dramatic interpretation of their emotion and
+cogitation.  There are plenty of novelists to tell you that their
+characters felt and thought so and so, but you have to take it on trust;
+Tolstoy alone makes you know how and why it was so with them and not
+otherwise.  If there is anything in him which can be copied or burlesqued
+it is this ability of his to show men inwardly as well as outwardly; it
+is the only trait of his which I can put my hand on.
+
+After 'The Cossacks' I read 'Anna Karenina' with a deepening sense of the
+author's unrivalled greatness.  I thought that I saw through his eyes a
+human affair of that most sorrowful sort as it must appear to the
+Infinite Compassion; the book is a sort of revelation of human nature in
+circumstances that have been so perpetually lied about that we have
+almost lost the faculty of perceiving the truth concerning an illicit
+love.  When you have once read 'Anna Karenina' you know how fatally
+miserable and essentially unhappy such a love must be.  But the character
+of Karenin himself is quite as important as the intrigue of Anna and
+Vronsky.  It is wonderful how such a man, cold, Philistine and even mean
+in certain ways, towers into a sublimity unknown (to me, at least), in
+fiction when he forgives, and yet knows that he cannot forgive with
+dignity.  There is something crucial, and something triumphant, not
+beyond the power, but hitherto beyond the imagination of men in this
+effect, which is not solicited, not forced, not in the least romantic,
+but comes naturally, almost inevitably, from the make of man.
+
+The vast prospects, the far-reaching perspectives of 'War and Peace' made
+it as great a surprise for me in the historical novel as 'Anna Karenina'
+had been in the study of contemporary life; and its people and interests
+did not seem more remote, since they are of a civilization always as
+strange and of a humanity always as known.
+
+I read some shorter stories of Tolstoy's before I came to this greatest
+work of his: I read 'Scenes of the Siege of Sebastopol,' which is so much
+of the same quality as 'War and Peace;' and I read 'Policoushka' and most
+of his short stories with a sense of my unity with their people such as I
+had never felt with the people of other fiction.
+
+His didactic stories, like all stories of the sort, dwindle into
+allegories; perhaps they do their work the better for this, with the
+simple intelligences they address; but I think that where Tolstoy becomes
+impatient of his office of artist, and prefers to be directly a teacher,
+he robs himself of more than half his strength with those he can move
+only through the realization of themselves in others.  The simple pathos,
+and the apparent indirectness of such a tale as that of 'Poticoushka,'
+the peasant conscript, is of vastly more value to the world at large than
+all his parables; and 'The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,' the Philistine
+worldling, will turn the hearts of many more from the love of the world
+than such pale fables of the early Christian life as "Work while ye have
+the Light."  A man's gifts are not given him for nothing, and the man who
+has the great gift of dramatic fiction has no right to cast it away or to
+let it rust out in disuse.
+
+Terrible as the 'Kreutzer Sonata' was, it had a moral effect dramatically
+which it lost altogether when the author descended to exegesis, and
+applied to marriage the lesson of one evil marriage.  In fine, Tolstoy is
+certainly not to be held up as infallible.  He is very, distinctly
+fallible, but I think his life is not less instructive because in certain
+things it seems a failure.  There was but one life ever lived upon the
+earth which was without failure, and that was Christ's, whose erring and
+stumbling follower Tolstoy is.  There is no other example, no other
+ideal, and the chief use of Tolstoy is to enforce this fact in our age,
+after nineteen centuries of hopeless endeavor to substitute ceremony for
+character, and the creed for the life.  I recognize the truth of this
+without pretending to have been changed in anything but my point of view
+of it.  What I feel sure is that I can never look at life in the mean and
+sordid way that I did before I read Tolstoy.
+
+Artistically, he has shown me a greatness that he can never teach me.
+I am long past the age when I could wish to form myself upon another
+writer, and I do not think I could now insensibly take on the likeness of
+another; but his work has been a revelation and a delight to me, such as
+I am sure I can never know again.  I do not believe that in the whole
+course of my reading, and not even in the early moment of my literary
+enthusiasms, I have known such utter satisfaction in any writer, and this
+supreme joy has come to me at a time of life when new friendships, not to
+say new passions, are rare and reluctant.  It is as if the best wine at
+this high feast where I have sat so long had been kept for the last, and
+I need not deny a miracle in it in order to attest my skill in judging
+vintages.  In fact, I prefer to believe that my life has been full of
+miracles, and that the good has always come to me at the right time, so
+that I could profit most by it.  I believe if I had not turned the corner
+of my fiftieth year, when I first knew Tolstoy, I should not have been
+able to know him as fully as I did.  He has been to me that final
+consciousness, which he speaks of so wisely in his essay on "Life."
+I came in it to the knowledge of myself in ways I had not dreamt of
+before, and began at least to discern my relations to the race, without
+which we are each nothing.  The supreme art in literature had its highest
+effect in making me set art forever below humanity, and it is with the
+wish to offer the greatest homage to his heart and mind, which any man
+can pay another, that I close this record with the name of Lyof Tolstoy.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Account of one's reading is an account of one's life . . . . . . . . . .
+Adam Bede. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Affections will not be bidden. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Air of looking down on the highest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Alliance of the tragic and the comic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Anthony Trollope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Authors I must call my masters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Capriciousness of memory: what it will hold and what lose. . . . . . . .
+Celebration of the monkey and the goat in us . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Conquest of Granada. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Contemptible he found our pseudo-equality. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Criticism still remains behind all the other literary arts . . . . . . .
+Dickens is purely democratic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Escaped at night and got into the boy's dreams . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Fictions subtle effect for good and for evil on the young. . . . . . . .
+Finer sort myself to be able to enjoy such a fine sort . . . . . . . . .
+Had the sense that in her eyes I was a queer boy . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Hardly any sort of bloodshed which I would not pardon. . . . . . . . . .
+Hazlitt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+He undid my hands. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Hospitable gift of making you at home with him . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+In school there was as little literature then as there is now. . . . . .
+Inexperience takes this effect (literary lewdness) for realit. . . . . .
+Jews are still the chosen people . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Kindness and gentleness are never out of fashion . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Kissing goes by favor, in literature as in life. . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Lamb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Lewd literature seems to give a sanction to lewdness in the life . . . .
+Life of Goldsmith. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Live it slowly into the past . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Lubricity of literature. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Made many of my acquaintances very tired of my favorite authors. . . . .
+Men who bully and truckle. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Mustache, which in those days devoted a man to wickedness. . . . . . . .
+My own youth now seems to me rather more alien . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+My reading gave me no standing among the boys. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Neither worse nor better because of the theatre. . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Never appeals to the principle which sniffs, in his reader . . . . . . .
+None of the passions are reasoned, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Not very distinctly know their dreams from their experiences . . . . . .
+Now little notion what it was about, but I love its memory . . . . . . .
+Our horrible sham of a slave-based freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Pendennis. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Prejudice against certain words that I cannot overcome . . . . . . . . .
+President Garfield . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Probably no dramatist ever needed the stage less . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Rape of the Lock . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Rapture of the new convert could not last. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Reservations as to the times when he is not a master . . . . . . . . . .
+Responsibility of finding him all we have been told he is. . . . . . . .
+Secretly admires the splendors he affects to despise . . . . . . . . . .
+Self-flattered scorn, his showy sighs, his facile satire . . . . . . . .
+Self-satisfied, intolerant, and hypocritical provinciality . . . . . . .
+Should probably have wasted the time if I had not read them. . . . . . .
+Slave-based freedom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+So long as we have social inequality we shall have snobs . . . . . . . .
+Society, as we have it, was necessarily a sham . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Somehow expressed the feelings of his day. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Somewhat too studied grace . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Speaks it is not with words and blood, but with words and ink. . . . . .
+Spit some hapless victim: make him suffer and the reader laugh . . . . .
+Style is the man, and he cannot hide himself in any garb . . . . . . . .
+Surcharge all imitations of life and character . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Surcharged in the serious moods, and caricatured in the comic. . . . . .
+Swedenborg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Tales of the Alhambra. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+The great doctor's orotundity and ronderosity. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+To be for good or evil whatsoever I really was . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Toiled, and I suppose no work is wasted. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Trace no discrepancy between reading his plays and seeing them . . . . .
+Tried to like whatever they bade me like . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Truth is beyond invention. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Unmeet for ladies. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Vicar of Wakefield . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Vices and foibles which are inherent in the system of things . . . . . .
+We did not know that we were poor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+We see nothing whole, neither life nor art.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+What I had not I could hope for without unreason . . . . . . . . . . . .
+What we thought ruin, but what was really release. . . . . . . . . . . .
+When was love ever reasoned? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Wide leisure of a country village. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Women who snub and crawl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+Words of learned length and thundering sound . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
+World's memory is equally bad for failure and success. . . . . . . . . .
+Worst came it was not half so bad as what had gone before. . . . . . . .
+You cannot be at perfect ease with a friend who does not joke. . . . . .
+You may do a great deal(of work), and not get on.. . . . . . . . . . . .
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of My Literary Passions,
+by William Dean Howells
+
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of My Literary Passions, by Howells
+#25 in our series by William Dean Howells
+
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+Title: My Literary Passions
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+Author: William Dean Howells
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+The Project Gutenberg Etext of My Literary Passions, by Howells
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+This etext was produced by David Widger <widger@cecomet.net>
+
+
+
+
+
+[NOTE: There is a short list of bookmarks, or pointers, at the end of the
+file for those who may wish to sample the author's ideas before making an
+entire meal of them.  D.W.]
+
+
+
+
+
+MY LITERARY PASSIONS
+
+By William Dean Howells
+
+1895
+
+
+
+CONTENTS:
+
+          BIBLIOGRAPHICAL.
+I.        THE BOOKCASE AT HOME
+II.       GOLDSMITH
+III.      CERVANTES
+IV.       IRVING
+V.        FIRST FICTION AND DRAMA
+VI.       LONGFELLOW'S "SPANISH STUDENT"
+VII.      SCOTT
+VIII.     LIGHTER FANCIES
+IX.       POPE
+X.        VARIOUS PREFERENCES
+XI.       UNCLE TOM'S CABIN
+XII.      OSSIAN
+XIII.     SHAKESPEARE
+XIV.      IK MARVEL
+XV.       DICKENS
+XVI.      WORDSWORTH, LOWELL, CHAUCER
+XVII.     MACAULAY.
+XVIII.    CRITICS AND REVIEWS.
+XIX.      A NON-LITERARY EPISODE
+XX.       THACKERAY
+XXI.      "LAZARILLO DE TORMES"
+XXII.     CURTIS, LONGFELLOW, SCHLEGEL
+XXIII.    TENNYSON
+XXIV.     HEINE
+XXV.      DE QUINCEY, GOETHE, LONGFELLOW.
+XXVI.     GEORGE ELIOT, HAWTHORNE, GOETHE, HEINE
+XXVII.    CHARLES READE
+XXVIII.   DANTE.
+XXIX.     GOLDONI, MANZONI, D'AZEGLIO
+XXX.      "PASTOR FIDO," "AMINTA," "ROMOLA," "YEAST," "PAUL FERROLL"
+XXXI.     ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN, BJORSTJERNE BJORNSON
+XXXII.    TOURGUENIEF, AUERBACH
+XXXIII.   CERTAIN PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES
+XXXIV.    VALDES, GALDOS, VERGA, ZOLA, TROLLOPE, HARDY
+XXXV.     TOLSTOY
+
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHICAL
+
+The papers collected here under the name of 'My Literary Passions' were
+printed serially in a periodical of such vast circulation that they might
+well have been supposed to have found there all the acceptance that could
+be reasonably hoped for them.  Nevertheless, they were reissued in a
+volume the year after they first appeared, in 1895, and they had a
+pleasing share of such favor as their author's books have enjoyed.  But
+it is to be doubted whether any one liked reading them so much as he
+liked writing them--say, some time in the years 1893 and 1894, in a New
+York flat, where he could look from his lofty windows over two miles and
+a half of woodland in Central Park, and halloo his fancy wherever he
+chose in that faery realm of books which he re-entered in reminiscences
+perhaps too fond at times, and perhaps always too eager for the reader's
+following.  The name was thought by the friendly editor of the popular
+publication where they were serialized a main part of such inspiration as
+they might be conjectured to have, and was, as seldom happens with editor
+and author, cordially agreed upon before they were begun.
+
+The name says, indeed, so exactly and so fully what they are that little
+remains for their bibliographer to add beyond the meagre historical
+detail here given.  Their short and simple annals could be eked out by
+confidences which would not appreciably enrich the materials of the
+literary history of their time, and it seems better to leave them to the
+imagination of such posterity as they may reach.  They are rather
+helplessly frank, but not, I hope, with all their rather helpless
+frankness, offensively frank.  They are at least not part of the polemic
+which their author sustained in the essays following them in this volume,
+and which might have been called, in conformity with 'My Literary
+Passions', by the title of 'My Literary Opinions' better than by the
+vague name which they actually wear.
+
+They deal, to be sure, with the office of Criticism and the art of
+Fiction, and so far their present name is not a misnomer.  It follows
+them from an earlier date and could not easily be changed, and it may
+serve to recall to an elder generation than this the time when their
+author was breaking so many lances in the great, forgotten war between
+Realism and Romanticism that the floor of the "Editor's Study" in
+Harper's Magazine was strewn with the embattled splinters.  The "Editor's
+Study" is now quite another place, but he who originally imagined it in
+1886, and abode in it until 1892, made it at once the scene of such
+constant offence that he had no time, if he had the temper, for defence.
+The great Zola, or call him the immense Zola, was the prime mover in the
+attack upon the masters of the Romanticistic school; but he lived to own
+that he had fought a losing fight, and there are some proofs that he was
+right.  The Realists, who were undoubtedly the masters of fiction in
+their passing generation, and who prevailed not only in France, but in
+Russia, in Scandinavia, in Spain, in Portugal, were overborne in all
+Anglo-Saxon countries by the innumerable hosts of Romanticism, who to
+this day possess the land; though still, whenever a young novelist does
+work instantly recognizable for its truth and beauty among us, he is seen
+and felt to have wrought in the spirit of Realism.  Not even yet,
+however, does the average critic recognize this, and such lesson as the
+"Editor's Study" assumed to teach remains here in all its essentials for
+his improvement.
+
+Month after month for the six years in which the "Editor's Study"
+continued in the keeping of its first occupant, its lesson was more or
+less stormily delivered, to the exclusion, for the greater part, of other
+prophecy, but it has not been found well to keep the tempestuous manner
+along with the fulminant matter in this volume.  When the author came to
+revise the material, he found sins against taste which his zeal for
+righteousness could not suffice to atone for.  He did not hesitate to
+omit the proofs of these, and so far to make himself not only a precept,
+but an example in criticism.  He hopes that in other and slighter things
+he has bettered his own instruction, and that in form and in fact the
+book is altogether less crude and less rude than the papers from which it
+has here been a second time evolved.
+
+The papers, as they appeared from month to month, were not the product of
+those unities of time and place which were the happy conditioning of
+'My Literary Passions.'  They could not have been written in quite so
+many places as times, but they enjoyed a comparable variety of origin.
+Beginning in Boston, they were continued in a Boston suburb, on the
+shores of Lake George, in a Western New York health resort, in Buffalo,
+in Nahant; once, twice, and thrice in New York, with reversions to
+Boston, and summer excursions to the hills and waters of New England,
+until it seemed that their author had at last said his say, and he
+voluntarily lapsed into silence with the applause of friends and enemies
+alike.
+
+The papers had made him more of the last than of the first, but not as
+still appears to him with greater reason.  At moments his deliverances
+seemed to stir people of different minds to fury in two continents, so
+far as they were English-speaking, and on the coasts of the seven seas;
+and some of these came back at him with such violent personalities as it
+is his satisfaction to remember that he never indulged in his attacks
+upon their theories of criticism and fiction.  His opinions were always
+impersonal; and now as their manner rather than their make has been
+slightly tempered, it may surprise the belated reader to learn that it
+was the belief of one English critic that their author had "placed
+himself beyond the pale of decency" by them.  It ought to be less
+surprising that, since these dreadful words were written of him, more
+than one magnanimous Englishman has penitently expressed to the author
+the feeling that he was not so far wrong in his overboldly hazarded
+convictions.  The penitence of his countrymen is still waiting
+expression, but it may come to that when they have recurred to the
+evidences of his offence in their present shape.
+
+KITTERY POINT, MAINE, July, 1909.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                           MY LITERARY PASSIONS
+
+
+
+I.  THE BOOKCASE AT HOME
+
+To give an account of one's reading is in some sort to give an account of
+one's life; and I hope that I shall not offend those who follow me in
+these papers, if I cannot help speaking of myself in speaking of the
+authors I must call my masters: my masters not because they taught me
+this or that directly, but because I had such delight in them that I
+could not fail to teach myself from them whatever I was capable of
+learning.  I do not know whether I have been what people call a great
+reader; I cannot claim even to have been a very wise reader; but I have
+always been conscious of a high purpose to read much more, and more
+discreetly, than I have ever really done, and probably it is from the
+vantage-ground of this good intention that I shall sometimes be found
+writing here rather than from the facts of the case.
+
+But I am pretty sure that I began right, and that if I had always kept
+the lofty level which I struck at the outset I should have the right to
+use authority in these reminiscences without a bad conscience.  I shall
+try not to use authority, however, and I do not expect to speak here of
+all my reading, whether it has been much or little, but only of those
+books, or of those authors that I have felt a genuine passion for.  I
+have known such passions at every period of my life, but it is mainly of
+the loves of my youth that I shall write, and I shall write all the more
+frankly because my own youth now seems to me rather more alien than that
+of any other person.
+
+I think that I came of a reading race, which has always loved literature
+in a way, and in spite of varying fortunes and many changes.  From a
+letter of my great-grandmother's written to a stubborn daughter upon some
+unfilial behavior, like running away to be married, I suspect that she
+was fond of the high-colored fiction of her day, for she tells the wilful
+child that she has "planted a dagger in her mother's heart," and I should
+not be surprised if it were from this fine-languaged lady that my
+grandfather derived his taste for poetry rather than from his father, who
+was of a worldly wiser mind.  To be sure, he became a Friend by
+Convincement as the Quakers say, and so I cannot imagine that he was
+altogether worldly; but he had an eye to the main chance: he founded the
+industry of making flannels in the little Welsh town where he lived, and
+he seems to have grown richer, for his day and place, than any of us have
+since grown for ours.  My grandfather, indeed, was concerned chiefly in
+getting away from the world and its wickedness.  He came to this country
+early in the nineteenth century and settled his family in a log-cabin in
+the Ohio woods, that they might be safe from the sinister influences of
+the village where he was managing some woollen-mills.  But he kept his
+affection for certain poets of the graver, not to say gloomier sort, and
+he must have suffered his children to read them, pending that great
+question of their souls' salvation which was a lifelong trouble to him.
+
+My father, at any rate, had such a decided bent in the direction of
+literature, that he was not content in any of his several economical
+experiments till he became the editor of a newspaper, which was then the
+sole means of satisfying a literary passion.  His paper, at the date when
+I began to know him, was a living, comfortable and decent, but without
+the least promise of wealth in it, or the hope even of a much better
+condition.  I think now that he was wise not to care for the advancement
+which most of us have our hearts set upon, and that it was one of his
+finest qualities that he was content with a lot in life where he was not
+exempt from work with his hands, and yet where he was not so pressed by
+need but he could give himself at will not only to the things of the
+spirit, but the things of the mind too.  After a season of scepticism he
+had become a religious man, like the rest of his race, but in his own
+fashion, which was not at all the fashion of my grandfather: a Friend who
+had married out of Meeting, and had ended a perfervid Methodist.  My
+father, who could never get himself converted at any of the camp-meetings
+where my grandfather often led the forces of prayer to his support, and
+had at last to be given up in despair, fell in with the writings of
+Emanuel Swedenborg, and embraced the doctrine of that philosopher with a
+content that has lasted him all the days of his many years.  Ever since I
+can remember, the works of Swedenborg formed a large part of his library;
+he read them much himself, and much to my mother, and occasionally a
+"Memorable Relation" from them to us children.  But he did not force them
+upon our notice, nor urge us to read them, and I think this was very
+well.  I suppose his conscience and his reason kept him from doing so.
+But in regard to other books, his fondness was too much for him, and when
+I began to show a liking for literature he was eager to guide my choice.
+
+His own choice was for poetry, and the most of our library, which was not
+given to theology, was given to poetry.  I call it the library now, but
+then we called it the bookcase, and that was what literally it was,
+because I believe that whatever we had called our modest collection of
+books, it was a larger private collection than any other in the town
+where we lived.  Still it was all held, and shut with glass doors, in a
+case of very few shelves.  It was not considerably enlarged during my
+childhood, for few books came to my father as editor, and he indulged
+himself in buying them even more rarely.  My grandfather's book store
+(it was also the village drug-store) had then the only stock of
+literature for sale in the place; and once, when Harper & Brothers' agent
+came to replenish it, be gave my father several volumes for review.  One
+of these was a copy of Thomson's Seasons, a finely illustrated edition,
+whose pictures I knew long before I knew the poetry, and thought them the
+most beautiful things that ever were.  My father read passages of the
+book aloud, and he wanted me to read it all myself.  For the matter of
+that he wanted me to read Cowper, from whom no one could get anything but
+good, and he wanted me to read Byron, from whom I could then have got no
+harm; we get harm from the evil we understand.  He loved Burns, too, and
+he used to read aloud from him, I must own, to my inexpressible
+weariness.  I could not away with that dialect, and I could not then feel
+the charm of the poet's wit, nor the tender beauty of his pathos.  Moore,
+I could manage better; and when my father read "Lalla Rookh" to my mother
+I sat up to listen, and entered into all the woes of Iran in the story of
+the "Fire Worshippers."  I drew the line at the "Veiled Prophet of
+Khorassan," though I had some sense of the humor of the poet's conception
+of the critic in "Fadladeen."  But I liked Scott's poems far better, and
+got from Ispahan to Edinburgh with a glad alacrity of fancy.  I followed
+the "Lady of the Lake" throughout, and when I first began to contrive
+verses of my own I found that poem a fit model in mood and metre.
+
+Among other volumes of verse on the top shelf of the bookcase, of which I
+used to look at the outside without penetrating deeply within, were
+Pope's translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and Dryden's Virgil,
+pretty little tomes in tree-calf, published by James Crissy in
+Philadelphia, and illustrated with small copper-plates, which somehow
+seemed to put the matter hopelessly beyond me.  It was as if they said to
+me in so many words that literature which furnished the subjects of such
+pictures I could not hope to understand, and need not try.  At any rate,
+I let them alone for the time, and I did not meddle with a volume of
+Shakespeare, in green cloth and cruelly fine print, which overawed me in
+like manner with its wood-cuts.  I cannot say just why I conceived that
+there was something unhallowed in the matter of the book; perhaps this
+was a tint from the reputation of the rather profligate young man from
+whom my father had it.  If he were not profligate I ask his pardon.  I
+have not the least notion who he was, but that was the notion I had of
+him, whoever he was, or wherever he now is.  There may never have been
+such a young man at all; the impression I had may have been pure
+invention of my own, like many things with children, who do not very
+distinctly know their dreams from their experiences, and live in the
+world where both project the same quality of shadow.
+
+There were, of course, other books in the bookcase, which my
+consciousness made no account of, and I speak only of those I remember.
+Fiction there was none at all that I can recall, except Poe's 'Tales of
+the Grotesque and the Arabesque' (I long afflicted myself as to what
+those words meant, when I might easily have asked and found out) and
+Bulwer's Last Days of Pompeii, all in the same kind of binding.  History
+is known, to my young remembrance of that library, by a History of the
+United States, whose dust and ashes I hardly made my way through; and by
+a 'Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada', by the ever dear and precious
+Fray Antonio Agapida, whom I was long in making out to be one and the
+same as Washington Irving.
+
+In school there was as little literature then as there is now, and I
+cannot say anything worse of our school reading; but I was not really
+very much in school, and so I got small harm from it.  The printing-
+office was my school from a very early date.  My father thoroughly
+believed in it, and he had his beliefs as to work, which he illustrated
+as soon as we were old enough to learn the trade he followed.  We could
+go to school and study, or we could go into the printing-office and work,
+with an equal chance of learning, but we could not be idle; we must do
+something, for our souls' sake, though he was willing enough we should
+play, and he liked himself to go into the woods with us, and to enjoy the
+pleasures that manhood can share with childhood.  I suppose that as the
+world goes now we were poor.  His income was never above twelve hundred a
+year, and his family was large; but nobody was rich there or then; we
+lived in the simple abundance of that time and place, and we did not know
+that we were poor.  As yet the unequal modern conditions were undreamed
+of (who indeed could have dreamed of them forty or fifty years ago?) in
+the little Southern Ohio town where nearly the whole of my most happy
+boyhood was passed.
+
+
+
+
+II.  GOLDSMITH
+
+When I began to have literary likings of my own, and to love certain
+books above others, the first authors of my heart were Goldsmith,
+Cervantes, and Irving.  In the sharply foreshortened perspective of the
+past I seem to have read them all at once, but I am aware of an order of
+time in the pleasure they gave me, and I know that Goldsmith came first.
+He came so early that I cannot tell when or how I began to read him, but
+it must have been before I was ten years old.  I read other books about
+that time, notably a small book on Grecian and Roman mythology, which I
+perused with such a passion for those pagan gods and goddesses that, if
+it had ever been a question of sacrificing to Diana, I do not really know
+whether I should have been able to refuse.  I adored indiscriminately all
+the tribes of nymphs and naiads, demigods and heroes, as well as the high
+ones of Olympus; and I am afraid that by day I dwelt in a world peopled
+and ruled by them, though I faithfully said my prayers at night, and fell
+asleep in sorrow for my sins.  I do not know in the least how Goldsmith's
+Greece came into my hands, though I fancy it must have been procured for
+me because of a taste which I showed for that kind of reading, and I can
+imagine no greater luck for a small boy in a small town of Southwestern
+Ohio well-nigh fifty years ago.  I have the books yet; two little, stout
+volumes in fine print, with the marks of wear on them, but without those
+dishonorable blots, or those other injuries which boys inflict upon books
+in resentment of their dulness, or out of mere wantonness.  I was always
+sensitive to the maltreatment of books; I could not bear to see a book
+faced down or dogs-eared or broken-backed.  It was like a hurt or an
+insult to a thing that could feel.
+
+Goldsmith's History of Rome came to me much later, but quite as
+immemorably, and after I had formed a preference for the Greek Republics,
+which I dare say was not mistaken.  Of course I liked Athens best, and
+yet there was something in the fine behavior of the Spartans in battle,
+which won a heart formed for hero-worship.  I mastered the notion of
+their communism, and approved of their iron money, with the poverty it
+obliged them to, yet somehow their cruel treatment of the Helots failed
+to shock me; perhaps I forgave it to their patriotism, as I had to
+forgive many ugly facts in the history of the Romans to theirs.  There
+was hardly any sort of bloodshed which I would not pardon in those days
+to the slayers of tyrants; and the swagger form of such as despatched a
+despot with a fine speech was so much to my liking that I could only
+grieve that I was born too late to do and to say those things.
+
+I do not think I yet felt the beauty of the literature which made them
+all live in my fancy, that I conceived of Goldsmith as an artist using
+for my rapture the finest of the arts; and yet I had been taught to see
+the loveliness of poetry, and was already trying to make it on my own
+poor account.  I tried to make verses like those I listened to when my
+father read Moore and Scott to my mother, but I heard them with no such
+happiness as I read my beloved histories, though I never thought then of
+attempting to write like Goldsmith.  I accepted his beautiful work as
+ignorantly as I did my other blessings.  I was concerned in getting at
+the Greeks and Romans, and I did not know through what nimble air and by
+what lovely ways I was led to them.  Some retrospective perception of
+this came long afterward when I read his essays, and after I knew all of
+his poetry, and later yet when I read the 'Vicar of Wakefield'; but for
+the present my eyes were holden, as the eyes of a boy mostly are in the
+world of art.  What I wanted with my Greeks and Romans after I got at
+them was to be like them, or at least to turn them to account in verse,
+and in dramatic verse at that.  The Romans were less civilized than the
+Greeks, and so were more like boys, and more to a boy's purpose.  I did
+not make literature of the Greeks, but I got a whole tragedy out of the
+Romans; it was a rhymed tragedy, and in octosyllabic verse, like the
+"Lady of the Lake."  I meant it to be acted by my schoolmates, but I am
+not sure that I ever made it known to them.  Still, they were not
+ignorant of my reading, and I remember how proud I was when a certain
+boy, who had always whipped me when we fought together, and so outranked
+me in that little boys' world, once sent to ask me the name of the Roman
+emperor who lamented at nightfall, when he had done nothing worthy, that
+he had lost a day.  The boy was going to use the story, in a composition,
+as we called the school themes then, and I told him the emperor's name; I
+could not tell him now without turning to the book.
+
+My reading gave me no standing among the boys, and I did not expect it to
+rank me with boys who were more valiant in fight or in play; and I have
+since found that literature gives one no more certain station in the
+world of men's activities, either idle or useful.  We literary folk try
+to believe that it does, but that is all nonsense.  At every period of
+life, among boys or men, we are accepted when they are at leisure, and
+want to be amused, and at best we are tolerated rather than accepted.
+I must have told the boys stories out of my Goldsmith's Greece and Rome,
+or it would not have been known that I had read them, but I have no
+recollection now of doing so, while I distinctly remember rehearsing the
+allegories and fables of the 'Gesta Romanorum', a book which seems to
+have been in my hands about the same time or a little later.  I had a
+delight in that stupid collection of monkish legends which I cannot
+account for now, and which persisted in spite of the nightmare confusion
+it made of my ancient Greeks and Romans.  They were not at all the
+ancient Greeks and Romans of Goldsmith's histories.
+
+I cannot say at what times I read these books, but they must have been
+odd times, for life was very full of play then, and was already beginning
+to be troubled with work.  As I have said, I was to and fro between the
+schoolhouse and the printing-office so much that when I tired of the one
+I must have been very promptly given my choice of the other.  The
+reading, however, somehow went on pretty constantly, and no doubt my love
+for it won me a chance for it.  There were some famous cherry-trees in
+our yard, which, as I look back at them, seem to have been in flower or
+fruit the year round; and in one of them there was a level branch where a
+boy could sit with a book till his dangling legs went to sleep, or till
+some idler or busier boy came to the gate and called him down to play
+marbles or go swimming.  When this happened the ancient world was rolled
+up like a scroll, and put away until the next day, with all its orators
+and conspirators, its nymphs and satyrs, gods and demigods; though
+sometimes they escaped at night and got into the boy's dreams.
+
+I do not think I cared as much as some of the other boys for the 'Arabian
+Nights' or 'Robinson Crusoe,' but when it came to the 'Ingenious
+Gentleman of La Mancha,' I was not only first, I was sole.
+
+Before I speak, however, of the beneficent humorist who next had my
+boyish heart after Goldsmith, let me acquit myself in full of my debt to
+that not unequal or unkindred spirit.  I have said it was long after I
+had read those histories, full of his inalienable charm, mere pot-boilers
+as they were, and far beneath his more willing efforts, that I came to
+know his poetry.  My father must have read the "Deserted Village" to us,
+and told us something of the author's pathetic life, for I cannot
+remember when I first knew of "sweet Auburn," or had the light of the
+poet's own troubled day upon the "loveliest village of the plain."
+The 'Vicar of Wakefield' must have come into my life after that poem and
+before 'The Traveler'.  It was when I would have said that I knew all
+Goldsmith; we often give ourselves credit for knowledge in this way
+without having any tangible assets; and my reading has always been very
+desultory.  I should like to say here that the reading of any one who
+reads to much purpose is always very desultory, though perhaps I had
+better not say so, but merely state the fact in my case, and own that I
+never read any one author quite through without wandering from him to
+others.  When I first read the 'Vicar of Wakefield' (for I have since
+read it several times, and hope yet to read it many times), I found its
+persons and incidents familiar, and so I suppose I must have heard it
+read.  It is still for me one of the most modern novels: that is to say,
+one of the best.  It is unmistakably good up to a certain point, and then
+unmistakably bad, but with always good enough in it to be forever
+imperishable.  Kindness and gentleness are never out of fashion; it is
+these in Goldsmith which make him our contemporary, and it is worth the
+while of any young person presently intending deathless renown to take a
+little thought of them.  They are the source of all refinement, and I do
+not believe that the best art in any kind exists without them.  The style
+is the man, and he cannot hide himself in any garb of words so that we
+shall not know somehow what manner of man he is within it; his speech
+betrayeth him, not only as to his country and his race, but more subtly
+yet as to his heart, and the loves and hates of his heart.  As to
+Goldsmith, I do not think that a man of harsh and arrogant nature, of
+worldly and selfish soul, could ever have written his style, and I do not
+think that, in far greater measure than criticism has recognized, his
+spiritual quality, his essential friendliness, expressed itself in the
+literary beauty that wins the heart as well as takes the fancy in his
+work.
+
+I should have my reservations and my animadversions if it came to close
+criticism of his work, but I am glad that he was the first author I
+loved, and that even before I knew I loved him I was his devoted reader.
+I was not consciously his admirer till I began to read, when I was
+fourteen, a little volume of his essays, made up, I dare say, from the
+'Citizen of the World' and other unsuccessful ventures of his.  It
+contained the papers on Beau Tibbs, among others, and I tried to write
+sketches and studies of life in their manner.  But this attempt at
+Goldsmith's manner followed a long time after I tried to write in the
+style of Edgar A. Poe, as I knew it from his 'Tales of the Grotesque
+erred Arabesque.'  I suppose the very poorest of these was the "Devil in
+the Belfry," but such as it was I followed it as closely as I could in
+the "Devil in the Smoke-Pipes"; I meant tobacco-pipes.  The resemblance
+was noted by those to whom I read my story; I alone could not see it or
+would not own it, and I really felt it a hardship that I should be found
+to have produced an imitation.
+
+It was the first time I had imitated a prose writer, though I had
+imitated several poets like Moore, Campbell, and Goldsmith himself.
+I have never greatly loved an author without wishing to write like him.
+I have now no reluctance to confess that, and I do not see why I should
+not say that it was a long time before I found it best to be as like
+myself as I could, even when I did not think so well of myself as of some
+others.  I hope I shall always be able and willing to learn something
+from the masters of literature and still be myself, but for the young
+writer this seems impossible.  He must form himself from time to time
+upon the different authors he is in love with, but when he has done this
+he must wish it not to be known, for that is natural too.  The lover
+always desires to ignore the object of his passion, and the adoration
+which a young writer has for a great one is truly a passion passing the
+love of women.  I think it hardly less fortunate that Cervantes was one
+of my early passions, though I sat at his feet with no more sense of his
+mastery than I had of Goldsmith's.
+
+
+
+
+III.  CERVANTES
+
+I recall very fully the moment and the place when I first heard of 'Don
+Quixote,' while as yet I could not connect it very distinctly with
+anybody's authorship.  I was still too young to conceive of authorship,
+even in my own case, and wrote my miserable verses without any notion of
+literature, or of anything but the pleasure of seeing them actually come
+out rightly rhymed and measured.  The moment was at the close of a
+summer's day just before supper, which, in our house, we had lawlessly
+late, and the place was the kitchen where my mother was going about her
+work, and listening as she could to what my father was telling my brother
+and me and an apprentice of ours, who was like a brother to us both, of a
+book that he had once read.  We boys were all shelling peas, but the
+story, as it went on, rapt us from the poor employ, and whatever our
+fingers were doing, our spirits were away in that strange land of
+adventures and mishaps, where the fevered life of the knight truly
+without fear and without reproach burned itself out.  I dare say that my
+father tried to make us understand the satirical purpose of the book.
+I vaguely remember his speaking of the books of chivalry it was meant to
+ridicule; but a boy could not care for this, and what I longed to do at
+once was to get that book and plunge into its story.  He told us at
+random of the attack on the windmills and the flocks of sheep, of the
+night in the valley of the fulling-mills with their trip-hammers, of the
+inn and the muleteers, of the tossing of Sancho in the blanket, of the
+island that was given him to govern, and of all the merry pranks at the
+duke's and duchess's, of the liberation of the galley-slaves, of the
+capture of Mambrino's helmet, and of Sancho's invention of the enchanted
+Dulcinea, and whatever else there was wonderful and delightful in the
+most wonderful and delightful book in the world.  I do not know when or
+where my father got it for me, and I am aware of an appreciable time that
+passed between my hearing of it and my having it.  The event must have
+been most important to me, and it is strange I cannot fix the moment when
+the precious story came into my hands; though for the matter of that
+there is nothing more capricious than a child's memory, what it will hold
+and what it will lose.
+
+It is certain my Don Quixote was in two small, stout volumes not much
+bigger each than my Goldsmith's 'Greece', bound in a sort of law-calf,
+well fitted to withstand the wear they were destined to undergo.  The
+translation was, of course, the old-fashioned version of Jervas, which,
+whether it was a closely faithful version or not, was honest eighteenth-
+century English, and reported faithfully enough the spirit of the
+original.  If it had any literary influence with me the influence must
+have been good.  But I cannot make out that I was sensible of the
+literature; it was the forever enchanting story that I enjoyed.
+I exulted in the boundless freedom of the design; the open air of that
+immense scene, where adventure followed adventure with the natural
+sequence of life, and the days and the nights were not long enough for
+the events that thronged them, amidst the fields and woods, the streams
+and hills, the highways and byways, hostelries and hovels, prisons and
+palaces, which were the setting of that matchless history.  I took it as
+simply as I took everything else in the world about me.  It was full of
+meaning that I could not grasp, and there were significances of the kind
+that literature unhappily abounds in, but they were lost upon my
+innocence.  I did not know whether it was well written or not; I never
+thought about that; it was simply there in its vast entirety, its
+inexhaustible opulence, and I was rich in it beyond the dreams of
+avarice.
+
+My father must have told us that night about Cervantes as well as about
+his 'Don Quixote', for I seem to have known from the beginning that he
+was once a slave in Algiers, and that he had lost a hand in battle, and I
+loved him with a sort of personal affection, as if he were still living
+and he could somehow return my love.  His name and nature endeared the
+Spanish name and nature to me, so that they were always my romance, and
+to this day I cannot meet a Spanish man without clothing him in something
+of the honor and worship I lavished upon Cervantes when I was a child.
+While I was in the full flush of this ardor there came to see our school,
+one day, a Mexican gentleman who was studying the American system of
+education; a mild, fat, saffron man, whom I could almost have died to
+please for Cervantes' and Don Quixote's sake, because I knew he spoke
+their tongue.  But he smiled upon us all, and I had no chance to
+distinguish myself from the rest by any act of devotion before the
+blessed vision faded, though for long afterwards, in impassioned
+reveries, I accosted him and claimed him kindred because of my fealty,
+and because I would have been Spanish if I could.
+
+I would not have had the boy-world about me know anything of these fond
+dreams; but it was my tastes alone, my passions, which were alien there;
+in everything else I was as much a citizen as any boy who had never heard
+of Don Quixote.  But I believe that I carried the book about with me most
+of the time, so as not to lose any chance moment of reading it.  Even in
+the blank of certain years, when I added little other reading to my
+store, I must still have been reading it.  This was after we had removed
+from the town where the earlier years of my boyhood were passed, and I
+had barely adjusted myself to the strange environment when one of my
+uncles asked me to come with him and learn the drug business, in the
+place, forty miles away, where he practised medicine.  We made the long
+journey, longer than any I have made since, in the stage-coach of those
+days, and we arrived at his house about twilight, he glad to get home,
+and I sick to death with yearning for the home I had left.  I do not know
+how it was that in this state, when all the world was one hopeless
+blackness around me, I should have got my 'Don Quixote' out of my bag;
+I seem to have had it with me as an essential part of my equipment for my
+new career. Perhaps I had been asked to show it, with the notion of
+beguiling me from my misery; perhaps I was myself trying to drown my
+sorrows in it.  But anyhow I have before me now the vision of my sweet
+young aunt and her young sister looking over her shoulder, as they stood
+together on the lawn in the summer evening light.  My aunt held my Don
+Quixote open in one hand, while she clasped with the other the child she
+carried on her arm.  She looked at the book, and then from time to time
+she looked at me, very kindly but very curiously, with a faint smile, so
+that as I stood there, inwardly writhing in my bashfulness, I had the
+sense that in her eyes I was a queer boy.  She returned the book without
+comment, after some questions, and I took it off to my room, where the
+confidential friend of Cervantes cried himself to sleep.
+
+In the morning I rose up and told them I could not stand it, and I was
+going home.  Nothing they could say availed, and my uncle went down to
+the stage-office with me and took my passage back.
+
+The horror of cholera was then in the land; and we heard in the stage-
+office that a man lay dead of it in the hotel overhead.  But my uncle led
+me to his drugstore, where the stage was to call for me, and made me
+taste a little camphor; with this prophylactic, Cervantes and I somehow
+got home together alive.
+
+The reading of 'Don Quixote' went on throughout my boyhood, so that I
+cannot recall any distinctive period of it when I was not, more or less,
+reading that book.  In a boy's way I knew it well when I was ten, and a
+few years ago, when I was fifty, I took it up in the admirable new
+version of Ormsby, and found it so full of myself and of my own
+irrevocable past that I did not find it very gay.  But I made a great
+many discoveries in it; things I had not dreamt of were there, and must
+always have been there, and other things wore a new face, and made a new
+effect upon me.  I had my doubts, my reserves, where once I had given it
+my whole heart without question, and yet in what formed the greatness of
+the book it seemed to me greater than ever.  I believe that its free and
+simple design, where event follows event without the fettering control of
+intrigue, but where all grows naturally out of character and conditions,
+is the supreme form of fiction; and I cannot help thinking that if we
+ever have a great American novel it must be built upon some such large
+and noble lines.  As for the central figure, Don Quixote himself, in his
+dignity and generosity, his unselfish ideals, and his fearless devotion
+to them, he is always heroic and beautiful; and I was glad to find in my
+latest look at his history that I had truly conceived of him at first,
+and had felt the sublimity of his nature.  I did not want to laugh at him
+so much, and I could not laugh at all any more at some of the things done
+to him.  Once they seemed funny, but now only cruel, and even stupid, so
+that it was strange to realize his qualities and indignities as both
+flowing from the same mind.  But in my mature experience, which threw a
+broader light on the fable, I was happy to keep my old love of an author
+who had been almost personally, dear to me.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+IRVING
+
+I have told how Cervantes made his race precious to me, and I am sure
+that it must have been he who fitted me to understand and enjoy the
+American author who now stayed me on Spanish ground and kept me happy in
+Spanish air, though I cannot trace the tie in time and circumstance
+between Irving and Cervantes.  The most I can make sure of is that I read
+the 'Conquest of Granada' after I read Don Quixote, and that I loved the
+historian so much because I had loved the novelist much more.  Of course
+I did not perceive then that Irving's charm came largely from Cervantes
+and the other Spanish humorists yet unknown to me, and that he had formed
+himself upon them almost as much as upon Goldsmith, but I dare say that
+this fact had insensibly a great deal to do with my liking.  Afterwards I
+came to see it, and at the same time to see what was Irving's own in
+Irving; to feel his native, if somewhat attenuated humor, and his
+original, if somewhat too studied grace.  But as yet there was no
+critical question with me.  I gave my heart simply and passionately to
+the author who made the scenes of that most pathetic history live in my
+sympathy, and companioned me with the stately and gracious actors in
+them.
+
+I really cannot say now whether I loved the Moors or the Spaniards more.
+I fought on both sides; I would not have had the Spaniards beaten, and
+yet when the Moors lost I was vanquished with them; and when the poor
+young King Boabdil (I was his devoted partisan and at the same time a
+follower of his fiery old uncle and rival, Hamet el Zegri) heaved the
+Last Sigh of the Moor, as his eyes left the roofs of Granada forever, it
+was as much my grief as if it had burst from my own breast.  I put both
+these princes into the first and last historical romance I ever wrote.
+I have now no idea what they did in it, but as the story never came to a
+conclusion it does not greatly matter.  I had never yet read an
+historical romance that I can make sure of, and probably my attempt must
+have been based almost solely upon the facts of Irving's history.  I am
+certain I could not have thought of adding anything to them, or at all
+varying them.
+
+In reading his 'Chronicle' I suffered for a time from its attribution to
+Fray Antonio Agapida, the pious monk whom he feigns to have written it,
+just as in reading 'Don Quixote' I suffered from Cervantes masquerading
+as the Moorish scribe, Cid Hamet Ben Engeli.  My father explained the
+literary caprice, but it remained a confusion and a trouble for me, and I
+made a practice of skipping those passages where either author insisted
+upon his invention.  I will own that I am rather glad that sort of thing
+seems to be out of fashion now, and I think the directer and franker
+methods of modern fiction will forbid its revival.  Thackeray was fond of
+such open disguises, and liked to greet his reader from the mask of
+Yellowplush and Michael Angelo Titmarsh, but it seems to me this was in
+his least modern moments.
+
+My 'Conquest of Granada' was in two octavo volumes, bound in drab boards,
+and printed on paper very much yellowed with time at its irregular edges.
+I do not know when the books happened in my hands.  I have no remembrance
+that they were in any wise offered or commended to me, and in a sort of
+way they were as authentically mine as if I had made them.  I saw them at
+home, not many months ago, in my father's library (it has long outgrown
+the old bookcase, which has gone I know not where), and upon the whole I
+rather shrank from taking them down, much more from opening them, though
+I could not say why, unless it was from the fear of perhaps finding the
+ghost of my boyish self within, pressed flat like a withered leaf,
+somewhere between the familiar pages.
+
+When I learned Spanish it was with the purpose, never yet fulfilled, of
+writing the life of Cervantes, although I have since had some forty-odd
+years to do it in.  I taught myself the language, or began to do so, when
+I knew nothing of the English grammar but the prosody at the end of the
+book.  My father had the contempt of familiarity with it, having himself
+written a very brief sketch of our accidence, and he seems to have let me
+plunge into the sea of Spanish verbs and adverbs, nouns and pronouns, and
+all the rest, when as yet I could not confidently call them by name, with
+the serene belief that if I did not swim I would still somehow get ashore
+without sinking.  The end, perhaps, justified him, and I suppose I did
+not do all that work without getting some strength from it; but I wish I
+had back the time that it cost me; I should like to waste it in some
+other way.  However, time seemed interminable then, and I thought there
+would be enough of it for me in which to read all Spanish literature; or,
+at least, I did not propose to do anything less.
+
+I followed Irving, too, in my later reading, but at haphazard, and with
+other authors at the same time.  I did my poor best to be amused by his
+'Knickerbocker History of New York', because my father liked it so much,
+but secretly I found it heavy; and a few years ago when I went carefully
+through it again.  I could not laugh.  Even as a boy I found some other
+things of his uphill work.  There was the beautiful manner, but the
+thought seemed thin; and I do not remember having been much amused by
+'Bracebridge Hall', though I read it devoutly, and with a full sense that
+it would be very 'comme il faut' to like it.  But I did like the 'Life of
+Goldsmith'; I liked it a great deal better than the more authoritative
+'Life by Forster', and I think there is a deeper and sweeter sense of
+Goldsmith in it.  Better than all, except the 'Conquest of Granada',
+I liked the 'Legend of Sleepy Hollow' and the story of Rip Van Winkle,
+with their humorous and affectionate caricatures of life that was once of
+our own soil and air; and the 'Tales of the Alhambra', which transported
+me again, to the scenes of my youth beside the Xenil.  It was long after
+my acquaintance with his work that I came to a due sense of Irving as an
+artist, and perhaps I have come to feel a full sense of it only now, when
+I perceive that he worked willingly only when he worked inventively.
+At last I can do justice to the exquisite conception of his 'Conquest of
+Granada', a study of history which, in unique measure, conveys not only
+the pathos, but the humor of one of the most splendid and impressive
+situations in the experience of the race.  Very possibly something of the
+severer truth might have been sacrificed to the effect of the pleasing
+and touching tale, but I do not under stand that this was really done.
+Upon the whole I am very well content with my first three loves in
+literature, and if I were to choose for any other boy I do not see how I
+could choose better than Goldsmith and Cervantes and Irving, kindred
+spirits, and each not a master only, but a sweet and gentle friend, whose
+kindness could not fail to profit him.
+
+
+
+
+V.  FIRST FICTION AND DRAMA
+
+In my own case there followed my acquaintance with these authors certain
+Boeotian years, when if I did not go backward I scarcely went forward in
+the paths I had set out upon.  They were years of the work, of the over-
+work, indeed, which falls to the lot of so many that I should be ashamed
+to speak of it except in accounting for the fact.  My father had sold his
+paper in Hamilton and had bought an interest in another at Dayton, and we
+were all straining our utmost to help pay for it.  My daily tasks began
+so early and ended so late that I had little time, even if I had the
+spirit, for reading; and it was not till what we thought ruin, but what
+was really release, came to us that I got back again to my books.  Then
+we went to live in the country for a year, and that stress of toil, with
+the shadow of failure darkening all, fell from me like the horror of an
+evil dream.  The only new book which I remember to have read in those two
+or three years at Dayton, when I hardly remember to have read any old
+ones, was the novel of 'Jane Eyre,' which I took in very imperfectly, and
+which I associate with the first rumor of the Rochester Knockings, then
+just beginning to reverberate through a world that they have not since
+left wholly at peace.  It was a gloomy Sunday afternoon when the book
+came under my hand; and mixed with my interest in the story was an
+anxiety lest the pictures on the walls should leave their nails and come
+and lay themselves at my feet; that was what the pictures had been doing
+in Rochester and other places where the disembodied spirits were
+beginning to make themselves felt.  The thing did not really happen in my
+case, but I was alone in the house, and it might very easily have
+happened.
+
+If very little came to me in those days from books, on the other hand my
+acquaintance with the drama vastly enlarged itself.  There was a hapless
+company of players in the town from time to time, and they came to us for
+their printing.  I believe they never paid for it, or at least never
+wholly, but they lavished free passes upon us, and as nearly as I can
+make out, at this distance of time, I profited by their generosity, every
+night.  They gave two or three plays at every performance to houses
+ungratefully small, but of a lively spirit and impatient temper that
+would not brook delay in the representation; and they changed the bill
+each day.  In this way I became familiar with Shakespeare before I read
+him, or at least such plays of his as were most given in those days, and
+I saw "Macbeth" and "Hamlet," and above all "Richard III.," again and
+again.  I do not know why my delight in those tragedies did not send me
+to the volume of his plays, which was all the time in the bookcase at
+home, but I seem not to have thought of it, and rapt as I was in them I
+am not sure that they gave me greater pleasure, or seemed at all finer,
+than "Rollo," "The Wife," "The Stranger," "Barbarossa," "The Miser of
+Marseilles," and the rest of the melodramas, comedies, and farces which I
+saw at that time.  I have a notion that there were some clever people in
+one of these companies, and that the lighter pieces at least were well
+played, but I may be altogether wrong.  The gentleman who took the part
+of villain, with an unfailing love of evil, in the different dramas, used
+to come about the printing-office a good deal, and I was puzzled to find
+him a very mild and gentle person.  To be sure he had a mustache, which
+in those days devoted a man to wickedness, but by day it was a blond
+mustache, quite flaxen, in fact, and not at all the dark and deadly thing
+it was behind the footlights at night.  I could scarcely gasp in his
+presence, my heart bounded so in awe and honor of him when he paid a
+visit to us; perhaps he used to bring the copy of the show-bills.  The
+company he belonged to left town in the adversity habitual with them.
+
+Our own adversity had been growing, and now it became overwhelming.  We
+had to give up the paper we had struggled so hard to keep, but when the
+worst came it was not half so bad as what had gone before.  There was no
+more waiting till midnight for the telegraphic news, no more waking at
+dawn to deliver the papers, no more weary days at the case, heavier for
+the doom hanging over us.  My father and his brothers had long dreamed of
+a sort of family colony somewhere in the country, and now the uncle who
+was most prosperous bought a milling property on a river not far from
+Dayton, and my father went out to take charge of it until the others
+could shape their business to follow him.  The scheme came to nothing
+finally, but in the mean time we escaped from the little city and its
+sorrowful associations of fruitless labor, and had a year in the country,
+which was blest, at least to us children, by sojourn in a log-cabin,
+while a house was building for us.
+
+
+
+
+VI.  LONGFELLOW'S "SPANISH STUDENT"
+
+This log-cabin had a loft, where we boys slept, and in the loft were
+stored in barrels the books that had now begun to overflow the bookcase.
+I do not know why I chose the loft to renew my long-neglected friendship
+with them.  The light could not have been good, though if I brought my
+books to the little gable window that overlooked the groaning and
+whistling gristmill I could see well enough.  But perhaps I liked the
+loft best because the books were handiest there, and because I could be
+alone.  At any rate, it was there that I read Longfellow's "Spanish
+Student," which I found in an old paper copy of his poems in one of the
+barrels, and I instantly conceived for it the passion which all things
+Spanish inspired in me.  As I read I not only renewed my acquaintance
+with literature, but renewed my delight in people and places where I had
+been happy before those heavy years in Dayton.  At the same time I felt a
+little jealousy, a little grudge, that any one else should love them as
+well as I, and if the poem had not been so beautiful I should have hated
+the poet for trespassing on my ground.  But I could not hold out long
+against the witchery of his verse.  The "Spanish Student" became one of
+my passions; a minor passion, not a grand one, like 'Don Quixote' and the
+'Conquest of Granada', but still a passion, and I should dread a little
+to read the piece now, lest I should disturb my old ideal of its beauty.
+The hero's rogue servant, Chispa, seemed to me, then and long afterwards,
+so fine a bit of Spanish character that I chose his name for my first
+pseudonym when I began to write for the newspapers, and signed my
+legislative correspondence for a Cincinnati paper with it.  I was in love
+with the heroine, the lovely dancer whose 'cachucha' turned my head,
+along with that of the cardinal, but whose name even I have forgotten,
+and I went about with the thought of her burning in my heart, as if she
+had been a real person.
+
+
+
+
+VII.  SCOTT
+
+All the while I was bringing up the long arrears of play which I had not
+enjoyed in the toil-years at Dayton, and was trying to make my Spanish
+reading serve in the sports that we had in the woods and by the river.
+We were Moors and Spaniards almost as often as we were British and
+Americans, or settlers and Indians.  I suspect that the large, mild boy,
+the son of a neighboring farmer, who mainly shared our games, had but a
+dim notion of what I meant by my strange people, but I did my best to
+enlighten him, and he helped me make a dream out of my life, and did his
+best to dwell in the region of unrealities where I preferably had my
+being; he was from time to time a Moor when I think he would rather have
+been a Mingo.
+
+I got hold of Scott's poems, too, in that cabin loft, and read most of
+the tales which were yet unknown to me after those earlier readings of my
+father's.  I could not say why "Harold the Dauntless" most took my fancy;
+the fine, strongly flowing rhythm of the verse had a good deal to do with
+it, I believe.  I liked these things, all of them, and in after years I
+liked the "Lady of the Lake" more and more, and from mere love of it got
+great lengths of it by heart; but I cannot say that Scott was then or
+ever a great passion with me.  It was a sobered affection at best, which
+came from my sympathy with his love of nature, and the whole kindly and
+humane keeping of his genius.  Many years later, during the month when I
+was waiting for my passport as Consul for Venice, and had the time on my
+hands, I passed it chiefly in reading all his novels, one after another,
+without the interruption of other reading.  'Ivanhoe' I had known before,
+and the 'Bride of Lammermoor' and 'Woodstock', but the rest had remained
+in that sort of abeyance which is often the fate of books people expect
+to read as a matter of course, and come very near not reading at all, or
+read only very late.  Taking them in this swift sequence, little or
+nothing of them remained with me, and my experience with them is against
+that sort of ordered and regular reading, which I have so often heard
+advised for young people by their elders.  I always suspect their elders
+of not having done that kind of reading themselves.
+
+For my own part I believe I have never got any good from a book that I
+did not read lawlessly and wilfully, out of all leading and following,
+and merely because I wanted to read it; and I here make bold to praise
+that way of doing.  The book which you read from a sense of duty, or
+because for any reason you must, does not commonly make friends with you.
+It may happen that it will yield you an unexpected delight, but this will
+be in its own unentreated way and in spite of your good intentions.
+Little of the book read for a purpose stays with the reader, and this is
+one reason why reading for review is so vain and unprofitable.  I have
+done a vast deal of this, but I have usually been aware that the book was
+subtly withholding from me the best a book can give, since I was not
+reading it for its own sake and because I loved it, but for selfish ends
+of my own, and because I wished to possess myself of it for business
+purposes, as it were.  The reading that does one good, and lasting good,
+is the reading that one does for pleasure, and simply and unselfishly,
+as children do.  Art will still withhold herself from thrift, and she
+does well, for nothing but love has any right to her.
+
+Little remains of the events of any period, however vivid they were in
+passing.  The memory may hold record of everything, as it is believed,
+but it will not be easily entreated to give up its facts, and I find
+myself striving in vein to recall the things that I must have read that
+year in the country.  Probably I read the old things over; certainly I
+kept on with Cervantes, and very likely with Goldsmith.  There was a
+delightful history of Ohio, stuffed with tales of the pioneer times,
+which was a good deal in the hands of us boys; and there was a book of
+Western Adventure, full of Indian fights and captivities, which we wore
+to pieces.  Still, I think that it was now that I began to have a
+literary sense of what I was reading.  I wrote a diary, and I tried to
+give its record form and style, but mostly failed.  The versifying which
+I was always at was easier, and yielded itself more to my hand.  I should
+be very glad to, know at present what it dealt with.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.  LIGHTER FANCIES
+
+When my uncles changed their minds in regard to colonizing their families
+at the mills, as they did in about a year, it became necessary for my
+father to look about for some new employment, and he naturally looked in
+the old direction.  There were several schemes for getting hold of this
+paper and that, and there were offers that came to nothing.  In that day
+there were few salaried editors in the country outside of New York, and
+the only hope we could have was of some place as printers in an office
+which we might finally buy.  The affair ended in our going to the State
+capital, where my father found work as a reporter of legislative
+proceedings for one of the daily journals, and I was taken into the
+office as a compositor.  In this way I came into living contact with
+literature again, and the daydreams began once more over the familiar
+cases of type.  A definite literary ambition grew up in me, and in the
+long reveries of the afternoon, when I was distributing my case,
+I fashioned a future of overpowering magnificence and undying celebrity.
+I should be ashamed to say what literary triumphs I achieved in those
+preposterous deliriums.  What I actually did was to write a good many
+copies of verse, in imitation, never owned, of Moore and Goldsmith, and
+some minor poets, whose work caught my fancy, as I read it in the
+newspapers or put it into type.
+
+One of my pieces, which fell so far short of my visionary performances as
+to treat of the lowly and familiar theme of Spring, was the first thing I
+ever had in print.  My father offered it to the editor of the paper I
+worked on, and I first knew, with mingled shame and pride, of what he had
+done when I saw it in the journal.  In the tumult of my emotions I
+promised myself that if I got through this experience safely I would
+never suffer anything else of mine to be published; but it was not long
+before I offered the editor a poem myself.  I am now glad to think it
+dealt with so humble a fact as a farmer's family leaving their old home
+for the West.  The only fame of my poem which reached me was when another
+boy in the office quoted some lines of it in derision.  This covered me
+with such confusion that I wonder that I did not vanish from the earth.
+At the same time I had my secret joy in it, and even yet I think it was
+attempted in a way which was not false or wrong.  I had tried to sketch
+an aspect of life that I had seen and known, and that was very well
+indeed, and I had wrought patiently and carefully in the art of the poor
+little affair.
+
+My elder brother, for whom there was no place in the office where I
+worked, had found one in a store, and he beguiled the leisure that light
+trade left on his hands by reading the novels of Captain Marryat.  I read
+them after him with a great deal of amusement, but without the passion
+that I bestowed upon my favorite authors.  I believe I had no critical
+reserves in regard to them, but simply they did not take my fancy.
+Still, we had great fun with Japhet in 'Search of a Father', and with
+'Midshipman Easy', and we felt a fine physical shiver in the darkling
+moods of 'Snarle-yow the Dog-Fiend.'  I do not remember even the names of
+the other novels, except 'Jacob Faithful,' which I chanced upon a few
+years ago and found very, hard reading.
+
+We children who were used to the free range of woods and fields were
+homesick for the country in our narrow city yard, and I associate with
+this longing the 'Farmer's Boy of Bloomfield,' which my father got for
+me.  It was a little book in blue cloth, and there were some mild wood-
+cuts in it.  I read it with a tempered pleasure, and with a vague
+resentment of its trespass upon Thomson's ground in the division of its
+parts under the names of the seasons.  I do not know why I need have felt
+this.  I was not yet very fond of Thomson.  I really liked Bloomfield
+better; for one thing, his poem was written in the heroic decasyllabics
+which I preferred to any other verse.
+
+
+
+
+IX.  POPE
+
+I infer, from the fact of this preference that I had already begun to
+read Pope, and that I must have read the "Deserted Village" of Goldsmith.
+I fancy, also, that I must by this time have read the Odyssey, for the
+"Battle of the Frogs and Mice" was in the second volume, and it took me
+so much that I paid it the tribute of a bald imitation in a mock-heroic
+epic of a cat fight, studied from the cat fights in our back yard, with
+the wonted invocation to the Muse, and the machinery of partisan gods and
+goddesses.  It was in some hundreds of verses, which I did my best to
+balance as Pope did, with a caesura falling in the middle of the line,
+and a neat antithesis at the end.
+
+The story of the Odyssey charmed me, of course, and I had moments of
+being intimate friends with Ulysses, but I was passing out of that phase,
+and was coming to read more with a sense of the author, and less with a
+sense of his characters as real persons; that is, I was growing more
+literary, and less human.  I fell in love with Pope, whose life I read
+with an ardor of sympathy which I am afraid he hardly merited.  I was of
+his side in all his quarrels, as far as I understood them, and if I did
+not understand them I was of his side anyway.  When I found that he was a
+Catholic I was almost ready to abjure the Protestant religion for his
+sake; but I perceived that this was not necessary when I came to know
+that most of his friends were Protestants.  If the truth must be told,
+I did not like his best things at first, but long remained chiefly
+attached to his rubbishing pastorals, which I was perpetually imitating,
+with a whole apparatus of swains and shepherdesses, purling brooks,
+enamelled meads, rolling years, and the like.
+
+After my day's work at the case I wore the evening away in my boyish
+literary attempts, forcing my poor invention in that unnatural kind, and
+rubbing and polishing at my wretched verses till they did sometimes take
+on an effect, which, if it was not like Pope's, was like none of mine.
+With all my pains I do not think I ever managed to bring any of my
+pastorals to a satisfactory close.  They all stopped somewhere about
+halfway.  My swains could not think of anything more to say, and the
+merits of my shepherdesses remained undecided.  To this day I do not know
+whether in any given instance it was the champion of Chloe or of Sylvia
+that carried off the prize for his fair, but I dare say it does not much
+matter.  I am sure that I produced a rhetoric as artificial and treated
+of things as unreal as my master in the art, and I am rather glad that I
+acquainted myself so thoroughly with a mood of literature which, whatever
+we may say against it, seems to have expressed very perfectly a mood of
+civilization.
+
+The severe schooling I gave myself was not without its immediate use.
+I learned how to choose between words after a study of their fitness,
+and though I often employed them decoratively and with no vital sense of
+their qualities, still in mere decoration they had to be chosen
+intelligently, and after some thought about their structure and meaning.
+I could not imitate Pope without imitating his methods, and his method
+was to the last degree intelligent.  He certainly knew what he was doing,
+and although I did not always know what I was doing, he made me wish to
+know, and ashamed of not knowing.  There are several truer poets who
+might not have done this; and after all the modern contempt of Pope, he
+seems to me to have been at least one of the great masters, if not one of
+the great poets.  The poor man's life was as weak and crooked as his
+frail, tormented body, but he had a dauntless spirit, and he fought his
+way against odds that might well have appalled a stronger nature.
+I suppose I must own that he was from time to time a snob, and from time
+to time a liar, but I believe that he loved the truth, and would have
+liked always to respect himself if he could.  He violently revolted,
+now and again, from the abasement to which he forced himself, and he
+always bit the heel that trod on him, especially if it was a very high,
+narrow heel, with a clocked stocking and a hooped skirt above it.
+I loved him fondly at one time, and afterwards despised him, but now I am
+not sorry for the love, and I am very sorry for the despite.  I humbly,
+own a vast debt to him, not the least part of which is the perception
+that he is a model of ever so much more to be shunned than to be followed
+in literature.
+
+He was the first of the writers of great Anna's time whom I knew, and he
+made me ready to understand, if he did not make me understand at once,
+the order of mind and life which he belonged to.  Thanks to his
+pastorals, I could long afterwards enjoy with the double sense requisite
+for full pleasure in them, such divinely excellent artificialities at
+Tasso's "Aminta" and Guarini's "Pastor Fido"; things which you will
+thoroughly like only after you are in the joke of thinking how people
+once seriously liked them as high examples of poetry.
+
+Of course I read other things of Pope's besides his pastorals, even at
+the time I read these so much.  I read, or not very easily or willingly
+read at, his 'Essay on Man,' which my father admired, and which he
+probably put Pope's works into my hands to have me read; and I read the
+'Dunciad,' with quite a furious ardor in the tiresome quarrels it
+celebrates, and an interest in its machinery, which it fatigues me to
+think of.  But it was only a few years ago that I read the 'Rape of the
+Lock,' a thing perfect of its kind, whatever we may choose to think of
+the kind.  Upon the whole I think much better of the kind than I once
+did, though still not so much as I should have thought if I had read the
+poem when the fever of my love for Pope was at the highest.
+
+It is a nice question how far one is helped or hurt by one's
+idealizations of historical or imaginary characters, and I shall not try
+to answer it fully.  I suppose that if I once cherished such a passion
+for Pope personally that I would willingly have done the things that he
+did, and told the lies, and vented the malice, and inflicted the
+cruelties that the poor soul was full of, it was for the reason, partly,
+that I did not see these things as they were, and that in the glamour of
+his talent I was blind to all but the virtues of his defects, which he
+certainly had, and partly that in my love of him I could not take sides
+against him, even when I knew him to be wrong.  After all, I fancy not
+much harm comes to the devoted boy from his enthusiasms for this
+imperfect hero or that.  In my own case I am sure that I distinguished as
+to certain sins in my idols.  I could not cast them down or cease to
+worship them, but some of their frailties grieved me and put me to secret
+shame for them.  I did not excuse these things in them, or try to believe
+that they were less evil for them than they would have been for less
+people.  This was after I came more or less to the knowledge of good and
+evil.  While I remained in the innocence of childhood I did not even
+understand the wrong.  When I realized what lives some of my poets had
+led, how they were drunkards, and swindlers, and unchaste, and untrue,
+I lamented over them with a sense of personal disgrace in them, and to
+this day I have no patience with that code of the world which relaxes
+itself in behalf of the brilliant and gifted offender; rather he should
+suffer more blame. The worst of the literature of past times, before an
+ethical conscience began to inform it, or the advance of the race
+compelled it to decency, is that it leaves the mind foul with filthy
+images and base thoughts; but what I have been trying to say is that the
+boy, unless he is exceptionally depraved beforehand, is saved from these
+through his ignorance.  Still I wish they were not there, and I hope the
+time will come when the beast-man will be so far subdued and tamed in us
+that the memory of him in literature shall be left to perish; that what
+is lewd and ribald in the great poets shall be kept out of such editions
+as are meant for general reading, and that the pedant-pride which now
+perpetuates it as an essential part of those poets shall no longer have
+its way.  At the end of the ends such things do defile, they do corrupt.
+We may palliate them or excuse them for this reason or that, but that is
+the truth, and I do not see why they should not be dropped from
+literature, as they were long ago dropped from the talk of decent people.
+The literary histories might keep record of them, but it is loath some to
+think of those heaps of ordure, accumulated from generation to
+generation, and carefully passed down from age to age as something
+precious and vital, and not justly regarded as the moral offal which they
+are.
+
+During the winter we passed at Columbus I suppose that my father read
+things aloud to us after his old habit, and that I listened with the
+rest.  I have a dim notion of first knowing Thomson's 'Castle of
+Indolence' in this way, but I was getting more and more impatient of
+having things read to me.  The trouble was that I caught some thought or
+image from the text, and that my fancy remained playing with that while
+the reading went on, and I lost the rest.  But I think the reading was
+less in every way than it had been, because his work was exhausting and
+his leisure less.  My own hours in the printing-office began at seven and
+ended at six, with an hour at noon for dinner, which I often used for
+putting down such verses as had come to me during the morning.  As soon
+as supper was over at night I got out my manuscripts, which I kept in
+great disorder, and written in several different hands on several
+different kinds of paper, and sawed, and filed, and hammered away at my
+blessed Popean heroics till nine, when I went regularly to bed, to rise
+again at five.  Sometimes the foreman gave me an afternoon off on
+Saturdays, and though the days were long the work was not always
+constant, and was never very severe.  I suspect now the office was not so
+prosperous as might have been wished.  I was shifted from place to place
+in it, and there was plenty of time for my day-dreams over the
+distribution of my case.  I was very fond of my work, though, and proud
+of my swiftness and skill in it.  Once when the perplexed foreman could
+not think of any task to set me he offered me a holiday, but I would not
+take it, so I fancy that at this time I was not more interested in my art
+of poetry than in my trade of printing.  What went on in the office
+interested me as much as the quarrels of the Augustan age of English
+letters, and I made much more record of it in the crude and shapeless
+diary which I kept, partly in verse and partly in prose, but always of a
+distinctly lower literary kind than that I was trying otherwise to write.
+There must have been some mention in it of the tremendous combat with wet
+sponges I saw there one day between two of the boys who hurled them back
+and forth at each other.  This amiable fray, carried on during the
+foreman's absence, forced upon my notice for the first time the boy who
+has come to be a name well-known in literature.  I admired his vigor as a
+combatant, but I never spoke to him at that time, and I never dreamed
+that he, too, was effervescing with verse, probably as fiercely as
+myself.  Six or seven years later we met again, when we had both become
+journalists, and had both had poems accepted by Mr. Lowell for the
+Atlantic Monthly, and then we formed a literary friendship which
+eventuated in the joint publication of a volume of verse.  'The Poems of
+Two Friends' became instantly and lastingly unknown to fame; the West
+waited, as it always does, to hear what the East should say; the East
+said nothing, and two-thirds of the small edition of five hundred came
+back upon the publisher's hands.  I imagine these copies were "ground up"
+in the manner of worthless stock, for I saw a single example of the book
+quoted the other day in a book-seller's catalogue at ten dollars, and I
+infer that it is so rare as to be prized at least for its rarity.  It was
+a very pretty little book, printed on tinted paper then called "blush,"
+in the trade, and it was manufactured in the same office where we had
+once been boys together, unknown to each other.  Another boy of that time
+had by this time become foreman in the office, and he was very severe
+with us about the proofs, and sent us hurting messages on the margin.
+Perhaps he thought we might be going to take on airs, and perhaps we
+might have taken on airs if the fate of our book had been different.
+As it was I really think we behaved with sufficient meekness, and after
+thirty four or five years for reflection I am still of a very modest mind
+about my share of the book, in spite of the price it bears in the book-
+seller's catalogue.  But I have steadily grown in liking for my friend's
+share in it, and I think that there is at present no American of twenty-
+three writing verse of so good a quality, with an ideal so pure and high,
+and from an impulse so authentic as John J. Piatt's were then.  He
+already knew how to breathe into his glowing rhyme the very spirit of the
+region where we were both native, and in him the Middle West has its true
+poet, who was much more than its poet, who had a rich and tender
+imagination, a lovely sense of color, and a touch even then securely and
+fully his own.  I was reading over his poems in that poor little book a
+few days ago, and wondering with shame and contrition that I had not at
+once known their incomparable superiority to mine.  But I used then and
+for long afterwards to tax him with obscurity, not knowing that my own
+want of simplicity and directness was to blame for that effect.
+My reading from the first was such as to enamour me of clearness, of
+definiteness; anything left in the vague was intolerable to me; but my
+long subjection to Pope, while it was useful in other ways, made me so
+strictly literary in my point of view that sometimes I could not see what
+was, if more naturally approached and without any technical
+preoccupation, perfectly transparent.  It remained for another great
+passion, perhaps the greatest of my life, to fuse these gyves in which I
+was trying so hard to dance, and free me forever from the bonds which I
+had spent so much time and trouble to involve myself in.  But I was not
+to know that passion for five or six years yet, and in the mean time I
+kept on as I had been going, and worked out my deliverance in the
+predestined way.  What I liked then was regularity, uniformity,
+exactness.  I did not conceive of literature as the expression of life,
+and I could not imagine that it ought to be desultory, mutable, and
+unfixed, even if at the risk of some vagueness.
+
+
+
+
+X.  VARIOUS PREFERENCES
+
+My father was very fond of Byron, and I must before this have known that
+his poems were in our bookcase.  While we were still in Columbus I began
+to read them, but I did not read so much of them as could have helped me
+to a truer and freer ideal.  I read "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers,"
+and I liked its vulgar music and its heavy-handed sarcasm.  These would,
+perhaps, have fascinated any boy, but I had such a fanaticism for
+methodical verse that any variation from the octosyllabic and
+decasyllabic couplets was painful to me.  The Spencerian stanza, with its
+rich variety of movement and its harmonious closes, long shut "Childe
+Harold" from me, and whenever I found a poem in any book which did not
+rhyme its second line with its first I read it unwillingly or not at all.
+
+This craze could not last, of course, but it lasted beyond our stay in
+Columbus, which ended with the winter, when the Legislature adjourned,
+and my father's employment ceased.  He tried to find some editorial work
+on the paper which had printed his reports, but every place was full, and
+it was hopeless to dream of getting a proprietary interest in it.  We had
+nothing, and we must seek a chance where something besides money would
+avail us.  This offered itself in the village of Ashtabula, in the
+northeastern part of the State, and there we all found ourselves one
+moonlight night of early summer.  The Lake Shore Railroad then ended at
+Ashtabula, in a bank of sand, and my elder brother and I walked up from
+the station, while the rest of the family, which pretty well filled the
+omnibus, rode.  We had been very happy at Columbus, as we were apt to be
+anywhere, but none of us liked the narrowness of city streets, even so
+near to the woods as those were, and we were eager for the country again.
+We had always lived hitherto in large towns, except for that year at the
+Mills, and we were eager to see what a village was like, especially a
+village peopled wholly by Yankees, as our father had reported it.  I must
+own that we found it far prettier than anything we had known in Southern
+Ohio, which we were so fond of and so loath to leave, and as I look back
+it still seems to me one of the prettiest little places I have ever
+known, with its white wooden houses, glimmering in the dark of its elms
+and maples, and their silent gardens beside each, and the silent, grass-
+bordered, sandy streets between them.  The hotel, where we rejoined our
+family, lurked behind a group of lofty elms, and we drank at the town
+pump before it just for the pleasure of pumping it.
+
+The village was all that we could have imagined of simply and sweetly
+romantic in the moonlight, and when the day came it did not rob it of its
+charm.  It was as lovely in my eyes as the loveliest village of the
+plain, and it had the advantage of realizing the Deserted Village without
+being deserted.
+
+
+
+
+XI.  UNCLE TOM'S CABIN
+
+The book that moved me most, in our stay of six months at Ashtabula, was
+then beginning to move the whole world more than any other book has moved
+it.  I read it as it came out week after week in the old National Era,
+and I broke my heart over Uncle Tom's Cabin, as every one else did.  Yet
+I cannot say that it was a passion of mine like Don Quixote, or the other
+books that I had loved intensely.  I felt its greatness when I read it
+first, and as often as I have read it since, I have seen more and more
+clearly that it was a very great novel.  With certain obvious lapses in
+its art, and with an art that is at its best very simple, and perhaps
+primitive, the book is still a work of art.  I knew this, in a measure
+then, as I know it now, and yet neither the literary pride I was
+beginning to have in the perception of such things, nor the powerful
+appeal it made to my sympathies, sufficed to impassion me of it.  I could
+not say why this was so.  Why does the young man's fancy, when it lightly
+turns to thoughts of love, turn this way and not that?  There seems no
+more reason for one than for the other.
+
+Instead of remaining steeped to the lips in the strong interest of what
+is still perhaps our chief fiction, I shed my tribute of tears, and went
+on my way.  I did not try to write a story of slaver, as I might very
+well have done; I did not imitate either the make or the manner of Mrs.
+Stowe's romance; I kept on at my imitation of Pope's pastorals, which I
+dare say I thought much finer, and worthier the powers of such a poet as
+I meant to be.  I did this, as I must have felt then, at some personal
+risk of a supernatural kind, for my studies were apt to be prolonged into
+the night after the rest of the family had gone to bed, and a certain
+ghost, which I had every reason to fear, might very well have visited the
+small room given me to write in.  There was a story, which I shrank from
+verifying, that a former inmate of our house had hung himself in it, but
+I do not know to this day whether it was true or not.  The doubt did not
+prevent him from dangling at the door-post, in my consciousness, and many
+a time I shunned the sight of this problematical suicide by keeping my
+eyes fastened on the book before me.  It was a very simple device, but
+perfectly effective, as I think any one will find who employs it in like
+circumstances; and I would really like to commend it to growing boys
+troubled as I was then.
+
+I never heard who the poor soul was, or why he took himself out of the
+world, if he really did so, or if he ever was in it; but I am sure that
+my passion for Pope, and my purpose of writing pastorals, must have been
+powerful indeed to carry me through dangers of that kind.  I suspect that
+the strongest proof of their existence was the gloomy and ruinous look of
+the house, which was one of the oldest in the village, and the only one
+that was for rent there.  We went into it because we must, and we were to
+leave it as soon as we could find a better.  But before this happened we
+left Ashtabula, and I parted with one of the few possibilities I have
+enjoyed of seeing a ghost on his own ground, as it were.
+
+I was not sorry, for I believe I never went in or came out of the place,
+by day or by night, without a shudder, more or less secret; and at least,
+now, we should be able to get another house.
+
+
+
+
+XII.  OSSIAN
+
+Very likely the reading of Ossian had something to do with my morbid
+anxieties.  I had read Byron's imitation of him before that, and admired
+it prodigiously, and when my father got me the book--as usual I did not
+know where or how he got it--not all the tall forms that moved before the
+eyes of haunted bards in the dusky vale of autumn could have kept me from
+it.  There were certain outline illustrations in it, which were very good
+in the cold Flaxman manner, and helped largely to heighten the
+fascination of the poems for me.  They did not supplant the pastorals of
+Pope in my affections, and they were never the grand passion with me that
+Pope's poems had been.
+
+I began at once to make my imitations of Ossian, and I dare say they were
+not windier and mistier than the original.  At the same time I read the
+literature of the subject, and gave the pretensions of Macpherson an
+unquestioning faith.  I should have made very short work of any one who
+had impugned the authenticity of the poems, but happily there was no one
+who held the contrary opinion in that village, so far as I knew, or who
+cared for Ossian, or had even heard of him.  This saved me a great deal
+of heated controversy with my contemporaries, but I had it out in many
+angry reveries with Dr. Johnson and others, who had dared to say in their
+time that the poems of Ossian were not genuine lays of the Gaelic bard,
+handed down from father to son, and taken from the lips of old women in
+Highland huts, as Macpherson claimed.
+
+In fact I lived over in my small way the epoch of the eighteenth century
+in which these curious frauds found polite acceptance all over Europe,
+and I think yet that they were really worthier of acceptance than most of
+the artificialities that then passed for poetry.  There was a light of
+nature in them, and this must have been what pleased me, so long-shut up
+to the studio-work of Pope.  But strangely enough I did not falter in my
+allegiance to him, or realize that here in this free form was a
+deliverance, if I liked, from the fetters and manacles which I had been
+at so much pains to fit myself with.  Probably nothing would then have
+persuaded me to put them off permanently, or to do more than lay them
+aside for the moment while I tried that new stop and that new step.
+
+I think that even then I had an instinctive doubt whether formlessness
+was really better than formality.  Something, it seems to me, may be
+contained and kept alive in formality, but in formlessness everything
+spills and wastes away.  This is what I find the fatal defect of our
+American Ossian, Walt Whitman, whose way is where artistic madness lies.
+He had great moments, beautiful and noble thoughts, generous aspirations,
+and a heart wide and warm enough for the whole race, but he had no
+bounds, no shape; he was as liberal as the casing air, but he was often
+as vague and intangible.  I cannot say how long my passion for Ossian
+lasted, but not long, I fancy, for I cannot find any trace of it in the
+time following our removal from Ashtabula to the county seat at
+Jefferson.  I kept on with Pope, I kept on with Cervantes, I kept on with
+Irving, but I suppose there was really not substance enough in Ossian to
+feed my passion, and it died of inanition.
+
+
+
+
+XIII.  SHAKESPEARE
+
+The establishment of our paper in the village where there had been none
+before, and its enlargement from four to eight pages, were events so
+filling that they left little room for any other excitement but that of
+getting acquainted with the young people of the village, and going to
+parties, and sleigh rides, and walks, and drives, and picnics, and
+dances, and all the other pleasures in which that community seemed to
+indulge beyond any other we had known.  The village was smaller than the
+one we had just left, but it was by no means less lively, and I think
+that for its size and time and place it had an uncommon share of what has
+since been called culture.  The intellectual experience of the people was
+mainly theological and political, as it was everywhere in that day, but
+there were several among them who had a real love for books, and when
+they met at the druggist's, as they did every night, to dispute of the
+inspiration of the Scriptures and the principles of the Free Soil party,
+the talk sometimes turned upon the respective merits of Dickens and
+Thackeray, Gibbon and Macaulay, Wordsworth and Byron.  There were law
+students who read "Noctes Ambrosianae," the 'Age of Reason', and Bailey's
+"Festus," as well as Blackstone's 'Commentaries;' and there was a public
+library in that village of six hundred people, small but very well
+selected, which was kept in one of the lawyers' offices, and was free to
+all.  It seems to me now that the people met there oftener than they do
+in most country places, and rubbed their wits together more, but this may
+be one of those pleasing illusions of memory which men in later life are
+subject to.
+
+I insist upon nothing, but certainly the air was friendlier to the tastes
+I had formed than any I had yet known, and I found a wider if not deeper
+sympathy with them.  There was one of our printers who liked books, and
+we went through 'Don Quixote' together again, and through the 'Conquest
+of Granada', and we began to read other things of Irving's.  There was a
+very good little stock of books at the village drugstore, and among those
+that began to come into my hands were the poems of Dr. Holmes, stray
+volumes of De Quincey, and here and there minor works of Thackeray.
+I believe I had no money to buy them, but there was an open account,
+or a comity, between the printer and the bookseller, and I must have been
+allowed a certain discretion in regard to getting books.
+
+Still I do not think I went far in the more modern authors, or gave my
+heart to any of them.  Suddenly, it was now given to Shakespeare, without
+notice or reason, that I can recall, except that my friend liked him too,
+and that we found it a double pleasure to read him together.  Printers in
+the old-time offices were always spouting Shakespeare more or less, and I
+suppose I could not have kept away from him much longer in the nature of
+things.  I cannot fix the time or place when my friend and I began to
+read him, but it was in the fine print of that unhallowed edition of
+ours, and presently we had great lengths of him by heart, out of
+"Hamlet," out of "The Tempest," out of "Macbeth," out of "Richard III.,"
+out of "Midsummer-Night's Dream," out of the "Comedy of Errors," out of
+"Julius Caesar," out of "Measure for Measure," out of "Romeo and Juliet,"
+out of "Two Gentlemen of Verona."
+
+These were the plays that we loved, and must have read in common, or at
+least at the same time: but others that I more especially liked were the
+Histories, and among them particularly were the Henrys, where Falstaff
+appeared.  This gross and palpable reprobate greatly took my fancy.
+I delighted in him immensely, and in his comrades, Pistol, and Bardolph,
+and Nym.  I could not read of his death without emotion, and it was a
+personal pang to me when the prince, crowned king, denied him: blackguard
+for blackguard, I still think the prince the worse blackguard.  Perhaps I
+flatter myself, but I believe that even then, as a boy of sixteen,
+I fully conceived of Falstaff's character, and entered into the author's
+wonderfully humorous conception of him.  There is no such perfect
+conception of the selfish sensualist in literature, and the conception is
+all the more perfect because of the wit that lights up the vice of
+Falstaff, a cold light without tenderness, for he was not a good fellow,
+though a merry companion.  I am not sure but I should put him beside
+Hamlet, and on the name level, for the merit of his artistic
+completeness, and at one time I much preferred him, or at least his
+humor.
+
+As to Falstaff personally, or his like, I was rather fastidious, and
+would not have made friends with him in the flesh, much or little.
+I revelled in all his appearances in the Histories, and I tried to be as
+happy where a factitious and perfunctory Falstaff comes to life again in
+the "Merry Wives of Windsor," though at the bottom of my heart I felt the
+difference.  I began to make my imitations of Shakespeare, and I wrote 57
+out passages where Falstaff and Pistol and Bardolph talked together, in
+that Ercles vein which is so easily caught.  This was after a year or two
+of the irregular and interrupted acquaintance with the author which has
+been my mode of friendship with all the authors I have loved.  My worship
+of Shakespeare went to heights and lengths that it had reached with no
+earlier idol, and there was a supreme moment, once, when I found myself
+saying that the creation of Shakespeare was as great as the creation of a
+planet.
+
+There ought certainly to be some bound beyond which the cult of favorite
+authors should not be suffered to go.  I should keep well within the
+limit of that early excess now, and should not liken the creation of
+Shakespeare to the creation of any heavenly body bigger, say, than one of
+the nameless asteroids that revolve between Mars and Jupiter.  Even this
+I do not feel to be a true means of comparison, and I think that in the
+case of all great men we like to let our wonder mount and mount, till it
+leaves the truth behind, and honesty is pretty much cast out as ballast.
+A wise criticism will no more magnify Shakespeare because he is already
+great than it will magnify any less man.  But we are loaded down with the
+responsibility of finding him all we have been told he is, and we must do
+this or suspect ourselves of a want of taste, a want of sensibility.  At
+the same time, we may really be honester than those who have led us to
+expect this or that of him, and more truly his friends.  I wish the time
+might come when we could read Shakespeare, and Dante, and Homer, as
+sincerely and as fairly as we read any new book by the least known of our
+contemporaries.  The course of criticism is towards this, but when I
+began to read Shakespeare I should not have ventured to think that he was
+not at every moment great.  I should no more have thought of questioning
+the poetry of any passage in him than of questioning the proofs of holy
+writ.  All the same, I knew very well that much which I read was really
+poor stuff, and the persons and positions were often preposterous.  It is
+a great pity that the ardent youth should not be permitted and even
+encouraged to say this to himself, instead of falling slavishly before a
+great author and accepting him at all points as infallible.  Shakespeare
+is fine enough and great enough when all the possible detractions are
+made, and I have no fear of saying now that he would be finer and greater
+for the loss of half his work, though if I had heard any one say such a
+thing then I should have held him as little better than one of the
+wicked.
+
+Upon the whole it was well that I had not found my way to Shakespeare
+earlier, though it is rather strange that I had not.  I knew him on the
+stage in most of the plays that used to be given.  I had shared the
+conscience of Macbeth, the passion of Othello, the doubt of Hamlet; many
+times, in my natural affinity for villains, I had mocked and suffered
+with Richard III.
+
+Probably no dramatist ever needed the stage less, and none ever brought
+more to it.  There have been few joys for me in life comparable to that
+of seeing the curtain rise on "Hamlet," and hearing the guards begin to
+talk about the ghost; and yet how fully this joy imparts itself without
+any material embodiment!  It is the same in the whole range of his plays:
+they fill the scene, but if there is no scene they fill the soul.  They
+are neither worse nor better because of the theatre.  They are so great
+that it cannot hamper them; they are so vital that they enlarge it to
+their own proportions and endue it with something of their own living
+force.  They make it the size of life, and yet they retire it so wholly
+that you think no more of it than you think of the physiognomy of one who
+talks importantly to you.  I have heard people say that they would rather
+not see Shakespeare played than to see him played ill, but I cannot agree
+with them.  He can better afford to be played ill than any other man that
+ever wrote.  Whoever is on the stage, it is always Shakespeare who is
+speaking to me, and perhaps this is the reason why in the past I can
+trace no discrepancy between reading his plays and seeing them.
+
+The effect is so equal from either experience that I am not sure as to
+some plays whether I read them or saw them first, though as to most of
+them I am aware that I never saw them at all; and if the whole truth must
+be told there is still one of his plays that I have not read, and I
+believe it is esteemed one of his greatest.  There are several, with all
+my reading of others, that I had not read till within a few years; and I
+do not think I should have lost much if I, had never read "Pericles" and
+"Winter's Tale."
+
+In those early days I had no philosophized preference for reality in
+literature, and I dare say if I had been asked, I should have said that
+the plays of Shakespeare where reality is least felt were the most
+imaginative; that is the belief of the puerile critics still; but I
+suppose it was my instinctive liking for reality that made the great
+Histories so delightful to me, and that rendered "Macbeth" and "Hamlet"
+vital in their very ghosts and witches.  There I found a world
+appreciable to experience, a world inexpressibly vaster and grander than
+the poor little affair that I had only known a small obscure corner of,
+and yet of one quality with it, so that I could be as much at home and
+citizen in it as where I actually lived.  There I found joy and sorrow
+mixed, and nothing abstract or typical, but everything standing for
+itself, and not for some other thing.  Then, I suppose it was the
+interfusion of humor through so much of it, that made it all precious and
+friendly.  I think I had a native love of laughing, which was fostered in
+me by my father's way of looking at life, and had certainly been
+flattered by my intimacy with Cervantes; but whether this was so or not,
+I know that I liked best and felt deepest those plays and passages in
+Shakespeare where the alliance of the tragic and the comic was closest.
+Perhaps in a time when self-consciousness is so widespread, it is the
+only thing that saves us from ourselves.  I am sure that without it I
+should not have been naturalized to that world of Shakespeare's
+Histories, where I used to spend so much of my leisure, with such a sense
+of his own intimate companionship there as I had nowhere else.  I felt
+that he must somehow like my being in the joke of it all, and that in his
+great heart he had room for a boy willing absolutely to lose himself in
+him, and be as one of his creations.
+
+It was the time of life with me when a boy begins to be in love with the
+pretty faces that then peopled this world so thickly, and I did not fail
+to fall in love with the ladies of that Shakespeare-world where I lived
+equally.  I cannot tell whether it was because I found them like my
+ideals here, or whether my ideals acquired merit because of their
+likeness to the realities there; they appeared to be all of one degree of
+enchanting loveliness; but upon the whole I must have preferred them in
+the plays, because it was so much easier to get on with them there; I was
+always much better dressed there; I was vastly handsomer; I was not
+bashful or afraid, and I had some defects of these advantages to contend
+with here.
+
+That friend of mine, the printer whom I have mentioned, was one with me
+in a sense of the Shakespearean humor, and he dwelt with me in the sort
+of double being I had in those two worlds.  We took the book into the
+woods at the ends of the long summer afternoons that remained to us when
+we had finished our work, and on the shining Sundays of the warm, late
+spring, the early, warm autumn, and we read it there on grassy slopes or
+heaps of fallen leaves; so that much of the poetry is mixed for me with a
+rapturous sense of the out-door beauty of this lovely natural world.
+We read turn about, one taking the story up as the other tired, and as we
+read the drama played itself under the open sky and in the free air with
+such orchestral effects as the soughing woods or some rippling stream
+afforded.  It was not interrupted when a squirrel dropped a nut on us
+from the top of a tall hickory; and the plaint of a meadow-lark prolonged
+itself with unbroken sweetness from one world to the other.
+
+But I think it takes two to read in the open air.  The pressure of walls
+is wanted to keep the mind within itself when one reads alone; otherwise
+it wanders and disperses itself through nature.  When my friend left us
+for want of work in the office, or from the vagarious impulse which is so
+strong in our craft, I took my Shakespeare no longer to the woods and
+fields, but pored upon him mostly by night, in the narrow little space
+which I had for my study, under the stairs at home.  There was a desk
+pushed back against the wall, which the irregular ceiling eloped down to
+meet behind it, and at my left was a window, which gave a good light on
+the writing-leaf of my desk.  This was my workshop for six or seven
+years, and it was not at all a bad one; I have had many since that were
+not so much to the purpose; and though I would not live my life over, I
+would willingly enough have that little study mine again.  But it is gone
+an utterly as the faces and voices that made home around it, and that I
+was fierce to shut out of it, so that no sound or sight should molest me
+in the pursuit of the end which I sought gropingly, blindly, with very
+little hope, but with an intense ambition, and a courage that gave way
+under no burden, before no obstacle.  Long ago changes were made in the
+low, rambling house which threw my little closet into a larger room; but
+this was not until after I had left it many years; and as long as I
+remained a part of that dear and simple home it was my place to read, to
+write, to muse, to dream.
+
+I sometimes wish in these later years that I had spent less time in it,
+or that world of books which it opened into; that I had seen more of the
+actual world, and had learned to know my brethren in it better.  I might
+so have amassed more material for after use in literature, but I had to
+fit myself to use it, and I suppose that this was what I was doing, in my
+own way, and by such light as I had.  I often toiled wrongly and
+foolishly; but certainly I toiled, and I suppose no work is wasted.  Some
+strength, I hope, was coming to me, even from my mistakes, and though I
+went over ground that I need not have traversed, if I had not been left
+so much to find the way alone, yet I was not standing still, and some of
+the things that I then wished to do I have done.  I do not mind owning
+that in others I have failed.  For instance, I have never surpassed
+Shakespeare as a poet, though I once firmly meant to do so; but then, it
+is to be remembered that very few other people have surpassed him, and
+that it would not have been easy.
+
+
+
+
+XIV.  IK MARVEL
+
+My ardor for Shakespeare must have been at its height when I was between
+sixteen and seventeen years old, for I fancy when I began to formulate my
+admiration, and to try to measure his greatness in phrases, I was less
+simply impassioned than at some earlier time.  At any rate, I am sure
+that I did not proclaim his planetary importance in creation until I was
+at least nineteen.  But even at an earlier age I no longer worshipped at
+a single shrine; there were many gods in the temple of my idolatry, and I
+bowed the knee to them all in a devotion which, if it was not of one
+quality, was certainly impartial.  While I was reading, and thinking, and
+living Shakespeare with such an intensity that I do not see how there
+could have been room in my consciousness for anything else, there seem to
+have been half a dozen other divinities there, great and small, whom I
+have some present difficulty in distinguishing.  I kept Irving, and
+Goldsmith, and Cervantes on their old altars, but I added new ones, and
+these I translated from the contemporary: literary world quite as often
+as from the past.  I am rather glad that among them was the gentle and
+kindly Ik Marvel, whose 'Reveries of a Bachelor' and whose 'Dream Life'
+the young people of that day were reading with a tender rapture which
+would not be altogether surprising, I dare say, to the young people of
+this.  The books have survived the span of immortality fixed by our
+amusing copyright laws, and seem now, when any pirate publisher may
+plunder their author, to have a new life before them.  Perhaps this is
+ordered by Providence, that those who have no right to them may profit by
+them, in that divine contempt of such profit which Providence so often
+shows.
+
+I cannot understand just how I came to know of the books, but I suppose
+it was through the contemporary criticism which I was then beginning to
+read, wherever I could find it, in the magazines and newspapers; and I
+could not say why I thought it would be very 'comme il faut' to like
+them.  Probably the literary fine world, which is always rubbing
+shoulders with the other fine world, and bringing off a little of its
+powder and perfume, was then dawning upon me, and I was wishing to be of
+it, and to like the things that it liked; I am not so anxious to do it
+now.  But if this is true, I found the books better than their friends,
+and had many a heartache from their pathos, many a genuine glow of
+purpose from their high import, many a tender suffusion from their
+sentiment.  I dare say I should find their pose now a little old-
+fashioned.  I believe it was rather full of sighs, and shrugs and starts,
+expressed in dashes, and asterisks, and exclamations, but I am sure that
+the feeling was the genuine and manly sort which is of all times and
+always the latest wear.  Whatever it was, it sufficed to win my heart,
+and to identify me with whatever was most romantic and most pathetic in
+it.  I read 'Dream Life' first--though the 'Reveries of a Bachelor' was
+written first, and I believe is esteemed the better book--and 'Dream
+Life' remains first in my affections.  I have now little notion what it
+was about, but I love its memory.  The book is associated especially in
+my mind with one golden day of Indian summer, when I carried it into the
+woods with me, and abandoned myself to a welter of emotion over its page.
+I lay, under a crimson maple, and I remember how the light struck through
+it and flushed the print with the gules of the foliage.  My friend was
+away by this time on one of his several absences in the Northwest, and I
+was quite alone in the absurd and irrelevant melancholy with which I read
+myself and my circumstances into the book.  I began to read them out
+again in due time, clothed with the literary airs and graces that I
+admired in it, and for a long time I imitated Ik Marvel in the voluminous
+letters I wrote my friend in compliance with his Shakespearean prayer:
+
+          "To Milan let me hear from thee by letters,
+          Of thy success in love, and what news else
+          Betideth here in absence of thy friend;
+          And I likewise will visit thee with mine."
+
+Milan was then presently Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and Verona was our little
+village; but they both served the soul of youth as well as the real
+places would have done, and were as really Italian as anything else in
+the situation was really this or that.  Heaven knows what gaudy
+sentimental parade we made in our borrowed plumes, but if the travesty
+had kept itself to the written word it would have been all well enough.
+My misfortune was to carry it into print when I began to write a story,
+in the Ik Marvel manner, or rather to compose it in type at the case, for
+that was what I did; and it was not altogether imitated from Ik Marvel
+either, for I drew upon the easier art of Dickens at times, and helped
+myself out with bald parodies of Bleak House in many places.  It was all
+very well at the beginning, but I had not reckoned with the future
+sufficiently to have started with any clear ending in my mind, and as I
+went on I began to find myself more and more in doubt about it.  My
+material gave out; incidents failed me; the characters wavered and
+threatened to perish on my hands.  To crown my misery there grew up an
+impatience with the story among its readers, and this found its way to me
+one day when I overheard an old farmer who came in for his paper say that
+he did not think that story amounted to much.  I did not think so either,
+but it was deadly to have it put into words, and how I escaped the mortal
+effect of the stroke I do not know.  Somehow I managed to bring the
+wretched thing to a close, and to live it slowly into the past.  Slowly
+it seemed then, but I dare say it was fast enough; and there is always
+this consolation to be whispered in the ear of wounded vanity, that the
+world's memory is equally bad for failure and success; that if it will
+not keep your triumphs in mind as you think it ought, neither will it
+long dwell upon your defeats.  But that experience was really terrible.
+It was like some dreadful dream one has of finding one's self in battle
+without the courage needed to carry one creditably through the action,
+or on the stage unprepared by study of the part which one is to appear
+in.  I have hover looked at that story since, so great was the shame and
+anguish that I suffered from it, and yet I do not think it was badly
+conceived, or attempted upon lines that were mistaken.  If it were not
+for what happened in the past I might like some time to write a story on
+the same lines in the future.
+
+
+
+
+XV.  DICKENS
+
+What I have said of Dickens reminds me that I had been reading him at the
+same time that I had been reading Ik Marvel; but a curious thing about
+the reading of my later boyhood is that the dates do not sharply detach
+themselves one from another.  This may be so because my reading was much
+more multifarious than it had been earlier, or because I was reading
+always two or three authors at a time.  I think Macaulay a little
+antedated Dickens in my affections, but when I came to the novels of that
+masterful artist (as I must call him, with a thousand reservations as to
+the times when he is not a master and not an artist), I did not fail to
+fall under his spell.
+
+This was in a season of great depression, when I began to feel in broken
+health the effect of trying to burn my candle at both ends.  It seemed
+for a while very simple and easy to come home in the middle of the
+afternoon, when my task at the printing-office was done, and sit down to
+my books in my little study, which I did not finally leave until the
+family were in bed; but it was not well, and it was not enough that I
+should like to do it.  The most that can be said in defence of such a
+thing is that with the strong native impulse and the conditions it was
+inevitable.  If I was to do the thing I wanted to do I was to do it in
+that way, and I wanted to do that thing, whatever it was, more than I
+wanted to do anything else, and even more than I wanted to do nothing.
+I cannot make out that I was fond of study, or cared for the things I was
+trying to do, except as a means to other things.  As far as my pleasure
+went, or my natural bent was concerned, I would rather have been
+wandering through the woods with a gun on my shoulder, or lying under a
+tree, or reading some book that cost me no sort of effort.  But there was
+much more than my pleasure involved; there was a hope to fulfil, an aim
+to achieve, and I could no more have left off trying for what I hoped and
+aimed at than I could have left off living, though I did not know very
+distinctly what either was.  As I look back at the endeavor of those days
+much of it seems mere purblind groping, wilful and wandering.  I can see
+that doing all by myself I was not truly a law to myself, but only a sort
+of helpless force.
+
+I studied Latin because I believed that I should read the Latin authors,
+and I suppose I got as much of the language as most school-boys of my
+age, but I never read any Latin author but Cornelius Nepos.  I studied
+Greek, and I learned so much of it as to read a chapter of the Testament,
+and an ode of Anacreon.  Then I left it, not because I did not mean to go
+farther, or indeed stop short of reading all Greek literature, but
+because that friend of mine and I talked it over and decided that I could
+go on with Greek any time, but I had better for the present study German,
+with the help of a German who had come to the village.  Apparently I was
+carrying forward an attack on French at the same time, for I distinctly
+recall my failure to enlist with me an old gentleman who had once lived a
+long time in France, and whom I hoped to get at least an accent from.
+Perhaps because he knew he had no accent worth speaking of, or perhaps
+because he did not want the bother of imparting it, he never would keep
+any of the engagements he made with me, and when we did meet he so
+abounded in excuses and subterfuges that he finally escaped me, and I was
+left to acquire an Italian accent of French in Venice seven or eight
+years later.  At the same time I was reading Spanish, more or less,
+but neither wisely nor too well.  Having had so little help in my
+studies, I had a stupid pride in refusing all, even such as I might have
+availed myself of, without shame, in books, and I would not read any
+Spanish author with English notes.  I would have him in an edition wholly
+Spanish from beginning to end, and I would fight my way through him
+single-handed, with only such aid as I must borrow from a lexicon.
+
+I now call this stupid, but I have really no more right to blame the boy
+who was once I than I have to praise him, and I am certainly not going to
+do that.  In his day and place he did what he could in his own way; he
+had no true perspective of life, but I do not know that youth ever has
+that.  Some strength came to him finally from the mere struggle,
+undirected and misdirected as it often was, and such mental fibre as he
+had was toughened by the prolonged stress.  It could be said, of course,
+that the time apparently wasted in these effectless studies could have
+been well spent in deepening and widening a knowledge of English
+literature never yet too great, and I have often said this myself; but
+then, again, I am not sure that the studies were altogether effectless.
+I have sometimes thought that greater skill had come to my hand from them
+than it would have had without, and I have trusted that in making known
+to me the sources of so much English, my little Latin and less Greek have
+enabled me to use my own speech with a subtler sense of it than I should
+have had otherwise.
+
+But I will by no means insist upon my conjecture.  What is certain is
+that for the present my studies, without method and without stint, began
+to tell upon my health, and that my nerves gave way in all manner of
+hypochondriacal fears.  These finally resolved themselves into one,
+incessant, inexorable, which I could escape only through bodily fatigue,
+or through some absorbing interest that took me out of myself altogether
+and filled my morbid mind with the images of another's creation.
+
+In this mood I first read Dickens, whom I had known before in the reading
+I had listened to.  But now I devoured his books one after another as
+fast as I could read them.  I plunged from the heart of one to another,
+so as to leave myself no chance for the horrors that beset me.  Some of
+them remain associated with the gloom and misery of that time, so that
+when I take them up they bring back its dreadful shadow.  But I have
+since read them all more than once, and I have had my time of thinking
+Dickens, talking Dickens, and writing Dickens, as we all had who lived in
+the days of the mighty magician.  I fancy the readers who have come to
+him since he ceased to fill the world with his influence can have little
+notion how great it was.  In that time he colored the parlance of the
+English-speaking race, and formed upon himself every minor talent
+attempting fiction.  While his glamour lasted it was no more possible for
+a young novelist to escape writing Dickens than it was for a young poet
+to escape writing Tennyson.  I admired other authors more; I loved them
+more, but when it came to a question of trying to do something in fiction
+I was compelled, as by a law of nature, to do it at least partially in
+his way.
+
+All the while that he held me so fast by his potent charm I was aware
+that it was a very rough magic now and again, but I could not assert my
+sense of this against him in matters of character and structure.  To
+these I gave in helplessly; their very grotesqueness was proof of their
+divine origin, and I bowed to the crudest manifestations of his genius in
+these kinds as if they were revelations not to be doubted without
+sacrilege.  But in certain small matters, as it were of ritual, I
+suffered myself to think, and I remember boldly speaking my mind about
+his style, which I thought bad.
+
+I spoke it even to the quaint character whom I borrowed his books from,
+and who might almost have come out of his books.  He lived in Dickens in
+a measure that I have never known another to do, and my contumely must
+have brought him a pang that was truly a personal grief.  He forgave it,
+no doubt because I bowed in the Dickens worship without question on all
+other points.  He was then a man well on towards fifty, and he had come
+to America early in life, and had lived in our village many years,
+without casting one of his English prejudices, or ceasing to be of a
+contrary opinion on every question, political, religious and social.
+He had no fixed belief, but he went to the service of his church whenever
+it was held among us, and he revered the Book of Common Prayer while he
+disputed the authority of the Bible with all comers.  He had become a
+citizen, but he despised democracy, and achieved a hardy consistency only
+by voting with the pro-slavery party upon all measures friendly to the
+institution which he considered the scandal and reproach of the American
+name.  From a heart tender to all, he liked to say wanton, savage and
+cynical things, but he bore no malice if you gainsaid him.  I know
+nothing of his origin, except the fact of his being an Englishman, or
+what his first calling had been; but he had evolved among us from a
+house-painter to an organ-builder, and he had a passionate love of music.
+He built his organs from the ground up, and made every part of them with
+his own hands; I believe they were very good, and at any rate the
+churches in the country about took them from him as fast as he could make
+them.  He had one in his own house, and it was fine to see him as he sat
+before it, with his long, tremulous hands outstretched to the keys, his
+noble head thrown back and his sensitive face lifted in the rapture of
+his music.  He was a rarely intelligent creature, and an artist in every
+fibre; and if you did not quarrel with his manifold perversities, he was
+a delightful companion.
+
+After my friend went away I fell much to him for society, and we took
+long, rambling walks together, or sat on the stoop before his door,
+or lounged over the books in the drug-store, and talked evermore of
+literature.  He must have been nearly three times my age, but that did
+not matter; we met in the equality of the ideal world where there is
+neither old nor young, any more than there is rich or poor.  He had read
+a great deal, but of all he had read he liked Dickens best, and was
+always coming back to him with affection, whenever the talk strayed.
+He could not make me out when I criticised the style of Dickens; and when
+I praised Thackeray's style to the disadvantage of Dickens's he could
+only accuse me of a sort of aesthetic snobbishness in my preference.
+Dickens, he said, was for the million, and Thackeray was for the upper
+ten thousand.  His view amused me at the time, and yet I am not sure that
+it was altogether mistaken.
+
+There is certainly a property in Thackeray that somehow flatters the
+reader into the belief that he is better than other people.  I do not
+mean to say that this was why I thought him a finer writer than Dickens,
+but I will own that it was probably one of the reasons why I liked him
+better; if I appreciated him so fully as I felt, I must be of a finer
+porcelain than the earthen pots which were not aware of any particular
+difference in the various liquors poured into them.  In Dickens the
+virtue of his social defect is that he never appeals to the principle
+which sniffs, in his reader.  The base of his work is the whole breadth
+and depth of humanity itself.  It is helplessly elemental, but it is not
+the less grandly so, and if it deals with the simpler manifestations of
+character, character affected by the interests and passions rather than
+the tastes and preferences, it certainly deals with the larger moods
+through them.  I do not know that in the whole range of his work he once
+suffers us to feel our superiority to a fellow-creature through any
+social accident, or except for some moral cause.  This makes him very fit
+reading for a boy, and I should say that a boy could get only good from
+him.  His view of the world and of society, though it was very little
+philosophized, was instinctively sane and reasonable, even when it was
+most impossible.
+
+We are just beginning to discern that certain conceptions of our
+relations to our fellow-men, once formulated in generalities which met
+with a dramatic acceptation from the world, and were then rejected by it
+as mere rhetoric, have really a vital truth in them, and that if they
+have ever seemed false it was because of the false conditions in which we
+still live.  Equality and fraternity, these are the ideals which once
+moved the world, and then fell into despite and mockery, as unrealities;
+but now they assert themselves in our hearts once more.
+
+Blindly, unwittingly, erringly as Dickens often urged them, these ideals
+mark the whole tendency of his fiction, and they are what endear him to
+the heart, and will keep him dear to it long after many a cunninger
+artificer in letters has passed into forgetfulness.  I do not pretend
+that I perceived the full scope of his books, but I was aware of it in
+the finer sense which is not consciousness.  While I read him, I was in a
+world where the right came out best, as I believe it will yet do in this
+world, and where merit was crowned with the success which I believe will
+yet attend it in our daily life, untrammelled by social convention or
+economic circumstance.  In that world of his, in the ideal world, to
+which the real world must finally conform itself, I dwelt among the shows
+of things, but under a Providence that governed all things to a good end,
+and where neither wealth nor birth could avail against virtue or right.
+Of course it was in a way all crude enough, and was already contradicted
+by experience in the small sphere of my own being; but nevertheless it
+was true with that truth which is at the bottom of things, and I was
+happy in it.  I could not fail to love the mind which conceived it, and
+my worship of Dickens was more grateful than that I had yet given any
+writer.  I did not establish with him that one-sided understanding which
+I had with Cervantes and Shakespeare; with a contemporary that was not
+possible, and as an American I was deeply hurt at the things he had said
+against us, and the more hurt because I felt that they were often so
+just.  But I was for the time entirely his, and I could not have wished
+to write like any one else.
+
+I do not pretend that the spell I was under was wholly of a moral or
+social texture.  For the most part I was charmed with him because he was
+a delightful story-teller; because he could thrill me, and make me hot
+and cold; because he could make me laugh and cry, and stop my pulse and
+breath at will.  There seemed an inexhaustible source of humor and pathos
+in his work, which I now find choked and dry; I cannot laugh any more at
+Pickwick or Sam Weller, or weep for little Nell or Paul Dombey; their
+jokes, their griefs, seemed to me to be turned on, and to have a
+mechanical action.  But beneath all is still the strong drift of a
+genuine emotion, a sympathy, deep and sincere, with the poor, the lowly,
+the unfortunate.  In all that vast range of fiction, there is nothing
+that tells for the strong, because they are strong, against the weak,
+nothing that tells for the haughty against the humble, nothing that tells
+for wealth against poverty.  The effect of Dickens is purely democratic,
+and however contemptible he found our pseudo-equality, he was more truly
+democratic than any American who had yet written fiction.  I suppose it
+was our instinctive perception in the region of his instinctive
+expression, that made him so dear to us, and wounded our silly vanity so
+keenly through our love when he told us the truth about our horrible sham
+of a slave-based freedom.  But at any rate the democracy is there in his
+work more than he knew perhaps, or would ever have known, or ever
+recognized by his own life.  In fact, when one comes to read the story of
+his life, and to know that he was really and lastingly ashamed of having
+once put up shoe-blacking as a boy, and was unable to forgive his mother
+for suffering him to be so degraded, one perceives that he too was the
+slave of conventions and the victim of conditions which it is the highest
+function of his fiction to help destroy.
+
+I imagine that my early likes and dislikes in Dickens were not very
+discriminating.  I liked 'David Copperfield,' and 'Barnaby Rudge,' and
+'Bleak House,' and I still like them; but I do not think I liked them
+more than 'Dombey & Son,' and 'Nicholas Nickleby,' and the 'Pickwick
+Papers,' which I cannot read now with any sort of patience, not to speak
+of pleasure.  I liked 'Martin Chuzzlewit,' too, and the other day I read
+a great part of it again, and found it roughly true in the passages that
+referred to America, though it was surcharged in the serious moods, and
+caricatured in the comic.  The English are always inadequate observers;
+they seem too full of themselves to have eyes and ears for any alien
+people; but as far as an Englishman could, Dickens had caught the look of
+our life in certain aspects.  His report of it was clumsy and farcical;
+but in a large, loose way it was like enough; at least he had caught the
+note of our self-satisfied, intolerant, and hypocritical provinciality,
+and this was not altogether lost in his mocking horse-play.
+
+I cannot make out that I was any the less fond of Dickens because of it.
+I believe I was rather more willing to accept it as a faithful
+portraiture then than I should be now; and I certainly never made any
+question of it with my friend the organ-builder.  'Martin Chuzzlewit' was
+a favorite book with him, and so was the 'Old Curiosity Shop.'  No doubt
+a fancied affinity with Tom Pinch through their common love of music made
+him like that most sentimental and improbable personage, whom he would
+have disowned and laughed to scorn if he had met him in life; but it was
+a purely altruistic sympathy that he felt with Little Nell and her
+grandfather.  He was fond of reading the pathetic passages from both
+books, and I can still hear his rich, vibrant voice as it lingered in
+tremulous emotion on the periods he loved.  He would catch the volume up
+anywhere, any time, and begin to read, at the book-store, or the harness-
+shop, or the law-office, it did not matter in the wide leisure of a
+country village, in those days before the war, when people had all the
+time there was; and he was sure of his audience as long as he chose to
+read.  One Christmas eve, in answer to a general wish, he read the
+'Christmas Carol' in the Court-house, and people came from all about to
+hear him.
+
+He was an invalid and he died long since, ending a life of suffering in
+the saddest way.  Several years before his death money fell to his
+family, and he went with them to an Eastern city, where he tried in vain
+to make himself at home.  He never ceased to pine for the village be had
+left, with its old companionships, its easy usages, its familiar faces;
+and he escaped to it again and again, till at last every tie was severed,
+and he could come back no more.  He was never reconciled to the change,
+and in a manner he did really die of the homesickness which deepened an
+hereditary taint, and enfeebled him to the disorder that carried him.
+off.  My memories of Dickens remain mingled with my memories of this
+quaint and most original genius, and though I knew Dickens long before I
+knew his lover, I can scarcely think of one without thinking of the
+other.
+
+
+
+
+XVI.  WORDSWORTH, LOWELL, CHAUCER
+
+Certain other books I associate with another pathetic nature, of whom the
+organ-builder and I were both fond.  This was the young poet who looked
+after the book half of the village drug and book store, and who wrote
+poetry in such leisure as he found from his duties, and with such
+strength as he found in the disease preying upon him.  He must have been
+far gone in consumption when I first knew him, for I have no recollection
+of a time when his voice was not faint and husky, his sweet smile wan,
+and his blue eyes dull with the disease that wasted him away,
+
+               "Like wax in the fire,
+               Like snow in the sun."
+
+People spoke of him as once strong and vigorous, but I recall him fragile
+and pale, gentle, patient, knowing his inexorable doom, and not hoping or
+seeking to escape it.  As the end drew near he left his employment and
+went home to the farm, some twenty miles away, where I drove out to see
+him once through the deep snow of a winter which was to be his last.
+My heart was heavy all the time, but he tried to make the visit pass
+cheerfully with our wonted talk about books.  Only at parting, when he
+took my hand in his thin, cold clasp, he said, "I suppose my disease is
+progressing," with the patience he always showed.
+
+I did not see him again, and I am not sure now that his gift was very
+distinct or very great.  It was slight and graceful rather, I fancy,
+and if he had lived it might not have sufficed to make him widely known,
+but he had a real and a very delicate sense of beauty in literature,
+and I believe it was through sympathy with his preferences that I came
+into appreciation of several authors whom I had not known, or had not
+cared for before.  There could not have been many shelves of books in
+that store, and I came to be pretty well acquainted with them all before
+I began to buy them.  For the most part, I do not think it occurred to me
+that they were there to be sold; for this pale poet seemed indifferent to
+the commercial property in them, and only to wish me to like them.
+
+I am not sure, but I think it was through some volume which I found in
+his charge that I first came to know of De Quincey; he was fond of
+Dr. Holmes's poetry; he loved Whittier and Longfellow, each represented
+in his slender stock by some distinctive work.  There were several stray
+volumes of Thackeray's minor writings, and I still have the 'Yellowplush
+Papers' in the smooth red cloth (now pretty well tattered) of Appleton's
+Popular Library, which I bought there. But most of the books were in the
+famous old brown cloth of Ticknor & Fields, which was a warrant of
+excellence in the literature it covered.  Besides these there were
+standard volumes of poetry, published by Phillips & Sampson, from worn-
+out plates; for a birthday present my mother got me Wordsworth in this
+shape, and I am glad to think that I once read the "Excursion" in it,
+for I do not think I could do so now, and I have a feeling that it is
+very right and fit to have read the "Excursion."  To be honest, it was
+very hard reading even then, and I cannot truthfully pretend that I have
+ever liked Wordsworth except in parts, though for the matter of that,
+I do not suppose that any one ever did.  I tried hard enough to like
+everything in him, for I had already learned enough to know that I ought
+to like him, and that if I did not, it was a proof of intellectual and
+moral inferiority in me.  My early idol, Pope, had already been tumbled
+into the dust by Lowell, whose lectures on English Poetry had lately been
+given in Boston, and had met with my rapturous acceptance in such
+newspaper report as I had of them.  So, my preoccupations were all in
+favor of the Lake School, and it was both in my will and my conscience to
+like Wordsworth.  If I did not do so it was not my fault, and the fault
+remains very much what it first was.
+
+I feel and understand him more deeply than I did then, but I do not think
+that I then failed of the meaning of much that I read in him, and I am
+sure that my senses were quick to all the beauty in him.  After suffering
+once through the "Excursion" I did not afflict myself with it again,
+but there were other poems of his which I read over and over, as I fancy
+it is the habit of every lover of poetry to do with the pieces he is fond
+of.  Still, I do not make out that Wordsworth was ever a passion of mine;
+on the other hand, neither was Byron.  Him, too, I liked in passages and
+in certain poems which I knew before I read Wordsworth at all; I read him
+throughout, but I did not try to imitate him, and I did not try to
+imitate Wordsworth.
+
+Those lectures of Lowell's had a great influence with me, and I tried to
+like whatever they bade me like, after a fashion common to young people
+when they begin to read criticisms; their aesthetic pride is touched;
+they wish to realize that they too can feel the fine things the critic
+admires.  From this motive they do a great deal of factitious liking;
+but after all the affections will not be bidden, and the critic can only
+avail to give a point of view, to enlighten a perspective.  When I read
+Lowell's praises of him, I had all the will in the world to read Spencer,
+and I really meant to do so, but I have not done so to this day, and as
+often as I have tried I have found it impossible.  It was not so with
+Chaucer, whom I loved from the first word of his which I found quoted in
+those lectures, and in Chambers's 'Encyclopaedia of English Literature,'
+which I had borrowed of my friend the organ-builder.
+
+In fact, I may fairly class Chaucer among my passions, for I read him
+with that sort of personal attachment I had for Cervantes, who resembled
+him in a certain sweet and cheery humanity.  But I do not allege this as
+the reason, for I had the same feeling for Pope, who was not like either
+of them.  Kissing goes by favor, in literature as in life, and one cannot
+quite account for one's passions in either; what is certain is, I liked
+Chaucer and I did not like Spencer; possibly there was an affinity
+between reader and poet, but if there was I should be at a loss to name
+it, unless it was the liking for reality; and the sense of mother earth
+in human life.  By the time I had read all of Chaucer that I could find
+in the various collections and criticisms, my father had been made a
+clerk in the legislature, and on one of his visits home he brought me the
+poet's works from the State Library, and I set about reading them with a
+glossary.  It was not easy, but it brought strength with it, and lifted
+my heart with a sense of noble companionship.
+
+I will not pretend that I was insensible to the grossness of the poet's
+time, which I found often enough in the poet's verse, as well as the
+goodness of his nature, and my father seems to have felt a certain
+misgiving about it.  He repeated to me the librarian's question as to
+whether he thought he ought to put an unexpurgated edition in the hands
+of a boy, and his own answer that he did not believe it would hurt me.
+It was a kind of appeal to me to make the event justify him, and I
+suppose he had not given me the book without due reflection.  Probably he
+reasoned that with my greed for all manner of literature the bad would
+become known to me along with the good at any rate, and I had better know
+that he knew it.
+
+The streams of filth flow down through the ages in literature, which
+sometimes seems little better than an open sewer, and, as I have said,
+I do not see why the time should not come when the noxious and noisome
+channels should be stopped; but the base of the mind is bestial, and so
+far the beast in us has insisted upon having his full say.  The worst of
+lewd literature is that it seems to give a sanction to lewdness in the
+life, and that inexperience takes this effect for reality: that is the
+danger and the harm, and I think the fact ought not to be blinked.
+Compared with the meaner poets the greater are the cleaner, and Chaucer
+was probably safer than any other English poet of his time, but I am not
+going to pretend that there are not things in Chaucer which a boy would
+be the better for not reading; and so far as these words of mine shall be
+taken for counsel, I am not willing that they should unqualifiedly praise
+him.  The matter is by no means simple; it is not easy to conceive of a
+means of purifying the literature of the past without weakening it, and
+even falsifying it, but it is best to own that it is in all respects just
+what it is, and not to feign it otherwise.  I am not ready to say that
+the harm from it is positive, but you do get smeared with it, and the
+filthy thought lives with the filthy rhyme in the ear, even when it does
+not corrupt the heart or make it seem a light thing for the reader's
+tongue and pen to sin in kind.
+
+I loved my Chaucer too well, I hope, not to get some good from the best
+in him; and my reading of criticism had taught me how and where to look
+for the best, and to know it when I had found it.  Of course I began to
+copy him.  That is, I did not attempt anything like his tales in kind;
+they must have seemed too hopelessly far away in taste and time, but I
+studied his verse, and imitated a stanza which I found in some of his
+things and had not found elsewhere; I rejoiced in the freshness and
+sweetness of his diction, and though I felt that his structure was
+obsolete, there was in his wording something homelier and heartier than
+the imported analogues that had taken the place of the phrases he used.
+
+I began to employ in my own work the archaic words that I fancied most,
+which was futile and foolish enough, and I formed a preference for the
+simpler Anglo-Saxon woof of our speech, which was not so bad.  Of course,
+being left so much as I was to my own whim in such things, I could not
+keep a just mean; I had an aversion for the Latin derivatives which was
+nothing short of a craze.  Some half-bred critic whom I had read made me
+believe that English could be written without them, and had better be
+written so, and I did not escape from this lamentable error until I had
+produced with weariness and vexation of spirit several pieces of prose
+wholly composed of monosyllables.  I suspect now that I did not always
+stop to consider whether my short words were not as Latin by race as any
+of the long words I rejected, and that I only made sure they were short.
+
+The frivolous ingenuity which wasted itself in this exercise happily
+could not hold out long, and in verse it was pretty well helpless from
+the beginning.  Yet I will not altogether blame it, for it made me know,
+as nothing else could, the resources of our tongue in that sort; and in
+the revolt from the slavish bondage I took upon myself I did not go so
+far as to plunge into any very wild polysyllabic excesses.  I still like
+the little word if it says the thing I want to say as well as the big
+one, but I honor above all the word that says the thing.  At the same
+time I confess that I have a prejudice against certain words that I
+cannot overcome; the sight of some offends me, the sound of others, and
+rather than use one of those detested vocables, even when I perceive that
+it would convey my exact meaning, I would cast about long for some other.
+I think this is a foible, and a disadvantage, but I do not deny it.
+
+An author who had much to do with preparing me for the quixotic folly in
+point was that Thomas Babington Macaulay, who taught simplicity of
+diction in phrases of as "learned length and thundering sound," as any he
+would have had me shun, and who deplored the Latinistic English of
+Johnson in terms emulous of the great doctor's orotundity and
+ronderosity.  I wonder now that I did not see how my physician avoided
+his medicine, but I did not, and I went on to spend myself in an endeavor
+as vain and senseless as any that pedantry has conceived.  It was none
+the less absurd because I believed in it so devoutly, and sacrificed
+myself to it with such infinite pains and labor.  But this was long after
+I read Macaulay, who was one of my grand passions before Dickens or
+Chaucer.
+
+
+
+
+XVII.  MACAULAY
+
+One of the many characters of the village was the machinist who had his
+shop under our printing-office when we first brought our newspaper to the
+place, and who was just then a machinist because he was tired of being
+many other things, and had not yet made up his mind what he should be
+next.  He could have been whatever he turned his agile intellect and his
+cunning hand to; he had been a schoolmaster and a watch-maker, and I
+believe an amateur doctor and irregular lawyer; he talked and wrote
+brilliantly, and he was one of the group that nightly disposed of every
+manner of theoretical and practical question at the drug-store; it was
+quite indifferent to him which side he took; what he enjoyed was the
+mental exercise.  He was in consumption, as so many were in that region,
+and he carbonized against it, as he said; he took his carbon in the
+liquid form, and the last time I saw him the carbon had finally prevailed
+over the consumption, but it had itself become a seated vice; that was
+many years since, and it is many years since he died.
+
+He must have been known to me earlier, but I remember him first as he
+swam vividly into my ken, with a volume of Macaulay's essays in his hand,
+one day.  Less figuratively speaking, he came up into the printing-office
+to expose from the book the nefarious plagiarism of an editor in a
+neighboring city, who had adapted with the change of names and a word or
+two here and there, whole passages from the essay on Barere, to the
+denunciation of a brother editor.  It was a very simple-hearted fraud,
+and it was all done with an innocent trust in the popular ignorance which
+now seems to me a little pathetic; but it was certainly very barefaced,
+and merited the public punishment which the discoverer inflicted by means
+of what journalists call the deadly parallel column.  The effect ought
+logically to have been ruinous for the plagiarist, but it was really
+nothing of the kind.  He simply ignored the exposure, and the comments of
+the other city papers, and in the process of time he easily lived down
+the memory of it and went on to greater usefulness in his profession.
+
+But for the moment it appeared to me a tremendous crisis, and I listened
+as the minister of justice read his communication, with a thrill which
+lost itself in the interest I suddenly felt in the plundered author.
+Those facile and brilliant phrases and ideas struck me as the finest
+things I had yet known in literature, and I borrowed the book and read it
+through.  Then I borrowed another volume of Macaulay's essays, and
+another and another, till I had read them every one.  It was like a long
+debauch, from which I emerged with regret that it should ever end.
+
+I tried other essayists, other critics, whom the machinist had in his
+library, but it was useless; neither Sidney Smith nor Thomas Carlyle
+could console me; I sighed for more Macaulay and evermore Macaulay.  I
+read his History of England, and I could measurably console myself with
+that, but only measurably; and I could not go back to the essays and read
+them again, for it seemed to me I had absorbed them so thoroughly that I
+had left nothing unenjoyed in them.  I used to talk with the machinist
+about them, and with the organ-builder, and with my friend the printer,
+but no one seemed to feel the intense fascination in them that I did, and
+that I should now be quite unable to account for.
+
+Once more I had an author for whom I could feel a personal devotion, whom
+I could dream of and dote upon, and whom I could offer my intimacy in
+many an impassioned revery.  I do not think T. B. Macaulay would really
+have liked it; I dare say he would not have valued the friendship of the
+sort of a youth I was, but in the conditions he was helpless, and I
+poured out my love upon him without a rebuff.  Of course I reformed my
+prose style, which had been carefully modelled upon that of Goldsmith and
+Irving, and began to write in the manner of Macaulay, in short, quick
+sentences, and with the prevalent use of brief Anglo-Saxon words, which
+he prescribed, but did not practise.  As for his notions of literature, I
+simply accepted them with the feeling that any question of them would
+have been little better than blasphemy.
+
+For a long time he spoiled my taste for any other criticism; he made it
+seem pale, and poor, and weak; and he blunted my sense to subtler
+excellences than I found in him.  I think this was a pity, but it was a
+thing not to be helped, like a great many things that happen to our hurt
+in life; it was simply inevitable.  How or when my frenzy for him began
+to abate I cannot say, but it certainly waned, and it must have waned
+rapidly, for after no great while I found myself feeling the charm of
+quite different minds, as fully as if his had never enslaved me.  I
+cannot regret that I enjoyed him so keenly as I did; it was in a way a
+generous delight, and though he swayed me helplessly whatever way he
+thought, I do not think yet that he swayed me in any very wrong way.  He
+was a bright and clear intelligence, and if his light did not go far, it
+is to be said of him that his worst fault was only to have stopped short
+of the finest truth in art, in morals, in politics.
+
+
+
+
+XVIII.  CRITICS AND REVIEWS
+
+What remained to me from my love of Macaulay was a love of criticism,
+and I read almost as much in criticism as I read in poetry and history
+and fiction.  It was of an eccentric doctor, another of the village
+characters, that I got the works of Edgar A. Poe; I do not know just how,
+but it must have been in some exchange of books; he preferred
+metaphysics.  At any rate I fell greedily upon them, and I read with no
+less zest than his poems the bitter, and cruel, and narrow-minded
+criticisms which mainly filled one of the volumes.  As usual, I accepted
+them implicitly, and it was not till long afterwards that I understood
+how worthless they were.
+
+I think that hardly less immoral than the lubricity of literature, and
+its celebration of the monkey and the goat in us, is the spectacle such
+criticism affords of the tigerish play of satire.  It is monstrous that
+for no offence but the wish to produce something beautiful, and the
+mistake of his powers in that direction, a writer should become the prey
+of some ferocious wit, and that his tormentor should achieve credit by
+his lightness and ease in rending his prey; it is shocking to think how
+alluring and depraving the fact is to the young reader emulous of such
+credit, and eager to achieve it.  Because I admired these barbarities of
+Poe's, I wished to irritate them, to spit some hapless victim on my own
+spear, to make him suffer and to make the reader laugh.  This is as far
+as possible from the criticism that enlightens and ennobles, but it is
+still the ideal of most critics, deny it as they will; and because it is
+the ideal of most critics criticism still remains behind all the other
+literary arts.
+
+I am glad to remember that at the same time I exulted in these ferocities
+I had mind enough and heart enough to find pleasure in the truer and
+finer work, the humaner work of other writers, like Hazlitt, and Leigh
+Hunt, and Lamb, which became known to me at a date I cannot exactly fix.
+I believe it was Hazlitt whom I read first, and he helped me to clarify
+and formulate my admiration of Shakespeare as no one else had yet done;
+Lamb helped me too, and with all the dramatists, and on every hand I was
+reaching out for light that should enable me to place in literary history
+the authors I knew and loved.
+
+I fancy it was well for me at this period to have got at the four great
+English reviews, the Edinburgh, the Westminster, the London Quarterly,
+and the North British, which I read regularly, as well as Blackwood's
+Magazine.  We got them in the American editions in payment for printing
+the publisher's prospectus, and their arrival was an excitement, a joy,
+and a satisfaction with me, which I could not now describe without having
+to accuse myself of exaggeration.  The love of literature, and the hope
+of doing something in it, had become my life to the exclusion of all
+other interests, or it was at least the great reality, and all other
+things were as shadows.  I was living in a time of high political tumult,
+and I certainly cared very much for the question of slavery which was
+then filling the minds of men; I felt deeply the shame and wrong of our
+Fugitive Slave Law; I was stirred by the news from Kansas, where the
+great struggle between the two great principles in our nationality was
+beginning in bloodshed; but I cannot pretend that any of these things
+were more than ripples on the surface of my intense and profound interest
+in literature.  If I was not to live by it, I was somehow to live for it.
+
+If I thought of taking up some other calling it was as a means only;
+literature was always the end I had in view, immediately or finally.
+I did not see how it was to yield me a living, for I knew that almost all
+the literary men in the country had other professions; they were editors,
+lawyers, or had public or private employments; or they were men of
+wealth; there was then not one who earned his bread solely by his pen in
+fiction, or drama, or history, or poetry, or criticism, in a day when
+people wanted very much less butter on their bread than they do now.
+But I kept blindly at my studies, and yet not altogether blindly, for,
+as I have said, the reading I did had more tendency than before, and I
+was beginning to see authors in their proportion to one another, and to
+the body of literature.
+
+The English reviews were of great use to me in this; I made a rule of
+reading each one of them quite through.  To be sure I often broke this
+rule, as people are apt to do with rules of the kind; it was not possible
+for a boy to wade through heavy articles relating to English politics and
+economics, but I do not think I left any paper upon a literary topic
+unread, and I did read enough politics, especially in Blackwood's, to be
+of Tory opinions; they were very fit opinions for a boy, and they did not
+exact of me any change in regard to the slavery question.
+
+
+
+
+XIX.  A NON-LITERARY EPISODE
+
+I suppose I might almost class my devotion to English reviews among my
+literary passions, but it was of very short lease, not beyond a year or
+two at the most.  In the midst of it I made my first and only essay aside
+from the lines of literature, or rather wholly apart from it.  After some
+talk with my father it was decided, mainly by myself, I suspect, that I
+should leave the printing-office and study law; and it was arranged with
+the United States Senator who lived in our village, and who was at home
+from Washington for the summer, that I was to come into his office.  The
+Senator was by no means to undertake my instruction himself; his nephew,
+who had just begun to read law, was to be my fellow-student, and we were
+to keep each other up to the work, and to recite to each other, until we
+thought we had enough law to go before a board of attorneys and test our
+fitness for admission to the bar.
+
+This was the custom in that day and place, as I suppose it is still in
+most parts of the country.  We were to be fitted for practice in the
+courts, not only by our reading, but by a season of pettifogging before
+justices of the peace, which I looked forward to with no small shrinking
+of my shy spirit; but what really troubled me most, and was always the
+grain of sand between my teeth, was Blackstone's confession of his own
+original preference for literature, and his perception that the law was
+"a jealous mistress," who would suffer no rival in his affections.
+I agreed with him that I could not go through life with a divided
+interest; I must give up literature or I must give up law.  I not only
+consented to this logically, but I realized it in my attempt to carry on
+the reading I had loved, and to keep at the efforts I was always making
+to write something in verse or prose, at night, after studying law all
+day.  The strain was great enough when I had merely the work in the
+printing-office; but now I came home from my Blackstone mentally fagged,
+and I could not take up the authors whom at the bottom of my heart I
+loved so much better.  I tried it a month, but almost from the fatal day
+when I found that confession of Blackstone's, my whole being turned from
+the "jealous mistress" to the high minded muses: I had not only to go
+back to literature, but I had also to go back to the printing-office.
+I did not regret it, but I had made my change of front in the public eye,
+and I felt that it put me at a certain disadvantage with my fellow-
+citizens; as for the Senator, whose office I had forsaken, I met him now
+and then in the street, without trying to detain him, and once when he
+came to the printing-office for his paper we encountered at a point where
+we could not help speaking.  He looked me over in my general effect of
+base mechanical, and asked me if I had given up the law; I had only to
+answer him I had, and our conference ended.  It was a terrible moment for
+me, because I knew that in his opinion I had chosen a path in life, which
+if it did not lead to the Poor House was at least no way to the White
+House.  I suppose now that he thought I had merely gone back to my trade,
+and so for the time I had; but I have no reason to suppose that he judged
+my case narrow-mindedly, and I ought to have had the courage to have the
+affair out with him, and tell him just why I had left the law; we had
+sometimes talked the English reviews over, for he read them as well as I,
+and it ought not to have been impossible for me to be frank with him;
+but as yet I could not trust any one with my secret hope of some day
+living for literature, although I had already lived for nothing else.
+I preferred the disadvantage which I must be at in his eyes, and in the
+eyes of most of my fellow-citizens; I believe I had the applause of the
+organ-builder, who thought the law no calling for me.
+
+In that village there was a social equality which, if not absolute, was
+as nearly so as can ever be in a competitive civilization; and I could
+have suffered no slight in the general esteem for giving up a profession
+and going back to a trade; if I was despised at all it was because I had
+thrown away the chance of material advancement; I dare say some people
+thought I was a fool to do that.  No one, indeed, could have imagined the
+rapture it was to do it, or what a load rolled from my shoulders when I
+dropped the law from them.  Perhaps Sinbad or Christian could have
+conceived of my ecstatic relief; yet so far as the popular vision reached
+I was not returning to literature, but to the printing business, and I
+myself felt the difference.  My reading had given me criterions different
+from those of the simple life of our village, and I did not flatter
+myself that my calling would have been thought one of great social
+dignity in the world where I hoped some day to make my living.
+My convictions were all democratic, but at heart I am afraid I was a
+snob, and was unworthy of the honest work which I ought to have felt it
+an honor to do; this, whatever we falsely pretend to the contrary, is the
+frame of every one who aspires beyond the work of his hands.  I do not
+know how it had become mine, except through my reading, and I think it
+was through the devotion I then had for a certain author that I came to a
+knowledge not of good and evil so much as of common and superfine.
+
+
+
+
+XX.  THACKERAY
+
+It was of the organ-builder that I had Thackeray's books first.  He knew
+their literary quality, and their rank in the literary, world; but I
+believe he was surprised at the passion I instantly conceived for them.
+He could not understand it; he deplored it almost as a moral defect in
+me; though he honored it as a proof of my critical taste.  In a certain
+measure he was right.
+
+What flatters the worldly pride in a young man is what fascinates him
+with Thackeray.  With his air of looking down on the highest, and
+confidentially inviting you to be of his company in the seat of the
+scorner he is irresistible; his very confession that he is a snob, too,
+is balm and solace to the reader who secretly admires the splendors he
+affects to despise.  His sentimentality is also dear to the heart of
+youth, and the boy who is dazzled by his satire is melted by his easy
+pathos.  Then, if the boy has read a good many other books, he is taken
+with that abundance of literary turn and allusion in Thackeray; there is
+hardly a sentence but reminds him that he is in the society of a great
+literary swell, who has read everything, and can mock or burlesque life
+right and left from the literature always at his command.  At the same
+time he feels his mastery, and is abjectly grateful to him in his own
+simple love of the good for his patronage of the unassuming virtues.
+It is so pleasing to one's 'vanity, and so safe, to be of the master's
+side when he assails those vices and foibles which are inherent in the
+system of things, and which one can contemn with vast applause so long as
+one does not attempt to undo the conditions they spring from.
+
+I exulted to have Thackeray attack the aristocrats, and expose their
+wicked pride and meanness, and I never noticed that he did not propose to
+do away with aristocracy, which is and must always be just what it has
+been, and which cannot be changed while it exists at all.  He appeared to
+me one of the noblest creatures that ever was when he derided the shams
+of society; and I was far from seeing that society, as we have it, was
+necessarily a sham; when he made a mock of snobbishness I did not know
+but snobbishness was something that might be reached and cured by
+ridicule.  Now I know that so long as we have social inequality we shall
+have snobs; we shall have men who bully and truckle, and women who snub
+and crawl.  I know that it is futile to, spurn them, or lash them for
+trying to get on in the world, and that the world is what it must be from
+the selfish motives which underlie our economic life.  But I did not know
+these things then, nor for long afterwards, and so I gave my heart to
+Thackeray, who seemed to promise me in his contempt of the world a refuge
+from the shame I felt for my own want of figure in it.  He had the effect
+of taking me into the great world, and making me a party to his splendid
+indifference to titles, and even to royalties; and I could not see that
+sham for sham he was unwittingly the greatest sham of all.
+
+I think it was 'Pendennis' I began with, and I lived in the book to the
+very last line of it, and made its alien circumstance mine to the
+smallest detail.  I am still not sure but it is the author's greatest
+book, and I speak from a thorough acquaintance with every line he has
+written, except the Virginians, which I have never been able to read
+quite through; most of his work I have read twice, and some of it twenty
+times.
+
+After reading 'Pendennis' I went to 'Vanity Fair,' which I now think the
+poorest of Thackeray's novels--crude, heavy-handed, caricatured.  About
+the same time I revelled in the romanticism of 'Henry Esmond,' with its
+pseudo-eighteenth-century sentiment, and its appeals to an overwrought
+ideal of gentlemanhood and honor.  It was long before I was duly revolted
+by Esmond's transfer of his passion from the daughter to the mother whom
+he is successively enamoured of.  I believe this unpleasant and
+preposterous affair is thought one of the fine things in the story; I do
+not mind owning that I thought it so myself when I was seventeen; and if
+I could have found a Beatrix to be in love with, and a Lady Castlewood to
+be in love with me, I should have asked nothing finer of fortune.
+The glamour of Henry Esmond was all the deeper because I was reading the
+'Spectator' then, and was constantly in the company of Addison, and
+Steele, and Swift, and Pope, and all the wits at Will's, who are
+presented evanescently in the romance.  The intensely literary keeping,
+as well as quality, of the story I suppose is what formed its highest
+fascination for me; but that effect of great world which it imparts to
+the reader, making him citizen, and, if he will, leading citizen of it,
+was what helped turn my head.
+
+This is the toxic property of all Thackeray's writing.  He is himself
+forever dominated in imagination by the world, and even while he tells
+you it is not worth while he makes you feel that it is worth while.  It
+is not the honest man, but the man of honor, who shines in his page; his
+meek folk are proudly meek, and there is a touch of superiority, a glint
+of mundane splendor, in his lowliest.  He rails at the order of things,
+but he imagines nothing different, even when he shows that its baseness,
+and cruelty, and hypocrisy are well-nigh inevitable, and, for most of
+those who wish to get on in it, quite inevitable.  He has a good word for
+the virtues, he patronizes the Christian graces, he pats humble merit on
+the head; he has even explosions of indignation against the insolence and
+pride of birth, and purse-pride.  But, after all, he is of the world,
+worldly, and the highest hope he holds out is that you may be in the
+world and despise its ambitions while you compass its ends.
+
+I should be far from blaming him for all this.  He was of his time; but
+since his time men have thought beyond him, and seen life with a vision
+which makes his seem rather purblind.  He must have been immensely in
+advance of most of the thinking and feeling of his day, for people then
+used to accuse his sentimental pessimism of cynical qualities which we
+could hardly find in it now.  It was the age of intense individualism,
+when you were to do right because it was becoming to you, say, as a
+gentleman, and you were to have an eye single to the effect upon your
+character, if not your reputation; you were not to do a mean thing
+because it was wrong, but because it was mean.  It was romanticism
+carried into the region of morals.  But I had very little concern then as
+to that sort of error.
+
+I was on a very high esthetic horse, which I could not have conveniently
+stooped from if I had wished; it was quite enough for me that Thackeray's
+novels were prodigious works of art, and I acquired merit, at least with
+myself, for appreciating them so keenly, for liking them so much.  It
+must be, I felt with far less consciousness than my formulation of the
+feeling expresses, that I was of some finer sort myself to be able to
+enjoy such a fine sort.  No doubt I should have been a coxcomb of some
+kind, if not that kind, and I shall not be very strenuous in censuring
+Thackeray for his effect upon me in this way.  No doubt the effect was
+already in me, and he did not so much produce it as find it.
+
+In the mean time he was a vast delight to me, as much in the variety of
+his minor works--his 'Yellowplush,' and 'Letters of Mr. Brown,' and
+'Adventures of Major Gahagan,' and the 'Paris Sketch Book,' and the
+'Irish Sketch Book,' and the 'Great Hoggarty Diamond,' and the 'Book of
+Snobs,' and the 'English Humorists,' and the 'Four Georges,' and all the
+multitude of his essays, and verses, and caricatures--as in the spacious
+designs of his huge novels, the 'Newcomes,' and 'Pendennis,' and 'Vanity
+Fair,' and 'Henry Esmond,' and 'Barry Lyndon.'
+
+There was something in the art of the last which seemed to me then, and
+still seems, the farthest reach of the author's great talent.  It is
+couched, like so much of his work, in the autobiographic form, which next
+to the dramatic form is the most natural, and which lends itself with
+such flexibility to the purpose of the author.  In 'Barry Lyndon' there
+is imagined to the life a scoundrel of such rare quality that he never
+supposes for a moment but he is the finest sort of a gentleman; and so,
+in fact, he was, as most gentlemen went in his day.  Of course, the
+picture is over-colored; it was the vice of Thackeray, or of Thackeray's
+time, to surcharge all imitations of life and character, so that a
+generation apparently much slower, if not duller than ours, should not
+possibly miss the artist's meaning.  But I do not think it is so much
+surcharged as 'Esmond;' 'Barry Lyndon' is by no manner of means so
+conscious as that mirror of gentlemanhood, with its manifold self-
+reverberations; and for these reasons I am inclined to think he is the
+most perfect creation of Thackeray's mind.
+
+I did not make the acquaintance of Thackeray's books all at once, or even
+in rapid succession, and he at no time possessed the whole empire of my
+catholic, not to say, fickle, affections, during the years I was
+compassing a full knowledge and sense of his greatness, and burning
+incense at his shrine.  But there was a moment when he so outshone and
+overtopped all other divinities in my worship that I was effectively his
+alone, as I have been the helpless and, as it were, hypnotized devotee of
+three or four others of the very great.  From his art there flowed into
+me a literary quality which tinged my whole mental substance, and made it
+impossible for me to say, or wish to say, anything without giving it the
+literary color.  That is, while he dominated my love and fancy, if I had
+been so fortunate as to have a simple concept of anything in life, I must
+have tried to give the expression of it some turn or tint that would
+remind the reader of books even before it reminded him of men.
+
+It is hard to make out what I mean, but this is a try at it, and I do not
+know that I shall be able to do better unless I add that Thackeray, of
+all the writers that I have known, is the most thoroughly and profoundly
+imbued with literature, so that when he speaks it is not with words and
+blood, but with words and ink.  You may read the greatest part of
+Dickens, as you may read the greatest part of Hawthorne or Tolstoy, and
+not once be reminded of literature as a business or a cult, but you can
+hardly read a paragraph, hardly a sentence, of Thackeray's without being
+reminded of it either by suggestion or downright allusion.
+
+I do not blame him for this; he was himself, and he could not have been
+any other manner of man without loss; but I say that the greatest talent
+is not that which breathes of the library, but that which breathes of the
+street, the field, the open sky, the simple earth.  I began to imitate
+this master of mine almost as soon as I began to read him; this must be,
+and I had a greater pride and joy in my success than I should probably
+have known in anything really creative; I should have suspected that, I
+should have distrusted that, because I had nothing to test it by, no
+model; but here before me was the very finest and noblest model, and I
+had but to form my lines upon it, and I had produced a work of art
+altogether more estimable in my eyes than anything else could have been.
+I saw the little world about me through the lenses of my master's
+spectacles, and I reported its facts, in his tone and his attitude, with
+his self-flattered scorn, his showy sighs, his facile satire.  I need not
+say I was perfectly satisfied with the result, or that to be able to
+imitate Thackeray was a much greater thing for me than to have been able
+to imitate nature.  In fact, I could have valued any picture of the life
+and character I knew only as it put me in mind of life and character as
+these had shown themselves to me in his books.
+
+
+
+
+XXI.  "LAZARILLO DE TORMES"
+
+At the same time, I was not only reading many books besides Thackeray's,
+but I was studying to get a smattering of several languages as well as I
+could, with or without help.  I could now manage Spanish fairly well, and
+I was sending on to New York for authors in that tongue.  I do not
+remember how I got the money to buy them; to be sure it was no great sum;
+but it must have been given me out of the sums we were all working so
+hard to make up for the debt, and the interest on the debt (that is
+always the wicked pinch for the debtor!), we had incurred in the purchase
+of the newspaper which we lived by, and the house which we lived in.
+I spent no money on any other sort of pleasure, and so, I suppose, it was
+afforded me the more readily; but I cannot really recall the history of
+those acquisitions on its financial side.  In any case, if the sums I
+laid out in literature could not have been comparatively great, the
+excitement attending the outlay was prodigious.
+
+I know that I used to write on to Messrs. Roe Lockwood & Son, New York,
+for my Spanish books, and I dare say that my letters were sufficiently
+pedantic, and filled with a simulated acquaintance with all Spanish
+literature.  Heaven knows what they must have thought, if they thought
+anything, of their queer customer in that obscure little Ohio village;
+but he could not have been queerer to them than to his fellow-villagers,
+I am sure.  I haunted the post-office about the time the books were due,
+and when I found one of them in our deep box among a heap of exchange
+newspapers and business letters, my emotion was so great that it almost
+took my breath.  I hurried home with the precious volume, and shut myself
+into my little den, where I gave myself up to a sort of transport in it.
+These books were always from the collection of Spanish authors published
+by Baudry in Paris, and they were in saffron-colored paper cover, printed
+full of a perfectly intoxicating catalogue of other Spanish books which I
+meant to read, every one, some time.  The paper and the ink had a certain
+odor which was sweeter to me than the perfumes of Araby.  The look of the
+type took me more than the glance of a girl, and I had a fever of longing
+to know the heart of the book, which was like a lover's passion.  Some
+times I did not reach its heart, but commonly I did.  Moratin's 'Origins
+of the Spanish Theatre,' and a large volume of Spanish dramatic authors,
+were the first Spanish books I sent for, but I could not say why I sent
+for them, unless it was because I saw that there were some plays of
+Cervantes among the rest.  I read these and I read several comedies of
+Lope de Vega, and numbers of archaic dramas in Moratin's history, and I
+really got a fairish perspective of the Spanish drama, which has now
+almost wholly faded from my mind.  It is more intelligible to me why I
+should have read Conde's 'Dominion of the Arabs in Spain;' for that was
+in the line of my reading in Irving, which would account for my pleasure
+in the 'History of the Civil Wars of Granada;' it was some time before I
+realized that the chronicles in this were a bundle of romances and not
+veritable records; and my whole study in these things was wholly
+undirected and unenlightened.  But I meant to be thorough in it, and I
+could not rest satisfied with the Spanish-English grammars I had; I was
+not willing to stop short of the official grammar of the Spanish Academy.
+I sent to New York for it, and my booksellers there reported that they
+would have to send to Spain for it.  I lived till it came to hand through
+them from Madrid; and I do not understand why I did not perish then from
+the pride and joy I had in it.
+
+But, after all, I am not a Spanish scholar, and can neither speak nor
+write the language.  I never got more than a good reading use of it,
+perhaps because I never really tried for more.  But I am very glad of
+that, because it has been a great pleasure to me, and even some profit,
+and it has lighted up many meanings in literature, which must always have
+remained dark to me.  Not to speak now of the modern Spanish writers whom
+it has enabled me to know in their own houses as it were, I had even in
+that remote day a rapturous delight in a certain Spanish book, which was
+well worth all the pains I had undergone to get at it.  This was the
+famous picaresque novel, 'Lazarillo de Tormes,' by Hurtado de Mendoza,
+whose name then so familiarized itself to my fondness that now as I write
+it I feel as if it were that of an old personal friend whom I had known
+in the flesh.  I believe it would not have been always comfortable to
+know Mendoza outside of his books; he was rather a terrible person; he
+was one of the Spanish invaders of Italy, and is known in Italian history
+as the Tyrant of Sierra.  But at my distance of time and place I could
+safely revel in his friendship, and as an author I certainly found him a
+most charming companion.  The adventures of his rogue of a hero, who
+began life as the servant and accomplice of a blind beggar, and then
+adventured on through a most diverting career of knavery, brought back
+the atmosphere of Don Quixote, and all the landscape of that dear wonder-
+world of Spain, where I had lived so much, and I followed him with all
+the old delight.
+
+I do not know that I should counsel others to do so, or that the general
+reader would find his account in it, but I am sure that the intending
+author of American fiction would do well to study the Spanish picaresque
+novels; for in their simplicity of design he will find one of the best
+forms for an American story.  The intrigue of close texture will never
+suit our conditions, which are so loose and open and variable; each man's
+life among us is a romance of the Spanish model, if it is the life of a
+man who has risen, as we nearly all have, with many ups and downs.  The
+story of 'Latzarillo' is gross in its facts, and is mostly "unmeet for
+ladies," like most of the fiction in all languages before our times; but
+there is an honest simplicity in the narration, a pervading humor, and a
+rich feeling for character that gives it value.
+
+I think that a good deal of its foulness was lost upon me, but I
+certainly understood that it would not do to present it to an American
+public just as it was, in the translation which I presently planned to
+make. I went about telling the story to people, and trying to make them
+find it as amusing as I did, but whether I ever succeeded I cannot say,
+though the notion of a version with modifications constantly grew with
+me, till one day I went to the city of Cleveland with my father.  There
+was a branch house of an Eastern firm of publishers in that place, and I
+must have had the hope that I might have the courage to propose a
+translation of Lazarillo to them.  My father urged me to try my fortune,
+but my heart failed me.  I was half blind with one of the headaches that
+tormented me in those days, and I turned my sick eyes from the sign,
+"J. P. Jewett & Co., Publishers," which held me fascinated, and went home
+without at least having my much-dreamed-of version of Lazarillo refused.
+
+
+
+
+XXII.  CURTIS, LONGFELLOW, SCHLEGEL
+
+I am quite at a loss to know why my reading had this direction or that in
+those days.  It had necessarily passed beyond my father's suggestion, and
+I think it must have been largely by accident or experiment that I read
+one book rather than another.  He made some sort of newspaper arrangement
+with a book-store in Cleveland, which was the means of enriching our home
+library with a goodly number of books, shop-worn, but none the worse for
+that, and new in the only way that books need be new to the lover of
+them.  Among these I found a treasure in Curtis's two books, the 'Nile
+Notes of a Howadji,' and the 'Howadji in Syria.'  I already knew him by
+his 'Potiphar Papers,' and the ever-delightful reveries which have since
+gone under the name of 'Prue and I;' but those books of Eastern travel
+opened a new world of thinking and feeling.  They had at once a great
+influence upon me.  The smooth richness of their diction; the amiable
+sweetness of their mood, their gracious caprice, the delicacy of their
+satire (which was so kind that it should have some other name), their
+abundance of light and color, and the deep heart of humanity underlying
+their airiest fantasticality, all united in an effect which was different
+from any I had yet known.
+
+As usual, I steeped myself in them, and the first runnings of my fancy
+when I began to pour it out afterwards were of their flavor.  I tried to
+write like this new master; but whether I had tried or not, I should
+probably have done so from the love I bore him.  He was a favorite not
+only of mine, but of all the young people in the village who were reading
+current literature, so that on this ground at least I had abundant
+sympathy.  The present generation can have little notion of the deep
+impression made upon the intelligence and conscience of the whole nation
+by the 'Potiphar Papers,' or how its fancy was rapt with the 'Prue and I'
+sketches, These are among the most veritable literary successes we have
+had, and probably we who were so glad when the author of these beautiful
+things turned aside from the flowery paths where he led us, to battle for
+freedom in the field of politics, would have felt the sacrifice too great
+if we could have dreamed it would be life-long.  But, as it was, we could
+only honor him the more, and give him a place in our hearts which he
+shared with Longfellow.
+
+This divine poet I have never ceased to read.  His Hiawatha was a new
+book during one of those terrible Lake Shore winters, but all the other
+poems were old friends with me by that time.  With a sister who is no
+longer living I had a peculiar affection for his pretty and touching and
+lightly humorous tale of 'Kavanagh,' which was of a village life enough
+like our own, in some things, to make us know the truth of its delicate
+realism.  We used to read it and talk it fondly over together, and I
+believe some stories of like make and manner grew out of our pleasure in
+it.  They were never finished, but it was enough to begin them, and there
+were few writers, if any, among those I delighted in who escaped the
+tribute of an imitation.  One has to begin that way, or at least one had
+in my day; perhaps it is now possible for a young writer to begin by
+being himself; but for my part, that was not half so important as to be
+like some one else.  Literature, not life, was my aim, and to reproduce
+it was my joy and my pride.
+
+I was widening my knowledge of it helplessly and involuntarily, and I was
+always chancing upon some book that served this end among the great
+number of books that I read merely for my pleasure without any real
+result of the sort.  Schlegel's 'Lectures on Dramatic Literature' came
+into my hands not long after I had finished my studies in the history of
+the Spanish theatre, and it made the whole subject at once luminous.
+I cannot give a due notion of the comfort this book afforded me by the
+light it cast upon paths where I had dimly made my way before, but which
+I now followed in the full day.
+
+Of course, I pinned my faith to everything that Schlegel said.
+I obediently despised the classic unities and the French and Italian
+theatre which had perpetuated them, and I revered the romantic drama
+which had its glorious course among the Spanish and English poets, and
+which was crowned with the fame of the Cervantes and the Shakespeare whom
+I seemed to own, they owned me so completely.  It vexes me now to find
+that I cannot remember how the book came into my hands, or who could have
+suggested it to me.  It is possible that it may have been that artist who
+came and stayed a month with us while she painted my mother's portrait.
+She was fresh from her studies in New York, where she had met authors and
+artists at the house of the Carey sisters, and had even once seen my
+adored Curtis somewhere, though she had not spoken with him.  Her talk
+about these things simply emparadised me; it lifted me into a heaven of
+hope that I, too, might some day meet such elect spirits and converse
+with them face to face.  My mood was sufficiently foolish, but it was not
+such a frame of mind as I can be ashamed of; and I could wish a boy no
+happier fortune than to possess it for a time, at least.
+
+
+
+
+XXIII.  TENNYSON
+
+I cannot quite see now how I found time for even trying to do the things
+I had in hand more or less.  It is perfectly clear to me that I did none
+of them well, though I meant at the time to do none of them other than
+excellently.  I was attempting the study of no less than four languages,
+and I presently added a fifth to these.  I was reading right and left in
+every direction, but chiefly in that of poetry, criticism, and fiction.
+From time to time I boldly attacked a history, and carried it by a 'coup
+de main,' or sat down before it for a prolonged siege.  There was
+occasionally an author who worsted me, whom I tried to read and quietly
+gave up after a vain struggle, but I must say that these authors were
+few.  I had got a very fair notion of the range of all literature, and
+the relations of the different literatures to one another, and I knew
+pretty well what manner of book it was that I took up before I committed
+myself to the task of reading it.  Always I read for pleasure, for the
+delight of knowing something more; and this pleasure is a very different
+thing from amusement, though I read a great deal for mere amusement, as I
+do still, and to take my mind away from unhappy or harassing thoughts.
+There are very few things that I think it a waste of time to have read;
+I should probably have wasted the time if I had not read them, and at the
+period I speak of I do not think I wasted much time.
+
+My day began about seven o'clock, in the printing-office, where it took
+me till noon to do my task of so many thousand ems, say four or five.
+Then we had dinner, after the simple fashion of people who work with
+their hands for their dinners.  In the afternoon I went back and
+corrected the proof of the type I had set, and distributed my case for
+the next day.  At two or three o'clock I was free, and then I went home
+and began my studies; or tried to write something; or read a book.
+We had supper at six, and after that I rejoiced in literature, till I
+went to bed at ten or eleven.  I cannot think of any time when I did not
+go gladly to my books or manuscripts, when it was not a noble joy as well
+as a high privilege.
+
+But it all ended as such a strain must, in the sort of break which was
+not yet known as nervous prostration.  When I could not sleep after my
+studies, and the sick headaches came oftener, and then days and weeks of
+hypochondriacal misery, it was apparent I was not well; but that was not
+the day of anxiety for such things, and if it was thought best that I
+should leave work and study for a while, it was not with the notion that
+the case was at all serious, or needed an uninterrupted cure.  I passed
+days in the woods and fields, gunning or picking berries; I spent myself
+in heavy work; I made little journeys; and all this was very wholesome
+and very well; but I did not give up my reading or my attempts to write.
+No doubt I was secretly proud to have been invalided in so great a cause,
+and to be sicklied over with the pale cast of thought, rather than by
+some ignoble ague or the devastating consumption of that region.  If I
+lay awake, noting the wild pulsations of my heart, and listening to the
+death-watch in the wall, I was certainly very much scared, but I was not
+without the consolation that I was at least a sufferer for literature.
+At the same time that I was so horribly afraid of dying, I could have
+composed an epitaph which would have moved others to tears for my
+untimely fate.  But there was really not impairment of my constitution,
+and after a while I began to be better, and little by little the health
+which has never since failed me under any reasonable stress of work
+established itself.
+
+I was in the midst of this unequal struggle when I first became
+acquainted with the poet who at once possessed himself of what was best
+worth having in me.  Probably I knew of Tennyson by extracts, and from
+the English reviews, but I believe it was from reading one of Curtis's
+"Easy Chair" papers that I was prompted to get the new poem of "Maud,"
+which I understood from the "Easy Chair" was then moving polite youth in
+the East.  It did not seem to me that I could very well live without that
+poem, and when I went to Cleveland with the hope that I might have
+courage to propose a translation of Lazarillo to a publisher it was with
+the fixed purpose of getting "Maud" if it was to be found in any book-
+store there.
+
+I do not know why I was so long in reaching Tennyson, and I can only
+account for it by the fact that I was always reading rather the earlier
+than the later English poetry.  To be sure I had passed through what I
+may call a paroxysm of Alexander Smith, a poet deeply unknown to the
+present generation, but then acclaimed immortal by all the critics, and
+put with Shakespeare, who must be a good deal astonished from time to
+time in his Elysian quiet by the companionship thrust upon him.  I read
+this now dead-and-gone immortal with an ecstasy unspeakable; I raved of
+him by day, and dreamed of him by night; I got great lengths of his
+"Life-Drama" by heart; and I can still repeat several gorgeous passages
+from it; I would almost have been willing to take the life of the sole
+critic who had the sense to laugh at him, and who made his wicked fun in
+Graham's Magazine, an extinct periodical of the old extinct Philadelphian
+species.  I cannot tell how I came out of this craze, but neither could
+any of the critics who led me into it, I dare say.  The reading world is
+very susceptible of such-lunacies, and all that can be said is that at a
+given time it was time for criticism to go mad over a poet who was
+neither better nor worse than many another third-rate poet apotheosized
+before and since.  What was good in Smith was the reflected fire of the
+poets who had a vital heat in them; and it was by mere chance that I
+bathed myself in his second-hand effulgence.  I already knew pretty well
+the origin of the Tennysonian line in English poetry; Wordsworth, and
+Keats, and Shelley; and I did not come to Tennyson's worship a sudden
+convert, but my devotion to him was none the less complete and exclusive.
+Like every other great poet he somehow expressed the feelings of his day,
+and I suppose that at the time he wrote "Maud" he said more fully what
+the whole English-speaking race were then dimly longing to utter than any
+English poet who has lived.
+
+One need not question the greatness of Browning in owning the fact that
+the two poets of his day who preeminently voiced their generation were
+Tennyson and Longfellow; though Browning, like Emerson, is possibly now
+more modern than either.  However, I had then nothing to do with
+Tennyson's comparative claim on my adoration; there was for the time no
+parallel for him in the whole range of literary divinities that I had
+bowed the knee to.  For that while, the temple was not only emptied of
+all the other idols, but I had a richly flattering illusion of being his
+only worshipper.  When I came to the sense of this error, it was with the
+belief that at least no one else had ever appreciated him so fully, stood
+so close to him in that holy of holies where he wrought his miracles.
+
+I say tawdily and ineffectively and falsely what was a very precious and
+sacred experience with me.  This great poet opened to me a whole world of
+thinking and feeling, where I had my being with him in that mystic
+intimacy, which cannot be put into words.  I at once identified myself
+not only with the hero of the poem, but in some so with the poet himself,
+when I read "Maud"; but that was only the first step towards the lasting
+state in which his poetry has upon the whole been more to me than that of
+any other poet.  I have never read any other so closely and continuously,
+or read myself so much into and out of his verse.  There have been times
+and moods when I have had my questions, and made my cavils, and when it
+seemed to me that the poet was less than I had thought him; and certainly
+I do not revere equally and unreservedly all that he has written; that
+would be impossible.  But when I think over all the other poets I have
+read, he is supreme above them in his response to some need in me that he
+has satisfied so perfectly.
+
+Of course, "Maud" seemed to me the finest poem I had read, up to that
+time, but I am not sure that this conclusion was wholly my own; I think
+it was partially formed for me by the admiration of the poem which I felt
+to be everywhere in the critical atmosphere, and which had already
+penetrated to me.  I did not like all parts of it equally well, and some
+parts of it seemed thin and poor (though I would not suffer myself to say
+so then), and they still seem so.  But there were whole passages and
+spaces of it whose divine and perfect beauty lifted me above life.  I did
+not fully understand the poem then; I do not fully understand it now, but
+that did not and does not matter; for there something in poetry that
+reaches the soul by other enues than the intelligence.  Both in this poem
+and others of Tennyson, and in every poet that I have loved, there are
+melodies and harmonies enfolding significance that appeared long after I
+had first read them, and had even learned them by heart; that lay weedy
+in my outer ear and were enough in their Mere beauty of phrasing, till
+the time came for them to reveal their whole meaning.  In fact they could
+do this only to later and greater knowledge of myself and others, as
+every one must recognize who recurs in after-life to a book that he read
+when young; then he finds it twice as full of meaning as it was at first.
+
+I could not rest satisfied with "Maud"; I sent the same summer to
+Cleveland for the little volume which then held all the poet's work, and
+abandoned myself so wholly to it, that for a year I read no other verse
+that I can remember.  The volume was the first of that pretty blue-and-
+gold series which Ticknor & Fields began to publish in 1856, and which
+their imprint, so rarely affixed to an unworthy book, at once carried far
+and wide.  Their modest old brown cloth binding had long been a quiet
+warrant of quality in the literature it covered, and now this splendid
+blossom of the bookmaking art, as it seemed, was fitly employed to convey
+the sweetness and richness of the loveliest poetry that I thought the
+world had yet known.  After an old fashion of mine, I read it
+continuously, with frequent recurrences from each new poem to some that
+had already pleased me, and with a most capricious range among the
+pieces.  "In Memoriam" was in that book, and the "Princess"; I read the
+"Princess" through and through, and over and over, but I did not then
+read "In Memoriam" through, and I have never read it in course; I am not
+sure that I have even yet read every part of it.  I did not come to the
+"Princess," either, until I had saturated my fancy and my memory with
+some of the shorter poems, with the "Dream of Fair Women," with the
+"Lotus-Eaters," with the "Miller's Daughter," with the "Morte d'Arthur,"
+with "Edwin Morris, or The Lake," with "Love and Duty," and a score of
+other minor and briefer poems.  I read the book night and day, in-doors
+and out, to myself and to whomever I could make listen.  I have no words
+to tell the rapture it was to me; but I hope that in some more articulate
+being, if it should ever be my unmerited fortune to meet that 'sommo
+poeta' face to face, it shall somehow be uttered from me to him, and he
+will understand how completely he became the life of the boy I was then.
+I think it might please, or at least amuse, that lofty ghost, and that he
+would not resent it, as he would probably have done on earth.  I can well
+understand why the homage of his worshippers should have afflicted him
+here, and I could never have been one to burn incense in his earthly
+presence; but perhaps it might be done hereafter without offence.
+I eagerly caught up and treasured every personal word I could find about
+him, and I dwelt in that sort of charmed intimacy with him through his
+verse, in which I could not presume nor he repel, and which I had enjoyed
+in turn with Cervantes and Shakespeare, without a snub from them.
+
+I have never ceased to adore Tennyson, though the rapture of the new
+convert could not last.  That must pass like the flush of any other
+passion.  I think I have now a better sense of his comparative greatness,
+but a better sense of his positive greatness I could not have than I had
+at the beginning; and I believe this is the essential knowledge of a
+poet.  It is very well to say one is greater than Keats, or not so great
+as Wordsworth; that one is or is not of the highest order of poets like
+Shakespeare and Dante and Goethe; but that does not mean anything of
+value, and I never find my account in it.  I know it is not possible for
+any less than the greatest writer to abide lastingly in one's life.  Some
+dazzling comer may enter and possess it for a day, but he soon wears his
+welcome out, and presently finds the door, to be answered with a not-at-
+home if he knocks again.  But it was only this morning that I read one of
+the new last poems of Tennyson with a return of the emotion which he
+first woke in me well-nigh forty years ago.  There has been no year of
+those many when I have not read him and loved him with something of the
+early fire if not all the early conflagration; and each successive poem
+of his has been for me a fresh joy.
+
+He went with me into the world from my village when I left it to make my
+first venture away from home.  My father had got one of those legislative
+clerkships which used to fall sometimes to deserving country editors when
+their party was in power, and we together imagined and carried out a
+scheme for corresponding with some city newspapers.  We were to furnish a
+daily, letter giving an account of the legislative proceedings which I
+was mainly to write up from material he helped me to get together.  The
+letters at once found favor with the editors who agreed to take them, and
+my father then withdrew from the work altogether, after telling them who
+was doing it.  We were afraid they might not care for the reports of a
+boy of nineteen, but they did not seem to take my age into account, and I
+did not boast of my youth among the lawmakers.  I looked three or four
+years older than I was; but I experienced a terrible moment once when a
+fatherly Senator asked me my age.  I got away somehow without saying, but
+it was a great relief to me when my twentieth birthday came that winter,
+and I could honestly proclaim that I was in my twenty-first year.
+
+I had now the free range of the State Library, and I drew many sorts of
+books from it.  Largely, however, they were fiction, and I read all the
+novels of Bulwer, for whom I had already a great liking from 'The
+Caxtons' and 'My Novel.'  I was dazzled by them, and I thought him a
+great writer, if not so great a one as he thought himself.  Little or
+nothing of those romances, with their swelling prefaces about the poet
+and his function, their glittering criminals, and showy rakes and rogues
+of all kinds, and their patrician perfume and social splendor, remained
+with me; they may have been better or worse; I will not attempt to say.
+If I may call my fascination with them a passion at all, I must say that
+it was but a fitful fever.  I also read many volumes of Zschokke's
+admirable tales, which I found in a translation in the Library, and I
+think I began at the same time to find out De Quincey.  These authors I
+recall out of the many that passed through my mind almost as tracelessly
+as they passed through my hands.  I got at some versions of Icelandic
+poems, in the metre of "Hiawatha"; I had for a while a notion of studying
+Icelandic, and I did take out an Icelandic grammar and lexicon, and
+decided that I would learn the language later.  By this time I must have
+begun German, which I afterwards carried so far, with one author at
+least, as to find in him a delight only second to that I had in Tennyson;
+but as yet Tennyson was all in all to me in poetry.  I suspect that I
+carried his poems about with me a great part of the time; I am afraid
+that I always had that blue-and-gold Tennyson in my pocket; and I was
+ready to draw it upon anybody, at the slightest provocation.  This is the
+worst of the ardent lover of literature: he wishes to make every one else
+share his rapture, will he, nill he.  Many good fellows suffered from my
+admiration of this author or that, and many more pretty, patient maids.
+I wanted to read my favorite passages, my favorite poems to them; I am
+afraid I often did read, when they would rather have been talking; in the
+case of the poems I did worse, I repeated them.  This seems rather
+incredible now, but it is true enough, and absurd as it is, it at least
+attests my sincerity.  It was long before I cured myself of so pestilent
+a habit; and I am not yet so perfectly well of it that I could be safely
+trusted with a fascinating book and a submissive listener.  I dare say I
+could not have been made to understand at this time that Tennyson was not
+so nearly the first interest of life with other people as he was with me;
+I must often have suspected it, but I was helpless against the wish to
+make them feel him as important to their prosperity and well-being as he
+was to mine.  My head was full of him; his words were always behind my
+lips; and when I was not repeating his phrase to myself or to some one
+else, I was trying to frame something of my own as like him as I could.
+It was a time of melancholy from ill-health, and of anxiety for the
+future in which I must make my own place in the world.  Work, and hard
+work, I had always been used to and never afraid of; but work is by no
+means the whole story.  You may get on without much of it, or you may do
+a great deal, and not get on.  I was willing to do as much of it as I
+could get to do, but I distrusted my health, somewhat, and I had many
+forebodings, which my adored poet helped me to transfigure to the
+substance of literature, or enabled me for the time to forget.  I was
+already imitating him in the verse I wrote; he now seemed the only worthy
+model for one who meant to be as great a poet as I did.  None of the
+authors whom I read at all displaced him in my devotion, and I could not
+have believed that any other poet would ever be so much to me.  In fact,
+as I have expressed, none ever has been.
+
+
+
+
+XXIV.  HEINE
+
+That winter passed very quickly and happily for me, and at the end of the
+legislative session I had acquitted myself so much to the satisfaction of
+one of the newspapers which I wrote for that I was offered a place on it.
+I was asked to be city editor, as it was called in that day, and I was to
+have charge of the local reporting.  It was a great temptation, and for a
+while I thought it the greatest piece of good fortune.  I went down to
+Cincinnati to acquaint myself with the details of the work, and to fit
+myself for it by beginning as reporter myself.  One night's round of the
+police stations with the other reporters satisfied me that I was not
+meant for that work, and I attempted it no farther.  I have often been
+sorry since, for it would have made known to me many phases of life that
+I have always remained ignorant of, but I did not know then that life was
+supremely interesting and important.  I fancied that literature, that
+poetry was so; and it was humiliation and anguish indescribable to think
+of myself torn from my high ideals by labors like those of the reporter.
+I would not consent even to do the office work of the department, and the
+proprietor and editor who was more especially my friend tried to make
+some other place for me.  All the departments were full but the one I
+would have nothing to do with, and after a few weeks of sufferance and
+suffering I turned my back on a thousand dollars a year, and for the
+second time returned to the printing-office.
+
+I was glad to get home, for I had been all the time tormented by my old
+malady of homesickness.  But otherwise the situation was not cheerful for
+me, and I now began trying to write something for publication that I
+could sell.  I sent off poems and they came back; I offered little
+translations from the Spanish that nobody wanted.  At the same time I
+took up the study of German, which I must have already played with, at
+such odd times as I could find.  My father knew something of it, and that
+friend of mine among the printers was already reading it and trying to
+speak it.  I had their help with the first steps so far as the
+recitations from Ollendorff were concerned, but I was impatient to read
+German, or rather to read one German poet who had seized my fancy from
+the first line of his I had seen.
+
+This poet was Heinrich Heine, who dominated me longer than any one author
+that I have known.  Where or when I first acquainted myself with his most
+fascinating genius, I cannot be sure, but I think it was in some article
+of the Westminster Review, where several poems of his were given in
+English and German; and their singular beauty and grace at once possessed
+my soul.  I was in a fever to know more of him, and it was my great good
+luck to fall in with a German in the village who had his books.  He was a
+bookbinder, one of those educated artisans whom the revolutions of 1848
+sent to us in great numbers.  He was a Hanoverian, and his accent was
+then, I believe, the standard, though the Berlinese is now the accepted
+pronunciation.  But I cared very little for accent; my wish was to get at
+Heine with as little delay as possible; and I began to cultivate the
+friendship of that bookbinder in every way.  I dare say he was glad of
+mine, for he was otherwise quite alone in the village, or had no
+companionship outside of his own family.  I clothed him in all the
+romantic interest I began to feel for his race and language, which new
+took the place of the Spaniards and Spanish in my affections.  He was a
+very quick and gay intelligence, with more sympathy for my love of our
+author's humor than for my love of his sentiment, and I can remember very
+well the twinkle of his little sharp black eyes, with their Tartar slant,
+and the twitching of his keenly pointed, sensitive nose, when we came to
+some passage of biting satire, or some phrase in which the bitter Jew had
+unpacked all the insult of his soul.
+
+We began to read Heine together when my vocabulary had to be dug almost
+word by word out of the dictionary, for the bookbinder's English was
+rather scanty at the best, and was not literary.  As for the grammar, I
+was getting that up as fast as I could from Ollendorff, and from other
+sources, but I was enjoying Heine before I well knew a declension or a
+conjugation.  As soon as my task was done at the office, I went home to
+the books, and worked away at them until supper.  Then my bookbinder and
+I met in my father's editorial room, and with a couple of candles on the
+table between us, and our Heine and the dictionary before us, we read
+till we were both tired out.
+
+The candles were tallow, and they lopped at different angles in the flat
+candlesticks heavily loaded with lead, which compositors once used.
+It seems to have been summer when our readings began, and they are
+associated in my memory with the smell of the neighboring gardens, which
+came in at the open doors and windows, and with the fluttering of moths,
+and the bumbling of the dorbugs, that stole in along with the odors.
+I can see the perspiration on the shining forehead of the bookbinder as
+he looks up from some brilliant passage, to exchange a smile of triumph
+with me at having made out the meaning with the meagre facilities we had
+for the purpose; he had beautiful red pouting lips, and a stiff little
+branching mustache above them, that went to the making of his smile.
+Sometimes, in the truce we made with the text, he told a little story of
+his life at home, or some anecdote relevant to our reading, or quoted a
+passage from some other author.  It seemed to me the make of a high
+intellectual banquet, and I should be glad if I could enjoy anything as
+much now.
+
+We walked home as far as his house, or rather his apartment over one of
+the village stores; and as he mounted to it by an outside staircase, we
+exchanged a joyous "Gute Nacht," and I kept on homeward through the dark
+and silent village street, which was really not that street, but some
+other, where Heine had been, some street out of the Reisebilder, of his
+knowledge, or of his dream.  When I reached home it was useless to go to
+bed.  I shut myself into my little study, and went over what we had read,
+till my brain was so full of it that when I crept up to my room at last,
+it was to lie down to slumbers which were often a mere phantasmagory of
+those witching Pictures of Travel.
+
+I was awake at my father's call in the morning, and before my mother had
+breakfast ready I had recited my lesson in Ollendorff to him.  To tell
+the truth, I hated those grammatical studies, and nothing but the love of
+literature, and the hope of getting at it, could ever have made me go
+through them.  Naturally, I never got any scholarly use of the languages
+I was worrying at, and though I could once write a passable literary
+German, it has all gone from me now, except for the purposes of reading.
+It cost me so much trouble, however, to dig the sense out of the grammar
+and lexicon, as I went on with the authors I was impatient to read, that
+I remember the words very well in all their forms and inflections, and I
+have still what I think I may call a fair German vocabulary.
+
+The German of Heine, when once you are in the joke of his capricious
+genius, is very simple, and in his poetry it is simple from the first,
+so that he was, perhaps, the best author I could have fallen in with if I
+wanted to go fast rather than far.  I found this out later, when I
+attempted other German authors without the glitter of his wit or the
+lambent glow of his fancy to light me on my hard way.  I should find it
+hard to say just why his peculiar genius had such an absolute fascination
+for me from the very first, and perhaps I had better content myself with
+saying simply that my literary liberation began with almost the earliest
+word from him; for if he chained me to himself he freed me from all other
+bondage.  I had been at infinite pains from time to time, now upon one
+model and now upon another, to literarify myself, if I may make a word
+which does not quite say the thing for me.  What I mean is that I had
+supposed, with the sense at times that I was all wrong, that the
+expression of literature must be different from the expression of life;
+that it must be an attitude, a pose, with something of state or at least
+of formality in it; that it must be this style, and not that; that it
+must be like that sort of acting which you know is acting when you see it
+and never mistake for reality.  There are a great many children,
+apparently grown-up, and largely accepted as critical authorities, who
+are still of this youthful opinion of mine.  But Heine at once showed me
+that this ideal of literature was false; that the life of literature was
+from the springs of the best common speech and that the nearer it could
+be made to conform, in voice, look and gait, to graceful, easy,
+picturesque and humorous or impassioned talk, the better it was.
+
+He did not impart these truths without imparting certain tricks with
+them, which I was careful to imitate as soon as I began to write in his
+manner, that is to say instantly.  His tricks he had mostly at second-
+hand, and mainly from Sterne, whom I did not know well enough then to
+know their origin.  But in all essentials he was himself, and my final
+lesson from him, or the final effect of all my lessons from him, was to
+find myself, and to be for good or evil whatsoever I really was.
+
+I kept on writing as much like Heine as I could for several years,
+though, and for a much longer time than I should have done if I had
+ever become equally impassioned of any other author.
+
+Some traces of his method lingered so long in my work that nearly ten
+years afterwards Mr. Lowell wrote me about something of mine that
+he had been reading: "You must sweat the Heine out of your bones as
+men do mercury," and his kindness for me would not be content with less
+than the entire expulsion of the poison that had in its good time saved
+my life.  I dare say it was all well enough not to have it in my bones
+after it had done its office, but it did do its office.
+
+It was in some prose sketch of mine that his keen analysis had found the
+Heine, but the foreign property had been so prevalent in my earlier work
+in verse that he kept the first contribution he accepted from me for the
+Atlantic Monthly a long time, or long enough to make sure that it was not
+a translation of Heine.  Then he printed it, and I am bound to say that
+the poem now justifies his doubt to me, in so much that I do not see why
+Heine should not have had the name of writing it if he had wanted.  His
+potent spirit became immediately so wholly my "control," as the mediums
+say, that my poems might as well have been communications from him so far
+as any authority of my own was concerned; and they were quite like other
+inspirations from the other world in being so inferior to the work of the
+spirit before it had the misfortune to be disembodied and obliged to use
+a medium.  But I do not think that either Heine or I had much lasting
+harm from it, and I am sure that the good, in my case at least, was one
+that can only end with me.  He undid my hands, which had taken so much
+pains to tie behind my back, and he forever persuaded me that though it
+may be ingenious and surprising to dance in chains, it is neither pretty
+nor useful.
+
+
+
+
+XXV.  DE QUINCEY, GOETHE, LONGFELLOW
+
+Another author who was a prime favorite with me about this time was De
+Quincey, whose books I took out of the State Library, one after another,
+until I had read them all.  We who were young people of that day thought
+his style something wonderful, and so indeed it was, especially in those
+passages, abundant everywhere in his work, relating to his own life with
+an intimacy which was always-more rather than less.  His rhetoric there,
+and in certain of his historical studies, had a sort of luminous
+richness, without losing its colloquial ease.  I keenly enjoyed this
+subtle spirit, and the play of that brilliant intelligence which lighted
+up so many ways of literature with its lambent glow or its tricksy
+glimmer, and I had a deep sympathy with certain morbid moods and
+experiences so like my own, as I was pleased to fancy.  I have not looked
+at his Twelve Caesars for twice as many years, but I should be greatly
+surprised to find it other than one of the greatest historical monographs
+ever written.  His literary criticisms seemed to me not only exquisitely
+humorous, but perfectly sane and just; and it delighted me to have him
+personally present, with the warmth of his own temperament in regions of
+cold abstraction; I am not sure that I should like that so much now.  De
+Quincey was hardly less autobiographical when he wrote of Kant, or the
+Flight of the Crim-Tartars, than when he wrote of his own boyhood or the
+miseries of the opium habit.  He had the hospitable gift of making you at
+home with him, and appealing to your sense of comradery with something of
+the flattering confidentiality of Thackeray, but with a wholly different
+effect.
+
+In fact, although De Quincey was from time to time perfunctorily Tory,
+and always a good and faithful British subject, he was so eliminated from
+his time and place by his single love for books, that one could be in his
+company through the whole vast range of his writings, and come away
+without a touch of snobbishness; and that is saying a great deal for an
+English writer.  He was a great little creature, and through his intense
+personality he achieved a sort of impersonality, so that you loved the
+man, who was forever talking-of himself, for his modesty and reticence.
+He left you feeling intimate with him but by no means familiar; with all
+his frailties, and with all those freedoms he permitted himself with the
+lives of his contemporaries, he is to me a figure of delicate dignity,
+and winning kindness.  I think it a misfortune for the present generation
+that his books have fallen into a kind of neglect, and I believe that
+they will emerge from it again to the advantage of literature.
+
+In spite of Heine and Tennyson, De Quincey had a large place in my
+affections, though this was perhaps because he was not a poet; for more
+than those two great poets there was then not much room.  I read him the
+first winter I was at Columbus, and when I went down from the village the
+next winter, to take up my legislative correspondence again, I read him
+more than ever.  But that was destined to be for me a very disheartening
+time.  I had just passed through a rheumatic fever, which left my health
+more broken than before, and one morning shortly after I was settled in
+the capital, I woke to find the room going round me like a wheel.  It was
+the beginning of a vertigo which lasted for six months, and which I began
+to fight with various devices and must yield to at last.  I tried
+medicine and exercise, but it was useless, and my father came to take my
+letters off my hands while I gave myself some ineffectual respites.
+I made a little journey to my old home in southern Ohio, but there and
+everywhere, the sure and firm-set earth waved and billowed under my feet,
+and I came back to Columbus and tried to forget in my work the fact that
+I was no better.  I did not give up trying to read, as usual, and part of
+my endeavor that winter was with Schiller, and Uhland, and even Goethe,
+whose 'Wahlverwandschaften,' hardly yielded up its mystery to me.  To
+tell the truth, I do not think that I found my account in that novel.
+It must needs be a disappointment after Wilhelm Meister, which I had read
+in English; but I dare say my disappointment was largely my own fault;
+I had certainly no right to expect such constant proofs and instances of
+wisdom in Goethe as the unwisdom of his critics had led me to hope for.
+I remember little or nothing of the story, which I tried to find very
+memorable, as I held my, sick way through it.  Longfellow's "Miles
+Standish" came out that winter, and I suspect that I got vastly more real
+pleasure from that one poem of his than I found in all my German authors
+put together, the adored Heine always excepted; though certainly I felt
+the romantic beauty of 'Uhland,' and was aware of something of Schiller's
+generous grandeur.
+
+Of the American writers Longfellow has been most a passion with me, as
+the English, and German, and Spanish, and Russian writers have been.  I
+am sure that this was largely by mere chance.  It was because I happened,
+in such a frame and at such a time, to come upon his books that I loved
+them above those of other men as great.  I am perfectly sensible that
+Lowell and Emerson outvalue many of the poets and prophets I have given
+my heart to; I have read them with delight and with a deep sense of their
+greatness, and yet they have not been my life like those other, those
+lesser, men.  But none of the passions are reasoned, and I do not try to
+account for my literary preferences or to justify them.
+
+I dragged along through several months of that winter, and did my best to
+carry out that notable scheme of not minding my vertigo.  I tried doing
+half-work, and helping my father with the correspondence, but when it
+appeared that nothing would avail, he remained in charge of it, till the
+close of the session, and I went home to try what a complete and
+prolonged rest would do for me.  I was not fit for work in the printing-
+office, but that was a simpler matter than the literary work that was
+always tempting me.  I could get away from it only by taking my gun and
+tramping day after day through the deep, primeval woods.  The fatigue was
+wholesome, and I was so bad a shot that no other creature suffered loss
+from my gain except one hapless wild pigeon.  The thawing snow left the
+fallen beechnuts of the autumn before uncovered among the dead leaves,
+and the forest was full of the beautiful birds.  In most parts of the
+middle West they are no longer seen, except in twos or threes, but once
+they were like the sands of the sea for multitude.  It was not now the
+season when they hid half the heavens with their flight day after day;
+but they were in myriads all through the woods, where their iridescent
+breasts shone like a sudden untimely growth of flowers when you came upon
+them from the front.  When they rose in fright, it was like the upward
+leap of fire, and with the roar of flame.  I use images which, after all,
+are false to the thing I wish to express; but they must serve.  I tried
+honestly enough to kill the pigeons, but I had no luck, or too much, till
+I happened to bring down one of a pair that I found apart from the rest
+in a softy tree-top.  The poor creature I had widowed followed me to the
+verge of the woods, as I started home with my prey, and I do not care to
+know more personally the feelings of a murderer than I did then.  I tried
+to shoot the bird, but my aim was so bad that I could not do her this
+mercy, and at last she flew away, and I saw her no more.
+
+The spring was now opening, and I was able to keep more and more with
+Nature, who was kinder to me than I was to her other children, or wished
+to be, and I got the better of my malady, which gradually left me for no
+more reason apparently than it came upon me.  But I was still far from
+well, and I was in despair of my future.  I began to read again--
+I suppose I had really never altogether stopped.  I borrowed from my
+friend the bookbinder a German novel, which had for me a message of
+lasting cheer.  It was the 'Afraja' of Theodore Mugge, a story of life in
+Norway during the last century, and I remember it as a very lovely story
+indeed, with honest studies of character among the Norwegians, and a
+tender pathos in the fate of the little Lap heroine Gula, who was perhaps
+sufficiently romanced.  The hero was a young Dane, who was going up among
+the fiords to seek his fortune in the northern fisheries; and by a
+process inevitable in youth I became identified with him, so that I
+adventured, and enjoyed, and suffered in his person throughout.  There
+was a supreme moment when he was sailing through the fiords, and finding
+himself apparently locked in by their mountain walls without sign or hope
+of escape, but somehow always escaping by some unimagined channel, and
+keeping on.  The lesson for him was one of trust and courage; and I, who
+seemed to be then shut in upon a mountain-walled fiord without inlet or
+outlet, took the lesson home and promised myself not to lose heart again.
+It seems a little odd that this passage of a book, by no means of the
+greatest, should have had such an effect with me at a time when I was no
+longer so young as to be unduly impressed by what I read; but it is true
+that I have never since found myself in circumstances where there seemed
+to be no getting forward or going back, without a vision of that fiord
+scenery, and then a rise of faith, that if I kept on I should, somehow,
+come out of my prisoning environment.
+
+
+
+
+XXVI.  GEORGE ELIOT, HAWTHORNE, GOETHE, HEINE
+
+I got back health enough to be of use in the printing office that autumn,
+and I was quietly at work there with no visible break in my surroundings
+when suddenly the whole world opened to me through what had seemed an
+impenetrable wall.  The Republican newspaper at the capital had been
+bought by a new management, and the editorial force reorganized upon a
+footing of what we then thought metropolitan enterprise; and to my great
+joy and astonishment I was asked to come and take a place in it.  The
+place offered me was not one of lordly distinction; in fact, it was
+partly of the character of that I had already rejected in Cincinnati,
+but I hoped that in the smaller city its duties would not be so odious;
+and by the time I came to fill it, a change had taken place in the
+arrangements so that I was given charge of the news department.  This
+included the literary notices and the book reviews, and I am afraid that
+I at once gave my prime attention to these.
+
+It was an evening paper, and I had nearly as much time for reading and
+study as I had at home.  But now society began to claim a share of this
+leisure, which I by no means begrudged it.  Society was very charming in
+Columbus then, with a pretty constant round of dances and suppers, and an
+easy cordiality, which I dare say young people still find in it
+everywhere.  I met a great many cultivated people, chiefly young ladies,
+and there were several houses where we young fellows went and came almost
+as freely as if they were our own.  There we had music and cards, and
+talk about books, and life appeared to me richly worth living; if any one
+had said this was not the best planet in the universe I should have
+called him a pessimist, or at least thought him so, for we had not the
+word in those days.  A world in which all those pretty and gracious women
+dwelt, among the figures of the waltz and the lancers, with chat between
+about the last instalment of 'The Newcomes,' was good enough world for
+me; I was only afraid it was too good.  There were, of course, some girls
+who did not read, but few openly professed indifference to literature,
+and there was much lending of books back and forth, and much debate of
+them.  That was the day when 'Adam Bede' was a new book, and in this I
+had my first knowledge of that great intellect for which I had no
+passion, indeed, but always the deepest respect, the highest honor; and
+which has from time to time profoundly influenced me by its ethics.
+
+I state these things simply and somewhat baldly; I might easily refine
+upon them, and study that subtle effect for good and for evil which young
+people are always receiving from the fiction they read; but this its not
+the time or place for the inquiry, and I only wish to own that so far as
+I understand it, the chief part of my ethical experience has been from
+novels.  The life and character I have found portrayed there have
+appealed always to the consciousness of right and wrong implanted in me;
+and from no one has this appeal been stronger than from George Eliot.
+Her influence continued through many years, and I can question it now
+only in the undue burden she seems to throw upon the individual, and her
+failure to account largely enough for motive from the social environment.
+There her work seems to me unphilosophical.
+
+It shares whatever error there is in its perspective with that of
+Hawthorne, whose 'Marble Faun' was a new book at the same time that 'Adam
+Bede' was new, and whose books now came into my life and gave it their
+tinge.  He was always dealing with the problem of evil, too, and I found
+a more potent charm in his more artistic handling of it than I found in
+George Eliot.  Of course, I then preferred the region of pure romance
+where he liked to place his action; but I did not find his instances the
+less veritable because they shone out in
+
+          "The light that never was on sea or land."
+
+I read the 'Marble Faun' first, and then the 'Scarlet Letter,' and then
+the 'House of Seven Gables,' and then the 'Blithedale Romance;' but I
+always liked best the last, which is more nearly a novel, and more
+realistic than the others.  They all moved me with a sort of effect such
+as I had not felt before.  They veers so far from time and place that,
+although most of them related to our country and epoch, I could not
+imagine anything approximate from them; and Hawthorne himself seemed a
+remote and impalpable agency, rather than a person whom one might
+actually meet, as not long afterward happened with me.  I did not hold
+the sort of fancied converse with him that I held with ether authors,
+and I cannot pretend that I had the affection for him that attracted me
+to them.  But he held me by his potent spell, and for a time he dominated
+me as completely as any author I have read.  More truly than any other
+American author he has been a passion with me, and lately I heard with a
+kind of pang a young man saying that he did not believe I should find the
+'Scarlet Letter' bear reading now.  I did not assent to the possibility,
+but the notion gave me a shiver of dismay.  I thought how much that book
+had been to me, how much all of Hawthorne's books had been, and to have
+parted with my faith in their perfection would have been something I
+would not willingly have risked doing.
+
+Of course there is always something fatally weak in the scheme of the
+pure romance, which, after the color of the contemporary mood dies out of
+it, leaves it in danger of tumbling into the dust of allegory; and
+perhaps this inherent weakness was what that bold critic felt in the
+'Scarlet Letter.'  But none of Hawthorne's fables are without a profound
+and distant reach into the recesses of nature and of being.  He came back
+from his researches with no solution of the question, with no message,
+indeed, but the awful warning, "Be true, be true," which is the burden of
+the Scarlet Letter; yet in all his books there is the hue of thoughts
+that we think only in the presence of the mysteries of life and death.
+It is not his fault that this is not intelligence, that it knots the brow
+in sorer doubt rather than shapes the lips to utterance of the things
+that can never be said.  Some of his shorter stories I have found thin
+and cold to my later reading, and I have never cared much for the 'House
+of Seven Gables,' but the other day I was reading the 'Blithedale
+Romance' again, and I found it as potent, as significant, as sadly and
+strangely true as when it first enthralled my soul.
+
+In those days when I tried to kindle my heart at the cold altar of
+Goethe, I did read a great deal of his prose and somewhat of his poetry,
+but it was to be ten years yet before I should go faithfully through with
+his Faust and come to know its power.  For the present, I read 'Wilhelm
+Meister' and the 'Wahlverwandschaften,' and worshipped him much at
+second-hand through Heine.  In the mean time I invested such Germans as
+I met with the halo of their national poetry, and there was one lady of
+whom I heard with awe that she had once known my Heine.  When I came to
+meet her, over a glass of the mild egg-nog which she served at her house
+on Sunday nights, and she told me about Heine, and how he looked, and
+some few things he said, I suffered an indescribable disappointment; and
+if I could have been frank with myself I should have owned to a fear that
+it might have been something like that, if I had myself met the poet in
+the flesh, and tried to hold the intimate converse with him that I held
+in the spirit.  But I shut my heart to all such misgivings and went on
+reading him much more than I read any other German author.  I went on
+writing him too, just as I went on reading and writing Tennyson.  Heine
+was always a personal interest with me, and every word of his made me
+long to have had him say it to me, and tell me why he said it.  In a poet
+of alien race and language and religion I found a greater sympathy than I
+have experienced with any other.  Perhaps the Jews are still the chosen
+people, but now they bear the message of humanity, while once they bore
+the message of divinity.  I knew the ugliness of Heine's nature: his
+revengefulness, and malice, and cruelty, and treachery, and uncleanness;
+and yet he was supremely charming among the poets I have read.  The
+tenderness I still feel for him is not a reasoned love, I must own; but,
+as I am always asking, when was love ever reasoned?
+
+I had a room-mate that winter in Columbus who was already a contributor
+to the Atlantic Monthly, and who read Browning as devotedly as I read
+Heine.  I will not say that he wrote him as constantly, but if that had
+been so, I should not have cared.  What I could not endure without pangs
+of secret jealousy was that he should like Heine, too, and should read
+him, though it was but an arm's-length in an English version.  He had
+found the origins of those tricks and turns of Heine's in 'Tristram
+Shandy' and the 'Sentimental Journey;' and this galled me, as if he had
+shown that some mistress of my soul had studied her graces from another
+girl, and that it was not all her own hair that she wore.  I hid my
+rancor as well as I could, and took what revenge lay in my power by
+insinuating that he might have a very different view if he read Heine in
+the original.  I also made haste to try my own fate with the Atlantic,
+and I sent off to Mr.  Lowell that poem which he kept so long in order to
+make sure that Heine had not written it, as well as authorized it.
+
+
+
+
+XXVII.  CHARLES READE
+
+This was the winter when my friend Piatt and I made our first literary
+venture together in those 'Poems of Two Friends;' which hardly passed the
+circle of our amity; and it was altogether a time of high literary
+exaltation with me.  I walked the streets of the friendly little city by
+day and by night with my head so full of rhymes and poetic phrases that
+it seemed as if their buzzing might have been heard several yards away;
+and I do not yet see quite how I contrived to keep their music out of my
+newspaper paragraphs.  Out of the newspaper I could not keep it, and from
+time to time I broke into verse in its columns, to the great amusement of
+the leading editor, who knew me for a young man with a very sharp tooth
+for such self-betrayals in others.  He wanted to print a burlesque review
+he wrote of the 'Poems of Two Friends' in our paper, but I would not
+suffer it.  I must allow that it was very, funny, and that he was always
+a generous friend, whose wounds would have been as faithful as any that
+could have been dealt me then.  He did not indeed care much for any
+poetry but that of Shakespeare and the 'Ingoldsby Legends;' and when one
+morning a State Senator came into the office with a volume of Tennyson,
+and began to read,
+
+         "The poet in a golden clime was born,
+          With golden stars above;
+          Dowered with the hate of hate, the scorn of scorn
+          The love of love,"
+
+he hitched his chair about, and started in on his leader for the day.
+
+He might have been more patient if he had known that this State Senator
+was to be President Garfield.  But who could know anything of the
+tragical history that was so soon to follow that winter of 1859-60?
+Not I; at least I listened rapt by the poet and the reader, and it seemed
+to me as if the making and the reading of poetry were to go on forever,
+and that was to be all there was of it.  To be sure I had my hard little
+journalistic misgivings that it was not quite the thing for a State
+Senator to come round reading Tennyson at ten o'clock in the morning, and
+I dare say I felt myself superior in my point of view, though I could not
+resist the charm of the verse.  I myself did not bring Tennyson to the
+office at that time.  I brought Thackeray, and I remember that one day
+when I had read half an hour or so in the 'Book of Snobs,' the leading
+editor said frankly, Well, now, he guessed we had had enough of that.
+He apologized afterwards as if he were to blame, and not I, but I dare
+say I was a nuisance with my different literary passions, and must have
+made many of my acquaintances very tired of my favorite authors.  I had
+some consciousness of the fact, but I could not help it.
+
+I ought not to omit from the list of these favorites an author who was
+then beginning to have his greatest vogue, and who somehow just missed of
+being a very great one.  We were all reading his jaunty, nervy, knowing
+books, and some of us were questioning whether we ought not to set him
+above Thackeray and Dickens and George Eliot, 'tulli quanti', so great
+was the effect that Charles Reade had with our generation.  He was a man
+who stood at the parting of the ways between realism and romanticism, and
+if he had been somewhat more of a man he might have been the master of a
+great school of English realism; but, as it was, he remained content to
+use the materials of realism and produce the effect of romanticism.  He
+saw that life itself infinitely outvalued anything that could be feigned
+about it, but its richness seemed to corrupt him, and he had not the
+clear, ethical conscience which forced George Eliot to be realistic when
+probably her artistic prepossessions were romantic.
+
+As yet, however, there was no reasoning of the matter, and Charles Reade
+was writing books of tremendous adventure and exaggerated character,
+which he prided himself on deriving from the facts of the world around
+him.  He was intoxicated with the discovery he had made that the truth
+was beyond invention, but he did not know what to do with the truth in
+art after he had found it in life, and to this day the English mostly do
+not.  We young people were easily taken with his glittering error, and we
+read him with much the same fury, that he wrote.  'Never Too Late to
+Mend;' 'Love Me Little, Love Me Long;' 'Christie Johnstone;' 'Peg
+Woffington;' and then, later, 'Hard Cash,' 'The Cloister and the Hearth,'
+'Foul Play,' 'Put Yourself in His Place'--how much they all meant once,
+or seemed to mean!
+
+The first of them, and the other poems and fictions I was reading, meant
+more to me than the rumors of war that were then filling the air, and
+that so soon became its awful actualities.  To us who have our lives so
+largely in books the material world is always the fable, and the ideal
+the fact.  I walked with my feet on the ground, but my head was in the
+clouds, as light as any of them.  I neither praise nor blame this fact;
+but I feel bound to own it, for that time, and for every time in my life,
+since the witchery of literature began with me.
+
+Those two happy winters in Columbus, when I was finding opportunity and
+recognition, were the heydey of life for me.  There has been no time like
+them since, though there have been smiling and prosperous times a plenty;
+for then I was in the blossom of my youth, and what I had not I could
+hope for without unreason, for I had so much of that which I had most
+desired.  Those times passed, and there came other times, long years of
+abeyance, and waiting, and defeat, which I thought would never end, but
+they passed, too.
+
+I got my appointment of Consul to Venice, and I went home to wait for my
+passport and to spend the last days, so full of civic trouble, before I
+should set out for my post.  If I hoped to serve my country there and
+sweep the Confederate cruisers from the Adriatic, I am afraid my prime
+intent was to add to her literature and to my own credit.  I intended,
+while keeping a sleepless eye out for privateers, to write poems.
+concerning American life which should eclipse anything yet done in that
+kind, and in the mean time I read voraciously and perpetually, to make
+the days go swiftly which I should have been so glad to have linger.  In
+this month I devoured all the 'Waverley novels,' but I must have been
+devouring a great many others, for Charles Reade's 'Christie Johnstone'
+is associated with the last moment of the last days.
+
+A few months ago I was at the old home, and I read that book again,
+after not looking at it for more than thirty years; and I read it with
+amazement at its prevailing artistic vulgarity, its prevailing aesthetic
+error shot here and there with gleams of light, and of the truth that
+Reade himself was always dimly groping for.  The book is written
+throughout on the verge of realism, with divinations and conjectures
+across its border, and with lapses into the fool's paradise of
+romanticism, and an apparent content with its inanity and impossibility.
+But then it was brilliantly new and surprising; it seemed to be the last
+word that could be said for the truth in fiction; and it had a spell that
+held us like an anesthetic above the ache of parting, and the anxiety for
+the years that must pass, with all their redoubled chances, before our
+home circle could be made whole again.  I read on, and the rest listened,
+till the wheels of the old stage made themselves heard in their approach
+through the absolute silence of the village street.  Then we shut the
+book and all went down to the gate together, and parted under the pale
+sky of the October night.  There was one of the home group whom I was not
+to see again: the young brother who died in the blossom of his years
+before I returned from my far and strange sojourn.  He was too young then
+to share our reading of the novel, but when I ran up to his room to bid
+him good-by I found him awake, and, with aching hearts, we bade each
+other good-by forever!
+
+
+
+
+XXVIII.  DANTE
+
+I ran through an Italian grammar on my way across the Atlantic, and from
+my knowledge of Latin, Spanish, and French, I soon had a reading
+acquaintance with the language.  I had really wanted to go to Germany,
+that I might carry forward my studies in German literature, and I first
+applied for the consulate at Munich.  The powers at Washington thought it
+quite the same thing to offer me Rome; but I found that the income of the
+Roman consulate would not give me a living, and I was forced to decline
+it.  Then the President's private secretaries, Mr. John Nicolay and Mr.
+John Hay, who did not know me except as a young Westerner who had written
+poems in the Atlantic Monthly, asked me how I would like Venice, and
+promised that they would have the salary put up to a thousand a year,
+under the new law to embarrass privateers.  It was really put up to
+fifteen hundred, and with this income assured me I went out to the city
+whose influence changed the whole course of my literary life.
+
+No privateers ever came, though I once had notice from Turin that the
+Florida had been sighted off Ancona; and I had nearly four years of
+nearly uninterrupted leisure at Venice, which I meant to employ in
+reading all Italian literature, and writing a history of the republic.
+The history, of course, I expected would be a long affair, and I did not
+quite suppose that I could despatch the literature in any short time;
+besides, I had several considerable poems on hand that occupied me a good
+deal, and worked at these as well as advanced myself in Italian,
+preparatory to the efforts before me.
+
+I had already a slight general notion of Italian letters from Leigh Hunt,
+and from other agreeable English Italianates; and I knew that I wanted to
+read not only the four great poets, Dante, Petrarch, Ariosto, and Tasso,
+but that whole group of burlesque poets, Pulci, Berni, and the rest, who,
+from what I knew of them, I thought would be even more to my mind.  As a
+matter of fact, and in the process of time, I did read somewhat of all
+these, but rather in the minor than the major way; and I soon went off
+from them to the study of the modern poets, novelists, and playwrights
+who interested me so much more.  After my wonted fashion I read half a
+dozen of these authors together, so that it would be hard to say which I
+began with, but I had really a devotion to Dante, though not at that
+time, or ever for the whole of Dante.  During my first year in Venice I
+met an ingenious priest, who had been a tutor in a patrician family, and
+who was willing to lead my faltering steps through the "Inferno."  This
+part of the "Divine Comedy" I read with a beginner's carefulness, and
+with a rapture in its beauties, which I will whisper the reader do not
+appear in every line.
+
+Again I say it is a great pity that criticism is not honest about the
+masterpieces of literature, and does not confess that they are not every
+moment masterly, that they are often dull and tough and dry, as is
+certainly the case with Dante's.  Some day, perhaps, we shall have this
+way of treating literature, and then the lover of it will not feel
+obliged to browbeat himself into the belief that if he is not always
+enjoying himself it is his own fault.  At any rate I will permit myself
+the luxury of frankly saying that while I had a deep sense of the majesty
+and grandeur of Dante's design, many points of its execution bored me,
+and that I found the intermixture of small local fact and neighborhood
+history in the fabric of his lofty creation no part of its noblest
+effect.  What is marvellous in it is its expression of Dante's
+personality, and I can never think that his personalities enhance its
+greatness as a work of art.  I enjoyed them, however, and I enjoyed them
+the more, as the innumerable perspectives of Italian history began to
+open all about me.  Then, indeed, I understood the origins if I did not
+understand the aims of Dante, which there is still much dispute about
+among those who profess to know them clearly.  What I finally perceived
+was that his poem came through him from the heart of Italian life, such
+as it was in his time, and that whatever it teaches, his poem expresses
+that life, in all its splendor and squalor, its beauty and deformity, its
+love and its hate.
+
+Criticism may torment this sense or that sense out of it, but at the end
+of the ends the "Divine Comedy" will stand for the patriotism of
+medieval Italy, as far as its ethics is concerned, and for a profound and
+lofty ideal of beauty, as far as its aesthetics is concerned.  This is
+vague enough and slight enough, I must confess, but I must confess also
+that I had not even a conception of so much when I first read the
+"Inferno."  I went at it very simply, and my enjoyment of it was that
+sort which finds its account in the fine passages, the brilliant
+episodes, the striking pictures.  This was the effect with me of all the
+criticism which I had hitherto read, and I am not sure yet that the
+criticism which tries to be of a larger scope, and to see things "whole,"
+is of any definite effect.  As a matter of fact we see nothing whole,
+neither life nor art.  We are so made, in soul and in sense, that we can
+deal only with parts, with points, with degrees; and the endeavor to
+compass any entirety must involve a discomfort and a danger very
+threatening to our intellectual integrity.
+
+Or if this postulate is as untenable as all the others, still I am very
+glad that I did not then lose any fact of the majesty, and beauty, and
+pathos of the great certain measures for the sake of that fourth
+dimension of the poem which is not yet made palpable or visible.  I took
+my sad heart's fill of the sad story of "Paolo and Francesca," which I
+already knew in Leigh Hunt's adorable dilution, and most of the lines
+read themselves into my memory, where they linger yet.  I supped on the
+horrors of Ugolino's fate with the strong gust of youth, which finds
+every, exercise of sympathy a pleasure.  My good priest sat beside me in
+these rich moments, knotting in his lap the calico handkerchief of the
+snuff-taker, and entering with tremulous eagerness into my joy in things
+that he had often before enjoyed.  No doubt he had an inexhaustible
+pleasure in them apart from mine, for I have found my pleasure in them
+perennial, and have not failed to taste it as often as I have read or
+repeated any of the great passages of the poem to myself.  This pleasure
+came often from some vital phrase, or merely the inspired music of a
+phrase quite apart from its meaning.  I did not get then, and I have not
+got since, a distinct conception of the journey through Hell, and as
+often as I have tried to understand the topography of the poem I have
+fatigued myself to no purpose, but I do not think the essential meaning
+was lost upon me.
+
+I dare say my priest had his notion of the general shape and purport,
+the gross material body of the thing, but he did not trouble me with it,
+while we sat tranced together in the presence of its soul.  He seemed,
+at times, so lost in the beatific vision, that he forgot my stumblings in
+the philological darkness, till I appealed to him for help.  Then he
+would read aloud with that magnificent rhythm the Italians have in
+reading their verse, and the obscured meaning would seem to shine out of
+the mere music of the poem, like the color the blind feel in sound.
+
+I do not know what has become of him, but if he is like the rest of the
+strange group of my guides, philosophers, and friends in literature--the
+printer, the organ-builder, the machinist, the drug-clerk, and the
+bookbinder--I am afraid he is dead.  In fact, I who was then I, might be
+said to be dead too, so little is my past self like my present self in
+anything but the "increasing purpose" which has kept me one in my love of
+literature.  He was a gentle and kindly man, with a life and a longing,
+quite apart from his vocation, which were never lived or fulfilled.
+I did not see him after he ceased to read Dante with me, and in fact I
+was instructed by the suspicions of my Italian friends to be careful how
+I consorted with a priest, who might very well be an Austrian spy.
+I parted with him for no such picturesque reason, for I never believed
+him other than the truest and faithfulest of friends, but because I was
+then giving myself more entirely to work in which he could not help me.
+
+Naturally enough this was a long poem in the terza rima of the "Divina
+Commedia," and dealing with a story of our civil war in a fashion so
+remote that no editor would print it.  This was the first fruits and the
+last of my reading of Dante, in verse, and it was not so like Dante as I
+would have liked to make it; but Dante is not easy to imitate; he is too
+unconscious, and too single, too bent upon saying the thing that is in
+him, with whatever beauty inheres in it, to put on the graces that others
+may catch.
+
+
+
+
+XXIX.  GOLDONI, MANZONI, D'AZEGLIO
+
+However, this poem only shared the fate of nearly, all the others that I
+wrote at this time; they came back to me with unfailing regularity from
+all the magazine editors of the English-speaking world; I had no success
+with any of them till I sent Mr. Lowell a paper on recent Italian comedy
+for the North American Review, which he and Professor Norton had then
+begun to edit.  I was in the mean time printing the material of Venetian
+Life and the Italian Journeys in a Boston newspaper after its rejection
+by the magazines; and my literary life, almost without my willing it, had
+taken the course of critical observance of books and men in their
+actuality.
+
+That is to say, I was studying manners, in the elder sense of the word,
+wherever I could get at them in the frank life of the people about me,
+and in such literature of Italy as was then modern.  In this pursuit I
+made a discovery that greatly interested me, and that specialized my
+inquiries.  I found that the Italians had no novels which treated of
+their contemporary life; that they had no modern fiction but the
+historical romance.  I found that if I wished to know their life from
+their literature I must go to their drama, which was even then
+endeavoring to give their, stage a faithful picture of their
+civilization.  There was even then in the new circumstance of a people
+just liberated from every variety of intellectual repression and
+political oppression, a group of dramatic authors, whose plays were not
+only delightful to see but delightful to read, working in the good
+tradition of one of the greatest realists who has ever lived, and
+producing a drama of vital strength and charm.  One of them, whom I by no
+means thought the best, has given us a play, known to all the world,
+which I am almost ready to think with Zola is the greatest play of modern
+times; or if it is not so, I should be puzzled to name the modern drama
+that surpasses "La Morte Civile" of Paolo Giacometti.  I learned to know
+all the dramatists pretty well, in the whole range of their work, on the
+stage and in the closet, and I learned to know still better, and to love
+supremely, the fine, amiable genius whom, as one of them said, they did
+not so much imitate as learn from to imitate nature.
+
+This was Carlo Goldoni, one of the first of the realists, but antedating
+conscious realism so long as to have been born at Venice early in the
+eighteenth century, and to have come to his hand-to-hand fight with the
+romanticism of his day almost before that century had reached its noon.
+In the early sixties of our own century I was no more conscious of his
+realism than he was himself a hundred years before; but I had eyes in my
+head, and I saw that what he had seen in Venice so long before was so
+true that it was the very life of Venice in my own day; and because I
+have loved the truth in art above all other things, I fell instantly and
+lastingly in love with Carlo Goldoni.  I was reading his memoirs, and
+learning to know his sweet, honest, simple nature while I was learning to
+know his work, and I wish that every one who reads his plays would read
+his life as well; one must know him before one can fully know them.  I
+believe, in fact, that his autobiography came into my hands first.  But,
+at any rate, both are associated with the fervors and languors of that
+first summer in Venice, so that I cannot now take up a book of Goldoni's
+without a renewed sense of that sunlight and moonlight, and of the sounds
+and silences of a city that is at once the stillest and shrillest in the
+world.
+
+Perhaps because I never found his work of great ethical or aesthetical
+proportions, but recognized that it pretended to be good only within its
+strict limitations, I recur to it now without that painful feeling of a
+diminished grandeur in it, which attends us so often when we go back to
+something that once greatly pleased us.  It seemed to me at the time that
+I must have read all his comedies in Venice, but I kept reading new ones
+after I came home, and still I can take a volume of his from the shelf,
+and when thirty years are past, find a play or two that I missed before.
+Their number is very great, but perhaps those that I fancy I have not
+read, I have really read once or more and forgotten.  That might very
+easily be, for there is seldom anything more poignant in any one of them
+than there is in the average course of things.  The plays are light and
+amusing transcripts from life, for the most part, and where at times they
+deepen into powerful situations, or express strong emotions, they do so
+with persons so little different from the average of our acquaintance
+that we do not remember just who the persons are.
+
+There is no doubt but the kindly playwright had his conscience, and meant
+to make people think as well as laugh.  I know of none of his plays that
+is of wrong effect, or that violates the instincts of purity, or insults
+common sense with the romantic pretence that wrong will be right if you
+will only paint it rose-color.  He is at some obvious pains to "punish
+vice and reward virtue," but I do not mean that easy morality when I
+praise his; I mean the more difficult sort that recognizes in each man's
+soul the arbiter not of his fate surely, but surely of his peace.  He
+never makes a fool of the spectator by feigning that passion is a reason
+or justification, or that suffering of one kind can atone for wrong of
+another.  That was left for the romanticists of our own century to
+discover; even the romanticists whom Goldoni drove from the stage, were
+of that simpler eighteenth-century sort who had not yet liberated the
+individual from society, but held him accountable in the old way.  As for
+Goldoni himself, he apparently never dreams of transgression; he is of
+rather an explicit conventionality in most things, and he deals with
+society as something finally settled.  How artfully he deals with it,
+how decently, how wholesomely, those who know Venetian society of the
+eighteenth century historically, will perceive when they recall the
+adequate impression he gives of it without offence in character or
+language or situation.  This is the perpetual miracle of his comedy,
+that it says so much to experience and worldly wisdom, and so little to
+inexperience and worldly innocence.  No doubt the Serenest Republic was
+very strict with the theatre, and suffered it to hold the mirror up to
+nature only when nature was behaving well, or at least behaving as if
+young people were present.  Yet the Italians are rather plain-spoken, and
+they recognize facts which our company manners at least do not admit the
+existence of.  I should say that Goldoni was almost English, almost
+American, indeed, in his observance of the proprieties, and I like this
+in him; though the proprieties are not virtues, they are very good
+things, and at least are better than the improprieties.
+
+This, however, I must own, had not a great deal to do with my liking him
+so much, and I should be puzzled to account for my passion, as much in
+his case as in most others.  If there was any reason for it, perhaps it
+was that he had the power of taking me out of my life, and putting me
+into the lives of others, whom I felt to be human beings as much as
+myself.  To make one live in others, this is the highest effect of
+religion as well as of art, and possibly it will be the highest bliss we
+shall ever know.  I do not pretend that my translation was through my
+unselfishness; it was distinctly through that selfishness which perceives
+that self is misery; and I may as well confess here that I do not regard
+the artistic ecstasy as in any sort noble.  It is not noble to love the
+beautiful, or to live for it, or by it; and it may even not be refining.
+I would not have any reader of mine, looking forward to some aesthetic
+career, suppose that this love is any merit in itself; it may be the
+grossest egotism.  If you cannot look beyond the end you aim at, and seek
+the good which is not your own, all your sacrifice is to yourself and not
+of yourself, and you might as well be going into business.  In itself and
+for itself it is no more honorable to win fame than to make money, and
+the wish to do the one is no more elevating than the wish to do the
+other.
+
+But in the days I write of I had no conception of this, and I am sure
+that my blindness to so plain a fact kept me even from seeking and
+knowing the highest beauty in the things I worshipped.  I believe that if
+I had been sensible of it I should hays read much more of such humane
+Italian poets and novelists as Manzoni and D'Azeglio, whom I perceived to
+be delightful, without dreaming of them in the length and breadth of
+their goodness.  Now and then its extent flashed upon me, but the glimpse
+was lost to my retroverted vision almost as soon as won.  It is only in
+thinking back to there that I can realize how much they might always have
+meant to me.  They were both living in my time in Italy, and they were
+two men whom I should now like very much to have seen, if I could have
+done so without that futility which seems to attend every effort to pay
+one's duty to such men.
+
+The love of country in all the Italian poets and romancers of the long
+period of the national resurrection ennobled their art in a measure which
+criticism has not yet taken account of.  I conceived of its effect then,
+but I conceived of it as a misfortune, a fatality; now I am by no means
+sure that it was so; hereafter the creation of beauty, as we call it, for
+beauty's sake, may be considered something monstrous.  There is forever a
+poignant meaning in life beyond what mere living involves, and why should
+not there be this reference in art to the ends beyond art?
+The situation, the long patience, the hope against hope, dignified and
+beautified the nature of the Italian writers of that day, and evoked from
+them a quality which I was too little trained in their school to
+appreciate.  But in a sort I did feel it, I did know it in them all, so
+far as I knew any of them, and in the tragedies of Manzoni, and in the
+romances of D'Azeglio, and yet more in the simple and modest records of
+D'Azeglio's life published after his death, I profited by it, and
+unconsciously prepared myself for that point of view whence all the arts
+appear one with all the uses, and there is nothing beautiful that is
+false.
+
+I am very glad of that experience of Italian literature, which I look
+back upon as altogether wholesome and sanative, after my excesses of
+Heine.  No doubt it was all a minor affair as compared with equal
+knowledge of French literature, and so far it was a loss of time.  It is
+idle to dispute the general positions of criticism, and there is no
+useful gainsaying its judgment that French literature is a major
+literature and Italian a minor literature in this century; but whether
+this verdict will stand for all time, there may be a reasonable doubt.
+Criterions may change, and hereafter people may look at the whole affair
+so differently that a literature which went to the making of a people
+will not be accounted a minor literature, but will take its place with
+the great literary movements.
+
+I do not insist upon this possibility, and I am far from defending myself
+for liking the comedies of Goldoni better than the comedies of Moliere,
+upon purely aesthetic grounds, where there is no question as to the
+artistic quality.  Perhaps it is because I came to Moliere's comedies
+later, and with my taste formed for those of Goldoni; but again, it is
+here a matter of affection; I find Goldoni for me more sympathetic, and
+because he is more sympathetic I cannot do otherwise than find him more
+natural, more true.  I will allow that this is vulnerable, and as I say,
+I do not defend it.  Moliere has a place in literature infinitely loftier
+than Goldoni's; and he has supplied types, characters, phrases, to the
+currency of thought, and Goldoni has supplied none.  It is, therefore,
+without reason which I can allege that I enjoy Goldoni more.  I am
+perfectly willing to be rated low for my preference, and yet I think that
+if it had been Goldoni's luck to have had the great age of a mighty
+monarchy for his scene, instead of the decline of an outworn republic,
+his place in literature might have been different.
+
+
+
+
+XXX.  "PASTOR FIDO," "AMINTA," "ROMOLA," "YEAST," "PAUL FERROLL"
+
+I have always had a great love for the absolutely unreal, the purely
+fanciful in all the arts, as well as of the absolutely real; I like the
+one on a far lower plane than the other, but it delights me, as a
+pantomime at a theatre does, or a comic opera, which has its being wholly
+outside the realm of the probabilities.  When I once transport myself to
+this sphere I have no longer any care for them, and if I could I would
+not exact of them an allegiance which has no concern with them.  For this
+reason I have always vastly enjoyed the artificialities of pastoral
+poetry; and in Venice I read with a pleasure few serious poems have given
+me the "Pastor Fido" of Guarini.  I came later but not with fainter zest
+to the "Aminta" of Tasso, without which, perhaps, the "Pastor Fido" would
+not have been, and I revelled in the pretty impossibilities of both these
+charming effects of the liberated imagination.
+
+I do not the least condemn that sort of thing; one does not live by
+sweets, unless one is willing to spoil one's digestion; but one may now
+and then indulge one's self without harm, and a sugar-plum or two after
+dinner may even be of advantage.  What I object to is the romantic thing
+which asks to be accepted with all its fantasticality on the ground of
+reality; that seems to me hopelessly bad.  But I have been able to dwell
+in their charming out-land or no-land with the shepherds and
+shepherdesses and nymphs, satyrs, and fauns, of Tasso and Guarini, and I
+take the finest pleasure in their company, their Dresden china loves and
+sorrows, their airy raptures, their painless throes, their polite
+anguish, their tears not the least salt, but flowing as sweet as the
+purling streams of their enamelled meadows.  I wish there were more of
+that sort of writing; I should like very much to read it.
+
+The greater part of my reading in Venice, when I began to find that I
+could not help writing about the place, was in books relating to its life
+and history, which I made use of rather than found pleasure in.  My
+studies in Italian literature were full of the most charming interest,
+and if I had to read a good many books for conscience' sake, there were a
+good many others I read for their own sake.  They were chiefly poetry;
+and after the first essays in which I tasted the classic poets, they were
+chiefly the books of the modern poets.
+
+For the present I went no farther in German literature, and I recurred to
+it in later years only for deeper and fuller knowledge of Heine; my
+Spanish was ignored, as all first loves are when one has reached the age
+of twenty-six.  My English reading was almost wholly in the Tauchnitz
+editions, for otherwise English books were not easily come at then and
+there.  George Eliot's 'Romola' was then new, and I read it again and
+again with the sense of moral enlargement which the first fiction to
+conceive of the true nature of evil gave all of us who were young in that
+day.  Tito Malema was not only a lesson, he was a revelation, and I
+trembled before him as in the presence of a warning and a message from
+the only veritable perdition.  His life, in which so much that was good
+was mixed, with so much that was bad, lighted up the whole domain of
+egotism with its glare, and made one feel how near the best and the worst
+were to each other, and how they sometimes touched without absolute
+division in texture and color.  The book was undoubtedly a favorite of
+mine, and I did not see then the artistic falterings in it which were
+afterwards evident to me.
+
+There were not Romolas to read all the time, though, and I had to devolve
+upon inferior authors for my fiction the greater part of the time.  Of
+course, I kept up with 'Our Mutual Friend,' which Dickens was then
+writing, and with 'Philip,' which was to be the last of Thackeray.  I was
+not yet sufficiently instructed to appreciate Trollope, and I did not
+read him at all.
+
+I got hold of Kingsley, and read 'Yeast,' and I think some other novels
+of his, with great relish, and without sensibility to his Charles
+Readeish lapses from his art into the material of his art.  But of all
+the minor fiction that I read at this time none impressed me so much as
+three books which had then already had their vogue, and which I knew
+somewhat from reviews.  They were Paul Ferroll, 'Why Paul Ferroll Killed
+His Wife,' and 'Day after Day.'  The first two were, of course, related
+to each other, and they were all three full of unwholesome force.  As to
+their aesthetic merit I will not say anything, for I have not looked at
+either of the books for thirty years.  I fancy, however, that their
+strength was rather of the tetanic than the titanic sort.  They made your
+sympathies go with the hero, who deliberately puts his wife to death for
+the lie she told to break off his marriage with the woman he had loved,
+and who then marries this tender and gentle girl, and lives in great
+happiness with her till her death.  Murder in the first degree is
+flattered by his fate up to the point of letting him die peacefully in
+Boston after these dealings of his in England; and altogether his story
+could not be commended to people with a morbid taste for bloodshed.
+Naturally enough the books were written by a perfectly good woman, the
+wife of an English clergyman, whose friends were greatly scandalized by
+them.  As a sort of atonement she wrote 'Day after Day,' the story of a
+dismal and joyless orphan, who dies to the sound of angelic music, faint
+and farheard, filling the whole chamber.  A carefuller study of the
+phenomenon reveals the fact that the seraphic strains are produced by the
+steam escaping from the hot-water bottles at the feet of the invalid.
+
+As usual, I am not able fully to account for my liking of these books,
+and I am so far from wishing to justify it that I think I ought rather to
+excuse it.  But since I was really greatly fascinated with them, and read
+them with an evergrowing fascination, the only honest thing to do is to
+own my subjection to them.  It would be an interesting and important
+question for criticism to study, that question why certain books at a.
+certain time greatly dominate our fancy, and others manifestly better
+have no influence with us.  A curious proof of the subtlety of these Paul
+Ferroll books in the appeal they made to the imagination is the fact that
+I came to them fresh from 'Romolo,' and full of horror for myself in
+Tito; yet I sympathized throughout with Paul Ferroll, and was glad when
+he got away.
+
+
+
+
+XXXI.  ERCKMANN-CHATRIAN, BJORSTJERNE BJORNSON
+
+On my return to America, my literary life immediately took such form that
+most of my reading was done for review.  I wrote at first a good many of
+the lighter criticisms in 'The Nation', at New York, and after I went to
+Boston to become the assistant editor of the 'Atlantic Monthly' I wrote
+the literary notices in that periodical for four or five years.
+
+It was only when I came into full charge of the magazine that I began to
+share these labors with others, and I continued them in some measure as
+long as I had any relation to it.  My reading for reading's sake, as I
+had hitherto done it, was at an end, and I read primarily for the sake of
+writing about the book in hand, and secondarily for the pleasure it might
+give me.  This was always considerable, and sometimes so great that I
+forgot the critic in it, and read on and on for pleasure.  I was master
+to review this book or that as I chose, and generally I reviewed only
+books I liked to read, though sometimes I felt that I ought to do a book,
+and did it from a sense of duty; these perfunctory criticisms I do not
+think were very useful, but I tried to make them honest.
+
+In a long sickness, which I had shortly after I went to live in
+Cambridge, a friend brought me several of the stories of Erckmann-
+Chatrian, whom people were then reading much more than they are now, I
+believe; and I had a great joy in them, which I have renewed since as
+often as I have read one of their books.  They have much the same quality
+of simple and sincerely moralized realism that I found afterwards in the
+work of the early Swiss realist, Jeremias Gotthelf, and very likely it
+was this that captivated my judgment.  As for my affections, battered and
+exhausted as they ought to have been in many literary passions, they
+never went out with fresher enjoyment than they did to the charming story
+of 'L'Ami Fritz,' which, when I merely name it, breathes the spring sun
+and air about me, and fills my senses with the beauty and sweetness of
+cherry blossoms.  It is one of the loveliest and kindest books that ever
+was written, and my heart belongs to it still; to be sure it belongs to
+several hundreds of other books in equal entirety.
+
+It belongs to all the books of the great Norwegian Bjorstjerne Bjornson,
+whose 'Arne,' and whose 'Happy Boy,' and whose 'Fisher Maiden' I read in
+this same fortunate sickness.  I have since read every other book of his
+that I could lay hands on: 'Sinnove Solbakken,' and 'Magnhild,' and
+'Captain Manzanca,' and 'Dust,' and 'In God's Ways,' and 'Sigurd,' and
+plays like "The Glove" and "The Bankrupt."  He has never, as some authors
+have, dwindled in my sense; when I open his page, there I find him as
+large, and free, and bold as ever.  He is a great talent, a clear
+conscience, a beautiful art.  He has my love not only because he is a
+poet of the most exquisite verity, but because he is a lover of men,
+with a faith in them such as can move mountains of ignorance,
+and dulness, and greed.  He is next to Tolstoy in his willingness to give
+himself for his kind; if he would rather give himself in fighting than in
+suffering wrong, I do not know that his self-sacrifice is less in degree.
+
+I confess, however, that I do not think of him as a patriot and a
+socialist when I read him; he is then purely a poet, whose gift holds me
+rapt above the world where I have left my troublesome and wearisome self
+for the time.  I do not know of any novels that a young endeavorer in
+fiction could more profitably read than his for their large and simple
+method, their trust of the reader's intelligence, their sympathy with
+life.  With him the problems are all soluble by the enlightened and
+regenerate will; there is no baffling Fate, but a helping God.  In
+Bjornson there is nothing of Ibsen's scornful despair, nothing of his
+anarchistic contempt, but his art is full of the warmth and color of a
+poetic soul, with no touch of the icy cynicism which freezes you in the
+other.  I have felt the cold fascination of Ibsen, too, and I should be
+far from denying his mighty mastery, but he has never possessed me with
+the delight that Bjornson has.
+
+In those days I read not only all the new books, but I made many forays
+into the past, and came back now and then with rich spoil, though I
+confess that for the most part I had my trouble for my pains; and I wish
+now that I had given the time I spent on the English classics to
+contemporary literature, which I have not the least hesitation in saying
+I like vastly better.  In fact, I believe that the preference for the
+literature of the past, except in the case of the greatest masters, is
+mainly the affectation of people who cannot otherwise distinguish
+themselves from the herd, and who wish very much to do so.
+
+There is much to be learned from the minor novelists and poets of the
+past about people's ways of thinking and feeling, but not much that the
+masters do not give you in better quality and fuller measure; and I
+should say, Read the old masters and let their schools go, rather than
+neglect any possible master of your own time.  Above all, I would not
+have any one read an old author merely that he might not be ignorant of
+him; that is most beggarly, and no good can come of it.  When literature
+becomes a duty it ceases to be a passion, and all the schoolmastering in
+the world, solemnly addressed to the conscience, cannot make the fact
+otherwise.  It is well to read for the sake of knowing a certain ground
+if you are to make use of your knowledge in a certain way, but it would
+be a mistake to suppose that this is a love of literature.
+
+
+
+
+XXXII.  TOURGUENIEF, AUERBACH
+
+In those years at Cambridge my most notable literary experience without
+doubt was the knowledge of Tourguenief's novels, which began to be
+recognized in all their greatness about the middle seventies.  I think
+they made their way with such of our public as were able to appreciate
+them before they were accepted in England; but that does not matter.  It
+is enough for the present purpose that 'Smoke,' and 'Lisa,' and 'On the
+Eve,' and 'Dimitri Roudine,' and 'Spring Floods,' passed one after
+another through my hands, and that I formed for their author one of the
+profoundest literary passions of my life.
+
+I now think that there is a finer and truer method than his, but in its
+way, Tourguenief's method is as far as art can go.  That is to say, his
+fiction is to the last degree dramatic.  The persons are sparely
+described, and briefly accounted for, and then they are left to transact
+their affair, whatever it is, with the least possible comment or
+explanation from the author.  The effect flows naturally from their
+characters, and when they have done or said a thing you conjecture why as
+unerringly as you would if they were people whom you knew outside of a
+book.  I had already conceived of the possibility of this from Bjornson,
+who practises the same method, but I was still too sunken in the gross
+darkness of English fiction to rise to a full consciousness of its
+excellence.  When I remembered the deliberate and impertinent moralizing
+of Thackeray, the clumsy exegesis of George Eliot, the knowing nods and
+winks of Charles Reade, the stage-carpentering and limelighting of
+Dickens, even the fine and important analysis of Hawthorne, it was with a
+joyful astonishment that I realized the great art of Tourguenief.
+
+Here was a master who was apparently not trying to work out a plot, who
+was not even trying to work out a character, but was standing aside from
+the whole affair, and letting the characters work the plot out.  The
+method was revealed perfectly in 'Smoke,' but each successive book of his
+that I read was a fresh proof of its truth, a revelation of its
+transcendent superiority.  I think now that I exaggerated its value
+somewhat; but this was inevitable in the first surprise.  The sane
+aesthetics of the first Russian author I read, however, have seemed more
+and more an essential part of the sane ethics of all the Russians I have
+read.  It was not only that Tourguenief had painted life truly, but that
+he had painted it conscientiously.
+
+Tourguenief was of that great race which has more than any other fully
+and freely uttered human nature, without either false pride or false
+shame in its nakedness.  His themes were oftenest those of the French
+novelist, but how far he was from handling them in the French manner and
+with the French spirit!  In his hands sin suffered no dramatic
+punishment; it did not always show itself as unhappiness, in the personal
+sense, but it was always unrest, and without the hope of peace.  If the
+end did not appear, the fact that it must be miserable always appeared.
+Life showed itself to me in different colors after I had once read
+Tourguenief; it became more serious, more awful, and with mystical
+responsibilities I had not known before.  My gay American horizons were
+bathed in the vast melancholy of the Slav, patient, agnostic, trustful.
+At the same time nature revealed herself to me through him with an
+intimacy she had not hitherto shown me.  There are passages in this
+wonderful writer alive with a truth that seems drawn from the reader's
+own knowledge; who else but Tourguenief and one's own most secret self
+ever felt all the rich, sad meaning of the night air drawing in at the
+open window, of the fires burning in the darkness on the distant fields?
+I try in vain to give some notion of the subtle sympathy with nature
+which scarcely put itself into words with him.  As for the people of his
+fiction, though they were of orders and civilizations so remote from my
+experience, they were of the eternal human types whose origin and
+potentialities every one may find in his own heart, and I felt their
+verity in every touch.
+
+I cannot describe the satisfaction his work gave me; I can only impart
+some sense of it, perhaps, by saying that it was like a happiness I had
+been waiting for all my life, and now that it had come, I was richly
+content forever.  I do not mean to say that the art of Tourguenief
+surpasses the art of Bjornson; I think Bjornson is quite as fine and
+true.  But the Norwegian deals with simple and primitive circumstances
+for the most part, and always with a small world; and the Russian has to
+do with human nature inside of its conventional shells, and his scene is
+often as large as Europe.  Even when it is as remote as Norway, it is
+still related to the great capitals by the history if not the actuality
+of the characters.  Most of Tourguenief's books I have read many times
+over, all of them I have read more than twice.  For a number of years I
+read them again and again without much caring for other fiction.  It was
+only the other day that I read Smoke through once more, with no
+diminished sense of its truth, but with somewhat less than my first
+satisfaction in its art.  Perhaps this was because I had reached the
+point through my acquaintance with Tolstoy where I was impatient even of
+the artifice that hid itself.  In 'Smoke' I was now aware of an artifice
+that kept out of sight, but was still always present somewhere, invisibly
+operating the story.
+
+I must not fail to own the great pleasure that I have had in some of the
+stories of Auerbach.  It is true that I have never cared greatly for 'On
+the Heights,' which in its dealing with royalties seems too far aloof
+from the ordinary human life, and which on the moral side finally fades
+out into a German mistiness.  But I speak of it with the imperfect
+knowledge of one who was never able to read it quite through, and I have
+really no right to speak of it.  The book of his that pleased me most was
+'Edelweiss,' which, though the story was somewhat too catastrophical,
+seemed to me admirably good and true.  I still think it very delicately
+done, and with a deep insight; but there is something in all Auerbach's
+work which in the retrospect affects me as if it dealt with pigmies.
+
+
+
+
+
+XXXIII.  CERTAIN PREFERENCES AND EXPERIENCES
+
+I have always loved history, whether in the annals of peoples or in the
+lives of persons, and I have at all times read it.  I am not sure but I
+rather prefer it to fiction, though I am aware that in looking back over
+this record of my literary passions I must seem to have cared for very
+little besides fiction.  I read at the time I have just been speaking of,
+nearly all the new poetry as it came out, and I constantly recurred to it
+in its mossier sources, where it sprang from the green English ground, or
+trickled from the antique urns of Italy.
+
+I do not think that I have ever cared much for metaphysics, or to read
+much in that way, but from time to time I have done something of it.
+
+Travels, of course, I have read as part of the great human story, and
+autobiography has at times appeared to me the most delightful reading in
+the world; I have a taste in it that rejects nothing, though I have never
+enjoyed any autobiographies so much as those of such Italians as have
+reasoned of themselves.
+
+I suppose I have not been a great reader of the drama, and I do not know
+that I have ever greatly relished any plays but those of Shakespeare and
+Goldoni, and two or three of Beaumont and Fletcher, and one or so of
+Marlow's, and all of Ibsen's and Maeterlinck's.  The taste for the old
+English dramatists I believe I have never formed.
+
+Criticism, ever since I filled myself so full of it in my boyhood, I have
+not cared for, and often I have found it repulsive.
+
+I have a fondness for books of popular science, perhaps because they too
+are part of the human story.
+
+I have read somewhat of the theology of the Swedenborgian faith I was
+brought up in, but I have not read other theological works; and I do not
+apologize for not liking any.  The Bible itself was not much known to me
+at an age when most children have been obliged to read it several times
+over; the gospels were indeed familiar, and they have always been to me
+the supreme human story; but the rest of the New Testament I had not read
+when a man grown, and only passages of the Old Testament, like the story
+of the Creation, and the story of Joseph, and the poems of Job and
+Ecclesiastes, with occasional Psalms.  I therefore came to the Scriptures
+with a sense at once fresh and mature, and I can never be too glad that I
+learned to see them under the vaster horizon and in the truer
+perspectives of experience.
+
+Again as lights on the human story I have liked to read such books of
+medicine as have fallen in my way, and I seldom take up a medical
+periodical without reading of all the cases it describes, and in fact
+every article in it.
+
+But I did not mean to make even this slight departure from the main
+business of these papers, which is to confide my literary passions to the
+reader; he probably has had a great many of his own.  I think I may class
+the "Ring and the Book" among them, though I have never been otherwise a
+devotee of Browning.  But I was still newly home from Italy, or away from
+home, when that poem appeared, and whether or not it was because it took
+me so with the old enchantment of that land, I gave my heart promptly to
+it.  Of course, there are terrible longueurs in it, and you do get tired
+of the same story told over and over from the different points of view,
+and yet it is such a great story, and unfolded with such a magnificent
+breadth and noble fulness, that one who blames it lightly blames himself
+heavily.  There are certain books of it--"Caponsacchi's story,"
+"Pompilia's story," and "Count Guido's story"--that I think ought to rank
+with the greatest poetry ever written, and that have a direct, dramatic
+expression of the fact and character, which is without rival.  There is a
+noble and lofty pathos in the close of Caponsacchi's statement, an
+artless and manly break from his self-control throughout, that seems to
+me the last possible effect in its kind; and Pompilia's story holds all
+of womanhood in it, the purity, the passion, the tenderness, the
+helplessness.  But if I begin to praise this or any of the things I have
+liked, I do not know when I should stop.  Yes, as I think it over, the
+"Ring and the Book" appears to me one of the great few poems whose
+splendor can never suffer lasting eclipse, however it may have presently
+fallen into abeyance.  If it had impossibly come down to us from some
+elder time, or had not been so perfectly modern in its recognition of
+feeling and motives ignored by the less conscious poetry of the past, it
+might be ranked with the great epics.
+
+Of other modern poets I have read some things of William Morris, like the
+"Life and Death of Jason," the "Story of Gudrun," and the "Trial of
+Guinevere," with a pleasure little less than passionate, and I have
+equally liked certain pieces of Dante Rossetti.  I have had a high joy in
+some of the great minor poems of Emerson, where the goddess moves over
+Concord meadows with a gait that is Greek, and her sandalled tread
+expresses a high scorn of the india-rubber boots that the American muse
+so often gets about in.
+
+The "Commemoration Ode" of Lowell has also been a source from which I
+drank something of the divine ecstasy of the poet's own exalted mood, and
+I would set this level with the 'Biglow Papers,' high above all his other
+work, and chief of the things this age of our country shall be remembered
+by.  Holmes I always loved, and not for his wit alone, which is so
+obvious to liking, but for those rarer and richer strains of his in which
+he shows himself the lover of nature and the brother of men.  The deep
+spiritual insight, the celestial music, and the brooding tenderness of
+Whittier have always taken me more than his fierier appeals and his civic
+virtues, though I do not underrate the value of these in his verse.
+
+My acquaintance with these modern poets, and many I do not name because
+they are so many, has been continuous with their work, and my pleasure in
+it not inconstant if not equal.  I have spoken before of Longfellow as
+one of my first passions, and I have never ceased to delight in him; but
+some of the very newest and youngest of our poets have given me thrills
+of happiness, for which life has become lastingly sweeter.
+
+
+Long after I had thought never to read it--in fact when I was 'nel mezzo
+del cammin di nostra vita'--I read Milton's "Paradise Lost," and found in
+it a majestic beauty that justified to me the fame it wears, and eclipsed
+the worth of those lesser poems which I had ignorantly accounted his
+worthiest.  In fact, it was one of the literary passions of the time I
+speak of, and it shared my devotion for the novels of Tourguenief and
+(shall I own it?) the romances of Cherbuliez.  After all, it is best to
+be honest, and if it is not best, it is at least easiest; it involves the
+fewest embarrassing consequences; and if I confess the spell that the
+Revenge of Joseph Noirel cast upon me for a time, perhaps I shall be able
+to whisper the reader behind my hand that I have never yet read the
+"AEneid" of Virgil; the "Georgics," yes; but the "AEneid," no.  Some
+time, however, I expect to read it and to like it immensely.  That is
+often the case with things that I have held aloof from indefinitely.
+
+One fact of my experience which the reader may, find interesting is that
+when I am writing steadily I have little relish for reading.  I fancy,
+that reading is not merely a pastime when it is apparently the merest
+pastime, but that a certain measure of mind-stuff is used up in it, and
+that if you are using up all the mind stuff you have, much or little, in
+some other way, you do not read because you have not the mind-stuff for
+it.  At any rate it is in this sort only that I can account for my
+failure to read a great deal during four years of the amplest quiet that
+I spent in the country at Belmont, whither we removed from Cambridge.
+I had promised myself that in this quiet, now that I had given up
+reviewing, and wrote little or nothing in the magazine but my stories,
+I should again read purely for the pleasure of it, as I had in the early
+days before the critical purpose had qualified it with a bitter alloy.
+But I found that not being forced to read a number of books each month,
+so that I might write about them, I did not read at all, comparatively
+speaking.  To be sure I dawdled over a great many books that I had read
+before, and a number of memoirs and biographies, but I had no intense
+pleasure from reading in that time, and have no passions to record of it.
+It may have been a period when no new thing happened in literature deeply
+to stir one's interest; I only state the fact concerning myself, and
+suggest the most plausible theory I can think of.
+
+I wish also to note another incident, which may or may not have its
+psychological value.  An important event of these years was a long
+sickness which kept me helpless some seven or eight weeks, when I was
+forced to read in order to pass the intolerable time.  But in this misery
+I found that I could not read anything of a dramatic cast, whether in the
+form of plays or of novels.  The mere sight of the printed page, broken
+up in dialogue, was anguish.  Yet it was not the excitement of the
+fiction that I dreaded, for I consumed great numbers of narratives of
+travel, and was not in the least troubled by hairbreadth escapes, or
+shipwrecks, or perils from wild beasts or deadly serpents; it was the
+dramatic effect contrived by the playwright or novelist, and worked up to
+in the speech of his characters that I could not bear.  I found a like
+impossible stress from the Sunday newspaper which a mistaken friend sent
+in to me, and which with its scare-headings, and artfully wrought
+sensations, had the effect of fiction, as in fact it largely was.
+
+At the end of four years we went abroad again, and travel took away the
+appetite for reading as completely as writing did.  I recall nothing read
+in that year in Europe which moved me, and I think I read very little,
+except the local histories of the Tuscan cities which I afterwards wrote
+of.
+
+
+
+
+XXXIV.  VALDES, GALDOS, VERGA, ZOLA, TROLLOPE, HARDY
+
+In fact, it was not till I returned, and took up my life again in Boston,
+in the old atmosphere of work, that I turned once more to books.  Even
+then I had to wait for the time when I undertook a critical department in
+one of the magazines, before I felt the rise of the old enthusiasm for an
+author.  That is to say, I had to begin reading for business again before
+I began reading for pleasure.  One of the first great pleasures which I
+had upon these terms was in the book of a contemporary Spanish author.
+This was the 'Marta y Maria' of Armando Palacio Valdes, a novelist who
+delights me beyond words by his friendly and abundant humor, his feeling
+for character, and his subtle insight.  I like every one of his books
+that I have read, and I believe that I have read nearly every one that he
+has written.  As I mention 'Riverito, Maximina, Un Idilio de un Inferno,
+La Hermana de San Sulpizio, El Cuarto Poder, Espuma,' the mere names
+conjure up the scenes and events that have moved me to tears and
+laughter, and filled me with a vivid sense of the life portrayed in them.
+I think the 'Marta y Maria' one of the most truthful and profound
+fictions I have read, and 'Maximina' one of the most pathetic, and
+'La Hermana de San Sulpizio' one of the most amusing.  Fortunately, these
+books of Valdes's have nearly all been translated, and the reader may
+test the matter in English; though it necessarily halts somewhat behind
+the Spanish.
+
+I do not know whether the Spaniards themselves rank Valdes with Galdos or
+not, and I have no wish to decide upon their relative merits.  They are
+both present passions of mine, and I may say of the 'Dona Perfecta' of
+Galdos that no book, if I except those of the greatest Russians, has
+given me a keener and deeper impression; it is infinitely pathetic, and
+is full of humor, which, if more caustic than that of Valdes, is not less
+delicious.  But I like all the books of Galdos that I have read, and
+though he seems to have worked more tardily out of his romanticism than
+Valdes, since be has worked finally into such realism as that of Leon
+Roch, his greatness leaves nothing to be desired.
+
+I have read one of the books of Emilia Pardo-Bazan, called 'Morrina,'
+which must rank her with the great realists of her country and age; she,
+too, has that humor of her race, which brings us nearer the Spanish than
+any other non-Anglo-Saxon people.
+
+A contemporary Italian, whom I like hardly less than these noble
+Spaniards, is Giovanni Verga, who wrote 'I Malavoglia,' or, as we call it
+in English, 'The House by the Medlar Tree': a story of infinite beauty,
+tenderness and truth.  As I have said before, I think with Zola that
+Giacometti, the Italian author of "La Morte Civile," has written almost
+the greatest play, all round, of modern times.
+
+But what shall I say of Zola himself, and my admiration of his epic
+greatness?  About his material there is no disputing among people of our
+Puritanic tradition.  It is simply abhorrent, but when you have once
+granted him his material for his own use, it is idle and foolish to deny
+his power.  Every literary theory of mine was contrary to him when I took
+up 'L'Assommoir,' though unconsciously I had always been as much of a
+realist as I could, but the book possessed me with the same fascination
+that I felt the other day in reading his 'L'Argent.'  The critics know
+now that Zola is not the realist he used to fancy himself, and he is full
+of the best qualities of the romanticism he has hated so much; but for
+what he is, there is but one novelist of our time, or of any, that
+outmasters him, and that is Tolstoy.  For my own part, I think that the
+books of Zola are not immoral, but they are indecent through the facts
+that they nakedly represent; they are infinitely more moral than the
+books of any other French novelist.  This may not be saying a great deal,
+but it is saying the truth, and I do not mind owning that he has been one
+of my great literary passions, almost as great as Flaubert, and greater
+than Daudet or Maupassant, though I have profoundly appreciated the
+exquisite artistry of both these.  No French writer, however, has moved
+me so much as the Spanish, for the French are wanting in the humor which
+endears these, and is the quintessence of their charm.
+
+You cannot be at perfect ease with a friend who does not joke, and I
+suppose this is what deprived me of a final satisfaction in the company
+of Anthony Trollope, who jokes heavily or not at all, and whom I should
+otherwise make bold to declare the greatest of English novelists; as it
+is, I must put before him Jane Austen, whose books, late in life, have
+been a youthful rapture with me.  Even without, much humor Trollope's
+books have been a vast pleasure to me through their simple truthfulness.
+Perhaps if they were more humorous they would not be so true to the
+British life and character present in them in the whole length and
+breadth of its expansive commonplaceness.  It is their serious fidelity
+which gives them a value unique in literature, and which if it were
+carefully analyzed would afford a principle of the same quality in an
+author who was undoubtedly one of the finest of artists as well as the
+most Philistine of men.
+
+I came rather late, but I came with all the ardor of what seems my
+perennial literary youth, to the love of Thomas Hardy, whom I first knew
+in his story 'A Pair of Blue Eyes.'  As usual, after I had read this book
+and felt the new charm in it, I wished to read the books of no other
+author, and to read his books over and over.  I love even the faults of
+Hardy; I will let him play me any trick he chooses (and he is not above
+playing tricks, when he seems to get tired of his story or perplexed with
+it), if only he will go on making his peasants talk, and his rather
+uncertain ladies get in and out of love, and serve themselves of every
+chance that fortune offers them of having their own way.  We shrink from
+the unmorality of the Latin races, but Hardy has divined in the heart of
+our own race a lingering heathenism, which, if not Greek, has certainly
+been no more baptized than the neo-hellenism of the Parisians.  His
+heroines especially exemplify it, and I should be safe in saying that his
+Ethelbertas, his Eustacias, his Elfridas, his Bathshebas, his Fancies,
+are wholly pagan.  I should not dare to ask how much of their charm came
+from that fact; and the author does not fail to show you how much harm,
+so that it is not on my conscience.  His people live very close to the
+heart of nature, and no one, unless it is Tourguenief, gives you a richer
+and sweeter sense of her unity with human nature.  Hardy is a great poet
+as well as a great humorist, and if he were not a great artist also his
+humor would be enough to endear him to me.
+
+
+
+
+XXXV.  TOLSTOY
+
+I come now, though not quite in the order of time, to the noblest of all
+these enthusiasms--namely, my devotion for the writings of Lyof Tolstoy.
+I should wish to speak of him with his own incomparable truth, yet I do
+not know how to give a notion of his influence without the effect of
+exaggeration.  As much as one merely human being can help another I
+believe that he has helped me; he has not influenced me in aesthetics
+only, but in ethics, too, so that I can never again see life in the way I
+saw it before I knew him. Tolstoy awakens in his reader the will to be a
+man; not effectively, not spectacularly, but simply, really.  He leads
+you back to the only true ideal, away from that false standard of the
+gentleman, to the Man who sought not to be distinguished from other men,
+but identified with them, to that Presence in which the finest gentleman
+shows his alloy of vanity, and the greatest genius shrinks to the measure
+of his miserable egotism.  I learned from Tolstoy to try character and
+motive by no other test, and though I am perpetually false to that
+sublime ideal myself, still the ideal remains with me, to make me ashamed
+that I am not true to it.  Tolstoy gave me heart to hope that the world
+may yet be made over in the image of Him who died for it, when all
+Caesars things shall be finally rendered unto Caesar, and men shall come
+into their own, into the right to labor and the right to enjoy the fruits
+of their labor, each one master of himself and servant to every other.
+He taught me to see life not as a chase of a forever impossible personal
+happiness, but as a field for endeavor towards the happiness of the whole
+human family; and I can never lose this vision, however I close my eyes,
+and strive to see my own interest as the highest good.  He gave me new
+criterions, new principles, which, after all, were those that are taught
+us in our earliest childhood, before we have come to the evil wisdom of
+the world.  As I read his different ethical books, 'What to Do,'
+'My Confession,' and 'My Religion,' I recognized their truth with a
+rapture such as I have known in no other reading, and I rendered them my
+allegiance, heart and soul, with whatever sickness of the one and despair
+of the other.  They have it yet, and I believe they will have it while I
+live.  It is with inexpressible astonishment that I bear them attainted
+of pessimism, as if the teaching of a man whose ideal was simple goodness
+must mean the prevalence of evil.  The way he showed me seemed indeed
+impossible to my will, but to my conscience it was and is the only
+possible way.  If there, is any point on which he has not convinced my
+reason it is that of our ability to walk this narrow way alone.  Even
+there he is logical, but as Zola subtly distinguishes in speaking of
+Tolstoy's essay on "Money," he is not reasonable.  Solitude enfeebles and
+palsies, and it is as comrades and brothers that men must save the world
+from itself, rather than themselves from the world.  It was so the
+earliest Christians, who had all things common, understood the life of
+Christ, and I believe that the latest will understand it so.
+
+I have spoken first of the ethical works of Tolstoy, because they are of
+the first importance to me, but I think that his aesthetical works are as
+perfect.  To my thinking they transcend in truth, which is the highest
+beauty, all other works of fiction that have been written, and I believe
+that they do this because they obey the law of the author's own life.
+His conscience is one ethically and one aesthetically; with his will to
+be true to himself he cannot be false to his knowledge of others.  I
+thought the last word in literary art had been said to me by the novels
+of Tourguenief, but it seemed like the first, merely, when I began to
+acquaint myself with the simpler method of Tolstoy.  I came to it by
+accident, and without any manner, of preoccupation in The Cossacks, one
+of his early books, which had been on my shelves unread for five or six
+years.  I did not know even Tolstoy's name when I opened it, and it was
+with a kind of amaze that I read it, and felt word by word, and line by
+line, the truth of a new art in it.
+
+I do not know how it is that the great Russians have the secret of
+simplicity.  Some say it is because they have not a long literary past
+and are not conventionalized by the usage of many generations of other
+writers, but this will hardly account for the brotherly directness of
+their dealing with human nature; the absence of experience elsewhere
+characterizes the artist with crudeness, and simplicity is the last
+effect of knowledge.  Tolstoy is, of course, the first of them in this
+supreme grace.  He has not only Tourguenief's transparency of style,
+unclouded by any mist of the personality which we mistakenly value in
+style, and which ought no more to be there than the artist's personality
+should be in a portrait; but he has a method which not only seems without
+artifice, but is so.  I can get at the manner of most writers, and tell
+what it is, but I should be baffled to tell what Tolstoy's manner is;
+perhaps he has no manner.  This appears to me true of his novels, which,
+with their vast variety of character and incident, are alike in their
+single endeavor to get the persons living before you, both in their
+action and in the peculiarly dramatic interpretation of their emotion and
+cogitation.  There are plenty of novelists to tell you that their
+characters felt and thought so and so, but you have to take it on trust;
+Tolstoy alone makes you know how and why it was so with them and not
+otherwise.  If there is anything in him which can be copied or burlesqued
+it is this ability of his to show men inwardly as well as outwardly; it
+is the only trait of his which I can put my hand on.
+
+After 'The Cossacks' I read 'Anna Karenina' with a deepening sense of the
+author's unrivalled greatness.  I thought that I saw through his eyes a
+human affair of that most sorrowful sort as it must appear to the
+Infinite Compassion; the book is a sort of revelation of human nature in
+circumstances that have been so perpetually lied about that we have
+almost lost the faculty of perceiving the truth concerning an illicit
+love.  When you have once read 'Anna Karenina' you know how fatally
+miserable and essentially unhappy such a love must be.  But the character
+of Karenin himself is quite as important as the intrigue of Anna and
+Vronsky.  It is wonderful how such a man, cold, Philistine and even mean
+in certain ways, towers into a sublimity unknown (to me, at least), in
+fiction when he forgives, and yet knows that he cannot forgive with
+dignity.  There is something crucial, and something triumphant, not
+beyond the power, but hitherto beyond the imagination of men in this
+effect, which is not solicited, not forced, not in the least romantic,
+but comes naturally, almost inevitably, from the make of man.
+
+The vast prospects, the far-reaching perspectives of 'War and Peace' made
+it as great a surprise for me in the historical novel as 'Anna Karenina'
+had been in the study of contemporary life; and its people and interests
+did not seem more remote, since they are of a civilization always as
+strange and of a humanity always as known.
+
+I read some shorter stories of Tolstoy's before I came to this greatest
+work of his: I read 'Scenes of the Siege of Sebastopol,' which is so much
+of the same quality as 'War and Peace;' and I read 'Policoushka' and most
+of his short stories with a sense of my unity with their people such as I
+had never felt with the people of other fiction.
+
+His didactic stories, like all stories of the sort, dwindle into
+allegories; perhaps they do their work the better for this, with the
+simple intelligences they address; but I think that where Tolstoy becomes
+impatient of his office of artist, and prefers to be directly a teacher,
+he robs himself of more than half his strength with those he can move
+only through the realization of themselves in others.  The simple pathos,
+and the apparent indirectness of such a tale as that of 'Poticoushka,'
+the peasant conscript, is of vastly more value to the world at large than
+all his parables; and 'The Death of Ivan Ilyitch,' the Philistine
+worldling, will turn the hearts of many more from the love of the world
+than such pale fables of the early Christian life as "Work while ye have
+the Light."  A man's gifts are not given him for nothing, and the man who
+has the great gift of dramatic fiction has no right to cast it away or to
+let it rust out in disuse.
+
+Terrible as the 'Kreutzer Sonata' was, it had a moral effect dramatically
+which it lost altogether when the author descended to exegesis, and
+applied to marriage the lesson of one evil marriage.  In fine, Tolstoy is
+certainly not to be held up as infallible.  He is very, distinctly
+fallible, but I think his life is not less instructive because in certain
+things it seems a failure.  There was but one life ever lived upon the
+earth which was without failure, and that was Christ's, whose erring and
+stumbling follower Tolstoy is.  There is no other example, no other
+ideal, and the chief use of Tolstoy is to enforce this fact in our age,
+after nineteen centuries of hopeless endeavor to substitute ceremony for
+character, and the creed for the life.  I recognize the truth of this
+without pretending to have been changed in anything but my point of view
+of it.  What I feel sure is that I can never look at life in the mean and
+sordid way that I did before I read Tolstoy.
+
+Artistically, he has shown me a greatness that he can never teach me.
+I am long past the age when I could wish to form myself upon another
+writer, and I do not think I could now insensibly take on the likeness of
+another; but his work has been a revelation and a delight to me, such as
+I am sure I can never know again.  I do not believe that in the whole
+course of my reading, and not even in the early moment of my literary
+enthusiasms, I have known such utter satisfaction in any writer, and this
+supreme joy has come to me at a time of life when new friendships, not to
+say new passions, are rare and reluctant.  It is as if the best wine at
+this high feast where I have sat so long had been kept for the last, and
+I need not deny a miracle in it in order to attest my skill in judging
+vintages.  In fact, I prefer to believe that my life has been full of
+miracles, and that the good has always come to me at the right time, so
+that I could profit most by it.  I believe if I had not turned the corner
+of my fiftieth year, when I first knew Tolstoy, I should not have been
+able to know him as fully as I did.  He has been to me that final
+consciousness, which he speaks of so wisely in his essay on "Life."
+I came in it to the knowledge of myself in ways I had not dreamt of
+before, and began at least to discern my relations to the race, without
+which we are each nothing.  The supreme art in literature had its highest
+effect in making me set art forever below humanity, and it is with the
+wish to offer the greatest homage to his heart and mind, which any man
+can pay another, that I close this record with the name of Lyof Tolstoy.
+
+
+
+
+ETEXT EDITOR'S BOOKMARKS:
+
+Account of one's reading is an account of one's life
+Adam Bede
+Affections will not be bidden
+Air of looking down on the highest
+Alliance of the tragic and the comic
+Anthony Trollope
+Authors I must call my masters
+Capriciousness of memory: what it will hold and what lose
+Celebration of the monkey and the goat in us
+Conquest of Granada
+Contemptible he found our pseudo-equality
+Criticism still remains behind all the other literary arts
+Dickens is purely democratic
+Escaped at night and got into the boy's dreams
+Fictions subtle effect for good and for evil on the young
+Finer sort myself to be able to enjoy such a fine sort
+Had the sense that in her eyes I was a queer boy
+Hardly any sort of bloodshed which I would not pardon
+Hazlitt
+He undid my hands
+Hospitable gift of making you at home with him
+In school there was as little literature then as there is now
+Inexperience takes this effect (literary lewdness) for realit
+Jews are still the chosen people
+Kindness and gentleness are never out of fashion
+Kissing goes by favor, in literature as in life
+Lamb
+Lewd literature seems to give a sanction to lewdness in the life
+Life of Goldsmith
+Live it slowly into the past
+Lubricity of literature
+Made many of my acquaintances very tired of my favorite authors
+Men who bully and truckle
+Mustache, which in those days devoted a man to wickedness
+My own youth now seems to me rather more alien
+My reading gave me no standing among the boys
+Neither worse nor better because of the theatre
+Never appeals to the principle which sniffs, in his reader
+None of the passions are reasoned,
+Not very distinctly know their dreams from their experiences
+Now little notion what it was about, but I love its memory
+Our horrible sham of a slave-based freedom
+Pendennis
+Prejudice against certain words that I cannot overcome
+President Garfield
+Probably no dramatist ever needed the stage less
+Rape of the Lock
+Rapture of the new convert could not last
+Reservations as to the times when he is not a master
+Responsibility of finding him all we have been told he is
+Secretly admires the splendors he affects to despise
+Self-flattered scorn, his showy sighs, his facile satire
+Self-satisfied, intolerant, and hypocritical provinciality
+Should probably have wasted the time if I had not read them
+Slave-based freedom
+So long as we have social inequality we shall have snobs
+Society, as we have it, was necessarily a sham
+Somehow expressed the feelings of his day
+Somewhat too studied grace
+Speaks it is not with words and blood, but with words and ink
+Spit some hapless victim: make him suffer and the reader laugh
+Style is the man, and he cannot hide himself in any garb
+Surcharge all imitations of life and character
+Surcharged in the serious moods, and caricatured in the comic
+Swedenborg
+Tales of the Alhambra
+The great doctor's orotundity and ronderosity
+To be for good or evil whatsoever I really was
+Toiled, and I suppose no work is wasted
+Trace no discrepancy between reading his plays and seeing them
+Tried to like whatever they bade me like
+Truth is beyond invention
+Unmeet for ladies
+Vicar of Wakefield
+Vices and foibles which are inherent in the system of things
+We did not know that we were poor
+We see nothing whole, neither life nor art
+What I had not I could hope for without unreason
+What we thought ruin, but what was really release
+When was love ever reasoned?
+Wide leisure of a country village
+Women who snub and crawl
+Words of learned length and thundering sound
+World's memory is equally bad for failure and success
+Worst came it was not half so bad as what had gone before
+You cannot be at perfect ease with a friend who does not joke
+You may do a great deal(of work), and not get on
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of My Literary Passions
+by William Dean Howells
+
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